(This week I'm going to try my hand at some social commentary. Wish me luck...
Content warning: cited NSFW language)
Here I go wading into politics waters without a whisper of training in commenting on them. Then again, Chomsky (who's never been afraid to shoot his mouth off, thank God) mentions that the self-designated ruling class often use their position as a tool to restrict discourse on politics to their own terms. Aka "You're a linguist, am I right in that? Yes, I am a political advisor. I believe I have more experience in these matters than you do." (Aka Let us do your thinking for you.)
So sod it. I'm going to say my piece and hope I get my point across. Politics is my business because it's everybody's business - it's got to be for democracy to have any meaning. My thought is, there are ways to use anger at oppression: ways that will help, and ways that will play into the hands of oppressors. This is a bleedingly delicate point that I'm going to try to qualify below.
The Tone Police [link]
One of the ways that privileged parties (consciously or otherwise) oppress is in what is called tone policing. I mentioned it previously in the context of people referring to Northerners who dislike Southern cultural and economic dominance as "chippy". Thankfully, the class-based cultural and economic oppression of the North seems mostly to have died a death; I don't mean that class-based oppression has disappeared in the UK, just that it's now no longer based on regional provenance in the way it once was.
Tone policing is, essentially, the refusal to listen to an oppressed party's grievances unless they are voiced in a manner that the oppressor approves of. People dedicated to fighting oppression in all forms come up against this frequently, amongst other derailing techniques. Tone policing attempts to delegitimise anger. If you're angry, this faulty logic goes, you aren't being rational, and so your complaints can be dismissed. This ability to stay detached, of course, is itself yet another manifestation of the privilege which is being complained about in the first place.
I bring this up because it's quite difficult to articulate my point without opening yourself up to accusations of tone policing. I agree wholeheartedly that this it is an insidious form of oppression that we have to be on our guard against, and I've put in the above partly as an acknowledgement that the burden of proof is at my end.
Looking Back In Anger [link]
Anger is the most useful force we have in fighting oppression. It's the natural reaction to injustice - why the hell have people put up with this situation? It's rare these days to find people who actively support racial/societal oppression; the opposite of anger (in this case and others) is indifference. Social and political apathy is what holds us back for the most part, not overt croneyism with privilege. When trying to encourage others to adopt a socially just cause, it's rare to find people who say "Actually, the oppression of X group benefits me quite a bit. I'm happy for them to suffer." Most of the time it's just the Internet's favourite word - "Meh".
There are reasons for this - it takes a non-trivial act of humility to come to the awareness that you are privileged in a situation. It's uncomfortable to realise that all along, you've been the bad guy in some way. That's not how we're sold the narrative of our own lives. Blame mass media if you like - Plato was in on the game when he noted that no-one considers themselves evil (or rather, unjustifiably evil). People might think that what they are doing is wrong on some level, but they will usually be able to provide a "but I'm not a bad person because..." clause. If someone thinks that what they are doing is unjustifiably harmful (without even the justification that they enjoy it) they will usually take steps to stop or to rectify what it is they've been doing.
This, to me, appears to be why some meet discussions of privilege and oppression with hostility and aggression. It's uncomfortable to be dragged out of our cocooning narrative where we're on the winning side. It's easier just to ignore or to attempt to delegitimise the complaints being levelled. Again, this is nothing new, with Plato's parable of the Cave describing the protagonist (by analogy with Socrates) discovering that there is more than the shadows on the Cave wall and being put to death by his neighbours on coming back to tell them the good news. It's a classic persecution narrative, one which any number of people (ironically including those who support oppression, whether actively or passively) can buy into, as it's also more comfortable than Oh Right, So I've Been Inadvertently Oppressing People This Whole Time.
Because it is a lot more effort. I mean, being aware of other people takes a lot more energy than only thinking about yourself and your wants and needs. My social activism mostly consists of consciously avoiding using oppressive language (as a male I refuse to use gendered insults where I can find replacements (I don't think the word "cunt" has any equivalent non-gendered insult, unfortunately, so I use it regardless of gender when I do), and slut-shaming is definitely out, for instance) and trying to call people on it when they do likewise, as well as signing petitions online because I'm a student stereotype. I can't claim I succeed perfectly at either of the former - trying to use my various strains of privilege to counter oppression doesn't mean that I magically don't have the privilege anymore, so it's more than likely that I'll still slip up occasionally. (There's no shame in being told you've got something racist stuck in your teeth.)
The problem of when to call someone out, and how you should do it, is complicated; in the video I mentioned Jay Smooth offers one way out. I myself try to be detached and to the point. (Prejudicial assumptions, for instance, seem mostly to collapse under the strain of being explicitly questioned. "So what makes you think that all X group people are Y?" "What grounds do you have for thinking that?" etc) I think it's vital that it isn't a point-scoring exercise - you're helping someone out, ideally, not delivering a put-down couched in social justice rhetoric.
Spitting Fire [link]
So we come back to anger. What I hope I've demonstrated above is that I do not oppose expressing anger at oppression, nor do I think that expressed anger invalidates action against it. As I said above, anger is the source of social progress. What I am saying is that there are ways to use your anger that are productive and ways that are counterproductive.
The example that sparked this thought was a chant that was used on a march protesting the current unelected Conservative regime's cuts to education funding. We were marching in solidarity with out lecturers and tutors, who were being given a pay increase below the rate of inflation, i.e. a wage cut in real terms. I don't need to spell out the horrifying disregard for the welfare of the country that the current government has shown in favour of lucrative privatisation under the guise of austerity; suffice it to say that their cost-cutting measures have systematically targeted the most vulnerable in our society, who by definition have little power to protest.
After chants like "No ifs, no buts, no education cuts!", the organiser holding a megaphone announced that they would lead us in an old favourite: "I say Tory, you say scum!" There wasn't much I could do at the time (being in the middle of a crowd), but it gave me a feeling of real unease. Before, we were demonstrating for something - in this case, showing that we were against the cuts to education in solidarity with our lecturers. On starting what is effectively name-calling, I felt that this undermined our position.
This expression of our anger has no rational aim. The oppressors can look at it, say, "Well, you see, we can't engage with them, they can't be reasoned with" and refuse to attempt further dialogue. It invalidates the previous statements, not because of its anger, but because it has no positive content - worse, it affects the rest of the message negatively by relinquishing the high ground of mature discourse for attempting to engage in a slanging match. As cathartic as it may be, it absolutely harms the cause that it is trying to fight for. Look at the riots in 2011 - there was anger and momentum, but it led to people smashing and looting their own communities and justified all manner of oppressive governmental measures.
Unless we want a blood-soaked revolution (which I think it's worth any price to avoid), this formless anger can have no place in civilian protest. We are protesting the discrimination of the government against particular groups (teachers, those on benefits, the poor generally), and if we compromise ourselves by indulging in statements that effectively promote the same kind of group-based discrimination we weaken our cause fundamentally. I don't think it would have been as bad or even a problem if the chant had started from within the marchers; a large part of my problem was that it was given by the same means and with the same endorsed authority as our grievances with the regime themselves.
No grievance is enough that it justifies dehumanising its perpetrators. We may disagree virulently with a person or group's views or ideas, but as soon as we stop respecting their fundamental, universal humanity we start to become as bad as any oppressor. The fact that someone disagrees with you does not in itself invalidate their opinion. Any number of cyclical wars and acts of violence have shown that oppression never justifies oppression. And by that, incidentally, I don't mean that hate speech has to be protected - any private individual or enterprise can choose whether to listen to or to promote an opinion without in any way oppressing its holder's freedom of speech.
In Summary...
I think that it's vital that we put our anger caused by oppression to good use. In civilian protest, we have to use our anger for putting our case to those in power in undeniable terms - those opposing oppression have the moral high ground, and to abandon it for momentary catharsis is an awful injustice in itself. If the oppressors start using violence, then that's another situation entirely; but we have to play by the rules, even if the oppressors don't - not for them, but for us, and for the rules themselves. I reject the proposal that this is the same as tone policing - I don't want to delegitimise anger, rather suggest that there are unconstructive uses of political anger.
In another regard, I think I agree with John* on the narrative of class warfare - it becomes a method of control. So long as the different hereditary factions are kept at each other's throats the real societal injustices those perpetrating them are free to keep right on oppressing. And we can't let that happen. Never before have we had such a great voice - if we can use our anger positively we could really accomplish something.
* I showed a draft of this post (believe it or not, I do those) to a friend who is actively involved in this field, and they objected to my inclusion of John Lennon because of his history of domestic violence. I may do a follow-up post on this topic (for now see the excellent Being A Fan of Problematic Things), but suffice it to say that I have little respect for his personal life - there's some indication that he later became a functioning human being under Yoko Ono's influence, which I think is what makes it possible for me to engage with him at all. My gut reaction to Sean Connery's unrepentant misogyny is mostly "Dear God, you should be in a museum. I will never voluntarily give you another penny and will discourage others from doing so."
(I hope that made sense. Join us next week for more linguistics malarkey as per.)
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
Primer: Metre
(When I was thinking of setting this blog up, my initial vision was of a place where I could explain things that interest me to the interested layperson. The thing that strikes me about Internet learning resources is that they're usually either very introductory or very advanced; there doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground in the spirit of the primers of yore, where with a bit of concentration you'd be briskly presented with the rudiments of the particular subject and then sent on your way to jump into the real deal.
Regular readers (hello, I'm honoured to be your procrastination material!) will probably be bored to tears by me continually sawing on about adult-level learning, but there it is. There are problems when you're just exposed to the primer system, of course - it's quite easy to fall behind when the course is moving at such a pace in order to get you up to speed quickly. In this regard, I think it's much better that we have a more forgiving education system than previously. There's no shame in not understanding something the first time, after all, aptitude is often a complex and uneven thing. I'm just supporting having more options in terms of free Internet learning.
In this topic I'm much indebted to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled - if you're starting off in this subject it's well worth checking out.) Also, sorry if Courier New isn't your cup of tea; the scansion marks are a lot harder to show otherwise.
This is a guide to metre, which is useful for all sorts of things to do with words, from poetry to music to linguistics. I've tried to make this as direct, accessible and free-standing as possible - so no non-English examples, no IPA, and a minimum of linguistic comment and links. I might do a separate post with the bits I've cut, who knows...
