Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Wackernagel’s Lectures on Syntax with Special Reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic (tr. David Langslow):
In this course on syntax, we shall have constantly to deal with inherited material, which is to be found in even the smallest details and in oddities concerning which one would hardly think in terms of inheritance. For example, at Iliad 3.276–7, in a prayer to Zeus and the Sun-god, we read: Ζεῦ πάτερ … Ἠέλιός τε (‘Zeus father (voc.) . . . and Helios (the Sun) (nom.)’), i.e. in the invocation one god is named in the vocative, the other in the nominative. It would be superficial simply to refer this to the requirements of the metre, since the poet would have had other means at his disposal for turning out a correct hexameter. From the point of view of Greek this is an oddity, particularly as vocatives elsewhere occur in coordination. This puzzle was solved by an outstanding philologist, Theodor BENFEY (1809–81). He showed (1872: 30–4) that in the Rigveda, the oldest written remains of an Indo-European language, when two forms of address are joined together with the little word ca ‘and’ (corresponding to Greek τε ‘and’), the second is in the nominative rather than the vocative. So Homer’s use of the nominative instead of the vocative is conditioned by the little word τε. This tiny detail reveals the power of linguistic habit and the influence of inheritance.
Here’s the original German:
Überall in unserer Syntax werden wir es mit Ererbtem zu tun haben. Es erstreckt sich bis auf kleinste Kleinigkeiten und Seltsamkeiten, bei denen man kaum an Vererbung denken würde. So heisst es I 277 in einem Gebet an Zeus und den Sonnengott: Ζεῦ πάτερ … Ἠέλιός τε. Da wird also der eine Gott bei der Anrufung im Vokativ genannt, der andere im Nominativ. Es wäre oberflächlich ohne weiteres von einem Zwange des Metrums zu sprechen, da dem Dichter andere Mittel zu Gebote gestanden hätten um einen richtigen Hexameter herauszubringen. Vom Standpunkt des Griechischen ist dies eine Seltsamkeit, besonders da sich in andern Fällen Vokative koordiniert finden. Das Rätsel wurde gelöst durch einen ausgezeichneten Sprachforscher, Theodor Benfey. Er wies nach dass wenn im ältesten indogermanischen Sprachdenkmal, dem Rigweda, einer ersten Anrede eine zweite durch das dem Wörtchen τε entsprechende Wort ča beigefügt wird, diese zweite Anrede statt des Vokativs den Nominativ hat. Die Setzung des Nominativs statt des Vokativs ist also durch das Wörtchen τε bedingt. So enthüllt sich in dieser minimalen Kleinigkeit die Macht der Gewohnheit und der Einfluss der Vererbung.
I note that Langslow felt it necessary to add the qualifying “linguistic” to Wackernagel’s “die Macht der Gewohnheit” [the power of habit]. At any rate, this is the kind of cross-linguistic comparison that provides so much of the thrill of historical linguistics. (More details at the Laudator link.)
I think it even reveals the origin of the conjunction/joining particle as a pronoun used for comparison. “(Oh) Zeu, like Helios, …”
Interesting stuff. Latin too has occasional examples of “nominativus pro vocativo”, but I don’t know if they’re particularly common in coordinations.
In Croatian epic poetry, you can find vocative instead of the nominative.
Eg. “knjigu piše Senjanine Ive” = Ivo of Senj is writing a letter
In Wikibrief I found this overview of Vedic grammar. In the “Bausteine” section is a table, the third column of which is titled KUCHEN. I briefly thought the word for pie was being used as an example. But it’s a link to the WiPe article on Proto-Indo-European language.
By the way, many German speakers and writers have a habit of using the nominative of a word in an appositional phrase (marked as explanatory or parenthetic) following a word in the dative.
I can’t supply an example offhand, since my pedantery turns such things away at the door to my memory. Later, alligator.
Modern German grammars probably don’t make a fuss about it. But in my secret recesses I am a fussbudget and scold.
So enthüllt sich in dieser minimalen Kleinigkeit die Macht der Gewohnheit und der Einfluss der Vererbung.
Are Gewohnheit and Vererbung supposed to be different things ? If so, how to distinguish them with reference to languages ?
Would not deliberate imitation, by writers versed in several languages, provide a sufficient explanation without the Grand Narrative ?
Gewohnheit = nurture/learned behaviour
Vererbung = nature/instinctive behaviour
Macht der Gewohnheit = people learn to do it, even though it seems weird
Einfluss der Vererbung = weird things can be found jointly in siblings because inherited from parents
I think you know this but maybe you are making a subtle point I have failed to understand.
Maybe you are saying the construction entered Homeric Greek from an Ionian or other Persian-adjacent source. This could presumably be investigated.
zyxt: In Croatian epic poetry, you can find vocative instead of the nominative.
Eg. “knjigu piše Senjanine Ive” = Ivo of Senj is writing a letter
I know nothing of Croatian epic poetry, but this looks like an oratory device. The orator is summoning the protagonist, installing a sense of immediate presence in the mind of the audience. “He’s writing a letter, oh Ivo of Senj!”
There are examples of this in Serbian epic poetry as well (e.g. Vino pije Kraljeviću Marko or Netko bješe Strahiniću Bane).
One explanation I encountered a long time ago is that this device was used for metric purposes: each line was 10 syllables long (the so-called deseterac), and by using the vocative you get an additional syllable or two, if you need them.
Not sure how plausible this is, but I’ve never tried consulting reputable sources to see what the consensus is.
I’m wondering if there’s some sort of parallel to the way in which pronoun case can work weirdly in compound subjects in English. I.e., the standard prescriptivist objection to a common informal-register sentence like “Me and him went down to the store” is that it Must Be Wrong because you obviously wouldn’t say “*Me went down to the store” or “Him went down to the store.” But in fact people who use the “me and him” construction know that, and generally don’t say either of those other things, because they are clearly following a tacit, not-taught-in-school rule that case works differently for “X and Y” than for either X or Y standing alone in the same syntactic position.
Would not deliberate imitation, by writers versed in several languages, provide a sufficient explanation without the Grand Narrative ?
No. I feel confident in saying the Venn diagram of people in the ancient world familiar with both Homeric Greek and the archaic Sanskrit of the Rigveda would show essentially no overlap; if by some miracle there was someone who knew both, I’m equally confident in saying they had no influence on the respective verse traditions.
Are Gewohnheit and Vererbung supposed to be different things ? If so, how to distinguish them with reference to languages ?
I can only speculate what Wackernagel was thinking, but one possible interpretation is that habit and inheritance work together – inheritance (in language: learning from and imitating previous generations of speakers) ensures that a linguistic phenomenon is kept alive from generation to generation, and habit ensures that people keep using it and themselves provide the opportunity to the next generation to learn it.
So far, so good. But habit is the enemy of change, and changes are not always inherited. When they are not, they leave no trace. For many people, this makes theories of biological evolution hard to distinguish from theories of creationism (directed change with no experimenting around).
How is one to imagine “inheritance” at work in the example of vocative-followed-by-nominative in Vedic and Greek ? What exactly has been “inherited”, by what mechanisms ? Is there a “substrate” Venn diagram with overlapping that is being posited ?
The ambiguity of the word “inheritance” (biological vs. cultural) is being worked pretty hard here. The linguistic version appears to be Lamarckian, which helps distinguish the two kinds of “inheritance”. But what about “convergence” ? Could it be that the vocative-followed-by-nominative is an example of “convergence” ?? If not, that would be something else that distinguishes linguistic “inheritance” from the biological kind.
How about replacing “habit and inheritance” with “imperfect imitation”, in the context of languages ? Would that bring linguistic science to its knees ? I doubt it. But it might help to curb the bluster.
Les lois de l’imitation
# Tarde fait de l’imitation le fondement du lien social, celle-ci couvrant tous les aspects de la vie sociale (religieux, politique, juridique, scientifique, économique, linguistique et culturel). Il y a d’abord des innovations ou des découvertes, qui peuvent n’être qu’un perfectionnement, si faible soit-il, d’innovations réalisées auparavant. Ces « initiatives rénovatrices » se propagent ensuite par imitation et répétition, s’étendent d’un milieu social vers un autre, d’un village à un autre, d’un pays à un autre. Les civilisations conquérantes imitent ainsi les civilisations conquises et vice-versa. #
It’s that the word “inheritance” in (modern) biology is in fact used in a highly technical way, greatly at variance with the normal sense of the word elsewhere.
In the biological sense, for example, you could only inherit the the money or property your parents were born with (not even that, if they acquired their property in utero.)*
It should really be the biologists who come up with an appropriate neologism for themselves. It’s they who came up with this counterintuitive concept that English hasn’t got a real word for …
* And so on, ad infinitum … I can see this as the basis of a grand Utopian vision …
Back in the day, inheritance was probably a good name because science didn’t know what you could inherit and not. Then it turned out that Lamarck and Lysenko were wrong, but why change a word you’ve used for a hundred years?
It should really be the biologists who come up with an appropriate neologism for themselves.
Sei’s drum. For the reader’s cognitive convenience I will now omit quotes around the word “inherit” and its various forms:
# How is one to imagine inheritance at work in the example of vocative-followed-by-nominative in Vedic and Greek ? What exactly has been inherited, by what mechanisms ? Is there a “substrate” Venn diagram with overlap that is being posited ? [Venn diagram without overlap] #
How is one to imagine inheritance at work in the example of vocative-followed-by-nominative in Vedic and Greek ?
Very simply: it would have been a feature of their common ancestral language. You do realize they developed from the same language, right? That’s what the whole Indo-European thing is about. It’s like asking how inheritance is at work in the example of Vedic pitar- and Greek pater- both meaning ‘father.’
I indeed realize.
I see now at Laudator that there are other instances of this “syntactic peculiarity”. I had thought this was a single peculiarity being inflated into a regularity.
I still think “imperfect imitation” can be usefully regarded as a notion of which both modern biological inheritance and linguistic inheritance are variants.
Biological evolution is now presented as a braided stream rather than a tree. Presenting it as a tree, with a trunk dividing successively into branches and smaller\ branches, introduces a misleading element of purpose or direction which is quasi-design. Any braided stream model of descent can be converted into a tree by favoring one early ancestor and one late descendant and treating all the side branches as of lesser importance, but that’s an artifact of presentation at best.
https://ktwop.com/2014/01/04/human-evolution-as-a-braided-stream-rather-than-a-branching-tree/
BUT WAIT! If you read the page, it turns out that the braided stream model also has been superceded.
