A Happy Dog Crate

The minstrel boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you'll find him.
His father's sword he has girded on
And his wild harp slung beside him.

'Land of song', cried the warrior bard,
'Though all the word betrays thee,
One sword at least thy right shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee.'

The warrior bard believed in his country, and underlined his faith with a harp. Though distant in both time and space, Alexandre Herculano de Carvalho e Araújo, as Wikipedia recounts, was a nineteenth-century Portuguese novelist and historian. But in his youth he was a poet. He published over nearly half a century, novels, short stories, histories, theatre, many pamphlets... , but his first published work was a book of poems ‐ A Voz do Propheta. And his second book of verse set such store by this that the 1838 title page doesn't mention his name; I suppose the 21st-century equivalent would be 

...by the best-selling author of
THE VOICE OF THE PROPHET

Title page as reproduced in the Project Gutenberg edition

 

 

 

<inline-ps>

I blithely used 'believed' in my opening sentence, expecting readers to know the relation between crente and 'believer'. Think of our words 'credentials' and 'credence'. I was fairly confident in assuming that harpa neeeded no glossing, but I shouldn't have assumed the same about crente.
</inline-ps>

As I am working on a translation for the Steven Spender Prize I wanted a more reliable text than the Gutenberg (there are spelling changes that can make for misunderstandings: a trivial example on that title page is auctor which has the Latin c, dropped in modern texts) and in my search for a more modern text I tried Amazon, who most helpfully wondered whether I meant a happy dog crate and provided a link to books about training a puppy. Who knew that crate-training was A Thing? Well I do now.

Amazon's helpful suggestion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There may be play at Lord's now though, so...

b

Update: 2021.06.06.17:10 – Added <inline-ps />

Questing voles and pinnipeds

I've just come across the word "pinniped" – not for the first time, as I'm a hoarder of obscure words, but it's only now that I have thought about their etymology.

When I first met the related word "pinnate', I thought it referred strictly to compound leaves like this one, but I have recently discovered that botanists use the term pinnate venation to describe basic leaves like the one further down, with a feathery system of veins.

This explains another appearance of the "word-bit" (or morpheme if you're in a linguistics exam) penna- (Latin: =a feather): the English word "pennon".

Another, slightly more obvious derivative, taking the pointiness to extremes, is "pinnacle".

But why stop at Latin? The English "pen" (mightier than the sword, but not because of its pointiness)   is derived ultimately from a Proto Indo European   (PIE) word, as Etymonline says:

late 13c., penne, "writing implement made from the hard, hollow stem at the base of a feather," from Old French pene "quill pen; feather" (12c.) ... in Late Latin, "a pen for writing," from Old Latin petna, pesna, from PIE *pet-na-, suffixed form of root *pet- "to rush; to fly."

In the late 13 century, of course, a pen was a feather . Scholars ...

<digression type="Further reading","optional">
If you'd like some extra philological speculation,  there's some here about how the stress in the Greek ένκαυστον (ink) shifted forwards to give the Late Latin encaustum, and where the r came from in most Romance words for ink. (Hint: The scholars were writing [the Italian ones at least] in chiostro. [="cloister"])
</digression>

... used a pen-knife (geddit?)...

<anachronism-alert>                                    
OK, they probably didn't have the modern sort of pen-knife in medieval monasteries, but that's where those implements – at some later stage – got their name. Gimme a break, dammit: it's a literary device.
</anachronism-alert>  

... to do their scrivening (if that's a word, and it is now). 

 Meanwhile in German a pen is not derived from that PIE root: it is a Füller, which says Duden , while its primary meaning is fountain pen, can also mean feather; (except that maybe it is derived from that root; "feather"/Feder is [by way of that same Grimm's law that makes English "father" and Latin pater cognate]).

