Anatoly Vorobey has a Facebook post that starts with a reference to a video in which Oleg Lekmanov compares a bunch of clips of people reading aloud the first stanza of Pushkin’s “Анчар” (The Upas Tree; there are a number of English translations, e.g. A.Z. Foreman, Michael Allen) to see if they read the last word in the second line as “раскалённой” (raskalyonnoi, the normal reading in modern Russian) or “раскаленной” (raskalennoi, with e as in Church Slavic, to rhyme with the final word of the stanza, “вселенной” [vselennoi] ‘universe’). Anatoly says it seems to him this is a sort of intelligentsia shibboleth, with a snobbish preference for the Church Slavic as “correct” (he quotes a textbook to that effect), whereas he thinks both pronunciations have a right to exist — a conclusion with which I, naturally, concur. One of his commenters brings up English rhymes like rove/love, but this seems to me a different, though parallel, case.
In any case, the Pushkin quote led me to look up the word анчар (apparently first used in this poem), which according to Russian Wiktionary (citing Vasmer) is borrowed from Dutch antjar, itself from Malay ančar. Amazingly (to me), the OED has an entry (from 1885) for antiar ‘The Upas tree of Java, Antiaris toxicaria; also, the poison obtained from it’; there are no citations, but there is an etymology: “< Javanese antjar, antschar.” And upas itself (entry from 1926) is “< Malay ūpas poison, in the combination pōhun (or pūhun) ūpas poison-tree.” All roads lead to Malaya.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Moral_Alphabet/U_for_Upas_Tree
snobbish preference for the Church Slavic
Would it really be snobbish? Or, more broadly, would taking Church Slavic into consideration be seeing as learned and not, say, backwards?
Well, yes, that’s what’s meant by snobbish here. Learnèdness is the snobbery of the intellectual.
It being Holy Week (on the older calculation) I have of course been attempting to prepare myself spiritually by rereading random chunks of Kit Smart’s “Jubilate Agno,” i.e. the most overwhelmingly bonkers religious poem in the history of the English language.
So I give you the “rhimes” section, in which he is perhaps anticipating John Wells’ lexical sets:
“For the trumpet rhimes are sound bound, soar more and the like.
For the Shawm rhimes are lawn fawn moon boon and the like.
For the harp rhimes are sing ring string and the like.
For the cymbal rhimes are bell well toll soul and the like.
For the flute rhimes are tooth youth suit mute and the like.
For the dulcimer rhimes are grace place beat heat and the like.
For the Clarinet rhimes are clean seen and the like.
For the Bassoon rhimes are pass, class and the like. God be gracious to Baumgarden.
For the dulcimer are rather van fan and the like and grace place &c are of the bassoon.
For beat heat, weep peep &c are of the pipe.
For every word has its marrow in the English tongue for order and for delight.”
Now, it seems that all of the sets that rhymed for Smart also rhyme for me, and is it really the case that there have been no relevant shifts in pronunciation between Smart’s idiolect and mine? Yet it also seems that if Smart had any pairs of words that rhymed for him but would not rhyme for me, his Lunatick Muse would have led him to emphasize those.
Would it really be snobbish?
I would guess that for uninitiated readers (upward of 90%, another guess; the poem is in the school curriculum) the Church Slavic source of the intended pronounciation is completely lost. Pushkin wrote 200 years ago and a fair number of words shifted their pronounciation and anyway Russian poetry readers do expect an occasional hiccup in either exact rhyme or exact pronounciation.
Kit Smart’s “Jubilate Agno”
Mad, but also marvellous.
For in my nature I quested for beauty, but God, God hath sent me to sea for pearls.
Let me hasten to clarify that I certainly did not mean “overwhelmingly bonkers” in a pejorative way, and marvelous it most certainly is.
Now, it seems that all of the sets that rhymed for Smart also rhyme for me
grace place beat heat?
I think bate would work in some Irish accents. I am less sure about hate for heat (I think hee’ could be found but not hate–Maybe hay’ in Cavan?)
I’m sure there are dialects in which they rhyme, I was just surprised that J.W. Brewer’s was one of them (if that is the case).
