False Friends

In the memory of a language teacher and one-time learner of foreign languages the term faux ami looms large (what other way is there to  loom, come to think of it?). I first met it with reference to parent in a French lesson in the mid sixties. In those unenlightened days (this post introduces the idea of écriture inclusive, in case it has passed you by) the right way to say "my parents" was  mes pères (and your mère didn't count); as I remember, mes parents meant "my ancestors". But, language developing the way it does and given the spread of Globish, this is no longer the case;  the "ancestors" meaning survives only in the better dictionaries, but as a literary convention:

Larousse

And the term faux ami, in those days at least, was necessarily French. In my brief introduction to German I did not meet a falsches Freund (not sure about that ending; German best before end Nov 1969). The  German teacher said faux ami too (though she also taught French, so maybe she just didn't bother with code-switching in her meta-language). And in later studies I met neither falsos amigos nor falsi amici (although it wouldn't surprise me if of late such expressions have become current).

When, much later, I was training to teach ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages)  the term "false friend" had become all the rage  – even among francophone student teachers. So I've come to use the term. And in my various ramblings about language and translation I mention it here and there; two cases spring to mind:

• terrible (links to old post, but here's the relevant bit)
  

  French terrible doesn't mean 'terrible'; the adjective, in English, doesn't work like that. The adverb, though, does: something that is terrible (Fr) is terribly good. (I first became aware of this in a Johnny Halliday song; when I read the song's name on the sleeve [not having started to study French]...

  <2021_autobiographical_addition>
  It was an EP (look it up if age <50) with a big hole where the gramophone spindle went (pretty niche, this detail – the French multi-disk towers must have been different from ours, so we had to get an adaptor [or trust to the eye to get the disk centred, with sometimes cacophonous, not to say damaging results]). My bother had brought it home from an exchange visit; see here for more details of the Regnault-family-exchange-programme).
  </2021_autobiographical_addition>

  ... I assumed that Elle est terrible had negative connotations. When I heard it, it obviously showed approval; the tune was that of one I'd already heard: She's Somethin' Else [I had no clear idea of what it meant exactly, but it was obviously approving].)

• romanesque  (links to old post, but here's the relevant bit)
  

  This week's Book of the Week  on Radio 4 [HD 2021 – not THIS week, obv.] is a political biography that deals with Mitterand. In it, I caught the phrase 'the romanesque side of Mitterand's nature' (his tendency to fantasize); and my translator's ears pricked up. I though[2121: sic] it was Sarkozy who had high arches... [Think about it.... Arches....] Mitterand wasn't anything to do with architectural history. I thought the book must have been a translation  whose translator had misunderstood roman-esque – 'like a story (un roman)'. 

But there are probably others. 

<stop-press>

I just heard another case on BBC News coverage of the Grenfell enquiry. A representative of a French company that produced flammable cladding – even with an interpreter (who surely knew better) – said he had arranged for the panels "to pass the test". On the face of it, this looks nefarious – if not criminal... Except  that in this context passer doesn't mean "pass". Passer un examen is just sitting it; in order to pass it you have to être reçu (or, in what I would guess is a small majority of cases, être reçue). (The behaviour of Arconic was in many cases atrocious, but this particular atrocity is imaginary.)

</stop-press>

And a false friend that I've become aware of only recently... 

<parenthesis> 

(I say "become aware of" not because  of my natural sesquipedaliophilia [don't bother looking that one up, it's hot off the presses, meaning "predilection for using long words"] but because I've met it several times when my choir has sung Elijah, and only now notice that it's a false friend)

</parenthesis>

...is "quicken". And it's the sort of false friend that is easiest to overlook: the general meaning is right in some contexts, but it's behaviour changes in its precise grammatical context.

The question of whether and to what extent Mendelssohn's text for Elijah is a translation is not uncomplicated. I treated it at some (some would say obsessive) length here. In brief, a German libretto was started by Schübring, a friend of Mendelssohn's, years before the work's first performance ; but that  was an English version, and the "translator", Bartholomew, had sight of Schübring's incomplete version – not that he regarded it as "sacred" (or even competent; he was quite dismissive of it).

The verb "quicken" has a long history. It was much used in the 18th century.. The word had been around since the 13th according to Etymonline, but in the sense of giving life (based on the sense of quick that we see in "the quick and the dead" (Biblical, before the punning film title), "quicksilver" (mercurial, not the metaphorical sense often attached to footballers, for some  reason), and "quicklime". 

