Soul of discretion

Some years  ago I wrote (here):

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

This was a bit defeatist (Defeatist? Moi?); there could still be a musicological point worth making. There are, as I wrote before looking at the score, two possible interpretations of the sounds:  

1. qui la conduit is an admission of (present) human weakness
   Here, la conduit means "[it] leads"  [the soul is being led by human frailty]
2. qui l'a conduit is a confession of (past) misdeeds (l'oubli de tes lois)
   Here, l'a conduit means "[it] has led" [sleep – human fecklessness – has led to l'oubli de tes lois]

   <autobiographical_note>
   I can almost hear Fr Gregory saying 'I hadn't time'. 

   <inline_PPS>
   The context was a soul in Purgatory aspiring to get into Heaven, speaking to the celestial bouncer in justification of their sins of omission.
   <inline_PPS> 

   </autobiographical_note>

There is a pun here, based on the two meanings of conduit and Fauré knew that. It's not inconceivable that he wanted the basses to sound Sam-the-Eagle-like. After all, the phrase is  marked by a very prominent bass entry. Perhaps the 19-year-old was having a sly dig at his schoolmaster father, who sent him away  from the family home in the South of France twice: he lived at home for only 14 five of his first 19 years –  with a foster mother until he was four, and then after only  five happy years...

<parenthesis>
(of the chapel near his home he wrote:

I grew up, a rather quiet well-behaved child, in an area of great beauty. ... But the only thing I remember really clearly is the harmonium in that little chapel. Every time I could get away I ran there – and I regaled myself. ... I played atrociously ... no method at all, quite without technique, but I do remember that I was happy; and if that is what it means to have a vocation, then it is a very pleasant thing.

quoted in Wikipedia

)
</parenthesis>

... he was sent to Paris to study at the Ėcole Niedermeyer.

L'Envoi

Meanwhile, a pedant's life doesn't get any easier: in My soul doth magnify the problem I wrote (of a concert that include the Magnificat)

...The words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted".

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ]) is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises..

And this a/u problem hasn't gone away. In the ENO's recent rendition of Mozart's Requiem one of the alternations between in aeternum and requiem eternam was a fleeting blemish (at 51'14") on a very welcome live concert. I'm sure I'd be happier if I didn't notice this sort of thing, but there we go. The choir of ENO usually sing in English, so maybe I should cut them some slack; shame though.

b

PS My choir was rehearsing (via Zoom) last night, and it reminded me of a previous concert, of which I had written:

...My favourite moment during rehearsals involved a private joke – private, that is, to people who have a bit of Latin. 

We were singing an arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo that involved only half the choir singing the second verse and the other half joining in at the words Trahe me post te. As often happens when more people sing, there was a tendency to slow down. Our conductor said 'I feel as if I'm having to drag‡ you along after me.' This was my moment of private hilarity [little things...], as the words mean 'Drag me after you' (think of tractor on the one [Latin] hand and draught [animals] on the other [English].) 

More here

Update: 2020.11.2311:45 – Added <inline_PPS /> and fixed dodgy maths re Fauré's time spent  at home.

Re-requiem

The other day  an edition of Notes from the Stave reminded of a piece I'd written in the early days of this blog on Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. One of the people commentating on the manuscript also featured as a boy soprano in the King's College Choir recording – Bob (credited at the time as "Robert") Chilcott. (In particular it alerted me to a mistranslation of mine, now fixed. To make matters worse, it was in a section that corrected a common mistranslation [of In Paradisum as *in paradise – which it doesn't mean]).

...In can mean many things  in Latin, but when followed by a noun in the accusative it doesn't mean 'in'. If the words were In Paradiso they would mean 'In Paradise'; but they are In Paradisum ... going on ...deducant Angeli : 'May angels will lead you into Paradise...' One of many other meanings of in, this time followed by the dative, is exemplified in the next phrase: in tuo adventu: that's closer to 'in' in meaning, with a sense something like 'on the occasion of', though I'd favour a simpler translation: 'When you arrive...'.

