Laudator Temporis Acti posts a striking passage from F.C. Conybeare and St. George Stock, Selections from the Septuagint (Ginn & Company, 1905):
Josephus, it has been asserted, employs only one Hebraism, namely, the use of προστίθεσθαι with another verb in the sense of ‘doing something again’ (see Gram. of Sept. Gk. § 113). For the accuracy of this statement it would be hazardous to vouch, but the possibility of its being made serves to show the broad difference that there is between Hellenistic Greek, even as employed by a Jew, who, we know, had to learn the language, and the Biblical Greek of the Septuagint.
The uncompromising Hebraism of the Septuagint is doubtless due in part to the reverence felt by the translators for the Sacred Text. It was their business to give the very words of the Hebrew Bible to the Greek world, or to those of their own countrymen who lived in it and used its speech; as to the genius of the Greek language, that was entirely ignored. Take for instance Numbers 9¹⁰ — Ἄνθρωπος ἄνθρωπος ὃς ἐὰν γένηται ἀκάθαρτος ἐπὶ ψυχῇ ἀνθρώπου, ἢ ἐν ὁδῷ μακρὰν ὑμῖν ἢ ἐν ταῖς γενεαῖς ὑμῶν, καὶ ποιήσει τὸ πάσχα Κυρίῳ. Does anyone suppose that stuff of that sort was ever spoken at Alexandria? It might as well be maintained that a schoolboy’s translation of Euripides represents English as spoken in America.
One of our difficulties in explaining the meaning of the Greek in the Septuagint is that it is often doubtful whether the Greek had a meaning to those who wrote it. One often cannot be sure that they did not write down, without attaching any significance to them, the Greek words which seemed to be the nearest equivalents to the Hebrew before them. This is especially the case in the poetical passages, of which Deuteronomy 33¹⁰ᵇ will serve for an instance — ἐπιθήσουσιν θυμίαμα ἐν ὀργῇ σου, διὰ παντὸς ἐπὶ τὸ θυσιαστήριόν σου. We can account for this by aid of the original: but what did it mean to the translator?
Another obvious cause of difference between Biblical and Alexandrian Greek is the necessity under which the translators found themselves of inventing terms to express ideas which were wholly foreign to the Greek mind.
The result of these various causes is often such as to cause disgust to the classical student. Indeed a learned Jesuit Father has confessed to us what a shock he received on first making acquaintance with the Greek of the Septuagint.
Few, alas, are those students who can feel such a shock today…
Unrelated, but irresistible: Avva posts a screenshot from the Israeli Ministry of Health that has a Russian-language list of countries including Идти (Idti), between Denmark and Ireland. The puzzle is resolved once you realize идти is a Russian verb meaning ‘to go.’ Computer translation is convenient, but it will betray you at the most unexpected moments!
First place I ever set foot in Africa was Идти.
There was a restaurant in Lome memorably described to me once as “fast food without the speed.” Unfortunately my main memory of the place is of my son (then aged about two) spectacularly throwing up on the floor. The staff were remarkably nice about it.
“One often cannot be sure that they did not write down, without attaching any significance to them, the Greek words which seemed to be the nearest equivalents to the Hebrew before them.” I find this a puzzling sentence even when one sorts out the complexities of polarity. If the translators wrote down those Greek words “which seemed to be the nearest equivalent” of the Hebrew they were presumably attaching to those Greek words the specific “significance” of being-the-nearest-equivalent which is (modulo adjustments to allow for idiomaticity and style etc.) what a naive person might suppose a translator is in the business of doing.
The LXX is so frequently condemned for violating common modern notions of how translation (including of Scripture) is supposed to be done that I often wonder if, rather than just being idiots and incompetents from the POV of modern academic scholarship (what can you expect of primitive Jews who didn’t have Ph.D.’s from prestigious German universities, the subtext of this attitude often goes …), the LXX translators were perhaps deliberately engaged in some different sort of enterprise than we assume they were or at least ought to have been, which we in our hubris are too incurious to try to understand on its own terms.
I’m quite sure you’re right. The idea that they only translated like that because they were stupid is up there with the notion that Picasso only painted like that because he couldn’t do realism.
The degree of literalism of the LXX is also quite variable between books. They could translate in a way more pleasing to nineteenth-century German professors. If they didn’t (as with the Torah) they were therefore choosing not to.
Even on the (highly probable) assumption that there were several very different groups of translators involved, one has to conclude that the more-Germanoid translators of the latter books saw good reasons for leaving their predecessors’ work as it was, without “improvements.”
How do you say in Russian ‘Den Mark’ (something wolves spray?) and ‘Ire Land’?
On the one hand, sure. On the other, did they have a model for doing translations of this sort? If not, why would we expect them to get everything right the first time, where by “right” I mean “right by their own standards”?
Like… the Big-C Constitution was, for its time, in its context, a stunning masterpiece. But compare it to, say, the German constitution of 1949, and weep.
Not everyone shares David M’s apparent enthusiasm for the 1949 https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verfassung_der_Deutschen_Demokratischen_Republik.
Heh. I didn’t know that one was also from 1949… I mean the western one, which to this day doesn’t call itself a constitution for obsolete historical reasons, despite the Constitution Court (Verfassungsgerichtshof, the court that determines whether laws are unconstitutional if someone sues) and the Constitution Protection (Verfassungsschutz, an intelligence agency).
I love the line from the Tongan constitution of 1975, “Whoever shall be really poor whether owing to sickness or old age may be exempted from paying taxes…” Elsewhere, a sidenote on Royal succession says, “Idiot cannot succeed.”
“Idiot cannot succeed.”
If only!
…no, that’s the Austrian one, dating from 1919/20. The German one is called Bundesverfassungsgericht.
By the way, I just discovered this glitch in Wiktionary: the page for Proto-Germanic *saidô ‘band’ gives German Saite ‘string’ as one of its descendants, but the page for the latter says it’s just a variant spelling of Seite ‘page.’ (I think the latter must be wrong.)
Well, the BRD’s Grundgesetz* was supposed to be a temporary expedient but now seems (with some tweaks) to have hardened into permanence. Whether that’s because of the brilliance of its structural design or merely because of path-dependence is not clear to me.
*The usual story is that the occupying Western powers told the rehabilitated subset of West German pols to draft up an acceptable constitution and they were the ones who basically said “yeah, we’re not gonna call it a real constitution if we’re adopting it while under military occupation and subject to the approval of the occupiers.”
The English Saite article doesn’t cite a source. The German one makes the same claim and cites Grimm’s dictionary for it. For other things it cites the DWDS, and there it says that the spelling with ai was introduced to distinguish the word from the unrelated Seite “side, page”.
Saite almost exclusively means “string of a musical instrument”, BTW. Sometimes the notochord is called Rückensaite, but usually it’s just Chorda.
the spelling with ai was introduced to distinguish the word from the unrelated Seite “side, page”.
Ah, so the wording is unclear but correct. Fooled me!
I suggest both, because it’s not been that hard to amend – my little paper copy from 2015 counts 60 amendments.
The story I’m used to is tied to Article 146: “this can’t be a constitution for the German people as long as the German people isn’t unified in a single German country; once that happens, the German people as a whole will give itself a constitution for real”. That ended up not happening, but everyone’s so used to the term Grundgesetz now that there’s no movement to amend its name.
Of course the stories aren’t mutually exclusive, and the thinking in terms of peoples shown by Art. 146 strongly suggests they’re both true.
Edit: Art. 146 has been amended precisely to freeze the status quo: Dieses Grundgesetz, das nach Vollendung der Einheit und Freiheit Deutschlands für das gesamte deutsche Volk gilt, verliert seine Gültigkeit an dem Tage, an dem eine Verfassung in Kraft tritt, die von dem deutschen Volke in freier Entscheidung beschlossen worden ist. “This Basic Law, which is in force for the entire German people [now] after the completion of the unity and freedom of Germany, shall lose its validity on the day on which a constitution that shall have been decided upon by the German people in free decision shall come into force.”
No, the wording in both the English and the German Wiktionary articles is wrong – though it may be what Grimm’s dictionary really said; I’m about to check.
Edit: nope – Grimm’s article on Saite says the spelling was introduced for disambiguation from Seite, and doesn’t explicitly say there that it’s unrelated, but the article on Seite gives completely different cognates and doesn’t mention Saite at all. So there’s a misunderstanding in Wiktionary.
I hope somebody can fix it. (I’m not signed in at Wiktionary and have no desire to get sucked into another Wikimorass.)
after the completion of the unity and freedom of Germany
Well, okay, but how big of a unity does that have to be? Austria? German Switzerland? The Netherlands? Flanders? France?
The country of Идти is not completely obscure in Israel; there’s this gars.
Well, okay, but how big of a unity does that have to be? Austria? German Switzerland? The Netherlands? Flanders? France?
Presumably the borders of the Weimar Republic.
The Grundgesetz amendment incident to the takeover of the sogenannte DDR about “der Einheit … Deutschlands” was adopted (either under foreign pressure or to reassure potential foreign pressurers) to signal that the respectable mainstream BRD politicians foreswore any interpretation of the original Grundgesetz that it remained provisional until a Verfassung was adopted by the residents of *all* of “Germany,” including the ehemalige deutsche Ostgebiete (stolen by Stalin and given by him to his then-vassals in Poland to help mitigate their loss of the territory he had just stolen from Poland a bit further east). Of course, that seizure of land was accompanied by sufficiently vigorous ethnic cleansing that the geographical range of “das gesamte Deutsche Volk” shrank notably, compared to what it had been in certain prior centuries.
how big of a unity does that have to be? Austria? German Switzerland? The Netherlands? Flanders? France?
i hope they’ll at least hold out for parts of pennsylvania and manitoba, if not belize, before making any premature moves.
—
it’s striking to me that the passage doesn’t seem to acknowledge (or perhaps even be aware of?) the existence of targum as a genre, which to my understanding is what the LXX was in its original context.
gilt “is valid, is in force” is present tense, so the present is claimed to be after “the completion of the unity and freedom”. In other words, the whole thing is now an assertion that the entire German Question is over, the German people is now coextensive with the Federal Republic, and everybody can stop worrying (or dreaming as the case may be).
So far it’s holding up much better than the Yugoslav assertion that all problems between the nationalities had been solved in the best possible way. Even Kaliningrad has at least equal chances of becoming Czech as becoming German again.
The country of Идти is not completely obscure in Israel
Interesting stuff.
The author of the WP page seems to be under the misapprehension that Ewe is “Togolese.” This is not a point of view likely to appeal to the current dynasty of Togolese Presidents-as-long-as-we-damn-well-like:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faure_Gnassingb%C3%A9
On the plus side, there is an Igbo version of the page, to go with the French and Hebrew. And why not, pray? (Sadly, I cannot read Igbo, but it looks like it’s just a translation of the English page.)
Togolese Presidents-as-long-as-we-damn-well-like
Gnassingbé is a staunch friend of Israel [’s right-wing government], so all is good.
The Hebrew version of Legar’s WP page says he speaks “Ewe—a tribal-African Togolese language of his parents’ native country, Togo.”
Fair enough. It’s actually much the most widely spoken language in Togo, at least in the south.
Kabiye, the only other officially recognised state language (beside French), is by an extraordinary coincidence the mother tongue of the Gnassingbés. (It is a “Gur” language, but Grusi and not Oti-Volta, and therefore of no particular interest.)
I feel like this is one of the things I should know and have forgotten, but is Hellenistic Greek more or less Greek than other Greek?
Greekish Greek?
Sources tell me that it’s another name for Koine, that is the more or less common standard that was spoken all around the Mediterranean and at points east for a few centuries. Descendant of Classical Greek, ancestor of Modern Greek, the language the New Testament was written in.
If the Romans and the Arabs hadn’t come, there would be modern national languages derived from the Koine where Romance and Arabic are spoken now.
But to answer the question, Hellenistic Greek could probably be characterized as “Greek spoken by barbarians” and as such, the real Greeks might have found it lacking in real Greekness.
Kaliningrad seems a bit out of the way even for a very enthusiastic and expansion-minded Czech nationalist. Surely the simplest strategy to Make Czechia Great Again via direct access to the Baltic involves: a) acting on irredentist claim to Silesia; b) acting on somewhat shakier but still defensible irredentist claim to Stettin/Štětín/Szczecin; and c) seizing control for pragmatic reasons enough of Štětín-adjacent Pomerania and a sufficient “corridor” between Štětín and the northern border of Silesia to make the whole thing work. Perhaps the Swedes could be persuaded to revive their ancient claim to part of Pomerania to provide a useful tactical ally in return for some of the spoils?
I presume everyone here knows that the König in Königsberg/Královec/Kaliningrad was a Czech (Přemysl Otakar II.). But yes, it does seem a bit of a stretch (and doesn’t provide a land corridor to the core Czech lands unlike the other proposals). But clearly there needs to be a ‘sea-coast of Bohemia’ somewhere to justify Shakespeare’s geography. (Přemysl Otakar did control part of the Adriatic, though not I believe in his capacity as King of Bohemia).
I’m not sure if Prague is notably closer to the Baltic than the Adriatic as the crow flies, but the lack of intervening Alps makes rail and road links to the Baltic coast straighter and quicker than if tries to get from there to Terst/Trieste.
“One of our difficulties in explaining the meaning of the Greek in the Septuagint is that it is often doubtful whether the Greek had a meaning to those who wrote it. ”
I don’t understand this (JWB above wrote what I intended to write).
Latin and Greek translations to Slavonic do very, very weird things to Slavonic. And so I think do Latin translations on languages like Guarani.
“The result of these various causes is often such as to cause disgust to the classical student. ”
Is this student shocked because it is the most eloquent Language of Greeks (representing a culture much higher than that of barbarian Jews and their goats) and not some silly Jargon of Slavs, Guarani or…. Anglo-Saxons?
how big of a unity does that have to be? Austria? German Switzerland? The Netherlands? Flanders? France?
The official position of post-war Western Germany was that Germany continued to exist legally in the borders of 1937, i.e., after the peaceful and internationally recognized return of the Saar area, but before Hitler’s annexations (Memel, Austria, Sudeten). That was the area whose German people were supposed to give themselves the constitution that would replace the Grundgesetz (GG). So the area included Western Germany, the Saar area (reunited with Western Germany in 1956), the GDR (labeled “Soviet Occupation Zone” throughout most of the 50s and 60s), the four sectors of Berlin, and the “Eastern Areas” annexed by Poland and the SU. As a result of the “4+2” negotiations in 1990, Germany dropped the (at that point merely symbolic) claims to the Eastern areas, and the rest was united with the GG as constitution. There is nowadays no significant political group in Germany, not even the right-wingers and populists of the AfD, that makes any irredentist claims on any territory beyond the current borders (although there are people who jokingly claim Mallorca as the “16. Bundesland”).
Actually, interlinear is a good thing. I don’t see why a reader may not prefer interlinear to (a) learning the language of the original (b) a translation that preserves the main idea.
NB that a lot of old bible translations, including the one into Old Church Slavic, adhered very closely to the Greek wording and must have sounded unidiomatic to the speakers of the target languages. This was simply seen as necessary faithfulness to the original holy text.
@Hans, I may have mentioned this before but long ago when I was a teenage exchange student in West Germany (Neu-Ulm, summer of ’82) I noticed that Germany’s rather difficult history had influenced street-naming practices because plenty of well-known defunct statemen and generals etc. were too controversial for that purpose. My host family lived on Johann-Strauss-Strasse, in a neighborhood where all the streets were named for classical composers, which someone had obviously thought a “safe” and apolitical theme.
But there was one area on the edge of town in some sort of non-elite public housing project where the street names were overtly political in that they all commemorated the lost cities of the East by their former names: Breslauer-strasse, Danziger-strasse etc. I subsequently came to learn that enough of the refugees from the lost Ostgebiete lived and voted in Bavaria that they were a material part of the CSU’s winning political coalition, who accordingly may have gotten symbolic-not-substantive gestures like that made in their direction from time to time. I don’t know if any of those streets were renamed after 1990!
EDITED TO ADD: Should have checked google maps before posting! Looks like not. Indeed Koenigsberger Strasse is still there and runs all the way from Danziger Strasse through its intersection with Stettiner Strasse until it gets to a park with a (presumably artificial) lake, which I think must be where I went a fair amount that summer in the company of local teenage boys to watch teenage girls sunbathing while listening to (English-language) hard rock on a portable cassette player.
Diese revanchistischen Straßennamen, die man teilweise auch noch in anderen Städten findet, sind in erster Linie ein „Kotau“ vor den damaligen und auch heutigen Vertriebenen- und Heimatverbänden, oder vor anderen erzkonservativen, auch reaktionären Gruppen und Organisationen, die teilweise immer noch der Ideologie und der Lebensweise nachtrauern, die im damaligen „Großdeutschen Reich“ an der Tagesordnung war. Man sollte sich zumindest über den ideologischen Hintergrund im Klaren sein, darüber nachdenken, auch öffentlich diskutieren, ob es in einer modernen Demokratie, in einer modernen Stadt, nicht weit eher Sinn macht, solche Straßen umzubenennen, zum Beispiel in Bertha-von-Suttner-Straße, Clara-Zetkin-Straße, Thomas-Mann-Straße, Kurt – Tucholsky-Straße, Erich-Kästner-Straße oder nach anderen demokratisch, fortschrittlich und weltoffen gesinnten Persönlichkeiten, die auch über unsere Stadtgrenze hinweg bekannt sind. Die von mir und anderen kritisierten Straßennamen lauten konkret: Tilsiter Straße, Stettiner Straße, Küstriner Straße, Danziger Straße, Breslauer Straße, Marienburger Straße.
https://www.blick-aktuell.de/Politik/Wolfgang-Huste-moechte-revanchistische-Strassennamen-abschaffen-338033.html
To paraphrase, this Die Linke local politician wants to rename Tilsiter Straße, Stettiner Straße, Küstriner Straße, Danziger Straße, Breslauer Straße, Marienburger Straße in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler after democratic, progressive and cosmpolitan people like Bertha von Suttner or Erich Kästner, since these names were introduced as a “kowtow” to former and present arch conservatives, who mourn for the days (more precisely: ideology and way of life) of Greater Germany.
Naming a street in Germany after Baroness von Suttner, a Prague-born daughter of Austrian nobility who apparently never lived in post-1871 “Germany,” seems a rather Anschluss-like symbolic gesture, doesn’t it? (Same for naming a street after Johann Strauss, I suppose, when no French or Italian composers had nearby streets named for them …)
ETA: She was to be fair born within the then-territory of the German Confederation, which encompassed the Kingdom of Bohemia.
i would think the natural seaport for czechia would be vladivostok – or did the czech[oslovak] legion fight in vain?
Of course Královec is a stretch – that’s the point of the joke!
Is that the Czech form? I’m disappointed. In FYLOSC it’s Trst. (It’s also spelled that way in Slovene, but they chicken out and go for [tərst]. Quitters.)
He’s shocked because the LXX (apparently) does very, very weird things to Greek, at least if your idea of Greek is thoroughly Classical.
On maps, they were always shown as part of Poland and the SU, but often marked by a stippled line and fine print saying “under Polish/Soviet administration”.
Here in Berlin (notably on the west side) I live next to a bunch of streets named after Prussian victories in 1870/71. Admittedly, I wouldn’t even know that if my mom, a historian, hadn’t told me because, other than Dijon, these places aren’t known for anything else, and the days when history teaching meant “get the kids to learn every battle” are long over.
“He’s shocked because the LXX (apparently) does very, very weird things to Greek, at least if your idea of Greek is thoroughly Classical.”
Yes, but what I meant is that it happens to Biblical translations all the time (and is likely to have happened in this student’s native language just as it happened in mine)…
P.S. or do you meant it is even more weird? Then my knowlege of Greek is insufficient… (Our translations can be morpheme-by-morpheme – can one repeat this with Semitic?)
drasvi: it may be a timing thing: even if the Bible translation in your L1 is kind of weird compared to other texts in that language you grow up thinking of it as an especially exalted register, whereas if you come to LXX Greek at college age or later after already having learned (as a learned L2) posh Attic Greek, the way in which it is deviant from that model (or even the koine model of NT Greek) does not immediately strike you as exalted. The Vulgate is certainly not written in a posh Ciceronian register of Latin, but I take it future back then tended to be exposed to the Vulgate in childhood not much later than they were exposed to Cicero, so the “defects” of the Vulgate again don’t strike you as defects as opposed to merely a separate register for Biblical texts.
even if the Bible translation in your L1 is kind of weird compared to other texts in that language you grow up thinking of it as an especially exalted register
What Dixon calls “Old High Fijian” is the language of the old Bible translation: it’s in a nonstandard dialect and incorporates a number of systematic grammatical errors reflecting the original missionaries’ imperfect grasp of the language. Naturally, it is a prestigious form of the language.
I am not fluent enough (yet) to attempt the Good Book in Guarani, but a quick look at Genesis 1 suggests a rather literal translation — the plural yvagakuéra ‘heavens’ seems to be exclusively a Bible thing, for example.
That said, I suspect the translation started from the Spanish text rather than the Vulgate — or the LXX or the Hebrew original. But perhaps I’m underestimating the number of competent grc–gn translators out there.
Of course, some of the oddities of the LXX are conventionally attributed to the translators’ imperfect grasp of the Hebrew* rather than their imperfect grasp of Greek (at least the variety of Greek commonly used in Ptolemaic Egypt) …
*Eventually rabbinical Judaism developed explanations/exegeses of pretty much all the difficult/obscure passages, but it should not always be assumed that this was due to superior philological grasp of a long-defunct and specialized register of Hebrew rather than some combination of self-confidence, handwaving, and lack of conscious awareness of the difference between actually parsing an oddly-phrased passage or glossing a very obscure word based on your own knowledge of Hebrew versus just remembering the answer to the puzzle you were taught in your schooling. (Or perhaps the intervention of the Holy Ghost, which we should not exclude the possibility of, I suppose.) Those standard answers to confusing bits of text may not yet all have been fully developed when the LXX translators were doing their own guesswork.