<tangent>

This sort of "quick" is the basis for an aperçu that I've recently had about an anomaly I met in the school chemistry lab. Some elements have seemingly random symbols, like K and Sn  and Hg. As a schoolboy I was content to just learn them; some of them, anyway,  had mnemonic value – tin and Sn shared an n; and s is close to t both alphabetically and with regard to where the tongue goes in forming it. But Hg?

 

Well the alchemists (or whoever) who first named mercury chose a different metaphor for its fluid behaviour ; not alive-silver, but watery-silver, not quicksilver but hydrargyrum.

</tangent>

And this was the sort of "quicken" I used to think was used in Bartholomew's English text for Elijah – a reasonable assumption, given the biblical associations of that sort of "quick".

Usually, the usage diagrams that Collins gives if you look hard enough (scrolling down three or four pages), doesn't pay attention to changes in meaning; so all the average navel-gazer can do is make suppositions about what changes in meaning were associated with what up-ticks or down-ticks happened. But conveniently, the Collins usage diagram showing the fortunes of "quicken" dates back only to the beginning of the eighteenth century; and as Etymonline says

Meaning "become faster" is from 1805. Related: Quickened; quickening. An earlier verb was simply quick (c. 1200), from Old English gecwician.

A drawback of these usage diagrams is that scale, units, and size of data-set, are all unspecified; but it's fairly clear from this chart that the "make faster" meaning diluted the usability of the word; having spent the eighteenth century flickering up and down quite wildly in the 2nd and 3rd strata (whatever they represent) for the next two centuries it languished (that's a word that may appeal to the Elijah cognoscenti) in the 1st.

Collins

Time I got to the point: Schübring's text in the chorus He watching over Israel is 

Wenn du mitten in Angst wandelt so erquickt er dich

(= something like "If you're walking in the midst of woes, he will speed you up")

Bartholomew, keen to use the new-fangled "quicken" to stand for the German erquickt didn't notice that our "quicken" doesn't work the same way. You quicken a heartbeat or a pulse or a pace, but not a person.  The nearest English comes to quickening a concrete noun is "quicken a heart" – but there "heart" is a metaphor (metonym?) for heartbeat. I mean to do some research* on that point, putting some numbers on my usage instincts, but this post is getting out of hand, so that's all for now.

b

 

Update: 2121.02.23.15:15 – Added footnote giving the promised  numbers.

* After a prolonged bout of DIY (which included a foray into Key Stage 4 Bitesize Physics on the subject of serial and parallel circuits) I've now spent some time in the British National Corpus justifying the breezy and unfounded claims I made last week about possible nouns used in collocation with quicken. If you want to see the BNC at work (fascinating but not appealing to all tastes) run this search. (it takes a while to get through everything, but if you just sit back and resist the temptation to keep prodding Return it gets there in the end). 

BNC search for quicken +NOUN

 

For the more faint-hearted I've  captured the most frequently used words – "most frequently" being a relative term, as only a single word (predictably, pace) occurs more than twice, and only seven others appear more than once (in a corpus that contains 100,000,000 words of text; these 27 cases are nearly half of the total [63]). The only one ...

 <parenthesis>
(apart from the initially perplexing WINDOWS, which it turns out refers to Windows, specifically a software product called "Quicken for Windows")
</parenthesis>

 ... that seems at odds with what I wrote last week (broadly, "no concrete nouns") is feet; but that is a metaphor for foot-steps (just as heart is a metaphor for heart-rate as I wrote before).

 

Update: 2121.02.26.10:15 – Expanded on Bitesize coincidence.

A word or two about my rather gnomic reference to Bitesize and its relevance to the DIY task I was engaged in. This Key Stage 4 Physics case almost exactly describes my kitchen lights. There are three, and after my first few hours fiddling, I uttered a triumphant Fiat lux and flicked the switch; one of them shone brightly, and the other two only got half the requisite voltage. The answer (as eny fule know) was to wire them all in parallel circuits. Duh.

Excerpt from spookily relevant Bitesize lesson

 

Update: 2121.03.03.13:05 – DIY/KS4 update

As some Frenchman put it (Chateaubriand? Talleyrand?) Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien (often rendered as "Good enough is fine" or some such lame excuse for not doing things right [perhaps that word  gives a hint about a certain problem with my worldview]). I tinkered to make the job neater, and all  hell broke loose (where "hell" suggests the presence of Lucifer [the light-bearer]; whereas the absence of light  –  in two cases out of three  – was the problem).