Anyway, before we start, here are some misconceptions about metre that I'd like to put to bed:
Learning Your Scales [link]
The word metre comes from the Classical Greek métron, meaning "measurement" (like the metric system). Think of it like sitting a word on a weighing scale; the act of doing this is called scansion, and how the word scans is called its quantity (from Latin quantus, meaning "how much, how many" - how much does the word weigh?).
When scanning a word, we look at each syllable and determine:
Accent
So, let's start with the last item, because it's the focus in English. In Standard English we have a stress-based accent, so this means that accented syllables will have stress, and unaccented syllables will not. So (for example) in O.pen.ing, de.CIE.ver and de.sel.ECT the first, second and third syllables respectively are accented (i.e. stressed), and the others aren't. A further thing to note is that because English is stress-timed, we further emphasise the stressed syllable by reducing (or squashing) the other syllables. (We have a thing known as secondary or weak stress, for example at the start of OV.er.DONE, but that needn't bother us for now.)
Length
The length of a syllable is, on an intuitive level, just how long it takes to say it. The naïve interpretation (in the sense of the first thing you'd think of) is that syllables can be short or long depending on their vowel. The slightly more complex reading is that syllables contain moras (from the Latin for "time period, delay") - one mora for a short vowel, two for a long one.
In English the convention is that the vowels in pat, pet, pit, pot, put, putt, and at the end of puma, puppy, and panther are short, and the rest (either single vowels like in father or diphthongs like how) are long. This is fairly intuitive; the sound of hat does feel shorter than that of hate or heart or hear.
Weight
Syllable weight is sometimes ignored in English metrical considerations, but I think you do so at your peril. A syllable is light when it has no consonant on the end, and heavy when it does. So he is light, but hit and him are heavy. More than one consonant on the end, or the combination of being heavy and with a long vowel, can be called superheavy. So the words loads and strengths are superheavy. (Moraically, a heavy syllable like hit has two moras, and a superheavy one has three).
A thing to bear in mind with syllable weight is that because syllables rarely come in isolation, if a heavy syllable is followed by one beginning with a vowel, the last consonant of the heavy syllable can be "adopted" to be the first of the next. This is the same process that operated on the words orange, uncle and umpire ; they all used to begin with an N in English, but because in speech people said anorange, anuncle, anumpire, the N went the other way (an.orange rather than a.norange).
The net result of this is that when analysing syllable weight, you can only be really sure a syllable will stay heavy if it has two or more consonants at the end (is superheavy) or comes at the end of a line (because there's nowhere to palm the last consonant off onto).
Moving Your Feet [link]
English poetic metre is a slightly strange compromise. It's based on Latin and Greek metres, which work mainly on Weight/Length rather than on Accent. They could do this because they had what's called contrastive vowel length - effectively, a vowel could be long without being accented, which sounds a bit odd to English speakers. (Try saying mēnsa (Latin for table, macron means long) then mēnsā (with a table) with the A the same length as the E. Feels like you've dislocated your jaw, doesn't it!)
So Classical scansion contrasts between Short/Light (one mora) vs Long and/or Heavy (two or more). To avoid muddling our terminology I'll refer to the former as Weak and the latter as Strong.
A metrical form is usually defined as a series of feet (think of them like steps in a dance). In Classical verse (which English and other verse is usually imitating) the commonest feet are named like so:
If you think the grouping looks odd, it's because I've done it the Classical way, where a strong [-] is worth two, and a weak [v] is worth one. So the spondee [- -] is in with the dactyl [- v v] and not the iamb [v -] because it adds up to four, not three.
A helpful way to think about this type of metre is to treat it like a musical beat.
Homer's favourite metre is called dactylic hexameter, and it goes like this:
x4
- v v | - v v | - -
- - | | - v
So it's got six feet (as you'd expect from hexameter), the first four of which can either be dactyls or spondees, and then the fifth is always a dactyl and a spondee, or a dactyl and a... troche? It looks like we're missing a weak beat there, but it's a fairly common thing to let whoever's reciting the line take a quick breath before going onto the next line. As epic poetry used to be recited from memory for hundreds and hundreds of lines, you can see why they needed it.
So two valid hexameter lines could go like this:
- - | - v v | - - | - - | - v v | - -
- v v | - - | - v v | - - | - v v | - v
Try tapping that out on your knee or something. You can keep a steady pulse going through the whole thing without much trouble. Incidentally, that dactyl-and-spondee ending bit is called an Adonic. We'll come back to it later.
Acute Angles [link]
As I mentioned earlier, Standard English is a stress-timed language, so a system based on syllable weight wouldn't work. Instead, we take the above system and redefine it to work mainly on Accent instead.
So Shakespeare's favourite metre, iambic pentameter, theoretically is made up of five unstressed-stressed pairs:
v / | v / | v / | v /| v /
"The plough|man home|ward plods | his wea|ry way" (Grey's Elegy)
(I'm marking a stressed syllable with [/] to distinguish it from a heavy/long [-].)
You'll note I said "theoretically". Because we're not using the metre to keep time, we can mess around with it a bit more.
Some common tricks are:
The third item is probably the most open to interpretation: individual actors and readers will place emphasis in different places - for instance, if the person performing Miranda's line chooses to stress the ''such'' as well (that has such people in't!), it would be natural to make the previous foot a pyrrhic in anticipation of the spondee. A classic example of a line with varying scansion is the famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Which of the first three words are you stressing? I think I'd stress the "Shall" - it's a bit hard for me to work out what I'd do naturally because this was my English teacher's favourite example of pentameter, so they'd go "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" which would sound ridiculous if you tried to read it out like that.
It's also worth mentioning Byron's famous comment that he knew the quantity of every word in English except for scissors: if our only criterion is accentual (ie. stressed/unstressed), we're stuck - it doesn't scan [/ v] (like question), but it doesn't scan [v /] or [v v] either (not even [/ /] as new world). If we allow the consideration of syllable weight as well, though, we can offer [/ -] and our problems are solved.
Volta Means Turning Away [link]
All these technical names for metre are very nice and all, but they're kind of missing the point. As we can see above, quantitive metre terms (as in, where your strongs and weaks add up) don't really fit for a stress-based accent. If you look at what was here before we started copying Classical forms, we had what is called an accentual-syllabic system. Basically, it means that you have a fixed number of stresses per line, and hang the number of unstressed syllables between them. This is nowadays known as sprung rhythm.
For my money, this is what separates the great poets from the good ones - you'll note that for my example of straight pentameter (without any frills) I had to use the Victorian Grey's Elegy, but my other examples are Shakespeare. He never lets the abstract ideal of five iambs get in the way of saying exactly what he means to say; in fact, I would argue that most of his lines scan more naturally if you view them as four-stressed sprung lines (like Beowulf!) with a break (caesura (siz-YOO-ruh), Latin cutting) between them:
x / x / x x | / x x / x
"To be, or not to be - that is the question:
/ x x / x | x x / x / x
Whether 'tis nobler | in the mind to suffer
x / x / x | x x / x / x
The slings and arrows | of outrageous fortune
x x / / | x x x / x / x
Or to take arms | against a sea of troubles
x x x / x / x | x / x /
And by opposing end them. | To die, to sleep" ... (Hamlet)
(For sprung scansion, I'm using [/] for stressed and [x] for unstressed, ignoring length/weight)
Doesn't that read much more naturally than a plodding "To be or not to be that is the question"? I could go on and on about how Shakespeare stuff feels alive (he might conceivably have used the word thou in conversation) compared to the frequently turgid pastoral, mock-archaic stuff churned out in later eras (Would someone born in the 19th century ever say "he maketh" except for reading the Bible or taking the mick?), but that's beside the point. (Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's work is the fact that his lines are rarely end-stopped except for to make a point - phrases flow freely across line boundaries instead of pausing pompously every ten syllables.)
I think this is what gives metre its bad reputation in the population at large - people think of jingly, formulaic doggerel rather than living poetry. Remember the Adonic? You can clearly see under the sprung scansion that it appears twice in Hamlet's soliloquy (thát is the quéstion, Whéther 'tis nóbler) - it's a mainstay in English speech. If a prose passage is said to have "good rhythm", you can bet it'll probably use lóts of Adónics! Remember métre means weíghing: it lets you measure the musical quality of speech, the topography of a sentence. I can think of no better example of consciously musical speech than the King James Bible, which were it produced today would probably be classed as a verse translation.
(I didn't put the Adonics in the last paragraph deliberately, by the way - as you may recall, analysis is the art of seeing what's already there clearer, not muddying the waters by dumping in a load of artifice.)
The master of this idea of poetry as musical speech is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's him that rediscovered (and named) the sprung rhythms in Shakespeare and folk forms, and him that gives us the most beautiful and perfect modern examples. The following are the first two stanzas of the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest work and masterpiece. The scansion scheme is taken from the notes to my edition:
([\] indicates an uncounted weak, secondary stress; if in your accent feel, hour, fire are monosyllabic, my apologies, in mine they aren't. It doesn't make a difference here.)
Do yourself a favour and read it aloud. The sounds swim on your tongue deliciously, the music of the heavy and light syllables and rich assonance and internal rhyme make you feel the crashing of the waves and the swell of the sea in their masterful rolling. This is poetry (which in Greek means "crafting") - we are shown how the everyday billows and swirls just beneath our grey ordinarifying vision.
A Glance at Rhyme [link]
I suspect you're already familiar with the basics of rhymes, so I'll keep it brief. They're a good way to build structural integrity in poems (the rhyming lines support each other like girders), and are often specified in the shape of different poetic forms. If you look at the quoted Deutschland stanzas above, for instance, you can see that the rhyme scheme is ABABCBCA.
As we have masculine and feminine lines, so we also have masculine and feminine rhymes: masculine scanning [/] (hit/bit), feminine [/ v] (frozen/chosen). In English masculine rhymes are by far the commonest type, though in other traditions (like French) it's usual to alternate between feminine and masculine for each couplet. When notating rhyme schemes that specify whether a rhyme has to be masculine or feminine, it's conventional to use lowercase for feminine and uppercase for masculine (yay patriarchy), so an Onegin stanza is aBaBccDDeFFeGG:
My uncle — high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him —
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
(This ingenious translation mirrors the jaw-dropping ingenuity of Pushkin's original Russian - it's very hard not to make feminine rhymes sound clunky or gimmicky in English.)