More here

My mistake (future simple rather than subjunctive) was perhaps explained (though not of course justified – mea maxima culpa) by Fauré's own attitude to the Requiem as a lullaby of death. I let his view of death as a peaceful return to a state of eternal rest influence me. As Michael Lewanski‘s blog says

Unlike nearly all other works in the genre, it [HD: Fauré's Requiem ] contains none of the drama, anxiety, or fraught emotions one tends to associate with human thinking about death.  Nearly all references to the last judgement from the Catholic liturgy (and trust me, there are plenty) are excised. 

This nonchalance  in the sense of "not getting  hot under the collar" misled me into  assuming on the part of  Fauré a certain (not to say sanctimonious) belief that angels would lead the departed into paradise.

The manuscript, and thus the stuff of the discussion, was an unbound version without some movements added later (Offertorium, Libera me, etc.); it was, in the words of the Bibliothèque Nationale's Head of Music Manuscripts a manuscript de travail working copy rather than a draft of something to be  published.

Bob Chilcott makes frequent additions to the discussion based on his experience as a chorister;   from the sublime (David Willcocks‘s observation that the high strings after the triumphant Hosanna  represent  the angels flying off  into the distance) to the ridiculous (after the recording of  Pie Jesu, when the sound engineer asked if Chilcott wanted to listen back to his efforts, the response was "Sorry Sir, he's gone off with  Marriner [Neville‘s  son Andrew] to buy sweets" [not the exact words – check Bob Chilcott's memory in the 17th minute of the programme]).

At one point (maybe more than one) Bob Chilcott calls attention to Fauré's word painting, which put me in mind of my own favourite example, discussed in an old post of mine:

My choice of 'listen out' [HD: the post was discussing phrasal verbs in  a context that had nothing to do with music] as an example is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem, which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano tune marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

And in the same post I returned to the theme of 'listen out':

<autobiographical_note>
At the funeral of a grande dame yesterday... I witnessed an underlining of the importance of this Ex-  [HD: in exaudi]. We were in the middle of one of those interminable call-and-response prayers, with the congregation saying ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘ again and again. And The Angelus butted in. (For the uninitiated:  The Angelus is a very noisy Call-to-prayer^† – much noisier than the Islamic version: ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause> ding ding ding <pause..._{has it stopped?}>  <oh dear me NO, suckers> DING DING DING DING DING DING DING DING... [ad nauseam]).  And the congregation was bleating (that‘s one for the etymologists: grex = ‘flock‘) ‘Lord, hear our prayer‘. Here was the perfect opportunity for something more robust: ‘Listen out for my prayer‘.
^† Not all believers would recognize this as a call to prayer exactly, but the name 'Angelus' is the first word of the prescribed prayer.                            

<inline_pps>
So it's a call to – and an accompaniment to – a particular prayer, to be prayed wherever the hearer happens to be, rather than [as in the Islamic case] a call to the faithful to come and pray at the mosque.
<inline_pps>

</autobiographical_note>

But this isn't getting the lawn repaired (Don't ask; in short I'm doing a Rooney [transplanting bits of "turf" from where it's spread over a path – though it's not turf exactly; it's just a bit greener than the weeds that are in the "lawn"].)

b


PS And here are a couple of clues:

• Hatter in cahoots with odd characters from Idaho returning to get rich. (11)
• Neat ass at the Gare du Nord on track for underhand trickery (9) 

Update 2018.08.29.13:00 –The answers: MILLIONAIRE and CHICANERY. And, swatting away hornets ("...Because he knows it teases") I've added an inline PPS in red.

'Local' colour again

Some years ago I wrote here about local colour, and last Saturday's Zola adaptation on Radio 4 [that takes you to iPlayer's TOUGH LUCK page, though I imagine the programme will in due course be resurrected on BBC Radio 4 Extra] re-wakened me to its importance. I noticed (with a mixture of regret and contempt) some strangely inappropriate background music: it was the thirteen waters* version of Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (although the extract started after the words Très-Haut, so they may not have committed that particular solecism).

