Having moved to Pittsfield, I naturally made it a priority to get a library card (the library is wonderfully called the Athenaeum), and the first order of business once I had it was to check out a few local histories. I have just begun reading The History of Pittsfield, (Berkshire County,) Massachusetts, from the Year 1734 to the Year 1800, by J.E.A. Smith (1869, repr. [1990?]), and I cannot resist passing along this sentence and footnote from page 7:
On the heights where Greylock lifts the topmost summit of the State, along the valleys of the Hoosac and the Housatonic, up the rude but flower-fringed wood-roads which penetrate the narrowing opes¹ of the Green Mountains, beauty is everywhere the prevailing element.
¹ The reader will pardon to necessity the employment of a word of merely local authority and very infrequent use. A hope — or more descriptively, without the aspirate, an ope — is a valley, which, open at one end only, loses itself at the other, sloping upward to a point in the mass of the mountains. The word is quite indispensable in the description of scenery like that of Berkshire; and its disuse has resulted in the adoption of such vile substitutes as “hole,” “hollow,” or even worse. Thus we have Biggs’s Hole and Bigsby’s Hollow, or more probably “Holler.” Surely neatly descriptive ope should not be displaced by such abominable interlopers as these.
WEBSTER has “HOPE, n. — A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.] Ainsworth.” — But English local topographical writers sometimes use the word in the sense given it in the text.
Now, that’s interesting enough, but when I went to the OED (a resource not yet available to the good Mr. Smith), I found entries for both spellings—with no indication that they are related.
The second noun hope:
[OE. hop app. recorded only in combination (e.g. fenhop, mórhop: see sense 1). It is doubtful whether all the senses belong orig. to one word. With sense 3 cf. ON. hóp ‘a small land-locked bay or inlet, salt at flood tide and fresh at ebb’ (Vigf.).]
1. A piece of enclosed land, e.g. in the midst of fens or marshes or of waste land generally.
2. A small enclosed valley, esp. ‘a smaller opening branching out from the main dale, and running up to the mountain ranges; the upland part of a mountain valley’; a blind valley. Chiefly in south of Scotl. and north-east of England, where it enters largely into local nomenclature, as in Hopekirk, Hopetoun, Hope-head, Dryhope, Greenhope, Ramshope, Ridlees Hope, etc.
And the entry ope, a. and n, definition B.2.a:
2. a. Eng. regional (south-west.). An opening; spec. a narrow, usually covered, passage between houses; = OPEWAY n.
Note the 1886 citation: W. BARNES Gloss. Dorset Dial. 85 Ope, an opening in the cliffs down to the water side. Coincidence, or a misplaced unaspirated form?
Perhaps frequent commenter Eliza can provide information as to whether either of these forms is still in use.
Incidentally, the Smith book is the source of the recent fuss about Pittsfield having the first recorded reference to baseball in America; as the SportsLine story says:
The evidence comes in a 1791 bylaw that aims to protect the windows in Pittsfield’s new meeting house by prohibiting anyone from playing baseball within 80 yards of the building…
Historian John Thorn was doing research on the origins of baseball when he found a reference to the bylaw in an 1869 book on Pittsfield’s history.
And there it is, at the top of pate 447: “…the exterior [of the meeting-house] was protected by a by-law forbidding ‘any game of wicket, cricket, base-ball, bat-ball, foot-ball, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball,’ within eighty yards of the precious structure.” Whatever they were playing in Pittsfield in 1791, however, it was certainly not the game of baseball as we know it, which was created (in primitive form) by Alexander Cartwright half a century later in Manhattan, true home of the game [just one of the forms taken by the English game of the same name, which was brought to America in the eighteenth century and developed various names, including “townball” and “roundball,” and various regional rules and styles of play; see David Block’s Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game].
The words don’t appear in any dialect book I have, lh, so I would have assumed that if they’re used at all, it’s in relation to topography, as you suggest. However, I’ve just found at least one reference to “ope” meaning “an opening” –
Does a fountain send out, the verb “send out” means to burst forth or to gush, from the same opening the same ope, the same hole or split in the rock fresh water and bitter water? http://www.biblebb.com/files/MAC/59-18.htm
I also found elsewhere the origin of the names of two villages I’m familiar with, both in north east England: Burnhope (apparently from hope, a valley) and Burnopfield (apparently from ope, also, according to the author, meaning valley). However, I don’t know how reliable the research is. These villages have much in common geographically, which could mean that ope and hope were at that point used interchangeably. SOED on the other hand, links ope to the noun open, meaning open space, which is apparently ME in origin, from the verb open, sense 2, meaning “not shut up” (among other meanings listed).
The following accords more with your citation:
The word `hope’ which occurs in the names of these streams is of Anglo-Saxon origin and means `side valley’. Hope-Burns are also very common in the dales of Northumberland but the Anglo-Saxon word hope is not so common in the stream names of the old Viking territory of Teesdale to the south http://www.thenortheast.fsnet.co.uk/Weardale.htm
So it appears the two words originally had two distinct meanings – “ope” possibly meant a fissure in a rock(?) and “hope” meant a valley, but these distinctions have since on the whole been blurred.