Pushkin's Onegin stanza is a modified form of a Shakespeare sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in which he uses each permutation of the two-rhyme quatrain (four-line stanza) - ABAB (crossed rhyme), AABB (flat rhyme) and ABBA (envelope rhyme). This gives a bewildering disorientating effect, making you lose your bearings until the final couplet snaps you back into place (frequently containing a salty epigram or joke, as here).
A last important concept in rhyming is the idea of full and half rhymes. All the examples so far have been full rhymes - a half rhyme is usually where the consonant doesn't match but the vowel does (sit/sick). You have the trade-off that half rhymes aren't as predictable (if you hear moon in a song it's almost always going to be spoon or June afterwards, isn't it...) but are also less satisfying than the genuine article. As the old saying goes, rhymes are a good servant but a bad master - it's rarely a good idea to write something just because it rhymes!
In Summary...
Wait, I hear you ask, what about a guide to the poetic forms? I'm afraid this post is more than long enough already - the good news is that on my old blog I explained the commonest forms at a fair bit of length. The bad news is it's analysing my own poems. I'm still quite proud of them, but if you don't trust me then feel free to give it a miss - there's plenty of explanatory stuff on the Internet if you Google.
So anyway, I hope that this overview has been useful, if you were feeling apprehensive about metre and how it works. Writing using metre and forms is, admittedly, difficult at first if you're not used to convincing your words to march in formation; but like a lot of worthwhile skills the more you work at it the better you'll get, and the more you'll enjoy it. I certainly feel like it gives an extra, musical dimension both to my reading and my writing.
(Go forth and have no fear! Or at least, have a vague idea of what's going on with metre so you know what to look up. Next week is another little departure as I comment on politics...)
Regular readers (hello, I'm honoured to be your procrastination material!) will probably be bored to tears by me continually sawing on about adult-level learning, but there it is. There are problems when you're just exposed to the primer system, of course - it's quite easy to fall behind when the course is moving at such a pace in order to get you up to speed quickly. In this regard, I think it's much better that we have a more forgiving education system than previously. There's no shame in not understanding something the first time, after all, aptitude is often a complex and uneven thing. I'm just supporting having more options in terms of free Internet learning.
In this topic I'm much indebted to Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled - if you're starting off in this subject it's well worth checking out.) Also, sorry if Courier New isn't your cup of tea; the scansion marks are a lot harder to show otherwise.
This is a guide to metre, which is useful for all sorts of things to do with words, from poetry to music to linguistics. I've tried to make this as direct, accessible and free-standing as possible - so no non-English examples, no IPA, and a minimum of linguistic comment and links. I might do a separate post with the bits I've cut, who knows...
Anyway, before we start, here are some misconceptions about metre that I'd like to put to bed:
- Metre is not restricted to sonnets and the like
- Neither is rhyming, though it's a bit more obvious
- If you think writing using them makes the work clunky or unnatural, I would suggest that you're not reading very good examples.
Learning Your Scales [link]
The word metre comes from the Classical Greek métron, meaning "measurement" (like the metric system). Think of it like sitting a word on a weighing scale; the act of doing this is called scansion, and how the word scans is called its quantity (from Latin quantus, meaning "how much, how many" - how much does the word weigh?).
When scanning a word, we look at each syllable and determine:
- Is its vowel long or short? (Length)
- Does it end in a consonant? (Weight)
- Is it stressed or unstressed? (Accent)
Accent
So, let's start with the last item, because it's the focus in English. In Standard English we have a stress-based accent, so this means that accented syllables will have stress, and unaccented syllables will not. So (for example) in O.pen.ing, de.CIE.ver and de.sel.ECT the first, second and third syllables respectively are accented (i.e. stressed), and the others aren't. A further thing to note is that because English is stress-timed, we further emphasise the stressed syllable by reducing (or squashing) the other syllables. (We have a thing known as secondary or weak stress, for example at the start of OV.er.DONE, but that needn't bother us for now.)
Length
The length of a syllable is, on an intuitive level, just how long it takes to say it. The naïve interpretation (in the sense of the first thing you'd think of) is that syllables can be short or long depending on their vowel. The slightly more complex reading is that syllables contain moras (from the Latin for "time period, delay") - one mora for a short vowel, two for a long one.
In English the convention is that the vowels in pat, pet, pit, pot, put, putt, and at the end of puma, puppy, and panther are short, and the rest (either single vowels like in father or diphthongs like how) are long. This is fairly intuitive; the sound of hat does feel shorter than that of hate or heart or hear.
Weight
Syllable weight is sometimes ignored in English metrical considerations, but I think you do so at your peril. A syllable is light when it has no consonant on the end, and heavy when it does. So he is light, but hit and him are heavy. More than one consonant on the end, or the combination of being heavy and with a long vowel, can be called superheavy. So the words loads and strengths are superheavy. (Moraically, a heavy syllable like hit has two moras, and a superheavy one has three).
A thing to bear in mind with syllable weight is that because syllables rarely come in isolation, if a heavy syllable is followed by one beginning with a vowel, the last consonant of the heavy syllable can be "adopted" to be the first of the next. This is the same process that operated on the words orange, uncle and umpire ; they all used to begin with an N in English, but because in speech people said anorange, anuncle, anumpire, the N went the other way (an.orange rather than a.norange).
The net result of this is that when analysing syllable weight, you can only be really sure a syllable will stay heavy if it has two or more consonants at the end (is superheavy) or comes at the end of a line (because there's nowhere to palm the last consonant off onto).
Moving Your Feet [link]
English poetic metre is a slightly strange compromise. It's based on Latin and Greek metres, which work mainly on Weight/Length rather than on Accent. They could do this because they had what's called contrastive vowel length - effectively, a vowel could be long without being accented, which sounds a bit odd to English speakers. (Try saying mēnsa (Latin for table, macron means long) then mēnsā (with a table) with the A the same length as the E. Feels like you've dislocated your jaw, doesn't it!)
So Classical scansion contrasts between Short/Light (one mora) vs Long and/or Heavy (two or more). To avoid muddling our terminology I'll refer to the former as Weak and the latter as Strong.
A metrical form is usually defined as a series of feet (think of them like steps in a dance). In Classical verse (which English and other verse is usually imitating) the commonest feet are named like so:
| [v v] | Pyrrhic | (PIR-ik) | |||
| [v -] | Iamb | (I-am) | |||
| [- v] | Troche | (TROH-kee) | or | Choree | (KOR-ee) |
| [- -] | Spondee | (SPONN-dee) | |||
| [v v -] | Anapaest | (AN-uh-peest) | |||
| [- v v] | Dactyl | (DAK-til) | |||
| [v - v] | Amphibrach | (AM-fi-brak) | |||
| [- v -] | Amphimacer | (AM-fi-may-ser) | or | Cretic | (KREE-tik) |
| [- - -] | Mollossus | (muh-LOSS-us) |
If you think the grouping looks odd, it's because I've done it the Classical way, where a strong [-] is worth two, and a weak [v] is worth one. So the spondee [- -] is in with the dactyl [- v v] and not the iamb [v -] because it adds up to four, not three.
A helpful way to think about this type of metre is to treat it like a musical beat.
Homer's favourite metre is called dactylic hexameter, and it goes like this:
x4
- v v | - v v | - -
- - | | - v
So it's got six feet (as you'd expect from hexameter), the first four of which can either be dactyls or spondees, and then the fifth is always a dactyl and a spondee, or a dactyl and a... troche? It looks like we're missing a weak beat there, but it's a fairly common thing to let whoever's reciting the line take a quick breath before going onto the next line. As epic poetry used to be recited from memory for hundreds and hundreds of lines, you can see why they needed it.
So two valid hexameter lines could go like this:
- - | - v v | - - | - - | - v v | - -
- v v | - - | - v v | - - | - v v | - v
Try tapping that out on your knee or something. You can keep a steady pulse going through the whole thing without much trouble. Incidentally, that dactyl-and-spondee ending bit is called an Adonic. We'll come back to it later.
Acute Angles [link]
As I mentioned earlier, Standard English is a stress-timed language, so a system based on syllable weight wouldn't work. Instead, we take the above system and redefine it to work mainly on Accent instead.
So Shakespeare's favourite metre, iambic pentameter, theoretically is made up of five unstressed-stressed pairs:
v / | v / | v / | v /| v /
"The plough|man home|ward plods | his wea|ry way" (Grey's Elegy)
(I'm marking a stressed syllable with [/] to distinguish it from a heavy/long [-].)
You'll note I said "theoretically". Because we're not using the metre to keep time, we can mess around with it a bit more.
Some common tricks are:
- Feminine ending
You add an extra weak syllable to the end of the line. So-called because in French, grammatically feminine adjectives have an extra -e on the end.
v / | v / | v / | v / | v / v
"Be not | afear'd - the isle | is full | of noises" (The Tempest) - Trochaic inversion
You turn an iamb round into a troche.
/ v | v / | / v | v / | v /
"What's in | a name? | That which | we call | a rose
v /| v /| v / | v / | v /
By a|ny o|ther name | would smell | as sweet" (Romeo and Juliet)
- Pyrrhic and spondaic substitution
Where you replace the iamb entirely either with two weak or two stressed (can be one stressed, one heavy). With the features of Standard English outlined above, this will usually mean two separate, short words.
v / | v / | v v | / v | v / v
"To be | or not | to be? | That is | the question." (Hamlet)
v / | / / | v / | v /| v /
"Oh brave | new world, | that has | such peo|ple in't!" (The Tempest)
The third item is probably the most open to interpretation: individual actors and readers will place emphasis in different places - for instance, if the person performing Miranda's line chooses to stress the ''such'' as well (that has such people in't!), it would be natural to make the previous foot a pyrrhic in anticipation of the spondee. A classic example of a line with varying scansion is the famous "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Which of the first three words are you stressing? I think I'd stress the "Shall" - it's a bit hard for me to work out what I'd do naturally because this was my English teacher's favourite example of pentameter, so they'd go "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" which would sound ridiculous if you tried to read it out like that.
