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. 

Ten More Green Bottles

In 40 days as I type, on 21 November, my choir will be singing Elijah, which might never have included one of its best-loved arias. We shall be singing from Michael Pilkington's 1991 edition (called, on its title page,  New Novello Choral Edition  – as opposed to my old 1951 edition Novello's Original Octavo Edition (confusingly announcing itself as

---

NEW EDITION

---

on its title page [though it's as old as me].) 

Mendelssohn was a self-willed collaborator, as this exchange with an early [putative] librettist suggests:

1 November, 1838, Pastor Schubring to Mendelssohn: 
The thing [an early plan of Elijah] is becoming too objective – an interesting, even a thrilling picture, but far from edifying the heart of the listener....[W]e must diligently set to work to keep down the dramatic, and raise the sacred element, and always aim at this. 

2 November 1838, Mendelssohn to Schubring:
I am glad to learn you are searching out the... sense of the Scriptural words, but if I might make one observation, it is that I would fain see the exuberant and defined...

17 November, 1838, Schubring to Mendelssohn
I am more and more convinced that you will have to supply the principal part of the text yourself.

6 December, 1838, Mendelssohn to Schubring:
With regard to the dramatic element, there still seems to be a diversity of opinion between us. With a subject like "Elijah" it appears to me that the dramatic element should predominate.... [F]or heaven's sake let them not be a musical picture, but a real world, such as you find in every chapter of the Old Testament.

The dates of the letters tell their own story.  The second is dated the day after the first (which in fact was not really the first, as Schubring had written a shorter note the day before). Then Schubring mulls over the issue for over two weeks. Nearly three weeks later Mendelssohn replies. After that, two months went by before Schubring wrote again, 'and in this he makes it clear that the subject, at least on Mendelssohn's terms, is too much for him' (says my later edition). Schubring's career as librettist was chequered.

Aria no. 31, O rest in the Lord, had a chequered career too.  Mendelssohn's sparring partner this time was William Bartholomew, an employee of the original publisher, who wrote that 'he thought he could trace some resemblance to the melody of the song Auld Robin Gray' in the melody as originally written:

Mendelssohn protested:

I do not recollect having heard the Scottish ballad to which you allude, and certainly did not think of it, and did not choose to imitate it; but as mine is a song to which I always had an objection (of another kind), and as the ballad seems much known, and the likeness very strong, and before all, as you wish it, I shall leave it out altogether (I think)...

'[T]he likeness very strong'? Here's the beginning of the ballad:

The key's the same, trivially [no doubt editorial]; and the rhythms are similar (but by no means identical). The first five notes in ARG are moving step-wise up a scale, unlike Mendelssohn's. 

But Mendelssohn thought he'd leave it out altogether. Now it was Bartholomew's turn to protest; the biographer of Mendelssohn, F. G. Edwards (editor of my old score) wrote:

Bartholomew... begged him to retain the air, and to change a note or two...

Well in the end, at the eleventh hour (too late to do the job properly all through the aria, he moved the G of Herrn [Lord], the fifth note  of the tune (which itself is the fifth degree of the scale – spooky or what?)  back down to C in the opening bars. But he either forgot or didn't bother to change that melody when it recurs twice in the coda:

It seems to me that Mendelssohn's youthful time in Scotland, which inspired both The Hebrides Overture and his 3rd Symphony – his first visit took place shortly before he wrote that original melody – almost certainly exposed him to Auld Robin Gray. But as readers of a very early post of mine will know,

Far be it from me to make any charge of  'plagiarism'; I believe in the 'Ten Green Bottles' theory of musical history. [I had previously mentioned

...words spoken by an MD of my youthful acquaintance: 'There has only been one tune written in the history of the world - "Ten Green Bottles".'

] 

.... But it's not just Pop and 'Classical' - those quotation marks are tweezers, registering my distaste ... [BK – I had previously been discussing a link between Handel and Eric Clapton] [A]s someone said in The Electric Muse (Robin Denselow, I think, but there were three others included in the et al) if you listen carefully to a Jack Bruce bass line (in a Cream number, if I remember rightly) you'll hear the folk song 'The Cutty Wren'.

Besides, I don't see what improvement Mendelssohn's rewrite represents.

Thankfully, Mendelssohn had his way, and Elijah is marked by 'appeal and rejoinder, question and answer, sudden interruptions etc' (as Mendelssohn had written to Schubring on 2 Nov. 1838).

But.... I was going to say a bit about word-painting. Only 8 more rehearsals to go though, so it'll have to wait for an update. I must go and do some note-bashing....

b

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?)

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each e cvowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

.

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Water, water everywhere

<plug object="choral concert">
Tonight – or,  by the time I hit the Submit button, last night, probably – my choir will start rehearsals for its first concert of the new term, when we'll be singing Elijah. When this was first suggested I thought I could use my secondhand copy of the score. The choir's instructions were

I think those of you who have a previous Novello version of the Elijah score may be able to use it ...

My old copy of Elijah,
alongside the 1957 programme

But as my previous edition's original sale price had been 7s. 0d. I thought I'd better use a new score. I'm quite attached to my old score though. Its previous owner, who sang with South Chiltern Choral Society, (and who I suspect was a language teacher, because he used my trick of using IPA symbols to make pronunciation notes) had kept the programme from their concert in 1957:

  Anyway, if it's as good as our our last Elijah over 10 years ago...

