From Susan Tallman’s NYRB review (archived) of a MOMA retrospective now on view at the Museum of Modern Art of the work of Ed Ruscha (an artist I’ve always liked):
For Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966), Ruscha mounted a motorized camera on the bed of his pickup truck (Google be not proud) and shot both sides of the two miles of Sunset Boulevard known as the Strip, then arranged the photos in strips along the top and bottom edges of a twenty-five-foot-long accordion-fold leporello.
I was unfamiliar with the term “leporello,” but Google quickly took me to Jill Ehlert’s 2015 “Book works” post, which explained:
The term leporello refers to printed material folded into an accordion-pleat style. Also sometimes known as a concertina fold, it is a method of parallel folding with the folds alternating between front and back. The name likely comes from the manservant, Leporello, in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Famed rogue and lover Don Giovanni (in Italian – also known as Don Juan in Spanish) has seduced so many women that when Leporello displays a tally of his conquests, it unfolds, accordion-style, into a shockingly long list. Many leporellos are used as a way of telling a story, while others are purely visual.
(There’s a nice illustration of such a book that Ehlert herself made; she’s a mixed-media artist in Cobble Hill, British Columbia.) I like the proposed derivation a lot; the word isn’t in any of my dictionaries (even the OED doesn’t know of it), so I can’t find out about its history, though Google Books finds a 1959 use in Ruth Zechlin’s The Complete Book of Handcrafts. Anyone know more about this charming word?
Not worth making a separate post of, but from the French noir Razzia sur la chnouf (chnouf is a slang term for hard drugs, apparently from German Schnupf ‘snuff’) I learned the Breton word kenavo ‘goodbye, au revoir,’ which Wiktionnaire says is “composé de ken, ma et vo.” I expect our resident Celticists to weigh in (is there a Welsh equivalent?).
W-aire quotes Deshayes, whose spelling is different: “Kennavo (qen na vezo, 1732), interj., au revoir, de ken + ma + vo.” It’s under “Ken (quen, 1499), adv., aussi, si, correspond au gallois cyn, de mêmes sens.” I suppose ma (assimilated to na in the example) is a subordinator, and vo~vezo is, says W-aire, “Forme mutée de la troisième personne du singulier du futur de l’indicatif du verbe bezañ «être».” In other words, ‘so it’ll be’?
I have known the Leporello for ages; it is included in German dictionaries. I always thought everyone (well everyone who cares about music) knew this aria (in German also known as Registerarie)..
I suppose that could be a relation of Gaelic mar sin leat, ‘like that with you’. Like *what* is never specified!
The word has come up here a couple times before. I doubt I would ever use it, but it is part of my passive vocabulary.
According to Ian Press’ Grammar of Modern Breton, ken na is “as long as, until”, and vo is the soft-mutated form of bo, 3rd sg future of “be.” (Welsh bo is actually subjunctive, but presumably it’s of the same origin. A slightly formal way of saying “goodbye” in Welsh is da boch chi “may you be good.”)
Ken is presumably cognate with either Welsh cyn “before” or cyn “as”; The na part is clearly nothing to do with the pronoun ma “my”; it seems to be equivalent to Welsh na “nor”, but if so, I don’t see why it’s got bleached of its negative sense.
Press confirms kenavo “goodbye”; apparently you can say kevo too. Perhaps if you’re really hip and happening.
[There was a fun object-based programming language called Kevo once upon a time. It only ran on Macs with the original kooky pre-Unix operating system though. I played with it a bit in the the olden days.]
Perhaps the bleaching of the negative sense of na (assuming that it really is the same etymon as Welsh na) is related to that weird Old French construction you get in e.g. plus fresche que n‘est rose “fresher than a rose is [not].” Come to that, weird modern French construction. Une chose plus commune qu’on ne pense.
Ah: Press says that “than” after a comparative is expressed by na if the next element is a subordinate clause. And it perhaps ought to have occurred to me that Welsh does that too, even before a NP: Gwell yw ffafr dda nag arian ac nag aur “Good regard is better than silver and than gold.” Maybe the French got it from us …
So, yes. It’s “than.” Or a subordinator, anyway. I think Deshayes probably just made a mistake with that “ma.”