But let's go back to pinnipeds: sea-lions, walruses, and so on – mammals that use pointy limbs in place of feet; and what's the vole doing in my subject line? Well Evelyn Waugh knew a thing or two, and I like to think that – although a vole isn't a pinniped – the idea of a word that combined feather and foot owes something to Waugh's classical education:

Feather-footed through  the plashy fen passes the questing vole
Scoop

 But while the sun's out there's some greenery that needs attacking.

b

The pun that never was

I went out to dinner last night, just for the halibut [BOU-BOUM - TSH {Ithangyou}].  (except that by the time I publish, it won't be 'last night'. and I didn't have the halibut anyway [it was an outlier at the top of the price list: the chance to resurrect the 'just for the halibut' gag wasn't worth the extra £6.50]). It, last night, that is, was the first night for some months (since the misguided 'Eat out to help out' initiative) when it was possible to eat out inside (which was just as well, in view of the biblical deluge we ran through from the car-park).

Which has led me to think of firsts and lasts. The subject of this morning's Life Scientific was Nira Chamberlain, a mathematician with many firsts to his name, all of them taking the form "the first black mathematician to be <accolade-or-position>". Towards the end of the program he's talking about being the first black mathematician to figure in Who's Who. At which point he mentioned another black academic saying something strongly reminiscent of the famous Kamala Harris quote...

<parenthesis subj="oh-yeah? Sez who?>

Well, maybe not that famous, but well enough known to feature in an oft-repeated podcast ident – Newscast or Americast, I think; and well enough known for Google to throw up millions of red-herrings...

<meta-parenthesis>
And who knew that the red herring (which was a Thing exported to the slave plantations, I've just learnt, as a bottom-of-the-market foodstuff: see here but here's an excerpt, in case you're not interested in the whole sorry tale

From its outset, the role of the Fishery Board was to maintain standards and to intervene in disputes between fishermen.... [F]ishery officers were obliged to inspect the curing of the fish and only correctly cured fish could be sold within Europe. Implicit in this approach was the intention that fish which did not meet the standard could be shipped to the West Indies to feed the slaves. As in the case of cod ‘the West Indies presented growing market for the rejects, for anything that was cheap’. By feeding the slaves, rather than have them growing their own crops, slave-owners could keep them working longer. This trade only flourished until the abolition of slavery ‘since the blacks, in connection with emancipation, acquired the privilege of choosing their own food.’

...) So 19th-century casual racism ('not up to snuff for Europeans, give it to the blacks') has made a crucial contribution to modern-day Caribbean cuisine.
</meta-parenthesis>

... when I was chasing down Monday morning's (Oh yes, it's already Wednesday) anecdote. based on the Vice President^then-elect's "Although I may be the first black* woman..." line, which has finally made sense to me. When I first heard it, it struck me as a non-sequitur; OK, so what's that got to do with the price of fish? But when I heard Nira Chamberlain's story it made sense. Now read on...

</parenthesis>

He said, at 22'40" in that programme that when he told her of his record she said...

<parenthesis subj="Who? The cat's mother?">

The first black South African woman to obtain a PhD in mathematics education and the first black female Executive Dean of the College of Science, Engineering and Technology at the University of South Africa is now the first black woman to preside over the Convocation of Wits University.
Witwatersrand Convocation Report

</parenthesis>

..."Being the first is nothing to be proud of, but it's a call [HD This word isn't clear but it's a monosyllable, and the gist is unaffected] to ensure that one is not the last."

So the first/last  trope made famous by Kamala Harris is (I guess) something that parents of girls (especially in racial minorities) say to encourage assertiveness and sisterhood; (and that's not a sexist use of sisterhood, we all need to be sisters).

The other first I was going to mention was live rehearsals of my choir, which were due to restart tomorrow. But the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport changed its guidance for amateur choirs last night...

<inline-ps type="esprit d'escalier">
So rather than viva voce it's going to have to be muta voce (on Zoom)
</inline-ps>

...having presumably discovered a new variant that can tell the difference between aerosols coming from a professional singer's mouth and those produced by an amateur's:

However, non-professional singing indoors should only take place in a single group of up to 6 people.