Smart is rhyming pairs of words, not the whole sets of words he cites in each line.
For example, in
“For the cymbal rhimes are bell well toll soul and the like.”
he’s rhyming “bell” and “well”, and then rhyming “toll” and “soul”; he is not saying that all of his “cymbal rhymes” are the same rhyme – or even have the same vowel.
“Grace” and “beat” were no more rhymes for Smart than for us.
(Rhyming syllables with different final consonants happened in mediaeval Irish verse, though.)
Ah, I misunderstood the system. Ignore my previous comments!
I read long ago that Pushkin used anchar because upas sounded silly in Russian, as if it were u-pas, someone pasturing something in some sort of pidgin Russian.
Is it really THAT snobbish to read the verses according to the original rhyme and meter? In absolutely every language there are folk couplets where a racy or obscene word is replaced by a non-rhyming word, and it invariably causes smiles and laughs from the most low-brow listeners. To me it signifies that the silliness of lost rhymes knows no class boundaries.
Of course not. There’s a Styrian song where Dreck, apparently formerly obscene, is simply skipped at the end of a line, with not even a pause, cutting the rhythm short, and the refrain sets in immediately.
But in English, there are the four Fs of biology: feeding, fleeing, fighting and reproducing.
Likewise a college friend told me that Prof. Joe Taylor (one of the first set of Macarthur Fellows) introduced him deadpan to the FFT, or Fast Fourier Transform, and the FFFT, or Very Fast Fourier Transform.
In absolutely every language there are folk couplets where a racy or obscene word is replaced by a non-rhyming word
The English examples I know of — Miss Susie had a Steamboat and Shaving Cream — are early 20th century creations. The two Hebrew examples I know, Zálman yesh lo mikhnasáyim and Kúmu kúmu yeladím, are mid-century ones. How widespread is the form, really?
Sorry I would have said “pairs” except for e.g. Smart’s deployment of the triad “sing ring string.”
Speaking of “Church Slavic,” I just acquired for free a random little booklet apparently printed under Catholic auspices in Switzerland in 1959, which has the Slavonic text of the Divine Liturgy with facing-page Italian translation – except the Slavonic is not printed in Cyrillic but in a perhaps-idiosyncratic romanization (“Testo slavo trascritto con traduzione italiana”).* There are quite a lot of j’s, and it may just reflect the standard approach of latin-scripted FYLOSC. Or maybe it’s something else; I haven’t yet investigated closely enough to be sure.
*The title on the cover is _La divina Liturgia secondo il rito bizantino-slavo_.
folk couplets where a racy or obscene word is replaced by a non-rhyming word
How widespread is the form, really?
i think of Miss Lucy [a/k/a Suzy, etc] and other more recent examples as descendents of early modern english “catches” – rounds which make punchlines by using the timing of the repetition (and often a rest) to assemble something racy from disconnected words or syllables. the polyphony allows for a different kind of frame-shifting, but to my ear it’s the same effect created with the same basic tools.
i’m sure it plays out differently in different languages, but on the anglophone side, it goes back at least to the 1500s, and spans a pretty broad social range, from shakespeare (i think it’s Twelfth Night that has some catch-singing) to university glee clubs to playground rhymes.
Relatedly, there is this puzzle poem, which I remember from Aha! Insight:*
Martin Gardner** doesn’t say where he got the poem from, however.
* Naturally, the book spoils the puzzle, but in the present context it’s not very hard anyway.
** Was Martin Gardner much known outside North America?
Caesar entered on his head
a helmet on each foot
a sandal in his hand he held
his mighty sword to boot
An older, non-rhyming version:
Caesar entered on his head
his helmet on his feet
armed sandals upon his brow
there was a cloud in his right hand
his faithful sword in his eye
an angry glare saying nothing
he sat down.
This is not totally unlike the mysterious Latin inscription found on a partly-eroded stone in the desert:
TOTI
EMUL
ESTO
Was Martin Gardner much known outside North America?
Yes, for the old Soviet.
