Kim Willsher writes for the Guardian:
The French government has been accused of making some of its new language tests for foreigners seeking to stay in the country so hard even its own citizens would fail them.
An impact report on a new immigration law expected to come into force before the end of the year suggested the stricter requirements could lead to 60,000 people being refused permission to remain in France.
The tests, which cost around €100 (£83.20), are part of bill passed a year ago, that includes tighter border controls and tougher measures to expel foreign migrants. Ministers argue its primary aim is to promote greater integration of foreigners. […]
An investigation by FranceInfo suggested the levels required would challenge even native speakers. It sent 10 French volunteers, including a literature student with five years of post-baccalauréat higher education, to sit the tests those seeking French nationality will face. Five failed the written test but passed the oral, while two failed to reach a level necessary to obtain their own nationality.
Félix Guyon, of the Thot school that helps refugees and asylum seekers learn French, said: “The level is far too high for most foreigners who are seeking nationality or papers to stay for a long period in France.”
Bathrobe, who sent me the link, complained about similar tests in English; this kind of thing (Wikipedia) is a convenient and superficially reasonable way for bigots to keep out those they consider riffraff — ou bien, si vouz voulez, racaille.
What will happen when the first rich American anglophone fails? Awk-ward!
As I said in a social media post about this story a few days ago: “I personally think that immigrants to France wishing to become naturalized French citizens should be able to qualify by demonstrating proficiency in Alsatian, Basque, Breton, Corsican, Flemish, or Occitan/Provencal even if their French is a little shaky. But I understand (even I do not approve of) the historical reasons why the authorities in Paris probably do not see it that way.”
On average, the English-proficiency exam for would-be naturalized citizens in the U.S. is famously undemanding,* but I don’t know how much variability there is in practice.
*Undemanding in a sort of absolute sense. Obviously people, especially once adults, vary considerably in their practical ability to acquire real fluency in a new language, so it may well be quite demanding for specific people in their specific life circumstances with their specific capacities. Waivers are possible.
On average, the English-proficiency exam for would-be naturalized citizens in the U.S. is famously undemanding
Mine consisted of writing, from dictation, the sentence “I live in the United States.” I did OK, but some of my fellow examinees were taking a long time with it. I don’t know how it is nowadays.
I also remember from that appointment the clerk calling over the speaker for “Mr. Vasqueeze!” and later, “Mr. Velasqueeze!”
“Integration” is actually becoming something of a dog-whistle word for appealing to the highly sought-after pig-ignorant racist vote. Those who deploy it are rarely if ever in favour of measures that actually promote integration (like allowing immigrants to work), and it provides a handy victim-blaming line: “We‘re not bigots! You‘ve failed to integrate!”
This is generally combined with outright lies about the degree to which real integration is actually succeeding. I recently mentioned that the notorious Extreme Radical Left Cultural Marxist* propaganda sheet the Economist recently pointed out that the UK is actually pretty good at it. This displeases fascists.
* A fair cop, actually. The Economist believes in objective reality and attempts honest reporting. My understanding of Modern Vernacular American is that this is in fact what is meant by “extreme radical socialist”, “Marxist” and similar terms in that dialect. As a descriptivist, I observe rather than condemn such changes in usage. (To point out that this new sense of “Marxist” appears to be entirely unconnected with the doctrines of Karl Marx is an obvious case of the etymological fallacy.)
Compare nascent Australia’s iniquitous dictation test, under our infamous Immigration Restriction Act 1901 – enabling the pernicious and shameful White Australia Policy.
Details from our National Archives:
We also had (and have, in some more hidden sectors of the economy) slavery, though this is reflexly denied.
We currently have a hard rule that anyone arriving illegally by boat, with whatever background and for whatever reason and nearly all of Third World origin, can never be granted residency here. Overstayers who arrived at our airports are treating very differently.
As always we turn for correction – in these and our myriad other failings – to statesmen who lead the Free World.
Are Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, and Cruella Braverman considered “integrated”? (Not to mention Sadiq Khan and Humza Yousaf.)
There are two different dimensions here, which raise different potential issues and concerns:
1. How much discretion as a practical matter does the test administrator have to make the test as applied to a particular applicant substantially easier or substantially harder?
2. How easy v. hard is the test for a hypothetical median applicant where the administrator is not trying to put a thumb on the scales in one direction or the other, and relatedly is it as easy v. hard in practice as its proponents claim it was designed to be?
You can fix issue 1 (i.e. assure standardization in administration across applicants) without necessarily finding the optimal solution to issue 2. One could also replace individualized administrative discretion of the issue-1 sort with explicit policy choices driven by priorities and distinctions among groups in overall immigration policy. For example, if the government of Japan wished the Japanese-proficiency test for naturalization to be less demanding for ancestrally-Japanese Brazilians than for folks like me, it could do so by explicitly having different passing scores or some slightly more complex/euphemistic system that yielded that same functional result.
Are Rishi Sunak, Kemi Badenoch, and Cruella Braverman considered “integrated”? (Not to mention Sadiq Khan and Humza Yousaf.)
Ms Badenoch is currently trying very hard indeed to amplify Eglon Morlock’s talking points, so she is probably going for “embedded.” But (as the Marxist Economist pointed out in the article I alluded to), the very fact that she was at one stage the darling of the Tory Party members, many of whom are actually pretty Trumpite, does actually say something positive about our ability to integrate immigrants. If even Reform-lite Tories can be keen on a candidate who is British because her mother nipped over to London to give birth and then took her home to Nigeria*, maybe we are not after all doomed to become Airstrip One.
* I don’t blame her. When we lived in Nigeria, my wife was all set to have our third child in Nigeria – competent midwife lined up, everything. Eventually we realised that few Nigerian women in a position to give birth in the UK would hesitate to take the option. As well she did: our son would have died.
We currently have a hard rule that anyone arriving illegally by boat, with whatever background and for whatever reason and nearly all of Third World origin, can never be granted residency here
Our own, ostensibly left-wing, government smuggled the same provision into the forthcoming immigration bill. C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute. (Talleyrand is one of the lesser-known attribution magnets. If, in his current infernal residence, he keeps up with current events, I bet he wishes that he had said it.)
I got Residency in NZ based on career/employment record, but also sponsored by the ‘Irish Families Association’ via my wife. This Association appeared to exist purely to collect revenue from aspiring migrants; the loophole was closed soon after. However the rules were supposed to be blind as to ethnicity/country of origin.
When it came to Naturalisation (ceremony), it was ‘expected’ we’d join in singing the National Anthem in English (bonus to manage also in Te Reo). There seemed to be a generous interpretation of ‘in English’.
Of course a different age 30 years ago. NZ has raised the bar on economically applicable skills, not so much on cultural integration. And relies on 2,000 km of stormy Ocean to dissuade boat people. There is a continuing exposure to those who arrive as legit tourists then evaporate.
Voici a sample test, minus the conversational part (maybe). Honestly, people in Brooklyn who used to say “We live here ten years already and locals are still not speaking Russian” are fine for US, it is a large and weird place, but if French government is of the opinion that everyone living in the country should be able to communicate in French at a supermarket or follow the directions to evacuate in case of fire or whatnot, it is not the worst thing in the world.
We live here ten years already and locals are still not speaking Russian
I did encounter a lot of otherwise-local people in Haifa who did know a little Russian and were able to talk in it with us; I guess that’s what happens when the Russian immigrants are such a large fraction of the city population. I’m not sure what the proportion is/was like in Brooklyn.
David E. Spart
You’ve copied-and-pasted the bit about The Economist from one of your rants a short time ago.
I’ll believe integration has worked when it’s possible to publish an academic work about the origins of Islam without risking one’s health.
You presumably believe that there should be no restrictions on immigration.
Here’s a further complication: There are several hundred million people in the world who are not French but are citizens of other EU member states who thus at present have close to an absolute right to live and work in France if they wish without getting any special permission from the French government or demonstrating any particular level of fluency in French. This test only applies to would-be residents of France from outside the EU, because that is the population as to which the French government retains some sovereignty and ability to set rules.
The combination of a) any EU-member citizen can relocate and live anywhere else in the EU; and b) each EU member can have its own rules for immigration and naturalization* (with newly-naturalized citizens then benefiting from a)) does not seem like a stable equilibrium in the long term or even the medium term.
*Including what you might call the “quasi-naturalization” of having tighter or looser rules for bestowing citizenship upon request on the chlldren or grandchildren of former citizens who emigrated long ago.
Grubtal: wouldn’t you be happier playing with your AfD friends on X?
@D.O.: These tests are very easy, and I presume the questions are enunciated clearly as well when read out. So these are presumably the ones that will be replaced, per the article?
A couple of longstanding English friends of ours just got French citizenship last year (they were showing us their French identity cards with, I felt, a certain amount of Schadenfreude, as the French call it.)
They’ve lived in France for yonks, and both speak French very well, though with a sexy English accent. One was telling me about the friendly chat he had in French with the examiner (or whatever they’re called) about French history. I don’t think their qualification was in any doubt once they’d got all the necessary documents lined up.
A Swiss doctor I once knew, who was actually an L1 English speaker (English mother) was telling me about the exam she had to sit to get on the UK medical register. She said she found the English-language bit the most challenging (stupid/poorly designed questions, by the sound of it.)
I know a Brazilian who came to Ireland during the Celtic Tiger immigration bonanza with a view to acquiring citizenship and then moving to France. It takes a minimum 5 years’ residence to naturalise as Irish, by which time she had learned pretty good French. She was unimpressed that the Irish naturalisation process provided assistance for applicants with poor English. She now lives in Paris, married to an Englishman whose right to work derives from his Irish wife.
for yonks
TIL… keep ’em coming!
the Irish naturalisation process provided assistance for applicants with poor English
As opposed to assistance to actually learn English, presumably? Don’t they do that too?