There is nowadays no significant political group in Germany, not even the right-wingers and populists of the AfD, that makes any irredentist claims on any territory beyond the current borders
How refreshingly sensible. I have just finished consuming a monograph which, with brain-softening plausibility, claims that because when Japan signed away its rights to Taiwan in 1952 it did not cede Taiwan to any nation in particular, the U.S. military government of occupied Taiwan is legally still in power, no transfer of power to any civilian authority ever having occurred (unlike the parallel cases of the Philippines and the Ryukyus). It follows, of course, that the U.S. defense of Taiwan is not merely a matter of U.S. national interest, but an outright duty under customary international law, as with other military occupations.
By the end, I had reclaimed my grip on the principle that an argument leading to a silly conclusion is a silly argument, and that since nobody disputes that the beginning of military occupation is a de facto matter, logically its end may also be. In practice this usually means the occupied area was (re)conquered, but there seems no reason why it cannot also happen through mere erosion.
(although there are people who jokingly claim Mallorca as the “16. Bundesland”).
The Turks and Caicos have been trying to persuade Canada to annex them as a fourth territory for some time now. In defiance of the usual views of national interest, Canada remains stubbornly resistant to the idea.
i would think the natural seaport for czechia would be vladivostok
A treaty exchanging Vladivostok for, say, Přerov, a city of roughly equal size (relative to the national population), particularly if accompanied by navigation rights on the Bečva and the Morava (a left tributary of the Danube), would IMO be quite reasonable. Alternatively, Vladivostok could be transformed into a Russo-Czech condominium. The spirit of compromise, if sincerely adopted, is more than equal to all such minor problems.
Ooh! Reichsbürger!
*facepalm*
Well, not quite as crazy. Nor is it quite as crazy as the idea that Taiwan is an external possession of … (wait for it) … Japan. This view (on Taiwan itself, mind you, not in Japan) has the extra added attraction that the people who claim it have a cult of personality around their Maximum Leader, a convicted fraudster.
One of the monograph’s lesser claims is that civil authority can’t just come out of nowhere except in the case of terra nullius; it has to be established by some kind of legal act. Tell that to the Connecticutensians, who came through the American revolution without (in a legal sense) even noticing.
The 1952 treaty between Japan and the ROC regime (subsequently unilaterally abandoned by Japan when they followed Nixon’s example and sucked up to the bandit regime in de facto control of the Chinese mainland) is, it can be reasonably claimed, worded more oddly and ambiguously than might seem necessary if it were not only abandoning Japan’s claim to Taiwan but specifically conveying Japan’s former rights to Taiwan to the ROC regime. There are multiple potential reasons that might have happened, and multiple (mutually incompatible!) theses about the current status of Taiwan that might arguably follow from this, and “so the U.S. military is in charge” is not necessarily the most obvious of the range of potential conclusions.
One of the more boring possibilities might be that the ROC government of the day thought (for reasons possibly driven more by nationalism/ego than a cautious reading of international law) that they *already* had sovereign jurisdiction and ownership of Taiwan fair and square without actually needing the Japanese to formally agree that they did. So it would have thus been vaguely insulting for Japan to purport to “give” them something they thought Japan already had no rights to rather than simply formally acknowledging that it had no such rights. But there may be other possibilities.
Of course Královec is a stretch – that’s the point of the joke!
Fun! I especially like the aircraft carrier Karel Gott.
@JWB: Streets named after cities and regions in the Eastern areas are not limited to Bavaria; here in Bonn, there also is such a district close to where I live. It was mostly built after the war and actually housed many Eastern refugees.
@Paddy: I’m not astonished by that guy’s stance, it’s exactly the kind of thing the extreme left is good at – demands that satisfy the principles of a dozen activists and potentially alienate a large part of the general populace. But you can have both – although Bonn has that district with “revanchist” street names, one of its central squares and node points is the Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz.
OFFS, I just learned that the whole Reichsbürger concept has been Recycled IN
SPACERussia – with an added cameo appearance by Dark Brandon! 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 See if you can spot it.I can’t follow – they ratified the Constitution. Why would Connecticut have had to be reestablished at that occasion?
>Královec is a stretch
Zelenskeho-gradsk
Why would Connecticut have had to be reestablished at that occasion?
The other twelve colonies had all operated under royal charters, which were full of references to Britain and the monarchy. For example, their governors were appointed by the King. Rather than trying to patch up the charters, the twelve all went back to the people and established modern-style governments based on popular sovereignty. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (the only one still in effect from that time, and arguably the oldest written constitution still functioning) reads (paragraph 2 of the Preamble):
As another example, the preamble of the 1776 Constitution of New Jersey reads:
Connecticut, however, had always had a popular-sovereignty constitution dating back to its founding in 1638; it was settled directly from Massachusetts and not from England. From Order 9 of the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (spelling modernized):
The Fundamental Orders were formally replaced by a 1662 royal charter that basically repeated and extended their terms (their representative in England bribed King Charles II to accept it), but maintaining the same machinery, including a governor annually elected by the supreme legislature. Though in form a corporate charter granted by the King, it gave the King no role in Connecticut’s government.[*] Therefore (as explained at the link above) the Connecticut General Court decided that its charter was a perfectly adequate constitution for a U.S. state and took no action to replace it until 1818, and continued to elect the same governor year after year until his retirement in 1784 after 16 consecutive annual terms.
[*] The charters for New England, New York, and East and West Jersey were revoked in 1686 and their surrender demanded, but Connecticut hid the original copy of its charter in an oak tree later known as the Charter Oak. All the charters were restored either de jure or de facto as a side effect of the overthrow of James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
@Hans: As I pointed out a while back, the Federal Republic’s Basic Law was, by design, silent on the question of how other territories could be (re-)integrated into the new state. This should* have been, for obvious reasons, one of the most important structural questions facing the new West Germany, but it was realized that it was not something they could dictate themselves.
* I am always a bit hesitant to try to put myself in the places of German conservatives in the 1940s and 1950s. Adenauer was born in 1876 and had seen so much change in his lifetime, it seems foolish to try to understand his worldview. (John le Carre was supposed to report on what newspapers the chancellor read on the car ferry during his morning commute, to see what was influencing him. But le Carre thought that was a fool’s errand, as Adenauer had already made up his mind about most important matters long before.)
@John Cowan: The opening of “The Gray Champion” by Nathaniel Hawthorne mentions the revocations of the colonial charters:
Oddly, reading this story (which was a student group’s selection, not from the textbook or assigned by our teacher) was the only exposure I had in school to any discussion of the impact of James II and the subsequent Glorious Revolution in the North American colonies. I also just discovered the title character among an online list of “public domain superheroes,” which is not an inaccurate characterization, just peculiar.
@Brett: The way I was taught in school history lessons*), in 1949 the idea was not that the other territories would join the Federal Republic (the way unity actually would come about in 1990), but that a united Germany would be established (probably based on some kind of agreement between the occupying powers), and this united Germany would give itself a constitution (probably through a national assembly, like Weimar), which then would replace the GG. That is the reason why there were no rules on accession and no details on how the new constitution should come about, except that it should be based on the free self-determination of the German peoples – nobody had a clue how a united Germany would be achieved, and the creators of the GG did not think they had the right to circumscribe the future will of the people on this matter.
When reunification happened in 1990, there was actually criticism that the GDR simply acceded to the Federal Republic and that there was no constitution-writing assembly, as people had been taught to expect based on the conventional interpretation of the intentions behind the GG. But the ruling circles of Western Germany weren’t thrilled at the idea of creating a new constitution from first principles, and most people, especially in the East, wanted unity fast, so this didn’t happen.
*) More probably it was Sozialkunde lessons. I’m not sure, that was 40 years ago 🙂
To the extent the EU as currently constituted places external constraints on the range of hypothetical potential constitutions the people a member state might potentially support or adopt, it could be argued that the “in freier Entscheidung” criterion for superseding the Grundgesetz cannot currently be satisfied. (I assume, perhaps inaccurately, that the potential need for unilateral withdrawal from the Council of Europe and the associated constraints of the Europäische Menschenrechtskonvention, should the Entscheidung lead to a constitution containing incompatible provisions, would be less of a practical constraint, at least for a wealthy and populous nation like Germany.)
@JWB, quarters where streets are named after [insert a theme] are common in Soviet and Russian cities. My part of Moscow is scholars – though near People’s Friendship University (on Miklouho-Maclay street) there is a Samora Machel street.
Also compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikanisches_Viertel
@drasvi: Sure, themed areas like that (streets with names of trees, streets with names of dead Presidents* …) are not uncommon in the U.S. either, although “archaic names for places we used to own but don’t anymore” is not one I’ve seen, although maybe someone somewhere named a bunch of consecutive streets after Filipino toponyms back when the Philippines were part of our would-be empire?
@Hans: Yes, that is essentially my understanding as well. (I don’t think that conflicts with what I wrote last night, or in 2019, but maybe I expressed myself poorly.)
To the extent the EU as currently constituted places external constraints on the range of hypothetical potential constitutions the people a member state might potentially support or adopt, it could be argued that the “in freier Entscheidung” criterion for superseding the Grundgesetz cannot currently be satisfied
Well, first, it doesn’t have to – the current, post-unification wording of the preamble states that the GG is that constitution, no need for a new one.
Second, the expectation was always that the united Germany would be a liberal democracy, with rights and values comparable to the GG. Membership in the EU was seen as anchoring that expectation, not contradicting it. Those who wrote the GG would not have expected the Federal Republic to agree with plans for a united Germany if the proposed united Germany would have been a Socialist “People’s Republic” or a fascist dictatorship, or even some half-authoritarian model like Hungary’s “illiberal democracy”. That’s not totally hypothetical; Adenauer and the Western German government rejected proposals by the SU in the early 50s for a neutral, demilitarized Germany because they didn’t trust the Soviets and were afraid that this would lead to Socialism by the back door. If there seems to be a contradiction between “free self-determination” and “you can only have a liberal democracy”, yes, there is, but it’s a contradiction that’s baked into the GG with its concept of wehrhafte Demokratie, a democracy that doesn’t allow itself to be abolished even in the name of the people, not after Hitler’s terrors. So the EU doesn’t impose anything that wasn’t already imposed by the GG itself.
Thirdly, if in the end the German people would want to give itself a constitution that, say, would allow to discriminate against gays or send refugees to Rwanda – for which positions I don’t see much appetite, certainly not 2/3rds majorities – we can always leave the EU; it has been done. But even the AfD only wants to abolish the Euro, and they get 15% at federal elections max.
So while your point could be argued in theory, it doesn’t have any practical relevance, and arguing it would put you on the unsavoury fringes of German political discourse.
@Brett: all good; my post was meant as a complement, not as a rejoinder 🙂
“archaic names for places we used to own but don’t anymore”
i think the u.s. parallel would be the vast number of streets (etcetera) named for confederate generals, notables, and military victories. these are generally a product of the 2nd Klan era (c.WWI onwards), and while concentrated in the former CSA are reasonably common throughout the country. here in nyc, for instance, there’s a cluster on the army base in south brooklyn (which says a lot about the relationship* between u.s. state institutions and CSA irredentism).
—
* wholehearted support. as my late commonlaw step-grandfather wrote back in 1960 or 1964**, “what if the north had won the civil war?”.
** if i remember right from his clipping file, for a progressive catholic magazine’s civil war centenary issue.
@Hans:: I know that there are now many constitutions that assert (with various levels of explicitness) that they cannot by abolished or abrogated. Obviously, while this might be the law de jure, such provisions may be unenforceable de facto in the face of mass public or military pressure for change.
I am also uncomfortable, philosophically, with absolute assertions that a government has a right to continue existing, rather than the choice of form of government being ultimately entirely in the hands of the people. The Constitution of the U. S. A. has provisions for amendments, but not explicitly for outright replacement; however, the Declaration of Independence asserts that right.
(I have commented before that the whole second paragraph of the Declaration is a masterpiece, and it is too bad that only the first few clauses are really well known, when those are really just introductory to the discussion of the right of revolution.)
@Brett: indeed, the U.S. Constitution itself was adopted via a process seemingly inconsistent with what the predecessor Articles of Confederation permitted. This may be just a general application of “if it succeed, none dare call it treason.”
@rozele, I don’t know that that’s a good parallel rather than a separate thing unto itself. Although now I wonder if there are some old street names in Virginia that are based on toponyms of places now in West Virginia as a result of the fortunes of war, where the original context was that an out-of-state toponym would not have been used. That said, AFAIK the quite considerable Confederate Nostalgia/Apologetics boom among the Virginia political/social elite for many many generations never manifested in a revanchist claim to be reunited with West Virginia, so I don’t think there would have been a post-1865 street naming to stake such a claim — or merely mourn the loss; I don’t claim any insight into how many Germans who approved of naming something “Breslauer Strasse” actually hoped to get Breslau back versus just as marking for memory and nostalgia for what had been irrevocably swept away.
Indeed, if Paris Street, Newark, N.J. was in fact named after the city by French immigrants (and not, e.g. a local inhabitant of that name), that would be in memory of their home, certainly not a claim of U.S. sovereignty over France.
I don’t claim any insight into how many Germans who approved of naming something “Breslauer Strasse” actually hoped to get Breslau back versus just as marking for memory and nostalgia for what had been irrevocably swept away
Hard to say. But the heyday of naming streets after places in the Eastern areas was in the 50s and 60s, when the loss was still new and many people still hoped that they would be able to return, so for a significant number of people back then it probably was some kind of claim. The displaced people’s organizations were a powerful voting block for the conservative parties into the 1980s, when the generation that still saw the East as their homeland started to die off. By then, reclaiming the Eastern areas had mostly become lip service – almost nobody believed it would actually be possible (a lot of people thought the same of re-unification by that time, by the way). Nowadays, it’s just memory and nostalgia, for those few who still feel a connection to those areas. (Disclosure: my maternal grandfather was from Elbing / Elbląg and my mother was born there, but doesn’t have memories of the place because she was 2 years old when the war ended. My grandfather missed his hometown and kept the memory alive, but he never was a revanchist; when it became possible to visit his former hometown after the fall of the Iron Curtain, he preferred not to go and not to spoil the memory by looking at current reality.)
I’m not sure whether any Parisian immigrants to Newark, N.J. were refugees/expellees although I suppose they well could have been, French history being what it is. But the whole municipality of New Rochelle, N.Y. was more overtly named by those who either had or could have lived in “Old” La Rochelle when conditions had been more propitious for their particular sort of Francophone, but had fled and/or been driven out when conditions became less tolerant due to political/military developments.
I am also uncomfortable, philosophically, with absolute assertions that a government has a right to continue existing, rather than the choice of form of government being ultimately entirely in the hands of the people.
Even if the people decide to abolish the choice? In any case, I rather frequently hear that objection of principle when discussing the German constitution with people from the UK or the US; I understand it, but I can only say that our specific German experience made us less ready to trust that letting democracy replace itself by some other system just because a majority is fine with that is a good idea.
I know that there are now many constitutions that assert (with various levels of explicitness) that they cannot by abolished or abrogated. Obviously, while this might be the law de jure, such provisions may be unenforceable de facto in the face of mass public or military pressure for change.
Sure. If Russian tanks ever make it to the Rhine, or if China takes over the world, the German constitution will be dead. And when a large majority of Germans decide they rather want to live in an authoritarian one-party state or a populist dictatorship or whatever alternatives to liberal democracy will be flavour of the day, it probably can’t be helped; but at least the current set-up gives the means to democracy to put up a fight and not fold meekly like Weimar.
“Revisiting” Neu-Ulm after over 40 years away via the google maps interface I see that it also boasts an Elbinger Strasse, parallel to Memelstrasse and close to Tilsiter Strasse – all in an area I may have been less likely to spend time in back then. It may well be that the Fifties/Sixties timeline also nicely coincides with suburbanization in West Germany and new housing construction requiring the layout and naming of new streets/roads, so it’s not as if some existing street would lose its name in order to honor the legacy of Elbing.
I doubt that even as much of 1% of the residents of the BRD as of, let’s say, this date in March 1989 had any sort of expectation of the collapse of Communist power in the DDR on anything approaching the rapid timescale on which it happened, and even by let’s say the beginning of September I don’t know that the percentage would have been that much higher. (It was clear by then that the sudden leakiness of the Hungary/Austria border meant that the DDR had a problem on its hands, but other solutions like “restrict travel to Hungary” or “get our friends in Moscow to make the Hungarians plug up the leaks” probably still seemed more plausible and less wild-eyed.)
“revanchist”
What USSR did was obviously evil.
In the U.S., the Constitution cannot be replaced (which is a form of amending it) without considerably more than a majority supporting it:
No such national convention has ever been called, and only the 21st Amendment (repeal of national alcohol prohibition) has ever been ratified by state conventions.
A constitution that does not require jumping through more demanding procedural and/or supermajoritarian hoops to change than are required for enacting an ordinary statute or winning an ordinary election is not really a constitution in any meaningful sense, i.e. it does not place any meaningful constraint on the ordinary legislative and electoral processes. The only bit of what John C. blockquoted that qualifies as what wikipedia calls generically an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrenched_clause is the last bit about “equal Suffrage in the Senate,” although I suppose that could be undermined by other amendments taking away specific meaningful powers of the Senate and making it of less relevance to the actual governance of the nation.
Some of the other examples from other nations seem somewhat silly. Why, for example, should the people of Italy not be able to freely choose (after jumping through sufficient procedural and/or supermajoritarian hoops) to restore the monarchy given the opera-buffa performance of non-monarchical regimes in that ill-governed nation?
a bunch of streets named after Prussian victories in 1870/71
Dublin buses on route 11, going north past my aunt’s house, display “Wadelai Park” as their terminus. My research revealed this to be a banal suburban development, on the site of an 1890s villa which had been named Wadelai, presumably by a Unionist owner, after a fort in Uganda which had recently been captured by the British from the Mahdists.
Obviously, while this might be the law de jure, such provisions may be unenforceable de facto in the face of mass public or military pressure for change.
The 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty required legislators in the Irish Free State to take an oath of fidelity to the British monarch. The statute enacting the 1922 Constitution specified that anything in the Constitution which violated the Treaty was void. As enacted the Constitution included the specified oath. In the 1930s Eamon de Valera won election on a promise to abolish the oath; the statute that effected this not only amended the Constitution to delete the oath, but also amended the 1922 enacting statute to delete the voiding provision. There were some philosophical arguments about whether this was cheating or not.
@mollymooly: Hmm. Were Irish nationalists of the 1890’s actively pro-Mahdist, on a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory?
More recently, the Ugandan government managed to get 10,000 Euros from Germany to try to make Wadelai more attractive to tourists, allegedly on account of a complex 19th-century German connection. https://www.monitor.co.ug/uganda/lifestyle/reviews-profiles/emin-pasha-s-legacy-in-nebbi-1536684
Oh, I get it. Interesting indeed. Thanks!
I’m not surprised. The man was literally elected on the slogan Keine Experimente! next to a drawing of his stern face…
[Edit: literally he wasn’t, his party was.]
Oh, that’s interesting, because it’s almost what Austria did. Austria north of the Danube is the legendary “only country the Soviet Union/Red Army ever voluntarily retreated from”, and Austria was reunited in 1955 in exchange for writing permanent neutrality into its constitution. (It’s still there; the date of this amendment, Oct. 26th, is the national holiday, and Austria isn’t allowed to join NATO… and still gets 80% of its natural gas from Russia, uh…). Austria was never demilitarized, indeed it’s sort of been pretending to be militarized on the Swiss model of neutrality, but, um. I’ve told the Cold War joke before: “How long will the Russians need to overcome the Alps?” – “A quarter of an hour. Ten minutes for laughing, five minutes for climbing.”
It wasn’t Socialism through the back door, BTW. The country became more and more stiflingly conservative till the conservative party expanded its plurality to a majority in the election of 1966 and governed alone. Then 1968 happened, and the elections of 1970 led to a minority government by the Socialist Party as it was called at the time, followed in 1971 by a majority government by the same party, renamed Social Democratic in 1975, into the early 80s; but the actual communists had long faded from relevance by then, and the Socialists never were communists.
Relax. The Ewigkeitsklausel lists the things that it is “inadmissible” to change, and it is not itself on that list:
“An amendment of this Basic Law by which the organization of the Federation in Countries, the principle of participation of the Countries in legislation or the principles laid down in Articles 1 and 20 are touched is inadmissible.”
Were Irish nationalists of the 1890’s actively pro-Mahdist, on a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” theory?
Some certainly cheered for the Mahdi, though the slightly later, larger wave of nationalist support for the Boers has eclipsed this in the popular memory.
it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government
To be sure, this is a political right; it is not and cannot be a constitutional right.
although I suppose that could be undermined by other amendments taking away specific meaningful powers of the Senate
Or indeed by abolishing it altogether, in which case all states would still have equal suffrage in the Senate, namely none at all.
A constitution that does not require jumping through more demanding procedural and/or supermajoritarian hoops to change than are required for enacting an ordinary statute or winning an ordinary election is not really a constitution in any meaningful sense
I think that’s too strong. The California Constitution can be amended by 2/3 of each house of the legislature, the same as is required for overriding a gubernatorial veto (and there are other ways to amend it, including a constitutional convention and a citizen initiative). There have been almost 500 amendments as a result. Nevertheless, the California Supreme Court has the power of judicial review, and will hold an ordinary statute void if it contradicts the current state of the Constitution, so it functions much like the other 49 state constitutions.
BTW, on the question of the de Valera regime’s legal shenanigans in sidestepping what appeared to be constitutional limits, there’s an interesting (if long and in parts fairly technical) article out there you can google up titled “Law Without Loyalty – The Abolition of the Irish Appeal to the Privy Council.”
Punchline: “Few countries attempting to obtain complete sovereignty by constitutional means have
left behind such glaring legal anomalies in the wake of their advance as Ireland.” The most interesting part (to me, YMMV) is the discussion of the UK courts ultimately letting them get away with this (not directly on the loyalty-oath question, but on a more practically-important thing that had been purportedly abolished via the same stratagem).
