…in the course of the years the study of foreign languages had become almost a mania with Chwostik, indeed a sort of collector’s mania (as exemplified by his acquiring Armenian as a particularly exquisite ‘piece’)…
– Heimito von Doderer
(The Waterfalls of Slunj, p. 144)
This is how we spent our morning: sitting on the floor next to the heater, poring canonically through our grammar books, finding here a rule and there an exception, and in yet another place something as yet incomprehensible. Of late, I have been particularly enjoying Armenian verbs1. For one thing, they are relatively simple to form, and for the most part extremely regular, with two conjugations and a few oddities. For another, they have these infixes that seem so minute (a letter or two) and yet change the meaning entirely, making this intransitive verb transitive, or that other one reflexive or passive; this seems to me, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, an economical and elegant way of putting together a language.
Take, for instance, the verb ‘to learn’: սովորել(soverel); add the causative infix -ցն (tsn) and you have ‘to teach’: սովորեցնել (soveretsnel).2 The way the infix creates associates between actions which one may or may not think of as connected is quite pleasing. To remember հիշել (hishel) can become to remind հիշեցնել (hishetsnel), to be happy ուրախանալ (urakhanal), to make happy ուրախացբել (urakhatsnel). That’s one thing.
Then there’s the reflexive or passive or medio-passive or the whatever you want to call it -վ (v) infix.3 So one has ‘to write’ գրել (grel) and ‘to be written’ գրվել (grvel), to read կարդալ (kardal) and ‘to be read’ կարդացվել (kardatsvel); ‘to shave’ սափրել (sap’rel), ‘to shave oneself’ սափրվել (sap’rvel). For -el conjugation verbs, one can also combine the causative and -v infixes for even more amusement and confusion.4 So ‘to make someone shave’ սափրեցնել (sap’retsnel) and ‘to make someone shave themselves’ սափրեցվել (sap’retsvel). I should here mention that this last is, although grammatically possible, not something that I’ve actually heard, and so one might say that it is not actually Armenian, but if it’s not Armenian, then what is it? I don’t know.
You reach a point in learning a language – usually sometime shortly after you can successfully ask and understand the way to the lavatory – when one word, usually a little word, will trip you up in supposed subtleties, tumble you into an ecstasy of confusion out of all proportion to its importance in actual use.1 The mention of this word in conversation, the delicate proportions of its appearance on the page, you greet with perturbation mingled with inexpressible2 delight. Oh these little words, of clear and unclear meaning, these adverbs, these prepositions, these postpositions, these nebulous, numinous specks upon the (in)certitude of syntax!
The current irritating particle is the Armenian էլի (eli), which one dictionary helpfully glosses as ‘adv. 1) again. 2) more.’3 A more helpful dictionary observed that eli also means ‘again, anew, more, some more, still, now, well’.4 This is not the half of it. For instance, when someone asks you what you’re eating, you can say: կաբտռֆիլ էլի (kartofil eli) which doesn’t mean just ‘more potatoes’ or ‘potatoes again’, but seems to mean something more like, ‘potatoes of course, as you can see by looking at my plate, numbskull’. գնում ես էլի (gnûm es eli) which isn’t ‘you’re going again’ but is rather ‘you’re going aren’t you’ or ‘so you’re going, huh’. One speaker seemed to use eli in every sentence, much as an English speaker might say ‘like’, ‘well’ or ‘y’know’. Between the dictionary and what I was hearing I became a bit confused, so I looked in our textbook and found the following:
The ‘colloquial հա էլի (ha eli)expression is translated into English as Oh, yes, that’s right. The particle էլի softens the tone of the speech especially in the imperative sentences and could be translated with the word please. It has some other meanings, too. The expression լավ էլի makes a request stronger.5
This was a step in the right direction. I also checked A.V. Gevorkian’s East Armenian Course, but as it has no index and my Armenian browsing skills aren’t particularly good, I couldn’t find an entry on eli, though I did find several pages on էլ (el), which set me to thinking about the stress of eli. Most Armenian words (or all, depending on who you ask or what dialect you’re dealing with) are stressed on the ultima (unless the final syllable is a written or unwritten schwa), but eli is stressed on the penult. This might mean nothing at all, but it could also mean that eli was formed from el i, with the friendly modal word el meaning ‘also, too, as well’ and i being an archaic form of ‘to be’. It’s a comfort to speculate, anyhow.