Mr Montgomery (my old physics master) came to me in a dream; well, during a T'ai Chi session on Zoom to be precise. Cherchez l'homme, he said: V= IR (we were multilingual in my school  – a Latin man [VIR] was the mnemonic for Voltage = Current x Resistance.) My new/improved circuit included a length of flex with higher resistance, which reduced the current. The fix was trivial; but Chateaubriand seems increasingly attractive.:-)

 

Betwixt and between

We are all on the cusp of language change, though some of us are more aware of it than others. My parents, to take a trivial example, gave the word secretary only three syllables, with stress on the first: /'sekrǝtri:/. My children give the same word four syllables, with stress on the third  (the one that is completely agglutinated in the older pronunciation): /sekrǝ'teǝri:/.

<parenthesis type="CYA">
There are other differences too, particularly the length of the last vowel. For fluency, ease, brevity, etc etc, I've used what is called a "broad phonemic transcription" (and the days when I could define those words with academic rigour have long gone). 
</parenthesis>

Caught between these two pronunciations, I use a bit of both, trying to suit my context. My mother ^{[whom saints preserve, and they better had]} was a (trisyllabic) secretary (the real deal, with Pitman's and everything), whereas a US politician is a quadrisyllabic (or should that be tetra-?) Secretary of State.

This matter of primary stress in polysyllables has come to the fore in my mind because of the word extirpate, beloved of many a singer of Elijah. (Baal is exhorted to do it by his devotees, and whatever it is it doesn't sound very pleasant.)

About the stress, if not the vowels, dictionaries...

<descriptivist-objection>
(but what do they know; it's my language, what people do is what it is.)
</descriptivist-objection>

... seem to be pretty unanimous: stress is on the first syllable (like extricate) rather than the second (like external). I haven't trawled through all 30+ found by onelook.com  (some of which – like Oxford for Pity's sake: Dominus obscuratio mea – exclude themselves (by my lights..

<mini-rant>
When a business gets big enough it starts throwing its weight around: 'What we do at FatCat.com is so widely used it has become a standard.' Adobe did this with PDF, Microsoft with Word... For heavens sake, the rules of the translation competition I just entered specified a .docx file...And the docx so-called "standard" compounds the insult by taking one roll-your-own "standard" (.doc) and hiding its chewing-gum-and-baler-twine reality behind a real standard (xml) ... 

<inline_ps> 
(and by this I mean a protocol but that is the result of collaboration between interested parties before anything hits the market with an implementation of that protocol. 
</inline_ps>  

...by tacking an x on. But I digress.
<mini-rant>

...) by using a roll-your-own transcription system) but here are three:

• Cambridge
  
• Macmillan

• Collins

                                

But  that last screenshot (which like the others isn't live, so if you want to explore further go to the actual  page), in an attempt to exclude extraneous stuff, truncates the word frequency blobs (there are five): so it's not 'quite frequent' but 'almost unheard of':

In the 18th century, it was quite common; when Elijah first appeared in the mid-19th century the word was a shadow of its former self, in the 20th century it hit rock bottom, and in the 21st I'd guess it was only ever heard in performances of Elijah.

Which is to say that it might as well be pronounced  any way that suits the music. And Mendelssohn requires stress on the second syllable; so that's what it gets. 

But our present Elijah is getting the Zoom treatment. Here's a review from happier times of our last rendition.

b

Update: 2021.03.20.12:40 – Added (inline_ps>

Faithful or attractive, take 2

"Since some time I have begun an oratorio [BK – Elijah], and hope I shall be able to bring it out for the first time at your Festival..." 

Mendelssohn to the organizers of Birmingham Music Festival, 24 July 1845

'Since some time'? 'Bring it out'? Mendelssohn was an imperfect  speaker of English, though his English was a lot better than my German  (which, as I have said before, was Best Before End November 1969), and Elijah appeared first in English; all his correspondence with the Festival organizers and with his English publishers was conducted in English.

F.G Edwards, in his History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio 'Elijah' wrote:

The music of "Elijah" was composed to German words; an English version was therefore necessary. Mendelssohn had no hesitation in assigning the task of making the English translation to Mr. Bartholomew—"the translator par excellence," as he called him—who is so well known as the translator or adaptor of Mendelssohn's "Athalie," "Antigone," "Œdipus," "Lauda Sion," "Walpurgis Night," the Finale to "Loreley," "Christus," and many of his songs and part-songs.

According to Edwards,

William Bartholomew (1793-1867) 

 

William Bartholomew (1793-1867) was "a man of many accomplishments—chemist, violin player, and excellent flower painter." In 1841 he submitted to Mendelssohn the libretto of a fairy opera, entitled "Christmas Night's Dream"; and in this way an acquaintance commenced which developed into a(49) close friendship between the two men—a friendship severed only by death.