Whether this was because of a realpolitik desire to avoid a legalistic confrontation with the de Valera regime that the non-judicial UK authorities didn’t actually want to have or whether it was just a consequence of the fact that the British judges fundamentally didn’t understand the basic idea of having meaningful constitutional restraints on a legislature, since they traditionally had none on theirs, is not clear to me. There was also maybe some weird glitch where the UK elite had earlier signed on to a slogan (which no doubt sounded good at the time at a superficial level) that the Irish Free State should have as much autonomy as Canada, no more no less, without thinking through how future changes in the degree of autonomy of one or the other perhaps ought not to flow through automatically to the other since the contexts and circumstances would inevitably be different.
To John Cowan’s point that any right to overthrow the existing constitutional order cannot itself be a constitutional right: that sounds extremely logical, yet there are constitutions which purport to recognize it. E.g. this from the Constitution of the State of New Hampshire: “Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”
Now, it may be a non-justiciable right, falling again into the “If it prosper, none dare call it treason” category.
“… whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, …”
But they just had overthrown an existing constitutional order (the Crown/the colonies — where constitutionally speaking they had some sort of representation in Westminster, though not directly elected). So the new Constitution had to tie itself in knots to both assert constitutionality in New Hampshire _and_ justify their prior “resistance against arbitrary power”.
(I guess Britain would also have needed some similar tying in knots if it had ever wanted a written Constitution — what with beheading a King and then bringing in a foreign King. vide the vehemence of Edmund Burke in both supporting the grievances of the Thirteen Colonies at the same time as condemning the Revolution in France.)
Vienna still has a Prager Straße and a Brünner Straße (and a Triester Straße) but those are justifiable since those really are the historic roads out of Vienna to those cities. Pressburgergasse might be more problematic but that is a legacy of Empire not nostalgia. Interestingly we don’t appear to have a Laibacher Straße but Munich does.
Hans: Even if the people decide to abolish the choice?
I don’t think the people now can legitimately constrain the people of the future this way. The dead have no rights. On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable, as J.W. Brewer points out, to have substantially stiffer requirements for changing a constitution than for passing ordinary legislation.
Vanya’s post made me reflect that quite a lot of the millions of Volksdeutsche who were ethnically cleansed by the new Communist regimes in Eastern Europe lived in former Hapsburg territory that had never been part of the Berlin-centric unified “Germany,” e.g. those driven out (with varying degrees of thoroughness) from Hungary, Romania, and Yugoslavia. (The Sudetenland is maybe a special case since Hitler had after all annexed it along the way …) But my impression is that the bulk of those refugees went to West Germany and relatively few (but not none) to Austria. No doubt there were a variety of reasons for this, including Austria’s we-were-the-first-victim-of-the-Nazis narrative which implied that helping to clean up the various messes left by and/or created in the aftermath of the war was not their obligation.
But I don’t have a sense one way or another whether there was a sufficient critical mass of such expelled Volksdeutsche in Vienna (or elsewhere in Austria) for them to be a politically/culturally salient group, whether or not that gave them the clout to influence street-naming practices.
There’s some Americana in this thread that is so unfamiliar to me that I’d be interested to learn the factual basis for it:
>they just had overthrown an existing constitutional order (the Crown/the colonies — where constitutionally speaking they had some sort of representation in Westminster, though not directly elected.
Which MPs are the basis for that? The seats for Cambridge in Cambridgeshire and Boston in Lincolnshire don’t count. Can we consign the claim to East Looe? Or maybe to Lostwithiel?
Grenville said the colonists were represented because all MPs were supposed to vote for the interests of the subjects of the kingdom, so it was all fine. The colonies were actually represented by every single MP! Is there another, less ridiculous angle that I’ve missed?
>i think the u.s. parallel would be the vast number of streets (etcetera) named for confederate generals, notables, and military victories. these are generally a product of the 2nd Klan era (c.WWI onwards), and while concentrated in the former CSA are reasonably common throughout the country.
“Reasonably common” is an arbitrary term, so maybe you can justify this in your mind. I’ve lived “at the north” all my life, in a variety of cities. I’ve literally never lived more than 2 miles from either a Lincoln Street or a Lincoln School, typically had either a Grant St. or a Grant School also within that range. Currently, I live just south of a string of streets including those two, Harrison and Colfax, and they all intersect with Sherman. When I ran elections, the proliferation actually caused difficulties. We had a dozen polling places at different Lincoln Schools.
I don’t know that I’ve ever noticed a byway or school in the north named for a confederate or a confederate victory. Army bases don’t seem relevant for a claim like this one. Googling, there do seem to be a handful of such places. They don’t seem to have anything to do with “the 2nd Klan era”. They seem plucked contextless from the past by historically illiterate developers who just wanted something that sounded interesting. I found a Fredericksburg St. surrounded by streets named for the three of the four primary northern victories – Antietam, Vicksburg and Appomattox – along with an Ardennes St. (!). If you believe this Fredericksburg was named to celebrate the Lost Cause, you’d have to believe the developer was also celebrating either the slaughter of French troops early in World War I, or the most significant and bloodiest Nazi counterattack on American forces between D-Day and the end of the Reich. The subdivision seems to date to the mid-70s. I’m pretty sure he just didn’t know much about it. I feel quite confident 90 percent of the homebuyers couldn’t have told you Fredericksburg was a battle, another 5% couldn’t tell you which war, and of the remaining 1%, the number who answered that the South won would be just slightly higher than the 50% you’d get if they were guessing.
Confederate commemoration “reasonably common” in the north? This seems like a politically wishful factoid — one of those things consistent enough with one’s view of the country that one comes to believe it’s true without ever checking.
@Ryan: this 2017 piece unfortunately seems to have linkrot affecting the maps, but for outside-once-Confederate-territory Confederate street names it mentions in text only three in Alaska, one in San Diego, and two in Brooklyn. The Brooklyn ones, which just got renamed within the last year or two, were on federal property in Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where both namesakes (Stonewall Jackson and R.E. Lee) had been stationed during their ante-bellum service in the U.S. Army. https://www.fastcompany.com/40459028/these-maps-show-which-u-s-streets-are-named-for-confederate-leaders
In the NYC area we often have wackier renaming controversies, because the demand for renaming apparently exceeds the supply of obvious candidates. One recurrent issue is that there will be something named SURNAME Street (or SURNAME something-else), where the SURNAME was that of a reasonably prominent old-time landowning family, which was prominent dating back to the time when slavery was a thing in New York and slave ownership reasonably common (but not universal) among members of families prominent enough to get stuff named after them. But it’s often unclear which member of the family a particular thing was named after or even if it was named after any given individual.
Take Rikers Island, site of NYC’s primary jail. It was bought by the city from whichever members of the RIker family owned it as of 1884, who had presumably themselves never been slaveowners, but it had been in the family for a long time, maybe back to the 1600’s. So renaming campaigns have cherry-picked the worst Riker family member they could find, in this case a fellow who is not accused of having personally been a slaveowner (although he was just old enough he could have been, given the timeline of abolition in New York) but who as an NYC municipal judge in the early 19th century was allegedly overly enthusiastic about enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act and may have cut corners and gone beyond the letter of the law in his haste to enforce it. His father (a U.S. Congressman who apparently was unequivocally a slaveowner) gets mentioned less.
I can’t confirm it now, but I have read that the Colonies were theoretically represented by the MP for the borough in which their charter was granted by the king.
Grenville said the colonists were represented because all MPs were supposed to vote for the interests of the subjects of the kingdom, so it was all fine. The colonies were actually represented by every single MP!
As a resident of Washington, DC, I’m quite familiar with this line of argument. We don’t need voting representation in Congress because all the members represent us (even though we can’t vote for them).
And now Congress won’t even let you reform your own police.
In Chicago, all politics is local, and the most local thing is your address. Street renaming is forced to work around the powerful political force of “But I’ve been sent roughly 70,000 free return-address labels from 50 different charities, and what am I gonna do if you change the street.”
I’m happy to have something important named for J.B.P. DuSable, the African-American merchant who traded here for a decade and left a few years before the establishment of a lasting settlement, but nonetheless is celebrated as the “first permanent non-indigenous settler”. I’m less excited that they chose to rename for DuSable one of the few iconic roads we have in the city – Lake Shore Drive. You might think they renamed LSD *because* it’s a big important street. But the real deciding factor is that no one has a Lake Shore Drive address, so there’s no angered constituency. (There is also “Inner Lake Shore”, running alongside DSLSD, and providing the postal address for high-rises and a few last Gilded Age mansions.)
Meanwhile, we also named a street for Ida B. Wells. Which is cool. But one of the more prominent downtown streets was already Wells St. I might have simply proclaimed that that one was hereafter Ida B.’s street. Instead, they renamed “Congress Parkway”. Again, I think primarily because no one had an address on that stretch of Congress Parkway, because those buildings all face east or west.
Come to think of it, Inner DuSable would be an amazing street name.
“Live here and you’ll become one with the mind of the man who (almost) founded Chicago!”
FWIW, while there can be some overlap, I think it’s useful to distinguish between renamings in
Category One: “It’s appalling that this building/street/whatnot still bears the name of X, who was appalling” and
Category Two: “It’s appalling that we *don’t* yet have something named after Y, who has been wrongfully denied recognition, so what can we rename after Y that doesn’t have politically powerful defenders of its existing name?”
Of course maybe sometimes bogus/pretextual Category One situations are ginned up to facilitate a Category Two situation?
I regret to say that the more-considerable-than-I-might-have-supposed German inventory of street names commemorating the Lost Cities of the East does not (to the knowledge of google maps) include a Strelsauer Strasse. Who now recalls the loveliness of the quondam capital of Ruritania before it was (I assume?) overrun by Stalinist thugs in the aftermath of WW2?
>linkrot affecting the maps
@JB Brewer
This version has a bit more information, but isn’t necessarily helpful on its own.:
https://cklibanoff.medium.com/public-memory-and-street-names-in-the-south-who-gets-remembered-de8f7cb9e1e8
She reports 1417-1132 = 285 northern streets named for confederates. However, she also reports her name list. Is there any reason to believe that the at least 15 northern streets named Pettigrew are named for a brigadier who got a brevet promotion at Gettysburg and then died of his wounds? None of them carry his first name. His CO was also killed in the same charge, but no one named any streets Heth. Are the various Armistead roadways in the north named for Lewis, another brigadier who died at Gettysburg, or George, who commanded Fort McHenry during the battle that gave us our national anthem? I’d be willing to bet the one that’s near “Key Ave.” in a town named McHenry, Illinois is named for the War of 1812 guy, not the Civil War guy.
I think she’s got a bunch of false positives.
@Ryan: Leaving aside the various 19th-century non-Southern U.S. politicians surnamed Pettigrew who seem like the sort of fellows that someone might have named a street after, there is (I learn from googling) a fictional character in the Harry Potter books surnamed Pettigrew. Given that the Pettigrew Street in Elkridge, Maryland is located very close to e.g. Quidditch Lane and Ravenclaw Road, I have some suspicions that that’s a non-Confederate instance …
Ha! Yeah I knew about that Pettigrew from watching the movies with the kids but had dismissed the idea there could be PotterMania streets.
But it may still speak to Rozele’s point. Pettigrew’s betrayal of the Potters to Voldemort sets the whole series in motion.
A very strange character to name anything for.
🙁 I can’t name even one Russian street named after a character:(
Grenville’s doctrine was virtual representation: he compared the colonies, because they were corporations with royal charters, to such institutions as “the India Company, the merchants of London, the proprietors of the stocks, and over many great manufacturing towns. It was exercised over the county palatine of Chester, and the bishopric of Durham, before they sent any representatives to Parliament, which likewise had no parliamentary representation.” But Pitt (along with various Americans) repudiated and denounced this argument:
And if Grenville pointed out that the palatines of Chester, Durham, and the Welsh Marches had been taxed without being represented, Pitt retorted that when the point was raised, Parliament had had the choice in fairness of dropping the taxation or providing the representation, and had chosen the latter.
Our renaming frenzy of early 90s was mostly about “returning historical names”, that is, renaming back what Soviets once renamed (accompanied by rebuilding of churches). I was quite angered that they also renamed a metro station….
And generally, even USSR was still full of monuments of tsarism (less full than tsarist Russia, of course) and Yeltsin’s Russia was full of monuments of communism. Rome, accordingly, has Colosseum.
Oh, that reminds me a lot of Austria! (One wonders if Schwarzenegger somehow carried something over.) “Minor” amendments to the Austrian constitution require 2/3 of parliament, and for most of its democratic history so far (into the 1980s with small pauses) Austria was governed by a Grand Coalition that had a 2/3 majority and routinely “elevated laws to constitutional rank” so later governments couldn’t abolish them as simply. As a result, nobody knows where Austria’s constitution ends. Austria’s equivalent to an edition of the constitution as a little booklet is a little booklet titled “The most important laws of the constitution”.
As another result, some experts feel that the sheer number of “minor” amendments (“minor” isn’t defined anywhere, BTW) amounts to at least one “major” amendment, which requires a referendum that hasn’t happened; it follows that Austria has been living in an unconstitutional state of affairs for decades.
Or Germany’s again:
“(1) The Federal Republic of Germany is a democratic and social federal state.
(2) All state power comes from the people [sg.]. It is executed by the people [sg.] in elections and referenda and through special organs of legislation, executive power and jurisdiction.
(3) Legislation is bound by the constitutional order, the executive power and jurisdiction are bound by the law.
(4) Against everyone [m. sg.] who enterprises to liquidate this order, all Germans have the right to resistance if other redress is not possible.”
Being a principle laid down in Art. 20, the right to resistance is currently eternal.
Written as one word as opposed to treating Pressburger as an adjective, it’s evidently named after someone called Pressburger.
There’s a part of Linz called Neue Heimat; I’ll need to check what the street names there are like.
(Other than the Field Museum.)
My recollection from living in Chicago long ago (and confirmed by some quick googling) is that the residential buildings along the “inner” Lake Shore Drive north of the Loop (can’t speak about south) generally just give their addresses as e.g. 600 North Lake Shore Drive, with no spelled-out “inner” qualification. In the old pre-internet days of newspaper-printed real estate ads, space was always at a premium so abbreviations were ubiquitous. It took me a while before the oddity of seeing “LSD” over and over again in the real estate ads wore off.
Hmp. There’s a similar Potter development in Lawrence, WI. No evil characters. But mostly minor ones. And who would want to live on a street named Gringotts? It sounds like a word for puke.
If Russian tanks ever make it to the Rhine
Not bloody likely.
Wagner Group repeteadly retaking Patrice Lumumba street (opposed also by Mozart Group) is more realistic (or more post-modernist which is the same)
@drasvi 10/03:20.34
https://city-address.ru/region-23_tihoretsk/ulitsa-onegina/
Ulitsa Onegina in Tikhoretsk (two streets West of Ul. Pushkina). Or did you mean HP character only? You could say Onegin is not a character, but a book in this case….
PP, no, I meant any literary character, and Onegin is still a character.
Though likely they would not name it so if it were not also the title and were not repeated so many times in the poem itself: actually, “улица Онегина” was my first idea as well:)
“not bloody likely” – in this context I should have continued “we are going in a taxi”.
(“Eliza Doolittle street” would make a good name for a street where a language school is located)
Brett: “On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable, as J.W. Brewer points out, to have substantially stiffer requirements for changing a constitution than for passing ordinary legislation.”
The Bulgarian constitution has a requirement that to change the constitution itself requires a separate kind of parliament to be elected, a Grand national assembly with more members than an ordinary one, with the sole power to draft and ratify a new constitution and nothing else. Kind of recursive. This has happened several times.
David Marjanović : “There’s a part of Linz called Neue Heimat”
I know that one, it looked architecturally distinctive — I saw it from the hill with a view of all the city. It was near this street near the botanical garden that also has a weird name, but I think for the opposite reason.
Das gemeinnützige Wohnbauunternehmen Neue Heimat Oberösterreich trägt den gleichen Namen. Es wurde 1939 gegründet und hat unter anderem im Bezirk Neue Heimat eine größere Anzahl an Wohnungen errichtet, rund 2700 Verwaltungseinheiten. Der Stadtteil wurde nach dem Wohnbauträger benannt.
https://www.linzwiki.at/wiki/Bezirk_Neue_Heimat/
This would indicate an earlier (maybe even as early as 1939) and different origin (Neue Heimat is named after a company/association for building apartment or other housing blocks) to the postwar Bavarian etc. streets. In this part of Linz there is a Haiderstrasse, but I must take this to be a coincidence.
…ah.
Yeah, that’s a coincidence, the name Haider is common.
Written as one word as opposed to treating Pressburger as an adjective, it’s evidently named after someone called Pressburger.
It is two words. Sloppy typing, sorry. And surely there is no doubt about the Pressburger Reichsstraße in Hainburg.
For some reason Ödenburger Straße is in Floridsdorf, which doesn’t make geographical sense, possibly a revanchist name, but from the 1920s.
In answer to JW, maybe because most of the Kaiserliche Volkdeutsche were cut off in 1918, post 1945 Austria didn’t have the same issues as West Germany, and most of the Vertriebene preferred to move to the much richer Bundesrepublik in any case. When I was working in Bielsko-Biala I did notice that there was a Bielitzer Verein in Vienna of Germans expelled from that city in 1945. But they were dwindling even 10 years ago, I doubt it has any presence today.
Hans: Even if the people decide to abolish the choice?
I don’t think the people now can legitimately constrain the people of the future this way. The dead have no rights.
In my view, abolishing democracy is exactly that, taking away the choice of government. So if the people decide to go for an authoritarian / totalitarian system / dictatorship, the only option they leave to later generations is resistance, which means replacing the government requires a much higher price in suffering and death than exchanging it by democratic elections.
On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable, as J.W. Brewer points out, to have substantially stiffer requirements for changing a constitution than for passing ordinary legislation
Agreed.
If Russian tanks ever make it to the Rhine
Not bloody likely.
They “only” need to make it past Ukraine and Poland – the German army in its current state could probably be overrun by Luxembourg. 😉
Neue Heimat
Germany had a construction and development company with that name belonging to the trade unions that famously went bankrupt after a series of scandals in the 1980s. It got the name under the Nazis, so the name had no connection to the resettlement of refugees after WW II.
Just on the issue of who ended up in Austria rather than the BRD/DDR, I came across the following from a 21st century newspaper article while looking for something else. The time frame the paragraph is speaking to is the end of 1945 and if the various numbers don’t quite add up, that’s the fault of Austrian journalistic innumeracy. Of course, 600,000 (or whatever) is a fairly small number compared to how many Vertriebene ended up further north.
Das kleine hungernde und frierende Österreich hat zu allem Überdruss auch noch viele ungebetene „Gäste“ zu verkraften. Es ist kein Ruhmesblatt, was sich da abspielt. Manfried Rauchensteiner hat erhoben, dass sich um diese Zeit fast 600.000 Flüchtlinge innerhalb der österreichischen Grenzen befinden: 104.000 sogenannte „Reichsdeutsche“ und 225.000 „Volks- oder Sudetendeutsche“, die aus ihren angestammten Siedlungsgebieten gnadenlos vertrieben worden sind. 170.000 Donauschwaben suchen fürs Erste in Österreich Sicherheit und Ruhe; 151.000 Sudetendeutsche; 15.000 Ungarndeutsche; 20.000 Siebenbürger Sachsen bzw. Banater Schwaben. Dazu kommen an die 170.000 jüdische Flüchtlinge. Die Versorgungslage ist katastrophal.
“Volks- oder Sudetendeutsche” is of course nonsense, the latter being a subset of the former. I suspect that’s where the innumeracy comes from, i.e. some are counted double or perhaps triple, but I couldn’t say how.
The Sudetenland had been outside the borders of the Second (Hohenzollern) Reich and Weimar Republic but then got annexed by the (Third) Reich, which may have created some conceptual ambiguity. Someone had to be a citizen and/or resident of the Reich as of when, in order to count as Reichsdeutsche? Of course the Reich that annexed the Sudetenland had at the time already anschluss’d Austria …
Exactly.
@Alon, actually there was a dispute about whether translating religious terms with Guarani words is a herecy…
<Though likely they would not name it so if it were not also the title and were not repeated so many times in the poem itself
“This is the title of this story, which is also found several times in the story itself”. The author, who is not named in this copy, is David Moser.
@drasvi: that sounds really interesting (or perhaps it’s just that I have an infidel’s interest in Christian heresy). Do you have a reference for it?
Seems surprising: unlike Islam, mainstream Christianity has generally been cool with translation, at least in principle: in fact, actively invested in translation. That was certainly true of the Catholic missionaries in South America too.
Was it not so much translation as a matter of principle, but that the use of some particular Guarani words was thought to be inappropriate? That would make sense.
(The Kusaal Bible translators evidently decided to avoid win “spiritual individuality” to translate “soul”, choosing instead siig, which really – or originally, at any rate – meant “life force”, and on the face of it is much less suitable. No doubt this is because not only people, but things and places have wina, and the Creator of the universe is also Win, so the translators had already decided that win really meant “pagan god”, which is what they use it for in the Bible translation.)
And who would want to live on a street named Gringotts? It sounds like a word for puke.
Shhhh.
there was a Bielitzer Verein
The Vereine of Baltimore.
The dead have no rights.
The unborn, however, have a fair number, including the right not to be born into slavery. (Note that my expression of this sentiment does not make me anti-abortion, though I am definitely pro-life.)
Street renaming is forced to work around the powerful political force
In New York City for the last fifty years or so we have given streets (and more often parts of streets) secondary or honorary names, which do not displace the originals but do appear on street signs. In some cases, such as Sixth Avenue, these are reversions to older names that have never been changed de facto (no New Yorker says “Avenue of the Americas”). Another well-known case is Fashion Avenue for Seventh Avenue between 34th St. and 39th St. (the Garment District); for some reason this is not on even the unofficial list (there is no published official list) of honorary names, though it is on street signs. Taras Shevchenko Place in my own neighborhood was (fully) renamed from Hall Place in 1978; an attempt was made in 2010 to demap the new name, as a token of which there exists a single “Hall Place” sign. I believe all the buildings along it have alternative street addresses on a street or avenue.
>>And who would want to live on a street named Gringotts? It sounds like a word for puke.
>Shhhh.
Sorry, John. Are you trying to sell?
No, but you never know who’s listening and may take offense!