There’s a Styrian song where Dreck, apparently formerly obscene, is simply skipped at the end of a line, with not even a pause, cutting the rhythm short
Cutting the metric rhythm short is of course another venerable way to make people laugh at the absurdity, and it was practiced in Russian too (Пиликала гармошка // Играл аккордеон // А маленький Антошка // Натягивал га // га северная птица // и мороза не боится // она может на лету // Почесать свою пи // etc )
But it isn’t quite on topic of the Anchar Tree…
Sinner man, he gambled.
He lived so well.
He want’d t’go to heaven,
But he had to go to—
Little David, play on…
I saw wood, floating in the air;
New to me. The only one of those I’d seen begins “I saw a peacock with a fiery tail”
Another one of those naughtiness-avoidance songs, where the naughtiness is extremely slight, is “Sweet Violets“.
I see there are more examples at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subverted_rhyme
But none of them are like David M.’s description of the Styrian song.
Martin Gardner has certainly been very much known in Britain from the 1970s on (if not also before) judging by the presence of his books in bookshops, in the days when bookshops had a good stock of books on niche subjects such as recreational mathematics.
I note the “saw” pun in the poem Brett quotes.
How widespread is the form, really?— en.wiki article Subverted rhyme* has no equivalent article in any other language Wikipedia, and all of its examples are in English. Absence of evidence is proof of absence.
* “subverted rhyme, teasing rhyme or mind rhyme” citations needed since 2013
Martin Gardner has certainly been very much known in Britain from the 1970s on …
Yes indeed. I still have several volumes of ‘Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions’, the earliest first published in Britain 1961, reprinted 1966, a Pelican Book 3/6. (And very dog-eared. Pressed in the pages is a hexaflexagon made from lineprinter paper.)
Also the ‘Annotated Alice’ and ‘Snark’ books, Penguin, published mid-1960’s in Britain.
@mollymooly, Y
https://canzonierepopolare.altervista.org/canzoni/lospazzacamino.html
I think this Italian song fits your criteria, i.e., the line break
gli fa vedere il buco,
il buco del camin.
Gives an innocent twist (sorry, innuendo seems to be contagious). No doubt molly can find an example in Irish (I think I have done enough for today).
Martin Gardner
Yes, I, too was very familiar with his books.
And Scientific American never really recovered its attraction after he left and was replaced by that Gödel, Escher, Bach person.
(I forget his name, but I’m told that he’s a strange loop.)
folk couplets where a racy or obscene word is replaced by a non-rhyming word
There seem to be multiple variants; Miss Susie and Shaving Cream aren’t really doing the same thing. From the description I’ve been imagining something closer to what Shaving Cream does than to what Miss Susie does.
[Other examples later in the thread include some cases of both.]
An interesting Russian variant that I hadn’t encountered elsewhere (so far) is “Eva’s couplets” (куплеты Евы), where the racy-or-obscene word is replaced by a non-rhyming word and then the poem extends from two to four lines, rhyming both versions. (Sometimes the resulting text is still borderline racy.)
Один воинственный вассал
Почти весь замок обо…шёл,
Нигде клозета не нашёл
И в книгу жалоб написал.
Incidentally, there are some folk cases where a racy or obscene word is replaced by a rhyming word – here’s one from Nick Nicholas.
en.wiki article Subverted rhyme* has no equivalent article in any other language Wikipedia, and all of its examples are in English.
Obviously the Hatters who know examples in other languages need to add them to Wikipedia. And I say this because I can’t contribute.
Are there languages now that have never used rhyme in popular poetry or songs, so they can’t do this trick?
Martin Gardner was known in Germany as well, I still have a book on mathematical puzzles that I got as a present as a boy.
Rhymes with the naughtiness removed are known. One I remember from my school boy times is
Da oben fliegt ein Geier / von unten sieht man … seinen Turnschuh
I leave the translation and solution to the puzzle as an exercise for the reader.
These were simple rhymes, not sung. But a novelty song of that type made it into the German charts in the 70s, sung by Rudi Carrell, a Dutchman very successful as game show host and comedian in Germany.
Other than that, I don’t know any German examples and I have no idea how old that kind of thing is in German culture.
Shouldn’t Turmschuh be in the plural for symmetry?