(At some point, I shall have to cite that altogether exemplary immigrant H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N. I feel the pressure building …)
It’s pretty outrageous that some of those responsible are trying to justify it by pointing to Germany. Germany requires only B1 level German for citizenship, whereas this new French law will require B2.
This is a higher level of language ability than is currently required to get permanent residency in any EU country, something the French government is clearly very well aware of, because the “projet de loi” includes a nice little comparative overview of the language requirements for residency in other EU countries – see pages 44 to 46 of the PDF here:
https://www.gisti.org/IMG/pdf/pjl2023_2023-02-01_ei_-iomv2236472l_cm_1.02.2023.pdf
The new requirement of B2 for French citizenship is mentioned only in a footnote: no. 6 at the bottom of page 42.
I’m not sure if there is any EU country that requires more than B1 for citizenship because I haven’t checked every one of them, but I have found that none of the countries anywhere near France do – not Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands, Belgium, UK nor Ireland.
using race as a basis for their rejection—something that would have caused offence to its allies, Britain and Japan.
i am somewhat skeptical of this claim. the australian genius for subtle(?) workarounds in immigration bureaucracy, though, is impressive – i have a relative whose lebanese grandfather arrived during the peak of the White Australia policy, which considered maronites like him to be qualified for residency, unlike their muslim* neighbors and family members (he presumably made it through some version of the dictation test; i wonder whether they used french with products of that set of levantine missionary schools). something similar derailed the Frayland-Lige’s “kimberley plan” (probably the last viable-ish Territorialist initiative), as a threat (according to then-PM robert menzies**) to the national assimilatory goal of “one [christian] australian family of [white] peoples”.
.
* i’ve got no idea how, or whether, druze or alawi immigrants fit into the scheme.
** who apparently preferred to be pronounced “mingus”, out of scots patriotism.
if French government is of the opinion that everyone living in the country should be able to communicate in French at a supermarket or follow the directions to evacuate in case of fire or whatnot, it is not the worst thing in the world.
Did you actually read the post? The whole point is that the proposed tests are “so hard even its own citizens would fail them.” If it were just about being able to communicate at a supermarket or follow the directions to evacuate in case of fire, no one would complain.
To Nat Schockley’s point, if France makes its rules more restrictive than its neighbors’ rules, presumably non-EU-citizen immigrants who cannot meet the stricter rules will go to Belgium or wherever instead and, if the immigrants thus driven away would have made France a more prosperous place, France will instead become a less prosperous place and perhaps draw lessons from that experience that lead to reconsideration of the wisdom of the stricter rules. Either (per my earlier note) the EU imposes uniform standards on its member states in this area or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t I don’t follow the argument that it is somehow unacceptable for France to experiment with different rules than its neighbors use. If French policymakers are aware of the discrepancy, presumably they either think that e.g. Belgian policy is not well-suited for French circumstances or they think that Belgian policy has not yielded optimal results for Belgium and this outcome suggests that a different approach should be tried. (I have no idea how empirically valid either view would be. I’m not a French policymaker.)
As I may have observed before, in New York City at present immigrants who are L1 Anglophones are predominantly non-white* and immigrants who are white are significantly more likely to be e.g. L1 Russophones.
*E.g., there are more NYC residents born in Jamaica than born in the UK/Canada/Ireland/Aus/NZ combined.
@jwb
The rules apply to citizenship, not residency. I am not sure if economic migrants from outside the EU consider the possibility of obtaining citizenship before targeting a country, probably the possibility of obtaining work or benefits (if they find themselves without work) would be more central. For refugees it would be the likelihood of obtaining refugee status, and again the possibility of obtaining benefits while waiting for a decision.
I was surprised at Peter Grubtal’s comment. Although he doesn’t comment here very often he never struck me as one to make obnoxious comments. If he’d just said “I’ll believe integration has worked when it’s possible to publish an academic work about the origins of Islam without risking one’s health”, there would have been no problem, but the aggressive attack on “David E. Spart” was really beyond the pale.
In a spirit of enquiry, I just took an official mock online version of the British Citizenship “Life in Britain” test. I got 21/24 (you need 18/24 to pass.) Two of my correct answers were, frankly, lucky guesses. (I don’t give a damn about British professional cyclists*, and would be delighted to swell the numbers of my fellow-citizens of a like mind by admitting foreigners who don’t give a damn either.)
Two of my “wrong” answers were, in my opinion, actually correct; another was a wrong guess about the length, in miles, of the longest straight line that can be drawn within the British mainland. (Yes, really. My selected answer differed by two miles from the correct one, IIRC: the alternatives were all bunched close together.) None of the questions had any conceivable bearing on actual life in Britain. Not one.
* Obviously this would be an appropriate question for French citizenship (mutatis mutandis.) Autre pays, autres moeurs, as we say in Britain.
There may be more sensible questions out there. I did wonder if the whole thing was a scam to make you buy the handbook, but it appears in fact to be free online, so I was far too cynical:
https://lifeintheuktest.com/life-in-the-uk-test-book/
(Provided as a service to foreign Hatters who want to better themselves by becoming British.)
It’s been more than 20 years since I took the US citizenship test, but as I recall the questions were all about ‘civics’ — the system of government, the constitution, names of famous presidents etc. This means, alarmingly. that it’s possible to become an American without the slightest understanding of the infield fly rule, say, or the area of Lake Superior.
Shocking!
“Spiny” Norman Tebbit (a man worthy, in fact, of considerable respect in many areas of his difficult life) infamously proposed the “cricket test” as a litmus test for True Brit; unfortunately, he did not mean by this “intimate familiarity with the rules of cricket, and enthusiasm for the game”; had that been his intent, I’m sure we could all agree that it was an excellent criterion for Englishness, though perhaps not, in fact, Britishness.
No one is more English than the Trobriand Islanders.
Quite so. I’ve often said as much myself.
From WP:
Apart from the local custom of variable team sizes, this is clearly indistinguishable from the game as played in England. However, I see no mention of beer-drinking among the spectators. This might suggest some unobvious divergences from the rules as we are familiar with them, but the argumentum ex silentio is notoriously specious.
20 odd years since my US Civics test too. Still blissfully unaware about sports, celebrities and movie trivia.
21/24. I shall apply for British subjectivity presently.
One question (what kind of cases magistrates handle) was not unconnected with life in Britain.
I had trouble with this question:
Who is the heir to the throne?
Mark one answer
> the area of Lake Superior.
Funny you should mention it. My kid got a perfect score on her mandatory, promotion-contingent 7th grade Constitution test last week. She also told us about a “ridiculous” question one of her teachers asked in class discussion. “If you went 400 miles north, where would you be?” The question likely had more details to hint at the answer, maybe “what body of water?” but this is how she told it. Without a hint, I didn’t know if he was looking for the Upper Peninsula, Marquette MI or what so I asked the answer and she said “it was lake suburbia or something.”
I wouldn’t have expected her to know but I might have hoped that Lake Superior would have been familiar enough that she’d remember it after he gave the answer. Sigh… kids these days.
“Lake Suburbia” sounds like one of those novels that wins literary awards and gets made into an art film.
I took two civics tests; not sure why (maybe one was for the green card?) The first one, at the same time as the language test I mentioned above, had three questions: how many stripes on the flag; what do the stars represent; and one more which I forget. I could have cheated on the stripes one by looking up at the flag on the wall, but I was ethical.
The second test was an oral one. I had studied the catechism well, and hoped I wouldn’t be asked the number of members of congress. When I went in, the guy asked me what the Constitution was; I said, “I am supposed to say ‘it is the ultimate law of the land.’” He smiled a little, and that was that.
@David Eddyshaw; Did you miss the video when I posted it?
To Nat Schockley’s point, if France makes its rules more restrictive than its neighbors’ rules, presumably non-EU-citizen immigrants who cannot meet the stricter rules will go to Belgium or wherever instead and, if the immigrants thus driven away would have made France a more prosperous place, France will instead become a less prosperous place and perhaps draw lessons from that experience that lead to reconsideration of the wisdom of the stricter rules.
Unfortunately, this is not a likely outcome. As PlasticPaddy said, the stricter B2 level is required only for citizenship, not residency, and most would-be immigrants probably won’t be deterred from coming. However, they could well be deterred from becoming citizens, which means that the most important real effect of this change will be to create yet another barrier to integration, another way of alienating residents who might otherwise be inclined to make the commitment to France that becoming a citizen represents.
It’s just going to be another way of entrenching the divide in French society between the ethnic minorities and the historic majority. This is already a horrendous problem in France, even more so there than in most European countries—although it is pretty bad in many parts of Europe, and seems to be getting worse. And unfortunately the current direction of public sentiment and political party policy is towards making it worse, not just in France, but seemingly everywhere in Europe.
So instead of France eventually having to bring its requirements into line with its neighbors, I think we might actually see is all of its neighbors eventually copying France and making their requirements just as hostile.
DE –
Your Afd jibe is just a smokescreen for not taking position on whether you are in favour of dropping all restrictions on immigration. I’ve never managed to get a non-weasely answer from any of the poseurs on this.
Bathrobe –
DE (ab)uses this blog for aggressively parading his political views and using strong language about mainstream politicians. Several times I’ve restrained myself from putting perfectly valid counter arguments to his posturing – for example recently on Thatcher and housing – to avoid turning the blog into a political slogging match.
Every country has its official myths, and one of the UK’s is that it is a union of four nations — synchronically arguable, diachronically rubbish. A reflection of this is the Life in the UK test’s quota of questions relating to the Other Three nations which few people in Number One Nation would be able to answer.