“Was it not so much translation as a matter of principle, but that the use of some particular Guarani words was thought to be inappropriate? ” – Verily so.
“That would make sense.” – Possibly verily…:)
@Alon, DE,
Renate Dürr, “Reflection on Language in Christian Mission The Significance of Communication in the Linguistic Concepts of José de Acosta ꜱᴊ and Antonio Ruiz de Montoya ꜱᴊ”, in Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World ed. Antje Flüchter and Rouven Wirbser, Leiden: Brill 2017.
(A translation of Sprachreflexion in der Mission Die Bedeutung der Kommunikation in den sprachtheoretischen Überlegungen von José de Acosta S.J. und Antonio Ruiz de Montoya S.J.
link)
sci-hub, googlebooks
I’ll post an excerpt (without references):
———————————–
Montoya had listed several translations for the lexemes “baptism” and “baptised person,” some of which referred to the act of bathing or pouring of water, others to the act of becoming a Christian.[83] Apparently, Montoya was explicitly trying to avoid an expression which was actually in use, and which is also used in Luis Bolaños’ (1549?–1629) Guaraní catechism, namely translating the act of baptism as ñemongarai, which contains a reference to the expression carai.[84] Montoya rejected this translation, since the word carai came with negative associations: initially, the Guaraní had used it for sorcerers, then for the Spaniards, which was why, according to Montoya, it should not be used in the sense of “becoming Christian.”[85] Obviously, however, Montoya’s position was not the dominant one, as is shown in Restivo’s new edition, which lists some translations derived from loan words, but also several purely Guaraní constructions for the semantic field of “baptism,” some of which incorporate the word carai.[86]
Genuinely Christian concepts posed the greatest challenge to authors of indigenous dictionaries at the time. Since the sixteenth century there had been debates whether indigenous expressions should be used for such concepts, if they should be paraphrased, or if Spanish or Latin loan words should be introduced. The underlying problem was almost impossible to solve: If Latin or Spanish loan words were used for concepts such as God, the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit or the Virgin Mary, there was a danger that they were not understood. On the other hand, if indigenous words were used – which usually originated with the old tradition and referred to pagan rites – the question arose in how far the intended Christian message actually got across; this was why such appropriations of indigenous words suffered accusations of heresy.
In the middle of the sixteenth century, the two main positions which opposed each other were a largely Franciscan and a largely Dominican one, which had their roots in the language theories favoured by the respective orders. Franciscans, in whose tradition Platonic language philosophy figured prominently, were usually in favour of loan words. Dominicans, who since Thomas Aquinas had adopted a mainly Aristotelian perspective, tended to translate or transcribe Christian concepts or dogma with indigenous words. The decisive factor in these practices was in how far word and meaning were supposed to be tied to each other.
In the Jesuit order, too, the writings of Thomas Aquinas occupied a central position. It is therefore not surprising that the Jesuits too – though not José de Acosta, as we have seen –usually preferred using indigenous translations over the introduction of Latin or Spanish loan words.[87] In support of this approach, they could also refer to the Jesuit and important Scholastic Francisco Suárez ꜱᴊ (1548–1617), who located the authority of language not in an inherent truth of words, but in their usage by God and men.[88] The meaning of words originated in the naming of things, and thus in the original communicative situation. Suaréz wrote that a human being, when choosing new words for new things, was sometimes able to hit upon perfect truth – truth which therefore could come in many different shapes.
My examination of Acosta’s mission theory has shown that the engagement with the indigenous languages and culture led missionaries to view successful communication as closely dependent on local circumstances, and to the acceptance of differences between languages and cultures. The issue of the dictionaries and Montoya’s apology written in 1651 to appease an allegation of heresy show that the extreme situation in the missions could on occasion lead missionaries to infer the connection between word and meaning from the communicative situation in question.89 In the opinion of the linguist and anthropologist Bartomeu Melià, Montoya’s apology is one of the most interesting documents of reflection on language in the ‘New World’.[90] It remained unpublished, but its fundamental theorems may still have had wider influence, since the questions they appertained to were discussed at some length in a meeting of missionaries proficient in indigenous languages called by Archbishop Juan Alonso y Ocón in 1658. The proceedings and results of this meeting in turn were summarised by the Jesuit Francisco Díaz Taño (1593–1677) and published in 1661.[91]
Four Guaraní terms which Montoya listed in his dictionary were accused of being heretical by the Franciscan bishop Bernardino de Cárdenas (1579?–1668) and through the anonymously published booklets by Agustín de Carmona (17th century) because their meaning was not unequivocal and they were therefore inadequate to convey Christian dogma.[92] This allegation was relevant on a larger scale since two other works were implied in it, namely the Guaraní catechism by Luis Bolaños of 1603 and Montoya’s bilingual Spanish and Guaraní catechism published in Madrid in 1640 because they, too, had used the incriminated expressions.[93] This shows furthermore that as late as the mid-seventeenth century, the question of how Christian terminology should be handled – whether it should be translated by using analogies, by paraphrasing or by using loan words – was far from resolved.
Generally, in his dictionaries, Montoya tried to use indigenous terms as often as possible, even in reference to genuinely Christian contents. However, examples of all three solutions can be found, sometimes combined with each other.[94] Montoya for instance made considerable use of indigenous terms of supposedly analogous meaning. One example is the translation of the lexemes of the semantic field ‘sermon’, which were translated with reference to the expression “becoming word.”[95] In Guaraní philosophy, the word was supposed to be the origin of all being, and thus had a religious meaning comparable to that in Christianity.[96] …
Another quotation of interest:
Thanks, drasvi!
It’s a perennial problem in Christian translation work (and before, right back to translating Jewish ideas into Greek.)
The translators of the Kusaal Bible didn’t go the loanword route (at least not from English or French: several key words are loans from Mooré, and/or from Toende Kusaal into Agolle Kusaal, but at least the phonotactics is less alien there.)
But they basically seem to have worked by calquing: take a more-or-less appropriate Kusaal word, and just declare that it means exactly the same as the English or French word you’re trying to translate.
Whether anybody was actually led into radical misunderstanding by this I don’t know. (But most Kusaasi to this day happily maintain their Old Time Religion and see no need to become Christian or Muslim, so I suppose you could say that the strategy wasn’t overwhelmingly successful.)
Some of the less theologically-loaded words weren’t too difficult, given any Western Oti-Volta language’s facility for coining new compound words. (Though “island” still has to be explained in the text, rather than translated. The concept is just too exotic.)
Throughout, roughly, the Middle Ages the western church was very much against translating the Bible beyond the Vulgate. (I suspect people simply weren’t consciously aware, most of the time, that the Vulgate was a translation.) But that left the ever-growing catechism, collections of famous sermons and much else.
A crude adaptation of a scheme from:
↗ Ethnic Guaraní ↗Guaraníete
Guaraní languages→ Paraguayan Guaraní ↗Spanish-based Jopara
↘ Classic Guaraní ↘Jopara
↘Guaraní-based Jopara
(just wonder what it will look like)
I suspect people simply weren’t consciously aware, most of the time, that the Vulgate was a translation.
“If Latin was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for us.”
The official Catholic position is that the Vulgate, even though a translation, is “free from any error whatsoever in matters of faith and morals”, which is more or less what Protestants (of the kind that are invested in such issues at all) mean when they describe the originals as “Infallible.” Go Jerome!
Mind you, like a fair bit of age-old Catholic doctrine (e.g. the Immaculate Conception), this only became the official position comparatively recently.
I can’t track down a reference, but I seem to remember that some medieval grammarians assumed that the Vulgate’s undoubted theological authority meant that it couldn’t contain actual _grammatical_ errors – even if it contradicted the normal secular authorities on the subject. So anything which looked at bit odd had to be explained away.
like a fair bit of age-old Catholic doctrine (e.g. the Immaculate Conception), this only became the official position comparatively recently.
Indeed.
(For some reason, all the hits I’m getting for that tidbit are Aus sites. Did it not get circulated elsewhere?)
Temporary as in only since ~C4th, although wikipedia is rather equivocal.
Married Roman Catholic priests have been smuggled in through the backdoor – Ukraine in fact: Greek-rite Catholic priests are allowed (since relatively recently, I think later than Vatican II, but definitely under John Paul II at the latest) to hold Roman-rite masses, and the Greek rite entails that priests must be married.
The tension is perhaps in part not so much that the Vulgate contains grammatical “errors” but that it is written in a different and later variety of Latin than the Cicero-era stuff that came to be treated as normative, so it follows some syntactic conventions that would three or four centuries earlier have been ill-formed under the then-existent conventions.
One of the so-called “humanist” Popes of the Renaissance presided over the vandalism of the Christian Latin tradition by having many of the Breviary hymns rewritten from their original rude-but-vigorous medieval style to conform more closely to dead-pagan “classical” notions of what was or wasn’t good Latin verse. It took until the early 20th century for the vandalism to be reversed.
Married Roman Catholic priests have been smuggled in through the backdoor
“Roman Catholic” is a hopelessly ambiguous exonym — I guess you are using to mean “Latin-Rite Catholic”, as opposed to “in-communion-with-Rome Catholic”?
David M.: Your “must” should be “may.” It’s not actually a prerequisite. That said, since the general norm is that a married man can get ordained but an ordained man can’t get married, anyone who fails to have a wife already in place before ordination is giving up the opportunity permanently, which creates a certain incentive structure.
Found one example on the Scriptural grammatical example. From Thurot, Extraits de divers manuscrits latins pour servir a l’histoire des doctrines grammaticales au moyen age:
Si on suivait exactement les grammairiens anciens dans la
terminologie et les définitions , on donnait raison à la vulgate
contre leurs préceptes , et on lui accordait quelque chose du
privilége de l’inspiration , qui aurait dû , ce semble , être réservé
au texte original .
(B 21 v°) In his omnibus Donatum 3 non sequimur, quia fortiorem in
divinis Scripturis auctoritatem tenemus. Corticem enim , silicem , stirpem et
diem communis generis esse non negamus. Radicem vero et finem et pinum
feminini generis esse Scripturarum auctoritate docemur.
( B 28 ) De scala et scopa et quadriga Donatum et eos qui semper illa
dixerunt pluralia , non sequimur, quia singularia ea ab Spiritu sancto co
gnovimus dictata.
“dictated by the Holy Spirit” is a fairly high view of Scripture…
Quite so. In addition, the twice-married (i.e. widowed and remarried) are not eligible for ordination at all. It’s also true that the rules for Eastern priests are the same rules that are applied to both Western and Eastern deacons, and that in both East and West bishops must be never-married (they are typically monks in Eastern churches).
Priestly celibacy is not in fact a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church: it’s a discipline, i.e. something which is commanded by the Church, but, unlike a doctrine, can be changed (or even abolished) by the proper authorities. This would be what Francis was getting at, I imagine.
This is a different concept from the development of doctrines, which is thought of not as changing them but as discovery or better understanding of things which were true all along (even though that may not have been previously clear.)
There is no insuperable theological obstacle, from a Catholic POV, to the Pope deciding one day that priestly celibacy is now officially out (and not just for edge cases, as at present.)
[I notice that WP has a list of “Sexually Active Popes.” A step too far?]
@John Cowan, I suppose the discipline may be otherwise in the Eastern-Rite jurisdictions subject to the Vatican, but in the actual Eastern Orthodox Church widower bishops are permissible and not historically uncommon as a practical matter. It is passing odd-to-perverse, I have occasionally thought, that for a married priest to find himself widowed suddenly opens up certain possibilities for career advancement.
It is passing odd-to-perverse, I have occasionally thought, that for a married priest to find himself widowed suddenly opens up certain possibilities for career advancement.
Although that seems to have been true for widowed women in Europe just a couple of centuries ago, who could become heads of households and businesses while they wouldn’t have been able to be in that position while their husbands were alive.
@Hans. True, and an interesting parallel. (A new career as an abbess in charge of a substantial institution with substantial property might also have been an option for a well-connected widow in a non-Protestant region.)
JWB: No, you are right, widower bishops are permitted in all the particular churches.
As for dates, priestly celibacy was imposed on the whole Latin Church by the Second Lateran Council, that is to say in 1139.
As another case, a monk was civilly dead at common law, but if he became an abbot, his legal personality revived.
…Yes, and for that it’s the endonym where I come from. How would a Catholic not be in communion with Rome?
Fascinating.
What happened if you murdered a monk? (Asking for a friend …)
You would have to bare your soul with your God; and/or their God.
How would a Catholic not be in communion with Rome?
The (male) clergy of the Old Catholic churches and the various independent Catholics are validly consecrated by Roman standards but not in communion with Rome: their churchs are in schism but not heresy. Rome denies that the Anglican Communion’s clergy are validly consecrated, even though they have apostolic succession through the Old Catholics. However, not all Anglicans consider themselves Catholic.
What happened if you murdered a monk?
That’s why I said civilly dead: the criminal as opposed to the civil law continued to protect monks. But, for example, if on the death of a property-owner his heir was a monk, the monk would be skipped as if he were dead and the property would pass to the next heir. Similarly, a monk could not be a witness, and if he were a defendant in a civil action, his abbot would answer for him.
Other traditional cases of civil death included banishment and abjuration, which was a sort of voluntary banishment sometimes permitted as an alternative to the death penalty. In the U.S., some states had civil-death statutes applying to prisoners for life as well as those on death row; only New York and Rhode Island retain it, and New York at least provides for many exceptions and limitations.
A totally unbiased history of “Roman Catholic” in English
Let me stop NewAdvent.org right there on the status of what you can find in a dictionary. And then
So which is it to be? An authority? or not satisfactory?
I always found it weird that in some mumbo-jumbo I was required to mutter in _Anglican_ churches there was “[I believe] in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.” In Sunday School (Methodist, who IIRC had the same mumbo-jumbo) it was emphasised that was lower-case “catholic”.
Apologies for intruding the Rationalist into these abstruse points, but that’s where whichever One True Church it was lost me.
We also have in dictionaries lower-case ‘catholic tastes’ = “embracing all” [wikt] “liberality or breadth of view” [Chambers 1972 dead trees] — not something I’d apply to the Church in Rome in any recent centuries.
@JC not all Anglicans consider themselves Catholic.
not Catholic or not catholic? Or do I mean not “catholic”?
@David Eddyshaw: The first way I died playing King’s Quest II was trying to murder the monk. The game chides you for attacking a “man of the cloth,” and King Graham falls down dead instead.
AntC already pointed out they other thing I was going to add, about how Episcopal and Methodist churches usually use a version of the Apostles’ creed that invokes a unitary “catholic” church
In Danish it is of course den hellige, almindelige kirke. WP.de tells me that avoiding katholische is specific to the evangelical churches, but that (in the Germanophone ones) allgemeine is mainly used in the reformed churches — and the Danish Popular Church is lutheran.
(Also where did one and apostolic come from? The Latin is sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam).
Nicene creed as modified at Council of Constantinople. The text without apostolic is the Apostle’s creed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostles%27_Creed
In German, the Protestant version is ich glaube an die heilige christliche Kirche (“I believe in the holy Christian church”), while the Catholics have heilige katholische Kirche. I remember reading an OHG translation of the credo which had the neologism allîch (would be Modern High German *allich) for “catholic”; that didn’t catch on.
Yeah, a Danish pastor can choose to use den nikænokonstantinopolitanske trosbekendelse at Mass. But the name itself is possibly a deterrent. The apostolic one is the one we were taught for confirmation, in any case. (The authorized Danish text of the Nicene Creed also has almindelig — and the filioque thing). TIL that the Danish church is an outlier in using the Apostles’ Creed as the default version. (It’s the only one that can be used for baptism, and if there is a baptism at mass the Creed is only said in that connection).
(I remember my dad trying to teach me to say konstantinopolitanerinde when I was not very old. I guess it was a traditional tongue twister. But since Konstantinopel is not current as a city name, and neither so tacking on -inde for females, it is quite pointless now. Stakit, stativ, kasket is more fun).
The Ur-text is “Εἰς μίαν, Ἁγίαν, Καθολικὴν καὶ Ἀποστολικὴν Ἐκκλησίαν.”* (Everything after the preposition is fem. acc. sg.) Danish “almindelige” is not an indefensible rendering of Καθολικὴν if for some reason the other Danish word that was transparently a loanword (via Latin) from the Greek was thought to have accumulated too much distracting historical baggage, but German “christliche” is ridiculous.
*The so-called “Apostles’ Creed” which omits certain of these adjectives is not extant in Greek (other than I suppose in scholarly sources that have occasion to translate the practices of the barbarians); it’s some abbreviated local thing that evolved in the barborous Western provinces of the Empire and was never sanctioned by a proper Oecumenical Council. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong or untrue, of course.
American Lutherans, in my experience, also say “the Holy Christian Church” in the Apostles’. Some churches say “one holy, universal and apostolic Church” in the Nicene.
I’ve never herd the Nicene Creed in a Norwegian church (but that may say more about me)
The version of the Apostles’ Creed used by the Lutheran former state church (Den norske kirke) and most other churches has “en hellig, allmenn kirke” (Bokmål)/”ei heilag, allmenn kyrkje” (Nynorsk). Norwegian Catholics use “en hellig katolsk kirke” (I don’t think there’s any Catholic parish using Nynorsk).
I’ve only heard the Nicene Creed at baptisms and Easter masses. On ordinary Sundays it’s the Apostolic one, translated in sentence fragments performed with pauses between them and in a monotone.
Ah yes, I somehow forgot… though I’m not sure about the absence of heresy. The Old Catholics ordain women, does that count?
Both. Although it’s the highest authority on Earth, it’s still not good enough.
@Trond, the bokmal wikipedia article on the Nicene Creed gives a choose-your-favorite version of the line as “én, hellig, allmenn/katolsk og apostolisk Kirke.” There’s an explanation “I Den norske kirke og andre protestantiske kirker bruker man ordet «allmenn» der gresk har Καθολικὴν og latin har catholicam. Dette er ikke noe som skjedde umiddelbart etter Reformasjonen, man brukte i lang tid «katolsk» også i den lutherske versjonen, da dette betyr «allmenn» eller «universell». Men på 1700-tallet innså Den norske kirkes ledelse at legfolk hadde vanskelig for å forstå forskjellen mellom begrepet og egennavnet «katolsk», og endret det derfor.” (It then explains that other folks may still use the “katolsk” version.)
OTOH, the Nynorsk wikipedia article just gives “ei, heilag, katolsk og apostolisk kyrkje” without any suggestion of variation in the text. It says “Den norske teksten er henta frå Norsk Salmebok,” but I don’t know if that publication (apparently a Lutheran one) in fact is katolsk-only at least in Nynorsk.
For an indication of the Nicene Creed actually being used in a Lutheran church in Norway, see this royal press release, although note that it was an ecumenical service with representatives of as many different flavors of Christian as they could find in attendance. No indication of what adjective was used in the line in question.
https://www.royalcourt.no/nyhet.html?tid=210199&sek=27262
If it’s a psalm book, chances are very good it’s Lutheran, because Lutherans sing psalms in church a lot, while Catholics use them very, very sparingly.
“og egennavnet «katolsk»”
Who and when began to refer to Catholics as Catholics?
I don’t understand the Russian translation (соборная), because собор means “gathering”. It could translate “synodal”….
@drasvi: собо́рность is a very important concept in modern(ish) Russian* Orthodox thought that no one can really agree how to translate into English, so the transliteration “sobornost” is often used instead. Some will tell you that “catholicity” is not a bad translation if, but only if, you are open to the notion that certain Orthodox understandings of “catholicity” do not map particularly well onto common Western/Anglophone understandings of ditto. (You also see “synodality” but that IMHO doesn’t have quite the right vibe in English as a matter of compositional morphology because “synod” doesn’t come with the right set of associations and implications, and by the time you learn the vibe you might as well just have said “sobornost.”)
*These days Ukrainian Orthodox may apparently spell it Соборність, but it’s the same concept and of equal importance, which of course highlights the increasing awkwardness of the lack of a good umbrella term in English for all the East-Slavic version(s) of the Orthodox tradition.
Brett : “The first way I died playing King’s Quest II was trying to murder the monk. The game chides you for attacking a “man of the cloth,” and King Graham falls down dead instead.”
So someone else here has played King’s Quest II also. 😀
In Bulgaria, the Synod is the leadership of the Patriarchate, while a Църковен Събор is something like an assembly of the bishops where they elect a new Patriarch, usually from the members of the Synod.
chances are very good it’s Lutheran, because Lutherans sing psalms in church a lot, while Catholics use them very, very sparingly.
Yeah I noticed that (the “sparingly” bit). Anglicans usually have one psalm per Sunday Morning Service, often sung only by the Choir. (Presumably the unwashed are considered too musically illiterate.) No psalm in ‘off-peak’ services, but then usually no choir.
@drasvi Who and when began to refer to Catholics as Catholics?
And when specifically did the majuscule become significant?
So the “universally accepted” is pure propaganda(?) = accepted everywhere except that weird/heretical Eastern Orthodox lot.
I tried to find early Slavic texts, found a translation of what WP calls the original Nicene Creed (325), with
“But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’— they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.”
…and without “In one holy catholic and apostolic Church; …”
The translation (of John’s nomocanon, not of the creed specifically) was traditionally attributed to saint equal-to-apostles Methodius himself in Moravia (800s), but the modern opinion is that it is Bulgaria 900s. The MS is medieval Russian and the word is кафоликна:/
JWB, I came up with an excellent translation: synagogality!
weird/heretical Eastern Orthodox lot
By no means.
The Orthodox Church doesn’t hesitate to call itself catholic, any more than the Catholic Church hesitates to call itself orthodox. Neither calls the other heretical.
Davsi : “Equal-to-apostles” : that’s a very literal way to translate it. I think I need to give a more detailed answer, and I don’t have the time now.
Edit : Also I support what John Cowan just said, unrelated to my previous comment.
@JC The Orthodox Church doesn’t hesitate to call itself catholic, any more than the Catholic Church hesitates to call itself orthodox. Neither calls the other heretical.
Thanks, but now I’m more confused.
Do the E. Orth. lot allow that the big-C Catholics-of-Rome lot are orthodox, or Orthodox? Do the E.O. allow that the C-of-R are catholic, or Catholic?