Indeed the version I know has seine Turnschuhe.
(No towers. Turnen “engage in gymnastics, or in sports more generally”; often used as the name for PE-and-sports as a school subject.)
@dm
Thanks, noticed typo after.
Chambers’ Dictionary claims that “nonny”, as in yer Elizabethan “hey nonny no” was “once a cover for obscenity”; which is a pleasing thought, but I’m not sure what the evidence is.
A German one I remember from 55 years ago (reflecting the mentality of 14-year-olds):
Everything I might say about Martin Gardner has been said, so I’ll just say that he was very well known everywhere that the Scientific American was read. (Past tense because the Scientific American has sunk very far from the days when everyone interested in science read it.) Comparing its present sorry manifestation with the magazine that existed in 1965 is like comparing the present incumbent of the White House with the one of 1965. I don’t know anyone who reads the Scientific American today, or even knows if it still exists.
Something reminded me of this one:
A bather whose clothing was strewed
By breezes that left her quite nude
Saw a man come along,
And unless I am wrong,
You expected this line to be lewd.
@ACB, I was aware of its continued experience, having opened an issue at the library more or less by accident, and I quite share your opinion of the modern version. As a teen I spent hours with bound volumes from the 50s at the public library, looking at the adverts for integrated circuits and tracing their development from one year to another. (Wow, 4 transistors in a DIP package! Will wonders never cease?) And Martin Gardner, of course.
Subverted rhymes exist in Danish too, though right now I can’t think of any. Also subverted translations:
More like an invocation of false friends, I guess.
SMBC on “half-euphemisms”
An exquisite collection of false friends!
(dann, letzten)
As a kid the lyrics to “La Pirilacha” were very familiar, so I was surprised today to learn that the song had only been released a couple of years prior.
@DM, well, yes, Danes (used to) know a few dregs of German (dann = så, letzen = sidste) so they are macaronically available. But spelling and declination are not essential to being understood innit.
Concerning Scientific American: Yes. I got my subscription in 1959, age 11; reluctantly let it lapse in the mid-70s due to graduate student penury; picked it up again later; but finally gave it up in disgust. It had basically turned into its National Lampoon parody, Scienterrific American.
Then it must have become much better later; it was great in the 1990s (articles by actual publishing experts on current cutting-edge topics), and I’ve read older articles in collections edited later that must have been from the 80s. I don’t know what has become of it in this millennium.
No, though the differences are all audible; and “last” has the whole tzt apparatus.
Shouldn’t Turmschuh be in the plural for symmetry?
The version I knew had the singular, and I remember that clearly because I also used to wonder why it was only one.
@David Marjanović: I believe Rodger C is indeed referring to the atrocity that Scientific American has become in this millennium. I read in in the 1980s and 1990s, and I agree it was quite good then.
I used to read at the library old Scientific Americans from the 1950s and 1960s. I was fascinated by Stong’s column The Amateur Scientist, with its beautiful illustrations, and fantasized about copying some of the projects. They seemed as easy as following a recipe. If some kids in America built a particle accelerator, why shouldn’t I? (I didn’t.)
Perhaps I’m wrong, but my understanding was that while ё was written with plain e in the past, it was always pronounced “jo” (i.e. the old orthography simply ignored the distinction between je and jo). If that’s true, pronouncing the word with e would be ahistorical, like when English speakers read “Ye Old Shop” with a “yuh” sound.
You’re wrong. There are no purely orthographical rhymes in Russian (ё already existed in the old orthography, it’s just that outside of grammars and dictionaries it was and is rarely used). The phenomenon of rhymes with е where you’d expect ё died out in the first half of the 19th century. It’s common in young Pushkin (but he was criticized for the rhyme копием — кругом, felt to be inappropriate for a church-slavonic word), but already exceptional by the time of the Anchar poem (except for participles in -енный, which were of church-slavonic origin).
I’d need to dig in my grad school notes to be sure, but I believe the shift of [e] to [o] in certain environments (after a soft consonant when not followed by another soft consonant, when stressed) happened around the 1300s in Russian. It hadn’t taken place in Church Slavonic, giving rise to doublets like крест (cross) and перекрёсток (a crossing in the road), or небо (sky, heaven) and нёбо (the roof of the mouth, palate).