It's also worth mentioning Byron's famous comment that he knew the quantity of every word in English except for scissors: if our only criterion is accentual (ie. stressed/unstressed), we're stuck - it doesn't scan [/ v] (like question), but it doesn't scan [v /] or [v v] either (not even [/ /] as new world). If we allow the consideration of syllable weight as well, though, we can offer [/ -] and our problems are solved.
Volta Means Turning Away [link]
All these technical names for metre are very nice and all, but they're kind of missing the point. As we can see above, quantitive metre terms (as in, where your strongs and weaks add up) don't really fit for a stress-based accent. If you look at what was here before we started copying Classical forms, we had what is called an accentual-syllabic system. Basically, it means that you have a fixed number of stresses per line, and hang the number of unstressed syllables between them. This is nowadays known as sprung rhythm.
For my money, this is what separates the great poets from the good ones - you'll note that for my example of straight pentameter (without any frills) I had to use the Victorian Grey's Elegy, but my other examples are Shakespeare. He never lets the abstract ideal of five iambs get in the way of saying exactly what he means to say; in fact, I would argue that most of his lines scan more naturally if you view them as four-stressed sprung lines (like Beowulf!) with a break (caesura (siz-YOO-ruh), Latin cutting) between them:
x / x / x x | / x x / x
"To be, or not to be - that is the question:
/ x x / x | x x / x / x
Whether 'tis nobler | in the mind to suffer
x / x / x | x x / x / x
The slings and arrows | of outrageous fortune
x x / / | x x x / x / x
Or to take arms | against a sea of troubles
x x x / x / x | x / x /
And by opposing end them. | To die, to sleep" ... (Hamlet)
(For sprung scansion, I'm using [/] for stressed and [x] for unstressed, ignoring length/weight)
Doesn't that read much more naturally than a plodding "To be or not to be that is the question"? I could go on and on about how Shakespeare stuff feels alive (he might conceivably have used the word thou in conversation) compared to the frequently turgid pastoral, mock-archaic stuff churned out in later eras (Would someone born in the 19th century ever say "he maketh" except for reading the Bible or taking the mick?), but that's beside the point. (Part of the effectiveness of Shakespeare's work is the fact that his lines are rarely end-stopped except for to make a point - phrases flow freely across line boundaries instead of pausing pompously every ten syllables.)
I think this is what gives metre its bad reputation in the population at large - people think of jingly, formulaic doggerel rather than living poetry. Remember the Adonic? You can clearly see under the sprung scansion that it appears twice in Hamlet's soliloquy (thát is the quéstion, Whéther 'tis nóbler) - it's a mainstay in English speech. If a prose passage is said to have "good rhythm", you can bet it'll probably use lóts of Adónics! Remember métre means weíghing: it lets you measure the musical quality of speech, the topography of a sentence. I can think of no better example of consciously musical speech than the King James Bible, which were it produced today would probably be classed as a verse translation.
(I didn't put the Adonics in the last paragraph deliberately, by the way - as you may recall, analysis is the art of seeing what's already there clearer, not muddying the waters by dumping in a load of artifice.)
The master of this idea of poetry as musical speech is Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's him that rediscovered (and named) the sprung rhythms in Shakespeare and folk forms, and him that gives us the most beautiful and perfect modern examples. The following are the first two stanzas of the first part of The Wreck of the Deutschland, his longest work and masterpiece. The scansion scheme is taken from the notes to my edition:
| 1. | 2. | Stresses | |
| / \ x x / | / x x / | 2 | |
| THOU mastering me | I did say yes | ||
| \ / x x / x / | \ x / x x / / | 3 | |
| God! giver of breath and bread; | O at lightning and lashed rod; | ||
| / / / x x / | x / x /x x / x / | 4 | |
| World’s strand, sway of the sea; | Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess | ||
| / x / x x / | x / x x / x / | 3 | |
| Lord of living and dead; | Thy terror, O Christ, O God; | ||
| \ x / / x / x \ / x x / | x / x x / / x x /x x / | 5 | |
| Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, | Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: | ||
| x / x x / x x / / x / | x / x x / x x / x x / x \ / | 5 | |
| And after it almost unmade, what with dread, | The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod | ||
| / /x x \ x / x x / | / / x x / x x / | 4 | |
| Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? | Hard down with a horror of height: | ||
| / x x / x /x x / x x / / | x x / x x / x / x \ / x / x x / | 6 | |
| Over again I feel thy finger and find thee. | And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress. |
([\] indicates an uncounted weak, secondary stress; if in your accent feel, hour, fire are monosyllabic, my apologies, in mine they aren't. It doesn't make a difference here.)
Do yourself a favour and read it aloud. The sounds swim on your tongue deliciously, the music of the heavy and light syllables and rich assonance and internal rhyme make you feel the crashing of the waves and the swell of the sea in their masterful rolling. This is poetry (which in Greek means "crafting") - we are shown how the everyday billows and swirls just beneath our grey ordinarifying vision.
A Glance at Rhyme [link]
I suspect you're already familiar with the basics of rhymes, so I'll keep it brief. They're a good way to build structural integrity in poems (the rhyming lines support each other like girders), and are often specified in the shape of different poetic forms. If you look at the quoted Deutschland stanzas above, for instance, you can see that the rhyme scheme is ABABCBCA.
As we have masculine and feminine lines, so we also have masculine and feminine rhymes: masculine scanning [/] (hit/bit), feminine [/ v] (frozen/chosen). In English masculine rhymes are by far the commonest type, though in other traditions (like French) it's usual to alternate between feminine and masculine for each couplet. When notating rhyme schemes that specify whether a rhyme has to be masculine or feminine, it's conventional to use lowercase for feminine and uppercase for masculine (yay patriarchy), so an Onegin stanza is aBaBccDDeFFeGG:
My uncle — high ideals inspire him;
but when past joking he fell sick,
he really forced one to admire him —
and never played a shrewder trick.
Let others learn from his example!
But God, how deadly dull to sample
sickroom attendance night and day
and never stir a foot away!
And the sly baseness, fit to throttle,
of entertaining the half-dead:
one smoothes the pillows down in bed,
and glumly serves the medicine bottle,
and sighs, and asks oneself all through:
"When will the devil come for you?"
(This ingenious translation mirrors the jaw-dropping ingenuity of Pushkin's original Russian - it's very hard not to make feminine rhymes sound clunky or gimmicky in English.)
Pushkin's Onegin stanza is a modified form of a Shakespeare sonnet (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) in which he uses each permutation of the two-rhyme quatrain (four-line stanza) - ABAB (crossed rhyme), AABB (flat rhyme) and ABBA (envelope rhyme). This gives a bewildering disorientating effect, making you lose your bearings until the final couplet snaps you back into place (frequently containing a salty epigram or joke, as here).
A last important concept in rhyming is the idea of full and half rhymes. All the examples so far have been full rhymes - a half rhyme is usually where the consonant doesn't match but the vowel does (sit/sick). You have the trade-off that half rhymes aren't as predictable (if you hear moon in a song it's almost always going to be spoon or June afterwards, isn't it...) but are also less satisfying than the genuine article. As the old saying goes, rhymes are a good servant but a bad master - it's rarely a good idea to write something just because it rhymes!
In Summary...
Wait, I hear you ask, what about a guide to the poetic forms? I'm afraid this post is more than long enough already - the good news is that on my old blog I explained the commonest forms at a fair bit of length. The bad news is it's analysing my own poems. I'm still quite proud of them, but if you don't trust me then feel free to give it a miss - there's plenty of explanatory stuff on the Internet if you Google.
So anyway, I hope that this overview has been useful, if you were feeling apprehensive about metre and how it works. Writing using metre and forms is, admittedly, difficult at first if you're not used to convincing your words to march in formation; but like a lot of worthwhile skills the more you work at it the better you'll get, and the more you'll enjoy it. I certainly feel like it gives an extra, musical dimension both to my reading and my writing.
(Go forth and have no fear! Or at least, have a vague idea of what's going on with metre so you know what to look up. Next week is another little departure as I comment on politics...)
Tuesday, 29 April 2014
Also Into You: Nick Drake, "Hazey Jane II"
(You might have noticed that for someone who described their interests as linguistics and music I've been tending a little more towards the linguistics side than the music side. I'd say that I'm just as into music (or rather that for me music and languages are two faces of the same statue), but that my musical activities tend to be, well, writing, playing and listening to music, rather than necessarily writing 'about' it.
But you know what, I've had a couple of thoughts pertaining to some of my favourite songs that I think might be worth sharing - things that feel, occasionally, like a little insight into the brilliance of the people who made them. Or who knows, maybe I'm just looking too hard. In any case, here's the first of these.)
Nick Drake is an incredible artist. His fine-spun, tightly-wound genius reminds me of J. S. Bach or Gerard Manley Hopkins - each beautiful piece is a perfect, multilayered gem, not a note or word too many or out of place, so strongly put together it feels like architecture as much as art. His life story is sadly familiar, but his work (the three albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon plus a few further recordings) survives. I don't think you need to be a guitarist to be able to appreciate just how right his extraordinary, subtle guitar lines are; if you do try to play them (Chris Healey's brilliant site is a good place to start) you'll see just how horrifyingly good the guy was at his instrument.
I don't mean he was a saint, or anything. His sense of humour sneaks into most of the stuff he does (Five Leaves Left is apparently what it said in Rizla packets when you were about to run out - and if you think he was only smoking tobacco, then you're probably missing something in The Thoughts of Mary Jane...), and as a person he seems to have had far from a Christ-like character, even before depression consumed his life. There's also the matter of whether he was into sex or not. To which I say, how is that any of our bloody business? But I seem to be in a minority in that opinion. But these details, for me, make him seem all the realer - this is a fallible, human person we're listening to, not a robot, which makes his achievements all the more impressive.
Start Over Again [link]
Bryter Layter is his second album - it's his most upbeat, even pop-y effort. Where Five Leaves Left had strings and congas, Bryter Layter adds in a beefy rock backing, complete with bluesy electric guitar (courtesy of Fairport's Richard Thompson, who guested previously but really lets rip now) and full drum kit (Dave Mattacks, also Fairport). Also, John Cale appears, because he was bloody everywhere back then. The overall theme that I get off this track (the closest we get to a radio-friendly single) and this album is that we're repeating something, harder this time, in the hope that it'll work better.