It starts at about 31'30"  of that iPlayer recording, and it is the unaccountable music played at a ball in the Tuileries. I say unaccountable not because of any anachronism (although to quote Wikipedia

<niggle>
"Zola's 20 Rougon-Macquart novels are a panoramic account of the Second French Empire. They are the story of a family principally between the years 1851 and 1871" and – as  the Cantique was published in 1866  –  it was a close-run thing – the Tuileries was burnt down in 1871. [Perhaps the entertainers at the ball were singing from a proof copy...  ]) But contemporaneity is not my biggest problem.
</niggle>

I just wonder whether sacred music with an organ accompaniment was a likely accompaniment to a glittering society ball in Second Empire Paris (for a start, how would they have got the organ through the doors of the Tuileries?...Unless it was already there. But then it would have  been in what Wikipedia calls "The little-used northern wing of the palace, which contained the chapel, Galerie de la Paix, and the Salle de Spectacle [which] would be called into service only for performances, such as the Auber cantata performed the evening of Napoleon and Eugénie's civil wedding ceremony, 29 July 1853,"). Perhaps it is an ironic comment on the narrative, but I don't see how.... (unless Racine's "tout l'enfer" stood  for what was going on at the ball; nah, much too subtle).

What made the music grate so painfully, though, was that the singers were English:

 /repɒn su:r nu: lǝ fǝ dǝ tæ græsǝ pwi:sɒnte

kwǝ tu: lɒnfǝ  fwi: ǝʊ sɒn dǝ tæ vwɑr/

.../ki: læ kɒndwi:  æ lu:bli: dǝ teɪ lwɑr/ ... 

(OK, I'm exaggerating a teensy bit; as with most choirs, only a few singers get it flamboyantly wrong, but those few stick out like a bear with a sore head).

What does this tell us about local colour? It had better be pretty damn good if it's to avoid breaking the spell of whatever it's supposed to be adding colour to.

b

PS A bit of an unfair clue, but quite pleasing (for me, at least):

"Bufo" for organic pest control? (8)

*This reference is explained here. When I say "it was the thirteen waters version, but they didn't sing those words" I'm not just being gratuitously contrary; it seems to me reasonable to suppose that before more egregious mispronunciations later in the piece they would have made the false liaison of très and haut.

Update: 2018.06.18.11:05 – Clarified footnote. And that answer is NEMATODE.

Singing in tongues

A few days ago my attention was caught by this tweet:

I did what I was told, and read this post. It's a fascinating field, but I was side-tracked by a digression prompted by these words...

When copying an accent in song turns out, it is all about the vowels. “Singing is all about vowels. Language is altogether is really [HD – sic; I suspect a hasty edit {you''ll know the sort of thing if you've read some of MY stuff}] vowels interrupted by consonants. Although there are things you have to be careful of when singing consonants generally it’s the vowels you have to be careful of.” Nail the vowels and you can nail the accent...

... particularly the word consonants. When you think about it – and you may have noticed that thinking about words is something I do – it does what it says (in a way often pleasing for the etymologically minded). Vowels could be regarded as 'sonants'  (not to be confused with sonorants – which really are A Thing in the world of phonetics [and I see that my made-up word sometimes is used like that {as here}, Aw shoot ...]). My point is that vowels are things produced by the vocal cords, or – to use my attempted, but misfired, neologism – 'sonants'. Con-sonants are things that just hold them together. If you think of an utterance as a stream, the water is the vowels; the consonants are the stepping stones.

<digression> 

Recently I was watching a French drama with subtitles. A subtitle read 'Have you had one?' I tried to recapture the original from my short-term memory, but failed; in my defence, it was late evening; earlier I'd've been  listening and not reading. It might have been (though I can't guarantee it)  Tu en a eu une? Hearing and making sense of that calls for quite some linguistic skill [and, for the non-Francophone, plenty of practice with the /y/ phoneme – on which, don‘t get me started]. After the elision of en a the only two consonant phonemes among all those vowels are /n/ (twice) after the initial /t/. 

</digression>

The idea of accents in singing reminded me of a concert I sang in  nearly thirty years ago.

<autobiographical note>

Our conductor was a very young Paul Daniel. About two weeks before the concert, he started feeling a pain in his shoulder. He kept rehearsing us until the very last Thursday rehearsal, so on the Saturday we turned up for the dress rehearsal fully expecting him to be there. 

But on the Friday he had seen a specialist who told him if he conducted us the following day he might do serious damage. So, at almost no notice, we had a deputy to conduct us. The choir's records are sketchy, for so long ago. Paul Daniel was with us for 3 years (that's twelve concerts, of which he missed one), and there are records here of only 2 of his concerts. But there is also this:

Brian Wright had driven down that morning from Yorkshire. And when we sang 

Praise ye

The God of Brass 

he winced. He had been used to northern choirs, and was not expecting our /ɑ:/. I wonder what vowel Walton had in mind.

