A correspondent writes that he was puzzled by Oscar Wilde’s reference to “vowelled” Greek, which apparently alludes to this passage from Keats’s Lamia:
Soft went the music the soft air along,
While fluent Greek a vowelled undersong
Kept up among the guests.
What the devil did he mean by “vowelled undersong”? My correspondent did some googling and “found Browning, of all people, discussing it in the preface of his Agamemnon”:
Just a word more on the subject of my spelling — in a transcript from the Greek and there exclusively — Greek names and places precisely as does the Greek author. I began this practice, with great innocency of intention, some six-and-thirty years ago. […] I supposed I was doing a simple thing enough: but there has been till lately much astonishment at os and us, ai and oi, representing the same letters in Greek. Of a sudden, however, whether in translation or out of it, everybody seems committing the offence, although the adoption of u for υ [upsilon] still presents such difficulty that it is a wonder how we have hitherto escaped “Eyripides.” But there existed a sturdy Briton who, Ben Jonson informs us, wrote “The Life of the Emperor Anthony Pie” — whom we now acquiesce in as Antoninus Pius: for “with time and patience the mulberry leaf becomes satin.” Yet there is, on all sides, much profession of respect for what Keats called “vowelled Greek” — “consonanted,” one would expect […]
I welcome all thoughts about this odd meme. And I share with you “Flatulence – a sonnet,” discovered in the course of the googling and passed along for my delectation; it begins:
My “vowelled undersong” is not in Greek,
Nor has it, really, much to do with vowels.
It’s not apparent when I try to speak,
But rumbles unimpeded from my bowels.
Thanks, Bruce!
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I find it difficult to understand the Browning passage. Perhaps it would make more sense if I lived in the time period. For example, I am confused by the sentence
“astonishment at os and us, ai and oi, representing the same letters in Greek.”
“representing the same letters” as what? Does he think of Latin O and Greek Omicron as literally being the same letter (and so on for U and Ypsilon, A and Alpha, I and Iota)? I mean, this is true in a sense from a historical perspective, but it seems an odd viewpoint to take with respect to the modern languages. There are a number of letters in each alphabet with no equivalent in the other, and even the paired ones have different names in English and Greek, and sometimes more than one counterpart (e.g. Ypsilon corresponds to Latin Y and Vee just as much as it does to Latin U).
But anyway, I think I get the gist of it. I don’t like the practice he mentions (I don’t see how “Olumpos” etc. is any better than “Olympus”, and there are several ways in which it seems worse—why not just use Ὄλυμπος if you really value indicating the original spelling and/or pronunciation?). But I won’t go into tedious detail on this because Hat has already described how I feel in previous threads like the one on “pace”.
Wilde’s “richer music of the vowelled Greek” (I didn’t know the Keats reference) always made intuitive sense to me: compared to Latin, Greek has more vowels (counting diphthongs) and is more liberal about combining them (e.g.). I’d guess — without having tried to calculate — that it has a higher V to C ratio, too,
Could the passage from Lamia be about the pitch accent? Then “vowel’d music” would make sense. Not sure about “vowelled Greek.”
Re TR’s (e.g.): Interesting that Perseus’ LSJ has not been proofread. ὄμθσσον is ὄμοσσον, and who knows what the caret in ἀάα^τος is intended to mean.
19th century Europeans loved vowels, commented favorably on languages exotic to them that have open syllables, and judged their speakers less barbaric than others, especially those who flaunt pharyngeals and ejectives.
I think Browning is talking about stuff like “Olumpos” instead of “Olympus,” but I’m pretty sure that the Keats reference just means “notably rich in vowels”. Jewel:jewelled::vowel:vowelled. Colvin’s biography of Keats sez:
(Emphasis added.)
As an aside, “Anthony Pie” for “Antoninus Pius” is probably the smoothest proper-noun localization I’ve seen all year. Anthony Pie! He sounds like a garbled legend from footnotes to Spenser, or maybe a stock panto character.
Y: In that context, how did they feel about, say, Hawaiian? Genuinely curious.
Antonine Pie is of course an impeccable Latin vocative, as in this genuine acclamatio: “Invicte imperator Antonine Pie, felix Aug., multis annis imperes.”
The Isle of Aeaea reminds me of Homer’s “obscure and sinister” epithet ἀᾱ́ατος, brilliantly etymologised by Alexander Nikolaev as literally obscure, namely < *ahāwato- < *n̥-sah₂wn̥to- ‘sunless’.