“Maybe an evolutionary swamp would be a better analogy, full of algae-covered bayous.”
And they expect it to get even more complicated.
Walt Kelly inkled it !
I Go Pogo!
A few easy clicks brought me to this charming abuse of multiplication: https://ktwop.com/2013/04/16/180-million-neanderthals-are-among-us/
The same fallacy as this: If one woman can produce a baby in nine months, nine women should be able to produce a baby in one month.
By the one-drop rule in effect in the U. S. of A., science tells us that there are 6 billion Neanderthals in the world.
More abuse of math. (“The new paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed” — you don’t say!)
There is a brief but very dense paragraph on the syntax of the vocative in Avestan midway through this article by Jean Kellens in the Encyclopaedia Iranica. Of the works he mentions, in particular that of Stephanie Jamison on the topic of the vāyav indraś ca vocative construction in Vedic is very interesting. She summarizes it here, p. 216ff (from Jamison, S.W. (1993) “Determining the synchronic syntax of a dead language [Vedic Sanskrit]”, in Historical linguistics 1989: papers from the 9th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Rutgers University, 14-18 August 1989. ed. H. Aertsen and R.J. Jeffers, pp. 211-220). I hope Google Books lets LH readers see the pages linked to.
The so-called one-drop rule is largely a 20th-century myth and/or retcon. In antebellum South Carolina (when it was early enough that the government and legal system could not pretend to be naive about the then-recent historical reality of what I believe are called admixture events) someone with up to 1/8 ancestry from sub-Saharan Africa (but the rest white) was still a white person as a matter of law, and if the African portion was in between 1/8 and 1/4 they might or might not be a white person and (in a context where it was legally relevant) a jury might have to decide what their race was.
Macht der Gewohnheit is a fixed phrase you can even use as an apology.
*lightbulb moment*
The whole article is a machine translation of the Wikipedia article. Probably a desperate attempt to get rich from ads on Wikipedia content.
Oh, that’s just emphasis.
You don’t say “*me went down to the store” or “*him went down to the store”, but you do say “me, I went down to the store” and “him, he went down to the store” (highly reminiscent of moi, je… and of nothing else in Germanic, BTW). And so, “me and him, we went down to the store”. The innovation here that the prescriptivists have missed, so it confuses and enrages them, is to shorten this to “me and him went down to the store”.
Nah. Individual branches of the tree are now presented as braided streams rather than as solid, that’s all (except for horizontal gene transfer).
“The so-called one-drop rule is largely a 20th-century myth”.
It was real enough that when Anatole Broyard (d. 1990, lived in NYC) “passed for white” it was an issue. If you want to say that it was a cultural rule rather than a legal one, or that it was post-Civil War (and post-Reconstruction) rather than pre- , OK, but that doesn’t make it a myth. There are all kinds of stories of white-looking people with black ancestry and the choices they had to make, where sometimes white-looking members of the family could pass, but had to avoid their black-looking kin.
Per the Broyard Wiki article, the one-drop rule was written into law early in the 20th c. (Reconstruction only came to an end in the late 1890s; there were still black Congressmen from the South until 1900 or so). 1890-1940 was not really a time of gradual progress, but of gradual regress. Net progress only began after WWII.
Broyard’s issues arose because he had grown up in an understood-to-be-black family (which had other members whose partially-African ancestry was more visually obvious than his was). Someone who looked the same who had grown up in an understood-to-be-white family w/o close family members who looked “less white” would not have had the same issues. There was a lot of historical arbitrariness in whose family fell into which category, and “passing” was possible because some kids born into “understood-to-be-black” families had a genetic endowment that minimized the visual impact of whatever the African portion of their ancestry might have been. But there were generally *not* “passing” controversies because some genealogical muckracker dug through old records determined that some prominent “white” person who had grown up in an understood-to-be-white family and whose parents had both grown-up ditto had in fact had a single undeniably black great-great-great-grandparent.
“Nah. Individual branches of the tree are now presented as braided streams rather than as solid, that’s all (except for horizontal gene transfer).”
Did you look at the article? One point is that most of us have Neanderthal ancestors and many have Denosivan ancestors, with other lines uncertain and TBA. And “horizontal gene transfer” is a lot of what the braided stream idea is all about.
Though yes, as I said above, the pure braided-stream model has been replaced, perhaps by the swamp model.
I would say that the 1920-1940 period was a very mixed bag on racial issues but there’s certainly a glass-half-full view, both because: (a) massive migration out of the rural South to urban North certainly came with lots of negatives as well as positives yet the fact that millions of black people did it suggested it was widely viewed as an improvement on net (and however much backlash there was in the North, exclusion from voting, in particular, was never part of it); and (b) the jazz boom among other things made black cultural innovation relevant and important to a variety of white people (including white people outside some sort of bohemian and/or elitist fringe) in a way that had maybe not been present in previous eras. But I certainly don’t dispute that 1890-1920 (or at least until the outbreak of WW1) was regression on net.
And yes attempts as in Virginia to enshrine the one-drop notion into statute are interesting, not least because they show that early 20th century white supremacists were more naive or more in denial about the family trees of their fellow prominent white people than their early 19th century predecessors had been.
well, yes, there was progress when black people moved out of the most regressive areas. But most black people still lived in the South, and white supremacy (lynching, the denial of the vote, and school segregation) only began to be seriously challenged after WWII. Basically the 14th Amendment was suspended in the South by a passive refusal of the Supreme Court to support it.
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190232573.001.0001/acprof-9780190232573
And yes attempts as in Virginia to enshrine the one-drop notion into statute are interesting, not least because they show that early 20th century white supremacists were more naive or more in denial about the family trees of their fellow prominent white people than their early 19th century predecessors had been.
And also because they show that the rule was not a myth, except in the sense that all history that doesn’t rely on rigorous documentation is a myth. And yes, “1890-1920 (or at least until the outbreak of WW1) was regression on net”; I’m not sure why you’re so grudging about it or so restrictive in your chronology — the entire period between Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the ’50s-’60s was regression pure and simple. I hope you’re not trying out some sort of revisionist history of racism, which at this point is hardly a daring move.
Two real turning points were the Wilmington Insurrection / massacre of 1898, and the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Both were led by Democrats of some national importance (Josephus Daniels and Tate Brady, respectively). Daniels held important narional positions both under Wilson and FDR.
I just have a larger understanding of “individual branch” than you seem to.
Not limited to the US or to racism, of course. There was a huge conservative backlash after both world wars all over the West, the first taken over by fascism, the second suddenly breaking in the 60s. The great big difference between the US and the Rest of the West is that the US had a third conservative backlash – Reagan – while the Rest didn’t.
Emerson, you’re a Boomer. You (to unfairly reduce you to a stereotype) no doubt think the world started circa 1956 with the combined forces of Elvis going on Ed Sullivan and the Montgomery bus boycott, because you have no personal memory of anything prior to that therefore it must all have been the Dark Ages. My own theory is that the high-profile Civil Rights Movement ™ was ultimately so successful between c. 1954 and c. 1966 (when the topics changed and things rapidly started going in other directions) because a lot of small incremental-but-positive things (side by side with lots and lots of negative or sideways things, of course) had been happening for several decades previously that had put that movement in a position of comparative strength it had earlier lacked. In particular, what changed in the decades between the wars with the Great Migration was less any obvious upsurge in the legal/political situation of black people in the U.S. but a change in their economic status, the role they played in the national economy, and the implicit/potential political power that gave them. You don’t have to be a Marxist to think that was a good time to be shifting from a rural-peasant type of population to an urban-factory-worker type of population, even if the latter status subsequently turned out not to be so great as the century wore on.
I don’t think this contradicts any of the other comments, but mention it as an interesting anecdote—future Chicago Cong. Oscar DePriest’s political career began as a county board member in 1904, at what is being posited as a low point in anti-racist progress. There was certainly no majority black district at the time. It’s interesting to ponder what coalition-building may have led to his win.
His name is still on the foundation plaque of the Cook County Buildimg, where I worked as an election staffer. Previously I had worked a few times as a substitute teacher at DePriest Elementary on the west side.
It’s a nice illustration of how subcurrents of history may be moving in different directions.
The great big difference between the US and the Rest of the West is that the US had a third conservative backlash – Reagan – while the Rest didn’t.
Ummm – how would you characterise Thatcher or Kohl? You could argue that what Kohl did was small beer (although I’d rather see that as another case of post-war Germany avoiding radical pendulum swings, not as the absence of swings), but Thatcher surely was the real conservative backlash deal?
The national Democratic Party still firmly supported white supremacy and tolerated lynching as of 1945. Truman started to change things and in 1948 the Democratic National Convention actually supported a Civil Rights plank, which split the party but not fatally. But the Civil Rights laws of the 60s really did destroy the Democratic coalition.
I am aware that post-boomer generations are eager to put a happy face on lots of things, but I would prefer to argue about things like lynch law, segregation, and voting rights. (But wait! Aren’t the loathsome Boomers rightwing? I’m so confused).
Well, if you’re only evaluating the performance of the national Democratic Party I can’t really help you much with that. My (heavily-qualified) happy face narrative is that during the period between lets say 1915 and 1955 a whole lot of blacks moved out of the part of the country that had very official/overt/strict Jim Crow rules into parts of the country that didn’t, so the local white folks in the North (who in many instances had previously prided themselves on progressive racial attitudes while having no actual black neighbors to test this self-approbation) thus had to scramble and improvise de facto rather than de jure substitutes for formal Jim Crow as a reaction to their new black neighbors. Which were indeed quite often nasty and motivated by racism but often not on balance quite as stringent in actual practice as the ancien regime in the Deep South. Thus *comparative* progress could objectively be made in that context. Combined with whatever was going on under the surface that made for example many northern white Democratic politicians willing by 1948ish to sign on at least rhetorically to civil rights policy positions their predecessors would not have signed on to in 1924ish. Something had probably happened in between to soften them up, wouldn’t you admit?
@Hans: It all depends on what you view as major versus minor issues. Mrs. Thatcher of famous memory neither restored capital punishment in the U.K. nor got rid of the metric system (or the vulgar innovation of decimalised currency), for example.
I would prefer to argue about things like lynch law, segregation, and voting rights
And contracted prison labor, aka “second slavery” (though that term has multiple uses).