Take the album itself - it begins with the acoustic-guitar-and-strings-backed miniature Introduction (so far, so Five Leaves Left) before slamming on the gas for our focus here, Hazey Jane II. A sprightly brass-and-electric-guitar fanfare and crucially (if you'll pardon the drummer's angle) a straight-ahead rock drum beat launch us into a gear we haven't heard from Our Man In Tanworth-in-Arden anywhere before. (I've embedded the whole album so you start with it for the full effect, if you're making use of the video.)
This doubling theme hits you right between the eyes when we get to the unrhymed, off-kilter lyric with that fantastic murky Hammond organ. The distended opener doubles back on itself awkwardly ("And what will happen in the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"), and then tries again later (in the day!) ("And what will happen in the evening / With the weasel with the teeth / That bite so sharp when you're not looking in the evening?") This figure reaches its apex in the bathetic pre-chorus: "What will happen / In the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"
The scansion and the narrator relax into short, regular (mostly) rhymed pairs (and the brass comes back) as we get to the chorus, the dénouement (which after all means "untying"): "And now that the family / Is part of a chain / Take off your eye-shades / Start over again". We've heard about letting our brother and sister's hair down (in this case in a double sense), and this strength through the joining of similar elements (family members or links in a chain) is the positive spin on doubling - if you stick with family members as doubles the fact that the world is filling up is the negative view.
And, as a little nod, just as we hear "Start over again" the instruments jump back to play the chorus again (but with different words), and then all the way back to the fanfare I was gushing about earlier. Instead of the clumsy overflowing lines we get more of the punchy matched couplets (to the punchy drum beat). The clincher comes in the coda (which, of course, supplements the song as a whole) - Hazey Jane is in the narrator's mind "again". And indeed, this is Hazey Jane II - the rather more sedately orchestral Hazey Jane I (even the chorus says "Hey, slow Jane") finishes off Side One. We're left with the cryptic "If songs were lines / In a conversation / The situation / Would be fine" and a brief major acoustic guitar chord - even when surrounded by a crowd of session players our hero still manages to get the last word!
Now, Take a Little Time to Make Your Story Clear [link]
So what are we to make of it? First of all, let us draw near and affirm our faith that our host is a good enough writer that the awkward verses are intentionally awkward. I mean, if you try singing this by yourself (or even with a guitar) it's almost impossible to get right - other people have picked apart the wizardry involved more lucidly than I can, but let's say you have to be pretty good to act that bad. Looking at the lay of the chords, we see the interplay between the awkward section and the other (hair-down?) section is reflected by the former being in D minor and the latter in F major - the relative major. This gives a dark vs light contrast, evoked by the images of crowding, anxiety and being bitten by night animals set against the narrator lightening up (ahem) and expressing themselves the second time around. The chord that we finish on, and that pops up repeatedly in both sections, is C major. It's a chord common to both the major and the minor, almost like hesitating at the crossroads. As a side note, Chris Healey's decoding of the guitar parts (which sound pretty on the money to me) has the Introduction and both Hazey Janes in the same slack tuning to further add to the parallels. (CGCFCE, a beautiful discovery that is also used (amongst other things) for the song Pink Moon - trying to recapture the magic?)
That enigmatic last quatrain I cited (with its enigmatic C major) coincides with a final brief foray back into the relative minor before the rhythm section winds up - the narrator's problem appears to be expressing himself to Hazey Jane properly. The last lines give us a deftly minimal indication of how wrong the situation is: if songs could substitute for saying what was really on your mind, then there wouldn't be a problem. The figure is so much more effective than simply saying it outright (which I suppose is part of the problem).
I think this uncertainty in the lyric gives us ground to read the whole theme of doubling in two ways, appropriately enough, positive and negative just as the song oscillates between major and minor. We're doing a second album (it's tomorrow i.e. in the morning), and a second song called Hazey Jane - the major says that this time we will say it right (Start over again), or build on what was already there (the family is part of a chain), and we hope this will be true, just as we start the song with this upbeat, major fanfare (taking off our eye-shades to try seeing things major). And yet we can't help but resolve back towards the minor - if we have to say it again, does that mean that it won't work this time as well? (This is where I think the abandoned safety in the books comes in - we're out on a limb in this artistic project, does doing more of the same mean that we'll just go further into No-Man's Land?) Or, worse, will repeating ourselves make the previous effort look weaker? (The awkward verse). In a conversation, as the narrator wants, you at least have the opportunity of hearing the other person talk and reacting to what they're saying. But here, there's the gnawing suspicion that we're just saying the same few things over and over, without any reassurance that anyone's listening or that we're being understood.
The Situation [link]
I don't really like rooting around creators' biographies (I'm definitely on Team Death of the Author, as detailed on my old blog), but if you have a look at the guy's circumstances when he was writing and producing the album, this would seem to be a dichotomy that rings true. I think it's somehow appropriate that even at his most marketable (let's put the fast one to the front of the LP!), Nick Drake is still holding back, still conflicted with desperation for people to like and get his work (maybe this time will work), but worried that it's all for nothing, that what he's saying isn't important enough or people aren't interested. It's that minor reflex that closes the song (the situation is decidedly not fine), and that's the spectre that hangs over Pink Moon, casting its warm, heart-breaking, silvery songs into inescapable pale shadow.
This drama (and dramatising his personal and artistic conflict is as much the soul of Nick Drake's work as it was of Sylvia Plath's or Anna Akhmatova's) will be far from new for those who are familiar with people or with Freud, who like all really great writers says what we would have said ourselves if only we could find the words. The specific dilemma of whether adding is increasing or diluting is also picked out by Derrida's discussion of the term "supplement" - an example he gives of a hymen (a sort of verbal Schrödinger's cat, as Hymen is the Classical god of marriage as well as a symbol of virginity). I don't think any of these reference points are particularly essential to our reading of Hazey Jane II - I merely point them out in case you haven't met and like the sound of them.
Regardless of how tangled up we get with all the records of his lifetime, what I hope I've got across is just how much incredibly layered thought seems to have gone just into one song. Each record practically has a heartbeat - and it's Nick's heartbeat. And as I suspect is true for a lot of his listeners, it's an inspiration in everything I do.
(I hope that was a nice interlude. Sorry if you don't know/like Nick Drake - next week we'll be back to our regular word-weighing with a post on metre, and how it isn't just for poems.)
But you know what, I've had a couple of thoughts pertaining to some of my favourite songs that I think might be worth sharing - things that feel, occasionally, like a little insight into the brilliance of the people who made them. Or who knows, maybe I'm just looking too hard. In any case, here's the first of these.)
| Song: | Hazey Jane II |
| By: | Nick Drake |
| Album: | Bryter Layter |
| Year: | 1970 |
Nick Drake is an incredible artist. His fine-spun, tightly-wound genius reminds me of J. S. Bach or Gerard Manley Hopkins - each beautiful piece is a perfect, multilayered gem, not a note or word too many or out of place, so strongly put together it feels like architecture as much as art. His life story is sadly familiar, but his work (the three albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon plus a few further recordings) survives. I don't think you need to be a guitarist to be able to appreciate just how right his extraordinary, subtle guitar lines are; if you do try to play them (Chris Healey's brilliant site is a good place to start) you'll see just how horrifyingly good the guy was at his instrument.
I don't mean he was a saint, or anything. His sense of humour sneaks into most of the stuff he does (Five Leaves Left is apparently what it said in Rizla packets when you were about to run out - and if you think he was only smoking tobacco, then you're probably missing something in The Thoughts of Mary Jane...), and as a person he seems to have had far from a Christ-like character, even before depression consumed his life. There's also the matter of whether he was into sex or not. To which I say, how is that any of our bloody business? But I seem to be in a minority in that opinion. But these details, for me, make him seem all the realer - this is a fallible, human person we're listening to, not a robot, which makes his achievements all the more impressive.
Start Over Again [link]
Bryter Layter is his second album - it's his most upbeat, even pop-y effort. Where Five Leaves Left had strings and congas, Bryter Layter adds in a beefy rock backing, complete with bluesy electric guitar (courtesy of Fairport's Richard Thompson, who guested previously but really lets rip now) and full drum kit (Dave Mattacks, also Fairport). Also, John Cale appears, because he was bloody everywhere back then. The overall theme that I get off this track (the closest we get to a radio-friendly single) and this album is that we're repeating something, harder this time, in the hope that it'll work better.
Take the album itself - it begins with the acoustic-guitar-and-strings-backed miniature Introduction (so far, so Five Leaves Left) before slamming on the gas for our focus here, Hazey Jane II. A sprightly brass-and-electric-guitar fanfare and crucially (if you'll pardon the drummer's angle) a straight-ahead rock drum beat launch us into a gear we haven't heard from Our Man In Tanworth-in-Arden anywhere before. (I've embedded the whole album so you start with it for the full effect, if you're making use of the video.)
This doubling theme hits you right between the eyes when we get to the unrhymed, off-kilter lyric with that fantastic murky Hammond organ. The distended opener doubles back on itself awkwardly ("And what will happen in the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"), and then tries again later (in the day!) ("And what will happen in the evening / With the weasel with the teeth / That bite so sharp when you're not looking in the evening?") This figure reaches its apex in the bathetic pre-chorus: "What will happen / In the morning / When the world it gets so crowded / That you can't look out the window in the morning?"
The scansion and the narrator relax into short, regular (mostly) rhymed pairs (and the brass comes back) as we get to the chorus, the dénouement (which after all means "untying"): "And now that the family / Is part of a chain / Take off your eye-shades / Start over again". We've heard about letting our brother and sister's hair down (in this case in a double sense), and this strength through the joining of similar elements (family members or links in a chain) is the positive spin on doubling - if you stick with family members as doubles the fact that the world is filling up is the negative view.
