Douglas per ordour and correk.

Daniel Wakelin (Professor of Medieval English Palaeography at Oxford) reviews a new edition of Gavin (or Gawin) Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid into Scots for the TLS (February 3, 2023):

For Gavin Douglas, translating the Aeneid was hard work. In the prologues that he added to his 1513 version of the poem – the first full translation of classical verse into Scots – he compiled an inky-fingered writer’s diary of his progress. Such a diary is unusual, and allows us to place and date the poem precisely. Douglas worked on it between early 1512 and summer 1513, with interruptions for other “grave materis”, and he did so under commission from Henry, Lord Sinclair. Douglas’s prologues showed Sinclair how busy he had been, but also reshaped the Aeneid for its readers. “I lang to haue our buke done”, Douglas grumbled, and he repeatedly called the poem “lang laubour” and “langsum wark”. Labour and longsome curl down the tongue like a yawn, and in the archaic word it is hard not to hear the German langsam: “boring”. For Douglas, under duress of Sinclair, the Eneados was endurance.

Douglas’s poem – which now appears in a three-volume edition from the Scottish Text Society, edited by Priscilla Bawcutt with Ian C. Cunningham – is certainly longer than Virgil’s Aeneid. This is partly because Latin grammar always needs expanding when translated, but also because Virgil’s hexameters do not fit neatly onto a traditional line of Scots or English poetry. Some later Elizabethan translators would try to resolve this through fourteeners or quantitative metres, but Douglas chose the challenge of rhymed couplets. He uses the couplet form not for discovery, joining words by surprise, but for consolidation, combining registers and parts of speech to fill out the sense of one line with another. […]

Douglas also has a habit of end-stopping lines at the close of clauses or phrases, such as names with their epithets, and to start lines with anaphora, words repeated, foregrounding the form. He describes Virgil’s Latin as yielding puzzles “lyne by lyne”, and it feels as though he progresses through Virgil’s poem this way, methodically. A doctoral thesis by Megan Bushnell (too recent to be cited in the edition) confirmed, from linguistic evidence, how Douglas translated in sequential order, and how he divided sense and chapters by the arbitrary page breaks of the 1501 printed Virgil that he worked from.

Passages from the first half of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas wanders across the Mediterranean (books I to V) and journeys to the underworld (book VI), have inspired poets across the centuries. Sure enough, some of Douglas’s most colourful verse appears in book VI, with descriptions of the underworld river Acheron as “Drumly of mud”, and Charon, the ferryman who helps Aeneas across it, as “a grisly ferryar … sluggart of array”. But once Aeneas has received the Sybil’s prophecy in book VI, he has to fulfil it, and it is the slow slog of books VII to XII — what Virgil, in Douglas’s rendering, calls “Fer largear materis” and “A grettar wark” — that best suits his hardworking rhyme. It is in books VII and XII, also, that Douglas talks most vividly of his own hard work translating Virgil. […]

Like Douglas himself, the characters of his Eneados perform “langsum wark” and “laubouris”, echoing the labor with which Virgil often describes the Trojans’ travails. They cut down trees – it is a great poem of deforestation – to build boats, build a camp or build Carthage; they raise funeral pyres and hold the proper rites. The passionate couple Nisus and Euryalus in Douglas’s couplets seem like prim planners, in their speeches connecting subclauses line-by-line, wary of presuming too much. Virgil’s competing elegiac and imperial themes of death and the city are united in that they are both reached in orderly fashion. This is accentuated by the expression “per ordour” (“in due order”), which recurs as a fussy tic throughout Douglas’s verse. Virgil sometimes has things arranged in visual order (longo ordine), but Douglas has people do things “per ordour” in a sense that is more moral, referring to deeds done with propriety. Even the prophecies and visions of book VI unfold “per ordour”. This model of orderly work seems to be what Douglas finds and follows in Virgil’s poem. His Eneados is less ambivalent than the Aeneid of much recent criticism. The Virgil that Douglas gives us instead is an austere one, his verse form and his vocabulary rendering the poem as a stern vision of the virtues of undertaking arduous endeavours and doing them properly. […]