So I'm hitting the Publish button and getting on with my entry for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation.

b

Update 2021.05.20.16:15 – Added <inline-ps />

Update 2021.05.22.16:55 – Added footnote

*She didn't say this bit.

Denouement or tying up loose ends?

Neither, I think (not that they're the same thing – it's just amusing that they're such a near miss)...

<parenthesis>
A denouement is an unknotting; most English speakers, especially gardeners...

 <meta-parenthesis>

Other people conversant with the word "node" include doctors, and people working in the area of networks and/or databases. My exposure to database software is  getting on for 20 years out of date, but one of the earlier systems was called quipu (and there's an account of the early days of LDAP development [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, if you must know] here). This directory-related name was taken from a messaging and/or recording device made of knotted string. A quipu, as Wikipedia explains...

...usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization...The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords....The configuration of the quipus has been "compared to string mops. Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords would be attached. A relatively small number have survived.

 The idea of knotting is a fruitful source of idle mental wanderings.
</meta-parenthesis>

...will know what a node is, even without the aid of the French noeud. The author has got loads of concurrent and intermixed story-lines, and in the denouement they are disentangled. Tying up loose ends is a rather different process; unfinished story lines have been left dangling, and the author tidies up. Hmm.
</parenthesis>

... And I'm talking about Line of Duty, of course; I was thinking of The end of the line? but Radio Times got there first. And I doubt if they're the only ones; as puns go, it's pretty low-hanging fruit. 

But I started to have my doubts during the penultimate episode. Why did Kate run off after the shooting? In the interests of devil's advocacy, I tried to defend it when MrsK objected.

<parenthesis subj="The case for the defence">
'There was no hard proof against Pilkington, so Kate feared she'd be framed for his murder'.
 </parenthesis>

But my heart wasn't in it. He was carrying and threatening to use an illegal gun, so it was obviously a righteous shoot, as they say. The motivation at this stage was further muddied by an article in Saturday's Times, which hinted at a Lesbian/Bonnie and Clyde angle, but as devil's advocacy goes, this was really scraping the barrel.

REWOP (reprinted w/o permission)

And when, during the Bonnie and Clyde bit (after reading that Times article it's hard to see that scene without imagining Foggy Mountain Breakdown as background music), a police pursuit vehicle appeared after Jo had been giving directions, why didn't Kate suspect that Jo had led her into a trap (again – Kate had precious little reason to trust her at that stage).

Then the action moved to Spain, and the wheels really came off. The subtitles (the Spanish ones) were a bit dodgy. For example, when the captain was telling his men to go in, the subtitle read 'Entrar, entrar', making him sound like an official instruction rather than the informal command (which I imagine it was): Entrad! Entrad! But the sound wasn't that clear, and this is not a serious error anyway; it just added to the undermining of my willing suspension of disbelief.

What really did it for me though (OK,  I'm a pron-Nazi) was the pronunciation of 'Thurwell'. I imagine the actor was a native speaker of Spanish who lived in England and had met the distinctly English /ɜ:/ (though even when exposed to the sound, in my experience, Spanish-speakers rarely get it). But this, in the world of fiction, was a Guardia who had

• never (or never knowingly – that is, he might have been exposed to it, but didn't recognize it as linguistically meaningful) heard our /ɜ:/
• only ever seen the name 'Thurwell' in reports

So he should have said [ur]. He flapped the /r/ OK, but he used the highly improbable (if not impossible) /ɜ:/.

<usual_apologies reason="IPA symbols">
Regular visitors to this blog will be used to my insistence on not using "sounds-like" soi-disant 'equivalences', which never work and sometimes mislead in an ESOL class. But here I should perhaps supply a 'misericord' (as defined here) by saying that the word word is transcribed /wɜ:d/. 

For the full pro-IPA rant, see here.