@NatShockley,PlasticPaddy: I may have gotten confused. The Grauniad story seems, when read carefully, to suggest there are now French-proficiency tests of three different levels of increasing stringentness at three different stages: 1) the carte-de-sejour stage; 2) some after-that stage which googling suggests is the carte-de-residence stage; and 3) the naturalization stage. Nat’s earlier point about neighboring countries’ practice may have been confined to the hardest test at that final stage and I may have read it sloppily. That said, the account of “so hard even actual French people can’t pass it” is maybe confusingly or misleadingly described in a way that suggests that the less rigorous tests at the earlier two stages of the process are also indefensibly hard. To the policy point it seems (to me at least) rather obvious that both excessively lax and excessively stringent rules can in different ways hinder ultimate successful integration of immigrants into the receiving society if that is the long-term goal, and the right golden mean between overlax and overstringent probably must be determined via trial and error.
FWIW the amount of fussy and frustrating bureaucratic process my second daughter had to go through to get her student-visa equivalent for a semester in Paris was really quite substantially greater than what her older sister had had to go through a few years previous to get ditto for a semester in Rome, from which we concluded that the French were likely just for whatever historical reasons to be more fussy and bureaucratic than certain other neighboring nations.
@mollymooly:
The questionnaire I did so mediocrely in myself had one specifically related to Scotland’s social services, which I guessed right (in hindsight, I think I was too generous to myself in saying I only got two right by lucky guessing.)
The exercise seems to be largely concerned with whether the applicant would be a useful team-mate in a pub quiz. It is arguable that this might indeed be a useful criterion for UK citizenship …
@Y, David Eddyshaw: In the genre of mixed civics and trivia questions, a classic is, “How many stripes are there on the Star-Spangled Banner?”
Answer: broad
“Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.”
Getting on for as good as the impure-blood-watered furrows of the Marsellaise, but overall, a pale thing in comparison.
Personally, I prefer
though I’m sorry to confess that I only know the French version. It’s a catchy number.
Very progressive people, the Sami! I myself have the French, Russian, and English (he said Redly).
“Frustrate their knavish tricks” is much more civilized.
[Sings] “Rebellious Scots to crush …”
Maybe a dozen years ago I attended a naturalization ceremony in a federal office building in lower Manhattan, where one of the low-level bureaucrats overseeing things wrapped the ceremony up by leading the new citizens in a semi-rousing singalong of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_Bless_the_U.S.A.
Which was a bit unexpected, not only because it is not an “official” national song but because it is generally understood in these polarized times as symbolically marked/coded for associations with Republicans, people who are not urban-coastal-elitists, and the sort of people who voluntarily listen to country & western music while driving around in their pickup trucks, with the federal bureaucrats who were running things on this particular occasion almost certainly not being in either the first or third categories. And at first glance not even the second, although on further reflection there’s probably a social-class thing going on, with the tendency to disdain cheesy/hokey performative gestures of patriotism (Barack Obama sighing when his campaign staff forced him to wear an American-flag lapel pin etc.) being very class-linked and your less elite sorts including lower-ranking public-sector workers not necessarily sharing that disdain even in very coastal/urban settings.
I don’t think any of the new citizens had previously had to pass a test on knowledge of the song’s lyrics, though.
Personally, I’m quite fond of (good*) country music (and have corrupted my even more Extreme Radical Socialist daughter into liking some of it too.)
Given that converts famously tend more extreme than the in-house-raised, I dare say that the inductees didn’t mind. And the actual lyrics are in fact pretty unobjectionable, after all. Reclaim it, I say!
* Cf Sturgeon’s Law.
Yes, good country music is very good indeed. The Ken Burns documentary miniseries is really quite well done (though of course it has omissions and lapses), if anyone is interested in a historical overview.
I get more and more negative about Ken-Burns-generated content as time goes on but he retains his mysterious mainstream following. Maybe he needs to do a dull-and-well-intended series about generative-transformational grammar to destroy his credibility in hat’s eyes.
Ken Burns peaked early with his first really big project, The Civil War, and even that doesn’t hold up all that well these days. The step down to Baseball was very plain, and that series seemed to come right at the nadir of the sport’s cultural prominence. Jazz was fine but not very deep, focusing too much on a relatively small number of big names.
I agree, and I am no defender of the greatness of Ken Burns. But I am also not one who demands perfection, and if one wants a historical overview of country music, his miniseries is, as I said, quite well done. If you know of a better one that is readily available, do share.
I am also no great fan of The Civil War, which relied far too much on that jovial Lost Causer Shelby “I would fight for the Confederacy today” Foote.
I am not a podcast recommender because I am not a podcast consumer, but I have heard from multiple sources I consider reliable that the “Cocaine & Rhinestones” series about various bits of country-music history is very well done and may (this again I can’t vouch for) do that trick that old-timey classic New Yorker pieces did of hold your attention for an hour or more on some seemingly niche topic that you didn’t think you had enough interest or prior knowledge about to devote that much time to. Apparently the George-Jones-themed episodes have been recently converted into a book of some sort, but I haven’t seen that. I’d just settle for someone posting a bunch of not-too-error-ridden transcripts on the internet somewhere.
Thanks! Alas, I too am not a podcast consumer, but I will try to remember to recommend it to those who are.
I will admit to not having watched the _Jazz_ series, not least because I think I probably know more than the curious-but-underinformed middlebrow viewer for whom it was intended but also because, you might say, Wynton Marsalis is cast in the Shelby Foote role. Pretty much all the jazz Wynton likes is good and historically significant. The trouble is that some significant portion of the jazz Wynton doesn’t like is also good and historically significant, so uncritically adopting his POV leads to an overnarrow canon and a distorted historical narrative.
@ Peter Grubtal
The correct response is to adopt a supercilious tone. Getting hot under the collar is not a winning strategy.
>fight for the confederacy today
Thanks for that. I’d missed it. Gah!
Says WP: Foote kept Nathan Bedford Forrest’s portrait on his wall and lauded him as “one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history”.
I’m pretty sure that’s not something Foote said to Ken Burns with a camera rolling, but in some separate interview elsewhere. But in any event the man is coming on 20 years dead and no longer fit for military service even for a Lost Cause which isn’t being too choosy in its recruitment standards. Put in more isn’t-this-a-linguistics-blog terms, the word “today” is deictic.
The trouble is that some significant portion of the jazz Wynton doesn’t like is also good and historically significant, so uncritically adopting his POV leads to an overnarrow canon and a distorted historical narrative.
And that’s exactly what it was. The early episodes, with Wynton-approved heroes like Louis Armstrong, were good; as time went on it got more and more crotchety, with a totally gratuitous slam at Cecil Taylor (a far greater jazzman than Wynton), and then it stopped well before the present (as then was) because Wynton simply had nothing to say about anything after hard bop.
My current learning strategy is (1) read/watch the Famous Popular Introduction (2) read the Criticism section of the wikipedia article on the aforementioned Famous Popular Introduction (3) add the sources cited in the aforementioned Criticism section to my list of Things I Might Get Around to Reading Some Day
Sounds like a plan …
There is something to be said for introductions which are incomplete and flawed, yet done well enough that the very criticism they attract significantly advances knowledge.
“Thank you for explaining that so clearly. That really helps me to understand exactly why I don’t agree with you.”
Wynton Marsalis also seemed to have no interest whatsoever in the trombone. I think J. J. Johnson doesn’t even get a mention in Jazz.
Dennis Pardee wrote a four-hundred-page review of Josef Tropper’s magisterial Ugaritic grammar; I’ve seen the review cited as a reference in its own right.
@Brett: Just re Wynton & trombones, A few days ago I listened straight through to Wynton’s _Black Codes (from the Underground)_ album as part of my current project (almost done!) of listening to #85Albumsfrom1985. There are two relevant points: 1. there is no trombone on the album; but 2. one of the tracks (composer credit to Wynton) is named “Delfeayo’s Dilemma,” which is presumably an allusion to his brother Delfeayo Marsalis. Who is a professional trombonist. Clearly complex intra-family dynamics at play here …
@David Eddyshaw
Thanks for the link to the ‘Life in the UK’ tests.
Educated middle-class Australian here. I modestly claim that in the last 67 years I’ve picked up a bit of general knowledge about the old country. Dunkirk, Bodyline and all that.
Hey, in 6th grade we had a general studies book with a nice picture of King John signing the Magna Carta (I think Oliver Cromwell was looking over his shoulder in a rather bossy way) at – whoops, no spoilers please, pick one: A. Westminster, B. St Paul’s Cathedral, C. Runnymede, D. platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross Station.
Hilarious stuff.
I just scraped through. I feel inadequate now because I did not know the national flower of Wales or the location where Charles II famously hid after the Battle of Worcester when he was trying to escape from the sans culottes. Or something.
The history questions in the test that I did struck me as amusingly harmless: basically “Our Island Story”, though I’d have preferred “1066 and all that” myself, as being more accurate.
I wonder what answer was expected for “the national flower of Wales”? The leek is actually our traditional symbol*, as any fule kno, but calling it a “flower” seems a bit of a stretch. Daffodils are only for undesirables like Wordsworthians.
“Bodyline” is of course the very epitome of the moral decline of Great Britain. Suez was the inevitable ultimate consequence. Happily, it would appear that the good people of the Trobriand Islands were not implicated in any similar ethical lapse. How true it is that they are more English than the English, as Brett so recently reminded us!
* Don’t ask me. I wasn’t consulted.
I always thought it said something about Scotland that the national plant was thistle.
You lookin at me, Jimmy?
(Or, as they say in the Gaelic, Nemo me impune lacessit.)
Irrelevant plug here for A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. Read it! Many of the words are English!
I join in the plug! As recommended here just a few months into the blog’s existence!
@DE: “Thank you for explaining that so clearly. That really helps me to understand exactly why I don’t agree with you.”
Me every time I read C. S. Lewis.
I see that. (I mostly do agree with him*, but I still see that …)
* Still don’t like the Narnia books, though. It’s a wonder I haven’t been excommunicated yet.