Frankly I don’t know anything at all about eli and do not have sufficient language to ask the question and understand the answer even if I did know someone who would be able to answer.6 Someday I am sure I shall understand it, and be able to use it correctly and instinctively. For now, though, the Armenian I speak will sound a little odd, eli.
Before the meeting ended, which was not long after, I was set thinking of Despard-Smith’s use of the phrase ‘the men’. That habit went back to the ’90’s: most of us at this table would say ‘the young men’ or ‘the undergraduates’. But at this time, the late 1930’s, the undergraduates themselves would usually say ‘the boys’. It was interesting to hear so many strata of speech round one table. Old Gay, for example, used ‘absolutely’, not only in places where the younger of us might quite naturally still, but also in the sense of ‘actually’ or even ‘naturally’ – exactly as though he were speaking in the 1870’s. Pilbrow, always up to the times, used an idiom entirely modern, but Despard-Smith still brought out slang that was fresh at the end of the century – ‘crab’, and ‘josser’,1 and ‘by Jove’. Crawford said ‘man of science’, keeping to the Edwardian usage which we had abandoned. So, with more patience it would have been possible to construct a whole geological record of idioms, simply by listening word by word to a series of college meetings.
* Defined by the OED thus:
A simpleton; a soft or silly fellow. So, in flippant or contemptuous use, a fellow, an (old) chap.
Date range from 1886 to 1946, but clustering around 1900 (corroborating Snow).
[↩]
When reading, I don’t always look up the words I don’t know the meaning of – usually because context is enough, but often just because of laziness. This habitual sloth set me on a false scent with the following passage:
Nobody, probably not even Kathy, need ever be aware of his spiritual child Katherine Volkov; unless some tittuping archivist picked up a scent on a scholarly ramble and thought to enliven scholarship with muck.
‘Tittuping’ is the word in question, and I assumed a meaning of uppity or impertinent or trespassing. Fear of error hounded me, nagged at my conscience for twenty minutes or more until at last I turned to the dictionary:
tittuping, ppl. a. That tittups*; bouncing, cantering, prancing; transf., rollicking, lively; also, unsteady, rickety.
1796 Campaigns 1793-4 II. vii. 44 My pen glances off into titupping strains. 1809 Theo. Jones Hist. Breckn. II. 542 The poem concludes in such galloping tittuping rhymes as almost compel the reader to forget the merits the author certainly possesses. 1824 Scott St. Ronan’s xiii, The ‘Dear me’s’ and ‘O laa’s’ titupping misses, and the oaths of the pantalooned or buckskinned beaux. 1833 New Monthly Mag. XXXVIII. 300 The appropriateness of the harmony itself sinks before the tittuping of an arpeggio bass. 1868 Morn. Star 30 Jan., For such poetic cantering, such tit-tupping of Pegasus in a rhythmic Rotten Row. 1895 Mrs. B. M. Croker Village Tales (1896) 76 They kept up a steady tittuping canter, raising a cloud of dust.
I mention this only because the equine/hunting overtones make the sentence from White that much richer than it might otherwise have been – the scholar a huntsman pursuing a quarry rather than a nosy rambler peeping through hedges.
‘Tittuping’ is also (just by the way) a participle favored by arts reviewers in UK dailies; see, e.g. The Guardian:
She has a wonderful habit, while trying to hide the escaped prisoner, of hitching up her skirt and tittuping across the stage in high heels.
and Telegraph:
Fragmented and episodic, it starts arrestingly with ghostly shushing sounds and moving searchlights picking out a lone dancer in black tittuping nervily on the balls of her feet.
Such usage defies comment.