<more-recent-example>     

I recently wrote to The Times on this subject, after they had published a profile of  Kamala Harris around the time of the US presidential election in November 2020:

As a retired teacher of English as a foreign language I was disappointed to read Dana Goodyear's misleading and unhelpful pronunciation advice ('it's Comma-la'). 'Sounds-like' pronunciation aids, as I was always telling my fellow teachers, are no better than the memory of  a speech event. This speech event involved two people who were both speakers of American English. So 'comma-la' tells us about the stress but nothing about the vowels. A speaker of British English will be misled by this memory aid:

• there is no /ɒ/ in the first syllable; 
• the schwa at the end of 'comma' is more-or-less the same in British English and in American English
• even a speaker of American English would have no idea about the last syllable (/ɑ/, /ɑ:/, or /ə/)

...

When I first read the Goodyear article I wronged the writer, assuming she was British and had  misled her readers by slavishly regurgitating her notes of what Harris had said. But what she wrote turns out to have been true for her speech community, and just misleading for speakers of British English (as I presume most of your readers are). 

<more-recent-example> 

</usual_apologies>

Returning to that series (containing only seven episodes, as if originally written for a commercial service, allowing for ad-breaks in an 8-episode series), there were many other disappointments. It was a bit of a damp squib (or 'DS').

But if the rain holds off, the hedge (the one bit that survived the depredations of Li'l Miss Lebensraum next door) needs attention.

b

Update: 2021.05.05.21:30 – Added <meta-parenthesis />

Angels and pinheads...

... and pre-sales marketing? In February 2014, someone asked at ResearchGate

Are there infinitely many possible sentences in a natural language? 

Most authors seem to think so. Frege, one of the few mathematicians who worked on that problem spoke of “unpredictably many” (or uncalculably many; “unabsehbar viele”) - not an infinite number of them. (Frege, Logische Untersuchungen, 3. Teil Gedankengefüge, 1993, p.72 ff (German) /see also Fodor/Lepore „Holism“ 1992,p 242).

Further discussion (much much further) here

 The answer, if you value your sanity, is 'Who cares?' Frege's  “unabsehbar viele” is good enough for me.

But not, it seems,  for Max Louwerse Ph.D., whose article in Psychology Today I just came across.  But, not without disingenuousness, he reframed the question to make it less intelligible:

How Many Words and Sentences Do We Know?

Honestly? Did he really ask that? What a stultifying, demeaning, dehumanizing, meaningless question 

<incoherent-rant>
Splutter, splutter. Wha...? No wonder academia gets a bad press sometimes. These people are caricatures of ...[I won't pursue that thought. Don't wrestle a pig. The pig enjoys it and you both get dirty. I shall just count to ten, take a deep breath and... See? Sweetness and light.]

</incoherent-rant>

And, in a way beloved of sub-editors everywhere, the article had a frankly risible corollary:

The number of words and sentences you know
is more impressive than you guessed.

Umm.... no, it's not, as a matter of fact. But, moving on. Dr Louwerse adduces quite a thought-provoking thought experiment

Let’s try to compute the numbers (bear with me). As a thought experiment, let’s first assume that we only have six words we know, rather than those 60,000 words. Let’s assume these six words consist of three nouns  (John, Mary, and Jane) and three verbs (hits, beats, and hugs). From this rather limited vocabulary of six words and a sentence structure English has (noun verb noun), we can generate 27 different sentences (Mary hugs Jane, Mary hits John, Jane beats Mary being three of them). Because the sentence structure could also consist of a noun-verb combination (John hugs), the number increases to 36.

But GIGO: garbage in: garbage out. Or, rather, "homely over-simplification in-[to an infinitely creative system (what Pinker called The Language Instinct): hopelessly incalculable number out":

This [I've ellipted loads of ifs, ans and buts here, but we started out with a thought experiment, so we're talking about an infinite number of back-of-an-envelope approximations: sue me]  means that the possible permutations of a 10-word sentence are over 4,741,000,000,000 sentences. If we now add the number of permutations from a three-word sentence to a 20-word sentence, we end up interpreting over 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 sentences. But so far we assume that the order of the word classes in a sentence remains constant. This is obviously not the case. Let’s simplify the situation again and assume that there are only two variations of word order in a sentence. If we only take two-word order variations into account, we can safely assume that we know at least 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 sentences or 10 sextillion sentences.

