Nabucco

My choir's latest virtual rehearsal was based on what is known in England as "The chorus of the Hebrew slaves" (so much better as the Coro di Schiavi Ebrei, as our copy had it...

<TYPO status="dubious" reason="old language?">
I think, though my knowledge of Italian is based on a course I did in 1992. the modern Italian would have degli in place of di. This would be yet another example of archaism in the 19th century text, like those I noted here

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...? 

<stop-press date="June 2020">
Yes he did – the splendidly named Temistocle Solera
</stop-press >

...) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

...

The ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. 

<background>
Earlier in the same post I had written:

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks 'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'.

<stop-press date="2020"> 

Catalan is like Castilian in its preference for derivation from UNDE, but without the pleonastic d: it uses plain on. So, far from adding a d at the beginning of the word, it drops one from the end.)
</stop-press>

And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr. chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa  – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). 

</background>

As Metternich...

<parenthesis>
"needs citation", to use Wikipedia's passive-aggressive  gibe, but my history teacher used to say it, and what's good enough for Mr Crosby is good enough for me
</parenthesis>

...said at the time 'Italy is a geographical expression'. The name VERDI was a coded feature of political graffiti, standing for Vittorio Emanuele Rei D'Italia. (And, now I think of it, the Hebrew Slaves have an allegorical relevance: the people of that geographical expression had been "enslaved" for centuries by various imperial powers.)
</TYPO>

Covid Chronicles 

The rehearsal (like most things these days: I wonder what's happened to the share price) was done over Zoom. For my madrigals group I use a tablet, which can put  nine thumbnails on one screen; it's a small group, so two screens is the most it runs to. But with the choir – with more than forty (60 or 70 on a good day) – I prefer to revert to my desktop PC, which runs to 2/3 screensful.

But it has no integrated camera. I've found a very old webcam, which I can't get to work. The PC itself is old enough (it runs Windows 7, no longer supported by Microsoft [and this old post sums up  my feelings about computer support:

She...[MrsK] asked a passing school-leaver [in PC World] if there were any known support issues with application software (I'm paraphrasing here, you understand) and the answer was, surprisingly enough, that everything was hotsy-totsy with Windows 8. 

Well, twenty years of working with software engineers (actually, 19¾ – HP took the penny-pinching precaution of shafting me 3 months before they would have had to fork out for a 20-year award) has taught me that if anything can go wrong with new software it will. This was true of Windows 95, and with everything since. Working in 'Support', which I did for many years, involved me almost daily in fixes and workarounds and you-just-can't-do-that-any-more when people tried to get existing application software to play nice with a new operating system.

]), but the webcam pre-dates even that – the user guide doesn't mention Windows 7 (only its predecessors Windows 2000 and Windows XP).

So my participation in the rehearsals is haunted by a photo of me (taken, now I think of it, when I was using Windows XP). The picture is in a file called mugshot.bmp, which gives an idea of its lugubriousness.

Tha'sall. Time I showed my face in the Real World.

b

Brother Lawrence / in the scriptorium / with a quill

Medieval Cluedo?

Yestreen...

<gloss>

I'm trying to get this charming abbreviation for "yesterday evening" re-adopted.

According to Collins it's Scottish and pretty rare But their "usage trends" graph shows that (back in the nineteenth century) it was all the rage.

</gloss>

... my choir sang this:

Manuscript from Reading Abbey, but probably produced in Oxford.
(see David Crystal, The Stories of English [2005], p. 108)

In  The Stories of English David Crystal says

Reading Abbey did not have a scriptorium, so the manuscript was probably copied at Oxford.

This gives the rota or "round" a double relevance to our choir, as a good few of us live in the Reading area, and both our MD and our accompanist studied at Oxford.

But why Sumer? Isn't it the wrong bird? The cuckoo arrives in Britain in April. Crystal gives the answer:

There was no contradiction, because in Middle English sumer was the only word available to describe the period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. The word spring to refer to the season is not recorded in English until the mid-sixteenth century.  

The Stories of English

That Crystal book has reminded me of a pipe-dream I discussed here

<digression theme="pipe-dream" likelihood="0">
Penguin missed a trick (or more likely decided that the trick wasn't worth the outlay) with this book. It was written like a coffee-table book, with two or three sorts of text and standalone features, quite like Words: An Illustrated History of Western Language (which I had a small part in publishing – but a bigger part than I wanted [and that's a whole 'nother story] ). But Penguin just squeezed it all together with tiny margins and no kind of visual clues to what sort of text was which. 