The Australian version of the practice citizenship test includes the question “Why is it important for people living in Australia to learn English?”
Well that’s an easy one. “To be able to appreciate Les Murray’s poetry.” I don’t see why they even bother to ask.
I should have thought they were fishing for the self-referential “Because that’s the language in which the citizenship test is administered”?
All wrong. The desired answer is along the lines of “colophon, grandee, harbinger, perpetrate”.
https://archive.org/details/Galaxy_v23n03_1965-02/page/n99/mode/1up?view=theater
@JWB:
Nah, that’s the trick. If you give that answer, it’ll show that you’re a lawyer or a mathematician or a communist or something, and your application will be (quite rightly) rejected. A lot of thought goes into these questions.
The citizenship test for Old North Australia is even more exacting. (No birthright citizenship, either.)
Thistles *and* unicorns. Very spiky people, the Scots.
That’s still not comparable to the Old North Australians. Didn’t the Honseck send a giant wasp to kill the boy who bought Old Earth?
Why are the WASPs always the bad guys? Aren’t people SAD to have the same FOE all the time?
Two legs good, six legs bad!
(And hexapodia is the key insight.)
“Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.”
“No ransom could save / The hireling and slave / From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave!” Language-related: I’ve seen this condemned, not for ferocity, but for racism (i.e. toward slaves warring against their masters), which I suspect misinterprets the use of the word “slave” in the verse, especially if we read the construction so as to give “hireling” and “slave” the same referent.
Two legs good, six legs bad!
Getting a leg over was the best. IIRC.
@Rodger C: I didn’t think there was any doubt that the slaves were supposed to be the British soldiers and sailors. Of course no one would serve in the British military except for money or because they were forced. Very impressive, the Royal Navy.
We could do “What is the object of watched?”
“O say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O’er the ramparts we watch’d were so gallantly streaming?”
Ramparts, presumably?
Cheat sheet for the “watched” question: Geoff Nunberg (2011), followed by Mark Liberman.
I’d forgotten that Hat himself participated in that discussion.
@DE: To summarize the cheat sheet, the sentence structure suggests the ramparts, but the subject of the poem suggests the broad stripes and bright stars despite the tortuosity, and the discussions included partisans of the fight and of “watch” intransitive and maybe other possibilities. As so eloquently expressed by a character in Casablanca, “What watch?”
And I think I see what you see in Lewis. I liked the Narnia books a lot, but I think you have to have read them at an impressionable age.
Further to David E.: Says WP: Foote kept Nathan Bedford Forrest’s portrait on his wall and lauded him as “one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history”.
Maybe one reason is that later in life, Forrest left the KKK and “twice made statements in support of racial harmony and black dignity,” as WP puts it.
I’d forgotten that Hat himself participated in that discussion.
So had I; thanks for the memories. I still agree with my 2011 self:
I think I see what you did there.
…
…
More people have been to Moscow than I have.
And I think I see what you see in Lewis
I was thinking about this. It’s actually many years since I read any of what you might call his pop-theol books, and I don’t recall all that much about his actual arguments in any detail; I think it’s probably true to say was that what appealed to me was not so much those, but the kind of meta-point that trying to think through doctrinal issues logically and without more presuppositions than you can help is the right thing to do for Christians actually able to do so. (This doubtless appealed to my inner Calvinist.)
He’s also good at identifying (some) major objections to Christian doctrine and acknowledging them: even if one finds his answers unconvincing, he doesn’t try to pretend that the problems don’t exist or resort to mere obscurantism.
So: not so much what do does, but the way that he does it.
I used to know someone who remembered his Eng Lit lectures from Oxford. Very good, according to her. (Not invariably the case with famous academics …)
He might not impress me so much if I reread him now; I don’t feel any pressing desire to do so at present.
On his fiction: I continue to maintain that Out of the Silent Planet is greatly underrated, Perelandra is very good, but only if you are actually a Christian: I can’t really imagine that anyone who isn’t would find it bearable at all (same with Charles Williams’ novels.). Less said about That Hideous Strength the better (though I like the fact that the grotesquely evil Satanic scientists’ organisation is called NICE.)
On reflexion, “the perilous fight” (the one over the ramparts) though it took me a good bit of ungardenpathing to make it even grammatical.
I like(d) the Narnia books a lot, but the bits I liked best were always Caspian’s life *in* Narnia, rather than the Penvensies etc wandering in and out of it. And the Christianity went straight over my head.
I recently read Lev Grossman’s Magicians trilogy, which, while not polemically hostile to the Narnia books, has a good bit of rather grisly fun imagining a broadly similar but somewhat more realistic scenario (for a certain value of “realistic”) … definitely not aimed at the children’s market. Much sex and violence. Unlike many a trilogy, I reckon it improves as it goes along. Believable character development as the initially highly irritating protagonist really does get it together.
I didn’t notice the Christian elements in the Narnia books as a child either. I just found the books dull, which, given that many people whose taste I respect clearly do not, almost certainly says more about me than about Lewis. Probably a side-effect of my Tolkien-blindness. I think part of it, too, is that I just don’t like Aslan …
It is odd, this thing where you like A, B and C, and by analogy with people around you you should love D, and you just… can’t. (Although with me it’s mostly things far more intellectual than Narnia, and I’m fairly resigned to my philistine-ness by now.)
Le cœur a ses raisons …
Conversely, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that anyone might have syntax problems with contre nous de la tyrannie l’étendard sanglant est levé. According to comments to Nunberg’s LLog post, that’s actually common.
The reason I didn’t notice is that this word order is unremarkable in German once you move the finite verb to the second position. It might even be the default – if you’re committed to using the passive in the first place… which is even more unusual in French, now that I think about it.
Adds another level of punning, if not poetry, in Spanish: El corazón tiene razones que no tienen razón.
There’s probably a lot to be said for inscrutable syntax in anthems. It generally doesn’t do to think too deeply about the meaning of the words …*
I must say that I don’t really have much idea quite what Reason thundering in her crater would actually entail, but it doesn’t impair my enthusiasm in belting out the Internationale …
* Context is all … the rather restful Man’yōshū poem in the Japanese national anthem, now skunked like the words to the German one, doesn’t immediately suggest “let’s go conquer Asia.”
my experience with the Narnia books is very much like JiE’s; i learned about the christian allegory from an Encyclopedia of Narnia at some point after my first time through the books. but i can confirm (at n=1) DE’s theory about the Space Trilogy, which i never got more than a chapter or so into.
somehow, l’engle’s murray family books didn’t stick in my craw the same way, though i don’t know that i would enjoy them at all now (except maybe for A Wrinkle in Time). i even reread A Swiftly Tilting Planet a few times as a young person, and that one does a truly wild job of packing its sweet liberalism with a scary moral-predestination framework compounded from christianity, eugenics, and some vaguely mormon (or possibly celto-israelite?) alternative history.
i wasn’t so taken with grossman’s trilogy, but perhaps i should give it another look. in the wizard-school subgenre, i think my current favorite is naomi novik’s Scholomance books (bonus points for the obscure romanian title reference, though only the architecture really carries over).
naomi novik’s Scholomance books
Absolutely. It’s one of those series where you keep wanting to say “don’t you love the way that …”
I like the way that our heroine’s hippy-chick peacenik mother (who is responsible for calling her Galadriel, for heaven’s sake) is all those things, but (and) also turns out to be awesome.
On CS Lewis: I might try Till We Have Faces again. I was too young to understand it when I first read it, I think, and what I remember suggests that it might be worth a revisit.
Dare I suggest the tortured parsing of The Star-Spangled Banner is much clearer if you actually sing the anthem? It’s a pretty hard tune, especially if you’re not a soprano. The breathing cuts it up into the Liberman parsing even before you check Key’s (first printer’s) punctuation.
@David Eddyshaw: I liked Perelandra (and, for that matter, Descent Into Hell), but more for the world-building than the unsubtle Christianity. What I cannot abide is The Screwtape Letters—witty, but rebarbative. Screwtape does not have the charisma of Satan in Paradise Lost.
@rozele: I don’t think the Scholomance is that obscure a reference. It’s in Dracula, after all—but, then again, maybe I wouldn’t have recognized it had I not recently reread that book.
A Wind in the Door is probably readable even as an adult, but it has problems, such as a huge step down in the villains. Anything past that is out; I’m not ever touching A Swiftly Tilting Planet, with its inherited evil, again.
I think Descent into Hell is definitely Charles Williams’ best novel, though All Hallows’ Eve is a worthy runner-up, and I have a soft spot for The Greater Trumps.
Thinking about it, although Williams can be appreciated as wholly orthodox (for all his somewhat weird occult dabblings), his presentation is so idiosyncratic that I can actually imagine him appealing to non-Christians more easily than more pedestrian Christian writers do.
Part of what’s gone wrong with That Hideous Strength is that Lewis tried to write a Charles Williams novel without actually taking the necessary precaution of first being Charles Williams …
I’ve never met anyone else who’s read Williams’ poetry. It’s … OK, I suppose, but I can’t say that I think people are missing much. It gets very weird in places … positively Lovecraftian.
Screwtape is, of course, not supposed to have any charisma. That book, I really think you do have to be a Christian to appreciate (or at least, playing with the idea of becoming one.) The temptations deployed against the “patient” are often uncomfortably recognisable …
The Aslan=Jesus penny dropped for me towards the end of The Last Battle. It was a “whoa dude” moment. The “hmmm” came later.
I haven’t read anything by Charles Williams except Descent into Hell, and that was decades after I read That Hideous Strength. So I had never made the connection that Lewis was taking after Williams in that book, although I did wonder why That Hideous Strength was so different from the two books that came before it.