</autobiographical note>

I have long felt that the life of a choral singer would be made simpler if music publishers adopted use of the IPA. Amateur choirs don‘t have the luxury of foreign language coaches – mentioned by the opera singer interviewed in Faking the Funk::

I’ve long thought that it was easier to sing in an accent that isn’t your own than it is to speak in a foreign accent. This turns out to be somewhat true according to Bill Beeman, a sociolinguist at University of Minnesota. Beeman also happens to be an opera singer. He speaks and sings in multiple languages: English, German, Italian, French and Russian. However, his accent in each of these languages is acctually better when he sings than when he speaks.  

“My accent when I’m singing is very carefully constructed and we use coaches when we’re singing in order to be able to produce the language as perfectly as possible,” he says. 

        <autobiographical_rant>

I don't think I've ever sung Fauré's lovely Cantique de Jean Racine  [ranted about here] without a more or less protracted argument – repeated in rehearsals – about the false liaison of très with haut. And I've sung it at least a dozen times [in concerts and other performances, that is; getting on for a hundred rehearsals. On one occasion it was a tenor [who doesn't even sing the words in question] who complained: "We sang it that way [HD: the 'thirteen waters' version^PS/PPSon tour in Belgium and had no complaints." GIVE ME STRENGTH!

</autobiographical_rant>

It would make the life of a choral singer much simpler, as I said. And each choir that cared about these things would only have to have one member, learning at the most a few dozen symbols. Besides so many amateur singers are language teachers (I wonder why...?) that the relevant expert would be readily to hand in most cases.

But I put it to a man at OUP who convinced me that it would cause so much upheaval (and cost publishers such a deal of money, I think he meant) that it just won't happen. But a chap can dream....

Enough dreaming though. There are words to be learnt for Saturday.

b
Update 2015.11.19.15.15 – Added PS 

PS A misericord (in the metaphorical sense introduced here): 'Thirteen waters' = treize eaux [geddit? the words that provoke the false liaison are très haut]

Update 2015.11.22.19.35 – Updated the Saturday link, so that it points to something useful a review.

Update 2016.04.16.20.20 – Added PPS and deleted obsolete footer.

Just back from this:

A good   day‘s sing. We sang the Cantique, and – true to form – there was a smattering of the thirteen waters version. Oh well – these things are sent to ... evoke clichés

No gender please, we're Anglophone.

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

So I'm more circumspect about questioning musical  settings now.  But in the case of the Elgar setting of My love dwelt in a northern land I'm pretty sure there's something a bit dodgy about the words. My present score starts:

My love dwelt in a northern land
A tower dim in a forest green
Was his... 
[my emphasis; more here]

But the original text was by the Scottish poet Andrew Lang, possibly with earlier precedent. One site says.

It's a setting of a poem by Andrew Lang which if my memory serves me correctly is itself an adaptation of a far older Scottish poem.

         (more here)

I wonder whether the original was in a language that has gender...? According to this site Lang held that the beloved was female; and here she is dying in Elgar's setting:

"My love" dies

Two pages later, though. she's had another sex-change, back to the "his" of the opening bars:

Could it have been something like sein Herz? But maybe this suspicion  is related to the fact that I first sang this song in a programme together with a later Elgar piece with words by Alice Elgar, who I was ready to believe had got a translation wrong. But, as I said, it's from a Scottish poet; and he didn't use 'he' either; but nor did he use 'she'. He used 'My'....[curiouser and curiouser.]

English students of foreign languages that have gender markings have to get used to the fact that the English possessives are marked for the sex of the possessor; many other languages are marked for the gender of the thing possessed. This gender versus sex distinction was one pointed out to me by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). "Concrete things have sex; words have gender." In English, we put a further restriction on the first part of that rule – "Concrete things have sex only if they're animate"; and we don't have the second part (about gender, with a few arguable  exceptions, like ships and old cars; the few words that look as if they are gendered – mostly pronouns and possessives – in fact denote sex.)