Elijah is a work of enormous excitement and dramatic force....The response of the chorus to their self-inflicted woes [BK not WCS's; the Israelites'] captured every nuance of their emotional turmoil and the semi-chorus sang with winsome sensitivity.)

Wokingham Times, April 2005

...it'll be a perfect way to spend a winter's evening at the Great Hall Reading.
</plug>

But what has this to do with  water (mentioned in the subject line)? Well those self-inflicted woes all stem from a drought:

...there shall not be dew nor rain these years, there shall not be dew nor rain  but according to my word.
(note cursey typeface)

Be that as it may, water – specifically water-based metaphors – has been on my mind. And drought is a good point de départ. When a source of something (there's another: a source is a spring – the watery kind ) runs low it dries up, or dwindles to a trickle. (on reflection, I suppose I could probably also have highlighted RUNS LOW; the low could refer to the level of a liquid in a container). And when a speaker loses their flow ...

<digression theme="fluency">
On the subject of flow, I am often asked – as a speaker of more than one language – if I'm "fluent in X". When you're fluent in a language words flow (without apparent reflection) from your mouth. "Am I fluent in X?" Hell, I'm not even fluent in English (although I am, as they say,  a 'native speaker'.)

<meta_digression>  

Stephen Fry, in the last edition of Fry's English Delight, distinguished between early and late bilinguals – a distinction I'm not sure about. For me, to be  bilingual a child has to be raised in a household where two languages are naturally spoken.  A man who, in later life, made a point of learning (not acquiring, to use the linguistics word for what a child does) Yiddish  (this was one of the examples given) is not, by my lights, bilingual. Maybe my lights are on the blink though. Maybe...

In my youth I was a social contact (and colleague of sorts) of Michael Portillo, erstwhile Cabinet Minister (and now sporter of multifarious jackets on a television near you). His father was Spanish. His Spanish was very good. In 1971, in Madrid, I met his cousin – who agreed; but, she added, 'habla como un libro'  ['like a book']. Maybe this wasn't original; maybe it's a traditional family description, but I give her as the source because she it was who said it to me. 

Does this make him bilingual? (Of course, he may be, depending on the linguistic environment he grew up in). 

</meta_digression>

</digression>

... their speech dries up, just as an actor may simply dry.

So much for speech; many water-related metaphors relate also to immersion (which itself is probably one... yup). If you're on uncertain ground (whoops: mixed metaphor warning) you're out of your depth; and maybe there are things going on under the surface – still waters run deep. You need to keep your head above water. And if you go against prevailing attitudes you swim against the tide; if you change your mind you row back, or in some circles (the sort where a lazy person rests on his oars, or doesn't pull his weight), you back-water ("backwater" does duty in another metaphorical sense with regard to a place where nothing much happens [oh yes, my use/non-use of hyphens is both intentional and deliberate (and if you think that's pleonastic, look 'em up)]. Or you could just go with the flow.

The word immersion itself suggests another metaphor, about language learning  – another source of watery metaphors: students acquiring vocabulary by osmosis, teachers drip-feeding information. And not just language-learning;  skills and information may leak from other disciplines. I'm sure many more such examples will come to me.

But I have other fish to fry. Before I go though, I'll share a thought I've had about bascule bridges. (That gear-change could have been smoother [via water ⇒ river ⇒ bridge], but this isn't The One Show.) Since seeing the hydraulic mechanisms that make Tower Bridge work, I no longer see it as two arms waving up and down but as a pair of asymmetrical see-saws, with their longer arms meeting, Each longer arm (half the roadway) tips up as water slooshes into the arm you can't see.

<digression theme="tai chi, nothing if not eclectic">
I use this image to reinforce the idea of weight draining from one leg into the other, so that upward movement doesn't involve muscular effort (in the rising leg).
</digression>

And where does this fit in, metaphor-wise? Well the French for see-saw (American teeter-totter) is une bascule.

b

PS: Here's a clue:
Thinker about body. (7)

Update: 2015.09.05.12:30  – Added picture, and fixed a rogue its (sorry about that,  it's not that difficult, I know, but I'm always doing it).

Update: 2015.09.14.10.55 – Added this PPS:

PPS Here's another water-based metaphor – not a current one, but still striking. Not having read Strait is the gate I don't know how – or whether – it survives translation [come to think of it, it's so striking that any translator must surely have kept it in] but La Porte Étroite includes this image. A person who has been blind from birth imagines birdsong as the sound of the environment [horrid over-functional word, but I don't have the text in front of me – the air? the world?]  boiling with joy and excitement.

Update: 2015.09.19.16.55 – Added this PPPS:

And, on  the subject of boiling, I happened on this one this morning...

<spoiler_alert>
...while doing today‘s Polygon in The Times.
</spoiler_alert>

Ebullience. As Etymonline says,

 ...from Latin ebullientem (nominative ebulliens) "a boiling, a bursting forth, overflow," present participle of "to boil over"...

More here from Etymonline .



Update: 2017.10.10.10.45 – Deleted old footer.