And, as a little nod, just as we hear "Start over again" the instruments jump back to play the chorus again (but with different words), and then all the way back to the fanfare I was gushing about earlier. Instead of the clumsy overflowing lines we get more of the punchy matched couplets (to the punchy drum beat). The clincher comes in the coda (which, of course, supplements the song as a whole) - Hazey Jane is in the narrator's mind "again". And indeed, this is Hazey Jane II - the rather more sedately orchestral Hazey Jane I (even the chorus says "Hey, slow Jane") finishes off Side One. We're left with the cryptic "If songs were lines / In a conversation / The situation / Would be fine" and a brief major acoustic guitar chord - even when surrounded by a crowd of session players our hero still manages to get the last word!
Now, Take a Little Time to Make Your Story Clear [link]
So what are we to make of it? First of all, let us draw near and affirm our faith that our host is a good enough writer that the awkward verses are intentionally awkward. I mean, if you try singing this by yourself (or even with a guitar) it's almost impossible to get right - other people have picked apart the wizardry involved more lucidly than I can, but let's say you have to be pretty good to act that bad. Looking at the lay of the chords, we see the interplay between the awkward section and the other (hair-down?) section is reflected by the former being in D minor and the latter in F major - the relative major. This gives a dark vs light contrast, evoked by the images of crowding, anxiety and being bitten by night animals set against the narrator lightening up (ahem) and expressing themselves the second time around. The chord that we finish on, and that pops up repeatedly in both sections, is C major. It's a chord common to both the major and the minor, almost like hesitating at the crossroads. As a side note, Chris Healey's decoding of the guitar parts (which sound pretty on the money to me) has the Introduction and both Hazey Janes in the same slack tuning to further add to the parallels. (CGCFCE, a beautiful discovery that is also used (amongst other things) for the song Pink Moon - trying to recapture the magic?)
That enigmatic last quatrain I cited (with its enigmatic C major) coincides with a final brief foray back into the relative minor before the rhythm section winds up - the narrator's problem appears to be expressing himself to Hazey Jane properly. The last lines give us a deftly minimal indication of how wrong the situation is: if songs could substitute for saying what was really on your mind, then there wouldn't be a problem. The figure is so much more effective than simply saying it outright (which I suppose is part of the problem).
I think this uncertainty in the lyric gives us ground to read the whole theme of doubling in two ways, appropriately enough, positive and negative just as the song oscillates between major and minor. We're doing a second album (it's tomorrow i.e. in the morning), and a second song called Hazey Jane - the major says that this time we will say it right (Start over again), or build on what was already there (the family is part of a chain), and we hope this will be true, just as we start the song with this upbeat, major fanfare (taking off our eye-shades to try seeing things major). And yet we can't help but resolve back towards the minor - if we have to say it again, does that mean that it won't work this time as well? (This is where I think the abandoned safety in the books comes in - we're out on a limb in this artistic project, does doing more of the same mean that we'll just go further into No-Man's Land?) Or, worse, will repeating ourselves make the previous effort look weaker? (The awkward verse). In a conversation, as the narrator wants, you at least have the opportunity of hearing the other person talk and reacting to what they're saying. But here, there's the gnawing suspicion that we're just saying the same few things over and over, without any reassurance that anyone's listening or that we're being understood.
The Situation [link]
I don't really like rooting around creators' biographies (I'm definitely on Team Death of the Author, as detailed on my old blog), but if you have a look at the guy's circumstances when he was writing and producing the album, this would seem to be a dichotomy that rings true. I think it's somehow appropriate that even at his most marketable (let's put the fast one to the front of the LP!), Nick Drake is still holding back, still conflicted with desperation for people to like and get his work (maybe this time will work), but worried that it's all for nothing, that what he's saying isn't important enough or people aren't interested. It's that minor reflex that closes the song (the situation is decidedly not fine), and that's the spectre that hangs over Pink Moon, casting its warm, heart-breaking, silvery songs into inescapable pale shadow.
This drama (and dramatising his personal and artistic conflict is as much the soul of Nick Drake's work as it was of Sylvia Plath's or Anna Akhmatova's) will be far from new for those who are familiar with people or with Freud, who like all really great writers says what we would have said ourselves if only we could find the words. The specific dilemma of whether adding is increasing or diluting is also picked out by Derrida's discussion of the term "supplement" - an example he gives of a hymen (a sort of verbal Schrödinger's cat, as Hymen is the Classical god of marriage as well as a symbol of virginity). I don't think any of these reference points are particularly essential to our reading of Hazey Jane II - I merely point them out in case you haven't met and like the sound of them.
Regardless of how tangled up we get with all the records of his lifetime, what I hope I've got across is just how much incredibly layered thought seems to have gone just into one song. Each record practically has a heartbeat - and it's Nick's heartbeat. And as I suspect is true for a lot of his listeners, it's an inspiration in everything I do.
(I hope that was a nice interlude. Sorry if you don't know/like Nick Drake - next week we'll be back to our regular word-weighing with a post on metre, and how it isn't just for poems.)
Tuesday, 22 April 2014
On the Hardest Language in the World
(It's a question that I see asked a lot in language learning communities online, so I thought I'd give answering it a go. Ditto the number of languages I "know".)
If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)
If the content of the stuff I've already put up here isn't enough of a clue, my area of specialisation is languages. My degree is in Modern Languages, but my interests include Classics and Linguistics as well. (It would look a bit funny not putting capital-L-linguistics next to Classics, but I don't normally see any need to capitalise. Classics as in Latin and Greek rather than things that are considered classic is a useful disambiguation. We hope you feel less ambiguated.)
My degree is, specifically, in French and Russian, but
one of my hobbies is gaining acquaintance with new languages. A few years ago I
made a list of all the languages that I'd like to be familiar with; it comes to
around thirty. Thirty languages? I hear you exclaim, How the hell are
you supposed to learn thirty languages? All things considered, I don't
think it's such an unreasonable goal. Here's why.
Languages don't exist in isolation. Well duh, I
imagine you'd say (looks like you're in for a lot of ventriloquising - sorry
about that). But what I mean is, languages exist in clumps (or rather clades) -
a language that exists on its lonesome from its particular line is quite a rare
occurrence. Let's take English: English is a Germanic language that has been
radically reshaped by its long contact first with the native Welsh-related
Brythonic (back when it was Anglo-Saxon, leaving us with such relatively
unusual features such as the continuous/progressive aspect, i.e. I am saying vs I say)
and then with French and Latin, resulting amongst other things in our
staggeringly varied vocabulary (once your language gets a taste for filching
other people's words it will usually go out of its way to do so, resulting in
today's English speakers using loans from Arabic, Urdu and Indonesian together
without a second thought: The admiral's on the bamboo veranda. A few too
many glasses of punch, I reckon. He's asking for ketchup? I'll make some
coffee...).
As a Germanic language, English is clearly related to
German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian (don’t forget Scots!) etc, as you can tell
from the fact that knowing English you can probably grok Hast du meinen
Vater gesehen? Wir waren neben dem Marktplatz even if you haven't studied
German. Similarly, Germanic is just one branch of the Indo-European, the
language family that most of the languages of India and Europe are descended
from (duhoy). If you take a list of the core vocabulary of a language (kinship
terms, body parts, pronouns and irregular verbs, common plants and animals and
so on) you get a Swadesh list (named for their originator, American linguist
and McCarthy victim Morris Swadesh) - if you compare them across the IE
languages the common base is clear. Take the number "one". One
reconstruction of the original Proto-Indo-European language root is *óynos: this gives
rise to the Latin ūnus and derived Romance languages like French un,
Italian/Spanish uno (Italic), German eins, Old English ān
(Germanic), Lithuanian víenas, Russian odín, Polish jeden
(Balto-Slavic), Persian yak, Sanskrit éka, and derived languages
like Hindi ek, Punjabi ika (Indo-Iranian).
I don't mean to hit you over the head with sudden tidings
of Indo-European reconstruction (even though it's seriously cool, being what
the linguistic community was mostly up to in the 19th century, including famous
names like The Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure) - my point is that
languages are a lot more interconnected than you might expect. Just knowing
English gives you a head-start on cognates (shared roots) in German and Romance
languages, not to mention that a lot of loan words these days are flooding in
from English, despite what self-appointed regulatory bodies like the Académie
française have to say about it.
My language list is organised around this idea: for each
language branch, I (somewhat arbitrarily) picked two modern languages and one
ancient. So for Italic, I had Latin, French and Italian, and for Balto-Slavic
Russian, Polish and Old Church Slavonic (the Slavic equivalent of Latin). I
also inserted Lithuanian into the group there, partly because the Lithuanians
of my acquaintance usually take a pretty dim view of being grouped with the
Slavs (they're Balts), and partly because Lithuanians (and neighbouring
Latvians) are the IE version of the coelacanth. Language change just doesn't
seem to have appealed to them from roughly the same era as Sanskrit onwards,
making them lots of fun for the philologically-inclined. But I digress (more
than usual).
The thing is, adding the other two corners to the each
language group is nowhere near as much work as the first one was. You find that
instead of starting from scratch with each new language, you can flick switches
on what you already know and slot it into the new one. Learning the grammar of
Italian, for instance, if you've got French, is largely working out how to turn
your French into Italian forms. So avoir (have) goes j'ai, tu as, il
a in French, and in Italian avere goes io ho, tu hai, lui ha.
(Actually, you don't need the personal pronouns in Italian - this linguistic
switch is called being pro-drop). I also get the feeling that the fact that English has branched so far away from the other Germanic languages makes us overestimate the distance between members of the same branch in general. (Might also explain our reticence to class Scots as a separate language, if we're going on English vs German as our benchmark!)
Another thing that I think puts people off is their
memories of enforced languages at school. I've already pontificated on the
difference between child- and adult-level learning, but in case you missed it
or don't have the strength to look at it again, my idea is that learning stuff
voluntarily as an adult is in a different league to learning as a child. Your
increased attention span, enthusiasm and access to materials (if you grew up
before the Internet was properly a thing, which I'm hoping for the sake of my
self-image is the case) mean your bored, school-age self being force-fed verb
tables doesn't stand a chance.