Isn’t “than” after a comparative na in Welsh? Why bring in the Welsh negative na?
Favereau’s Grammaire de breton contemporain is nicely detailed. It explains kenavo as ‘jusqu’à ce que soit la “revoyure”…’.
“Les formes futures, en effet, gardent de nombreuses traces de l’ancien subjonctif présent qu’elles exprimaient naguère, comme en gallois (cf. ken ‘vo nos // cyn bo nos d’ici qu’il fasse nuit, & optatif da bo chi, cf. da ‘vo ganit tu seras bien aise < que tu sois… etc.). On peut même affirmer que c’est le subjonctif qui en breton actuel fait office de futur, plutôt que de prétendre que le futur rend en breton le subjonctif.” Maybe there’s a more modern description that does better without traditional categories, but this works.
I never mentally connected Welsh na “nor” and na “than” before. I think that they must be, at least in origin, the same word, though, They both cause spirant mutation of the next word, too, at least in Posh Welsh.
I wonder if the French empty negative after comparatives actually is a Celtic thing? Does that turn up elsewhere in Romance?
Apparently Breton na is followed by soft mutation, not spirant, but Breton seems to have a rather different distribution of the spirant mutation from Welsh anyway (it occurs after ma “my”, for example.)
I suppose “before night may come” is pretty close to “until night comes.”
The word has come up here a couple times before.
Great heavens, so it has. Once again I am impressed both by the infinite scope of the LH archives and by my ability to forget even such striking things as this.
And many thanks to everyone who has explicated the Breton construction!
Does that turn up elsewhere in Romance?
Spanish has a no expletivo somewhat like French’s ne explétif, and, indeed, used with some comparisons.
I never mentally connected Welsh na “nor” and na “than” before.
The OED isn’t sure that English “nor” meaning “than” is connected to the more familiar “nor”.
“Origin uncertain; perhaps a specific use of nor conj.1 Compare na conj., ne conj.2. Compare earlier or adv.1 A.II.2 (and for confusion of or and nor perhaps compare nor conj.1 I.4).”
It also says, “In recent use chiefly Scottish, Irish English, U.S. regional, and English regional.” Maybe I’ve never been in whatever U.S. regions it might still exist in.
@jf
Here are the citations in the H. Wentworth, “American Dialect Dictionary”, p.1944:
—
1871(1852) s.Ind., s.Ill., s.Ohio a’n’t worth no more nor a white one. Eggleston Hoos. Schoolm. 121; 70. 1880 Tenn. I likes ye better nor I does Becky. Murfree ‘Blue Ribbon.’ 1888 Ark. Thanet ‘Loaf of Peace.’ 1895 e.Canada N.B., N.S., Newfoundland He is taller nor me. 1909 n.w.Ark. He can’t do more norI can. 1911 e.Ky. He’s better nor you. 1925 w.cent.W.Va. ‘He is no more nor a chunk of a boy.’ ‘I bought those shoes no longer nor 3 weeks back.’ 1934 Dial. Web.
—
If you have access to DARE, you can probably get more information.
The terms leporello and concertina came up in the comments in the 2021 “The Shapira Affair” post, as well as in a subsequent online discussion. Moses Shapira claimed he had an ancient Deuteronomy-ish manuscript. Though his claim had a modern defender, I suggested that defending it by comparison to Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran) mss was not apt, because the claimed find spot was more distant from the Dead Sea, so wetter, and because the DSS were not in the form of a leporello.
The ‘Catalogue Aria’, as it’s called in English, is indeed well-known to opera lovers, but I’ve never associated the character Leporello with concertina folds.
Just looking at what happens after comparatives in Breton and Cornish: Welsh seems to be alone in using na before noun phrases.
