Re: CHAT: Must Needs? (WAS: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry)

At 7:37 pm -0500 17/3/02, Roger Mills wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>>At 8:40 pm -0500 14/3/02, Elliott Lash wrote:
[snip]
>>>Must needs? I thought that was only a 19th century construction!
>>
>>Ah, we Sussexmen are a bit behind the times  ;)
>It's certainly a (literary only) archaism to older American ears like mine;
>quite likely utterly unknown to many of the Younger Generation (Mr. E. Lash
>excluded!) 8-)))
>
>>It's not unfamiliar to me; but the alternative form "needs must" does sound
>>a bit weird  :)
>The memory alert is ping-ing, and the image of a wicked Max Beerbohm cartoon
>involving IIRC Roger Fry (now obscure 19th C. critic) is wavering on the
>screen, captioned:  "We needs must love the Highest".
Oh yes, I know it - but it still sounds odd to me.  Whereas, 'must needs'
has lingered on at least until my generation.
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At 1:24 am -0500 18/3/02, David Peterson wrote:
>It's certainly a (literary only) archaism to older American ears like mine;
>quite likely utterly unknown to many of the Younger Generation (Mr. E. Lash
>excluded!) 8-)))>> Wrote Roger...
>
>???  I'm young.  All young Americans seem to know this.  We all are forced to
>study a Shakespeare play a year.  The phrase is the subject of fun,
and
>because of that, hardly not unheard of.
Sounds like the way modern Americanism are often received over here  ;)

>   However, it's never used seriously,
>and probably understood to mean "an old way to say 'must'"--that's the way I
>understood it, until now.  How does "needs" mean "absolutely"?
I doesn't, does it?

I, whose (quite normal it seemed to me) use of it prompted this thread, had
understood 'needs' to mean "inevitably" in this context, i.e. not only does
one have a moral or physical obligation to do something [must], but one
cannot exscape from that obligation [must needs].

If its inevitable that you do a certain action, then you _need_ to do it.
The connexion in meaning is fairly clear, but as for the morphology, I
don't know.
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At 10:30 am -0700 18/3/02, Dirk Elzinga wrote:
[snip]
>
>Maybe Roger's point was not that younger Americans wouldn't
>*recognize* the construction, but that they wouldn't be able to use
>it appropriately. You seem to concur, when you say that "it's never
>used seriously". I am quite familiar with the expression, since one
>of my favorite passages from the _Book of Mormon_ uses it no less
>than three times:
>
>"For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.
i.e. not only ought to be that there is an opposition in all things, it is
an inevitable that there is so [since this is how it was ordained to be]

>If
>not so, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither
>wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad.
>Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if
>it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life
>neither death, not corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery,
>neither sense nor insensibility."
>
>My father has the tendency to talk this way as well;
So it's not just in Sussex  :)

>the speech
>habits of many Mormons has been influenced by passages like this.
>While we as Mormons believe the _Book of Mormon_ to be ancient
>scripture, there is no denying that many of its linguistic patterns
>are rooted in the speech of early 19th century New England.
But it believed to be a _translation_ of ancient scripture, isn't it? IIRC
this was sometime in the 1820s at Palmyra in New York state.  So it is not
surprising that many of linguistic patterns of the English version are
rooted in the speech of early 19th century New England.  It seems to me
that it would be surprising if this were not so.

Ray.

PS - in case any one wonders, I'm not a Mormon - just one born & brought in
Sussex, in Old England  :)

=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                     [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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