<inline_ps date="2020">
"No sort of visual clue" is strictly a bit of an exaggeration. The designer has done what he or she could in the cost-reduced circumstances of what the trade knows (or knew in my day) as a "mass-market paperback". If you know what to look for it makes sense. There's a vertical rule down the margin of the standalone features; but it's easily missed, and the reader only realizes what's happened when the syntax of two unrelated sentence parts makes the inconsistency felt.
</inline_ps> 

The reader's never sure whether the current text is part of the main argument or part of an illustrative aside. It needs changes in line-length or font or shade of paper to make it a smooth reading experience.

<sub_digression>
In fact, the writing so obviously has this sort of treatment in mind that I suspect it was written to order for another publisher but that the contract fell through. The typescript then got bought by another publisher whose needs were at odds with the book as written. Maybe not though – who knows...?
<sub_digression>

My fantasy – though I haven't discussed this with the good Professor – is to win a large amount of money and become a proper publisher. My Rights department would negotiate with Allen Lane to acquire the rights for a properly designed book, and my Design department would make this book CanDo Publishing's lead title.
<digression> 

<tangent>
In researching this post I've come across my latest nomination for a Tezzy ("Time-wasting Site of the Year".  I haven't dabbled yet, but imagine the temptation will get the better of me in the end.  Here it is, the British Library's Medieval Manuscripts Blog
</tangent>

Enough for now.

b
PS An irrelevant quandary:

My attention has been brought to this petition, and I'm in a quandary about signing it. I know I shouldn't be, as it obviously addresses a critical issue.

<parenthesis>
(My first choice of wording in that last sentence was "It clearly addresses", but while it does obviously address the issue, clarity is hardly characteristic of the way it goes about it. The "writer" has had a thought, taken a number of words in the relevant area, and spewed them out onto the page in the hope that the reader will organize them into something meaningful; with any luck, that meaning will match the meaning intended. 

I am reminded of Sheridan (père's) words (used to drum up business for a teacher of how to write)

We write with ease to show our breeding 

But easy writing's curs'd hard reading. 

) 

</parenthesis>

I want to subscribe to the gist without subscribing to the woeful wording. I do wish people would give some thought to what they're writing, rather than scatter-brainedly  conjuring up a bunch of more or less relevant words and leaving it to the reader to arrange them into a thought. How's this for a doozie?

It is important to learn about Black History and unteach this ignorance as some children may not choose to educate themselves and just listen to the people around them and be influenced causing people to hold racist views and pass them down many generations meaning the cycle of racism and systematic oppression will never end.

Fifty-five words with no punctuation. and daisy-chain syntax. The people the petition is addressed to are almost guaranteed to dismiss it as intemperate ravings.

I guess I'll sign, but with a heavy heart.

Update: 2020.06.06.16:20 – Added inline PS.

Bras dessus bras dessous

In a trail for an Eartha Kitt program  I heard once there was a song that I had never heard in the original (although C'est si bon ...

<parenthesis>
(one of those "translations" that give up the effort of actually translating, and just throw in the odd snatch of the original – Volare is another example)
</parenthesis>

...is a commonplace on the lounge circuit in an English version):

C'est si bon,
De partir n'importe où,
Bras dessus bras dessous,
En chantant chansons

And the phrase bras dessus bras dessous took me back to my French classroom in the early '60s (possibly '63-'64, otherwise '65-'66...

<autobiographical-note>
Not in the intervening year, when we were consigned to the attention of an assistant, who –  much to our annoyance at the time – insisted that we learn and use the symbols of the IPA.  I was later to realize that – unless total immersion in the environment of the target language was possible  – IPA symbols were an almost essential ...

<parenthesis>
(and that "almost" is a craven sop to the sometimes vocal language teachers who are happy to pander to the needs of  students who can't use a decent [that is, mono-lingual] dictionary)
</parenthesis> 

...tool for learning a language.
</autobiographical-note>

...). The particular memory was of Cedric Baring-Gould's mime of walking arm in arm. My reaction was not a simplistic "Aha – bras dessus bras dessous is "the equivalent..."  (whatever that means in the context)  "....of the English" ...

<parenthesis>
(the assistant had introduced us to the less formal la main dans la main [in Françoise Hardy's "Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge].. or "was to introduce" – all these parentheses are a bit too involved even for me...
</parenthesis>

 ...."arm-in-arm".

My association of that phrase with that mime is an example of the sort of association summed up on the right hand side of this diagram I later (much later) used in a Portuguese lesson:

I've probably uploaded this to TESconnect, but here it is anyway; and if you want to change the target language, you're welcome to the Visio sources (Microsoft-backup-willing)

The question O que é? triggers the name of the object, without recourse to the arduous and time-consuming and unnatural and error-prone left-hand route.