Breton has na before subordinate clauses, but eget otherwise; Henry Lewis’ Llawlyfr Cernyweg Canol, “Handbook of Middle Cornish”*, has ages agis es ys eys, presumably all forms of the cognate of Breton eget, in all cases.
So this isn’t a pan-Brythonic thing at all. Perhaps it’s an independent development in Welsh and Breton, in which case maybe the Breton construction is after all modelled on French, especially as it does seem to turn up elsewhere in Romance.
Middle Cornish ys appears after kyns “before” as well: kyns ys coske = Welsh cyn cysgu “before sleeping.” So the comparative-like usage after “before” is common to Cornish and Breton, at any rate.
* I’ve got Wella Brown’s Grammar of Modern Cornish too, but the trouble with Modern Cornish is that you never know how much of it is real and how much is made up.
Aha! Welsh na after comparatives is not the same word as na “nor” after all.
In Middle Welsh, “than” after comparatives was not na but no:
a dyvu a Vrython wr
well no Chynon?
“did there come from the British a better man than Cynon?” (An excellent question.)
I should have thought of looking at Middle Welsh. I just assumed it was like modern Welsh in this.
Also, in MIddle Welsh, <kyn “before” takes no before pronouns (kyn no hynny “before that”) but not before nouns, and it later dropped out before pronouns as well. So the “before”-as-comparative theme does turn up.
Aha! Welsh na after comparatives is not the same word as na “nor” after all.
In Middle Welsh, “than” after comparatives was not na but no:
a dyvu o Vrython wr
well no Chynon?
“did there come from the British a better man than Cynon?”
(An excellent question.)
I should have thought of looking at Middle Welsh. I just assumed it was like modern Welsh in this.
Also, in Middle Welsh, kyn “before” takes no before pronouns (kyn no hynny “before that”) though not before nouns, and it later dropped out before pronouns as well. So the “before”-as-comparative theme does turn up.
Knowing which word to look up in GPC now, I discover a Middle Welsh noged “than”, which GPC tags as cognate with this mysterious Middle Cornish ages and Old Breton hacet, modern eged; it says that the Ushant dialect has negit.
GPC tentatively suggests than the -ed part is the same as yd, the commonest positive preverbal particle in Middle Welsh (which it relates to Latin ita, which never occurred to me.)
So I can after all see a sort of grand unified theory of Brythonic “than” taking shape. Though if Breton eged really is equivalent to a Welsh nog yd, Breton must in fact have generalised an originally preverbal form to use before NPs as well.
Wella Brown’s Modern Cornish grammar conjugates ages like a preposition, but as I say, I never know what to make of Modern Cornish. Lewis has nothing about that.
I always thought everyone (well everyone who cares about music) knew this aria (in German also known as Registerarie).
Of course I know the Catalogue Aria, but like Kate Bunting I’ve never associated it with concertina folds.
If no one has mentioned Irish (I forget and am too lazy to check), the first “hit” for ná on the Contemporary Irish corpus is
Tá níos mó ná é sin i gceist.
Trans [PP] More than that is involved.
Any etymology for it?
Wiktionary sez “From Old Irish indás (‘than (it) is’).”
Which Thurneysen has under 779 (a subsection of The Verb ‘To Be’: A. The Substantive Verb):
To provide supplementary info to Hat’s response:
From the RIA historical Corpus:
Aoinneach de shíol Ghaedhil Ghlais
Ní bhfuil i nÉirinn fhódghlais
Is fearr do foilceadh ‘ná thu
I bhfolaibh uaisle a Dhonnchadh.
2nd half of 17C–seems to indicate the writer thinks a vowel (i?) has been omitted before ná. There was a vowel in M. Ir and the eDIL has
indaas , indás = ind-n-taas `als das, was er ist,’ Thurn with the meaning ‘than’ with among others a citation
messa fria mbraithrea indate a nnamait `worse to their brethren than are their enemies,’ Ml. 100c26, where MI is “The Milan glosses on the Psalms”
messa fria mbraithrea indate a nnamait `worse to their brethren than are their enemies,’ Ml. 100c26, where MI is “The Milan glosses on the Psalms”
Available here on p. 340, under PSALMUS LXXVIII, translating “proditores autem æquati, immo prælati.”