Perhaps Mendelssohn's estimate of Bartholomew's excellence as a translator could be questioned. Perhaps Mendelssohn just meant that he was biddable, and ready to offer dubious and/or risible versions of the German texts as long as they approximated to the rhythms and sounds of the original. Here are some bits of the German, with Bartholomew's English text (I admit I was tempted to add some derisive quotation marks to that English); in the event I have just coloured offending^‡ versions in red.

verbig dich am Bache Crith

   =(?) thither^† hide thee by Cherith's brook

so ziehet hin, greifet ihn, tötet ihn!

    =(?) So go ye forth; seize on him! He shall die!

Wir haben es gehört  

    =(?) We heard it with our ears

noch sind übrig geblieben siebentausend in Israel, die sich nich gebeugt vor Baal

    =(?) for the Lord hath yet left Him seven thousand in Israel, knees that have not bowed to Baal

That last one is hard to deliver without laughing. At a first reading, I thought the seven thousand knees were just an encouraging spin on the notion of only 3,500 faithful. But look at the German: 'siebentausend..., die sich nicht...'  The die are the 7,000 faithful. The 'knees' are a figment of Bartholomew's imagination [and the resultant chaotic syntax is his fault].

But I don't underestimate the difficulties of verse translation; I'm a one-time practitioner, as mentioned here. And I'm not suggesting the wholesale revision of dated works; I pointed out here, for example, that in The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves Verdi set the archaic word Ove where modern Italian would have Dove; archaisms come with classic works of art. I'm just saying that the publishers of the next edition might usefully spend some money on a less unreliable English version; after all, they must have recouped the £250 [+ £100 ex gratia to Mendelssohn's widow] they paid for the copyright.

(I shouldn't have to add, but perhaps I'd better, that this doesn't make Elijah any less exciting to sing or listen to. I'm looking forward greatly to singing it with my choir next month. )

^†This is a puerile attempt at sounding archaic. Thither doesn't just mean there; it didn't in 1846 and it still doesn't.

b

Update 2015.10.14.16:20 – Added clarifications in maroon.

Update 2015.10.15.15:25 – Umble [sic] pie eaten.

^‡I have wronged Bartholomew. He was presumably influenced by biblical translations (not always the ones relevant to the Elijah story). Of the four lapses I identified, three are explicable:

1. seize on
   This is used only once in the King James Bible (which I'm assuming is the one Bartholomew was conversant with), and in the New Testament. But a biblical snippet like this would naturally have come to mind when Bartholomew was looking for words to match the rhythm of the German.
2. we heard it with our ears^§
   Again, this isn't taken directly from the Bible text, but it's strongly reminiscent of this:
   Then spake the priests and the prophets unto the princes and to all the people, saying, This man is worthy to die; for he hath prophesied against this city, as ye have heard with your ears.
   [Jer. 26:11] 
3. knees
   This is not in the German text in the Novello edition, but it is in the King James Bible, almost verbatim:
   Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal
   [1 Kgs 19:18]
   And it is also in the Lutheran bible that Schübring based his libretto on:
   Und ich will übriglassen siebentausend in Israel: alle Kniee, die sich nicht gebeugt haben vor Baal
   more
   In the KJV text, I think the all the makes it sound slightly less silly. But it's a fair cop:
   Pride [goeth] before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. 

Update 2015.10.19.15:15 – Final obsessive? shaft – added this footnote:

^§ In an afterthought added to item 3  in this list of dubieties

<digression>
...I almost wrote infelicities – which would have been pleasing [in view of the composer's given name  – geddit, b-boum/tsh] but perhaps a little excessive. Besides, I rarely pass up the chance to use a word as luscious as dubiety ...
</digression>

...I cited the Lutheran Bible's Kniee (which I had previously said was 'a figment of Bartholomew's imagination'). The associated syntax, I had said, was 'his fault'.

Well, in a sense, it WAS. I was put onto the track of this line of enquiry by this extract from the Lutheran Bible (of the extract from The Book of Jeremiah, which I gave as precedent for '[we] heard it with our ears'):

Und die Priester und Propheten sprachen vor den Fürsten und allem Volk: Dieser ist des Todes schuldig; denn er hat geweissagt wider diese Stadt, wie ihr mit euren Ohren gehört habt.
More

Again, the bit of text that I had found questionable was in the Lutheran Bible [as far as I can tell from the only Lutheran text that I have found on the Internet – which can't have been the one Schubring knew [unless he had a DeLorean in the garage], but was not in Schubring's German text. Possibly (I think probably would not be an overstatement) there are many other bits of Bartholomew's translations that reinstate bits of Biblical text which Schubring had suppressed – presumably with Mendelssohn's approval (as their correspondence is quite detailed).