The work of polishing up Douglas’s Eneados started early. The scribe of the best manuscript (now in Trinity College, Cambridge), used as the basis for this edition, writes that Douglas “was” bishop of Dunkeld, suggesting that the manuscript was produced after Douglas’s death in 1522. The editors note that the watermarks in the paper might support that later date, but stress that the scribe calls this manuscript the “first correk coppy”, where “first” points to an earlier production. I might instead stress “correk”: this was the first time the poem was copied correctly, even if posthumously, after faulty copies hitherto. Douglas wrote that he hoped to be “correkkit” by readers, and the scribe of the Trinity College manuscript was the first to answer his wish. The task has since been taken up by skilled editors including Thomas Ruddiman in 1710 and David F. C. Coldwell between 1957 and 1964, and now by Priscilla Bawcutt and Ian C. Cunningham. […]

It is this loving “laubour” of scholarly publishing clubs, such as the Scottish Text Society, that ensures that literary works are preserved for posterity “per ordour” and “correk”. Copying and correcting are longsome work, but they are the closest embrace of any kind of criticism. As Gavin Douglas said, “The clerk reiosys hys bukis our [over] to seyn”. The well-ordered text of this edition was a labour of love, and will bring rejoicing.

I love knowing a good scholarly edition is out there, even if I will probably never consult it. (We discussed Douglas back in 2006.)

Comments

  1. Stu Clayton says

    it is hard not to hear the German langsam: “boring”

    The word means “slow”, not more and not less, and never anything else. In all senses of “slow”, including that of “slow-witted”. “Boring” is langweilig.

    How reliable is the smooth cleverness about other things, when he misunderstands a simple word in a bog-standard current language ? Is it merely a case of slightly overreaching himself ?

    One wrong note is disastrous in Old MacDonald Had A Farm rendered on a kazoo. One wrong note in an orchestral rendition might be tolerable.

  2. I wondered about that too, and am glad to have my suspicions confirmed. But Wakelin is Professor of Medieval English Palaeography, a profession in which he probably doesn’t require a great deal of German, so I think we can forgive him his slip. (I can easily see myself screwing up that fine language in a comparable way.)

  3. Stu Clayton says

    Well, at least he seems to think that German is something everyone ought to know, or sort-of know with an occasional reminder.

    On the other hand, I think that about 10 years ago I commented here on the atrocious proofreading of German book titles in the TLS. Seems that things haven’t improved. I wrote a couple OF Incensed-of-India letters to the editors, with nary a reply from them. I took this to be abashed silence, so was slightly mollified.

  4. John Cowan says

    The Dictionary of the Scots Language defines langsum thus (in its pre-1700 section): “Lengthy, protracted, long drawn out; tediously lengthy, tedious, wearisome. In various collocations.” In the modern Scots section there are two additional definitions:

    2. Lonely, forlorn, wearied with tedium.

    3. Tardy, dilatory.

  5. @John Cowan: Definition 2 looks like it involves contamination from lonesome.

    Separately: Why would Douglas’s prefatory sections be called “prologues”? To me, that makes them sound like they should be parts of Aeneas’s narrative.

  6. If “langsam” meant “boring” in German, composers from German-speaking parts of Europe would have thought twice before using it as a tempo marker. The much overplayed Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony is marked “Sehr langsam” at the beginning. Then “Molto rit.” (ritenuto or ritardando?) and “à Tempo” again, this time in Italian: “Molto Adagio.”

  7. Stu Clayton says

    The much overplayed Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony

    I agree, it’s boring.

  8. it is hard not to hear the German langsam: “boring”

    … or rather the Scandinavian word; Scots took much of its vocabulary from Old Norse, not German. It may be relevant to note that the Swedish word långsam had from early times a connotation of ‘boring’ or ‘tiresome’. See Svenska Akadamiens Ordbok:

    4) långtråkig, långrandig (se d. o. 2), ledsam; jfr LÅNG 7 a β; äv. i uttr. det är (förr äv. ngn har) långsamt efter ngn. Bureus Suml. 45 (c. 1600). Dhet är så långsampt för migh sade lättingen. Törning 29 (1677). (Han) skulle henne tilfrågat om tijden varit långsam i hans frånvaro. VDAkt. 1699, nr 251. Nu har jag litet långsamt efter min kamrat. EHellzén (1804) hos Dahlgren Släktprof. 1: 81. Vår väntan blef lång, men vi behöfde ej ha långsamt. Ericson Fågelkås. 2: 144 (1907). Det är så långsamt efter dig. Blomberg Uvd. 173 (1917).