Here’s Rev. Robinson Thornton (1867) speculating on the origin of languages and the causes of language change: “On comparative philology, with reference to the theories of Man’s origin” (Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute, Or Philosophical Society of Great Britain, vol. 1)
Or compare Finnish with Tashlhiyt Berber.
And “Anthony” should probably be Antonius, not Antoninus, anyway. In fact, Marcus Antonius of the late Republic is now commonly known as Mark Antony.
(There’s a somewhat related anecdote on that point: a common coin type of said Mark Antony was made with the legend ANT AVG. When a reissue of the type was made 200 years later under Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, the respective legend was expanded to avoid inevitable misinterpretations: ANTONIVS AVGVR.)
> As an aside, “Anthony Pie” for “Antoninus Pius” is probably the smoothest proper-noun localization I’ve seen all year
Almost as good as John Pick of Mirandola, which I once saw.
Mark Tully is another good one.
I had to read the Browning passage several times before it stopped seeming totally nonsensical. My hypothesis for making sense of it is that he’s saying “if people admire Greek for its voweliness, as the Keats line suggests they do, they ought to share my idiosyncratic desire to actually get the vowels right” (where using the conventional filtered-through-Latin orthography for Greek proper names is viewed as Just Plain Wrong).
My more speculative hypothesis is slightly more sophisticated, or at least complicated. Greek-origin proper names in their conventional English spelling are likely to be subject to ordinary English pronunciation practices like having vowels reduced in unstressed syllables, esp since Anglophones are used to doing that with Latinate-looking vocabulary. So “Olympus” will definitely have a schwa in the final syllable and possibly in the first syllable as well, whereas “Olumpos” will look so comparatively weird and foreign the Anglophone will end up sufficiently baffled as to what is and isn’t stressed that perhaps everything will get at least a little stress and nothing will get reduced to a schwa, and you’ll thus get some half-assed approximation of all the proper Greek vowels in their full splendor. Of course, if *everyone* adopted Browning’s preferred orthography, it would after a while no longer look novel, and vowel reduction would likely creep back in.
In the mid-twentieth-century it was a common practice among English translators of the classics–Fitts, Fitzgerald, etc.–to transliterate directly from the Greek. As an English teacher, this drove me crazy: How is one supposed to pronounce “Kirkê” or “Kyklôps” in an English sentence, let alone so that undergraduates will know you’re referring to their (still just possibly) familiar Sursey and Sighclops? What’s Hekabê to them, or they to Hekabê? The fact that I know Greek only made matters worse. Fortunately this practice seems to have faded among translators writing for the public.
I like the transliteration style, as I associate it with historical novels. To me, Socrates and Aristotle are figures from the history of philosophy, whereas Sokrates and Aristoteles are actual persons who happen to be philosophers. (I can go either way on Plato vs. Platon.) And I definitely prefer the actor Nikeratos in The Mask of Apollo yelling “Iakchos!” to create terror in a darkened theatre with an echo chamber: if he had yelled “Jacchus!” I would have laughed instead.
I can see the appropriateness of that in a novel. It’s another thing when trying to recite Homer.
Matt,
I was thinking about Hawaiian especially. See a summary here.
Thanks, Y! I actually own that book — better put aside some time to sit down and read it.
It’s ironic that Jespersen’s subjective comparison of masculine English with childlike/effeminate Hawaiian, cited in The voices of Eden, comes from a native speaker of Danish — a language with a huge vowel system, famous for leniting its obstruents, and so increasingly “vowelled”. But then other eminent linguists and philologists of that generation wrote, in all earnestess, such nonsense as H. C. K. Wyld in The best English (1934):
Unbiased, my aaahse!
But then there is J.Y.T. Grieg, who described RP as “the silliest and dwabliest [Scots: most feeble] of all the English dialects […] artificial, slovenly to a degree, absurdly difficult for foreigners to acquire, and except to ears debased by listening to it, inharmonious. […] It obliterates distinctions, tends to reduce all unstressed vowels to the same natural grunt, and then — as if by some obscure process of psychical compensation — diphthongizes and breaks up vowels that in other Standards are cleanly and simply articulated […]. It needs to be taken out in the open air, and buffeted by trans-Atlantic winds.”
As for Jespersen, his opinion of his own language is (by comparison with English) on record:
A /t/ is a [t]? In English?? In the first volume of his monumental Grammar Jespersen himself describes some very un-[t]-like allophones of /t/.
Growth and Structure of the English Language is a popularization, though Jespersen says he hopes it may be “of some profit to the expert philologist”. Naturally, expert philologists in 1905 were rather less knowledgeable than their counterparts today.
It’s a book I learnt a lot from, as it was the first history of English I read . But yes, it’s long past state of the art.