Do you have an interest? Look at your language's Wikipedia pages on the subject. Browse news articles and blogs. Hook up with
some native speakers, online or in person via stuff like Couchsurfing or
Facebook. Do language exchanges - if you have native or near native-level English
(which I imagine you must do to persevere through this lot), you're made for
life as far as languages to teach people go. Everyone wants to improve their
English: talk in English for an hour, and in return talk in your native's
language for an hour afterwards. That way, you're both getting roughly the same
out of the experience. Also, having an agreed-upon time when you do your
Talking In Each Other's Native Languages means that you won't need to bug each
other with language questions at other times - which, should you have any kind
of interaction with your exchange partner at all outside of your sessions,
should be a weight off the nerves of everyone involved.
Depending on how niche your language is, you can probably
find a fair amount of free stuff online just devoted to teaching people your
language. Why? People love sharing. A thing my mum told me as an awkward
preteen about making conversation was this: People love talking about
themselves. Sharing the intricacies of your own language and culture to a wider
audience is wonderful - I love telling people about the North and my relation
to it, just as Harmut clearly loves telling people about German and Germany on
his ace language pages. (This and others are on my list of useful
online language resources, by the way, so if you know any
good ones please let me know - I plan to write some introductory stuff myself.)
I'm sure you’re happy that speaking a particular language
is a perfectible skill. You can get better at it. But you know what? So is
learning a new language, full stop. As I've gone through the motions of
acquainting myself with each new language, I've noticed that the same steps
keep appearing:
- Work out what sounds are present in the language, and how they interact.
- Work out how the sounds are written down.
- Become familiar with the most common forms - greetings, a general idea of how words are used, common irregular words, common vocabulary (the last two overlap).
- Gradually widen the core to include more vocabulary and more nuance, the more specific nuts and bolts of grammar and usage.
(Compare it to learning new instruments - there's only so
many chords and scales that people use, you just need to learn how to produce
them. And if it's an instrument in the same family as one you already know,
it's all the easier. Not instantaneous mastery, but a good leg up.)
The concept that Chomsky and co. put forward is that
people are fundamentally all saying the same sorts of things - they just express
them differently. We are united by our humanity - like many great theoretical
conclusions, you could have asked anyone in the street and they'd probably have
told you exactly the same thing. People on the opposite side of the world from
you are interested in having enough to eat and a place to sleep, in looking
after their families and making something of their lives. They have the same
size and shape brain, a similar pair of eyes and lungs and kidneys. Their
larynges contract and vibrate columns of air just like yours, and their ears
receive airborne packets of information as yours do. Their voices and brains
and minds make different use of the same raw materials, but it would be a
poorer world if we required everyone to talk, think and dream in exactly the
same way as we do. And with modern technology, they are no longer even a single
world away from you. We live in exciting times - here's hoping we don't screw
it up.
Let's take English and Mandarin as examples of languages
that are traditionally thought to be distant and difficult to learn for each
other's native speakers. Like most Chinese languages and others nearby,
Mandarin has lexical tone - this means that when you learn a word, you have to
learn which of four tones it has (five if you include the unmarked neutral
tone). English speakers also make use of tone, but to express intonation.
The intonation on the word Well in each of
the following phrases (in my UK English, at least) roughly approximates each of
the four tones:
| 1. | Weeeeell, I dunno, it's a fairly big favour... | ("high level" mā) |
| 2. | Well? What did she say? | ("rising" má) |
| 3. | Well?! Are you going to open it, then? | ("dipping" mǎ) |
| 4. | Well! If that's how it is, then I quit! | ("high-falling" mà) |
(Also like music, tone contours are mapped out on a
five-point scale - this coincides with the musical idea that the pentatonic scale is the natural range of the human voice, used as it is in most folk songs
and guitar solos.)
Mandarin and the other Chinese languages are also united
in their use of Han characters. I grant you, they are tough. You apparently
need between 3, and 4,000 characters to be able to get by; but this is ignoring
the fact that most characters are made up of a combination of other, simpler characters.
There are 214 basic radicals, and a character is usually made up of a radical and
a suffix that indicates how it was pronounced in Middle Chinese (unfortunately
rarely any indication of how it's pronounced now). So the simplified character 妈
(pinyin mā) means "mother" - it uses the woman radical
(on the left) 女 (nǚ) and used to rhyme with 马 (mǎ,
horse). In this case we're lucky and the rhyme still works - though the
tone is different. You can see how the woman radical is a simplified drawing of
a woman - on Memrise they use animations and mnemonics ("The Chinese
mother is expected to work like a horse for her family") along with
spaced repetition to great success.
But wait a second - isn't English spelling largely based
on conventions from Middle English? Doesn't the root in reading and they had read a book come out, even though it doesn't sound the same? I think
it's a fair comparison. Basically, when you learn a Mandarin word, just as when
you were first learning to write English words, you have to learn the spelling
and pronunciation separately. There's also the matter that where Mandarin has
lexical tone, English has lexical stress: They import an import has a
rare English stress-based minimal pair (pair of items that differ only in one
feature, showing that there is a conscious contrast based on the feature) - the
Mandarin examples I cited give a tone-based one (mā vs mǎ),
which are as about as common as voicing-based minimal pairs in English (like bet
vs pet). If you don't know a word's tone in Mandarin, you don't know the
word. As English speakers we have to get used to paying attention to diacritics
in words (which English seems to be allergic to), but once we know the rules of
the game in that regard we're golden. (Mandarin nouns also have associated
measure words - a bit like knowing that it's a parliament of rooks, but
used all the time, and with a limited number of about 150. A bit like learning
a word's gender in other IE languages, but with logic still attached!) There's also the bonus that Mandarin's grammar almost entirely analytic - no learning of irregular verbs required, for instance. It's almost like only having so much room for grammar in their heads people in this case can't be bothered!
That's basically it, really: learning languages is a lot
easier if you force yourself to be flexible and open. There will be sounds that
you don't normally make (so I recommend getting to grips with IPA shenanigans
so you don't get stuck with pasty approximations), and some that you do make,
but are said slightly further in or out of your mouth, or with stronger or
weaker aspiration, or with a different emphasis style. You need to make
yourself listen, and listen carefully. If you've got a tame native speaker to
really work over your pronunciation it'll do you no end of good. You have, too,
to be humble enough to let yourself be corrected if you make mistakes, which
you will do, because that's how you learn a second language. For my money, starting
your acquaintance with a new language is like meeting someone new: you should
be doing at least as much listening as talking, if not more.
Christ, I hate that question. When I was living in France
and going to a lot of Couchsurfing meet-ups, I found the best answer was, Not enough. I quite like the analogy of languages as people: what
would you say if someone said, So how many people do you know? (I
warned you you'd be being ventriloquised some more, reader, I'm sorry about
that. It's dreadfully rude of me.) I imagine you'd probably ask what kind of
"knowing" the person asking you meant. Know enough to have a
conversation with? Know enough that you would acknowledge each other in the
street? Know enough that you could turn up on their doorstep in the middle of
the night utterly distraught, and they would let you in, make you a cup of tea
and not ask more questions than you wanted to answer? Know enough to sleep
with? Know enough to share your body with? Know enough to fall out and argue with
because you both know the other could be better than you're being? Know enough
that their heartbeat answers yours, that your lives are intertwined? Know
enough that your children will know them as they know you? Know enough that you will be remembered together with them and could wish for nothing more?
I have a casual acquaintance with around fifteen or
sixteen languages. I have native English and fluent French and Russian,
although not at anything like the level I really should have by this point. About two thirds of the
rest I can read more or less with a dictionary and have stilted conversations
in; I've found that fluency (in the sense of not needing to translate your
thoughts into the language consciously) is a transferable skill - I've had
conversations in Ancient Greek, though my reconstructed pitch accent is often
met with slight bewilderment.
I've found another useful image is that of planting
trees. When you're still getting to grips with the first three steps outlined
above, you're digging; when you're onto the fourth step, it's planted, and
you're watering; when you achieve fluency (which is nothing like an end point,
just as getting to know someone well isn't) your tree is in bloom. If you
neglect it, it can wilt, but with more watering and care it should come back
into flower. I don't think that you can aim to get to a native or near-native
level in much more than one language beyond your own: I find that each new
language that I meet makes me appreciate the beauty of my own all the more, the
rich soil that I've spent my life with and know as I know myself.
In Summary...
Sorry, did you still want to know which language is
objectively the hardest to learn in the world? It's your second language, the
one that you slave over in school for hours and hours to what feels like no
progress. After that it's more or less plain sailing - so long as you've got
the spare afternoons and know how to pitch your mast. Individual languages are
only subjectively hard if you’re coming at them from far away and don’t know
the ropes.
(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)
(Got back on topic in the end, eh... Tune in next week for a slight gear change in a more musical direction. While then!)
Tuesday, 15 April 2014
On My Beef With Eye Dialect (Part Two of Two)
(Welcome back to my beef with eye dialect. Last week we looked at the English class system, my relation to it, and its oppression of dialect deemed nonstandard, drawing parallels with the oppression of minority languages. This week we'll examine the use of eye dialect more in depth and whether any alternatives are still viable in the case of Broad Yorkshire in particular.
Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.
Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)
She Sed Wot [link]
Running abbreviations: RP = Received Pronunciation, SE = Standard English, BY = Broad Yorkshire.
Also, content warning: cited NSFW language)
She Sed Wot [link]
Falling back to our eye dialect... First off, there
appear to be two similar but conflicting definitions of what we mean by eye
dialect. One is the use of phoneticised spellings of standard pronunciation (as
in the heading), the other is using phoneticised spellings to indicate
non-standard diction. The two senses combine in their design of othering the
speech recorded, and by extension the speaker, often in order to make fun of
them. After all, attacking what is different from you is the basis of a lot of
lazy humour. You could compare this to someone altering or distorting their
voice while telling a joke for a character - the one who gets the teller's
natural voice is always the one who is treated with the most respect within the
joke, if the teller is not the narrator themselves.
For example, here's a joke about Mancunians (inhabitants
of Manchester) and Scousers (inhabitants of Liverpool):
In a maternity unit there is a shortage of labels, so
the midwife goes out into the corridor and tells the three new fathers (a Manc,
a Scouser and a Nigerian) there that they'll have to go in and pick up out
their children by family resemblance.
The Manc goes in first, and comes out with a baby. The baby's black. The Nigerian guy says, "Excuse me, mate, I think that baby's
mine." The Manc says, "Sorry, man, I didn't want to take any chances
- one of them's a Scouser!"