Do the C-of-R lot allow that the E.O.s are catholic, or Catholic? Do the C-of-Rs allow that the E.O. are orthodox, or Orthodox?
These lines of enquiry are a form of why-can’t-they-all-be-friends and play-together-nicely. Are both parties using both adjectives (small-c/o) as propaganda against the other?
Is it the Protestants/non-Conformists they’re trying to alienate?
Who and when began to refer to Catholics as Catholics? AntC ‘s source is for English only; Catholic Encyclopedia 1908 sv “Catholic” has some early info….
… but doesn’t address the question of when the parties to the 1054 schism settled on “Catholic” and “Orthodox”. ibid. sv “Orthodox Church” is hardly less informative:
“Mainstream”, then.
More like “Western European Roman”. The Donatists were mostly in North Africa west of Egypt. Basically the Carthaginian Church (it’s not one of the original five Patriarchates). The Bulgarian one was the first that was officially added to them.
Not with the same status, of course. Only the Roman and Constaninople Patriarchares are still in (mostly) full communion at present; the Constantinople Patriarchate are first among equals in Orthodoxy, while the Bishop of Rome claims supremacy.
Edit: not religious at all, far from it, just describing their claims to the best of my knowledge.
More like “Western European Roman”. The Donatists were mostly in North Africa west of Egypt. Basically the Carthaginian Church
No West. The ancient church in North Africa (except for Egypt) was of the Latin Church. They used Latin in the liturgy (after the church shifted from Greek) and the area was at least partly Romanized, enough for there to have been a North African Romance, I believe, for a time.
Donatists had a strong presence there but “small-o orthodox” Catholics were present as well. St Augustine of Hippo and St Cyprian of Carthage wrote in Latin and are considered Latin Fathers of the Church. Saints Felicity and Perpetua are North African and are mentioned in the Eucharistic Prayer I (aka the Roman Canon) during the most solemn part of the mass. There have been three Popes who were North African or of North African descent: St Victor, St Gelasius, and St Miltiades.
Yes? I’m not sure what it is that I said that you’re disagreeing with. Can you be more specific?
You obviously know that by that point that part of North Africa was Romanised. You know that North African Romance is a thing. I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
Yes? I’m not sure what it is that I said that you’re disagreeing with. Can you be more specific?
Perhaps I misunderstood but I thought that that by “ More like “Western European Roman….” you were implying that the word Catholic was specific to Western Europe and not to North Africa save Egypt. I was pointing out that the Church in North Africa was just as Catholic ( except for those pesky Donatists ) and considered part of the Western Church, no qualifications needed.
I phrased it as “Western European Roman” to _include_ Donatism. I should have dropped “European”, I guess. I was making it up as I went, sorry. I’m under a lot of stress, don’t get a lot of sleep (almost any, actually).
@AntC:
The capital-C Catholic Church is bound to the Nicene notion that the Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic.
My ecclesiological pay grade is extremely low, but I presume that when push comes to shove the Catholic Church sticks to the view that full belonging to the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church is defined by full communion with the Church of Rome, which the Eastern Catholic Churches have but even the Eastern Orthodox Church (let alone any Protestant church) lacks.
In practice, I reckon the Catholic Church prefers not to dwell too much on this point. It rather treats catholicity as a matter of degree. Only particular churches in full communion with Rome are “fully catholic,” but the Eastern Orthodox Church is in a communion “so profound that it lacks little to attain … fullness.” I suppose it follows that it’s almost fully catholic.
I presume it’s the same with orthodoxy. Surely the Catholic view of full orthodoxy has to be subscribing to Catholic dogma in its entirety. Yet, doctrinal differences with the Eastern Orthodox Church are so minor it surely counts as almost fully orthodox.
It would be impolitic for the Catholic Church to put out explicit statements detailing where it places every other Christian church on its catholicity/orthodoxy ladder, but its ecumenical (the official term for “why-can’t-we-all-be-friends-and-play-together-nicely”) efforts are remarkably aligned with common sense. After Eastern Orthodoxy it seems to perceive proximity to Oriental Orthodoxy and Anglicanism; less so to Lutheranism; least so to other forms of Protestantism.
@drasvi: You reminded me that Ecclesia and Synagoga were occasionally-occurring female figures, who were anthropomorphic representations of Christianity and Judaism, particularly popular during the later Middle Ages.
@Giacomo Ponzetto: At the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964, the disunity of the world’s churches was decried, but the full validity of the Orthodox liturgy and the Catholic character of the Orthodox churches was affirmed:
The next year, Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I of Constantinople declared jointly that the schism of 1054 had been a mistake—with the understanding that such a statement was obvious not, on its own, going to resolve all the longstanding disagreements between the branches.
Thanks Giacomo, Brett.
Far from being an obstacle to the Church’s unity, a certain diversity of customs and observances only adds to her splendor, …
Terrific(?) … poppycock.
In the study of revelation East and West have followed different methods, and have developed differently their understanding and confession of God’s truth.
So … (?) God Himself has no input to the “understanding and confession” of the alleged “truth”?
@Brett longstanding disagreements between the branches.
Yeah. It’s been plenty long enough since 1964 even.
@GP doctrinal differences with the Eastern Orthodox Church are so minor it surely counts as almost fully orthodox.
Must be tricky to put across all that peace & goodwill stuff when “minor” differences are still outstanding so long.
Are Catholics still forbidden to set foot/hear service in other denominational churches? Or in Orthodox churches? I’ve a friend whose father (Catholic) refused to attend her marriage, which was in a fairly broad Methodist church — chiefly to mollify the groom’s parents (one of whom strong Anglican). A non-denominational service would have been even worse, it seems — for reasons I just don’t get. Long after they married, it came to light the groom had been adopted from a Jewish girl/refugee family from the camps in Germany.
(Of course both bride and groom were militantly agnostic — except when their parents were in earshot.)
So my “why-can’t-we-all-be-friends-and-play-together-nicely” line of q’s is motivated by actual personal harm these schisms are still causing. (The Methodists were very welcoming, didn’t even cause offence to this out-and-out atheist/happy for me to ‘make a witness’/didn’t insist I take communion.)
“Are Catholics still forbidden to set foot/hear service in other denominational churches? Or in Orthodox churches?”
As a baptized Orthodox but an actual ignostic, I’ve certainly had no trouble attending Catholic events in cathedrals in Vienna, Cologne and Linz. For the music. Seriously, it’s great. Especially in Cologne. Those organs are amazing. I behaved as an Orthodox an no one seemed to mind. (As in crossing myself the wrong way around while entering).
@AntC: The next sentence after the first one I posted above is:
So Catholics should be permitted to participate in Orthodox services.
* Because they put this original Latin in parentheses, not square brackets. (The old Associated Press news wire did the same thing quite consistently, using parentheses in place of square brackets. I suspected this may have been a holdover from when they were trying to ensure compatibility with terminals with even the most minimal—less that 7-bit ASCII—character sets. It was a frequent source of annoyance for me when associate news editors failed to correct the parentheses to brackets in The Tech‘s World and Nation stories.)
Without being a theologian, I think it was clear to me early on that the proper name for the church headquartered at the Vatican was den romersk-katolske kirke. Even though the shorter form katolsk is used in many contexts (in opposition to protestantisk).
And somewhere I picked up the jocular jeg er græsk-katolsk as meaning ‘I really don’t have a preference’.
Were they ever? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. The Catholic Church has been around for a long time in a lot of places. Currently, however, there’s clearly no such prohibition.
On the contrary, the Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism explains the following.
The Catholic Church obviously (obviously from its own point of view) draws the line at sacraments. Ordinarily, Catholics may licitly receive sacraments only from Catholic ministers and Catholic ministers may licitly administer sacraments only to the Catholic faithful.
Exceptions can be made in theory, but for the Catholic faithful I don’t think they go far in practice. They may be exceptionally allowed to receive the Eucharist from an Orthodox minister, but I gather the latter isn’t allowed to administer the Eucharist to Catholics anyway. Conversely, most Protestant churches offer the Eucharist to any Christian, but Catholics may not receive it because the Catholic Church does not consider it a valid sacrament.
Although marriage is also a sacrament according to the Catholic Church (but not according to most Protestants), if a Catholic marries a non-Catholic she may obtain dispensation from the requirement to have a Catholic marriage ceremony.
In AntC’s friend’s case, it’s possible she didn’t ask for dispensation or that her bishop denied it, but it’s also possible (and perhaps more likely) that her father was being ornery.
Were they [Catholics] ever [forbidden to set foot/hear service in other churches]?
In Britain (and especially Ireland) oh yes. Even though my school (in the state system) was only very vaguely CofE, Catholic boys were forbidden from attending morning assembly. (Which had only the Lord’s Prayer as any sort of religious flummery. — 1970’s)
I lived in Yorkshire, which has many fine medieval churches and of course York Minster/all originally Catholic foundations. My then-wife (Catholic, Irish mother) was nervous about going into them even as a tourist/with no service going on.
AntC’s friend … possible she didn’t ask for dispensation or that her bishop denied it,
Well, that would have been tricky: she wasn’t a regular church-goer/didn’t have anybody to ask/certainly no bishop. (‘militantly agnostic’ is how I put it.)
but it’s also possible (and perhaps more likely) that her father was being ornery.
Yeah. Northern Ireland Catholic. Had recently been back to visit, probably got the priest in his ear. He was looking pretty hang-dog by the end of the reception — which he did attend.
It is imprudent to rely on Vatican-affiliated sources for information on what the Eastern Orthodox attitude toward the Vatican-affiliated heterodox might be, both because (a) there is not necessarily any completely coherent/unified Orthodox position on the matter or a practical institutional method for attaining one; and (b) due to their psychological and/or political motives the Vatican sources are likely to cherry-pick the most positive-sounding Orthodox statements and/or spokespersons. And of course sometimes such positive-sounding statements are in part motivated by politeness (that sounds better than “political considerations,” doesn’t it?) and should not be treated as checks that can be cashed for their apparent face value.
In general, issues re whether one should even be physically present in a building belonging to, or during a service conducted by, The Wrong Sort of Christian tend to be determined by local custom and practice under the influence of particular historical and political/social circumstances. However Irish Catholics typically felt about the notion of setting foot in a Protestant church as of such-and-such past decade would not necessarily generalize to Lithuanian Catholics as of the same timeframe and vice versa. It was not necessarily a centralized-command-and-control thing dictated by the Vatican, although you could not necessarily rely on your local parish priest to admit that this was actually just a local thing rather than a Vatican-mandated universal thing, and if he had not traveled much he might not be aware of that himself. And indeed at a certain historical point Irish-ancestry Catholics across the water in Great Britain proper might feel more strongly about such things, as a self-conscious minority worried about the risk their kids would be assimilated into the local majority, than those in the Republic, who could afford to appear more broad-minded because acting from a position of strength.
There’s a part (sometimes omitted in modern practice, sometimes not) about half-way through the Divine Liturgy where the catechumens (and a fortiorari anyone present who is not only not a full member of the Orthodox Church but is not actively in the process of becoming one) are formally ordered to depart, because (in theory) the rest of the service is only for the “insiders.” In practice no one leaves. I’m not not sure how many centuries it’s been since it was in practice expected that some folks would, in fact, leave at that point, but it could well be more than a dozen. (Obviously in many little parish churches in overwhelmingly Orthodox territory the issue might not arise frequently because there would be no non-insiders present on a typical Sunday.) If that sort of obviously illogical mismatch between rhetoric and practice really bugs you, Orthodoxy is probably not the version of Christianity most compatible with your personality/mindset. (Or at least your present personality/mindset, which in principle could be transformed with the assistance of the Holy Spirit etc.)
@AntC
https://www.catholic.com/qa/what-are-the-requirements-for-marrying-a-non-catholic-christian
—
“To obtain permission to marry a non-Catholic baptized Christian, the following conditions must be fulfilled: (1) You declare that you are prepared to remove dangers of defecting from the faith; (2) you make a sincere promise to do all in your power so that all offspring are baptized and brought up in the Catholic Church; (3) the other party is to be informed at an appropriate time about the promises which you are to make, in such a way that it is certain that he or she is truly aware of the promise and your obligation; and (4) both parties are to be instructed about the purposes and essential properties of marriage which neither of the contracting parties is to exclude.”
—
It would be a reasonable suspicion that the bride, groom or groom’s family would be unhappy with (2). Also if the bride is already on a path of “defecting”, she may not really like (1).
The Catholic Church is a highly bureaucratic institution, so everyone has someone to ask, just like everyone has some local official to ask for a marriage license regardless of their involvement in local politics and municipal governance.
Even if you are not merely militantly agnostic but even aggressively anticlerical, having one devout parent is surely enough for you to know you’re supposed to ask the parish to ask the diocese.
Figuring out which parish is supposed to be yours, although you may not have visited in years or ever, is usually (in places I’ve lived) quick and easy.
Obviously you need not want to ask — I certainly have friends baptized in the Catholic Church who got married at City Hall, which I doubt one may get a dispensation for. Devout parents may be displeased, but that’s a private family affair.
@PlasticPaddy: One of the (several) things that I did not care for in the temporary rabbi we had from 2015 to 2016 was that she said she would not marry people who did not pronounce the commitment (usually associated with Catholics) to raise any children then had according to our faith.
I don’t think my mother ever told me what she agreed to do in that respect when she married my Jewish father. She was raised a devout Catholic, and to they were married by a priest, a friend of my grandparents, in a nonsectarian chapel down the street from their house. (My Jewish great grandfather, to whom my dad was very close, apparently asked to have the chapel’s large cross taken down during the ceremony.) However, my mother considered herself excommunicated. She had grown up, attending Catholic schools and a Catholic college, being told (as she quoted it), “You can’t be a cafeteria Catholic.” Since she was not going to follow Catholic teachings on birth control, she figured she could simply not be a part of the Catholic communion. I remember Mom meeting and having a poignant conversation with a Catholic feminist member of Voice of the Faithful in the Harvard Book Store (not the same as the Coop), who told her, about thirty years after she had auto-excommunicated that everyone practicing was really a cafeteria Catholic.
@PlasticPaddy, Brett:
The Church-wide requirement for marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics is not a promise that children are going to be brought up Catholic, but only that the Catholic parent will do their best to that effect. The non-Catholic spouse isn’t required to promise anything, and on the contrary the Catholic Church “recognize[s] that the non-Catholic partner may feel a like obligation because of his/her own Christian commitment.” So it should be understood the end result can go either way.
However, the matter is largely in the hands of each bishop or Conference of Bishops. Hence, I imagine the local interpretation of “best effort” may get rather strict when the local bishops feel like Brett’s erstwhile rabbi.
I’ve only encountered them in the Litany at Easter, but wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in the full Tridentine mass.
There are numerous individual statements on which things done by which churches are how valid under which circumstances. (For example, suppose it’s Sunday, you’re traveling, and you’re desperate to attend Mass: which churches have masses that it’s better to attend than not to attend any.) What there isn’t is a convenient list, which would indeed be impolitic.
It is a mystery.™
That’s because of the transubstantiation/consubstantiation/just-a-symbol thing.
Yeah, it’s really not uncommon for people to be “more Catholic than the Pope” in such respects, either because identity issues are involved of which religion is just one facet (as one may expect in Northern Ireland) or because Vatican II has passed them by.
…if they ever find out.
In Catholicism baptism nor marriage requires the supervision of a priest.
Attending Protestant services was declared by the Irish Catholic hierarchy to be a reserved sin until Vatican II. Austin Clarke wrote “Burial of an Irish President” about the 1949 funeral of Douglas Hyde, first president of Ireland. Noel Browne was the only Catholic government minister to attend but I don’t know that he was publicly criticised for this dissidence. In 1997, there was controversy when Catholic President McAleese took communion in Dublin’s other Anglican cathedral, but her attendance at the service was not questioned at all.
I still feel a bit odd about going into a Catholic church – not really for religious reasons (at least, not because I think the modern Church of Scotland would mind), but out of a ‘never the twain shall meet’ sense that it’s Not My Place, and that I might be making things unpleasant for the people whose place it is.
Less in overwhelmingly Catholic countries – I’ve been to, although not part of, a mass at the monastery at Montserrat – but I’m still never very confident about how exactly to behave.
I’m still never very confident about how exactly to behave
Just jump up and shout “Amen” or “Praise Jesus” from time to time. They love that stuff. Also, dancing in the aisles is good, especially if you haul someone out of a neighboring pew.
@mollymooly:
it’s true that the Catholic Church holds that anyone can efficiently perform the sacrament of baptism, but that’s only as a last resort. That’s quite different from the (common, though not universal) Protestant take that any of the faithful may baptise.
@Brett, GP, mollymooly
I did not mean to imply anything about how the issue of the “promise” was handled and how people felt about it. As you say, this depends on the marriage partners, the families and (their relationship with) their local clergy, and on the approach of the higher ups, e.g., Bishop, Archbishop and Pope. I would only say that wording like “declare” and “solemn promise” seems to me to raise the emotional stakes.
David Marjanović says:
Saints Felicity and Perpetua are North African and are mentioned in the Eucharistic Prayer I (aka the Roman Canon) during the most solemn part of the mass.
I’ve only encountered them in the Litany at Easter, but wouldn’t be surprised if they’re in the full Tridentine mass.
They are in the modern rite of the mass as well (aka the Ordinary Form, also called the Novus Ordo by some, although this last names carries some baggage.) The current form of the mass has around 6 or more Eucharistic Prayers (I can’t remember off the top of my head right now) with a few, I believe, for use on special occasions. The first 4 are, in my experience the ones in most common use. The first one is indeed basically the Eucharistic Prayer from the Tridentine Mass. Its’s also known as the Roman Canon and was the only Eucharistic Prayer used in that form of the mass. It’s the one that names a long list of saints, both male and female, and is the one where Saints Felicity and Perpetua are mentioned.
The Eucharistic Prayer is the most solemn and climactic part of the mass where the consecration of the bread and wine occurs. It’s up to the priest celebrating to decide which to use.
In my experience most priests tend to use prayers 2-4 as they are shorter and/or a bit less elaborate than Prayer I but where I’ve lived Prayer I is still used at least occasionally, especially on importan feast days since its such an ancient and venerable prayer. This sort of thing can vary between parishes, dioceses and countries though so someone living somewhere else may not have the same experience, especially if one only attends church occasionally.
Jen in Edinburgh : “I still feel a bit odd about going into a Catholic church – not really for religious reasons (at least, not because I think the modern Church of Scotland would mind), but out of a ‘never the twain shall meet’ sense that it’s Not My Place, and that I might be making things unpleasant for the people whose place it is.”
My feelings also. Despite being baptized Orthodox, I consider myself ignostic, but I still feel compelled to act Orthodox in a Catholic church. A childhood friend of mine (Orthodox, female) married a Catholic (male, both Bulgarian) in an Orthodox church and no-one saw issue with it. Still, as I said, I feel compelled to act Orthodox when in Catholic churches and it makes me feel uncomfortable, as if I’m imposing. “it’s Not My Place” exactly. I’m afraid I would offend them by my presence _or_ by me following Orthodox orthopractice, but not to do it would also feel unauthentic and disrespectful. Completely irrational, but that’s psychology for you.
We briefly discussed Felicity and Perpetua a couple of years ago (at which time JWB complained about Felicitas erasure and I mentioned editing The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity for OUP).
Something loosely akin to the situation with Pres. Hyde’s funeral in Dublin occurred on a neighboring island in somewhat more recent times. In the late 1980’s, the Lord Chancellor (of, technically, the entire U.K., I think) was a distinguished Scottish lawyer, the Lord Mackay of Clashfern, who was a member of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, a small sect (alias the “Wee Frees”) that is sufficiently rigorous in its old-fashioned mode of Calvinism as to forbid its members from being present at celebrations of the Popish Mass. Lord Mackay attended two such Masses, both in the context of funerals for judicial colleagues, which got him into ecclesiastical disciplinary trouble. His defense that he had attended these events “purely with the purpose of paying my respects to my dead colleagues” and not to signal his support or endorsement of any Popish doctrinal claim was not met with favor, and he eventually shifted his churchgoing to a slightly less rigorous (although still rigorous compared to the lax modern Church of Scotland etc.) sect after refusing to promise not to do the same thing again in the future.
I think if both spouses agree that they should do their best to raise their children as good [….]s and […]s at once, and also agree that the best possible way is trying not to be too oppressive with your children in such matters, it counts as doing all in their power.
@JWB:
1. Nynorsk salmebok was an early 20th century project to provide congregations with psalms in the national language. I didn’t know that it also contained Nynorsk translations of the creeds, but it makes sense. The first complete Bible translation into Landsmaal was published in 1921, the next in 1938.
A great deal of the psalms in Nynorsk salmebok were written/translated by only three people. Two of those, Bernt Støylen and Anders Hovden were themselves members of the committee. Of the two, Støylen was the committee leader, but Hovden’s psalms are probably better known today. The third (or rather the first) was Elias Blix, a professor of Hebrew at the University and (for a period in the 1880’s) Church Minister in a Liberal government. He regularly published psalms anonymously in Landsmaal periodicals, and from 1869 to 1892 in Landsmaal supplements to the official psalm book. The 1892 version of the supplement was officially authorized for use in the Church. Some of Blix’ psalms gained wide popularity. One of them, Gud signe vårt dyre fedreland, is considered Norway’s “national hymn” and widely sung on May 17 and other national occasions. It was reportedly sung “spontaneously” by congregations in 1905 after hearing the result of the referendum on independence from Sweden. Another, No livnar det i lundar, is a popular spring song, also used for National Day, and celebrating life, for weddings, confirmations and funeral.
2. Catholics, Nynorsk and psalms. Norwegian Catholics do sing psalms, and there’s even a Catholic psalm book Lov Herren – katolsk salmebok, published in 2000, but with a history of Katolsk salmebok predecessors going back to tje mid-19th century. Looking it up, there are a decent number of Nynorsk titles. Some are Lutheran psalms, mostly by Blix, but others are translations of Latin hymns from all eras, many by Ragnhild Foss for Latinske salmer og sekvenser (1938) with melodies that I believe was made especially for Lov Herren by the composer Wolfgang Plagge, a Norwegian Catholic. Å, brød på pilgrimsferdi is an example in a conservative form of Nynorsk. This anonymous translation was published in the 1964 edition of Katolsk salmebok, but the melody is by Plagge.