As I wrote in an earlier post:

My memory was of the mime performed by my French master 50-odd years ago. I've mentioned Cedric before, here. I can imagine his shade smiling down with a look of smug satisfaction (like the one he used to show the difference between 'No vacancies' and 'Complet' [HD 2020: arms  folded for the latter, hands upraised for the former]). 

At this time of year [HD 2020: I was writing about the time of the rentrée des classes], teachers of all kinds may need the fillip of this post: if you're good, what you do (probably more than what you say) will let your pupils take away from your lessons much more than you think.

I'll never forget BG's figure hunched over the enormous reel-to-reel Grundig that he always carried from class to class. (The assistant had one of the new cassette players, but BG swore by his magnétophone .)

Time for my walk, if I can get this published before Minusnet ("better than damp string")  crashes again.

b

...if it wasn't for those pesky prepositions

This morning (that is, yesterday morning at time of going to <whatever>, my attention was caught by a charming birthday wish for Richard Wagner:

...and don't bother clicking on this screenshot, which is as dumb as can be.
Rather, give your ears a treat by going to YouTube.

<autobiographical-note subject="WCS tour, 2016">
If your YouTube experience is anything like mine (which it probably won't be) this Wagner piece is followed by a piece that Ben (the pianist on YouTube and my choir's pianist) played with us on our tour of the North-East in 2016: Abendlied.
</autobiographical-note>

You'll note that Facebook has helpfully supplied a bit of contextual information – leading me to wonder about their choice of preposition. I'm not sure what this sort of note adds.

The first response to Ben's post points to this bit of silliness on Facebook's part ...

<tangent subject="Gresham's Law?">
(not, please, behalf – although see my rant in the first update to this; the abomination has wormed its way into a kosher dictionary (Collins, I think, from memory). This seems to be yet another example of Gresham's Law as it applies to language: not Bad money drives out good, but Bad language-use drives out good).
</tangent subject>

...but, I feel, misses the point:

Facebook's note is not just otiose; it's wrong. By the same token, Oliver Twist is ABOUT Charles Dickens, that is, not.

In Facebook's defence (can I have written that? ) maybe some pictures need a bit of context-setting; and when writing a bit of generic text the right preposition in one case won't work in another. So whoever it was at Facebook who decreed We must generate some context-setting text on the fly was giving  the writer ...

<parenthesis>
(or maybe they make the mistake of leaving this sort of thing to the software engineer rather than spending money on a writer (or even, as with some enlightened and forward-thinking tech companies, a "User-Interface Engineer")
</parenthesis>

...a poisoned chalice.

That's all you're getting; a quickie. I'm thinking of more preposition-related stuff, but there's some serious tail-chasing in progress at the moment (if progress is the right word).

b

Weighed in the balance

The other night I caught, on Radio 3, the last 15-20 minutes (enough to send me back to BBC Sounds to hear the rest) of Belshazzar's Feast.  And it was extraordinary how familiar the music was, given that I had sung it over 30 years ago – in December 1987 to be precise.

<pre-history>
Two years before that I had my audition for Wokingham Choral Society with their new MD Paul Daniel. I persuaded him to take me on, despite my limitations when it came to reading music (and at the time I didn't even have a keyboard of any kind at home to help with note-bashing) on the strength of my having "recently" sung Beethoven's Mass in C (WCS's concert piece that term) with MagSoc's choir. That recently was something of an exaggeration, but it sounded more persuasive than the more accurate 'about 12 years ago when I was looking for an unauditioned choir having been kicked out of the chapel choir').

<peccadillo>
After three years with that choir (three years that coincided with Paul Daniel's tenure, before he went on to greater things) I left WCS, to return in the early noughties, under Aidan Oliver. On the strength of being a returning member I escaped without audition. (This may have had something to do with the maestro's attitude to red tape.)
</peccadillo>

</pre-history>

The rehearsals went well until three or four weeks before the concert, when Paul Daniel began to feel a pain in his shoulder. A physiotherapist and member of the choir kept telling him to get it seen to, but he tried to work though the pain.  Finally, on the Friday before the concert he saw a specialist and was told that if he conducted at the concert it might be the last concert he conducted.

<hearsay>
(well anyway, that's what the chairman said  when he told us on the Saturday morning, and it's at least plausible)
</hearsay>

So at incredibly short notice they found a new conductor, Brian Wright whose biography mentions the piece.