Isn‘t "only if they're animate" an improbably arbitrary restriction? Hardly. In The Unfolding of Language  Guy Deutscher writes of  an Aboriginal language that assigns the gender "edible vegetable" to an aeroplane. He sums up his point:

In linguistic jargon...'gender' has nothing to do with sex  and can refer to any kind of classification that a language imposes on nouns. While sex-based gender is an extremely common type of classification, some languages have special genders not only for 'male' and 'female' but also for classes of nouns such as 'long objects', 'dangerous things', or 'edible parts of plants'.

When there‘s a correspondence between sex and gender (une fille, for example, is both feminine and female, but ein Mädchen is neuter) a phonological rule can interfere; you don't say ma amie because of the initial vowel in amie.

<harebrained_notion>
Did Bizet make use of this rule in Carmen's claim to be going chez mon ami(e?) Lillas Pastia? Does she toy with Don José's jealousy with doubts about the sex of Lillas Pastia? Lilas is a girl's name; certainly, when I first heard the Seguidilla I assumed Carmen was referring to a woman; I couldn't hear the -ll- that Bizet gave it. Does this make it male, I wonder.... Bizet's only clue (well, I haven‘t read the libretto in detail)  is to write that Lillas is an aubergiste – and I think Mistress Quickly was one of those.
</harebrained_notion>

But I must get this post out there before the concert this Saturday.

b

Update 2015.06.12.11:55 – Added links and further Lillas speculation in purple.

Update 2017.05.25.23:00 –  Deleted old footer.

Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra

Those words are from the text of the Requiem mass... 'when the heavens and the earth are moving'. 

The recent terrible events in Nepal reminded me of three things.

The first  was 'The Great Peruvian Earthquake' of 31 May 1970. Again there was a complete   breakdown in communications. As it happened there was something  else going on not too far away, kicking off on that very day: the Mexico World Cup. The father of a member of the group I sang and played with was Peruvian, and was trying in vain to get news of his family. It struck me as ironic that at a time when hundreds of journalists with millions of pounds worth of hi-techery (which we had been told about in awestruck tones for weeks beforehand by Jimmy Hill  and his fellow pundits – the instantaneous action-replay  was a new invention at the time

<weasel_words>
...well maybe not brand new. Perhaps like many technological sporting innovations it was known of but thought too expensive – until an excuse for conspicuous consumption arose (something REALLY IMPORTANT like the FIFA World Cup.)
</weasel_words>

, and was going to revolutionize football commentary) were so nearby (well, on the same page of the map at least), the plight of the Peruvians was so dire.

I being in my Peter  Starstedt  phase (Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  had spent 4 weeks at no. 1 a few months previously) I wrote a song – another of Paul Simon's 'songs that voices never shared':

<digression> 

In homage to Starstedt's whimsical Zeitgeist-y references ('You sip your Napoleon brandy, and never get your lips wet'...) I had odd portentous sallies like 'What have you done, Jules Rimet?' The most heavily ironic touch  was a setting  of the football chant

Ee Aye Addio We won the Cup

in a minor  key. Pretty poignant, I think you'll agree.  

</digression>

The second was a reflexion on musical settings relating to earthquakes, which I wrote nearly a year ago here, and which I felt merited another airing:

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). [Update: the main piece had referred to Verdi‘s Requiem, which, at the time, I had recently sung.]

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

The third was to wonder if there was any remote etymological link between 'terra-' and 'terror' – and it seems there's not.  It's just a coincidence that earthquakes (Sp. terremotos

<digression>
I use terremoto rather than tierra lest anyone think 'But of course  tierr- is not the same as terr-.'  A Spanish speaker wouldn't feel this, being used to the e/ie variation under conditions of stress in some sorts of /e/. This accounts for many irregular Spanish verbs, such as tener – with stressed tiene [='he/she/it has'] but unstressed tenemos ['we have'] (well, not totally unstressed of course, but unstressed in the relevant syllable). (Italian doesn't do this: terracotta but also terra.)

</digression>

) are both terrible and terrifying.

The Proto-Indo-European root for tierra is given in Etymonline‘s entry for 'terrain':

...from terra "earth, land," literally "dry land" (as opposed to "sea"); from PIE root *ters- "to dry" 

Meanwhile, under 'terror', the source is different:

...from terrere "fill with fear, frighten," from PIE root *tres- "to tremble" (see terrible).