As your special correspondent I was able to join today in when my Catholic wife and mother in law had lunch after Mass with the cantor, half the choir and the parish priest of Trondheim’s Catholic Cathedral, and even the visiting chief organist of Oslo’s Catholic Cathedral. Before I even raised the subject of psalms, the cantor said he wanted to revise the psalm book to better reflect actual usage in church, and the organist agreed. After I raised the subject of Nynorsk, the priest told that at least ordo and maybe the rest of the liturgy has been translated to Nynorsk, and has been used for special celebrations, but he didn’t know of any congregations that have used it regularly.
3. Catholic marriage. I’m married to a Catholic by a Catholic priest (and friend of my wife’s family) according to Catholic rites in Trondheim’s Catholic Cathedral. My then wife-to-be was asked if she was going to raise our prospective children as Catholics. She confirmed that. I was then asked how I saw my role in this. “Opposition?”, I said. “Or support”, said the priest. “Or that. Those are not mutually exclusive”, said I. No more questions asked. At the time I was still a registered member of the Church of Norway, as Norwegians used to be from birth until actively choosing otherwise. I’m not anymore, nor of any other religious community, but I don’t think that would have mattered one way or the other.
4. Catholic eucharist: On the occasions that I take part in Catholic Mass, I generally try to follow the rites to avoid disturbing those around me without feigning Catholicism. That means joining in singing, standing up with the congregation but not kneeling (if possible), and obviously not taking the eucharist. At the funeral of my father-in-law I stood in line and took the benediction because my mother-in-law asked me to.
5. Lutheran services: When I take part in a Lutheran service — also mostly for family occasions — it’s much the same. I stand with the congregation and join in the psalms. But that’s easy. I like singing psalms.
Also: Today’s High Mass in Trondheim’s Lutheran Cathedral was partly conducted in South Sami. If I’d known before being told by the Catholics at lunch, I might have joined in instead of going to the Medieval museum.
after refusing to promise not to do the same thing again in the future.
‘The dispute precipitated a schism’, says wikipedia. Of course it did.
I posted a long comment that I hope is waiting to be released.
‘The dispute precipitated a schism’, says wikipedia. Of course it did.
I once saw a helpful diagram of all the schisms (and remergers) in the history of the Church of Scotland. It looked a bit like the London Underground map.
On the other hand, I recall a Free Presbyterian (I think it was, and if it wasn’t, it should have been) once saying “schism is a sign of church vitality.”
I think there’s something* in that: it’s easy to be all eirenic and ecumenical if your don’t believe that the issues you disagree about are of any particular importance anyway. (Much the same take, of course, as that of all those agnostics and atheists who helpfully inform us about how foolish we are to be divided, given that our beliefs are all delusional anyway.)
* Something. Not everything …
Sure: schisms show that some people are actually thinking about the issues and actually care about them.
…if the schisms are theological in nature, at least. I’m not sure if this can also be said of purely ritual schisms, e.g. the Old Believers vs. Russian Orthodoxy.
(Much the same take, of course, as that of all those agnostics and atheists who helpfully inform us about how foolish we are to be divided, given that our beliefs are all delusional anyway.)
@DE, not the same. Ecumenism is the opposite of “we vs. them”. Which range form simple arrogance (some spiritual sort of it) to simply killing each other. Even when you aren’t, this “we vs. them” is still here and for some people it is what religion is all about. What’s the use of your truer-than-your-neighbour’s doctrine if you are like this?
There was a large community of Soviet intelligentsia who turned to religion in Soviet times, among them many sympathise to ecumenical ideas. I don’t mean that many of them do anything “ecumenical”, just instinctively sympathise. Because they need God, not this. They were quite influential, now are less so. When the war began, I was reading FB and came across the site of one of parishes associated with this phenomenon – it seems they (the parishioners) are not very supportive of our special military operation.
I posted a long comment that I hope is waiting to be released.
Thanks for the heads-up; I have found and released it.
@drasvi:
I don’t think we really disagree. Myself, I’m not by any means hostile to ecumenism: my feeling is that what unites orthodox Christians is incalculably more important than what divides them. It’s just that it does not follow from this that what divides them is unimportant.
On the schism-as-sign-of-vitality theme: it does seem often to be the case that “union” churches, formed by the kissing-and-making-up of erstwhile doctrinal antagonists, tend to the tepid in their subsequent careers. (If they have any.) It would be invidious (but easy) to cite specific examples.
@DE: was it this one? that’s as bad as u.s. trotskyists!
and now i wonder where the genesee country scots on the goyish side of my family tree fit in – though since i think they left dumfriesshire for new jersey before the 2nd Secession there were only a limited number of options available. they did stay rock hard presbyterians long enough for my great-grandmother to have to sneak into the town’s carnegie library to read novels – before (perhaps predictably) running off to greenwich village.
While attending a Methodist Ash Wednesday service, the woman I was with helpfully informed me that I should feel no obligation to accept the imposition* of ashes alongside most of the congregation. I was pleased that they made it clear that I should feel free not to participate; but there was, in any case, zero chance of me doing so, whatever anyone might have said.
* I assume the choice of the word imposition is related to the ceremony being about acceptance of mortality: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
I have to go to my grandmother’s funeral in a few hours. Why does it have to be on the next day after death? and with an open casket? It’s an absurd custom, and absurdly emotionally hard. I’ve had to bury multiple relatives and friends that way already. I’m currently emotionally breaking down. It’s absurdly traumatic having to interact with people while grieving.
that’s as bad as u.s. trotskyists!
Whoa! That’s a great ‘tube map’.
At least with Trotskyists, the Prophet is not only Unarmed [Deutscher] but also conveniently dead. Rational people can reasonably agree on the overarching objectives, but reasonably disagree on the facts-on-the-ground in each country/polity, and how to achieve the overarching etc in each context.
That can’t be said of the Eternal and Almighty with whom all these schismatics are in regular communion, claimedly. I guess they’ve made progress since the Religious Wars in that they’re not actually killing each other over differing beliefs in the _same God_.
@DM schisms show that some people are actually thinking about the issues and actually care about them.
So caring about ‘issues’ overrides caring about people? (People who I, looking from outside, would describe as fellow-believers.) I remember a homily from a Methodist minister running up to Summer holidays: to make time from lying on the beach for church on Sundays — any kind of church/communion if you couldn’t find a Methodist one. Would a Catholic or Anglican be as catholic? Were Catholic or Anglican churches in holiday places welcoming to other denominations? IIRC in Italy, the padre broke out from Italian to welcome holidaymakers in English.
@DE … atheists who helpfully inform us how foolish we are to be divided, given that our beliefs are all delusional anyway.
No, you’ve got the causality all backwards. It’s not because your beliefs are taken to be delusional ab initio. (This seems to be another caricature of atheists.) It’s because they’re supposed to be beliefs in the same God with whom you are supposed to be in regular communion. Why is this God such a terrible communicator? What’s the “communion” or “Communion” word doing when there doesn’t seem to be any communing?
Since beliefs seem to be what _divide_ followers of the God Of Abraham ex consequenti those beliefs must be delusional/not rooted in any Almighty/merely humans clothing their all-too-human prejudices/animosities in gobbledygook.
@AntC
You could probably model these splitting and recombining histories by some sort of geologic process; in this case issues, personalities or even God would be necessary for the detail but not for the global aspects. As to why these groups do not put aside differences and merge into one super-group, it might be easier to postulate that at the current stage of social evolution, the forces pulling groups of a certain size apart are stronger than those pushing smaller groups together….
I presume it’s the same with orthodoxy. Surely the Catholic view of full orthodoxy has to be subscribing to Catholic dogma in its entirety. Yet, doctrinal differences with the Eastern Orthodox Church are so minor it surely counts as almost fully orthodox.
In line with the Eastern apophatic theology (the via negativa), the Eastern Orthodox churches abstain from deciding formally whether the Roman dogmas are or are not things that the Orthodox may believe. A good many of the things the Church of Rome maintains dogmatically, like the Immaculate Conception, look from the Orthodox viewpoint like pointless answers to non-existent problems.
Ordinarily, Catholics may licitly receive sacraments only from Catholic ministers and Catholic ministers may licitly administer sacraments only to the Catholic faithful.
Liceity is a matter of Catholic rules, which obviously apply only to Catholics. What is clear is that such cross-confessional sacraments are valid to Catholics. On the Orthodox side, the majority of priests and theologians think that Catholic sacraments are valid, a fairly small minority thinks they are not (rather more of the laity take this position), and a larger minority is simply indifferent to the question.
By the same token, though there is no regular intercommunion or concelebration between the Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Church of the East as yet, there are a number of particular agreements between various Eastern non-Catholic churches and their Eastern Catholic counterparts. For example, if it is “morally or materially impossible” for a Syrian Orthodox communicant to receive the sacraments of penance, communion, or unction from a priest of their own denomination, a Syrian Catholic priest may provide them, and vice versa.
The Catholic Church is a highly bureaucratic institution, so everyone has someone to ask, just like everyone has some local official to ask for a marriage license regardless of their involvement in local politics and municipal governance.
It is also true that there is no rule which is binding et semper et ubique et ab omnibus: there is always a dispensing authority, whether priest, bishop, or Pope.
just like everyone has some local official to ask for a marriage license regardless of their involvement in local politics and municipal governance.
Well, in countries where civil marriage exists at all. In Israel it does not.
Also, dancing in the aisles is good, especially if you haul someone out of a neighboring pew.
If anyone objects to your doing so sky-clad, simply mention King David.
I assume the choice of the word imposition is related to the ceremony being about acceptance of mortality
No, it’s just from the literal Latin sense of imponere ‘place upon’: the ashes being placed on your forehead.
I’m currently emotionally breaking down. It’s absurdly traumatic having to interact with people while grieving.
Yes, indeed, especially against your will. I’ve been able to be very selective about who I interact with, for which I am very grateful.
No, you’ve got the causality all backwards. It’s not because your beliefs are taken to be delusional ab initio. (This seems to be another caricature of atheists.) It’s because they’re supposed to be beliefs in the same God with whom you are supposed to be in regular communion. Why is this God such a terrible communicator? What’s the “communion” or “Communion” word doing when there doesn’t seem to be any communing?
Since beliefs seem to be what _divide_ followers of the God Of Abraham ex consequenti those beliefs must be delusional/not rooted in any Almighty/merely humans clothing their all-too-human prejudices/animosities in gobbledygook.
As usual, you are taking your own personal reactions as representative of the entire community to which you attribute your beliefs, whether all of humanity or (as in this case) all atheists, when in fact you represent no one but yourself and would do well to learn a little humility. There are all manner of atheists, but you seem to know of none but yourself.
In my very limited experience, which is restricted to places at least as Catholic as Boston (which is rather noticeably plurality-Catholic), Catholic churches welcome whoever wishes to attend Mass.
In my ignorance, I have a hard time thinking of any reason why they wouldn’t. I can easily see why the Catholic Church would think that attending one if its Masses may be good for you although you aren’t Catholic. Why would it be bad for you or any of the assembled Catholic?
It’s trickier the other way round. Catholics are supposed to attend Mass every Sunday. A non-Catholic Eastern Eucharistic celebration will do if a Catholic one cannot be found (as John Cowan wrote). A Protestant service won’t do.
Is it more commendable for a Catholic to attend a Protestant service or none at all? The answer will depend on who you ask, and I’ve never asked any priest. However, it could obviously be negative, the concern being that attending a Protestant service might deceive the Catholic faithful into thinking that substitutes for attending a Catholic Mass.
To return to our titular theme of language rather than ecumenism: it’s strange to see an Italian priest referred to as “the padre” because that strikes me as impossible in Italian (though of course I could be underestimating the dialectal variety of Italian). Il prete, il sacerdote, il celebrante, il reverendo, il parroco, but not il padre. That’s only a vocative, and some would argue an anglicism at that. Traditionally, the vocative would be Reverendo.
Yes, it’s an anglicism — English is full of them. “Padre” has been used to mean ‘priest’ since at least 1584 (R. Fitch Let. 25 Jan. in R. Hakluyt Princ. Navigations i. 212 We found there two Padres, the one an Englishman, the other a Flemming).
The NP “the padre” as used in an English sentence would seem to be a perfectly cromulent English NP, although maybe a little marked for register/dialect. Why even call it an anglicism? Anglicisms are unremarkable in English.
BTW, anyone who likes that diagram of Scottish sectarian schisms and reunions will want to check out the more complex U.S.-Presbyterian analogue included (in two different versions, which I have not attempted to compare) in this wiki-article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Presbyterian_and_Reformed_denominations_in_North_America
Note that this is simpler than it could have been because: (a) it does not attempt to include the various Calvinist (or post-Calvinist) groups whose predecessors did not self-identify as “Presbyterian” as of 250 years ago, such as New England Puritan Congregationalists, Dutch (and German) Reformed groups, etc etc.; and (b) it does not track groups that historically evolved out of Presbyterianism but self-consciously cast off that label and some of the accompanying doctrinal baggage, such as the Disciples of Christ and other so-called Stone-Campbell (probably an exonym) denominations.
“Arrivederci, Reverendo” ~1.10
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mwA3u941trA
but
“Padre, dissi…” ~32.10
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GD4r9qNmNkM
I think I said on another thread that the “padre” in Late Latin seems to have been reserved for certain saints or people who “deserved” the appellation. Maybe a parallel would be acclamation by one’s troops as “imperator”….
What I was trying (and failing) to say is that in Italian usage not only il padre is not used to mean “the priest,” but Padre is also not traditionally used as a title nor a form of address for a parish priest.
For titles, I’d say the distinction remains strong (though I don’t have or know how to seek corpus evidence). A secular priest is “Don Mario” or “Don Rossi.” Only a regular priest is “Padre Mario.”
For forms of address, the distinction is blurring. Traditionally, a secular priest is addressed as “Don Mario” or “Reverendo” and a regular priest as “Padre Mario” or “Padre.” Accordingly, in PlasticPaddy’s clips, Don Camillo is a (fictional) parish priest addressed as “Reverendo,” while Padre Pio was a Capuchin friar addressed as “Padre”. Usage of “Padre” to address a secular priest is increasing, but some argue that’s a calque of “Father” being used in the same way in English.
However, they may well be wrong since English and Italian could have undergone the same change independently. The OED glosses as follows.
It still seems strange to me that English “the padre” is used for “Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and other areas of Spanish and Portuguese influence.” To be fair, however, most of Italy was ruled by the kings of Spain for at least a couple of centuries. I stand corrected in my ignorance of cromulent English!
GP: an equally relevant piece of English-usage history is that starting at least in the 19th century “padre” came to be used in the military register of BrEng to refer to a (presumptively Protestant) clergyman who was an army chaplain (don’t know if the Royal Navy shared the usage or not). There’s a story about this that has to do with Brit-military exposure to Spanish non-Protestant usage when Wellington’s army was fighting in the Peninsular War, but I don’t know if that’s really the origin. But the important point is that it was already standard Brit-Army usage when the use of “Father” to refer to a Church of England priest was still very controversial and factionally marked.
That usage then spread to the U.S. military and to not-strictly-military institutional settings such as prisons. So, e.g., the “sad old padre” referenced in the Nashville (but also Welsh!) standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green,_Green_Grass_of_Home is the (presumptively Protestant) prison chaplain who will accompany the condemned prisoner to his execution.
The first speaker that springs to mind for this use of “padre” is Harry Morgan portraying Col. Sherman Potter on M*A*S*H.
everyone has someone to ask, just like everyone has some local official to ask
as a matter of institutional policy, sure. but in my boston-raised/nyc-dwelling experience, the last thing a catholic parishoner would be likely to do is go to a priest for permission about anything – unless they happen to know the guy well enough to be certain that he’d tell them to do exactly what they were going to do anyway. (nobody goes to their precinct house to ask about giving an 18-year-old a beer at a barbecue, either: same principle.) the existence of an officially mandated bureaucratic path to permission is mostly evidence that an institution is very well aware that nobody gives a shit what it thinks.
And of course in the M*A*S*H* instance the “padre” in question (the character, not necessarily the actor) happened to be Catholic, but Irish Catholic rather than some-sort-of-Romance-language Catholic.
How many steps of extrapolation is this from what I said?
Five? Ten?
I mean what I say, and I don’t mean what I don’t say.
@JWB: That usage made it to the OED in the Third Edition. Their earliest citation is about the Royal Navy, from Marryat’s (1836) Mr Midshipman Easy. Since Marryat served in the Royal Navy from 1806 to 1830, he’s presumably a trustworthy guide to its jargon.
Giacomo Ponzetto says:
A secular priest is “Don Mario” or “Don Rossi.” Only a regular priest is “Padre Mario.”
For now I just want to point out for people unfamiliar with these terms that “secular priest” means a priest who serves in a diocese under a bishop and is not a member of a religious order, basically. In the US he would be called a “diocesan priest” as well. A “regular priest” is a member of a religious order who takes vows under the head of that order. Members of a religious order follow a code of life called a “rule” which is in latin “regula” which is where the term “regular priest” comes from.
The anabaptist protestant minister in Catch-22 is addressed as “padre”, much to his discomfort.
There’s also the padre (presumably Anglican) in the Mapp and Lucia stories, an affectation among many others.
@J.W. Brewer: Father Mulcahey being Catholic seems to have been sufficient to get him the nickname “Dago Red” (at least in the early M*A*S*H media), mixing references to the Irish and to southern Europeans.
@Brett: I think that may have only been in the movie and perhaps underlying novel? The tv-series portrayal was less “edgy” and more respectful… (actually maybe a good piece of period evidence about what you were and weren’t allowed to mock on an “edgy” or “irreverent” network tv show in the 1970’s). Obviously there are Irish-surnamed American Catholics with Italian maternal ancestry, and vice versa, although that may have been more common by the time I was growing up than in the generation that would have produced serving chaplains during the Korean War.
Thanks, Pancho, I got very confused!
I’m unsure that’s true in general. Conversely, I’d have thought there are officially mandated bureaucratic paths to driver’s licenses and building permits because it’s rather ill-advised to drive or build without one.
In the specific context of the Catholic Church and marriages, my Italy-raised/Spain-dwelling experience is that the bureaucratic path in question is very well traveled by people who do want a Catholic marriage. Overwhelmingly because a wedding ought to be in the bride’s parish, but the couple often prefers some other, nicer church. If it’s another Catholic church, as it almost always is in these countries, both churches need to agree. They do after you ask them nicely, bearing the appropriate gifts (in cash and/or in kind).
Obviously if your wedding venue of choice is not a Catholic church, you don’t need to ask anything from any Catholic official. However, you still may ask because you (or at least your parents) value approval of your marriage by the Catholic Church. Game-theoretic cynicism suggests that your obvious ability to get the wedding you want anyway should lower the bar for the niceness expected of your asking and your gifts, but I cannot confirm from direct experience.
In a symmetric situation, however, I personally know Catholics who cared enough to go through the very considerable trouble of getting an annulment of their Catholic marriage rather than just a civil divorce.
@Giacomo Ponzetto:
I suspect English has modeled itself not after Italian but Spanish, where the term is well attested in that use at least as far back as the 16th century:
Why Anglos imagined Italian usage to be identical is beyond me, though.
I suspect English has modeled itself not after Italian but Spanish
OED (updated March 2005):
Why Anglos imagined Italian usage to be identical is beyond me, though.
I doubt they imagined any such thing; I doubt they cared at all what Italian usage was.
@Alon Lischinsky:
Thanks. I have no doubt that English-speakers must not have cared in the least about Italian usage.
One possibility, though, is that by the time padre became an English word English-speakers were so uniformly Protestant that the difference between regular and secular Catholic priests was lost on them, or else they chose to ignore it because regular priests were more exotic and Popish.
I have a vague sense that Spanish is ahead of Italian in using padre for diocesan priests, but note that Bartolomé de las Casas is not a telling example because he was a Dominican. A Dominican would have been (and still would be) “Padre Bartolomeo” in Italian as well.
I’m reasonably sure Portuguese has native usage most consistent with the English one. As far as I can tell, o padre is the most standard way of saying “the priest” in (at least European) Portuguese. Whether once upon a time it did not apply to simple parish priests I am not qualified to tell.
The Catholic priest in Whisky Galore, on being called “padre” by an oafish protestant-ish English landowner, congratulates him on speaking Spanish along with all his other accomplishments. (Needless to say, nobody else calls him “padre.”)
Thanks @Giacomo/everyone.
English-speakers must not have cared in the least about Italian usage.
Since it was my usage started this digression, I plead guilty to not understanding the nuance of regular vs secular Catholic priests. I was in Italy, in a Catholic church. I thought I’d give my description a Latin-y flavour. I’d have heard ‘padre’ several times during the prayers/blessings — in the sense Padre nostro/Padre omnipotente.
Though my ‘padre’ (lower case) was “the padre” as used in an English sentence would seem to be a perfectly cromulent English NP, [thanks @JWB]
“I don’t think we really disagree. ”
DE, yes.
Also Catholic / Orthodox schism is a different story (from schisms among Protestants).
True: it seems to be regarded as pretty small potatoes by the churches in question, compared with the major Protestant deviations.
The Anglicans have something specific going on on the ecumenical front with the Orthodox (or at least, the Anglo-Catholics do. The C of E are the pioneers of Cakeism Theology, something which I rather admire about them from the safe distance of my remote Calvinistic abode of true-Protestant purity.)
@Hat There are all manner of atheists, but you seem to know of none but yourself.
(It was @DE who made imputations about atheists/put words in their mouths. I wonder how many he knows?)
I was more-or-less paraphrasing Hitchens, in a presentation where Stephen Fry was nodding in agreement.
And I’m pretty sure I could find a parallel line of thought in the ‘Four Horseman’ conversations [Hitchens, Dorkins, Harris, Dennett].
Are you saying there are atheists you know of that per @DE’s characterisation would prima facie reject Christian beliefs as delusional? Hitchens, Dorkins, Fry went to English Public Schools, so would have got plenty of Religious Instruction. AFAICT they all observed religious practice early in life.