Bartholomew had a low opinion of the original librettist. On 23 June 1846 he wrote to Mendelssohn:

...I know not how so bad a scribe as he who penned the libretto could have been found;  words, nay even sentences were omitted... 

(Quotations from this and other correspondence are taken from F.G Edwards'  History of Mendelssohn's Oratorio 'Elijah' )

Poor Mendelssohn! Only months before (just before Christmas 1845) he had written at length to Schubring:

My dear Schubring,—I now send you, according to your permission, the text of 'Elijah,' so far as it goes. I do beg of you to give me your best assistance, and return it soon with plenty of notes in the margin (I mean Scriptural passages, etc.)... 

...Speaking is a very different thing from writing. The few minutes I lately passed with you and yours were more enlivening and cheering than ever so many letters.—Ever your
Felix

Bartholomew's 'so bad a scribe' must have tried Mendelssohn's loyalty.

For the revised version, Bartholomew seems to have largely had his way, with Mendelssohn struggling (successfully, in the case of the 'couch-watering' widow) against Bartholomew's scriptural conservatism. On 3 March 1847 he wrote to Bartholomew:

My dear Sir,—I have just received your letter of the 24th, and hasten to reply. I like all the passages of the translation you send me with but two exceptions. In No. 30, 'that Thou would'st please destroy me' sounds so odd to me—is it scriptural? If it is, I have no objection, but if not, pray substitute something else. And then in the new No. 8 [the widow scene]—the words from Psalm vi. which you hesitated to adopt are, of course, out of the question; but I also object to the second part of the sentence which you propose to add to the words of Psalm xxxviii. {6}, viz.: 'I water my couch,' etc. [Psalm vi., 6.]—I do dislike this so very much, and it is so poetical in the German version. So if you could substitute something in which no 'watering of the couch' occurred, but which gave the idea of the tears, of the night, of all that in its purity. Pray try!

But enough of this. I should redirect my energy into LEARNING THE NOTES.

Update 2015.11.22.12:25 – Added post-choral PS

PS One last reflection on Bartholomew: How long was the drought?

I don't have the text in front of me (as after the concert last night –  the fullest I've ever seen the Great Hall, and the first time I've ever heard such an enthusiastic ovation [deserved, especially by a brilliantly electrifying Elijah] – I returned my hired score), but Google tells me the German text, as originally set, in the passage where Elijah decides to go to Ahab, is Heute, im dritten Jahre, will ich mich dem Könige zeigen..., The original curse, mentioned in the opening bars, is these years there shall not be dew nor rain but according to my word – that is, it was up to Jehova when the water supply was to be reconnected. The baritone tune (in this later section, N^o 10) mirrors the opening curse, and the 'these' of the opening bars becomes 'three'.

This belief is no doubt partly due to that dritte. A simple textual translation of those German words would be "Today, in the third year, I will show the king..." But Bartholomew's extraordinary translation makes it oddly specific: 'Three years this day fulfilled, I will show myself unto Ahab..." Oddly specific and improbably, if you think about it; if it stops raining in, say March, it's not going to start again at precisely the same time of year; that'd be a MIRACLE. And Bartholomew has also mangled the sense in another way. Heute ... will ich zeigen...; it just happens to be im dritten Jahre [="in the third year"], not "precisely, to the day, at the end of the third year" [or as Elijah puts it in Bartholomew's text "three years this day fulfilled"].

I'm forced to the conclusion that the only way to be true to Mendelssohn's intentions would be to sing the German – not a welcome suggestion among singers who look forward, every few years, to singing words like "extirpate". 

Update 2015.11.23.15:40 – Added clarification in green.

Update 2015.12.05.23:30 – Added PPS

PPS: One last thing. Elsewhere I wrote this:

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes).

I quoted from a couple of pieces (with a pretty interesting reflection on the way Fauré plays with his audience's expectations, TISIAS) , and was aware at the time that this tally needed adding to. I've just noticed one in Elijah, and though that post seems the obvious place to put it I think that would be an update too far –  it would be the fifth PS.

Earth-Heaven = 1 octave
(Excerpt from Elijah)

When in  the second half of the oratorio, Elijah is taken up bodily into Heaven (none of this rotting business – so common) the music steps up an octave, starting with the basses on E♭.

And Mendelssohn repeats the scale, and then gives both extremes to underline the point.



Update 2015.12.06.11:30 – Improved music snippet, updated footer and added this crossword clue:

Mine sea cow – sounds like our kind. (8)

Update 2021.01.15.11:30 –  Deleted old footer; and  tried to dredge up the answer to that clue after six years. My knee-jerk answer would be manatees, but I can't think how that works.