         See more here (if you're that way inclined).

And the possibility of a metathetical link between *ters- and *tres- doesn‘t seem to me worth fretting about; that would be a supposed phonological development in a language that exists  only in  the minds of a few linguists.

OK – Real Life calls.

b

Update: 2015.04.28.11:20 – Added notes in red.
Update: 2015.04.30.09:20 – Added PS.

PS At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day), and the latest version of the graph I gave then reflects this:

Update: 2015.05.01.22:55 – Added illustration  from the Libera Me.
Update: 2016.01.23.11:30 – Embellished reminiscence in purple.

You say /espǝræntǝʊ/ ...

... and I say /esperɑ:ntǝʊ/. These were two of the pronunciations I  heard on Radio 4 this morning. Which underlines a problem with trying to create a 'universal language': it can't be done. The people who insisted on the /ɑ:/ did not try to do anything outlandish to the uniquely English /ǝʊ/, though I imagine there are carefully-spoken Esperantists who give it an [ɔ] (or whatever it's supposed to be).

In my pre-1966 boyhood (the date will have resonance for Roman Catholics living through the revolution that replaced the Latin Mass with the vernacular Mass, following the 2nd Ecumenical Council called by Pope John XXIII) I often heard the argument

 'That's the wonderful thing about having the liturgy in Latin: any member of the Faithful anywhere in the world can go into a church anywhere else in the world and feel at home.'

Erm... no they couldn't.  And people who said they could were either telling a pious lie (which I'm sure they believed), or were linguistically insensitive on an epic scale, or both.

This 'argument' was very popular among traditionalists opposed to the introduction of the vernacular Mass, But it holds very little, if any, water, as this  reminiscence shows:

<autobiographical_note> 

During an exchange visit to a family living in Motteville, I went to a French church. I was an altar-boy (and fully paid-up member of the Guild of St Stephen to boot, I'll have you know), as I've said elsewhere, and knew the Latin Mass by heart. But it wasn't until the altar-boy rang the bell at the end of the 'Mass of the Catechumens' (the bell that signals

 <Hocus_Pocus interesting tidbit="1655 usage note†">
'OK, we've come to the Really Secret stuff, so if you haven't been baptized  you know where the door is' [that's a fairly loose interpretation,  but you get the gist]
</Hocus_Pocus>

 ) that I had any idea where the ceremony had got to; we  had arrived late, as Madame had a lot of children to organize, without the help of Monsieur, whose sole contribution to the family atmosphere seemed to be to sit at the table before meals shouting 'On a faim'. 

</autobiographical_note> 

This is what happens when anyone tries to impose a universal language; because of local accidents of pronunciation and context, the beautiful system breaks down into a babble of mutually-incomprehensible dialects.

<PS>
Incidentally, I can't stand the French pronunciation of the Latin U à la française, although that [y] was more than likely what Fauré had in mind for his various liturgical settings.
</PS>

Of course, Esperanto limps on; listen to the programme. But it never lived up to the dreams of L. L Zamenhof (its creator). And although articles like this big up its numerical importance, one can't but agree with that programme's conclusion: if you want a common language, learn English (which is just as well, since foreign language learning in the UK [to any useful level] seems to be the privilege of a dwindling minority of the [largely] privately-educated.)

b

Update 2015.01.27.10:15 – added note:

† In fact, it's just struck me that that supposed derivation from the crucial^‡ words of the Consecration of the Eucharist makes my choice of tag-name strangely apposite. (I say 'supposed' because the fact of its having been written down doesn't  cut much ice; in 1655 people were quite capable of preserving in aspic a piece of folk etymology [which may, in this case, it seems to me, be more ben trovato than vero]).

Update 2015.03.22.22:40 – added PS
PS

^‡And there's another pregnant coincidence, given the etymological link between crucial and crucify.

Moving heaven and earth

On Saturday week I shall, ojalá, deo volente, weather permitting, etc, be singing Verdi's Requiem [details of the concert here or, after the 29 June 2014, here], and in preparation for the concert I was browsing the text the other day. Here and there in the Latin, despite various teachers' efforts, there is a word or words that I don't understand; and I thought I would wile away [see here if you think that's a typo – the footnote, and the Update arising from it ] the time on a bus journey going through the translation.