    Although the dictionary of Scots (https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/dost/langsum) gives its etymology as Middle English:

    Langsum, a. Also: layng- and -su(i)me, -some, -sam.
    [North. ME. langsum, midl. and south. long-, OE. langsum. Cf. Longsome.]

    1. Lengthy, protracted, long drawn out; tediously lengthy, tedious, wearisome. In various collocations.

  9. I’ve discovered a convenient online version (from the University of Michigan Library) of a 1553 edition of the Eneados.

  10. I’ve recently had occasion to cite this text on Quora (where I now sojourn). It contains the earliest attestation of scone. https://www.quora.com/How-come-some-British-people-pronounce-the-word-scone-as-though-it-rhymes-with-gone-while-others-use-a-pronunciation-closer-to-cone/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5

  11. Very interesting, thanks!

  12. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    FWIW, Danish langsom has no hint of tedium. Den langsomme sats = ‘the slow movement’ of some symphony is just the one with the fewest beats per minute, nothing else. (Of course there are metaphorical uses; if you don’t want to call someone stupid you could say lidt langsom. But ikke så hurtig is more likely. [When deprecating or praising, Danish is never superlative]).

    I don’t remember Sw långsam being used other than literally, either, but it was clearly the case in earlier days.

    On the other hand, Da sløv (cognate with E slow) means “dull” of an edge, and anything from “indolent” over “laggard” to “dullard” of people. (And again, ikke den skarpeste kniv i skuffen = ‘not the sharpest knife in the drawer’ is traditional).

    TIL that there’s another sløv that means ‘sneaky’ vel sim.. Or used to be, I don’t remember encountering it. (Swedish cognates slö and slug, respectively).

  13. David Marjanović says

    …wait, is schlau “smart” cognate with…

    Anyway, langsam in isolation can’t even mean “slow-witted”; you’d have to extend it to langsam von Begriff or something (“slow on the uptake”), and that would be much less idiomatic than schwer von Begriff.

  14. … wait, is schlau “smart” cognate with…

    No. Schlau and Du sluw are etymological nativizations of Low German slû ‘id.’ The original sense was probably ‘sneaking, creeping’. English sly, despite the apparent identity of sound and sense, is borrowed from ON slǿgr ‘able to strike’; WP says the latter is a vrddhied gerundive of PGmc or PNGmc slahaną.

    Of the OED’s quotations s.v. longsome, the transition from ‘slow’ to ‘tedious’ comes around 1700 (I’ve deleted the Scots examples):

    a1656 Bp. J. Hall Shaking of Olive-tree (1660) ii. 401 To demonstrate this in particulars, were a long-some task.

    c1704 M. Prior Henry & Emma 371 We tread with weary steps the longsome plain.

    1765 Public Ledger (London) 5 Oct. 4/2 Here, as the tomes of learning, I survey, A longsome list of Heroes, Poets, Kings, Presents itself to view.

    1842 F. Trollope Visit to Italy I. i. 4 The longsome interval between leaving Paris and arriving at Lyons.

  15. Stu Clayton says

    Anyway, langsam in isolation can’t even mean “slow-witted”; you’d have to extend it to langsam von Begriff or something (“slow on the uptake”),

    No word “in isolation” means anything. If you try to disprove this by pointing to a dictionary entry for the word, for instance, you are associating the word with other words to show “what it means”. You are demonstrating that no word “in isolation” means anything.

    Anyway, consider ein langsamer Mensch, of whom it can also be said er ist langsam. He is slow of limb and wit.

    I used “slow-witted” upthread in an attempt to mark the metaphorical sense of “slow” as distinct from the physical one (although relatable by a chain of thoughts).