<pre-history>
 (although that was with the RPO; he cut his teeth with WCS.)
</pre-history>

Four things struck me about the concert :

• The venue: it was a sports hall, converted pro tem – not a great success acoustically
• The conductor, a northerner, didn't like the way we said brass. He didn't try to change it, but said he felt more comfortable with choirs who said /bræs/. I think Walton, a Lancastrian, would probably have agreed.
• From the horse's mouth (that is, Walton's) he corrected the printed score with respect to the triplet when the choir sings 'weighed in the balance'. (I'm afraid the details escape me.)
• Also on the programme was Paco Peña, whose performances I had enjoyed twice in the late '60s.
  

  <autobiographical-note>
  One of these was at the Guildford Festival. My oldest sister was a student at the University of Surrey, which was linked in some way with Battersea Technical College. Linking the two sites was a shuttle minibus, on which I stowed away disguised as a student (I was in the fifth year – or "Year 11" in new money).

  The concert was called something like "Three aspects of the guitar", and was divided between John Williams (classical),  Paco Peña, (flamenco) , and Chris Spedding (a late replacement for a jazz guitarist, though "jazz" is not a very apt description of his one hit, "Motor bikin'"). 

  At the end, John Williams announced that, having met for the first time that afternoon, they were going to play together. With his three-finger (classical) tremolo his Repertoire included Tárrega's Recuerdos de la Alhambra (that clip demonstrates both the technique and the piece). Paco Peña, with his four-finger (flamenco) tremolo (how VERY DARE they use the little finger?) knew the tune well enough to improvise an accompaniment. And Chris Spedding would do his thing. Hmm? (His solo contribution to the concert proper didn't inspire confidence.) 

  The two acoustic guitars started, confirming Fernando Sor's opinion:...

  <no-source>
  Sorry, can't place it. I believe I saw it on the sleeve notes to John Williams and Julian Bream's first Together album.
  <no-source>

  ,...(something about the only sound more beautiful than a guitar being the sound of two). So we eyed Chris Spedding's VOX AC30 with dread. 

  In the event his contribution was far from intrusive; and when the music finished – after a moment when we hoped (vainly) for more – there was the sort of ovation that I had never been part of before (and have never been part of since). It was not a matter of a few people standing up and others joining them. It was unanimous (in a way that does justice to the roots of the word: one mind). 

  <second-concert>
  To describe my other late ‘60s Paco Peña concert would be even more self-indulgent than usual. 
  </second-concert> >

   </autobiographical-note>

You've got to draw a line somewhere.. Life's just one AOB after another

b

Sauntering

John Muir, "Father of the National Parks"

My ears pricked up – as they often do when exposed to (often unwitting) crimes against etymology – when I was listening to Radio 3 just now. They were playing a repeat of a 2017 broadcast based on an almost-real-time walk along Offa's Dyke. The commentary didn't quite assert that the word "saunter" derived  from pilgrims to the Holy Land (la Sainte Terre, geddit?).

But it did assert something in that area – that la Sainte Terre was among the many disputed suggested etymologies of "saunter"; and I don't feel it was sufficiently deprecatory of this particular bunch of hooey.

Etymonline provides a link to thoughts on this topic, which is a good read. They take the history of supposed etymologies of saunter from Dr Johnson (a believer in this bit of hokum), via other believers, including Henry David Thoreau...

<autobiographical-note>
(who wrote "I have often traveled in Concord". "Travelling in Concorde" had an amusing secondary meaning in 1979, when I was working on the ODQ [details here]. Oh how we larfed.)
</autobiographical-note>

...and John Muir (in a conversation recounted in The Mountain Trail and its Message by its author Albert Wentworth Palmer).

<aside>
It's a strangely appropriate coincidence that the etymology of the name Palmer is not in doubt:

"pilgrim; itinerant monk going from shrine to shrine under a perpetual vow of poverty;" originally "pilgrim who has returned from the Holy Land," c. 1300, palmere (mid-12c. as a surname), from Anglo-French palmer (Old French palmier), from Medieval Latin palmarius, from Latin palma "palm tree" (see palm (n.2)). So called because they wore palm branches in commemoration of the journey. "

Source

</aside>

I liked this summary of the Muir/Palmer quote:

I'm willing to allow the gist of the quip to be true, and that Muir really did say something like that on some occasion. Perhaps Palmer had the sort of memory attributed to Coleridge that could recall a casual conversation completely.

But that doesn't mean the etymology is correct.

Etymonline

This often happens  in discussions of etymology; a quotation is cited as a knock-down argument, but  the seeker of truth gets up again and shrugs off the standing count of 8. I mentioned an example with reference to Kemp's Nine Days Wonder, here.