@mollymooly:
The whole thing with Aslan sacrificing himself and being resurrected should have been a giveaway …
It wasn’t for me; despite being haled along to church every Sunday as a child, I had managed to miss the entire thing about Jesus dying for our sins. It came as a complete surprise to me when I fell among Christians again in my late twenties. (Not necessarily the fault of the church – my longterm girlfriend at university was a Christian, and when I met her again subsequently, she insisted she’d explained it all to me on several occasions. I have no reason to disbelieve her …)
Ramparts discussion at LLog suffers from not including the best solution out there. Dave Barry suggested that it should be read “o’er ram parts we watched”.
Obvious once it’s been pointed out.
@David M. I don’t speak German, but in a sense the word order of Contre nous de la tyrannie l’étendard sanglant est levé is fine in English. Against us, tyranny’s bloody standard is raised. (I’m all for raising standards, but there are limits.) But “of tyranny the bloody standard” has to be poetry of a kind that isn’t very familiar any more.
@Giacomo: Probably all of the Americans who disagreed about the parsing of the “Banner” had been singing it since they were in single digits, so I don’t think singing settles it. What settles it for me is that that part of the poem is about watching the flag, nothing else, and in poetry imagery overrides punctuation and word order and breathing and all. (Now tries to dodge the imagery of “ram parts”.)
When I first read the Narnia books, I didn’t know the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but I think I was still in elementary school when I got the connection, probably because someone told me. I felt betrayed, but i got over it.
I like Perelandra and I like That Hideous Strength even more. For me, the Christianity is part of the fantasy, like Kinship or the gods of Bekla* or the Greek or Norse gods or Discordianism or or or…
Thanks for the recommendations for the Scholomance books. Up to now, I’d have said there was only wizard school—the one on Roke Island—but i’m willing to learn differently.
Oh, and David M.: If you think you understood “impressive”, you’re right.
*One of the things I’m never going to write is the essay on why Richard Adams and Richard Cowper were the same writer.
@Giacomo Ponzetto: The sung tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner”* cannot have anything to do with the intended meaning of its words. The words began as a non-musical poem, “Defence of Fort M’Henry,” by Francis Scott Key. It was only later set to the tune of a lousy Britush club song.** (That’s why, for example, the very first, monophonemic word of the song gets stretched across two notes.)
* And no one has yet answered my civics question about how many stripes it has.
** The practice of pitching the parts about “the rockets’ red glare” an octave higher than is natural is even more recent. I suspect that originated with a military band arrangement, where the change in register at that point was merely due to a change in which instruments had the tune.
@ David eddyshaw
I read Narnia with great pleasure at the age of 10, and I still think they have some wonderful moments.
The Christian allegory of course went right over my head.
I fear that if I read them again now I might be disappointed. So I’d better not
“Tolkien-blindness” is a lovely phrase.
I meant to read CS Lewis when I was at an omnivorous age, because I’d heard that The Screwtape Letters was witty. I’m not planning on doing so now. I satisfy myself with Eleanor Morton’s numerous short videos on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, and I recommend them all, especially to those who would get the jokes more directly.
@Brett: I agree that the tune of the SSB doesn’t tell you anything, but I disagree with your specific points. Wikipedia has sheet music of an edition c. 1790 of “The Anacreontic Song” where the future rockets’-red-glare part goes up to the same high note as in the modern “Banner”.
The words to that part were “Voice Fiddle and Flute no longer be mute / I’ll lend you my Name and inspire you to boot.” When I was in college, the verb “boot” meant “vomit”, and I can only conclude that the slang was older than I thought.
I also think Key meant the “Banner” to be sung to that tune. In 1806 he published a poem about the war against the Barbary pirates as “Song—Tune Anacreon”. It has the same meter and rhyme scheme, with the internal rhyme in the fifth line of each stanza, as the SSB , as well as many verbal similarities. The publication I linked to was anonymous, but the poem was included in the posthumous book of Key’s poems.
(For fans of “Banner” background, the introduction of that book is Roger B. Taney’s account of how the poem was written.)
Speaking of background, I’m going to say that the U.S. flag has either thirteen stripes, seven white and six red, or six red stripes on a white background. (I hope my students don’t see that, since I tell them not to give two mutually inconsistent answers to a question.)
The modern American flag has 13 stripes, of course, and they are canonically stripes. That is individual pieces of material sewn together. But Brett wouldn’t ask the question with such an obvious answer, would he now? BTW, I never thought about how many different pieces the Union Jack has. It is not a straightforward question, as it happens, because the Very Old Glory is defined as various crosses atop a blue background, which unless one knows it, is not an obvious way to look at the final result. Still, if the cross of St. George counts as one piece than there are 4 quarters with one strangely shaped white part, one red part, and two blue parts for the total count of 17.
For me, the Christianity is part of the fantasy, like Kinship or the gods of Bekla or the Greek or Norse gods or Discordianism or or or…
Fair enough. You might like Charles Williams too, on the same basis. But I think he’s a bit of a Marmite author even for Christians. I’d say he was a sort of genre writer in the way that (say) Isaac Asimov is: you’d be disappointed if what you were looking for in his works was literary excellence: he’s very good at whatever it is that he’s doing, but it’s not Eng Lit.
I get the impression that there is a kind of CS Lewis cult among US Christians, very much stressing the Christian-allegory aspects of the Narnia books, but that may be an artefact of there just being a lot more in-yer-face Christians over there. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Brit preacher mention the books in a sermon, but I have come across this with Americans (Including, to be fair, in part of a surprisingly good series on the unpromising theme of Ecclesiastes.)
A sewn rather than printed Saltire has 7 parts (maybe 6 in an old one with white strips laid over each other) – it’s made of strips and triangles, not crosses.
So you could potentially get to 31 for the Union Jack, if I’ve counted right.
An old version here seems to have needed extra parts to make the centre red part broad enough for their liking.
Modern version folded up here, but I think you can see how it goes.
Technically I think the red-and-white saltire is outlined in white (the same way the red St George’s cross is), rather than being narrow red on broad white, so you could get up to 35 if you really wanted to, using a white strip the width of the red and a white strip the width of the red strip’s border…
The literal, physical flag that flew over Fort McHenry during the British attack in question in 1814 still exists, and is on display in Washington at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It has a countable number of stripes without getting into Union-Jack-style complications of how to count them. It’s an odd number but not a prime number.
I’m fairly sure that when I visited Fort McHenry they were flying a replica of that flag with the same added number of stripes; initially they added both a star and a stripe for each new state, but the stripe part was soon given up and the number reduced to the original…
Pretty sure the answer to Brett’s question is one. Unless the word stripes is used in the later, lesser-known verses.
I have accidentally linked the same flag twice above – the old one is here, but maybe LH could kindly fix the first comment for me!
Done!
I believe the only places I have seen a physical flag with the fifteen stars, fifteen stripes design* are the Smithsonian and, as anhweol reminded me, Fort McHenry.** There must be others, replicas and museum artifacts, but they are not abundant.
* The flag decal on the truck parked next to my car right now has twenty-five stars and eleven stripes. I’m not sure what the political significance of that is.
** I remember the flag from when we visited when I was five. However, compared to many other elements of the tour (such as the weapons,**** the architecture, and the diorama of the battle showing the fort surrounded by abatises), the flag was not that memorable, and I didn’t know at that point that the national anthem was about the battle there. My father asked me if I noticed anything unusual about the flag. I spotted the difference in the pattern of stars, naturally, but I didn’t count the stripes. (And even if I had, I don’t think I would have known at that time that there were normally thirteen.)
*** A linguistic point I remember from the tour is that they distinguished between guns and cannons. The former were on rotating mounts, so they could be aimed in any direction, and they were mostly concentrated on the seaward side of fort. Cannons, in contrast, could not be rotated, and they only had a few of those. I remember one cannon we saw that was positioned to fire down a moat at any lobsterbacks who made it in there. It fired hollow balls that would shatter against the curving moat wall they were aimed at, producing a lethal spray of shrapnel.
I have a pattern for the Union Jack that requires three parts in total – a red yarn, a white yarn, and a blue yarn. But the technique is tapestry crochet, a variety of colourwork in which the colours not meant to be visible are hidden within the stitches of the colour that is meant to be visible.
From the film Ideocracy? https://www.fotw.info/flags/fic(idio.html
Thanks for the comment fix
Brett: Thanks for the Smithsonian link; it was very educational. I did not realize how big the flag was (as a side note, I am not happy about the elegant variation in “about two feet … about 24 inches”):
And this astonished me:
Autre temps, autre moeurs!
I found this picture from wikipedia impressive – in the first picture there of it on display it could be any size.
By the time the Ft. McHenry flag was made there were in fact 18 states in the Union rather than 15, but national flag design had not kept pace until Congress caught up with new legislation in 1818, by which time there were 20 states. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Acts#Flag_Act_of_1818
From a Tumblr post by me a few months ago…
“Fun fact: after the 14th and 15th state were added, the flag was amended in 1794 (in effect from 1795) to add two more stars and two more stripes! So for a while the US flag had 15 stars and 15 stripes (the famous Star-Sprangled Banner was one of those).
But then new states kept going in and there was no representation of those on the flag, and it was clearly untenable to have 20-and-counting stripes, so a new amendment in 1818 went back to 13 stripes and set out the “as many stars as states” protocol which is still in force today.”
Around that time there were attempts to add extra stars to US coinage designs (many of which also originally had 13 of them). There was a bunch of coins made with various amounts of stars, many of them running behind the actual state counts (though IIRC some variants went up to at least 17), before, IIRC also circa 1818, the variations stopped and the star counts went back to 13 permanently.
@J. W. Brewer: Thanks for clarifying the number of stripes.