But it turned out that that word (translation) calls for a pair of quotation marks (or perhaps that should be QUOTATION MARKS...? " "...? ) The publisher prints a note at the beginning:

...Permission must be obtained from the publishers if it is wished to perform the work in this new English translation..

Can any choir have wished this fate on themselves? And I imagine the publishers had (realistic?) visions of money changing hands; why else would they require formal written permission? The mind boggles.

Most such works have the self-awareness to call themselves 'singing versions' or something of the kind. The problems are obvious. Take the first word, 'Requiem'; three syllables. Most singing versions just have 'Re/qui/em' – good enough. But our man at Ricordi, Geoffrey Dunn, it says here, knows better: 'Rest and peace'. Hmm.

Rest and peace eternal give them, Lord Our God; and light for evermore shine down upon them. 

'...and light for evermore shine down...' Why, for heaven's sake? The Latin is a straightforward noun phrase: lux perpetua. Most singing versions (and indeed prose translations, as I remember from a misspent childhood) content themselves with 'perpetual light'. But not Mr Dunn; 'change for change's sake' is the order of the day; I imagine he would translate that as Ars gratia artis, though I'm not convinced that ars is the same thing as 'change'. Not content with a simple adjective for perpetua he contorts the original prayer into an inverted monstrosity featuring an adverbial phrase. Besides, he has removed the prayerful mystery of that perpetual light. Dunn's could be a torch powered by a nuclear reactor.

Elsewhere I have asked 'Why can't translators just GET OUT OF THE FRIGGING WAY ?' Moving on to the Sanctus, not having time for a detailed critique:

Pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua

Easy enough: 'Heaven and earth are full of your glory', right? (Or, if you must, 'Full are heaven and earth...') . But Mr Dunn needs something more. Another idea perhaps?

Earth and heaven are full of echoes to Thy glory

Once again, this meddlesome 'translator' has removed the prayerful mystery of the original. Gloria tua is an ablative – 'with your glory'. Mr Dunn has asked himself  'But what's making the noise?' Echoes of course!

But having got his teeth into a device (introducing new ideas^‡‡), he won't put it down. The second time those words appear, he goes one better:

Earth and heaven are full of echoes praising Thy glory

And what can have been his reason for swapping 'heaven' and 'earth' around? 'Heaven and earth' is what corpus linguists call a strong collocation... a very strong one. The British National Corpus has 66 cases of 'heaven and earth' and only 3 of the inverted form. The Corpus of Contemporary American shows slightly more tolerance for the inverted form (340 plays 26 in a much bigger corpus) but 'heaven and earth' is normal.

There are things native speakers just know about ordering words: native speakers of English just don't say 'the red big bus'. ESOL students learn a rule about this sort of thing, but native speakers don't have to. Most of them don't know it. Teachers of ESOL know it (or in some cases  [!] know where to find it). But when you change the order you are consciously doing something different: 'No, not the green one, the RED big bus'. (Even there it sounds pretty odd; I think I'd say '... the big RED bus'; but contrastive stress can change otherwise fixed word orders.)

So rather than dismiss Dunn's order out of hand, we should perhaps consider what sort of exception he's trying to make. Is the music involved, perhaps? Looking at the music introduces yet another variant (on pp. 143-4 of the Ricordi edition):

Heaven and earth fill with echoes,  praising Thy glory

And perhaps the music explains the change back to 'heaven and earth'. A lot is happening in the music here, and the 2nd choir don't have the words at all. But the sopranos in the 1st choir are singing a descending scale; for them  to sing 'Earth and heaven' would be plain contrary.

The idea of a tune influencing the words suggested to me the bass line on p. 207 of the Ricordi edition. Heaven and earth are involved here too, but not in the Pleni sunt coeli... context; it is the cosmic disaster (a pleasingly apt word, given the derivation from the Latin astrum [='star']^†) that strikes on the Dies irae. From coeli starting on a G (and flirting for a bar with notes as high as C) the basses drop down an octave for the word terra. And what does Mr Dunn's 'translation' do here?

