Frequent commenter Catanea writes me (I have added links):
Today, in preparation for an upcoming course, my husband was transliterating a manuscript page, of the Puer natus… bit of a Gradual. That leaf said:
“Puer natus est nobis et filius datus est nobis cuius imperium sup[er] humerum eius et vocabitur nomen eius magni consilij angelus y Cantate domino canticum novum quia miribilia fecit. Gloria. Evo vae R Viderunt om…»
(with music). […] Despite about a century of manuscript study, somehow we had both missed «evo vae» until now. It turns out to be a «mnemonic» [those are scare-quotes. It wouldn’t help me remember] for Saecula saeculorum, or Saeculorum Amen, or…
As «euouae» Wikipedia – or Collins dictionaries – classes it as an English word (useful in scrabble).
But nothing has told us where it came from, how it got there. No etymology. Do you know? Does anyone at the Hattery?
I do not, so I pass it along to the assembled Hatters, adding that it is unknown to the OED. I mention also that the pronunciation, /juː.ˈuː.iː/ yew-OO-ee, is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard. Do people actually say that?
My favourite not-immediately-transparent mediaeval mnemonics are those for logical syllogisms:
https://medievallogic.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/syllogism-mnemonics/
They do work, but they inspire in me a similar feeling to traditional UK medical school anatomy mnemonics (possibly a lost artform in degenerate days.) By age-old tradition (probably going back to Galen) they have to be obscene. They, too, work, but I tended to find it easier to remember the anatomy than the mnemonic sometimes.
An example I recall from my youth:
[Ah: All this has happened before on LH, and all this will happen again]
https://languagehat.com/doctors-slang/#comment-90664
Comparing Aeuia = hallelujah (vowels only)
I would take euouae = s(a)eculorum amen (vowels only)
That is actually given as the explanation. I think the question is the origin of the convention.
The most familiar of these opaque mediaeval musical conventions has to be the gamut:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ut_queant_laxis
I was astonished when I first learnt that the names weren’t just all arbitrarily invented.
In the WP sample, there are three melodic endings, with the words of the latter two abbreviated to euouae. But the melodies differ only in the Amen. It seems like ae would have sufficed.
I think the question is the origin of the convention.
I suppose the purpose of the convention is to save precious parchment.
That “e” is treated as *the* vowel (singular) of the first syllable is interesting. Not surprising, since it presumably is a result of the same process by which Latin “saecularis” became English “secular” (via OFr “seculer”), but still interesting.
If the first e is for sæc- then the acronym should really be æuouae, which would extend the Guinness Consecutive Vowel record to seven.
What’s more peculiar is the “Gloria. Evo vae.” Presumably “Gloria” is short for “Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto,” which is very common, both for that word-string and as an example of using the opening word(s) (“incipit”) as a short form of the longer text. What’s rather weirder is apparently using “Evo vae” not just to stand for “saecolurum. Amen,” but for the entire “Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et sempter, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.” It’s like the reverse of an incipit by using (in mnemonic reduction) the end of the line for the whole thing.
I guess they could be using the beginning and end of the *whole* thing to represent the *whole* thing, rather than denoting its halves separately? I don’t know enough about medieval Latin hymnody to know how common or uncommon it was for some other text to be inserted between the Gloria etc. half and the Sicut erat etc. half. That’s pretty common in Byzantine psalmody, such that when abbreviating you would, in a context where nothing intervened between the two halves, give the abbreviated version (incipits in both cases) for both halves to make that clear.
The Etymology of AOI and AE discusses the possible connection of AOI in Chanson de Roland to EUOUAE and AEUIA = Alleluia.
Differentiae Database seems to have the scoop:
mnemonics … for logical syllogisms
Yes, I could recite “Barbara Celarent Darii Ferioque …” back in the day. (Seems a little different from your link.) And decode what they mean. There’s not as much to decode as you might think: the consonants apart from the first in each word are there for decoration/to make the hexameters work.
@JWB, mollymooly: in medieval Latin, “e” for etymological “ae” is a very usual spelling; “ae” must have ceased to be a diphthong and merged with short /e/ in the early centuries AD.
Hans and others: we actually have evidence that AE remained a diphthong during the imperial era: see my comment (December 9 4:20) at this thread, and subsequent exchanges on the topic with various fellow hatters:
https://languagehat.com/the-uzhe/
Direct link to that comment.
@Etienne: well, “throughout” is perhaps too long – I would not bet any money that it was still a diphthong in the 3rd or 4th century AD. But 1st or 2nd century? Probably yes.
I learned On old Olympus’s towering top, a Finn and German vended some hops for the cranial nerves in high school and was surprised later to hear that med students learned Oh, oh, oh, to touch and feel…
…but XI is accessorius…?
(And VIII is sometimes acusticus… or even acusticolateralis because of the lateral-line organ of primarily-aquatic vertebrates…)
As Sheila lay flat …
Y said:
“ In the WP sample, there are three melodic endings, with the words of the latter two abbreviated to euouae. But the melodies differ only in the Amen. It seems like ae would have sufficed.”
In that sample the melodies may only differ in the Amen but there could be other chants where the differences include the “saeculorum” part. The custom of printing chants with “euouae” at the end would take that into account.
Most Gregorian chants fit into a system of 8 modes. Those modes include one or more traditional tones for singing psalms, canticles, the Gloria Patri, etc. The tones differ between modes but also within modes with the same or similar tones having various endings which is why the euouae is helpful to tell the singers which ending to sing. I could be misremembering but I believe the reason ( or one reason ) there are different endings is that if the singing continues after the Gloria Patri in that tone and/or mode, the singing flows more easily into the following chant ( depending on how the following chant begins, I think.)