Unless someone out there knows better …
Edit: No. It appears that ope originally meant an open space and hope originally meant a valley. I was misled by my first citation, which happens to be the most recent. It’s late and I need sleep.
Aha! So, now I have a new understanding of a place in West Chatham County, on Rte 17 south from Savannah– Silk Hope.
Thanks, ‘Hat!
place names woth hope in them are also fairly fairly common in Scottish borders eg Stanbhope in Tweedale. Most of the places I can call to mind seem to fit the side valley idea fairly well.
I came across your site when searching for the origin of “ope”. There are no less than 10 places called Ope on the coast of Portland, e.g. Church Ope, Broad Ope, Longstone Ope, Big Ope etc. These are ancient and may have Scandinavian origins – they are all recessed beaches (coves), landing places or access ways: This points to ‘ope’ being an opening for landing, and I am sure William Barnes was right. Portland itself is an historic place -inhabited since mesolithic times; it was settled by the Romans, and has been a royal manor since before the Conquest. It is now generally accepted as being scene of the first Viking raids on England.
Could the OE meaning have an earlier Scandinavian derivation?
it was certainly not the game of baseball as we know it, which was created (in primitive form) by Alexander Cartwright half a century later in Manhattan, true home of the game.
Sigh. In those early days I was still in thrall to the Cartwright myth; in fact, he did not in any sense, primitive or not, create baseball, which has an unbroken line of ascent back to England (Jane Austen mentions it). See Richard Hershberger’s comment from last year on the difficulty of correcting Wikipedia on this point.
Could this dialectal English hope be cognate with German Hof ‘farm, farmstead’?
@ml
http://kepn.nottingham.ac.uk/map/place/Durham/Stanhope
Gives for stanhope the final element hop = a valley; a remote enclosed place; a piece of enclosed land in a fen; an enclosure in marsh or moor
This is just one place, but it looks promising in sense “enclosed place” for comparison with Hof.
No, not cognate, because Hof (pl. Höfe) has a short /f/, preserved from Proto-Germanic (and correspondingly a long vowel nowadays*); Dutch hof, Norwegian hov. The German Wiktionary article has the details from Guus Kroonen’s etymological dictionary of Germanic (2013). The “language-internal cognate Haufen” mentioned at the end is only a root cognate; its direct English cognate is heap, with a Proto-Germanic *p from a *pp that was shortened in a long syllable and comes from PIE *pn. (Courts, farms and the like used to be on hills. Sometimes anyway.)
* Except in the last name Hoffmann. I think the ff is purely cosmetic, like a lot of ck were in earlier centuries, and has given the vowel a spelling-pronunciation. Maybe the name is actually from far enough north, though, that the lengthening of vowels in monosyllabic words didn’t reach it, and the ff is meant to mark the vowel as short.
Northern German Hof with short /o/. Despite what you may think seeing the name of the song, the singer isn’t singing in Frisian, but in Plattdeutsch.
Oh! A useful reminder that the lengthening of monosyllabic words hasn’t reached that far – and that it really is independent of the lengthening of stressed open syllables, which started in that very area (and hasn’t reached Switzerland).
Unchanged [ɛ] in “rain”!
Interesting how the /r/ approaches [ɹ] sometimes. There is an accent in Austria that does this.
Supporting Eliza’s conclusions from 2005, ope looks related to arch. Nyn. òp “opening”, ON op “opening; escape”.
Irregularities aside, hope “sheltered valley” would seem like a parallel formation to ON hóp/hópr “enclosed bay” (also a regular cognate of hoop). If or how these two are related to the “heap” word is beyond me.
But *[æː] (weht, dreht) has broken: it’s [aɪ̯].
Like in Icelandic.
That development has also affected /e:/ in loanwords; in the East Frisian Platt I know, “tea” is [taɪ̯] (Standard German Tee).
That occurs in the video, but I think there’s etymological nativization going on.
Tee is in fact /tɛ/ in (conservative versions of) my dialect, following the pattern of See and Schnee (/ɛ/ < MHG /ɛː/ by general loss of phonemic vowel length). Even OK has joined this pattern. MHG /æ(ː)/ had long become /a/ by then, so it wasn’t available; but if the Platt breaking of */æː/ happened, say, 300 years ago, tea might have sneaked in before that.
I was larnt /se:/ aso. in German class, and the lurkers (Wikt.en) agree. I wasn’t larnt Tee specifically, or maybe I repressed the memory after 44 years, but I would 100% use /e:/. (IPA value, close-mid).
(‘Sea’ is Da sø from ON sær, PG saiwi it seems. ON has side forms with breaking: sjór, sjár. OId Danish has sio/syo, but I think that’s partly a spelling convention that’s opaque to me).
You should have been taught /ze:/. The only common word in German starting with /s/+V is the relatively recent loan Sex; some speakers even extend this pronunciation to the related older loans like sexuell and Sexualität. In the 1960s, some older speakers would pronounce Sex as a homonym of sechs.
Which is the correct pronunciation in Standard German.
