Re: Native Grammatical terms

At 07:50 PM 11/18/03 -0800, Padriac wrote:
>--- John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
>
> > It's pretty clear that *something* has changed,
> > unless we were to believe
> > that Chaucer was an incompetent versifier.
>
>Quite. And if the Cwendaso are half as keen on
>their own language in general as Isidora says,
>they would certainly notice when old poetic forms
>don't quite fit anymore.
Ahem.  Padraic, I think you were the one who complained the other day that
I had been calling them "Cwendaso" instead of "Tovláugad."  ;)

Yes, I think that they would notice.  Tovlm itself is actually prose in the
original, but it gets catigorized with the poetry.  (Tovlm is the oldest
work in the corpus.)  There are other prose works as well, such as
collections of proverbs and chronicles of  lifespans which get lumped in
with the poetry, but there are also genuinely poetic works.  I really have
no idea what sort of poetic structure or structures they are in the habit
of using.  It's something that I haven't given much thought to yet.  (It's
not as if I don't have plenty of other things to think about as well.)  But
they would certainly notice if the rhyme scheme or the meter took some
strange turns.  It's possible that such things could also lead to a degree
of phonlogical conservatism in the ceremonial dialect in addition to the
previously mentioned syntactic conservatism.  I have already thought that
some of the phonological changes that the language has undergone may
involve the deletion of vowels adjacent to sonorant consonants and the
sonorant consonants becoming syllabic.  Most vowel deletion processes would
seriously disrupt meter, but this oughtn't since the number of syllables
would not change.  There is that "vowel compression" issue, where one of
two adjacent vowels goes to a glide in some dialect (including the one that
I work with.)  That could put a crimp in your meter, so it might be
necessary not to diphthongize when performing certain poems where you would
compress the vowels in ordinary speech.  (In fact, doing it in ordinary
speech is one signal that tells you whether you are dealing with one word
or two.  The vowels remain distinct across word boundaries; within words,
the are compressed.)

Right now, I probably need to go to bed for the night.  It's past 12:30
here, and I'm not particularly sleepy, but there is such a thing as having
to get up in the morning.  The problem is that I felt pretty sleepy around
9 pm and went to bed.  Frustratingly, I ended up taking a nap instead of a
night's rest.

On an off-topic note, we bought the extended edition of The Two Towers
today, and the children and I watched it.  One of the new scenes is
Theodred's funeral, where Eowyn sings a lament in what I assume must be
Anglo-Saxon.  Unfortunately, the singing didn't last for as long as I would
have liked.

Isidora