* tittup, Chiefly dial. [app. echoic, from the sound of the horse’s feet.]
No. 35 Holywell St.
I will be to you wine in the cellar and the more modestly or rather indolently I retire into the backward Bin, the more falerne will I be at the drinking…
postation · postpositive · postprandial · post-haste · dumb as a post · postage · postulate · postilion · postalize · imposture · postliminy · by post · ‘ oh, omne animal triste!’ · postless · post-mortem · posthumous · posterity · post factum · ergo propter hoc
Post scriptum: postreme.
· anodyne · bask · charming · destitution · emperish · fret · grapple · hebetude · incendiary · jest · kairos · lassitude · Mephistopheles · notoriety · omphalos · presume · quiff · restraint · sumptuous · tergiversate · unctuous · vertiginous · waffle · xiphoid · yare · zealous ·
Lately I’ve been thinking (very slowly) about the word choir and, in particular, its appearance in two familiar poems. The first is Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth‘, and the relevant passage (ll.5–8) runs as follows:
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, —
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
I like the reversal of expectations; one assumes that the choir will be composed of boys singing dirges, but instead – with the emphasis of repetition – the choir is composed of the shells hissing over no-man’s land. Owen relegates the expected boys to silence in the next stanza (ll. 10–11). Equally silent, but in a different context, are the choirs in Shakespeare’s seventy-third sonnet (ll. 1–4):
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In this metaphorical application to the empty branches of a tree in winter, choir is used in the (quite common) sense of the place in a church where the choristers stand. Again, as in the Owen poem, one senses the failure (or emptiness) of organized religious expression to capture the emotions the author wishes to communicate. But that is not what I want to talk about. Rather, I’m interested in homonymy – in particular, the word quire. In addition to being an alternate (and archaizing) spelling ‘choir’, a quire is:
1. A set of four sheets of parchment or paper doubled so as to form eight leaves, a common unit in mediæval manuscripts; hence, any collection or gathering of leaves, one within the other, in a manuscript or printed book.
2. A small pamphlet or book, consisting of a single quire; a short poem, treatise, etc., which is or might be contained in a quire. Obs.1
In a bound book, the text-block is composed of quires.2 In the case the ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ it adds to the tone of the shells a second quire, a second voice of mourning: the poet’s own; but I do not think this formal parallel was conscious for Owen. For Shakespeare, though, it’s almost impossible to deny the pun. The yellow leaves lingering on the branches might just as well be the leaves of a book – pages which must be unwritten, of course, when the poet dies (just as the branches ‘where late the sweet birds sang’ become ‘bare ruin’d choirs’).3 The full quires containing the sonnets, however, will continue their serenade (dare I say, ‘twittering’?) despite the changing seasons, despite death, in a typical declaration of immortality. I could go on. But I won’t. It is enough that in the printed editions of these poems the words within the quires sing tunefully, recited through the passing years in many voices, despite the silent or demented choirs mentioned.
The news which We desire are not of that nasty species.
The hipster (who aspires to archeologist street-cred because she worked one summer at Petra) was talking about a scandal involving the Met Museum, a fracas she had heard about while working as a law clerk in New York. An eccentric gentleman had, it seems, written a book pointing out that many of the ancient artifacts in said museum ‘have no provenience’ and that the trustees, curators, & co. were, if not actually hushing the matter up, at least not proclaiming this ‘truth’ in large letters on billboards for the edification of the public.1 Museological shenanigans are nothing new (cf. Elgin Marbles), but the word provenience, which I had never heard before, gave me pause: pro-VEE-nyehns? what about provenance (PROH-veh-nehns)?
That I am frequently ignorant and often mistaken, I willingly acknowledge; in this instance, awed perhaps by her sartorial excesses (which, as we know, infallably signify correct English usage), I assumed – with true faith in my capacity for folly – that provenience was a highly specialized museo-/archeo-logical term, similar but not identical to the more familiar provenance. Just to be sure, though, I referred to my good friend the OED, which said:
provenience, n.
= provenance. Now chiefly U.S. (and to some extent Canad.).