Aren’t the loathsome Boomers rightwing?
There are Jerries, yes. But then there are Abbies.
“Well, if you’re only evaluating the performance of the national Democratic Party I can’t really help you much with that.” Thank you for more much-needed snot.
What this meant is that lynching continued, black people in the South couldn’t vote and went to segregated schools, and nobody of any importance at the national level really cared. There were massacres of over a hundred people in Arkansas and Oklahoma in 1919 and 1921 and smaller massacres through the 20s, and in Arkansas only the victims were prosecuted. The KKK was a political power in much of the North through the 1920s.
Perhaps someone else can talk to this guy.
Unfortunately those events don’t do much to distinguish the period you’re talking about from 1873 in Colfax, LA, 1892 in Memphis or 1899 in Wilmington, NC.
Meanwhile, blacks had their own regiments in most northern state militias, (something at the time considered a positive reflection of communal power rather than an aspect of segregation), an outgrowth of the membership of black veterans in the politically powerful GAR, and they were finding a place in the northern Republican political coalition. It’s tough to balance against continued ritual violence in the south and say which period was “better,” but that progress towards political power certainly helped the civil rights movement.
@Hans: It all depends on what you view as major versus minor issues.
Probably. Although I wasn’t saying that Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl were all the same; I just was trying to make the point that there actually was a conservative pendulum swing in some important European countries in the 80s, even if the specific contents were different (but all of them included some degree of welfare reduction, anti-trade-union policies, deregulation and privatization).
Thatcher’s right-wingery was largely economic, rather than the currently popular kind based primarily on encouraging voters to hate and fear their neighbours so that they will vote against their own economic best interests.
One feels almost nostalgic …
She was not averse to exploiting such things, but it wasn’t her primary focus.
Specifically racial issues have never been quite as toxic in the UK as the US, for obvious historical reasons.
@ DM
Oh, that’s just emphasis.
Are you sure? Do you have proof for this historical explanation of “me and him”?
“Unfortunately those events don’t do much to distinguish the period you’re talking about from 1873 in Colfax, LA, 1892 in Memphis or 1899 in Wilmington, NC.”
Well, I suppose I should have said that things started to get bad in 1877, got steadily worse until about 1900, and stayed worse until 1940, though the resegregation of the Federal Civil Service didn’t happen until 1913. . I suppose that “fewer unprosecuted lynchings” is also progress, going from 99 in 1903 to 33 in 1933, though the reason for the decline was mostly that white supremacy had been firmly established, for example by the Tulsa riot, which definitively destroyed quite a hopeful racial situation. .
The comparison was with the 1865-77 period, when there was really progress, compared to the 1877-1940, when most of that progress was reversed and mostly stayed reversed, though it was not a steady year by year decline. And all of the villains (Josephus Daniels, Tate Brady, Woodrow Wilson) remained respected and admired. Even when I was young Wilson wasn’t spoken of as a segregationist or a racist.
I somehow managed to forget about them. There are differences that make them less big deals than Reagan, but they mostly amount to Reagan being personally popular due to his skills as actor, to Thatcher focusing on libertarian economics rather than conservative policies (other than the Falkland war!) and to Kohl, as you say, refraining from extremism in any direction (while Reagan merrily took the Overton Window with him everywhere he went).
However, Reagan’s personal popularity boosted the conservative backlash in a way not remotely seen elsewhere. That started before his first election, but it didn’t end with his landslide reelection. Thatcher left office in disgrace; Kohl’s retreat came with a major defeat for his party and a swing to the left, and was soon followed by a corruption scandal for him and his party; but until a few years ago it seems to have been impossible to speak ill of St. Ronnie of the Raygun even in mainstream Democratic circles, and he tended to come right after Lincoln in ranked lists of presidents until a few years into the Trump misadministration.
Yes, that’s been a continuing (and bitter) mystery to me for four decades now. What an evil bastard he was! I understand the enthusiasm of the GOP, but why the Dems?! (It’s doubtless connected with the absence of a genuine party of the left in this strange land.)
Also with Reagan’s ability to say exactly what he was supposed to say. He spread optimism (“make America great again”, “it’s morning again in America”, “tear down this wall”), fear (“evil empire”, “welfare queens”) and envy (“welfare queens”) at the same time, and that combination was irresistible.
A case can probably be made that he was acting the whole time until Alzheimer’s made him believe it for real. I’ve read about one of his early TV debates that he knew neither how to debate nor the topic he was talking about, “but ‘debating president’ was a role he was able to learn”, so he did that and won the debate.
There are differences that make them less big deals than Reagan, but they mostly amount to Reagan being personally popular due to his skills as actor, to Thatcher focusing on libertarian economics rather than conservative policies
But ironically Reagan was actually far more successful at moving the US towards libertarian economics than at being a cultural conservative. Arguably Reagan failed completely as a culture warrior – even most of the Trumpian GOP in 2022 won’t come out against gay marriage or try to bar women from serving in combat roles. Saying “no” to drugs didn’t get very far. We still don’t have prayer in schools in the US – which I remember as the hot button issue among New Hampshire conservatives when I was growing up. Otoh, Reagan gutted environmental protection and research into alternative energy and accelerated the process of privatization of government profits and socialization of corporate costs that Trump has proudly continued. Reagan’s economic legacy was the real disaster for the US.
In Slobodian’s “Globalists” and / or Mirowski’s “The Road from Mont Pelerin” we see the neoliberals learning that their full program would hurt too many people to be honestly put in place by democratic methods the way the libertarians tried to, and concluding that they were going to have to go to the “two truths” method, one truth for the people running the show and a different truth (involving all kinds of things about race, gender, Jesus, etc.) for the masses. Adam Kotsko in “Neoliberalism’s Demons” has shown how contemporary evangelical Christianity came into being in opposition to the social gospel and is customized for support of a ruthless version of the free market. (Click on my name for my review of Kotsko)
I see that Counterpunch doesn’t proofread. I do proofread, but not very well. If he reads what I just posted, Hat will be be grinding his teeth.
Thatcher, Reagan, and Kohl. Timeframe doesn’t work, but who cares.
And the author must have been looking at the keyboard the whole time up until and including while clicking “Send”, never once looking at the screen. It’s quite astonishing.
It’s also strange how the review describes Calvinism in a way that fits most of Christianity – except, funnily enough, generic American fundamentalism – and ends suddenly, without rhyme or reason.
Missing from the review is the history of neoliberalism outside the US. Dazzled by Clinton’s electoral successes, Social Democrats all over Europe imitated him – Blair, Schröder, even people you haven’t heard about like Klima – and were quite successful with that for a few years. Germany is still suffering from the Agenda 2010 and Hartz IV.
A particularly cruel consequence of Calvinism is that there can be no possibility of protest because there are no innocent victims. We are all guilty
I’ll bear that in mind when I’m next protesting.
The conclusion, let’s say, does not follow from the premises. Anybody who tells you it does is either remarkably ill-informed about Calvinism, or is deliberately misusing Christian doctrine for political ends. Blaspheming, as we Calvinists call it. There is indeed a lot of such blasphemy about.
As DM implies, “We are all guilty” is mainstream Christianity, all orthodox flavours, rather than Calvinism specifically. The conclusion that this means that we should do nothing about suffering is heretical (and abominable), not orthodox Calvinism or anything else.
heretical (and abominable)
Para uno de esos gnósticos, el visible universo era una ilusión o (más precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan.
The non-proofreading author was me.
I would recommend that you read Kotsko’s book and not rely on my review for your judgements of it. He is a former evangelical who is now a theologian and philosopher.
Neither his book nor my review was an overview of neoliberalism (though the other two books I mentioned above were). It was about the function of evangelical Christianity in neoliberalism.
“The conclusion that this means that we should do nothing about suffering is heretical (and abominable),”
As is your view to the people who I’m speaking of. They are capable of individual charity to the worthy poor but totally opposed to the social gospel.
Why should we be charitable to worms crawling on the earth who are born sinful and cannot escape their sinful nature?
I hold no brief whatsoever for the “Evangelicals” who do indeed support the wicked Neoliberal project, and, worse yet, its carapace of systematic deception. Quite the contrary. American white Evangelical Christianity is deep in the spiritual shit (if you will excuse a theological technical term.)
However, you are in sheer factual error in attributing their views specifically to Calvinism, and you are egregiously in error in supposing that Calvinism in any way teaches that only the deserving should be helped (that would indeed be a timesaver, as we don’t believe that there are any …)
Help for the undeserving is pretty much the theme tune of genuine mainstream Christianity. We are undeserving. God helped us, and we didn’t deserve it a bit. “Christians” who repudiate this central doctrine have repudiated Christ. They have no standing in theological discussion at all.
Recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres.
There are different versions of this in the ‘net, all pretending to be quotes. Did B. rewrite Tlön several times ? The one above seems most B.-like to me, but it’s been decades since I read the story.
“paternidad” instead of “cópula“, how wimpy is that.
What’s more, the other version a few comments back doesn’t make sense. What is multiplicar y divulgar el universo visible supposed to mean ? lo could only refer to >i>sofisma otherwise, which is just as dumb.
Para uno de esos gnósticos, el visible universo era una ilusión o (más precisamente) un sofisma. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables porque lo multiplican y lo divulgan.
On the one hand, evangelical Christianity (under any definition) has barely made it out of the US, while neoliberalism has.
On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly what explains why neoliberalism hasn’t caught on as much as in the US.
Reminds me of a film I’ve never watched.
evangelical Christianity (under any definition) has barely made it out of the US
Doctrinally, UK (and Australian) Protestantism is in fact to a considerable extent “evangelical” in this sense (essentially a euphemism for “fundamentalist.”) It’s quite different from European Protestantism in that way.
What is different from the US is the lack of the hell-spawned linkage between the theological doctrines and extreme right-wing politics (what Americans call “right wing.”) This was the result of a deliberately planned and exceedingly successful strategy on the part of the American right wing. There is nothing inevitable or indeed natural about this linkage at all: it’s a perversion of Christianity.