Gosh!  That many! Little me! Squillions and squillions! What's that in Terabytes? What a piece of work is man. And, speaking of pieces of work (in the non-Shakespearean 21st-century sense of "He's a piece of work") there's a moment of truth at the end of the article:

Before you object that it is unfair to count the number of words this way, let alone the number of sentences because once you know the rule system behind words and sentences one should not count words and sentences individually, you are right. But that’s not the point. The point here is to marvel at the impressive talent that we have that often goes unnoticed because it comes so naturally to us. 

Louwerse says that the marvellousness (I've done him the courtesy of repairing his syntax: a point has to be a noun...

<inline_PS>

(or a subordinate clause doing the work of a noun, or "NP" as linguists like to say) 

<inline_PS>

...of the system of natural language is 'the point', throwing dust in the eyes of his pursuers by claiming not to have wasted his time on pointless number-crunching, and finally admitting (cherchez le bouquin?...

Getting a sense of how many words and sentences we know, brings us to the question: How do we keep those words in mind. That’s a question I’ll save for a later post (and for a popular science book [HD: My emphasis] that will come out soon).

...) You'll have to forgive me if I don't join the queue at the bookseller's.

b

Update:2021.04.28.15.05 – Added <inline_PS />

Brought to Book

When Roy Plumley devised Desert Island Discs in 1942 I suspect he was influenced by Jules Verne's L'Île mystérieuse, published nearly 70 years earlier in 1875. In that book,published in the same year in an English translation by Mrs. Agnes Kinloch Kingston (and retranslated the following year....

<unanswered-question>
Was it that bad? Maybe naked sexism is to blame, or maybe the original translation was just a rush-job always intended to be improved once the initial novelty had been cashed in on. It'd be interesting to find out (but not, I suspect, interesting enough for me to do it). The Wikipedia article suggests the Kinloch translation was expurgated. If interested, make my day.
</unanswered-question>

...by Stephen W. White).

Jules Verne answers the question What does a castaway need? quite comprehensively with the contents of a fortuitous chest found among the driftwood after a wreck:

[T]his chest contained tools, weapons, instruments, clothes, books; and this is the exact list of them as stated in Gideon Spilett’s note-book: —Tools:—3 knives with several blades, 2 woodmen’s axes, 2 carpenter’s hatchets, 3 planes, 2 adzes, 1 twibil or mattock, 6 chisels, 2 files, 3 hammers, 3 gimlets, 2 augers, 10 bags of nails and screws, 3 saws of different sizes, 2 boxes of needles.

Weapons:—2 flint-lock guns, 2 for percussion caps, 2 breach-loader carbines, 5 boarding cutlasses, 4 sabers, 2 barrels of powder, each containing twenty-five pounds; 12 boxes of percussion caps.

Instruments:—1 sextant, 1 double opera-glass, 1 telescope, 1 box of mathematical instruments, 1 mariner’s compass, 1 Fahrenheit thermometer, 1 aneroid barometer, 1 box containing a photographic apparatus, object-glass, plates, chemicals, etc.

Clothes:—2 dozen shirts of a peculiar material resembling wool, but evidently of a vegetable origin; 3 dozen stockings of the same material.

Utensils:—1 iron pot, 6 copper saucepans, 3 iron dishes, 10 metal plates, 2 kettles, 1 portable stove, 6 table-knives.

Books:—1 Bible, 1 atlas, 1 dictionary of the different Polynesian idioms, 1 dictionary of natural science, in six volumes; 3 reams of white paper, 2 books with blank pages.

I expect the bible was in an appropriate translation, which to Roy Plumley would have been the King James (AV), though Jules Verne probably had something else in mind.