However, there’s an additional bit of trivia. According to Wikipedia, Fort McHenry had two flags to fly: the giant “garrison flag” at the Smithsonian, used in normal situations, and a smaller “storm flag” for bad weather, made by the same seamstresses. Historians have argued that, as the attack on Fort McHenry was during the rain, the storm flag was the one Key saw at twilight and (if I understand correctly) maybe also the one he saw at dawn.
I’m surprised to see that the discussion of “the hireling and slave” at Wikipedia doesn’t mention the possibility that seems so obvious to me: that it refers to sailors impressed into the Royal Navy. Is it possible that historians know something I don’t?
@me: six red stripes on a white background. (I hope my students don’t see that, since I tell them not to give two mutually inconsistent answers to a question.)
Or wrong answers. It’s white stripes on a red background.
Getting back late to the other thread (…): I read Charles Williams’ poetry as an undergrad already into Lewis and Tolkien; there’s a large selection in Anne Ridler’s Charles Williams: Selected Writings, my introduction to him. As a young man I liked it very much as Christian poetry that (remarkably to me at the time) was actual poetry and also Thoroughly Modern, as well as being both intellectually and formally challenging (Williams knew GM Hopkins’ nephew and was an early admirer of his poetry). Both my taste and my beliefs have changed since then, to say nothing of my having a wider acquaintance with modernist poetry; I no longer wonder why he isn’t in the anthologies. Of the creepier aspects of the Taliessin poems, though, I became fully aware only after, a little later, reading Robert Conquest’s “The Art of the Enemy”; but then it’s worst in poems like “Taliessin’s Song of the Unicorn” and “The Sister of Percivale,” which Ridler omitted from her otherwise very wide selection.
And yes, Till We Have Faces is by far the best of Lewis’ fictions.
Also, he said Screwtape was his most difficult book to write because he had to consciously squeeze all the charisma out of S’s persona.
I read a few of Williams’ poems last night. Mostly they were about Christianity, but (as Rodger C says) quite modernist, much more modern in form than is typical of devotional poetry. One thing I noticed specifically is that in this poem, Williams uses the same metaphor of Jesus as a bridge builder that
Aslan offers in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Interesting; one seldom sees Williams’ pre-Taliessin (mostly pre-Hopkins-influenced) poetry.
For an early example of how disturbing Williams could be, read “Witchcraft” from Windows of Night.
bridge builder
A fo ben bid bont.
“Who is chief, let him be a bridge.”
It’s a famous Welsh trope (from the Four Branches.)
I hope that the smart people who have read Scholomance can help me out.
I read all three books, and there was a point (well, more than one point) that never ever made sense.
1) Enclaves are safe. That’s their defining characteristic; they are proof against maleficaria (we do see one that has been breached, and everyone is shocked by this new development). (The enclaves are also all [SPOILER] Bzrynf, ohvyg ba haraqvat naq haraqnoyr gbezrag bs n puvyq [/SPOILER], but that’s learned very late in the series.)
2) The Scholomance is very much NOT SAFE. That’s its defining characteristic. Maleficaria are constantly working their way in and taking tolls of students. Anything and everything can be a deadly trap that can kill you. Graduation is a running battle against waves of maleficaria.
Given 1 & 2, why have schooling in the Scholomance at all? Why not just have four years of schooling inside the enclaves, where the kids will be safe?
Did I miss some obvious explanation?
A fo ben bid bont.
I really thought this was Kusaal, and that the ‘Welsh trope’ thing was a joke. Not enough unusual letters, though.
On further inspection I do know ‘pen’ and ‘pont’…
Me too. Until I noticed ‘bont’.
And I specially didn’t italicise it, so people would know it wasn’t foreign ….
It’s from Branwen ferch Llŷr, and said by Bendigeidfran, who means it literally; but then he’s a giant, so it’s easy for him to say.
It’s almost always misunderstood as “He who would be a chief, let him be a bridge”, because Kids These Days* have no Sprachgefühl for the subjunctive, which is in as pitiful a state in modern Welsh as in modern English. As Ifor Williams crossly points out in his notes to Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, this is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.
* The ones who speak Modern Welsh instead of proper Middle Welsh.
In “fel pont dros ddŵr cythryblus fe’m gosodaf i lawr,” the unmutated “pont” does rather stick out like a loanword-from-Latin (or French, but timeline difficulties …) sore thumb. I guess before the Romans arrived and improved the infrastructure the Britons just forded rivers rather than crossing them while keeping their feet dry?
As I have previously remarked, we didn’t even have children (plant) in those days, let alone bridges. I presume that if you wanted to cross a river dryshod you just had to hope that a convenient giant with leadership ambitions would come by.
Pont is actually feminine in Welsh, which just goes to show that my forebears were really bad Latinists.
Paul ap Simon is known for having composed all his songs in Welsh. The English versions really don’t do them justice.
@mollymooly @DavidEddyshaw Basically, the Irish policy is simply to encourage immigrants to come here purely to study/work, and promptly leave them to their own devices to acquire English – various voluntary organisations work around the country to Teach English As A Second Language, but all terribly haphazard, with no official policy, and as mentioned, government communications with immigrants tend to be translated into multiple languages, including French, Polish, Portuguese, etc.
we didn’t even have children (plant) in those days
…wait, is that the same word that Q-Celtic clan?
(If true, I wonder what did the Hibernian barbarians call their family structures, because AFAIK that word is all over the histories.)
…wait, is that the same word that Q-Celtic clan?
Yes.
Setting a high bar
I’ve meant to say that the closest Norwegian equivalent is å legge lista høyt, an obvious high jump metaphor.
J1M: I wonder what did the Hibernian barbarians call their family structures, because AFAIK [clan] is all over the histories.
I have wondered if it might originally have been borrowed with a meaning “foundation, colony” rather than from the “branch” metaphor, and that this might be preserved in the geographically based clan system. If so, it was equated with family structure because both leadership and “membership” in geographic clans were inherited.
There was of course a Celtic word *brīwa for “bridge” which was certainly use in Gaul, though there seem to be fewer attestations in Britain (not sure if any in what became Wales?). I have sometimes wondered what it ought to have produced if inherited by Welsh – perhaps something too close to _briw_ as in “wound, injury”? _Pont_ is fairly unambiguous by comparison
(River-crossing terminology of Celtic origin is seen in the use of hurdles to make a ford crossing easier; giving the river-name Clwyd. Perhaps bridge technology hadn’t quite reached that corner of Wales; but the same could be said over the water of Baile Átha Cliath… )
There are now apparently quite a number of ways to cross the Clwyd dryshod, according to this exhaustive-looking yet monolingual compilation some niche enthusiast(?) has/have assembled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_crossings_of_the_River_Clwyd
Drochaid is wheel-road, Wiktionary says, so presumably before carts were common you just waded.
(My favourite Gaelic/English placename pair is Beul an Atha/Bridgend on Islay, although I have probably said that before.)
Irish policy is simply to encourage immigrants to come here purely to study/work, and promptly leave them to their own devices to acquire English
Many non-EU immigrants have study visas entitling them to work 20h/wk to fund their 40h/wk registered EFL course. Many of these actually work 60h/wk and study 0h/wk on an EFL course which exists only in the registry.
In the U.S. there are “officially” fairly strict restrictions on the ability of holders of student visas to work legally (any employment must be conceptually related to the course of study as relevant practical experience and for the first year only the sponsoring university can pay the student, to be a lab assistant or whatever etc.) but there is some reason to believe these restrictions are not uniformly followed in practice. Separately, issuance of a student visa is supposed to be conditioned on a showing that the non-citizen student has “sufficient funds available for self-support during the entire proposed course of study.” I don’t know how well that’s enforced either.
As a technical matter, bureaucrats (and some others) when being careful do not refer to such students as “immigrants” because these are what in U.S. legal jargon are among the “non-immigrant” categories of visa (just like the other sorts of visa available to tourists or touring German heavy metal bands or what have you), where in principle the student is expected to return to their country of origin upon completion of the course of study, although it’s not a very well-kept secret that many such students in fact hope to remain in the U.S. on some other basis once the student visa expires.
There is a scene in The Liberator* (which tells the story of a unit that fought in the Allied conquest of Italy), in which a captured American soldier is being interrogated by the Germans, and the Wehrmacht linguist keeps asking the captive about the “ponds.” The G. I. says he doesn’t remember seeing any ponds in the area—getting confused and terrified as the interrogator grows increasingly angry and accuses him of lying. Then the German stops, calms down and says he had gotten confused and meant to ask about “bridges” but was mixing up English and Italian.
* The show uses a combination of CGI and motion capture to give the visuals a “graphic novel” feel—except there should be another word for that, since it’s dramatization of a nonfiction story, based on a book by Ian Kershaw. I assume the confusing interrogation scene really happened.
The Life in the UK test is in my mind because I have two office-mates who have successfully negotiated it. I’ve also tried the sample test a while ago, and have presumably thus marked myself out for deportation. My office-mates now (well, at time of writing) have ready answers to questions, about the bureaucratic intricacies of the other home nations (and national flowers), that I don’t know enough to spontaneously ask.
It’s remarkable how bad it is. One question that stuck in my mind concerned which date women got the vote in the UK. The MCQ answers you’d expect, I think, would be pre-Boer war, pre-WW1, pre-WW2, or (come on!?) later, because each of those would illuminatingly key into some historical and social context – what does it tell us about the country that this happened in that period, and not before? But no: it’s which damn year, with a scatter of about a decade.
It’s regrettably far too revealing about Life in the UK. Your naturalisation journey, it says, will be governed by the Home Office: an organisation so staggeringly unimaginative and process-beslugged that it is capable of endorsing this as a totem of the country’s self-identity.
I have presumably thus marked myself out for deportation
As I have a grandparent who was born in Argentina, some Rootless Cosmopolitan forebears and a Venezuelan daughter-in-law, to say nothing of being a notorious Trotskyite activist, I expect I shall be bound for the camps on Ascension island* once that nice Mr Farage becomes Prime Minister.
