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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Rocky wrote: | | Aren't we just guessing here? |
The "st" dipthong is cognate with "z". So too is its reverse, "ts". How any of these letters or letter combinations was intended to be pronounced when written is anyone's guess, though in AE we presume an established, modern pronunciation absent evidence to the contrary.
Thus phrases like "thou dost protest too much" are fully cognate with "thou doz protest too much" ("thou does protest too much").
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Is anyone else seeing a couple of random Comments Marked as Spam? |
Yes. And only your "random" comments.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Would somebody explain how this 'spam' business works? It sounds rather like my own experience of being banned from various sites for being 'a troll'. This is again an instance of when, at a certain level of opposition, all sense of proportion goes out the window.
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The person that uploaded the video can unmark the comment as spam: http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en-uk&answer=81796
Basically, the YouTube community decides what is spam and what is not. If enough people decide that the comment is spam it will get deleted.
I ran into this behaviour when I used to edit wikipedia. I gave up on wikipedia. But on YouTube it seems unfair that your comments would be marked as spam. YouTube's not pretending to be an academic repository of all the world's knowledge or anything. And you're not hawking porn or Viagra.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Please use the "Mark as Spam" feature with extreme caution, as those who misuse it may be prohibited from using the site. |
An example of the lack of balance I have been referring to. However it must be pointed out that Dan is causing his opponent genuine pain. Those of you who have been in this business for some time will know that one of the most valuable rhetorical skills to acquire is that of coolness.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | An example of the lack of balance I have been referring to. |
What? Media bias???
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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No, it is Dan's opponent not being able to recognise that Dan is an opponent. Everybody else this bloke has ever come up against simply argues high level details, but Dan is arguing at the paradigm level. Now D's opp has never encountered this before so his brain goes into its accustomed mode for this situation which is Careful Ignoral (You're Mad variant). Actually it may be Careful Ignoral (You're Bad variant) but it leads to the same outcome. Dan must be physically removed!
The Soviet Union went in for this in the 1960's and afterwards ie when everybody in the country had been thoroughly indoctrinated with Communism. Dissidents were put into mental asylums because they were (quite genuinely) thought to be mad--after all the doctors had been indoctrinated too. Though of course the Soviet state more usually assumed its dissidents to be Bad rather than Mad.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| YouTube user Sayl0r12 wrote: | | yo, im not gonna lie. you all look really gay debating on youtube like you have PHd's in gayology |
This one is currently not marked as spam!
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Chad
In: Ramsbottom
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Strange... I had a thumbs down next to one of my comments, which has now disappeared.
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Ishtar
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| Chad wrote: | | Strange... I had a thumbs down next to one of my comments, which has now disappeared. |
It means someone thumbed it up
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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In case anyone is interested, I found a link on the Representative Poetry Online [RPO] some website suggesting one Ian Lancashire at the University of Toronto should know all about Chaucer texts, so I emailed him:
The Notes for The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue at
http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/457.html
begin:
1] Bold-faced vowels indicate syllables that, though frequently silent today, may have been sounded in Chaucer's time. (In the original printed edition of RPO, these vowels had a dot accent over them.) I think these are the same e's that appear underlined at the beginning of my Penguin edition of The Canterbury Tales, but I haven't been able to find any explanation for them. Would you be so kind as to throw some light on the subject for me?
- Are these e's (with bold, underlines or diacritics depending on where you look) highlighted in any way by Caxton or other old sources? Or are they a modern invention? By whom?
- If they are only frequently silent today and may have been sounded in Chaucer's time, why are these particular letters picked out?
On a related note, do you know if the original (or early) texts are available on-line in their original form, including "Averylle", "euery veyne", "to serve halowis" and so on? (Copy-and-paste-able I mean, unlike the Caxtons on the British Library website.)
To which he promptly replied:
These letters were hypothetically sounded in Chaucer's time. Metrics offer the principal support for this speculation -- to get to ten syllables in what appear to be pentameter lines, we need to accent vowels that are silent today. E.g.,
| Chart: | 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
When that A-pril with his show-res soot-e |
Scholars at work on the history of the English language give additional evidence. (See Carol Percy's HEL site for an introduction to the vast literature on the history of English. Or go to the Cambridge History of the English Language.) |
and on the related note:
See, I knew he was the guy to ask.
So the emphasis on the Es is a modern(ish) mark-up convention. I have since heard from Penguin that they don't know where their version came from! The Penguin Popular Classics are cheap-n-cheerful because they use old editions they don't need to be precious about. At least we know now that Chaucer had nothing to say about these particular Es, which you will recall are all silent if read as ordinary English: scholars mark them to say 'no, no, you must voice these ones'.
Interesting how the supposition that the inferred poetic meter must be adhered to takes precedence over any common sense that the language is hidden in plain sight.
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Since he was so responsive and clued-up in this field, I continued:
By the way, what do scholars make of the preponderance of final Es occurring as the last letter of the line?
And on another related note, since you seem to have the info at your fingertips, can you point me to a good list of raw data on the Great Vowel Shift? I've only seen a very short list of before-and-after examples in Bill Bryson's Mother Tongue. Wherever I look on-line, they jump straight into explanations of the changes in terms of IPA and linguistic jargon. I just want to see the words. Again, the response was immediate:
| I think it may be easier to use verse to argue for this sounding, but it should occur wherever words like "soote" occur. |
and
Hmm. That wasn't helpful. (The BBC site says the pronunciations were different, but doesn't show the spellings. No joy from the YouTube shenanigans on this either.)
So I pressed the point...
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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Realising that my posts on the final Es are in terms of silent Es and that would be a step too far, I checked again:
Again, thank you for your response. But to clarify:
The Canterbury Tales General Prologue has 32000+ letters in 860 lines; 3800+ are the letter E. If E occurred randomly, we'd expect about 100 lines to end with E.
But it's not random: E occurs more frequently at the end of a word -- 12% of all letters are E, whereas 28% of final letters are E. With about 1900 out of 6700 words ending in E, we'd expect about 240 lines to end with E.
As it is, over 460 lines, over 50% of them, end in E. That is a distinct bias towards the very last letter of the line. There are twice as many final Es at the ends of lines as there should be.
- Whether silent or voiced, how do scholars explain this?
- If so much of the reconstruction of Middle English depends on rhyme and verse structure, isn't this bound to cause a systematic error in analysis of the text?
On the GVS, I'd like to see the original spellings, not current spellings. The best I have seen is a very short list in Bryson:
shifted: | Chart: | spot : spat
spat : speet
speet : spate
law : low
fod : food
lyf : life |
not shifted: | Chart: | bed : bed
hill : hill |
Where can I see big chunk of "raw data"?So far, answers come there none.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| DPCrisp wrote: | | Interesting how the supposition that the inferred poetic meter must be adhered to takes precedence over any common sense that the language is hidden in plain sight. |
As you know, I originally pursued logic of this sort -- and ultimately went down in flames to your superior thinking (I still defend my ideas as having been intelligently-reasoned). I had a lot to say then about detecting pronunciation from rhyme and the placement of the silent e.
Regardless, I don't think the lines are ten syllables -- and certainly not rigidly so. I think the rhythm is more lyrical than the 10 syllable format allows -- which suits itself better to comedic writing. It's based off of four major beats -- like four-four time in music. The minor beats -- 8th notes and 16th notes if you will -- are thrown in as needed.
I remain satisfied that a natural rendition such as you have always proposed results in something that sounds... well... funnier.
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