Modern castaways care less for the soul (in a secular sense, that is). One of them, in the Children's  Writers subseries of Desert Island Discs Revisited, was Philip Pullman.

<mini-rant>
And, incidentally, if the BBC are so pleased about the size and range of their archive (they go on about it often enough) they should invest in some kind of usable index. I heard this episode recently on Radio 4Extra, but I'm blowed if I can find it. It's not so much an archive as a gigantic compost heap. But I digress.

The Children' Writers subseries is there OK.., but not Philip Pullman. Perhaps the episode is too new to have been indexed. But I know I didn't dream it, because of the surprising absence that I'm about to recount. Now read on.
<mini-rant>

I've listened to many episodes of this programme, probably 200-300 in all, and I'm accustomed to atheists, when told they're getting the Bible, who say 'Well you can keep that'; to which I always reply (in a polite sotto voce),   

But what about the language? The Bible's a priceless source of the things we say and do: expressions like 'Good Samaritan', 'Lazarus', 'Pearls before swine', 'the powers that be', 'David and Goliath', 'scapegoat', 'Prodigal Son', 'cast your bread upon the waters','the patience of Job'...(there must be hundreds if not thousands of these, part of the texture of the language and underlying much of Western European culture – particularly music and literature). 

Pullman, though not a practising Christian, avoided saying 'Well you can keep that.' "Aha," I thought, "At last someone's going to defend the AV on grounds of language and culture." But he didn't say that. The BBC's woeful indexing system prevents me from checking what he did say, but it was something along the lines of 'It's full of good stories and wisdom.' Well yes, but there's more to it than that, and it was disappointing that Pullman didn't say so.

Disappointing and surprising.  Pullman has studied the Bible closely (much more closely than most of us). In a review this time last year in the Guardian Richard Holloway, former bishop of Edinburgh, wrote

Though he wears his scholarship lightly as befits a master storyteller, there is no doubt in my mind that Pullman has a complete grasp of the intricacies of the quest for the historical Jesus. Like Schweitzer, he thinks Jesus was an immeasurably great man who died to bring in a better world, the difference being that Schweitzer believed Jesus died trying to force God's hand, whereas for Pullman Jesus realised in the garden of Gethsemane that there was probably no God, so any bettering of the human condition is now up to us.

This review escaped my notice in April 2020,  but I came across it in connection with a book I'm just reading: The Good Jesus and Christ the Scoundrel. In it, Pullman rewrites the story of Jesus, but in a world where Mary's son was twins – Jesus (the good one) and Christ (who hasn't yet [I'm only halfway through] merited the epithet 'scoundrel'). And the central counterfactual (a world where Jesus and Christ are a sort of first-century Palestinian Jedward) made me think of the two worlds in the Lyra books. At least, I think it did.

<plantedMemory-query>
I say 'I think it did', because the source of "my" idea may be that review:

In Pullman's allegorical retelling of the Christian story, Mary gives birth to twins, the first born called Jesus, the second born  Christ. Christ, a feeble[HD: ??? Granted, he was 'small weak, and sickly' as an infant, which suggests he didn't grow up to be an alpha-male; but was he 'feeble'?], introspective character, is Mary's favourite, while Jesus is strong and quiet and calm. "One for Joseph, and one for me, thought Mary." Pullman has serious fun with the interaction between the brothers. It is Christ, impressed by his brother's oratory and moral passion, who puts the three satanic questions to him during his period in the desert. And in the parable of the prodigal son, Christ knows Jesus is fingering him as the timid, mean-spirited, stay-at-home older brother.

One day a mysterious stranger approaches Christ and recruits him to keep an account of the words and actions of Jesus – from a particular perspective. Whatever agency is behind the mysterious stranger – and it is easy to detect the shadow of the Magisterium from the Dark Materials trilogy – he gives Christ clear instructions on how to keep the record. "There is time, and there is what is beyond time. History belongs to time, but truth belongs to what is beyond time. In writing of things as they should have been, you are letting truth into history. You are the word of God." This is actually a fair summary of one theory as to how the theological tone of the gospel records was gradually heightened.