  16. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    Well, according to Hellquist D schlau is in fact cognate with Sw slug. But I mixed up the Danish words. The second sløv is in fact cognate with E sly (and older and dialectal Sw slög); there is another obsolete Danish word slu that is cognate with schlau/slug.

  17. David Marjanović says

    Ah, that’s why schlau is a northern word…

    Anyway, consider ein langsamer Mensch, of whom it can also be said er ist langsam. He is slow of limb and wit.

    That’s new to me.

  18. To me, too; If someone used langsam to mean slow-witted specifically (as opposed to physical slowness or slowness in reaction or response) I’d probably get it given enough context, but it’s not an interpretation I am used to.

  19. Stu Clayton says

    given enough context

    Crossword puzzle sites tell you that one solution to the clue “ein langsamer Mensch” is Trödler. The word does not usually imply er hat eine lange Leitung, I would say. This last phrase is in the same euphemistic ball park as schwer von KP. Just as is er ist ein langsamer Schüler, said by a teacher.

    slow-witted specifically (as opposed to physical slowness or slowness in reaction or response)

    “Slow-witted” to me means “slow in thought processing”, as judged by the time it takes for an expected response to occur. It does not mean “dumb”.

    Sometimes someone will say something to me that i immediately grasp as stupid, impertinent, passive-aggressive etc. If I spend too much time deciding on a suitable response, I might seem stupid. So I say “fuck off”.

  20. Stu Clayton says

    Ran out of edit time. What I give is a quick response of a fancy kind, buying time to show I’m not slow-witted while pumping my gun. Something like “hau ab, du passiv-aggressive Impertinenzbestie” [one of my standards]. Another is “impertinentes Stück Scheiße !”

    These are remarkably effective in stunning the punter, who doesn’t know what to respond and shows himself to be slow-witted ! Turn the table and shove hard.

  21. PlasticPaddy says

    Slow-witted vs. dumb: an acquaintance was asked during an interview for a position as University lecturer: What would you teach in a second-year analysis class? After quite a long pause, the candidate replied: “That would depend on what was taught in the first-year.” Unfortunately he did not get the job and was not “being smart”, that is how his mind worked.

  22. Stu Clayton says

    Interviews can pose problems of just this kind. But they are problems only if you let them be. In a interview you can learn things that suggest terminating it.

    Off and on over the last few years I have played through imaginary situations in which I am being interviewed for an IT job. I know quite a lot about coding issues in Java, “programming patterns”, formal algorithms etc. But there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know, of course.

    If an interviewer puts trick questions about obscure details of Java, say, I would firmly decline continuing in this manner. Or about stuff I don’t deal with and don’t want to, such as shift operators.

    From 16+ years of doing code reviews I know that programmers come up with the weirdest shit. It sometimes takes me half an hour to figure out what’s going on in a piece of code, due to some obscure “feature” being used that someone has learned about from stackoverflow. Then I show how to rewrite the code without the weird shit.

    That kind of thing sometimes makes me despair of my sanity. But I learn a lot from it – about code, myself and other people.

    Programmers and interviewers can do that to you. So I draw boundaries. “I have the impression that this company would not be a good fit for me.” It is a bad idea to go scared into a job interview.

  23. “Slow-witted” to me means “slow in thought processing”, as judged by the time it takes for an expected response to occur. It does not mean “dumb”.
    I don’t think that’s the issue here – I (and I guess DM, too) take “slow-witted” to mean the same. Our point is just that langsam doesn’t generally mean “slow-witted” in most contexts, only in those when we have to do with learning, response times, etc. If someone would tell me that someone is ein langsamer Mensch I’d assume that he takes his goddamn time for everything, not that he’s slow-witted. OTOH in your example with the langsamer Schüler, slow-witted would be my default interpretation, too.

  24. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    Trick questions are a bad sign. If I can tell them that you do something with a configuration setting or a subcommand that I don’t usually need and don’t remember what is called, that should be enough in these latter days of the search engine. But in Danish job interview, specific technical questions are not very common. It’s more about demonstrating a general understanding of the problem domain. And sincerity — once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

  25. Stu Clayton says

    And sincerity — once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.

    In all walks of life. I remember, decades ago, believing that to be sincere I had to be sincere. The extravagances of youth !