Unfortunately, the Americans have shown considerable vigour in exporting this abomination to the rest of Anglophonia (witness the last Australian Prime Minister as Specimen A.) Still, I’m happy to say that nobody in my own (“evangelical”) church circles in the UK sees anything odd or in any way contradictory in my also being a left-wing Labour party activist (or “extreme radical communist” as Americans say.) I do get the occasional odd look from Labour comrades when I talk about being a churchgoing Christian … (though I did unexpectedly have a moment of bonding when campaigning recently with a comrade from South America, who said, rightly, that we shared the fact that we came to left-wing politics via our Christianity. But his story is much more impressive than mine.)
Is there really a cult of Borges Bowdlerizers ? How very weird. Argies, I bet.
@David Marjanović: Zardoz, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, is one of those works which, no matter how much you may have heard about it, you cannot comprehend without experiencing it for yourself.
Is there really a cult of Borges Bowdlerizers ?
Don’t forget the Anti-Borges.
So it’s true ! Must have missed that thread in 2010.
a film I’ve never watched
Sean Connery was one of the few actors with enough star quality to make almost anything watchable if he was in it. Zardoz is a pretty severe stress test of this quality, but I think he brings it off …
And of course, it has Charlotte Rampling. Who wouldn’t want to see Charlotte rample?
Evangelical Christianity is huge in Africa, New Guinea, and Latin America.
I’m sorry I said anything and will bow out again.
Evangelical Christianity is huge in Africa, New Guinea, and Latin America
Very true.
My impression in Africa is that, again, the poisonous linkage with far-right politics is absent, but the political landscape tends to be so unfamiliar from a European standpoint anyway that it’s hard to say anything meaningful about that. Christians are not especially keen on military dictatorships compared with anybody else, anyway.
There is certainly an association with “cultural conservativism”, but then Islam in Africa is not exactly celebrated for wokeness, nor are many traditional cultures, so it’s difficult to know how much of it is imported and how much is home-grown. I had very different experiences in Ghana and in Nigeria in this regard; the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, whom I used to work for, was founded by pious Swiss and Scots and is not a bit like the Americans; ECWA, whom I worked for in Nigeria, on the other hand, is very obviously American influenced (to a degree that gave me something of a culture shock.) Mind you, it’s a kind of time-capsule American evangelicalism from the early 1960’s in a lot of ways. Dancing is evil, as, of course, is alcohol … (but then, in an environment where the great majority of people are Muslim, you probably need to parade your soberer-than-thou credentials …)
Brazil, though … the whole package, it seems.
I’m sorry I said anything and will bow out again
Not on my account, I hope. I get cross with reductive ideas about Calvinism but I don’t attribute them to malice.* I think I got a bit carried away …
* Though the sinister forces of Arminianism are, of course, everywhere secretly at work amongst us. Oh yes.
“Dancing is evil” – any sort of it or more sexual varieties?
Any sort. The idea of “more sexual” varieties is simply too horrific to contemplate.
You might wonder if this had something to do with pagan associations of dance in Africa, which would make it more comprehensible, I guess, but it wasn’t: it was a sociological hangup of American Evangelical Protestant missionaries, that they brought with them and imposed on their unfortunate acolytes as if it were some genuine doctrinal thing. Who then internalised it …
As the joke goes, they disapprove of fornication, because it might lead to dancing.
In spite of the reputation of Anglo-American Puritans as the ultimate Calvinist killjoys, outdoor dancing was actually something that they were very fond of—so long as there was no touching between men and women and no suggestive hip gyrations.
As I expect all Hatters know already, the “pure” in “Puritan” refers (or originally referred) to purity not from Sin (shudder) but from those horrid Roman Catholic beliefs/habits/nameless rituals. It started out as a slur used by other Protestants for their brethren who just didn’t know when to call it a day. “Ultras.”
Yes, Ultras is a good equivalent.
@DE, thank you.
There are Jewish and Muslim communities that disapprove it, I do not know why. Also music.
And there is prudishness (tango… and well, African dances appear sexual to Europeans too).
As I undestand you, it is more like the former kind.
—
I must admit that I was surprised when my freind quoted claims of a follower of one minor sect that radio and TV are evil as an example of “weird” beliefs. Is not it just true?
Now this freind is a political emigrant, and is recording a song about our TV with one of our rock groups…
Mandaeans are said to hold that all music is Satanic (which probably makes some sort of sense given that they are the last remaining actual Gnostics.)
The only Mandaean I’ve ever actually known doesn’t seem particularly hung up on this issue, though, I must say.
TV, of course, is evil. I thought everybody was agreed on that?
I’ll just note that our Scandinavian Ultra-Lutherans used to share the same views on alcohol, dancing, and musical instruments, and they became victims of the same jokes. Real hard-core members shied away from the church and its satanic educated priests and gathered at the bedehus to listen to the orations of the emissær. Satan, Hell and Eternal Damnation were more central than God, Heaven and Saving Grace. Southwestern Norway was dubbed “the Dark Continent” by the author Arne Garborg, who was born at its heart at the height of its power.
It’s never struck me before, but the prototypically southern and western distribution of the bedehus culture would normally indicate a maritime import. Would Dutch Ultra-Calvinists have recruited among Norwegian sailors and migrant workers in Haarlem and Amsterdam?
The Plymouth Brethren (with whom I have family connexions) are or were well entrenched in the Faroe Islands, with apparently over 10% of the population belonging (and, according to an old flatmate of mine who did a lot of local history work there) a dominant role in many institutions. I don’t know how this came about, though presumably sailors must have been involved to actually get there …
The Plymouth Brethren are probably most significant in the general scheme of things for the fact that their founder, John Nelson Darby, more or less invented modern Dispensationalism, a deeply nontraditional* system of Biblical interpretation and eschatology which has been largely adopted by American Evangelicals; among other mischief, it explains their somewhat odd attitude to modern Israel (which may yet doom us all.)
* Utterly incompatible with Calvinism, and therefore (naturally) Completely Wrong.
Just as an empirical matter, it seems reasonably clear as a matter of history that pure undiluted Calvinism is an unstable isotope (I dunno why; maybe it’s foreordained?), so any society which seems at time t to have a transient Calvinist majority will inevitably within a relatively short number of generations become a post-Calvinist society. And there is no obvious limit to the sorts of wackiness that a post-Calvinist society will generate.
It’s true. We’re just too good for this earth.
Πάντα ῥεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει.
@DE I do get the occasional odd look from Labour comrades when I talk about being a churchgoing Christian
In Wales? Huh? The history of the Labour Party in the Mines/Valleys is soaked in ‘Chapel’ — not to mention Keir Hardie founding the Party from “a very generalised socialism based on a secularised Christianity rather than Marxism” [his biographer]
I suppose there’s Robert Owen’s (alleged) blaspheming. Nye Bevan/Michael Foot/Neil Kinnock were (I’d say) Chapel-adjacent, although they’d never admit to it.
I’ve never managed to get across to an American how you can be Socialist/left-wing without necessarily being Marxist. And I don’t mean the sort of feeble alleged ‘Socialism’ of a Bernie Sanders or AOC.
a film I’ve never watched.
Aargh! A still of Sean Connery that I can’t un-see, damn you! Girlie man ?
@AntC: As I indicated above, no still of Connery as Zed can come anywhere near conveying how weird and tasteless that film is.
John Boorman really wanted to make a fantasy epic. He tried yo get the rights to The Lord of the Rings, but was unable to. Zardoz was what Boorman made instead, on a shoestring budget. Of course, he did eventually manage to make an expensive epic fantasy adaptation, Excalibur.
pure undiluted Calvinism is an unstable isotope (I dunno why; maybe it’s foreordained?)
is it because it’s so easy to slide from there to antinomianism?
how do the welsh manage to avoid it?
(not entirely a facetious question – i’ve been thinking lately about secularized non/anti-antinomian versions of predestination as a central piece of u.s. political culture, and trying to wrap my head around how that slide is avoided)
OK. A bit of this devil’s invetion, statistics. According to this report (the first that sprung out of google), which is based on some other report, in UK’s 2019 “get Brexit done” elections Anglicans voted 58/28 for Con/Lab, Catholics 40/42 (which is actually bad for Lab, they used to win 3:1), Methodists and Baptists are mentioned somewhat vaguely, Muslims 11/85, Jews 63/26 (wow! vas iz geshen mit di idn?), unaffiliated 32/47 (presumably a generational thing).
This is nowhere close to 80/20 Rep/Dem split for white Evangelicals in the US, but notice the word “white” here. Apparently God tells black Evangelicals to vote differently. I guess, (mostly white and southern) Evangelical love for Rep is more of a correlation, not causation thing.
@D.O.:
The Brexit vote did not go altogether along party lines; the issue was deliberately used by the Conservatives to split the Labour vote*, in which it succeeded quite dramatically, with the lamentable results we see today.
However:
The Church of England used to be called “the Tory Party at Prayer”, so the breakdown there is not too surprising. It’s worth pointing out though, that “Anglican” is the English “default” answer that people give when they actually have no active commitment to any religion at all (or used to be: proper answers are much more common nowadays than even a few years ago, especially among the young.)
The left-wingery, as AntC rightly says, historically goes not with the Established Church (the clue’s in the name) but with Nonconformity; the Labour Party’s foundation was indeed soaked in “Chapel.” I was exaggerating a bit, too, in saying I get funny looks from comrades in the Party over my Opium of the People use: of the members I actually meet in Real Life (i.e. those who come to meetings, campaign etc) several are fellow Opiatees. That’s even before yoiu start counting Muslims.
Scotland, where the default religious affiliation is/was the (officially Calvinist) Church of Scotland, voted convincingly for “Remain” (and was a Labour stronghold until the Scots Nationlists, who are leftist in economics, swept the board.) In Wales (still a land of Labour hegemony: Cymru am byth!) the Leave majority was the result of the votes of incomers to Wales from England (yes, really): this was and still is essentially a specifically English ethnonationalist project. It was the xenophobia wot won it.
* There are good left-wing arguments against the EU, in fact, which evidently Jeremy Corbyn of blessed memory subscribed to in his heart, to the fatal detriment of Labour campaigning on the issue; but these had minimal effects on actual voting. It’s the xenophobia, stupid …
My only point is that people with “default” or “traditional” religious views tend to vote for a more conservative choice, but there are many overriding considerations.
There are good left-wing arguments against the EU, in fact,
th’forementioned Neil Kinnock campaigned against continuing EEC membership in the 1975 referendum — I went to a public meeting at which he spoke. Strange how pro-Europe he became later. (AFAICT the EU never changed to address any of what he objected to.)