It also didn’t involve Ѣ (which hadn’t yet merged with [e]), which is why we don’t complain хлёба нёт when we run out of bread.
Reverting to Christopher Smart – my choral society is preparing ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’ for Saturday week, and Britten instructs his singers to pronounce ‘suit, mute and the like’ as ‘soote, moot’.
So I had the sound change backward. It wasn’t jo>je in unstressed syllables, but je>jo in stressed syllables before a hard consonant (though I was right that ё was not originally part of the orthography, and was corrected incorrectly on this point). But regardless of the direction of the change, the change happened in the high Middle Ages, so the literary pronunciation of “je” for ё still makes no sense. If readers were affecting a pre-Medieval dialect, much more would be different than that one vowel. It seems that at some point it became fashionable to imitate OCS, but only in specific situations. It would be like English readers undoing the Great Vowel Shift to sound more erudite when reading Chaucer, but only for one vowel. Because this isolated, ahistorical change happens to match the spelling (i.e. e continued to be used for jo well into the modern era), I think it is likely that the spelling is part of the reason why this affectation exists, or at least part of why it became so popular. My original example was people pronouncing “ye old shop” with a yod that never existed, and it turns out I was spot on: an ahistorical affectation reinforced by an ambiguous spelling convention.
Except that in the days when people still went to church they heard the old pronunciations every time they did so. The Bible was always read in Church Slavonic, with no yo.
Well, retentions of a single feature from an earlier stage of a language, but only for a single word or a few, are not unknown. Danish has a few fossilized case forms, like using the genetive with the preposition til (til søs, or even a plural in til hånde), Spanish has el agua with a descendant of Latin illam that was regular before words starting with stressed /a/, French has fils /fis/ and forms of liaison that only pop up when being pretentious.
A delicious instance of omitting an obscene rhyme… In their concert program “Airs de cour sous Louis XIII”, Vincent Dumestre and Le Poème harmonique first perform the ribald song “À Paris sur petit pont” (in which some workmen building a bridge ask a passing girl what she has in her giron). When the singers, after the last verse, decide to resolve the contrepèterie and sing le poil du…, (‘the hair of the…’), they omit the final obscene word. But Claire Lefilliâtre immediately launches into the next song, the much more elevated “Qu’on ne me parle plus d’amour”….
Brilliant!
Pushkin rhymes words of this type (where /je/ develops to /jo/ in the 18th century) on both /jo/ and /je/.
In that same poem, Анчар, he also rhymes человек with потек which requires /je/. But then again лег with ног requiring the other way.
Even if the /je/ version is historically associated more with liturgical and high-register language, within Pushkin’s corpus it seems a bit less driven by register and more by sheer compositional opportunism.
Even in the highly slavonicized language of Пророк he rhymes ход with полёт.
And he will rhyme бесценный/уединенный (requiring /e/) in a highly personal poem to a close friend.
Though it seems to me subjectively (I haven’t tabulated it, I’m sure somebody has) that rhymes implying /jo/ predominate for him overall: закон/пробужден, мотылек/цветок etc and that he’s not unusual in this for the period.
One exception may be words with historical ѣ that have developed analogical /jo/ in modern Russian. He seems to have a preference for the /e/ version there. Like I think the past singular masculine of сечь (сѣчь) he only rhymes with /e/. Like пресек/век, сек/навек. Or звезд (gen.pl.) with разъезд. But again that’s my impression from chance reading.
In these lines from Пророк (given in old orthography), such a reading might make сердце echo the word разсѣкъ in a cool way.
И онъ мне грудь разсѣкъ мечемъ,
И сердце трепетное вынулъ,
И угль, пылающiй огнемъ,
Во грудь отверстую водвинулъ.
(Oh and I just noticed there’s also the rhyme-pair мечемъ/огнемъ, where it is probbaly anyone’s guess whether a pronunciation with /je/ or with /jo/ was originally contemplated.)
it seems a bit less driven by register and more by sheer compositional opportunism.
That sounds right — it’s how poets work.