Maybe this is the source of the idea. 

</plantedMemory-query>

So the idea may not be mine. What is mine Ehem. This is my theory, and it is mine. is this: that Christ is no more a scoundrel than Judas was evil in Borges's Tres Versiones de Judas (one of the Ficciones). He did some things that had an  immediate effect that seemed apparently bad; but he was an essential part of the story (and deployed as such by the master story-teller).

L'Envoi

I'm no longer much of a user of Twitter, but it remains an endless (and serendipitous) source of new vocabulary. Who'd have thought that a castaway might be coincé? There's a world of difference between an island and a coin [=corner].

<trouvaille>

I recently came across this game (for use in a French class):

I'm not so sure about gl[sic]onflable. Maybe you can infate it?

</trouvaille>

But I have things to do – starting with the identification of the Nickelodeon-bird (well that's its working title: its call is just like "Put another nickel in" ).

b

Quicken - the backstory

When I wrote a piece on faux amis recently – "false friends"...

<inline-pps>
(words that seem, to a language learner, like an easily memorable translation word, but which don't mean the same as the presumed "equivalent")
</inline-pps>

 – the context (unstated at the time) was a virtual recording. Back then it wasn't clear that the finished product would be presentable, let alone something to be proud of:

(I'm not sure if this attempt at embedding works. If not, go to this YouTube link.) The use of quicken (and of languish, which I also comment on, occurs in the passage starting with the tenors at 0'56" ...

<rumblers-parenthesis comment="_I_ know about the apostrophe, but the virtual compiler wouldn't like it.">

(an entry I'm  glad not to have  been involved in :-) )

</rumblers-parenthesis>

.... The process of producing the virtual recording lasted several weeks.  I'd heard about the tribulations involved for the compiler/sound mixer.  (This is a Cambridge Alumni Festival event that took place last autumn [Northern hemisphere, Fall if you must] being a sort "brains' trust" of people in the university involved in  music...

<in line-ps>
(one of whom discussed at some length the problems she had had with this sort of venture)
<in line-ps>

...), but that work was all done with impressive efficiency by our MD. All the singers had to do was record the sound and the video (separate recordings, sync'd...

<parenthesis>
(I understand this is not the only way these recordings can be done [which accounts for all the other virtual recordings you see that show singers wearing headphones; this, for example: {spot the family resemblance, in almost the same position on the screen, 2nd row}
])
</parenthesis>

...). The synchronization involved a clap (doing the same job as a clapper-board in a film studio). My first two takes of the video were false starts, as it was so fiddly balancing a mobile phone on a music stand and getting myself in the frame. On Take 1 I missed the clap on the guide video (showing the conductor), and on Take 2 I clapped all right but realized that my hands weren't visible at all. I suppose James (our MD) could have watched for my shoulders to twitch; maybe not.

Recording the audio was easier, although the (few)  days I spent in recording studios as a would-be troubadour in the 1970s were enough to  tell me that it was bound to take an hour or two. The main problem was that I had a mental block over the word quicken; It took me until Take 6 to avoid singing

Should'st thou walking in grief languish
He will cripple thee

Another singer found, when she listened back to what she thought would be the final take, she had been singing

He walking over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps 

I imagine we weren't the only ones to stumble in this way.

But the bulk of the work was done after we'd submitted our recordings...

<unexpected-network-error>
(which – the submission itself – was a whole 'nother kettle of worms: I brought the network to its knees at one stage)
</unexpected-network-error>

All quite satisfying, not to say surprising, in the end. Many thanks to our MD cum sound mixer cum artistic director cum help desk, to our multi-talented accompanist, to the ad hoc socially distanced vocal quartet that sang on the guide video, and to all the backroom choir members who made our first recording possible. What's next?

 

b

Update 2021.03.31.12:30 – Added inline PS, and fixed some typos.

Update 2021.04.01.14:45 – Added inline PPS.