((Not that I’m saying that leaving the EU now makes any sense: don’t come crawling back to NZ looking for trade deals after abandoning the Commonwealth like that.))
is it because it’s so easy to slide from there to antinomianism?
That can certainly happen. I’m not sure that antinomianism is itself particularly unstable, though: it’s fun to be antinomian …
John Buchan’s surprisingly good
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_Wood
features a Bad Guy who figures he can do whatever he likes because he’s predestined to be saved (SPOILER: he turns out to be wrong about that.)
I don’t think Calvinism actually is particularly unstable, as a strand within Protestantism. I think JWB is recycling the old Catholic/Orthodox trope that Protestantism is inherently unstable because it doesn’t have a unified central command and, hey, if you’ve already split from the True Church once, you get into the way of splittery. Why stop?
I think there is actually a good bit of truth in that as far as churches as institutions go: I saw a chart of the history of splits (and remergers) within the original Church of Scotland which looked like a map of the London Underground. However, all these twiglets are Calvinist
…
A lot of mainstream Protestant denominations differ very little from each other doctrinally. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is actually in many respects more doctrinal diversity within Catholicism than among mainstream churches outside.
Another possible interpretation of instability is that everything becomes corrupt and once in a while need to be reset (Reformation).
—
Clouds or streams can be more stable (and preserve macro-identity)
I didn’t say that Protestantism as such was inherently unstable.* The (established) Church of Scotland is not these days meaningfully Calvinist. Nor is the largest faction of Presbyterians in the U.S., not to mention the U.C.C. (lineal descendant of the fiercest New England Puritans), or the largest descendant of the old colonial Dutch Reformed (which gave us the happy-self-improvement Rev Norman Vincent Peale, whose church was attended by the youthful D.J. Trump). Nor is the largest “Reformed” faction in the Netherlands,, etc etc etc. The instability/brittleness of New England Calvinism is the subject (via a metaphor) of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s comical poem from I think the 1850’s: http://holyjoe.org/poetry/holmes1.htm
Separately, I think it should be pretty obvious that the traditional religious coalitions of Conservative v. Labour in mid-20th-century Britain are sociological in nature rather than theological. The participation in the Labour coalition of both more rigorous sorts of Dissenting Protestants and of Roman Catholics, who differ theologically from the C of E in radically different directions, is one illustration of that.
Back in the day, the Rev’d Abraham Kuyper, Prime Minister of the Netherlands in the very early 20th century and a major player in Dutch politics from the 1870’s through his death in 1920, developed his own Calvinistically-based political philosophy, hostile to both liberalism (and probably neo-liberalism) and socialism. I’m not sure how much influence his thought has had in practical politics (as opposed to niche theological discourse) in Anglospheric countries, or how easily adaptable it is to Protestants (or even non-Protestants) that do not share distinctively Calvinist presuppositions.
*Orthodoxy does not have a “unified central command.” Good Lord, man, don’t you read the newspapers?
The (established) Church of Scotland is not these days meaningfully Calvinist
True.
Established churches soon tend not to be meaningfully anything. I feel that they may even be a bad idea …
Tell me: are Orthodox people in the pew still making a big thing about the filioque?
@David E.: I mean, we don’t say it. I’m not sure how many people devote time and energy to thinking about the detailed ways in which the Hereticks (oops, I mean “heterodox,” which is felt a slightly more polite word) are Wrong Wrong Wrong. But as it was a thousand years ago, using unleavened bread for hosts (mass-produced in an industrial setting, to boot) is probably more shocking at a visceral level. Not to mention such scandals as clean-shaven clergy. I, personally, did not become Orthodox because I made an exhaustive study of the filioque issue in particular but gave the Church the benefit of the doubt on that after finding it attractive on other grounds. As to pure theology abstracted somewhat from orthopraxis I wonder if the controversy of the 14th century (in which the Palamite position ultimately triumphed over that of the wicked-or-at-least-misguided Barlaam of Calabria, who was trying to smuggle rationalistic/scholastic/Thomist ways of thought into the True Church) is more important than the filioque, although no doubt they can be connected.
The instability/brittleness of New England Calvinism is the subject (via a metaphor) of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.’s comical poem from I think the 1850’s
I loved that poem when I were a lad; it wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned it was supposed to be about religion, and when I did I reread the poem and said “Huh, I don’t see it.” I take the word of you and others who say that’s why he wrote it, but he sure did a good job of making sure it didn’t stink of allegory (unlike C. S. Lewis — even as a kid I got the strong sense in the later Narnia books that I was being preached to, and I didn’t like it).
Orthodoxy does not have a “unified central command.” Good Lord, man, don’t you read the newspapers?
Although I don’t have a horse in this race, surely the issue isn’t whether the entire church, broadly defined, has a unified central command but whether individual believers are supposed to defer to a Big Guy rather than their own consciences — that was one of the issues that mattered to me back when I considered myself a Protestant. Yes, each Orthodox church has its own Big Guy, but hey, the Catholics used to have multiple popes. (I love this bit in the Wikipedia article: “At this point, as again in the mid-11th century, we come across elections in which problems of harmonising historical criteria and those of theology and canon law make it impossible to decide clearly which side possessed the legitimacy whose factual existence guarantees the unbroken lawful succession of the successors of Saint Peter.”)
@JWB:
I understand you.
My own experience is that actual knowledge of doctrine, let alone active concern regarding its correctness, is a pretty niche thing among the actual members of almost any church. And indeed, I think that is pretty much as it should be, by and large: it’s not about the doctrines, which are ancillary at best.
I do (evidently) myself think that doctrine is important, but to a great extent chiefly as a defence against what you might call Bad Memes. Erroneous doctrines can have actual real-world consequences which lead to wicked behaviour on the part of those who subscribe to them*, or bleed into core areas where wrong doctrines can seriously impair a person’s spiritual life. However, I’ve often noticed that doctrines that, logically, really ought to lead to such consequences, in point of fact, for many people, don’t: following through on the logical consequences of one’s tenets is also a niche activity, practiced only by nerds** and the dangerously unstable (there is some overlap between these categories.)
This is doubtless a Good Thing for humanity …
* I think that seriously wrong doctrines have corrupted many (white) American Evangelical churches, and that this has undoubtedly led to unequivocal harm both to their own spiritual health and to the physical wellbeing of their unfortunate fellow-countrymen (to say nothing of mere foreigners.) I’m not indulging in mere abuse in saying that I regard them as heretical. It’s the mot juste.
This is actually a kindred point to the assertion I was making elsewhere: pseudoscience kills. People are constituted in such a way that Bad Ideas Kill. That’s why we need philosophers (and even theologians …)
** Or saints, as they are traditionally called in Christian terminology.
unlike C. S. Lewis — even as a kid I got the strong sense in the later Narnia books that I was being preached to, and I didn’t like it
Nor me. The only one I find bearable is The Magician’s Nephew.
I don’t like fiction authors threeping their opinions down my thrapples even when I agree with their opinions.
(Of course, more subtle writers than Lewis can get away with it, because you don’t actually notice them doing it. Lewis himself did it much better in Out of the Silent Planet.)
I don’t like fiction authors threeping their opinions down my thrapples even when I agree with their opinions.
Exactly, which is why I get so impatient with people who praise 19th-century Russian novels because they’re against serfdom, 20th-century ones because they’re dissident, etc. etc. Not to mention writers who pretend to write historical novels when actually they just want to have viewpoint characters who mouth the latest, wokest ideas but in fancy dress. (This is of course one of the annoying things about Downton Abbey, but that was so silly it was hard to take it seriously enough to object, plus it had Maggie Smith.)
The Prince and the Pauper would be unbearable that way, but somehow it’s bearable. Huckleberry Finn too, come to think of it. The Funny goes a long way to sweeten it.
A touching religious anecdote (from Thomas Wright, A Selection of Latin Stories: From Manuscripts of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, CXVIII, De muliere sacerdoti obviante):
“wokest”
Novels are sincere. Authors acutally want to say it.
TV series are not.
@hat: Orthodoxy does not in practice rely on Big Guys as its real source of theological unity and stability, because its historical experience has quite frequently been that any given Big Guy may be a shill/stooge for (or at a minimum a well-intentioned man acting under duress from) a hostile government, whether that be Ottoman, Communist, or a nominally-Christian emperor/czar who is pursuing a political agenda that is not consistent with the true interests of the Church. Thus, the common/shared reference standard of what Orthodoxy consists of (which is certainly not the individual believer’s conscience picking and choosing!) resides institutionally at a more diffuse grass-roots level via a consensus of lower clergy, monastics, and pious laity (all claiming merely to honor the apostolic tradition and the patrimony of the Holy Fathers) who will collectively drag their heels when it comes to complying with any non-Orthodox directions from the current Big Guy (possibly with a lot of hypocritical “Byzantine” bowing and scraping and pretense along the way) until the political winds shift (as they generally do if you are patient enough) and that particular Big Guy falls from favor and is no longer trying to impose stupid stuff on the Church.
This has been over the centuries a reasonably effective survival strategy under difficult historical circumstances, although it can unfortunately also impede even modest sensible non-heretical reform efforts, because the most reactionary participants in the diffuse grass-roots consensus often (not always) have the most passion and leverage when push comes to shove. There’s a line from Burke re how an institution “without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation” that I sometimes recall in this regard.
Novels are sincere. Authors acutally want to say it.
TV series are not.
Nonsense. There are plenty of TV writers who are just as sincere as other writers, and plenty of novelists who say what they’re supposed to say. Have you ever read any socialist realism?
Holmes’ “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” appeared in one of my school anthologies, purely as a humorous poem, with no mention (nor, I suspect, awareness on the editors’ part) of the allegory.
Orthodoxy does not in practice rely on Big Guys as its real source of theological unity and stability
Oh, I know. I was reacting to your comment:
Orthodoxy does not have a “unified central command.” Good Lord, man, don’t you read the newspapers?
Which is not about the grass-roots level.
Lewis’s fantasy novels are a mixture of uncomplicated adventuring and Christian allegory, and sometimes the latter gets out of hand. However, which books a particular reader may find especially preachy seems to be highly idiosyncratic. (There are general trends though; The Last Battle and Perelandrea are so explicitly Christian that other plot elements seem to be crowded out.) I find, for example, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader far more readable than Out of the Silent Planet. Also, I like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where the religious content is limited to a reenactment of the Biblical tale of crucifixion, better than later books in which Lewis makes Narnian bugbears of specific real-world heresies. (And he’s even not consistent about those! In The Last Battle, he makes repeated attacks on syncretism, only to announce later that good works and faith in any believedly benevolent deity are sufficient for salvation.)