You’re correct I “know of none” atheists would reject religious beliefs as delusional without taking the trouble to find out the content of those beliefs.
I wonder how many he knows?
Well, actually, rather a lot. You seem to have a rather curious notion of my lifestyle.
I have also sctually been an atheist. I like to think that I wasn’t quite so smug about it, but I probably was.
@Trond Engen. Does anybody in Norway actually speak Nynorsk in everyday life?
I was more-or-less paraphrasing Hitchens, in a presentation where Stephen Fry was nodding in agreement.
Of course you were, and of course he was. You should get out more.
I’ve been reading Romola to my wife in the evenings, and in tonight’s chapter (we’re getting close to the end) there occurred the following sentence: “Only a little while ago, the young acolyte had brought word to the Padre that he had seen the Holy Mother with the Babe, fetching water for the sick: she was as tall as the cypresses, and had a light about her head, and she looked up at the church.” The padre in question turns out to be a pievano (parish priest).
…And I just got to this sentence in the Russian novel I’m reading (Lena Eltang’s Каменные клёны [Stone Maples], set in Wales): “Мне больше нравился отец Лука из кардиффской церкви, у него была пегая борода и золотые узоры на одеждах — мама толком не знала, кто она, и ходила то к протестантам, то к католикам, то к отцу Луке.” [I liked Father Luke from the Cardiff church better, he had a piebald beard and gold patterns on his garments — mother didn’t really know who she was, so she went now to Protestants, now to Catholics, and now to Father Luke.]
@DE, you? Atheist? *scandalised*
I am even not sure if I ever was one!!! It’s difficult to feel anything about the matter when people who believe in God only exist in history and you’re a child.
“it seems to be regarded as pretty small potatoes by the churches in question, compared with the major Protestant deviations.”
Actually it is not what I meant: I know too little about Protestant deviations. I just see that stories are different.
@Joe Gobbini: Nobody speaks Nynorsk any more than any other written language. Many speak dialects that are better represented by Nynorsk than Bokmål.
But your question may be: Is there a class of native speakers of refined, educated Nynorsk whose speech serves as an ideal for Nynorsk users in general? The answer is no.
@drasvi:
Yes, it did belatedly occur to me that you might have meant the exact opposite of what I took you to be saying …
I think my statement is basically correct though: from the Catholic POV the Orthodox are merely schismatics (filioque, schmilioque), i.e. the differences are essentially just matters of church discipline, whereas Protestants were traditionally regarded as actual heretics (i.e. deviating in fundamental doctrinal matters), though the official position on this has now changed greatly, of course.
It’s a longstanding Catholic polemical trope that the Protestant rejection of the magisterium and elevation of personal judgment in religious matters is inherently unstable, and accounts for the all-too-evident fissiparous nature of Protestantism, but in fact in many respects mainstream Protestants still all sing from the same hymn sheet (so to speak), whereas Catholicism happily tolerates quite a large range of theological positions even officially, let alone privately. Church discipline/order trumps doctrine, at least to some extent: logical, given traditional Catholic ideas of what the Catholic Church actually is (basically, Christendom. Hence the self-designation: Catholic.)
@DE, actually I misunderstood you: I was thinking about diversity within Protestantism.
Yes, I think usually people think of Protestants as “more different”, also they are dangerous*:-)
—
*music
Actually, a terribly sad re-enactment of “he’s dangerous” is Boko Haram story.
Trond Engen, thanks for your answer. I always suspected Nynorsk to be largely artificial. Are there still many speakers of dialects in Norway? I mean, as opposite of speakers of educated Norwegian (which I suppose to be more or less Bokmal). To be more precise: how do people speak in large cities like Oslo and Bergen?
Now riddle me this: The Church of Denmark calls itself Lutheran-Evangelical and is/was distinct from Den reformerte Kirke (Zwingli-Calvin, Evangelical-Reformed, and with an obsolete [or German-inspired] weak form of the participle for extra credibility). But the events around the kings liquidating the assets of the Catholic Church and creating their own is none the less called Reformationen.
Coming up on the half millennium it is. (The year is usually given as 1534, which was the end of the civil war between King Christian II [Catholic] and Duke Christian of Holstein [protestant]. But already in 1526, King Frederick I arrogated to himself the right to elect bishops, though they were still Catholic, and gave “freedom” of religion [as long as it was Western Christianity]).
@Lars: German-speaking Lutherans celebrate Reformationstag at the end of Oktober and English-speaking Lutherans observe Reformation Day etc. etc. That “reformierte[n]” came to be the conventional way of describing Kirche[n] that were *not* evangelisch-lutherische because they disagreed with some substantial portion of the Augsburg Confession and/or related doctrinal writings in favor of the rival views of Calvin/Zwingli/whoever doesn’t change that, or mean that Lutherans think that they’re personally “unreformierten.” Perhaps it’s not unlike the way in which in multiple languages “Catholic” or the equivalent word came to conventionally mean specifically “those specific people over there” even when used by those formally committed to the proposition that their own church possessed catholicity.
Things got further complicated in Germany when starting in the 19th century many secular rulers mushed their local “reformed” and “Lutheran” protestants into a single unified church for administrative convenience, thus treating the historical doctrinal differences between them as no big deal. Many of the subset of Lutherans who found this particularly irksome because they did not think the differences no big deal and did not wish to be organizationally united to heretics then emigrated to the U.S. Dissidents from the various Scandinavian state churches were also overrepresented in emigration to the U.S., but the points of dissent were, I think, not necessarily the same as in the German situation.
I don’t recall reformeret ever coming up when I was taught about the Church of Denmark, except of course as the etymological base of reformationen. Hence my question. (I thought protestantisk was a sufficient cover term for the northern European rebellion against Roman Catholicism).
(Also we don’t have a reformationsdag and I don’t think one ever existed. The formal change would probably date to the coronation of Christian III [the Duke of Holstein mentioned above] as the first Protestant king, or maybe some royal reskript issued around that time, but it’s not in the calendar. [Unlike, for instance, the Battle of Lyndanisse where the national flag fell from the sky]. Maybe that tells something about the perceived importance of religion back when people put feast days in the calendar. Lately we’re having them removed. EDIT: It seems that Christian III had some Catholic bishops arrested 6 days after his coronation. That would probably be the date [12 September 1537]).
OED, s.v. reformed:
Definitely confusing if you’re not brought up to it, but I can assure you that as a young Lutheran lad I absorbed suspicion of both the Catholics to the right of us (as it were) and the wild-eyed whatnots (Calvinists and their ilk) to the left, though it was some time before I learned the umbrella term “reformed” for the latter.
Also the succession of bishops in the Church of Denmark starts from Johannes Bugenhagen, who was never a Catholic bishop and born a bit too late to be an apostle. Does not seem to be a problem in practice, though.
And I got two events mixed up above. The arrests happened 6 days after he entered Copenhagen after a siege, so it would be August 12, 1536.
The Reformationstag (October 31st) remembers the day when Luther supposedly*) nailed his 95 Theses onto the door of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche. It is currently a public holiday in 9, mostly Northern and traditionally Protestant / Lutheran states. For the 500th anniversary of the thesis event in 2017, it was made a public holiday across Germany exceptionally in that specific year.
*) It seems historians disagree whether that actually happened or is a myth.
The traditional Reformationstag commemorates Luther’s posting of the 95 Theses in 1517, which was the beginning of a process, not the completion or culmination of it. Subsequent key dates might include 1530 (formal crystallization of the theological position in the Augsburg Confession), various other dates around then (demonstrated willingness of certain secular rulers to use force to protect new-style believers against any Imperial attempt to force them to return to the Emperor’s preferred religion), and 1555 (Emperor officially agrees not to interfere with the Lutheran approach in parts of the Empire where the local ruler is on board with it).
In Eastern Orthodoxy there are separate commemorations of the events of A.D. 787 (the iconoclast position officially condemned as heresy by the Seventh Ecumentical Council) and the subsequent events of A.D. 843 (the council’s decision finally becomes fully effective as a practical matter following the death of the last pro-iconoclast emperor), which I do think reflects an understanding of the relevant differences between what theologians may say and what actually happens in the world.
@Hat:
Yes: it never really struck me before, but there is a very definite tendency among certain groups (like mine) to use “Reformed” to mean “conservative; standing for the original principles of the organisation”, in contrast to Those People, who have gone and altered all the original principles. Reformed them, you might say …
A friend of mine was once heard referring to “that noted Calvinist, Jesus Christ …”
@David E.: I think that often depends on context. In the context of the Dutch tradition (both in the Netherlands and in North America) where “Reformed Church” was the official title of the mainstream body that (in the view of its critics) became lax and liberal as the centuries wore on, the True Believers needed a different adjective to differentiate themselves. The largest such split-off group in the U.S. is the Christian Reformed Church and smaller ones include the Free Reformed Churches, the Heritage Reformed Congregations, the Protestant Reformed Churches, the United Reformed Churches, etc. I guess “Reformed Reformed Church” was thought non-cromulent in either English or (mutatis mutandis) in Dutch?
It’s presumably not a coincidence that Reformationstag falls on Halloween. The choice of date has been interpreted as Luther selecting the evening before a solemnity, so that lots of people coming to the church in the morning would be able to see and discuss his theses.
Re-reformed could surely be simply recast as “Formed.”
This is the time of the year when “Was Saint Patrick a Protestant?” clickbait circulates on the Irish internet. Formerly this was complicated by the fact that “Protestant” meant the established church, with Presbyterians et al called “Dissenters”. Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen famously sought “to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter”.
The 1861 census form was the first with a religion question, and instructions as follows:
The 1871 census was held after disestablishment and chaos ensued. The report called them “Protestant Episcopalians”; of 667,998 recorded,
The 164,289 who simply wrote “Protestant” were revisited for further details; 146,794 were Church of Ireland
The church pushed back against attempts to describe it as “the Protestant Episcopalian Church” and argued that since the disestablishment act called it the “the Church of Ireland” and “the Irish Church” these were its official names. (The latter has long fallen into disuse.) For similar reasons the Welsh part of the Church of England, separated and disestablished in 1920, is called “the Church in Wales”.
The lack of an adjectival form of “Church of Ireland” is inconvenient. “Anglican” is little used. One usually says, e.g. “Sylvia is Church of Ireland”. As late as 2002 if you wrote “Protestant” on the Irish census form’s religion question it was lumped in with “Church of Ireland”, but I think by then it was hobgoblin consistency.
The lack of an adjectival form of “Church of Ireland” is inconvenient. “Anglican” is little used.
I herewith propose “Hibernican”, after the general model for such national churches. I don’t ask for royalties, but wouldn’t mind if someone occasionally bought me a beer in recognition if I ever manage to visit the Green Isle.
the Welsh part of the Church of England, separated and disestablished in 1920
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Poems_(Chesterton,_1915)/Antichrist,_or_the_Reunion_of_Christendom:_An_Ode
I’ve never noticed the lack of an adjectival form of ‘Church of Scotland’ before now, which is interesting. But it wouldn’t have occurred to me to count Episcopalians (who do have their own adjective) in with Protestants…
Ecclesia reformata strictioris observantiae
Joe Gobbini: I always suspected Nynorsk to be largely artificial.
Not any more than any other written language based on a thorough analysis of the grammar of spoken language, and with a century and half of development through actual usage.
Are there still many speakers of dialects in Norway? I mean, as opposite of speakers of educated Norwegian (which I suppose to be more or less Bokmal). To be more precise: how do people speak in large cities like Oslo and Bergen?
Most speak dialect, but dialects change, especially in regions where Bokmål is the written standard. That goes for educated speakers as well. So what does that mean? There’s no national class of speakers whose spoken language is written Bokmål and whose ways have to be emulated to get anywhere in society. Not anymore, anyway. You’ll speak dialect in a job interview without hesitation. But even so, young people — of any education or class — often choose to avoid the most prominent dialect features in speech, or to speak an approximation of Oslo colloquial. This development is steady but uneven.
The Oslo colloquial is not identical to written Bokmål. The old social distinctions are breaking down, but many of the broad Eastern features survive and are even universal.
Bergen is a case of its own. There’s no sign that the dialect is losing ground among the young, even with Bokmål as written norm, and even if a large part of the population are born and raised elsewhere.
Oh, is that why the Missouri Synod is such a den of misery…
They were (supposedly) in Latin, though, so pretty much only the people who came to church every day could have read them. Luther’s whole translation program came later.
@Trond, am I right that [you mean that]: Bokmål is closer to vernacular and thus causes measurably more levelling?
How large is Norwegian dialect diversity – in comparison to the four Scandinavian standards, say?
@Drasvi: Yes and no. The Oslo colloquial is a sociolinguistic model for levelling. That process is stronger in districts with Bokmål as the written standard, since it implicitly means accepting the Oslo colloquial as model. Nynorsk has no such center of gravity.
Yes: it never really struck me before, but there is a very definite tendency among certain groups (like mine) to use “Reformed” to mean “conservative; standing for the original principles of the organisation”, in contrast to Those People, who have gone and altered all the original principles. Reformed them, you might say …
Per contra, I began to observe in the 1980s the use (in the U.S.) of the term “educational reform” to mean changes in the direction of more traditional methods and philosophies, and thinking that was an abuse of language, and that its adherents were not reformers but reactionaries. Then again, I remembered Ivor Brown saying that someone reacting against the imposition of traditional ways might perfectly well be called a reactionary, but somehow that never happened….
Welsh part of the Church of England, separated and disestablished in 1920, is called “the Church in Wales”
Kind of by accident. The Disestablishment Act 1920 referred repeatedly to the “properties of the Church in Wales”, meaning by that “(properties of the Church [of England]) in Wales”, which was later read as “properties of the (Church in Wales)”, thus creating a new term which was applied to the new organization.
======
Some decades ago, when Gale and I were walking with our upstairs neighbor Mrs. McKierney, she suddenly collapsed on the street with a Jacksonian seizure. We called 911 and she was taken to the hospital. Since she lived alone and it seemed plain that she would no longer be able to, we were entrusted with her keys, and we searched her apartment from some clue about relatives she might have. Sure enough, we found the name and address of her brother Daniel McKierney in Ireland and wrote to him.
A few weeks later, we heard from our local Catholic Worker Maryhouse a block away. Her brother had made his way to our apartment building, but had not been able to figure out how to get in: in those days there was no buzzer system, and you had to call us on the phone, at which point we would wait for you to call our names from the street and we would drop our keys out the window). So he walked to the Catholic Worker (being Catholic and a worker, I suppose), and they put him up, even though normally as a man he was ineligible (they being a women’s shelter and all). So we went and got him, and the three of us figured out how to arrange for her to return to Ireland (we had found her Irish passport, fortunately, along with of all things some stock certificates) with the help of their social workers. At first Mrs. McKierney (presumably “Mrs.” was an honorary title, or perhaps she had never adopted her husband’s name or had reverted to her maiden name on being widowed, we don’t know) didn’t recognize her brother, but eventually she did.
While the paperwork mill was grinding, I took him for a walk around the neighborhood, and we happened to pass by St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery (better described as “off the Bowery”, as it is on Second Avenue) and I mentioned that it was the local Church of England. He nodded. I needed to give a similar explanation of the American meaning of “Social Security”, so as to make clear that it was the national pension that his sister had earned by her work as a house-cleaner (and so would still be entitled to after her repatriation), and not the dole.
Later, we somehow got on the subject of the Anti-Rent War and its followup in upstate New York during the 1840s, which interested him as a former farm laborer in Ireland. (Austerlitz, where my upstate house is, was IIRC up-rent, whereas neighboring hamlets were down-rent.) I told him that it led directly to the abolition of leases longer than twelve years in New York State, and served as a sort of rehearsal for the American Civil War, the Anti-Renters having become Free-Soilers (opposed to the extension of slavery) and then Republicans. An interesting man, Daniel McKierney.
Eventually, we got a letter from Mrs. McKierney’s relatives telling us of her death.
David M.; How large is Norwegian dialect diversity – in comparison to the four Scandinavian standards, say?
By Scandinavian I presume you mean Continental North Germanic. I don’t know how to measure that. There are still some vestiges of old urban high sociolects modeled on written Danish with local Norwegian phonology. OTOH there are some dialects with archaic grammatical features not usually represented in Nynorsk and others with Eastern phonological developments not usually represented in Bokmål, but in both cases shared with Standard Swedish. There are dialects that preserve phonological distinctions lost in all standards, and others with new developments not found in any of them. And still, total variation is probably not bigger than pre-levelling Danish or Swedish, and considerably smaller than German.
I wonder if “Reformed” could helpfully be replaced by “Transmogrified”? After all, the word does have a sort of ecclesiological ring to it …
On the other hand, that would seem to undermine the classic Reformer position that one is not innovating but returning to the pristine original …
“Remogrified”?
>Reformationstag falls on Halloween
I had just commented facetiously to a friend that the American Election Day was set constitutionally for the first Tuesday after the first Monday to ensure it would never fall on All Hallows Day, to avoid having the materials destroyed by pranksters the night before.
But does anyone know whether the ecclesiastical calendar was a factor? I’m not sure why else they might have wanted to avoid Nov. 1st.
@Ryan: here’s a boring nerdy explanation that has no ecclesiastical angle (although it notes that the choice of Tuesday may have had one). https://americacomesalive.com/why-is-election-day-on-the-tuesday-after-the-first-monday-in-november/ It’s not in the constitution, and the statute could in principle be changed, but since it’s been followed since the 1840’s it has built up a certain amount of inertia/momentum by now.
” but returning to the pristine original”
Downshifters, nudists, salafi…
@Ryan, JWB: Some wag on the internet (can’t remember where exactly) wrote that the rule was chosen so that only people smart enough to figure out the date would vote. Obviously a joke, and it didn’t work out that way, either.
I’ve seen it stated as a fact that Nov. 1st was avoided precisely because it’s an important Catholic holiday.
Most of Europe votes on Sundays, though, and probably “always” has, in order to increase turnout. The exception that comes to mind is the Netherlands (Wednesdays), and there the reason is a Reformed church that refuses to “work” on Sundays.
Most of Europe votes on Sundays, though, and probably “always” has, in order to increase turnout.
UK (not sure if that counts as Europe these days) votes on Thursday. I’d always heard it was to increase turnout, because people would be distracted over a weekend. Untouchability of weekends also something that divides UK from Europe?
Not every ex-colony follows suit: election day in NZ and Aus is Saturday — although it’s easy to vote in advance.
our upstairs neighbor Mrs. McKierney … suddenly collapsed on the street with a Jacksonian seizure
I just read around and watched some videos about this. I thought I knew something about “seizures”, but it transpires that I knew essentially nothing. Decades ago I had a fling or two with guys who turned out to have a kind of “epilepsy”, but that didn’t bother me. Sex is a leveller. Fact.
At any rate, I had no idea how many kinds of “seizure” there are, nor of their general etiology. Now I have a teeny bit more idea. Maybe it will turn out to be of some use. I find it bracing to be reminded that I don’t know it all, nor need to.
# “[John Hughlings Jackson’s] real contribution was to say these movements mean there must be an organized part of the brain [from which] these movements are generated. Subsequently, what that really gave the basis for is that, now, we have a whole area of the brain that we call the homunculus where it maps out where the primary and sensory motor cortex are.” # Jackson’s contribution
Norway votes on Mondays. I never suspected religion had anything to do with that, but now I do. If so, it doesn’t matter much anymore. Electoral districts (= municipalities) have been allowed to open polling stations on Sundays for a long time.
David M.: I’d be curious to know who was stating this is a fact and on what documentary/archival/evidentiary basis, since the relevant decisions by the U.S. Congress were made back when the Roman Catholic population of the country was still fairly small and politically marginal, especially in the national context and those American non-Catholics of the time who took some notice of All Saints’ Say (Episcopalians and Lutherans, pretty much) would not have marked it with such solemnity or festivity as to preclude voting on the same day.
The Congressional Research Service, citing a secondary source I have not checked up on, sez: ‘Lawmakers prevented Election Day from falling on November 1 by selecting the first Tuesday after the first Monday, which “took into consideration the fact that many merchants used the first day of the month to tally their books from the previous month.”’
I see I kind of lost track, in telling Mrs. McK’s story, of why I told it. it was simply that it turned out to be the Right Thing in context to call the Episcopal Church the “Church of England”, which has not been its name since 1785. At that time, the name “The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America” was adopted; in 1964 it was supplemented by the shorter name “The Episcopal Church”, which had been in informal use for many years.
I note that Apostolic Succession in the U.S. was assured by Samuel Seabury, who had been elected bishop by the clergy of Connecticut (why am I not surprised? — see above) two years before. Since he could not be consecrated in England thanks to the Royal Supremacy, he went to Scotland, where he was consecrated by the non-juring bishops of the nascent Scottish Episcopal Church[*]. Nowadays the (U.S.) Episcopal Church describes itself as “Protestant, yet Catholic”, which reminds me of a Jewish friend’s characterization of (U.S.) Conservative Judaism as “having both feet planted firmly in mid-air”.
I wonder if “Reformed” could helpfully be replaced by “Transmogrified”?
The trouble there is the flaky etymology: “17th century; origin uncertain, but possibly from transmigure [obsolete syn. for transmigrate] or transmigrate [itself]. It is also possible that this word is a formation derived from maugre, hence it originally signified the ‘evil eye”, but under the influence of the former etymologies shifted its meaning to its sense of “transformation”. Another possibility is a humorous blending of transfigure and modify.” In addition, the modern sense is to change the form completely, as if the Mass had been replaced by an actual human sacrifice.
the first Tuesday after the first Monday
It’s all due to the invention of the telegraph.
[*] Quoth WP: “The church is sometimes pejoratively referred to in Scotland as the “English Kirk”, but this can cause offence.”
the wild-eyed whatnots (Calvinists and their ilk) to the left
Running along the top edge of that “tube map” of Churches of Scotland are the Cameronians. I only know of them from Alice Munro’s story “Friend of My Youth”, about a daughter’s fascination with her mother’s stories about a small Cameronian family that she had once boarded with: “My mother could not say who the Cameronians were or why they were called that. Some freak religion from Scotland, she said from the perch of her obedient and lighthearted Anglicanism.” Their rules didn’t even allow cooking on Sunday (let alone voting). A soap-opera plot ensues: “Now there had to be a wedding, but not the one that had been planned.” Unable to resolve the differences between how her mother told the story, how she would have liked to tell it herself, and what might have really happened, the daughter turns to ancient history:
This is also one of Munro’s stories with a character that would be classified as autistic today, though she never uses the word and probably (writing in the 1980s) didn’t know it.