Vedic न na ‘like’, literally ‘(although) not’ is also somewhere in this comparison as inequality space.
“Although not” -> “like.” That does seem like a possible pathway. I suppose after a comparative, there is in fact always an implication that the the things being compared are not the same.
Welsh equative adjectives are followed by â(g) (cystal ag aur “good as gold”) which seems to be the preposition “with”; it is also homophonous with a(c) “and” despite the spelling difference, and it really does seem to be all one original word. (You hear people say [ak] for ac, but that’s a spelling pronunciation denounced by the purists.)
According to Thurneysen, Old Irish had the accusative after equative adjectives and the dative after comparatives, with no intervening particle or preposition before a noun.v The oldaas and indaas forms only introduce a subordinate clause after a comparative.
There seems to be a common thread of clause-introducing particles getting coopted to introduce NPs after comparatives. Come to think of it, that’s true of “than” as well.
Interesting detail from Evans’ very nice Middle Welsh grammar: Middle Welsh comparatives are usually predicative, not attributive, and they are put in a relative clause when they need to modify a noun, e.g. attep a vo gwell “a better answer” (“an answer which is [subjunctive] better.”)
Later, both the relative particle a and the unaccented copula tended to be lost, but the lenition induced by the relative particle remained: that’s why it’s a dyvu o Vrython wr well no Chynon (not gwell) in my example above: it’s elliptical for “did there come from the Britons a man [who was] better than Cynon?”
So this is another area where comparative clausal constructions have got kinda telescoped.
I always thought everyone (well everyone who cares about music) knew this aria
I think you shouldn’t presume on people’s tastes in music — even and especially people who care about music. Not only do I not know that aria, I really can’t stand much Mozart, especially the poncy operas.
How soon they forget.
I’d still like to know who came up with the simile (if that’s the word I want).
Here is a production with a fanfold list. The libretto calls it a book, though (and not small either):
@PP: Thank you. In fact, I’ve spent very little time in those places. I’m still willing to bet it would be pretty hard to find people saying “nor” meaning “than” there now.
This is about knowing, not liking. I was taught much of this in school – though not how the list is folded!
I am not particularly a fan of Mozart’s vocal music. However, classical music is one of my major arcana, and so I definitely knew about the aria, including how it is usually staged.
I believe that in the classic staging, Leporello pulls out quite a small book as he announces that he has been keeping a list, but then releases all but one page and the whole long list unfolds, falling all the way to the floor, for a laugh. It has been a while since I have seen that; contemporary directors probably think of it as a cliché.
@CuConnacht: That’s also very similar to the way “I’ve Got a Little List” is typically staged. Until this week, it had not occurred to me that using the prop that way in The Mikado could be an allusion to Don Giovanni.
Incidentally, there’s a sentence in the article that would be a cruel test for a copyeditor: “It is something Ruscha has been asking us to do since as long ago as Dublin,.” Instinct would tell the careless editor to delete the comma, but if you’ve read and remembered the earlier text, you won’t:
The last line of the piece:
I was going to suggest that calling an accordion-like foldout a ‘leporello’ probably came from opera houses staging the Catalogue Aria that way, but others beat me to it. There are serious opera fanatics in the world who could probably tell you in detail where and when it has been done that way.
I can add a partial parallel. In Shakespeare’s Henry V I.ii, the Archbishop of Canterbury presents the king with a very long genealogy justifying his claim to the throne of France. At the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton a few years ago, he (or an attendant?) brought a written copy inked on a white cloth roll and unrolled it onto the stage while he spoke the details. It was about 20 feet long, and dramatically very effective, partly because it was a bit like dropping a roll of toilet paper.
Of course, a roll (or a foldout leporello) is more appropriate for a genealogy than a little book – Leporello’s usual prop – would be, since the entries are all connected.
One of the first edition of Every Building on the Sunset Strip on sale next week.