Returning to that Offa's Dyke program, my ears pricked up again at mention of Cader Idris. Like Arthur's Seat (a similar landmark, though not the same size), a Cader is something you sit on – a big chair (the Castilian cadera means "hip" but the Catalan cadira means "chair"; I discussed these two, and how they relate to cathedrals and ex cathedra pronouncements [made with that authority that comes from sitting in a big chair], here.)

<AOB>
Other body parts used to name land forms (e.g. the Paps of Jura) come to mind, and other metaphors for land forms (like "canyon", from cannon) will have to wait.
</AOB>

That's all (for today) folks.

b


Update:2020.05.10.12:40 – Deleted this working note, which once served to remind me where I was going:

Also Cader Idris, cf Arthur's Seat and see cathedra stuff.

Annie - Mona Lisa of the Seine

The slimmed down Covid-19 version of Radio 4Extra's RadioLab programme (itself a repeat of the original NPR broadcast from the USA) brought to my attention a programme originally broadcast (in the UK) 2 years ago.

<autobiographical_note>
In the mid 1980s, when I was getting my First Aid at Work certificate, we were told that the first thing to do on approaching an unconscious casualty was to call out, as the sense of hearing is the last bit of consciousness to go (I'm not sure about this; maybe some other sense is the very last to go; but an apparently unconscious patient can still hear). So we always addressed the dummy as "Annie", which I assumed was based on the name of the dummy, Resusci-Anne.
</autobiographical_note>

But that RadioLab programme (the relevant section starts about 7'25" in) made me think again about the derivation of that "Anne". The English /æ/ phoneme used in "Anne" is  not a million miles from the first syllable of the French "Inconnue", and the similarity increases in the context of the following nasal. It told...

...the story of an innocent young woman from the country who comes to Paris, who's seduced by a rich lover and then abandoned when she falls pregnant. With nobody to turn to, she drowns herself in the waters of the Seine, a modern Ophelia. At the mortuary, her beautiful face, now peaceful in death, is preserved forever with a plaster cast. 

It was another drowning - or near-drowning - that ensured the Inconnue a place in medical history. 

In 1955 Asmund Laerdal saved the life of his young son, Tore, grabbing the boy's lifeless body from the water just in time and clearing his airways. Laerdal at that time was a successful Norwegian toy manufacturer, specialising in making children's dolls and model cars from the new generation of soft plastics. When he was approached to make a training aid for the newly-invented technique of CPR - cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the combination of chest compressions and the kiss of life which can save the life of a patient whose heart has stopped - his son's brush with death a few years earlier made him very receptive.  

He developed a torso or whole-body mannequin which simulates an unconscious patient requiring CPR. Asmund wanted his mannequin to have a natural appearance. He also felt that a female doll would seem less threatening to trainees... 

Source

In Norwegian, the similarity ...

<inline_ps>
between the Norwegian equivalent of  "Anne" and the first syllable of the French Inconnue
</inline_ps>

...may be closer. A fuller treatment than RadioLab's was given in a BBC Magazine article in 2013 (already quoted from above, and given the intriguing headline The Mona Lisa of the Seine;)

Millions of people around the world have learned CPR on a mannequin known as Resusci Anne. The story of the 19th Century beauty behind the model - or at least, one version of it - will be told at a symposium in London to mark European Restart a Heart Day. But does anyone really know anything about her?  

...[!I]f you're one of the 300 million people who's been trained in CPR, you've almost certainly had your lips pressed to the Inconnue's.

5 years later ( or maybe a bit more in the case of the original US broadcast) that figure hadn't changed;...

<old-numbers>

L'inconnue de la Seine

As CPR has been taught for nearly 70 years, that 2013 figure might have been expected to increase by at least a few hundred thousand since then. The "300 million people who'[ve] been trained in CPR" seems to be a rather sticky one. But still; what matters (to my understanding at least) is that they've all used a version of the same dummy, and that the dummy's based on a death-mask.
</old-numbers>

... but anyway it's a large number.

Bye for now. I'll leave you with a chance Where've-I-heard-that-before? noticed on my daily walk the other day; the radio played the Polka from Smetana's Bartered Bride  and I couldn't help comparing it with that staple of Belfast pub songs I'll Tell My Ma. Not identical by any means but close enough to remind me of the old Clancy Brothers/Tommy Makem version. (I didn't use this in the first sentence of this para. The introduction is a bit wordy. Skip to 0'9" if you just want to hear the music.)

<thinks>
Perhaps I shouldn't always be wired for sound – give the birdsong a chance. This morning they were making such a din that I almost missed the rare passage of an aeroplane.
</thinks>

b

Update 2020.05.06.13:00 – Added inline PS.