  26. I am still under the impression that to be asleep I have to be asleep, but perhaps I am wrong about this.

  27. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    I saw a program once about truck drivers who were driving their trucks while clinically asleep. Obviously not safe or legal. since they were probably not reading signs they were not used to seeing, but doing enough from sheer routine to keep the truck on the road on their known route.

    And on the other hand, I just read some advice to people with sleeping problems that just lying in your bed and thinking about sleeping will actually rest you physically. You also need REM sleep, but you can live longer without it.

  28. You also need REM sleep, but you can live longer without it.

    I’m not clear on what this means.

  29. I am still under the impression that to be asleep I have to be asleep, but perhaps I am wrong about this.

    If you keep still and Matron is not suspicious person, you are asleep as far as she is concerned. That’s also the case when you’re asleep.

    One difficulty about sincerity is that protestations of sincerity create suspicion (except in gullible people). Protestations expose you to Motivverdacht. If other people see you as being sincere, that must suffice. They may change their mind over time, depending on how you act, but in that case a “Trust me!” in the past will merely have made things worse.

    What you do counts, what you say is pfft by comparison. Talking heads tend to forget this.

  30. With my current medication regimen, I have discovered that I can be in a liminal state, in between asleep and awake as I had previously experienced them. There are things that I can do in that state and others that I cannot, and it can persist for an hour or more (so it’s not just a transient phenomenon, not just part of the transition from asleep to back awake).

  31. David Marjanović says

    Crossword puzzle sites tell you that one solution to the clue “ein langsamer Mensch” is Trödler.

    That means “procrastinator” basically – someone who works slowly, but may or may not think slowly.

  32. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    You also need REM sleep, but you can live longer without it.

    I’m not clear on what this means.

    Rapid-eye-movement sleep. It happens while you’re dreaming. I think that there are about two 20-minute episodes per night.

  33. Stu Clayton says

    Even knowing what “REM sleep” is, as I do, the sentence is not clear.

    “You also need X, but you can live longer without it”

    The claim is that X is needed – but for what ? One assumes “in order to live”, or maybe only “in order to live without severe physical and/or mental problems”. So then what does “you can live longer without it” mean ? If you can live without it, you don’t need it – in contradiction to the first clause of the claim.

    One last question remains: live longer than what ? Than you would have lived with X ? What then is X “needed” for if you can live longer without it than with it ??

  34. PlasticPaddy says

    I took this to mean “one can live longer in a state of REM-sleep deprivation than in a state of total sleep deprivation”, which DE or any other medic might like to confirm.

  35. David Marjanović says

    I think that there are about two 20-minute episodes per night.

    The Pffft! of All Knowledge: “REM and non-REM sleep alternate within one sleep cycle, which lasts about 90 minutes in adult humans. As sleep cycles continue, they shift towards a higher proportion of REM sleep. […] REM sleep occurs 4 times in a 7 hour sleep.”

  36. Rapid-eye-movement sleep. It happens while you’re dreaming. I think that there are about two 20-minute episodes per night.

    Yes, I know that, but as Stu says, the whole thing makes no sense: “You need X, but you can live longer without it” (for any value of X).

  37. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    clear — What I’ve been told is that you can keep alert and functioning with a certain amount of cat naps, but your brain needs REM sleep to organize what you’ve experienced, and if you don’t get it you effectively go crazy. But it takes longer.

  38. Stu Clayton says

    But it takes longer [to go crazy]

    Longer THAN WHAT ? Than it takes when you get REM sleep ? So we all go crazy sooner or later, and REM sleep helps to make it later ?

    I’ll need to see a few “scientific studies” before I’ll swallow that. Of course I reserve the right to spit it out, with or without studies. I call bullmeme.

  39. Jen in Edinburgh says

    You need both food and water, but you can live longer without food. I don’t really get what’s so weird about the idea that some things are fatal quicker than others.

  40. Stu Clayton says

    Jen, you’re changing the subject.

    Until now, there was a claim involving one thing – REM sleep – and the consequences of having it or not having it. Now you introduce two things: food and water. You can live longer not having food than you can live not having water, you say. That’s an intelligible statement. The one about REM sleep is still unintelligible.