When I heard that joke, the person telling it did an
approximation of a Mancunian accent on the last line - that's part of the joke.
The Nigerian man's line they delivered in their natural speaking voice, the
same as the rest of the narration. He's a straight man, the voice of reason,
the one we agree with. We're meant to laugh at the Mancunian (and by extension
the Liverpudlian as well). (It's important not to discount potential racism
informing the person (who wasn't a person of colour) deciding not to do an
impression of a Nigerian person, but I think this sympathetic straight-man aspect
is also decisive.)
We might suggest the same with eye dialect: you don't
write in eye dialect yourself; to do so would be a sign that you aren't
educated (and thus are unable to make the distinction). Eye dialect becomes a
way to mark a character's speech and thereby thoughts as substandard and open
to derision. Dickens (never afraid to stoop for a cheap laugh) does this all
the time with his working class characters; any number of butcherings of AAVE
(African American Vernacular English) in white authors' works throughout
American history have served a similar purpose.
An interesting case relating to BY is in Barry Hines'
novel A Kestrel for a Knave (set in Barnsley). Throughout the novel the
working class characters' dialogue is written in dialect (Billy says Alarm's
gone off tha knows, and Gi'o'er! That hurts! [short for give over,
meaning stop it]), the more well-to-do characters (and the narrator)
speaking SE. In the Penguin Modern Classics afterword, when talking about adapting
the book for the film Kes, Hines says that he wrote the script entirely
in SE, and the cast translated it back into BY for filming. He also mentions
that he regrets writing with dialect and would rather the dialogue were all in SE.
These two details, I feel, reinforce the interpretation
of eye dialect (or in Hines' case, of written dialect at all) as othering by
its very nature - the writer and the cast, both speakers of BY, have no need of
it; so we are left to assume that the inclusion of the novel's dialect is for
the benefit of outsiders not familiar with BY, even though it seems (in its
author's eyes) to demean the characters who speak it.
Pure Written Dialect [link]
I think Hines' discomfort with the idea of written
dialect is telling. English other than SE is stigmatised to the extent that it
is denied the legitimacy of being written down even by its native speakers. To
non-linguists, "accent" and "dialect" are things that
happen to other people - if you have an accent, or, worse, speak in dialect, it
is a mark of being uneducated. Linguists point out in vain that it is
impossible not to have an accent or not speak in a dialect, because these terms
have been co-opted into the oppressive narrative of aggressive linguistic normativity.
For the record, accents differ on how words are pronounced, and dialects differ
in terms of words and constructions used. The line between isn't always very
definite, but it has been observed that in the face of increased social and
popular mobility the traditional dialects of UK English have tended to be
replaced by more-or-less SE spoken with a particular accent. This coincides
with the far end of my mixed dialect continuum outlined above. I would also
argue that the demotion of dialects to "accents" is a common,
self-fulfilling weapon in their erasure.
It doesn't have to be like this, though. It is famously
said that the difference between a language and a dialect is an army and a navy
- just like the dividing line between different species of the same genus
becomes harder to see the closer you look, at what point a dialect becomes a
separate language has historically been more a matter of politics than of
taxonomy. The different "dialects" of Modern Arabic and Chinese are
divergent enough that they are often unofficially termed separate languages;
the Romance and Nordic languages are close enough that their individual
languages can be classified as different points on a dialect continuum. As the
usual rough test for two creatures being of the same species is whether they
can interbreed successfully, so the rule of thumb for the dialect/language
split is whether two candidates are mutually intelligible, and to what degree.
Take Scots. Debate rages over whether it is a dialect of
English or its own language, closely related to English but separate, in the
manner of Norwegian's relation to Swedish. As I described above for BY, the
situation is complicated by the imposition of SE on the pure form - many Scots
themselves appear to consider the language merely substandard English. But
thanks to the existence of a literary tradition dating from the Middle Ages and
including writers such as Robert Burns there is an established written form of
Scots.
Here's the penultimate stanza of Burns' To a Mouse
(of which the third and fourth lines have become proverbial in SE) with an SE
translation:
| But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men Gang aft agley, An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, For promis'd joy! | But little Mouse, you are not alone, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes of mice and men Go often askew, And leave us nothing but grief and pain, For promised joy! |
There are several features that distinguish the Scots
original from the English: there are words that are found in archaic SE (thou
art, thy, nought), as well as ones that have no direct
equivalent in SE (lane, Gang
aft agley). There are words that do exist in SE, but that have more
consonants than the Scots versions (o', an', lea'e) - in
this case the apostrophe is called an apologetic apostrophe, as it is
apologising for Scots' divergence. Since the 20th century it is no longer used,
so for instance in Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting we get passages like
Renton's analysis of Jean-Claude Van Damme films from the opening chapter:
As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory
dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the
tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot
thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jean–Claude's ready tae git doon tae
some serious swedgin. – Rents. Ah've goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy
gasped, shaking his heid.
(It's worth noting that some Scots purists condemn Irvine
Welsh's writing as hopelessly Anglicised. It's noticeable that the very literate Renton frequently switches between SE and Scots forms - like and here, elsewhere realised as n.)
We can tell from the rhyme scheme in the Burns poem (men
rhyming with vain and pain etc.) that even the words that exist
in SE and are written exactly the same aren't necessarily pronounced the same.
I think this is a key point - in a pure dialect, there is no need to mark
consistent pronunciations if they differ from another, because the written form
is meant to be read without reference to it.
Writing Tyke [link]
Let's go further with that. There's a lot of dialectal
variation within Yorkshire, but around Sheffield (dialectally West Yorkshire),
where my family are from, the vowel in goat (using John Wells' lexical set)
varies between something like [o:] (like a Spanish o, but long) and [ow]
(quite Sheffield - if you've ever heard Sean Bean say O2 you'll
recognise the elongated vowel sounds we tend to come out with). I tend towards
the latter. Regardless, the underlying phoneme that stays the same across
different words in the goat set (old, poke, over etc.) and so wouldn't need to
be represented by a different spelling in pure dialectal writing. If it is
spelt out somehow (like eauw or something for the latter) it becomes
clear that we are in eye dialect territory - a difference is being marked from
a standard.
Another example would be the vowel in strut. In Yorkshire
it's [ʊ], which is the same as the vowel in put (and Wells' foot set,
though in many parts of the Yorkshire and the North in general that has [u:], the same vowel as goose).
People trying to parody a Northern accent often write things like "fookin'"
to indicate /'fʊkin/ (where they themselves would probably say /'fʌkiŋ/),
though to me (and people who pronounce Luke and look similarly)
that looks like it should be read /'fu:kin/. (This was, by the by, the point
that came up in the conversation that sparked this whole rumination.) Drawing
the attention of people gormless enough to do this sort of thing to that can
earn accusations of being "chippy" (i.e. having a chip on your
shoulder), because it's apparently unreasonable to be angry at the eradication of your culture being used as a badly-informed joke.
Anyway. There are features of BY that don't exist in SE,
though: the most famous is probably definite article reduction, where the
is reduced to a glottal stop, traditionally spelt t' (A were walkin
down t'road). There are other reduced forms that don't exist in SE like dun't
for doesn't (It dun't matter) and me for my (A've
lost me phone again). In pure BY the second person singular pronoun forms
are still used (thou realised as tha, thy reducing to thi
like me and taking third person singular endings), the reflexive -self
of SE is met with forms in -sen (If ever tha does owt for nowt, do it for thisen), and while is used where SE has until (She's workin while five; occasionally causing quite a bit of of confusion), amongst other features.
It's important to note that features such as mesen
and gang (from the Burns) are not corruptions of SE forms – they are
different forms that have survived from Old English, often longer than their
equivalents in SE - take nowt (pronounced /nawt/ most places, but /nowt/ round Sheffield), continuing archaic SE naught, or tha continuing thou.
If you’re familiar with German you might recognise features in Mousie (Mäuschen)
and gang (sie ist gegangen). A good example is the present
participle: SE playing, BY laikin (same root as LEGO [laik
good]). The Old English form was closer to the German spielend – the
generalisation of the noun-forming –ing (German –ung) is a
hypercorrection that does not cross into most pure dialects.
In any potential pure written BY standard, a decision
would have to be made to what level to phoneticise the spelling. We can follow
Scots in ignoring sounds that are present in SE but absent in BY (so ow
right at the beginning of the first half for SE how, goin for SE going);
spelling the equivalent of SE I as A might be accepted (we could
argue SE I is a regular pronunciation of the price vowel, so pure BY
should be allowed to regularise it to the trap vowel), but the suggestion (as
some BY writers have done) of spelling the equivalent of SE weak to and for
as ter and fer is more contentious. Do we represent all weak
forms in spelling as a rule? To is already an exceptional pronunciation
(it doesn't rhyme with toe, after all), but weak for is
unresolved. Incidentally, the question of how representative to make an
orthography (and whether to make a new breakaway set more representative of reduction)
is an established pattern with the likes of Belarusian as compared to Russian.
A Sailed Ship? [link]
All this is really, though, just idle speculation. If BY
was to have its own literary tradition (beyond being othered as the speech of uneducated characters), the time to establish it was at the very latest the
beginning of the last century. The influence of SE has pulled us too far along
the gradient, I fear, for a pure BY to be able to be freestanding. While local
pride has grown stronger with the destigmatisation of "regional
accents", I very much doubt that there is enough of a foundation left to
build on; the pure dialect has to all intents and purposes been erased, just as
was desired. In the 19th century nationalising drive many previously minor
Slavic languages delved into medieval texts to reclaim words that were
definitely not Russian loans, and people began to use them again, but I don't
imagine that a parallel situation could ever really arise now that our society
seems (with such incredibly positive results, and which I completely support in
other regards) to tend towards the communal rather than the individualising. I
would love to be proved wrong, of course - though as I'm not a native speaker
of pure BY it's out of my hands.
That's the thing that really gets me about eye dialect -
it's waving the possibility of having a proper non-Standard literary tradition
in the non-Standard speaker's face, and then blowing your nose on it. It's a
disgusting distortion of the written word, which used right could be brilliant.
(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)
(So there you have it. Join us next week for my answer to a frequently-asked linguistic question - which is the hardest language in the world to learn?)
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