Yes, DM was talking about his dialect.
Yes. Absolutely [e:] in the standard.
Not the entire standard has a [z], though…
I was reading DM as trying to conclude something about Frisian breaking from the value of the vowel in some German standard, and I assumed that his Viennese dialect was too far away (geographically) to be relevant.
Teaching Danes to use a /z/ is a fool’s errand, though, so it’s absent from most forms of German teaching here. Lucky that some forms of Standard also omit it.
But listen to any Danish politician trying to speak English, and you’ll hear. The lack of voicing really sticks out. (Also unaffricated ch, I believe, but some people do manage to learn that).
(Singers seem to have an easier time of it, but it was only when I was studying that Mozart aria that I really noticed that I was missing something).
Ah…
1) As Hans mentioned, the Frisian language probably has nothing to do with it; it’s about the Sea-Level German spoken in East Frisia* for over 400 years now.
2) On one hand, my dialect** is indeed too far away to be relevant. On the other, it evidently shares with Low German the lack of an innovation that is found throughout Standard German and apparently a lot of Central German (from southwest to east at least): the redistribution of MHG/MLG [ɛ e ɔ o œ ø] according to the new vowel lengths (so that short = lax and long = tense) following the lengthening of stressed open syllables in particular.
3) Lack of [z] is a feature of south of the White-Sausage Equator minus stage pronunciation. Consonant length survives in most of this area, so intervocalic /z/ and /s/ remain distinct as /s/ and /sː/ (as the spelling suggests). Stage pronunciation is very strictly defined and has no geographic variation, and has [z] and lacks consonant length, but is limited to upscale theaters and professional singing.
* Except for one island in the sea till 1850/1950 and one island in the bog.
** Not Viennese, but identical for this purpose.
is stage german associated with a particular region? (the way stage yiddish was, i’m told, more-or-less voliner yiddish, which i think is one of the varieties with the fewest vowel mergers, so theoretically comprehensible to everyone – unless it’s just a founder-effect thing, which is totally plausible)
There was actually an official conference about this 1898.
This was basically what Goethe had told Eckermann — actors from Northern Germany had the best pronunciation.
The Bühnenaussprache as such (as codified by Siebs) has been basically dead since WWII; you sometimes can hear it in dubbed movies from the post war period with older voice actors. It sounds stilted and artificial. Since then actors use a pronunciation they or their director feel is appropriate for the part.
Some time ago I heard a radio recording of Thomas Mann from the early 1930s (talking about his favourite music), and his pronunciation was almost identical the modern standard pronunciation.
A few years ago I had a young co-worker from Bavaria — his pronunciation was basically identical to mine.
Half of its features are very northern*; the other half consists of deliberate artificial adapations to stage acoustics.**
Tobias Moretti uses it in his movies and TV series regardless of what role he plays. (Really jarring in Kommissar Rex.) He’s from Tyrol, but you’d never guess he’s from Austria or anywhere near. The reason is that, in addition to his movie career, he’s a Burgschauspieler – an actor at the Burgtheater in Vienna, the most upscale theater of… ha, Austria… the entire former monarchy ever since the Scala was lost. He’s played Faust and all.
That said, he (and AFAIK everyone else) uses [ʀ], which Siebs didn’t allow yet.
Conversely, one artificial feature that was decided “at a conference on theater pronunciation held in Berlin from April 14 to 16 of 1898” has escaped and is now widespread (with less extreme phonetics, see the second footnote) in northern Standard accents: g is [g], with syllable-final fortition to [kʰ], except that -ig is [ɪç] because that’s louder, except that you get dissimilation to [ikʰlɪç] for -iglich (königlich “kingly, royal, regal”). As presented at the link, there have been hilarious papers and book chapters by phonologists that tried to explain this weird feature of “the German sound system” or “the Standard German sound system”, which simply isn’t what this is. What it is is mixing & matching different features from different then-Standard accents to serve acoustics and aesthetics.
(Google and Ecosia didn’t find that one, BTW; DuckDuckGo did. Yay… Microsoft, I guess.)
* Possibly partially explained by the fact that Siebs was born in Bremen, on the coast, and grew up on the North-Frisian-speaking island of Helgoland. But he was an actual historical-comparative linguist, so it’s not like he didn’t know anything else.
** Examples: maximum possible distance between fortes and lenes – fortes aspirated in all positions, even finally, lenes consistently voiced; ei au eu end in tense vowels, [ae̯ ao̯ oø̯].
As Hans mentioned, the Frisian language probably has nothing to do with it; it’s about the Sea-Level German spoken in East Frisia* for over 400 years now.
The singer, Knut Kiesewetter, actually grew up and spent most of his life in North Frisia (he was born in Stettin, in the part of Pomerania that became Polish after WW II.) So I assume he sings North Frisian Platt, but it’s similar enough to East Frisian Platt for me to understand. For those who don’t have their Frisias straight – North Frisia is the Easternmost AND Northernnmost Frisia, North of Hamburg and South of Denmark; East Frisia is in the West of Germany on the Dutch border, and West Frisia is in the Netherlands.