* I have actually been there, but unfortunately I didn’t see any sea turtles. I did meet Robson Green though, who was almost as good as a turtle.
I got no questions about cyclists, flowers or distances, but two about magistrates, which in my case I have not got. And I really wasn’t sure what the right response to ‘The devolved Scottish government rules Scotland from Edinburgh’ (True or False) was going to be.
It is possible, I suppose, that what they really want to know is if you’re a person capable of reading and remembering some things in the short term, and that the chance that some facts about the UK will stick in your mind is merely a pleasant side effect.
(I’m not sure if David was being sarky, but I’m quite enjoying Robson’s various adventures again, and do think he would be almost as good as a turtle.)
My footnotes are never sarcastic.
I would have preferred a sea turtle though. I mean, you can meet Robson Green anywhere, not just on Ascension Island.
AI art generators did surprisingly poorly whenever I asked for a Robson Green-green sea turtle mashup.
Probably for the best. The world may not yet be ready.
As David E.’s rejoinder suggests, JenInEd’s adjective “sarky” turns out not to be a typo for “snarky,” but a foreign adjective of its own said to be “(UK, Ireland, Commonwealth, informal)” with a hypothesized etymology is from “sarcastic” rather than from the Channel Island named Sark.
said to be “(UK, Ireland, Commonwealth, informal)” with a hypothesized etymology is from “sarcastic”
[aww I don’t think there’s anything “hypothesised” about it: both wiktionary and Cambridge online are unequivocal it’s a clipping; even my dead-trees 1972 Chambers files it under ‘sarcasm’.]
This ex-UK now Commonwealth speaker recognised the clipping, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it written down in the wild/I wouldn’t be sure how to spell it myself/maybe ‘sarcy’ [allowed in urbandictionary; again not geographically-derived from a Commune in the Marne] or even ‘sarchy’. So I did harbour doubts it was a typo for ‘snarky’.
It was new to me but I understood it. I had already called attention too many times to colloquial Britishisms which were new to me and didn’t want to risk discouraging anyone.
No chance of that: we don’t realise we’re doing it.
Spelling “sarky” is obviously far better than “sarcy” et al. Spelling of informal derivatives is pliable.
OTOH I recently encountered “chicest”, which at first I thought was a typo for “choicest”, but I can’t propose a better alternative. Certainly not “chikest”… “chicquest”? “most chic”? “chic-est”? “plus chic”? ‘”chic” is absolute, non-comparable’?
Another impossible method is “chickest”, after “panicked”. I’d go with “chic-est” or “most chic”, unless I could find different wording.
The next question is why we don’t have “chicer” and “chicest” with an /s/, like “critic” and “criticize”. Maybe we’re pretending we got “criticize” from French
Perhaps you were thinking of the coat of arms, which does indeed have 6 red (vertical) stripes on a white background. It is, however, blazoned as thirteen, despite the heraldists general habit of treating an odd number like this as stripes on a background, which is also involved in the probable reason the colours are switched – so that the blue chief is technically on a white field rather than a red one.
chicest
“Arcing” (which turns up remarkably often in SF novels) still throws me every time. Probably less of a problem for USians.
Inflection of “chic” is the same problem as inflection of mic, sync, pic, but it seems to be less controversial. Dictionaries give “chicer, chicest”; “chic-est” is sometimes used, but the unhyphenated spellings are much more common.
> Spelling “sarky” is obviously far better than “sarcy”
Though it’s pronounced that way, the correct spelling is saoirse.
Earlier today, I almost wrote “forwent”, then realized that people wouldn’t understand what I wrote. Even though it’s regular and is in the dictionary.
Jen said:
The correct answer is of course ‘False’, since it is ruled from Buckingham Palace (or possibly Balmoral), though governed from both Holyrood and Whitehall.
One might have expected that one of the great offices of His Majesty’s Government would have had some awareness of the lexico-constitutional niceties.
Though in a country where the climactic act of the legislative process – Le Roy le veult – takes place in Norman French, a certain level of constitutional confusion is intelligible.
My daughter applied for French nationality as soon as she was old enough, 25 years ago. She had to go for an interview. I went toit with her, in case the interviewer turned out to be nasty and aggressive. However, it wasn’t necessary. The moment my daughter opened her mouth you could see the wheels turning in the interviewer’s head: this girl is obviously French, and it’s only due to an unfortunate accident of birth that she’s not French already. No formal test of the language, culture or history. It may have helped that my daughter is white and not obviously Muslim.
Later on she had to go for a day to a military camp for a day of Service to the Nation, a rather pointless thing that has replaced conscription. There there was a written test of civics and history, which she found trivially easy. Not everyone did, however, and two girls behind her were whispering and grappling with such difficult questions as knowing why the 14th July was a holiday..
I definitely didn’t realise I was doing it. And yes, sarcastic, although presumably I don’t think there’s 100% overlap or I’d just have written that…
Inflection of “chic” is the same problem as inflection of mic, sync, pic, but it seems to be less controversial. Dictionaries give “chicer, chicest”; “chic-est” is sometimes used, but the unhyphenated spellings are much more common.
Yes, for some reason it doesn’t bother me at all — I’d write “chicest” without batting an eye.
@Y: I would definitely use forgo, forgoed, and either forgoed or forgone (deoending on context) as the principal parts of that verb. Using forwent sounds, if not quite wrong, distinctly nonnative. It’s not just the irregularity that makes forwent unidiomatic though; the strong but not suppletive paradigm forswear, forswore, forsworn is fine. It’s probably just another sign that go is a very peculiar verb. It has had two different suppletive past tense forms in English, while German and Dutch use yet another suppletive past.
@Norman Gray: I think rule is just a poor choice of word in that context, since that word can mean either substantive or nominal authority. Compare the observation that Charles V was that last Holy Roman Emperor who not only reigned but ruled.
As to rule from Balmoral, I once saw the beginning of a mock British documentary or news broadcast, showing the state of Britain after a successful Operation Sea Lion. Following the pattern of France, there was a German-occupied zone in England and Wales, while a puppet government in Scotland was led by Edward VIII from Balmoral. However, that was probably unfair to Edward, as well as to the Scots.
Holyrood (the one over the road) is surely also the equivalent of Buckingham Palace, with Balmoral the equivalent of Sandringham.
My confusion was about whether they were going to say that Westminster was the ultimate source of the devolved government’s powers.
And I would be inclined to read ‘chicest’ as a typo for ‘choicest’, so I think you just can’t win with that one.
Surely if the monarch can be a nominal Anglican on one side of the border and a nominal Presbyterian on the other side of the border he can reign from different palaces on whichever side of the border may be contextually appropriate. Subject to any fine print in the Act of Union 1707, which I have not recently reviewed.
The same monarch of course has lots of different hats (crowns) to wear. For example, he is the present King of Saint Christopher* and Nevis, and in that capacity he presumably reigns not from one of his British palaces but … but … maybe there’s a spare room in the Governor-General’s official residence in Basseterre where they keep a spare throne in case he drops by?
*Apparently in sufficiently elevated registers the ubiquitous alternative form “Kitts” is officially eschewed.
I’d say “forwent” if ever actually called upon to speak the preterite of “forgo.” Certainly I would write “forwent.” “Forgoed” is just Wrong.
@David Eddyshaw: It looks like you’re right. Both forwent and forgoed are rare (compared with forgo or forgone), but the latter is four or five nepers even rarer than the former.
Just re some of the flag discourse above, if you dig deeply enough you can find multiple people on the internet trying to properly describe the stripes of the U.S. flag (post-1818 to avoid the McHenry detour) in conventional heraldic blazonry and disagreeing with each other about the exactly proper way to do it. One problem seems to be that the most stringently prescriptive English approaches to how to do a blazon were not always followed by Continental authorities, and for all I know vice versa.
Pragmatically, it does seem highly desirable for me for a blazon to be unambiguous – i.e. given the words and their syntax, everyone who knows the system will generate the same visual result from them. But I don’t know that it needs quite so much to be perfectly non-redundant, i.e. with no room for multiple forms of words that would each successfully generate the same visual result. Some of the peevery about the supposedly wrong blazons offered by others seemed to assume the latter desideratum.
Chiquest!
Pragmatically, it does seem highly desirable for me for a blazon to be unambiguous – i.e. given the words and their syntax, everyone who knows the system will generate the same visual result from them.
I agree, provided you mean “same” at the heraldemic or even dieraldemic (?) level. There will be heraldetic variations, whether due to context, register, diastyle, or idiostyle.
@Jerry: Sure, a perfectly phonemic alphabet can fit a language with accent variation and unambiguously cue speakers how to pronounce a word in their own particular accent, with some predictable resulting output variation from speaker to speaker as their accents differ.
Chiquest!
drawn by wendy pini, i hope?
set to the tune of a lousy Britush club song
for quite a while, i’ve thought that most of the song’s supposed difficulty (and the bad rap its melody gets) is a direct result of it usually being sung at an ostentatiously wrong tempo, and often out of its proper meter. at a sprightly contradance tempo in 3, emphasizing the one, it flows very nicely; there are plenty of reasons to dislike the song, but the damn thing simply isn’t meant to be sung slow, legato, or in 4.
@Brett, @DE: See? Either the ketchups or the catsups would get me in the end. I realized it couldn’t be done, and rephrased the sentence.
Rear Admiral James McPherson (ret’d) is being interviewed on the PBS News Hour, and he just said of the Judge Advocate Generals that “many of them forewent… forego [higher civilian salaries, etc.]”. A nice example of on-the-fly replacement of an awkward form.