Why Downton Abbey was woke? I didn’t notice. They portayed homosexuality, shell shock, and desertion as more accepted than it was true at the time? I always thought DA was essentially conservative, or at best incrementalist, showing how upstairs and downstairs lived in harmony with necessary changes hapenning as they should.
Basically, everyone is presented as having more acceptable (by current standards) attitudes than were likely, or sometimes even conceivable, at the time. Even the old dowager, crusty and conservative as she is, is portrayed as lovable and eventually coming around to accept the wacky ideas of the younger generation, even if she grumbles a bit. Absolutely nobody is shown as having the horrifying (by current standards) ideas that were commonplace then. If an actual turn-of-the-century duke and duchess were to magically appear in today’s world, I’m not sure who would be more shocked, them or the fans of the show. The same is true of their servants, come to that.
Well, it’s an entertainment, not a dissertation. If protagonists are not acceptable to modern audiences no one would watch it. Moreover, the countess was an American and the earl was a softie. I would give it a pass. Basically, whenever DA errs it’s not wokeness, it’s glamour.
Well, it’s an entertainment, not a dissertation.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean it’s exempt from criticism. The very fact that modern audiences won’t accept accurate portrayals of the way people used to be is significant and troubling.
Moreover, the countess was an American
I hope you’re not under the impression that American rich people had progressive ideas back then!
Hat@10:52
There are plenty of TV writers who are just as sincere as other writers
Hat@11:42
The very fact that modern audiences won’t accept accurate portrayals of the way people used to be is significant and troubling.
I suppose you could reconcile these claims by means of a further claim: that TV writers are sincere, inaccurate and successful. Alternatively, that they are sincere and accurate, but for that reason unsuccessful at finding a producer, given that modern audiences won’t accept the product.
On a lighter note: you seem to have taken up woke behavior and vocabulary. I am appalled and outraged, and troubled too. And concerned. It makes me uncomfortable and unhappy.
I hope you will reply that you don’t give a shit about my emotional state. That would mean you are on the road to recovery.
I suppose you could reconcile these claims by means of a further claim: that TV writers are sincere, inaccurate and successful.
Huh? There’s nothing to reconcile; there’s no inherent connection or contradiction between sincerity and accuracy, and success is something else altogether. You seem to be straining for something to complain about.
you seem to have taken up woke behavior and vocabulary.
Once again, I have no earthly idea what you are on about.
Catholicism also does that much less than commonly believed.
You’re talking about people who put US flags in their churches. They voted for Trump as a means to get reactionary judges installed everywhere.
There are good left-wing critiques of the current state of the EU. Corbyn seems to have believed that just quitting it would solve the EU’s problems.
True left-wingers don’t believe in reform. Year Zero, comrade! Recreate everything from scratch! (I kid, but with real bitterness.)
In the biological sense, for example, you could only inherit the the money or property your parents were born with (not even that, if they acquired their property in utero.)*
That was actually true in feudalism until it was abolished (in England) by the statute Quia emptores (1290), as far as real (landed) property was concerned. Selling land simply made the buyer a (sub)tenant of the seller, and such chains of subinfeudation could be as long as necessary, sometimes eight or ten persons long between the king and the actual free man or serf who worked it. In Scotland the remnants of this system remained intact until 2000.
And so on, ad infinitum … I can see this as the basis of a grand Utopian vision.
A grand vision, certainly, though hardly utopian.
you do say “me, I went down to the store” and “him, he went down to the store”
I certainly don’t: it sounds French (or French Canadian) to me. though “him and me, we …” is considerably more acceptable.
What an evil bastard he was!
There certainly was an evil bastard somewhere, but I’m not sure that Ronnie was it. An actor who plays a villain is not a villain, and it can’t be an accident that Ronnie was a liberal when married to Jane and a conservative when married to Nancy.
As the joke goes, they disapprove of fornication, because it might lead to dancing.
As always, the Jewish version is better: Orthodox Jews object to fornication standing up because it might lead to mixed dancing. (Actually, of course, this is not true: all sexual practices are acceptable when done by a married couple. It’s a parody of “fence around the Torah” thinking.)
I’ve never managed to get across to an American how you can be Socialist/left-wing without necessarily being Marxist.
The Americans who would care, like myself, already know that, and are perfectly capable of distinguishing between a Right Deviationist and a Utopian of either the Owenite or the Morrisite persuasion.
it’s fun to be antinomian
By Jewish or Muslim standards, all Christians are antinomians.
although no doubt they can be connected
This is Mear Tautologicks. Every two things can be connected.
Every two things can be connected
In a path-connected universe, yes.
@John Cowan: Reagan was personally pliable and behaved like an actor playing the president most of the time. That does not, however, mean that he had no rebarbative views all his own. His intense hatred for the Sandinistas specifically (compared with other Communist regimes) is an example; nobody pushed that on him.
Year Zero, comrade! Recreate everything from scratch!
Du passé faisons table rase;
Foules esclaves, debout, debout!
Le monde va changer de base:
Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!
(Go on, you know you want to sing it …)
My introduction to antinomianism, if I understand it right, is the tracts of Jack Chick.
No, but I’m surprised any is needed. It seems self-evident to me.
Oh, whole sentences like these are nowhere near as common or obligatory as in French. But use of the oblique forms for emphasis of sufficiently isolated pronouns is close to obligatory whenever there aren’t too many peevers around:
it’s me, it’s her…
this is me, this is him…
who wants to… – Me! Me!
Let’s you and him fight.
Who’s that? Oh, him. He wasn’t an evil bastard, he just played one on TV. Too bad he was on TV 24/7.
Who, me? Me, I went down to the store. Don’t know what he (*him) did.
Yeah, those uses don’t sound odd in the least to me.
In my natural speech, when completely purged of school-instilled artificiality, “I” is confined to the position immediately before the VP, and “me” is used everywhere else.* The distinction has nothing to do with emphasis [or case, properly speaking]; an emphatic form is usually going to turn up as “me”, but this is quite impossible if it immediately precedes the VP: not *”Me want some.” Conversely, there is nothing to prevent you saying “I want some” with as much emphasis as you can muster.
“Emphasis” is quite irrelevant. Compare:
Q: “Which person did he hit?”
A: “He hit me”
Q: “What did he do to you, exactly?”
A: “He hit me.”
Q: “Which person hit him?”
A: “I hit him.
Q: “What did you do to him, exactly?
A: “I hit him.”
The verb “to be” behaves exactly like other verbs in this. “It is I” is an excusable piece of preciousness. “It is me” is the only acceptable form. No emphasis is implied by this choice.
(As I’ve recently said, “emphasis” always seems to me in syntactic discussions to really mean “I don’t actually understand why this form is being used here.” It’s the syntactic equivalent of explaining unexpected historical developments as “dialect mixture” without producing the actual dialect.)
* Apart from unsystematic relic constructions like “say I.”
Inexcusable piece of preciousness. Perish the thought that I might be so open-minded as to countenance it in any way. Harrumph.
Actually, I need to add a whole set of systematic exceptions: the pronoun remains “I” when plonked after the verb/operator/auxiliary whatever in interrogative constructions:
“What do I know?”
You still can’t put “me” for “I” there, regardless of how emphatic you’re feeling.
Back in the day in the context of British politics, sentiment against the EEC (as the not-yet-so-Leviathanish EU was then generally known) was notably heavier on the Labour side of the aisle. The Labour gov’t that came to power in ’74 had pledged a referendum on whether the prior Heath gov’t’s decision to join should be sustained or rejected and as late as ’83, Labour ran (unsuccessfully to be sure, although I don’t know that that was their weakest point) on a pledge that a hypothetical PM Foot would pull the UK out. I’m not sure what all the issues were but there was apparently a perception that the Eurocrats in Brussels were likely to be more neo-liberal (to use a word that may not yet have been in common parlance as a pejorative) than Labour would like and might thus impede the ability of a Labour-controlled Parliament to move the UK in a more socialistical direction.
That sui generis politician Enoch Powell MP shared this view, but was even more intensely nationalist than he was intensely anti-socialist and thus opposed EEC membership on the grounds that he would rather spend the rest of his life subjected to noxious left-of-center policies enacted by a parliament freely elected by his fellow Britons than live under congenial right-of-center policies imposed on Britain by foreigners.
Enoch Powell believed above all in the sovereignty of Parliament; he bonded with Tony Benn over this issue. He would certainly have been horrified by the current Tory régime.
I think the turnaround in mainstream Labour attitudes to the EU is associated with Jacques Delors’ active opposition to neoliberalism. He really got up the noses of the Thatcherites and their poodles in the press. Can’t be bad …
Apropos (though he could scarcely be fitted into neat political or ecclesiatical categories, and the more credit to him):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/09/bruce-kent-obituary
(yet another case where I am a bit surprised to discover that he was in fact still alive. And now he isn’t …)
I regret to say that the formerly Rev’d Mr. Kent seems to me like a walking stereotype, rather than any defier of neat categories. Thinks the peace-loving Soviet Union is misunderstood; thinks the Catholic Church is too uptight about sex.* You couldn’t swing a cat by its tail in any U.S. college town 40 years ago without hitting someone like that. One need not think that those are obviously or inherently wrong positions to still find them not particularly original or category-defying.
*I must say as a non-believer in Vatican doctrine about clerical celibacy that it still seems like bad form for a fellow in that position to not get himself properly laicized (sorry, “laicised”) before going off and getting married, even if the lady in question didn’t care.
a walking stereotype
Typical Catholic monsignor …
(They’re all the same.)
[Bruce Kent] yet another case where I am a bit surprised to discover that he was in fact still alive.
Crikey! Yes.
“misunderstood”
Well, this is certain (for any country).
Moroever, if an average hater of USSR speaks about it, it is going to be a sequence of (1) critical (2) false claims. As I understand USSR better (which does not mean that I understand everything, but usually criticism by someone familiar with a different subset contains numerous claims that you can recognize as false), I will disagree with most of them. And the hater will see that I am tendentious and highly pro-Soviet, because EACH time I disagree with her (and I disagree with almost everything) I am “defending” USSR.