    Seems to me a lot of people here aren’t getting enough REM sleep, but feel just fine.

  41. It was all too much for me, so I took a nap.

  42. Stu Clayton says

    A wise decision. I still have miles to go before I sleep. The forces of obscurantism have gathered in the gazebo, so I need to remain alert.

  43. Lars Mathiesen says

    Stu, total sleep deprivation will make you useless because you can’t concentrate or react in a timely manner. It’s not fatal as such, but it greatly increases the risk of walking in front of a bus or crashing your car. REM deprivation, as I understand it, will end up by making you irrational (maybe hallucinating or deciding that you can fly), but on a longer time scale.

  44. I agree with Jen. The claim is that lack of only REM sleep is less harmful than total lack of sleep. What is odd about that? It’s analogous to saying lying outside naked exposed to 5C air temperature will kill you less quickly than being exposed to -30C, but you will eventually die either way.

  45. Stu Clayton says

    I, at least, said nothing about “odd”, “fatal”, “harmful” or their opposites. What I said is that I can’t get any sense out of the string of words

    (A)
    “You also need X, but you can live longer without it”

    Not even when X = “REM sleep”. The natural assumption here is that “it” refers to “X”. If it does, (A) is unintelligible. If it doesn’t, (A) is badly phrased and unintelligible.

    Of course one can change the subject, and write:

    The claim is that lack of only REM sleep is less harmful than total lack of sleep.

    Unfortunately, that sentence contradicts what Lars, the originator of (A), wrote in a later comment:

    #
    Stu, total sleep deprivation will make you useless because you can’t concentrate or react in a timely manner. It’s not fatal as such, but it greatly increases the risk of walking in front of a bus or crashing your car. REM deprivation, as I understand it, will end up by making you irrational (maybe hallucinating or deciding that you can fly), but on a longer time scale.
    #

    No one has addressed the unintelligibility of (A), except for me and Hat. (A) is unintelligible, not “right” or “wrong” or “odd”.

    (A) originally was a sentence purporting to say something about “REM sleep” as a value of X. What it says, is not clear. This has made it possible for a lot of opinions on “REM sleep” to be offered precisely because (A) is unintelligible, so I guess everybody’s happy at having made a contribution.

    By what syntactic and lexical means (A) expresses any of those opinions remains shrouded in mystery.

  46. David Marjanović says

    (A) implies very clearly that you need sleep to live; you also need REM sleep specifically, but you can live without it for longer than you can without sleep in general.

    Not syntax, not lexis. Context. 😐

  47. (A) implies very clearly

    Not to me it doesn’t. Like Stu, I’m baffled that people don’t see the problem with that sentence.

  48. Stu Clayton says

    Apparently there is a doctrine being practiced here, to the effect that context trumps unintelligibility. How you say what you say, need not help others to understand what you mean. It can be a mere pretext for saying further things in the context.

    Unintelligibility promotes a culture of democratic discussion. Everyone can chime in.

  49. Stu Clayton says

    Hat, there is a possible explanation for what we’re seeing here, which after consultation with a shrink I must admit seems extremely unlikely.

    That is: alien brain rays emanating from Washington DC have modified the cognitive modules of almost everyone, so that they can no longer recognize nonsense. You and I must have been standing behind shelves of aluminum foil rolls when that happened.

  50. I think that’s extremely plausible.

    *runs off to make tinfoil hat*

  51. January First-of-May says

    And on the other hand, I just read some advice to people with sleeping problems that just lying in your bed and thinking about sleeping will actually rest you physically. You also need REM sleep, but you can live longer without it.

    FWIW, after some long considerations on the sheer pragmatic implausibility of the otherwise obvious meaning of the last clause, I did eventually settle on (effectively) PlasticPaddy’s interpretation: “one can live longer in a state of REM-sleep deprivation than in a state of total sleep deprivation”.