@JWB, I’m not sure whether I’m thinking of the same conversations you’ve found online, but I certainly know a few individuals who are keen on such an approach to describe the US and other flags – some focusing on conventional blazonry, others a similar approach for modern flags. In at least one case I have tried and failed to convince them not only that a unique standard description (or as you put it, not redundancy in the system) is not necessary, but even had trouble with the concept that the same words used in a system of blazonry which avoids redundancy might be used in other contexts where overlapping definitions were desirable.
Part of the issue is that on some level the idea of a blazon itself has been traditionally been used to shape the idea of what is counts as the “same” at the heraldic level. The blazon is treated as the definition of the arms, and variation in how it is emblazoned is expected and even encouraged, as long as it can be recognised as having the same blazon. A relatively natural consequence of this approach is treating equality of blazon as the measure of “heraldemic” equivalence, and so desiring unique blazons for each possibility. Heraldists interested in describing the observed function of these symbols might look at it differently, but the peevers tend to be more concerned with regulation and other prescriptiveness.
My point with the US example certainly wasn’t to suggest that there was one right way to blazon it – more that the author of the blazon was deliberately using something he himself considered non-standard because of the significance of the number 13. And that he seems to have followed a fairly pedantic approach to the rule of tincture which treated red stripes on white as different to white stripes on red despite using a blazon which didn’t emphasise that. (The pedantic approach itself being, along with the question of whether the rule applies to cantons and/or chiefs, one of the things which different authorities and traditions have disagreed on, even more significantly than their different approaches to how to blazon.)
The problem of the German anthem has been solved by declaring the third stanza alone the federal anthem. (Benign enough: Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland / Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit sind des Glückes Unterpfand / ||: Blüh’ im Glanze dieses Glückes, blühe, deutsches Vaterland! :||) The first stanza is skunked; that’s the one with the maximum geographic extent of the German language. And the second was probably approximately never sung except during the origin of the song – it makes obvious the whole thing is a drinking song, extolling deutsche Frauen, deutscher Wein.
…and there I was believing Protestants emphasized Jesus’s death over his resurrection, in contrast/reaction to Catholics (and Orthodox). Must be a specifically Lutheran thing then. (Good Friday is a legal holiday in northern but not southern Germany.)
Oh. I never took it as “tyranny’s”, I took it as “from/by the tyranny”. It only dawns on me now that par would probably used in that case, at least today.
London is apparently (slides 11–15) named after the boats that were required to cross the Thames there, below its lowest fording point.
That made me wonder where kritisieren comes from. Wiktionary just says “borrowed from critiquer“, cites the Duden, and leaves the rest as an exercise to the reader.
Don’t know about Dutch, but gehen – ging – gegangen, while on the irregular side of things, is not suppletive. As in fing “caught” and hing “was intransitively hanging”, the i is due to late shortening of the ie that survives in lief, rief, schlief because of the consonant cluster that ng once was.
I only remember Karfreitag as a bundesweiter Feiertag.
The Paul Deutsches Wörterbuch says it’s from Kritik (or any of the related words) mit bildungsspr. Suffix -isieren. Which iirc is originally a Greek suffix. None of the dictionaries I consulted (Pfeifer, Kluge) mentions French critiquer.
there I was believing Protestants emphasized Jesus’s death over his resurrection
I think that this is actually so, at least as a very broad generalisation.
One of the few actual sermons – a very good one – that I heard from my late father-in-law, who was an ordained minister, but primarily was an academic theologian, was dedicated to the proposition that both were absolutely central, not only in general creedal terms but in their implications for everyday Christian life through the believer’s spiritual identification with Christ. He was very much implying that our own tradition does indeed tend to be somewhat one-sided here …
But my own quondam ignorance can’t really be attributed to the church tradition I was (kinda) raised in. It was a rather more radical failure of attention (though in my own defence, Church of Scotland services tended not to be very compelling experiences for a child in those days …)
it makes obvious the whole thing is a drinking song, extolling deutsche Frauen, deutscher Wein
Tuische man sint wol gezogen;
Rehte als engel sint diu wip getan …
as your fellow-countryman says.
@David Marjanović: Although it is a venerable suppletive, the past ging is supposedly from a different Proto-Indo-European root, ǵʰengʰ meaning “step,” as opposed to ǵʰēh₁, “go”; the two have probably been getting conflated all the way back to Proto-Germanic, with the loss of the laryngeal. However, the distinct “step” word is also attested in other branches, for example as žengti (and a bunch of close relatives) in Lithuanian, whose “go” words look very different.
Calvin may have had (according to some) weird and legalistic ideas about Jesus’ death, contributing to a possible imbalance of emphasis, but that’s not really a strictly Protestant thing but a general Western problem that started substantially earlier with Anselm’s (according to some) similarly weird and legalistic ideas. Yer more “Reformed” Protestants were in former times less likely than Lutherans to actually observe Good Friday as such, for the same reasons they banned Christmas when they could get way with it. Non-observance of Christmas created substantially more popular backlash than non-observance of Good Friday, of course. And encouragement of gluttony via downgrading or abolition of Lent just to symbolically stick it to the Pope probably endeared the Reformers to those segments of the public without strong theological views.
ǵʰengʰ meaning “step”
Yet another obvious Oti-Volta loan: cf Kusaal gaŋ “step over”:
Zʋwɔk daan pʋ gaŋid bugumm.
tail.long owner NEGATIVE step.over.IMPERFECTIVE fire.NEGATIVE
“One with a long tail does not step over the fire.”
(Sound advice, as I am sure we can all agree.)
I remember flouting the possibility of a long buried derivational pattern, and we alsobriefly discussed it five years earlier.
To the forms mentioned there I now want to add hange – heng – hekk – hev hengje “hang (intr.)”, which don’t have a corresponding verb *hå, but does work with ON há “high”,
Zʋwɔk
tail.long
There are separate words for ‘long tail’ and ‘short tail’? Or are there two morphemes here?
@trond
Are there analogues of sway and swank in Norwegian?
Or are there two morphemes here?
Yeah, it’s a compound noun, following the normal Oti-Volta principle that attributive adjectives compound with their heads. “Tail” is zʋʋr. Standard Kusaal orthography, which I follow by default when commenting here, writes compounds as single words unless the combining form of the first noun happens to be spelt the same as its singular, as in dau wɔk “tall man.” (In this case, the combining form is actually different in tone from the singular, but the orthography never marks tone.)
The word-division conventions of the standard orthography are its least satisfactory feature, closely followed by the way vowel nasalisation is marked. In fairness, word division in Kusaal is not a straightforward issue at all. I usually gloss over the gory details of it all in glossing my examples here (geddit?)
Zʋwɔk is actually three morphemes; there’s a singular noun-class suffix *-gɔ lurking in there too; cf zʋwa’ad “long tails” …
Pleasingly, zʋʋr “tail” (plural zʋya, combining form zʋ) tends to be the very last lexeme in dictionaries. (Unfortunately, “head” is zug.)
I’ve sometimes described the Baptist church of my childhood as a place where it was Good Friday every Sunday. The infrequent Communion service was a mournful event in which the communion itself was generally accompanied by an organ solo of “Go to Dark Gethsemane.”
@Rodger C.: Ah, that’s what happens when you grow up among Baptists more worldly than the Old Regulars and suchlike who don’t have organs in their churches because they are (supposedly) un-Biblical.
ulr, you’re right, Good Friday is off in all of Germany – and most of Switzerland but not Austria. However, there are some heavily Catholic countries in the list.
PP: Are there analogues of sway and swank in Norwegian?
Nope. Not directly, no. But it may well fit here.
I now wonder if this pattern could be related to special word-formations in Germanic or “Northwest” IE like *wring- “twist” but also *lang- “long”, *þung- “heavy”, and *stang- “rod”, i.e. an archaism preserved in dialectal IE.
To take this far out, I also wonder if it’s related to the nasal present, carrying a participal continuous aspect: Like *gang- is to be continuously walking, *fang- is to be continuously holding or take constant possession of, and *hang- is to be constantly high, *wring- is to make constantly twisted, *lang- is being constantly in a state of, eh, laying flat, *þung- is being constantly in a state of pulling, and *stang- is being constantly in a state of stiffness.
And even further out, the present participle ending *-ents/*-onts is the same infix outsourced to the “be” verb when word stems became too complex for infixing. If so, that might have happened independently in different branches of IE.
Ingenious, except… no, actually, maybe that works, too: in Anatolian the *-ent-/*-ont- participle is the past passive one, and the same suffix forms the ergative that the neuter nouns have
Grubtal: As an American by birth and s patriot by conviction, I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for
the apehaving no restrictions on immigration, for the same reasons that I favor jus soli.Brett: Not a wasp but s sparrow.
David M.: Ingenious, except…
It was a pretty handwavy argument.
no, actually, maybe that works, too: in Anatolian the *-ent-/*-ont- participle is the past passive one, and the same suffix forms the ergative that the neuter nouns have
I remembered there was something special with the Anatolian participle, but didn’t bother to look it up. Since Anatolian is old and diverging anyway, I imagined I could just handwave harder. Thanks for helping me with that!
Still. the idea would probably run into all sorts of complexities if I were to try to work it out in detail. There’s usually a reason that something has been dismissed by two centuries of indoeuropeanists.
The Onion has a (who could have thought) take on citizenship tests too.
@D.O.: YouTube comments are typically a sewer, but I love how many people comment on those Onion videos in total deadpan continuations of the bit.
Thanks, it would never have occurred to me to check the comments. Here are a couple of good ones:
@charles_xcx
18 hours ago
As an immigration lawyer, the swimsuit portion is one of the most important aspects of the test. Not only does it help immigrants understand and adapt to the American tradition of wearing totally unflattering clothing, its also one of the most rewarding parts of my job in helping review these aspiring citizens.
@SinuousStudios
near perfectly (they make an exception for bears).
19 hours ago
Try the UK citizenship test sometime, you have to fly and land an umbrella