@JWB The Labour gov’t that came to power in ’74 had pledged a referendum on whether the prior Heath gov’t’s decision to join should be sustained or rejected …
I think you’re engaging in post-hoc revisionism. I was there at the time and campaigned in 1975 against EEC membership on the terms Heath had caved in to. Simply: it was a worse deal than the one Heath had negotiated under MacMillan. The British taxpayer would end up subsidising inefficient French small farmers.
The anti-EEC coalition was a ‘broad church’ spanning many reasons for opposition. (It did include the right wing of the Tory Party/Yes Powell was against the EEC on principal as undermining UK ‘sovereignty’. I’d say he was only a small part of the anti camp.)
The pro-EEC coalition was a ‘broad church’ spanning many reasons for staying in — including a lot of poppycock about cultural destiny: the ‘Common Market’ was at the time a purely economic arrangement; not a skerrick about culture, that all came later. What the middle-class centrists of both parties wanted was to go spend their Summer holidays in the gites they could purchase in the heart of that inefficient French rural idyll.
I was all for rural idyll. But we didn’t need to tax the British working people ’til they bled and hock off the family silver to pay for it.
The neo-liberal threat came much later — although I’d call the EU more Corporatist, only paying lip service to neo-liberalism. It was British ‘big agri’ that benefitted the most: a modest subsidy to an inefficient French farmer pro-rates to a huge windfall for a ginormous British farming conglomerate — also paid for by bleeding working people white: paying twice both in taxes to fund butter mountains and in exorbitant food prices.
So there! (To be even-handed, I could possibly also be engaging in post-hoc revisionism. But giving away sovereignty was really Major’s doing in signing the Maastricht Treaty — which several other members wouldn’t have a bar of.)
@dm, jc
JC,-I think you are also of an age to remember a song that had the lines “Want a train that loops the loop, me I want a hula hoop… “. There are also parallel phrases like “Men, they always/never…”, usually shortened to an expressive “Men!” I do not find these sound foreign, just assertive.
DM-use and forms of pronouns in English is and may always have been a mess. Formerly there were many more constructions like me liketh (Ger. mir gefällt) and these were reanalysed (methinks) or the pronoun was substituted and some other constructions were affected by analogy or even by comparison with French expressions, e.g., c’est lui /it’s him, which also do not follow Latin models
The very fact that modern audiences won’t accept accurate portrayals of the way people used to be is significant and troubling.
Bridgerton takes European aristocracy so far into comfy progressive world that it is almost parody. Or maybe some kind of wish fulfillment.
On the other hand, The Northman, like Eggers’ other films, does not make a lot of obvious concessions to the modern viewer. The hero massacres Slavic villagers and doesn’t get particularly upset about it. Slaves are unhappy about their own lot, but nobody questions the basic principle of victors taking their spoils. Women take initiative and have agency but don’t act in ways that would be unreasonable for the era. The heroine also speaks in a reconstructed 7th century Slavic, and I am a little surprised that hasn’t been discussed here yet.
For what I know, modern viewer needs more brutality.
Not a random comment, I have been discussing it with a friend (the context was science fiction series, but anyway). Yet another film with massacres and everything is what I take as a concession.
For what I know, modern viewer needs more brutality.
Yeah, I don’t take “massacres villagers and doesn’t get upset about it” as brave refusal of presentism but as bog-standard violent fun of the type that seems almost mandatory these days (to judge by the ads I see on TV).
@hat
I would take these films as “cartoon violence”, which requires for me a suspension of disbelief (i.e. “this is not really happening to the actors, I wonder how the simulation was achieved”). The problem is that I think there are more crimes documented as correlated with excessive viewing of this type of material than of Tom or Wile E. Coyote being hit on the head with a sledgehammer or anvil, being doused with a flammable liquid and set on fire, being blown up by nitro-glycerine or (c) Acme T.N.T., etc.
Yes, I agree.
as bog-standard violent fun of the type that seems almost mandatory these days (to judge by the ads I see on TV).
You would be completely wrong, but thank you for being condescending and dismissive.
Yet another film with massacres and everything is what I take as a concession.
How is it a concession? The level of acceptable violence in early medieval days actually was fairly horrific by modern standards, at least if we can believe the chroniclers and contemporary accounts. (Still acceptable for much of the Russian Army apparently). A world where capturing other human beings to enslave them was an accepted cultural practice is a foreign world to most of us. Eggers captures that foreigness better than most contemporary filmmakers, and without the hidden glee that you might detect in Game of Thrones.
You would be completely wrong, but thank you for being condescending and dismissive.
Huh? You are reading me wrongly and very uncharitably. Do you really think that’s how I respond to serious comments after all your time here? I wasn’t making any judgment about the value of the movie, which I have not seen, just responding to your adducing the violence as not making concessions to the modern viewer. Maybe you haven’t seen enough other recent movies and cable tv shows, not to mention shooter video games? Violence is now presented not only openly but enthusiastically and at length, and I find it hard to believe that however gory The Northman is, it goes beyond what the modern viewer will tolerate. That’s all I was saying.
Vanya, I will correct myself then: I disagree that one can conclude that a film “does not make obvious concessions” based on presence of violence.
In this particular case I seem to have rather committed the famous error of mistaking diachrony for synchrony. You’re of course right that “emphasis” implies “me went down to the store”, which I’m aware is quite ungrammatical (so that the closest possible approximation is “me, I went down to the store”).
@ David M.: and that gets us right back where we started, with the interesting mystery of why compound subjects (“me and him” or “him and me”) behave *differently* when it comes to case than either “me” or “him” behave in a non-compound context. Your proposed analysis in which “me and him” is clipped from “me and him, we …” would need to explain why the same clipping doesn’t occur in a non-compound context.
Yes, “Him and me went” (which is correct, in my natural uncorrupted-by-school-grammar idiolect) can’t be accounted for by my proposal that the so-called “nominative” forms are really just the immediately-pre-VP forms. Mind you, I think I can account for my own usage simply by adding a rule that requires the default (“oblique”) forms in all cases where the pronoun doesn’t constitute a NP by itself. So the rule becomes
I, he, she, we, they are used when the pronoun constitutes a NP by itself and either (a) precedes the VP directly or (b) follows the verb/auxiliary/operator directly in an interrogative clause.
In all other cases, the forms are me, her, us, them.
All other uses of I, he, she, we, they are marked as +SNOOTY (or, even worse, as Ghastly Hypercorrections.)
“me and him” is clipped from “me and him, we …” would need to explain why the same clipping doesn’t occur in a non-compound context.
But it does occur — at least in my idiolect (uncorrected-by-school-grammar, as @DE points out).
Me, I say that all the time. Me, I’m going to the Saturday market now. I catch up with the stall-holders. Them, they’re there every Saturday come rain or shine.
‘Them’s there every Saturday’ isn’t in my idiolect, but neither do I find it particularly marked. ‘Me’m …’ is awkward to say, but ‘Me’s going …’ I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
@AntC: but the point is that (I assume, perhaps wrongly and am happy to be contradicted on this) that you don’t clip “Me, I’m going to the Saturday market” to “Me going to the Saturday market now.” Whereas I assume you would at least tolerate if not actually say “Him and me are going to the Saturday market” without insisting on the full “Him and me, we’re going to …” version.
[don’t clip to] “Me going to the Saturday market now.”
That I find odd because there’s no finite verb/it needs a “‘s”, as I already wrote. Is “Me going …” what you meant to posit?
“Him and me are going …” — with a finite verb — is fine. “Him and me going …” would be the clipping parallel to what you’re positing. Sounds like some Hollywood caricature of ‘native talk’.
AntC: sorry, you are correct and I screwed up my example. It would have to me “me am going” or perhaps “me’s going” as you had suggested.* All I’m saying is that in my idiolect even adding the finite verb there is ungrammatical even in a highly informal register where “him and me are …” is fine, so we keep coming back to the issue of why the rules are different for compound subjects. OTOH, if you genuinely find “me’s going” acceptable or even something you yourself might say, than that is an interesting datapoint.
*Maybe not in some varieties of English where copula omission (or “deletion”) is a thing, but I’m not sure about that and don’t want to digress down that rabbithole.
Russian:
Они с Петей придут позже. “They.NOM with Petya-INSTR will-come later”
Маша с Петей придут позже. “Masha-NOM with Petya-INSTR will-come later”.
Маша и Петя придут позже. “Masha-NOM and Petya-NOM will-come later”
All are common.
Мы с Петей придём позже “We.NOM with Petya-INSTR will-come later”
Я и Петя придём позже “I.NOM and Petya-INSTR will-come later”.
The second is rare and implies that we are not a group.
*Я с Петей …. Not in use. Expect the verb in singular (as a claim about “I”: I will come with others, I will come with a bag in my hand…) but not in use anyway.
What I mean by this is that some languages distinguish between “a group” and “two distinct claims with the same predicate”.
Just for the record, I love this construction, find it very useful and lament its absence elsewhere.
Same here.
I was just reading about the isolated vocative formation for the name of God in Qur’anic and Classical Arabic, اللهم allāhumma, and I was reminded of this thread.
Ahmad Al-Jallad, A Manual of the Historical Grammar of Arabic, has a list of innovations characterizing Arabic. Number 18 is the following:
(Wolf Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʻez, p. 323, reports a hesitant speculation made by Arne A. Ambros comparing to the element -mma in this vocative the Geʻez enclitic particle መ -(ə)mma ‘precisely, quite, then, the very, even’. Here is the entry for the particle in Dillman’s 1865 Lexicon linguae aethiopicae, for those who are curious. There is also a particle m (to be vocalized ma?) in Ugaritic that is sometimes appended to vocatives of nouns. However, the same m is also apparently appended to nouns that are not in the vocative and to any other part of speech. Akkadian has a particle -ma of various uses, including emphasizing or limiting. Here is Huehnergard’s discussion of the particle. It is interesting to me because Arabic independent pronoun base ʾiyyā, to which object pronouns are attached when they are fronted before the verb, resembles the usual Arabic vocative particle yā. Similarly, Sabaic has an enclitic particle m, my, mw. And Ḥarsūsī apparently -me(h), which T.M. Johnstone in his lexicon calls “a deictic element”. There are probably more things that could be listed here…)
I wonder if LH readers can think of other examples of retention of archaic formations or other grammatical peculiarities used only in relation to deities. (Sometimes almost like the opposite of taboo avoidance—the old form, the original form, the real form, must be used with the deity, despite obsolescence or change elsewhere in the language, because it is the only one felt to be appropriate or effective.)