[L. provenient-em, pr. pple. of provenire to provene: see -ence. Preferred to provenance by those who object to the French form of the latter: cf. convenance, convenience.]
I will eschew jokes about freedom-findsites and tell you plainly this entry did not content me. Nor, indeed, did that of the American Heritage Dictionary4 & M-W: ‘Alteration of provenance.’ So I did what any self-respecting idiot would do: I checked usage.
As per Google: Provenience – 26,000 results, the most amusing of which was:
…despite his lack of academic connections and his provenience in the often ideological left…
Other results included:
Provenance returned 704,000 results (see notes), none of which made me laugh.
Lack of amusement aside, these results seem to confirm two suspicions: 1) most people say provenance – provenience is a word used by acheologists and their ilk;2 2) Lewis Lapham likes to make snide jokes his audience really can’t be expected to find amusing. Speaking of Lewis Lapham, I decided to search magazines and, since Harper’s doesn’t put anything online except the index, I searched the The Atlantic: provenience — 0, provenance — 31. Finally, there was this helpful on an archaeology info page:
Provenience is another word which has a slightly different meaning when used archaeologically. The dictionary defines provenience (a variant of the more common provenance) as ‘origin’ or ‘derivation.’ In the art world, provenance means the history of an object, where it came from and who owned it. It is sometimes used this way in archaeology as well, when referring loosely to the origin of an object. More technically, in archaeology the term refers to the actual position of the object in three dimensions. Thus, an object’s provenience can be stated as being 30m north, 22m east, and 3.5m down from an arbitrary fixed point on the site (called the datum point).
Venturing, then, into the depths of archeological jargon, I searched the relevant journals with JSTOR where, not surprising, the results were much closer: provenience — 1252, provenance — 1481, provenance+provenience — 112. Interestingly, the two earliest entries give provenance in italics (that is, as a French word; see JHS No. 2 (1881): 100, & No. 3 (1882): 285). The first JSTOR entry for ‘provenience’ is in an article written by the English archeologist Percy Gardner, in his article ‘A Sepulchral Relief from Tarentum’ (JHS 5 (1884): 112):
…as to their provenience, it seems to be established that in some cases at all events they come from cemetaries…
Only the year before, Gardner had used provenance (without italics) in his article ‘A Statuette of Eros’ (JHS 4 (1883): 266 — 274):
…on grounds of style this provenance would seem scarcely probable…
I would guess that Gardner, in using provenience, was trying separate the origin of the object from its art-historical provenance and, precisely because the word provenance has cultural baggage, turned to the relative neologism, provenience. Around this time – viz., when I should be drawing conclusions – I became a bit bored with the entire enquiry, and though hipsters exist solely to be mocked, there is only so much effort I wish to expend in the process. Besides, it might seem as though I were trying to score points off the young woman’s false diction, which isn’t the case at all. If she had been nit-pickingly accurate in all other details, it would make sense to fault her for saying provenience – which taken as narrowly as possible should perhaps just refer to the findspot – for very few items spring miraculously out of the ether: they have a provenience, even if it is unknown. That items in the Met should be without a clear history of ownership and origin is, of course, deplorable;3 but it is not much of a surprise and I find it difficult to imagine why anyone would make a fuss about it. Scholars will argue about the dates of objects, about the craftsman who made it, about its role in history, which suggests that the primary characteristic of such facts is their mutability. Solipsism is, however, the refuge of the uninspired and, having found my haven, I will at last be quiet.
Compact OED
To make decisions to avoid regret. The origins of regret: ‘The ultimate origin is uncertain’ (OED, s.v. regret) — ineluctable.
· alkaline · Bosporus · capillary · deviation · Euclid · frenetic · gargantuan · heretic · inumbrate · jovial · kernal · lucid · mutton · Niobe · omicron · pigeon · query · risible · sufferage · tremulous· undulate · venial · wrest · Xanthippe · yield · ziggurat ·
::
ego hoc feci mm–mmx
© 2000–10 M.F.C.