When the high heav'n and all the earth are ... (all on the top note) and  
shaken (on the lower G)

This really is contrary. You've got a high word ('heaven') and a low word ('earth') simply  crying out to be reflected in the music. Verdi showed the way. But Mr Dunn knew better.

An observation about Fauré's word painting is at the back of my mind, but it'll have to stay there for the time being – an update, perhaps...? But for now I must get back to learning the music. Don't miss the concert!

b
Update 2014.06.22.16:45 – Added this note:

^†When Shakespeare called Romeo and Juliet 'star-crossed', I wonder whether he was tipping the wink to the more erudite in his audience: 'Here comes a disaster'.  The word désastre was only borrowed from French in the late-sixteenth century, so if so it was a pretty trendy bit of wordplay.

Update 2014.06.23.11:15 – Added this  PS:
PS to footnote: But maybe I'm overestimating the relevance of erudition in this context. At the time, probably the lowliest of the groundlings knew that astrology and disaster went hand in hand. The existence of the new borrowing  is not relevant (silly me).

Update 2014.06.25.15:00  – Added  this PPS:

On the subject of word painting (which I think is the expression for writing musically suggestive settings), as a foil to Verdi's setting of the words 'heaven and earth', this observation about Fauré's setting of those words occurred to me.

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).

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of  Libera me.

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.'

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will^††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom.

<PREscript>
Well over a year ago I wrote  a piece about prescriptive grammars (the ones that say you're doing everything wrong and tell you how you should oughter).

In it I wrote a longish digression about what I was singing at the time. It seems rather (indeed, more...:-?) apt here, so here it is:

My choice of 'listen out' as an example [of a phrasal verb – see the full context here] is not entirely accidental. I'm singing this season Fauré's Requiem [and THIS season, Verdi's], which includes the prayer Exaudi orationem meam. This phrase is preceded by a soprano solo tune^‡ marked both piano and dolce: a very gentle and not-very-down-to-earth (in fact angelic)  'It is fitting that a hymn should be offered to you in Sion, O God'. Here the human penitent breaks in,  fortissimo: Exaudi – as if they were saying 'Enough of this airy-fairy stuff  – "it is fitting that..." – my Aunt Fanny! This really matters to a human soul. Among all the millions of prayers addressed to you throughout Christendom – not to mention that bl**dy  'hymnus' – listen out for mine.' The rather limp translation 'Hear my prayer' doesn't do justice to the word.

Then the speaker thinks better of this impertinent fortissimo interruption, and repeats Exaudi  – but piano. The id then reasserts itself with the next word fortissimo: 'No I'm  not going to be quiet and reverential.' The internal dialogue between the super-ego and the id is reminiscent of Gollum's arguments with himself. 

^‡ ...Fauré made the elementary mistake of not making this a solo – though it is a sweet and angelic-sounding tune sung by the sopranos. Apologies for this lapse ( – he was only young! [not so young, I was thinking of his Cantique de Jean Racine, written while he was still at school])
</PREscript>

Update 2014.06.26.09:50 – Added gloss to Dum veneris, and typo fix.

Update 2014.06.27.11:25 – Added this note:

 ^††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

Update 2014.06.29.19:45 – Added this PPPS:
PPPS One last Geoffrey Dunn horror, but I don't have the text any more. Having written above about Exaudi (the bit in red) I was listening out (!) for the treatment of this verb. As I said, I don't have the text to hand, so I'm not sure of his word for latronem [= Sp: ladrón] in

Et latronem exaudisti

I'd've said something like 'and who heeded [see above for why it's not just 'heard'] the thief'. But our Geoffrey turns the syntax inside out and makes it 'and the robber won Thy pity'. Oh dear...

Update 2014.06.277.31.18:50 – Added this note:

 ^‡‡ On re-reading I see that he has form for this: in the first line of the piece he does it twice – Requiem → 'Rest and peace'; Domine → 'Lord Our God.

Update 2014.08.10.16:15 – Added this PPPPS:
I've run out of handy footnote symbols, so you'll have to do a bit of DIY to place this. It's 2 or 3  screens down (but YMMV), where I talk about 'the red big bus'. A recent Slate post addressed this point, in what it announces as

A long fascinating article—or is it a fascinating long article?

I  expect it is, though I confess I haven't read it carefully.