Russian examples spring to mind immediately: Боже! ‘God!’, Господи! ‘Lord!’, Иисусе! ‘Jesus!’, отче! (‘Father!’, also for priests). And there is English thou and its associated forms, with its peculiar restriction to God in some traditions in recent times. And things like German Christi Geburt, Mariä Himmelfahrt.
This seems like a topic that may have been discussed before on LH.
Very interesting, thanks!
This seems like a topic that may have been discussed before on LH.
I agree, but I can’t think of a particular thread.
I wouldn’t call these relict grammar, but relict formulaic speech, which happens to employ obsolete grammar, like English “God forbid”.
For another instance of the “religious vocative” in Russian or Russian-adjacent language varieties, in the church-jargon variety of English spoken by Anglophone Orthodox Christians of the Slavic-roots variety, the loanword “Vladika” is used (generally without case inflection) as a respectful-yet-intimate title for bishops. But if you’re really nuanced, you can use the antique vocative “Vladiko” when addressing the bishop directly while keeping “Vladika” for third-person reference. I somehow managed by dumb luck to master this nuance recently and was complimented for doing so by a fully bilingual (grew up in U.S.; sounds like L1 native speaker in both English and Russian) fellow parishioner. Whether that vocative is marked within Russian as a Church-Slavonicism is not known to me but it well might be.
“Vladyko” is obviously a fossilized exception. All other church titles lost their vocative case.
Right, but the question is whether it’s felt as a Church-Slavonicism or simply as archaic. I’ve been googling around but haven’t found an answer yet.
But in searching, I happened on this useful page of Church Slavonic abbreviations (which includes влⷣко – влады́ко).
There was and is a sort of churchy register, which Dmitry Pruss once suggested to call High Church Slavonic, where Russian speakers try to emulate an elevated style of church speech from a century or a couple ago depending on their familiarity with such speech. My guess is that “Vladyko” belongs to that register.
Even in the latest revision, the Authorized Book of Rituals has lots of obsolescent grammar:
(GT does a pretty good job, but the subjunctives break it. Also oplade here is more “open” than “charge,” your heart is not a power pack). Apart from that, there is also the Latinate genetive Jesu Kristi which is more widely used. Jesus Kristus’ would be possible, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it. (There are more modernized Bible translations, but the Authorized Mass is the Authorized Mass).
I am pretty sure that by the time of the first Protestant establishment there were no other cases in living use so their Latin forms didn’t get used. (Of course clerics would have known them from the Catholic mass, but unlike in German there was no Danish grammar to connect them to).
Vater unser at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer – but that’s another case of formulaic speech using thoroughly obsolete grammar.
Interestingly, Mariä has been completely replaced by Maria – I think all expressions that used it have been reinterpreted as odd compound nouns. This may have started with place names like Mariazell (final stress as in genitive + possessed object).
But Jesu & Christi are here to stay, to the extent that the genitive itself is.
The interesting part here is that unstressed a and unstressed o are pronounced the same in most of Russian. (Not in Ukrainian, though.)
Good point. If you are going to say “Vladyko”, you have to make sure to use an appropriate accent where there is a difference.
Shades of Lewis Carroll: The prayer is called Fadervor, even though for most people it now starts Vor fader, du som …. And I omitted a mention of the various place and church names with latinate genetives: Sankt Petri, Annæ, Budolfi, Olai, and probably more. (But Ansgars, Knuds, and so on for names used in their Germanic form. That Olaus for Olav/Óláfr/*anulaibaz surprised me, I’d have guessed Olavus for the Latin form, so Olavi in the genetive or just plain Olavs).
(We have Mariæ bebudelsesdag (Annunciation) in the church calendar, but not as a public holiday — and her Ascension not at all — so it hasn’t suffered univerbation. Most if not all of her churches are called Vor Frue with no trace of genetive inflection, [including the Hafnian cathedral, prima inter pares], and there are even a few villages so named after their churches. [I used to live 5km from one]).
@LM
Happy Dannebrog Day!
] Now, the flag is falling from the sky in the Battle of Lindanise, also known as the Battle of Valdemar (Danish: Volmerslaget), near Lindanise (Tallinn) in Estonia, of 15 June 1219.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Denmark#1219_origin_legend
Thanks, Juha!
While Volmer is indeed a Danish form of Valdemar, it was only in the heyday of national romanticism that people used that for the old kings, nowadays they are known as Valdemar this and that, and today is Valdemarsdag. One of many days where public institutions are supposed to fly the flag.
TIL that Tallinn is supposed to have started as the Estonian for “camp of the Danes”. For some reason we usually spell the location of the battle as Lyndanisse, and in school we were taught about Slaget ved Lyndanisse where the banner fell from the sky. Volmerslaget is not something people will recognize, except WP editors it seems. Or maybe they got it from an 1890s vintage encyclopedia — Google gives me a very chauvinistic 1895 poem by Christian Richardt, so it was clearly a thing.
Lyndanisse
In the Estonian mythology and Kreutzwald’s epic Kalevipoeg, Linda was the mother of Kalevipoeg and the wife of Kalev.
She has given the name to several Estonian locations, including the Lindakivi (Linda boulder) in Lake Ülemiste. According to the epic myth “Kalevipoeg”, her son, the title character, named the Estonian fortress settlement at the location of modern Tallinn in her honor – Lindanise (approximate translation: Linda’s nipple or bosom).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_(Estonian_mythology)
Danish King’s Garden is just next to Toompea, on the slope facing St. Nicholas Church. According to an old legend, this is the spot where a flag descended from the sky during the Danish invasion, and it was this flag that turned the course of the battle in favour of King Valdemar II. Later, the flag became the national flag of Denmark. The sculpture Tuli lipp (‘The Flag Descended’) speaks of this legend.
https://www.visitestonia.com/en/danish-kings-garden
It reminds me of Ladislaus for Vladislav ~ László.
Olaus for Olav/Óláfr/*anulaibaz
Russian—and German—also had it:
Це́рковь Свято́го О́лафа, це́рковь О́левисте (эст. Oleviste kirik), немецкое и старое русское название — Олай (нем. Olaikirche) — баптистская церковь в Таллине (улица Лай, 50), историческая постройка XIII века, являющаяся архитектурной доминантой Старого города и популярной смотровой площадкой. По некоторым данным, в XVI—XVII веках церковь являлась самым высоким зданием мира.
Oleviste
Now that I noticed Olai, I see it all over. (Well, mostly near the Cathedral of Saint Olav in Elsinore, and on the Faroes where he is the patron saint, lending his name to their national day which seems to have started as the annual thing at Tórshavn).
Ladislai in the genetive would have stumped me for a second too; -aus in Latin looks like it has at least a /w/ to match the /v/ in -slav, so I can ignore the difference in syllabification which my Danish ear is not very sensitive to and accept it’s the same name, but -ai triggers the “back up, engage logic” mechanism which is inherently slow.
in which the Palamite position ultimately triumphed over that of the wicked-or-at-least-misguided Barlaam of Calabria, who was trying to smuggle rationalistic/scholastic/Thomist ways of thought into the True Church
… reminds me of:
THE THOMIST AND THE PALAMITE
Ecumenism Exemplified
Reminiscences of an Anglo-Orthodox Summer-School
By E. L. Mascall
The sun was shining in the sky
With unimpeded ray.
He did his very best to make
The place serene and gay,
And this was strange, because it was
An English summer day.
The rain had vanished sulkily,
Because it thought- the sun
Had got no business to be there
Now August had begun.
“With all these people here,” it said,
“We ought to spoil their fun.”
The rooms were close as close could be,
The lectures dry as dry.
No heresies had raised their heads,
No schisms wandered by.
You could not think a thought, because
It was too hot to try.
The Thomist and the Palamite
Were walking hand in hand.
Each did his very best to make
The other understand.
“If only we could both agree,”
They said, “It would be grand.”
“If sixty trained philosophers
Argued for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Thomist said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Palamite,
And shed a bitter tear.
“Let us collect some simple souls,”
The Thomist did beseech,
“For they have very much to learn
And we have much to teach.”
“Why, yes,” replied the Palamite,
“That ought to heal the breach.”
The older theologians heard,
But never a word they said.
While one discreetly winked his eye,
Another shook his head,
Meaning he much preferred to spend
The afternoon in bed.
But crowds of simple souls rushed up,
All eager for the treat.
The Thomist and the Palamite
Sat on the garden-seat,
And all the simple souls sat round
In circles at their feet.
“The time has come,” the Thomist said,
“To talk of many things,
Of angels perched on needle-points
And how a seraph sings.”
“And also,” said the Palamite,
“If energies have wings.”
“But stay,” exclaimed the simple souls,
“Before you start your chat.
We have not got the least idea
What you are getting at!”
“No matter,” said the Palamite,
“We quite expected that.”
“A lot of time,” the Thomist said,
“Is what we chiefly need,
Six blackboards and some coloured chalks-
They’re very good indeed.
And here are forty-seven books
Which we propose to read.”
“But not to us!” their hearers cried,
Turning extremely blue,
“We did not know that was the sort
Of thing you meant to do!”
“Oh dear,” the Thomist said, “Of course
I should say, fifty-two.
“It’s very kind of us to come
So far from hearth and home.”
The Palamite said nothing but
“Fetch me another tome.
I mean the one in fourteen parts
About the Church of Rome.
“It seems a shame,” the Thomist said,
“To lead them such a dance;
And yet we surely must not lose
So promising a chance.”
The Palamite said nothing but
“They’re used to it in France.”
“We weep for you,” the Thomist said,
“We deeply sympathize.
You boggle at the simplest words
Like ‘supernaturalize.'”
“And even,” said the Palamite,
“Like ‘demythologize.'”
They lectured in alternate spells
Until the set of sun,
And then the question-time began,
But questions there were none,
For on the grass the simple souls
Lay sleeping every one.
That’s what Goya meant by el sueño de la razón. How difficult life must have been for our forefathers ! They often needed doctrinal discussions in order to snooze, whereas we just take a sleeping pill.
Monographs and hefty tomes, in contrast, can be as stimulating as a pot of strong coffee. I can read Thomas for hours without dropping off. Real people are soporifics.