    It basically works like this:
    – you also need REM sleep (and it will be very bad if you don’t have it)
    but just lying in your bed and thinking about sleeping will actually rest you physically
    so you can live longer without [REM sleep] if you rest physically by lying in your bed and thinking about sleeping [than if you do not] (but actual REM sleep would still eventually be required, see above)

    But yeah, it’s very weirdly phrased, and I had to think carefully about how it could possibly make sense to figure out this interpretation – and only after having to figure out that the natural interpretation(s) is/are pragmatically nonsensical.

  52. I think the Don’t-get-it faction are ignoring the force of also. You also need REM sleep means ‘You need REM sleep in addition to Y’. Now what is Y here? There is no explicit answer in Lars’s comment, but I think it safe to infer that Y = ‘sleep that rests you physically’. Now the previous sentence says that merely lying down is equivalent to Y, so it is already in the context, even though not explicitly so. I only worked this out just now, but I immediately intuited Lars’s sentence in this sense without effort.

  53. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    I can only say that I’m happy to have provided a piece of prose on which the multitudes here assembled were able to hone their powers of textual criticism. If anybody were trying to teach me what I should have written instead, I sadly missed it.

  54. Stu Clayton says

    If anybody were trying to teach me what I should have written instead, I sadly missed it.

    I did try:

    The natural assumption here is that “it” refers to “REM sleep”

    in

    You also need REM sleep, but you can live longer without it.

    Pronoun trouble ! Does Danish place fewer demands on referential integrity ? I see a bright future for pro-drop. Pro-drop will also placate gendering activists. Just repeat the damn noun, don’t try to pro the damn noun.

  55. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    The natural assumption here is that “it” refers to “REM sleep” — Yes, and wasn’t that what you all concluded that I meant? At least I think that’s what it should refer to. I saw more confusion about what it was being compared to. Rather, what the length of life its lack allows was being compared to.

    Is this intelligible?:

    You also need REM sleep, but you can live longer without REM sleep than without any physical relaxation at all

    If so, I’m curious why my original version doesn’t work, given that “physical relaxation” was the subject of the preceding sentence..

  56. It doesn’t work that way. The “it” is restricted to material in the sentence in which it appears. At least for me and Stu.

  57. David Marjanović says

    The “it” is restricted to material in the sentence in which it appears.

    And indeed it refers to the REM sleep in the same sentence. It’s the comparative longer that refers to material outside the same sentence, and indeed to material outside the entire text (longer [than you can live without] sleep in general/nREM sleep).

    The sentence is badly written in the sense that I’d suggest editing it if given the power of peer review: everything that slows the readers down is bad in a scientific paper. Nonetheless, context makes the meaning of the sentence clear.

  58. Nonetheless, context makes the meaning of the sentence clear.

    To you, maybe, but since others are completely at a loss, you might not want to sound so definitive about it.

  59. Stu Clayton says

    Some progress is being made. I get an impression of raised hats [Firbank].

  60. Stu Clayton says

    Nonetheless, context makes the meaning of the sentence clear.

    It seems that way because, when you are already familiar with the subject (context), you don’t need to pay close attention to the formulations of the sentences you read. Context doesn’t “make the sentences clear”, it allows you to skate over them.

    That’s exactly why proofreading is best done by someone other than the author.

  61. Lars Mathiesen (he/him/his) says

    Ah, I think I see a possible garden path problem, or maybe that’s the wrong name — is it a reading like “you can live longer if you avoid REM sleep than if you do get REM sleep” that interferes with the one I intended?

  62. David Marjanović says

    It seems that way because, when you are already familiar with the subject (context), you don’t need to pay close attention to the formulations of the sentences you read. Context doesn’t “make the sentences clear”, it allows you to skate over them.

    Yes.

  63. For what it’s worth, I also found (A) unintelligible, and even now that I know what it was supposed to mean, it seems ill formed.

  64. For what it’s worth, I also immediately got what Lars meant, because that was the interpretation that made sense; it took Stu’s and Hat’s incomprehension to see that the wording of the sentence was problematic. Confirms again a lesson that took me a long time to learn – a) that something is clear to me doesn’t mean it’s clear to everybody else and b) no, that doesn’t mean everybody else is stupid or wilfully obtuse. Learning that lesson has made my life much easier.

  65. PlasticPaddy says

    @hans
    Very well put.

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