I'll go on from this, if you consider the enormous investment in time
and labour that pre-printing manuscripts involved can one really
consider anything as representing a kind of unpremeditated untextual
poetry?
2008/12/1 David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>:
>>You can then go on (that is, One can; I certainly can't) to assert some sort
> of dating of the Original Oral Text, based upon this principle.<
>
> Oh my dear Christopher, you lovely guy, how can one have an Original ORAL TEXT?.
>
> anti-matter meets matter, conceptually!
>
> Bless you!!!
>
> 2008/12/1 Christopher Walker <[log in to unmask]>:
>> Caveat for Candice: my OE goes back to 1970, plus a few years thereafter. So
>> I am no more up to date. And my knowledge, which time has long since eroded,
>> was never all that vast.
>>
>> Caveat for everyone else: I was a poor student of phonology (OE and OHG),
>> finding it somewhat Grimm: more snafu than gyfu in my case.
>>
>> Anyway here goes.
>>
>> First orthography: the insular (or Irish Latin, < Old Irish) symbol at issue
>> is written 'G' when capitalised and like a 'g' but with the two loops open
>> (ie a tailed 'z') when in lower case. It covers various phonemes. The two
>> that are relevant here are nowadays contrasted in the Mod E minimal pair
>> velar 'gear' and palatal 'year'. The phoneme /h/ (from W Germanic /?/) can
>> be represented by either 'h' or 'g'; hence Mod E suffix '-gh'. Another
>> phoneme becomes the stop in the '-ng' of English gerunds and is graphed in
>> ME and in Middle Scots with a slightly different tailed 'z', which survives
>> in the Mod E orthography and pronunciation of, say, 'Menzies Campbell'. And
>> so on...
>>
>> And so on, in fact, to sound. As implied above, the issue isn't voiced
>> versus unvoiced: /g/ and /k/ are voiced and unvoiced velar plosives in
>> Modern English, and as such they are quite distinct both from /dg/ and /ch/
>> and from /y/. It's position in the mouth.
>>
>> So, with all that in mind, here is the first line of Beowulf:
>>
>> Hwæt we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
>>
>> The 'g' of 'Gar-Dena' (everything up to -na is capitalised in the MS) is
>> written as capital G, whereas the 'g' of 'gear-dagum' is in lower case, as
>> are all the 'g's of line 13, including that of 'God', irrespective of
>> phoneme.
>>
>> So why alliterate them? Well the visual link is irrelevant. (Campbell notes
>> that the runes gyfu and cen, though more systematically used for back and
>> front respectively, are also swapped about.) The modern argument is, I
>> think, that it's similar sounding allophones of these two quite different
>> phonemes that actually make it possible: even though one was back positioned
>> and velar and the other front positioned and palatal, both were spirant or
>> fricative in terms of how they sounded. Consider, by analogy, the three
>> 'c' sounds of 'keep', 'cool' and 'calm' which move from the front of the
>> mouth to the back. We normally ignore this distinction but it's there.) Wren
>> in 1958 (my Klaeber has gone missing for the moment) makes the same point
>> more or less:
>>
>> 'The alliterating g of [line 1] shows that at any early date the front
>> ['year'] and the back ['gear'] positions of g still retained their original
>> fricative or spirant quality; for it is this spirantal quality which makes
>> the alliteration. Pronounced in the later classical Anglo-Saxon of Ælfric's
>> time, when the MS was copied, there would be no true alliteration.'
>>
>> You can then go on (that is, One can; I certainly can't) to assert some sort
>> of dating of the Original Oral Text, based upon this principle.
>>
>> Grimm's Law, Verner's Law... and now Walker's Law: Just this one post and
>> then stop.
>>
>> CW
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>>
>> Dozens have gone missing, the decision taken is Elsewhere.
>> but yes, yes we remain as poetry, pure immateriality.
>> in the name of the 'current state of things' they murmur to us:
>> "we went for a stroll, now it's a question of marching!" But this
>> stroll of ours has brought us a long way off, and now
>> the horizon is behind us.
>>
>> (from *Materiali*, Indiani Metropolitani 1977
>>
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
|