 |
 |
No, it was a perfectly correct editorial judgement -- the only reason I didn't use the umlaut version in the original typescript is that I can never manage special symbols. So you were playing Ezra Pound to my Wasteland, and the end result is unequivocally improved.
Basically, you and Kent are right on this issue, and I'm wrong.
Rodent
On 28 October 2016 at 20:44 Roger Collett <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Sorry for the pedantic editing – PedantRogerWe don't do umlauts, Kent.
:-p
Robin
(author of, inter alia, "Stamping on Schroedinger's Kittens")
{And before you pick me up on this, too, I know the above should read :P. I just prefer to do a Frank Sinatra on it.}
[Ulp!!!! I just looked at myself in the mirror, and it turns out that it was printed with an umlaut in the book. I'm pretty sure, however, that that was a (entirely justified) Editorial Correction.
So the next round's on me. R.]
On 28 October 2016 at 20:18 Kent Johnson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Schrödinger, Robin, Schrödinger.
(Then again, I posted a motel review at Trip Advisor yesterday, which will be read by thousands, in which I twice spelled 'its' as 'it's.'
>>> Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]> 10/28/16 2:03 PM >>>Jamie,
Retitled, so it can be more easily ignored if necessary.
“As a (spoken) language, English is isochronic between stresses.”
I really did think more than several times before I couched it that way. My immediate thought was, "Sheesh, that's going to come over as so pretentious that it makes even me want to throw up."
I appealed to The Ghost of Einstein, who sagely remarked, "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Unfortunately, he then went on to add, "but in this case, you're saying what you say in the fashion that you're saying it because you're too idle to explain what you mean. If you actually know what you mean."
Then he, muttering, "Pedant!" under his breath (and I had to admire the way he managed to pronounce the word, even muttered, with an exclamation point).
"Sucks to you, jimmy!" I yelled, too late, as he'd already left to feed Shroediger's kittens.
What did I mean? Turns out, as so often, google was my friend. google suggested I simply quote Derek Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry.
[Am I the only person who talks to google? I work on the principle that if I'm nice to google, google will be nice to me, and not let on just how much of my Wealth of Knowledge I owe to the Search Engine to Die For. In this instance, I was dubious. "You know what I think of Attridge," I told google [who probably did]. "I mean, for me, metrics stopped at Malof's Manual of English Meters, and Attridge just uses linguistics to make the whole business too complicated for words."
google sighed. "You want to do the work for yourself, or do you want to take my suggestion? I'll even find the page for you, so you won't even need to get out of your chair and hunt around for the book. Which you've undoubtedly misshelved anyway. Lazy git," google concluded, without Einstein's Exclamation Point.]
Courtesy of google, more clearly put than my earlier formulation:
"Fundamental to this branch of the temporal tradition is the linguistic phenomenon known as isochrony or stress-timing: the tendency of the stressed syllables of certain languages to fall at perceptually equal time-intervals. The existence of this phenomenon as a perceived characteristic of English speech, at least under certain conditions, is easily demonstrated."
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=5nIABAAAQBAJ -- p. 22
In English (and Germanic languages generally), how long you take to say something depends on the number of stresses present. In Romance Languages, the time it takes to say something will depend on the length of the syllables.
This has consequences -- most obviously, why an anapaestic line in English sounds faster than an iambic one -- "The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold," with a vengeance.
Also why it's virtually impossible, even substituting stress for length, to write even moderately successfully in any of the various quantitative classical metres. [Except, of course, the English Sapphic Stanza, and Clough's Amours de Voyage, but let's not go there.]
[Actually, that's not entirely true, but it seems to be what everyone says, so I suppose it must be true. For all of me, it's because classical metrics allow a range of syllable substitution / foot variation, that simply doesn't work in a language where the metre is based on stress-patterning. We english speakers, consciously or not, perceive stress, while the Greeks and Romans [with qualifications] perceived length.]
Pertinent (perhaps) to the setting-words-to-music discussion is that (classical) music also works in terms of [strict?] temporal intervals -- demi semi quavers, anyone?
The stress-timed nature of English(es) as a language is simply a fact of life. That's the way we speak, and if you're a fish, you don't need to know that H2O is the chemical symbol for a water molecule.
The consequences of this, and how it works out in practice, are something else again.
K, at this point I stop. I'm not even going to mention stress contrast as the key to ictus, why both Anglo-Saxon (and onwards) stress metre(s) AND syllable-accent metre both work in English (and let's not bring up the observation that the link of Dipodic Metre to ballads and nursery rhymes is why [some] classically trained musicians dislike Dylan), and why much of what Peter is complaining about in the lack of proper (oops -- I'm loading the scales here, and attributing to Peter things he didn't say) musicality in English poetry goes back at least to the late sixteenth century.
Just pretend I didn't say that ...
:-)
Robin
On 28 October 2016 at 04:21 Jamie McKendrick <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Robin, I'm not up to speed on Saussure, but I think I get the point with regard to literature that "the thing was already there" or in the theoretical jargon "always already there".You've lost me with the 'isochronic' - is this to do with brainwave activity?