Ireland usually votes on Thursday. Twenty years ago, if the government wanted college students to vote they made it Friday, since most were registered at their parents’ home and travelled back most weekends. Offshore islands vote a couple of days early in case bad weather delays delivery of their ballot boxes to the count centre. The 1922 constitution made election day a holiday; this was abandoned within a few years as employers complained at the expense.
mollymooly may be right as to Thursday being typical or modal, but going back to the early 1980’s it appears that general elections have been held on every day of the week except Sunday and Monday, with the most recent one (on a Saturday) being the first time anyone’s weekend got ruined by it.
@John C. Perhaps you would have done better to tell the visitor that St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery was a Church of Ireland parish?
@ktschwartz, the “haughty bishop of St. Andrews” was, to give him his full ecclesial dignity, Archbishop Sharp, whose 1679 murder at the hands of the Covenanters was followed by a period of boring tranquility for Anglican/Hibernican/etc. archbishops in which none of them died of homicide until 1977, when the Most Rev’d Janini Luwum, Archbishop of Uganda, was arrested by the henchmen of Idi Amin and then died while in custody in what the authorities said had been an unfortunate car crash. The sort of car crash that leaves the passengers’ bodies riddled with bullets.
I ended up having a conversation with a friend elsewhere about how the Episcopal church is anglican and Anglican churches are episcopal, which made me feel I’d come full circle. (We had started off discussing mollymooly’s mindblowing distinction between Protestants and Presbyterians, where I would distinguish Episcopalians and Protestants.)
The church is sometimes pejoratively referred to in Scotland as the “English Kirk”
One of the churches that my uncle went to for a while in the course of falling out with every* church in his town in turn is known matter-of-factly as the ‘English church’. I think he’s agnostic now.
*probably not Catholic. That would be a step too far.
@JWB: and miss the opportunity to say “Church in Wales in the Bowery”?
.
for my part, i firmly (lectically) believe that episcopalians are in the u.s. and anglicans are in the u.k. and both are church of england.
Episcopalians (“Piskies”) are in Scotland, too …
Interesting (now I think of it) that the bishop-having got focused on as the thing about Anglicans in Scotland. It’s hardly as if that makes Anglicans all that special, after all. I mean, even Methodists have bishops in Foreign Parts, I believe. Mind you, at the critical points the Church of England was pretty much Calvinist too (after all, the Westminster Confession comes from, er, Westminster) so I suppose actual theological differences were not very salient.
The Scots ones are mostly* very “High” in Anglican terms (i.e. Anglo-Catholic), presumably because the Low-Church ecological niche had largely been gobbled up by the (presbyterian) Church of Scotland. Jen from E is not alone in not immediately thinking of them as “Protestant.” Many Piskies would agree, in fact, and indignantly assert that they were not Protestant, except maybe in some technical sense.
* It so happens that the Episcopalian church I happen to know best (in Edinburgh, in fact) is a major exception to this sweeping overgeneralisation. I think it’s broadly true, though.
@David E.: Well, it’s just further confirmation of how all these conventional labels are a bit arbitrary. Similarly, Presbyterians are not the only sort of Christian to have presbyters, Congregationalists are not the only sort to have congregations; Baptists are not the only sort who engage in baptism; and so on. Maybe Methodists are the only ones with a Method, though?
The Slavonic churches certainly had a Method.
Do Quakers actually quake? Did they ever, like, quake quake?
(“Methodist”, too, seems to have begun as a mocking exonym.)
@Brett: Those are Methodians not Methodists. Kind of like how the Armenian church isn’t Arminian, and vice versa.
My late father-in-law was a fairly well-known Arminian academic theologian. I used to refer to him as a notorious Armenian, a quip which in my view was evergreen. My wife, curiously, felt otherwise, but I expect that was just her Armenian heritage.
@JWB Baptists are not the only sort who engage in baptism
‘Baptist’ is (maybe) a shortening of ‘Anabaptist’ — ” called that by opponents in derision.”. Which arises from them being _against_ baptising a child too young to understand God or religion. (They viewed it as a form of child abuse.) “rejected baptism of infants and instituted baptism only of believing adults.” “Most baptists do not believe that baptism is a requirement for salvation, …” [wp]
So, no they don’t ‘engage in baptism’ of the child, or even necessarily at all. (They do these days have a blessing for children, which near-enough corresponds to the stage of baptism in other churches. But there’s no marking of the cross on the forehead.)
Untouchability of weekends also something that divides UK from Europe?
Indeed. When Her Majesty’s Government learned late on a certain Friday that the Americans had taken umbrage, it was not until Monday afternoon that they found out just where Umbrage was.
Episcopalians (“Piskies”) are in Scotland, too …
I thought piskies were in Cornwall, actually. (Of course, they are just pixies with metathesis.)
even Methodists have bishops in Foreign Parts, I believe
True, but this seems to be little known even among themselves. Gale was a Methodist for a time, in between her departure from the Southern Baptists and her arrival at the Spiritual-but-not-Religiousists, and when I told her it had once been the Methodist Episcopal Church and therefore had bishops she was astonished. Note that the United Methodist Church (as it is today) continues to have bishops but remains connectionalist (that is, the supreme authority is with conferences known as connections, or connexions in the UK). The Free Methodist Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Methodist Episcopal Zion Church are also bishoped.
@DE Do Quakers actually quake? Did they ever, like, quake quake?
Yes. I used to live in York, UK, (home of ‘Rowntrees’ — like Cadbury’s a quaker company). Quakers were very active in CND/the peace movement, so I got to know a lot of them. They did indeed quake sometimes at their ‘meetings for worship’. (If I ever were compelled to be a Christian, I think I would find Quakerism quite amenable. There’s no ‘submitting’ to anything/anyone. Quite a few houses of worship don’t even have a pastor or authority figure.)
@AntC: Maybe the best way to understand it as a strictly linguistic phenomenon is that “Baptists” are the subset of Christians who (in the original context in which the name arose) have/had unusual and thus distinctive views about baptism, just as e.g. Presbyterians are (or at least originally were) those who have/had unusual and thus distinctive views about the role and status of presbyters (and/or presbyteries). The distinctiveness of the group’s view about X makes referring to X a convenient shorthand way of describing the group.
The relevant sense of the prefix ana- in “anabaptist” is “again, anew,” because they were rebaptizing folks who had already been baptized, which was thought both gratuitous and scandalous by their opponents. They of course thought the first time hadn’t really counted so they were doing it properly for the first time.
Because in the chaotic-yet-energetic religious environment of the U.S. circa 1900 the early Holiness and Pentecostal churches generally first arose out of a Methodist or Methodist-adjacent matrix, they too are quite often bishop-endowed. Sometimes that just means an ad hoc storefront church accountable to no higher denominational authority titles its pastor as “bishop”; sometimes it means that, e.g. the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God of the Americas, Inc., a historically/predominantly black denomination with 150+ congregations scattered across the Eastern U.S. as well as a few abroad, is presided over by a Board (maybe “Synod” would be too high-falutin’ a word for them?) of three Presiding Bishops, who are depicted on the website wearing purple shirts with Roman collars.
both gratuitous and scandalous by their opponents
More than that, the (Ana)baptists were in essence saying that all non-Anabaptists, not having been properly baptized, were necessarily going to Hell. That made them scary, and accounted for their persecution by all sides in the Thirty Years’ War and after. (Of course the polygamy and communism didn’t help either.)
the polygamy and communism didn’t help either
Subversive ideas indeed. There was a lot of paranoia about polygamists under the bed.
JWB, “catechumen” or rather its Slavonic translation (nominalised passive participle “about-voic-ed”, “bevoiced”) is one of words used in idioms following the scheme “to [violent action] like a […]”.
Especially “to scream like a catechumen”, “to run like a catechumen”.
@Trond, thank you. Though I’m not sure I udnerstand how this implication (.”…it implicitly means accepting the Oslo colloquial as model”) works.
My interest is twofold: theoretically, I don’t understand how Russian convergence (especially before 19th century when some 95% people were peasants…) and then levelling works.
Emotionally, I think dialect levelling is not a good thing (and also irritated with associated snobbery). My irritation with attempts to invent a “scientific” definition of “a language” as opposed to to “a dialect” has to do with this as well (apart of that I just think it is pseudo-science).
Intellectually or emotionally, Norway must be an interesting model.
I have some friends who are also (members of the Society of) Friends, and I don’t think any of them would self-describe as Christian or even religious.
Of course, the existence of nontheistic Quakers seems perfectly reasonable and virtuous to this atheist Jew.
Do Anabaptists hunt anacondas in Anacostia?
Huh:
And:
“Most baptists do not believe that baptism is a requirement for salvation, …”
When growing up Baptist, I came to wonder why my denomination put such emphasis on a rite (and a mode of that rite) that it admitted was inessential. As my Sunday-school teacher said, “Why is it so much easier to get unto Heaven than into the Baptist Church?” It was the perfect preparation for becoming Anglo-Catholic, which was one of my stages on the way to spiritual-but-etc.
Today I learned (or, more probably, rediscovered) that Thomas More and John Fisher have been accepted as saints by the Anglican churches since 1980. Men for all seasons, indeed.
My own feeling is that there should be a lot more canonisation of field linguists.
The Papists, for all their grave errors, have shown us the way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Foucauld
I’d also be well disposed to proposals for the wholesale anathematisation of generative linguists*, but I prefer to focus on the positives here.
* A Papal Bull Qui fictas arbores elaborant would be nice.
As the Russian Church moved its activities eastward through Siberia and into Alaska it generated various saints who learned to preach in and translate texts into various local languages. They may have varied as to how much pure descriptive fieldwork they did, but still usually generated material that should be of interest to modern scholars trying to understand earlier stages of the relevant languages, including as a few examples:
1. St. Innocent of Irkutsk (Buryat/Mongolian);
2. The Saint known variously as Innocent of Moscow, Innocent of Alaska, and Innocent, Enlightener of the Aleuts (multiple dialects of Aleut, then Tlingit, then Yakut when he went back across the Bering Straits later in his career);*
3. St. Jacob Netsvetov (Yupik and several Athabaskan languages – he was presumably bilingual as a child since his dad was Russian while his mom was Aleut but just having him serve Aleut-speaking congregations rather than evangelize further inland would have been too easy …).
*A catechism he had originally written in Aleut for the benefit of local converts subsequently got back-translated into Russian, where it sold well, went through dozens of printings over several decades, and apparently proved spiritual useful to Russophones who had theoretically been Christians since infancy.
Drasvi: Though I’m not sure I udnerstand how this implication (.”…it implicitly means accepting the Oslo colloquial as model”) works.
No, it was handwavy, wasn’t it. What I mean is that with Bokmål, the general assumption is that it (or rather its folk prescriptivist conservative form) encodes a moderately high Oslo sociolect, which is the neutral form of Norwegian. When a district chooses Bokmål as language of administration and/or instruction, then, it also imposes (or acknowledges) this assumption.
A Papal Bull Qui fictas arbores elaborant would be nice.
Wouldn’t that be aimed at long-rangers and lexicostatisticians?
Or generative syntax trees?
I think that’s who he meant to begin with.
St. Stephen, Apostle to the Permians…
My man!
Didn’t Permians live millions of years ago?
Hey, the Great Race of Yith needs to hear the Good News too!
“Have you heard the Eldritch Shrieking of the Flying Polyps?”
I find it … restful.
YMMV.
the second of ruthanna emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy novels, Deep Roots, does in fact include some well-rendered proselytizing by a lovecraftian species whose identity i won’t spoil here.
@Trond, well, it’s tricky then. In the Arabic-speaking world people shift towards large cities, not literary Arabic. “Large cities” doesn’t, I think, necessarily means “upper/uducated classes”* (same for posh English). In sociolinguistic literature this observation is presented as a surprise: the assumption is that people must shift to a “prestige variety**” and the prestige variety is literary Arabic.
It still sounds plausible to me that when you learn Oslo colloquial in school and hear it on TV and read it in books and are told that it the “proper” way of speaking (I don’t know if the TV and “proper” parts are present in Norway), the influence of Oslo grows. Otherwise your exposure to respective forms is limited….
* I don’t know, honestly. Maybe Palestinians in Amman (many of whom moved to there) are exactly “upper”?
** here I see a problem, because if you keep designating the direction of shift as “prestige variety” and identify the “prestige variety” as one in whose direction the shift occurs, you are getting circular. Such terminology implies a hypothesis that there is an unknown set of properties (“prestige”) that triggers shift. Then you need to identify this set…
Another problem: do speakers percieve some languages as not-quite-suitable for daily communication? I think they do, perhaps Latin, perhaps even Italian in Italy. I think some of those sociolinguists beleive literary Arabic (as a whole) is so, and it is not a problem because they speak about individual variables like the reflex of /q/.
What makes people feel so?
The concept of languages “suitable” for a function is very suspicious, on the other hand when use of a language is limited to a certain role, it may affect its form.
That’s how many Hasidic Jews feel about Hebrew, innit? Or is that not the kind of suitability you meant?
“I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” Charles V of France, attrib — or possibly to Frederick the Great]
France was the one place he wasn’t of
Exactly.
“Charles spoke several languages. He was fluent in French and Dutch, his native languages. He later added an acceptable Castilian Spanish, which he was required to learn by the Castilian Cortes Generales. He could also speak some Basque, acquired by the influence of the Basque secretaries serving in the royal court.[43] He gained a decent command of German following the Imperial election, though he never spoke it as well as French.[44] By 1532, Charles was proficient in Portuguese, and spoke Latin.[45] A witticism sometimes attributed to Charles is: “I speak Spanish/Latin (depending on the source) to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.”[46] A variant of the quote is attributed to him by Swift in his 1726 Gulliver’s Travels, but there are no contemporary accounts referencing the quotation (which has many other variants) and it is often attributed instead to Frederick the Great.[47]”
Naturally, a poet has recently asserted that Charles V spoke German to the stable boys and Slovene to the precious horses…
Up to 251 millions.
You don’t need a king for that, a poet suffices.
Charles V is treated of in the comment above that. In Latin.
(I wish SFReader would come back…)
So do I, but I don’t think he’s coming back unless and until he has personally lost the war and survives. I wonder if he volunteered and has been lying outside Bakhmut for half a year, for example. :-S
In present-day Italy, this strikes me as vanishingly unlikely. Italian is the most commonly used language for daily communication. Even someone (say, a South Tyrolean German-speaker) who doesn’t so use it must surely be aware that lots of others do and must find that quite normal.
Two centuries ago, maybe. Back then Italian was essentially a written literary and official language. Presumably a small elite also spoke it, at least in the appropriate intellectual or official occasions, but that may not count as daily communication. How did people perceive it then? A language unsuited for daily communication? A fancy register of the same language they used for daily communication? A fancy register of the language people in Tuscany used for daily communication? Unfortunately, I have no idea. I wonder if experts know. People who didn’t belong to the small Italian-writing elite don’t seem to have had many chances of recording their perceptions for posterity.
Frederick the Great didn’t speak to women much at all. When he did, it was in French (as in his correspondence with Catherine II, although both were native German speakers) or in German (to female servants, if he had them). A Protestant hero would have been rather unlikely to address God in Spanish – in Frederick’s time. Today, millions of Latin American Pentecostals pray in Spanish.
> Do Anabaptists hunt anacondas in Anacostia?
Yes, but they have to do it analogically, because anacondas are anadromous.
Ataque de piranhas nas prainhas do Paraná!
Anacondas anádromas do Amazonas!
Strange – it looks like Akismet doesn’t let me comment in the Adelphi thread. It’s eaten my comment, a comment where I complain about it eating my first comment, and a test comment… Not that my first comment was one to keep for the ages, but you still might want to know.
I saw your three comments in the Adelphi thread, I left a comment of my own, but that disappeared, and so — expectedly — did the next,.
Yours are visible now, too. There seems to be a delay for comments to show up in that specific thread.
@DE Do Quakers actually quake? Did they ever, like, quake quake?
It seems this one did, quite a lot.
Essex nowadays a hotbed only of chavs, I believe.
Bergen is a case of its own.
I have seen it described as the Glasgow of Norway. I don’t know if that means that Bergensk is hard to understand or just odd.
Bergensk is not hard at all, but mildly odd. It shares phonology with surrounding dialects that are very well represented by Standard Nynorsk. I have myself described it as straight Nynorsk with two genders. In honest moments I might add that it also has the past ending -et as in (conservative) standard Bokmål, I think as the only “natural”/broad dialect (as opposed to Old High Urban sociolects).
… but speaking of sociolects: It’s probably the only dialect outside of Oslo with a sociolectal span that most Norwegians will know and be able to imitate (however badly). “High” Bergensk is useful for much the same purposes in Norwegian popular media as RP is in American.
… and I’ll even argue that a “Low” or “Broad” Bergensk voice is useful for the same purposes as, say, that of Michael Caine or Bob Hoskins.
So how do you say: “Stroll on! Knock it on ve ‘ead!” in Low Bergensk?
1. I’m probably not able to catch the complete pragmatics of the original.
2. Translation ought to be done by a native speaker of the target language.
But when did that stop me? Something like K’e de me deg! Slå’an te pises!
Thank you.
I shall road-test it when I am next in Bergen and wish to express incredulity in a streetwise fashion.
I think I was wrong. I got the incredulity in “Stroll it!”, but the knocking on the head is not about actually hitting anything, but more like “Stop it!”, right? So the two expressions are just different ways of expressing increduilty, strengthening eachother in colocation. If so, I might instead try “Kom an igjen! K’e de me deg!”
But of course, all dialects can do this. I meant to make a point about sociolinguistics, not vocabulary.
@Trond, likely you know that (Germanic?) -sk- was borrowed into Slavic and that it is commonly used in names of cities, like Bryansk, Minsk, Smolensk, Pronsk. Actually, they were adjectives originally.
This -sk is sometimes used to form a “Russian city” from something which is either not city or has a form impossible with -sk, humorously.
If there are any Russians in Bergen, it is quite possible that someone referred to it as “Bergensk”, “In our Bergensk”. In other words, it plays the role that once -grad played.
Mukhosransk (Fly-shitted) is a generic provincial shithole.
When you need make your city a village you add -ka.
It is very weird to see this “Bergensk”, I each time read it as “Russian humorous form of ‘Bergen'”.
(Though people in Bergen I personally know or almost so are Moroccans…)
Virtually all Cockney expressions express incredulity, this being the default setting for all true Londoners.
I did not know it was a borrowing from Germanic. I always thought it was straightforwardly related to Slav. -skV(-).
How did that come about? Minsk, Polotsk and Vitebsk (to name a few off the top of my head) are no recent inventions.
Update: Oh, you mean the entire set is an early Germanic loan? I should have thought of that.
“I always thought it was straightforwardly related to Slav. -skV(-).”
Oh. I think I usually see it described as “borrowing”. I put (?) because I’m not confident that it is not original, I did not know the argumetns. But now I tried to check and see
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/-iskos
Yes, I’m speaking about the suffix itself in various meanings. The cities named so are old, but there are newer ones formed by analogy I think.
P.S. no, “borrowing” is not my idea and it can be utterly wrong. But it totally looks like arealism.
Hm. The suffix is projected back to PIE from Germanic, Slavic and Greek. The prolific Romance suffix was borrowed from Germanic to Late Latin. Maybe we could see borrowing between Germanic and Slavic as well. If so, the Greek, differing in meaning as a diminutive, could well be a chance resemblance.
Whatever we could gain from that. There’s no internal Germanic derivation that jumps in the eye. And if there were, somebody would have suggested it long ago.
I’d say “Circumbaltic” (but this suggests Finnish…).
Of course it can be retention since the wild Yamnaya days (and still can be areal if IE ancestors [those of ancestors who spoke IE…] of Balts, Slavs and Germanic speakers stayed close to each other).
But suffixes with this meaning (nisba) are very sticky: Pakistani and Kafkaesque are recent English aquisitions, then Romance borrowing… And there are numerous parallels like Valdemar/Vladimir, or double names (like Valdemar/Vladimir:)) etc…. Even -ila in Slavic. (I understand that parallels in names can be recent)
I’m not ready to count [[Slavs, Balts], Germans], Greeks as 3 lineages. If it is a borrowing, I am not confident that it is Germanic. Can be any source.
In a conversation a couple days ago, I was asked why the names of all the Canaanite tribes in the Tanakh (like the Amorites, Perizzites, Moabites, and Edomites) all had names ending in –ite, when the Hebrew plurals and collectives normally would end in –im (or sometimes just –i). I knew that the –ite suffix was from Greek, but no further details. In the course of discussing this, I used the word polity, which the person I was talking to was not really familiar with in the context of the ancient Near Eastern tribal peoples. As we were discussing this, I looked up the origin of the –ite suffix for residents of a certain place, and it turns out that it actually comes from an ancient reanalysis of polity! Per Wiktionary:
In the course of this discussion, it also occurred to me why (as I noted previously), the name Salemite should be used for inhabitants of Salem, Oregon. I imagine that it is related to the much older Jerusalemite.
“Hereby ye shall know that the living God is among you, and that he will without fail drive out from before you the Salemites, and the Portlandites, and the Corvallisites, and the Eugenites …”
I am a bit confused. Hoplite seems to = hopl(on) + ītes or is it somehow hoplī + tes? Or is Wiktionary claiming the ītes in this word attested in Herodotus to be a similar back formation from hopl-polītes? Or are there two ītes suffixes, one used only from the Hellenistic times to denote “inhabitants of”?
Wanted to ask the same question but know too little about Greek.
(an association:I though about a Russian phrase топографический кретинизм, топографический идиот etc.- a “topographical idiot”, someone who has difficulty determining her location or finding objects in a forest or unfamiliar city. Most people willingly admit to be so, others do it when they can’t find something.
Wiktionary also knows a suffix -iot:
“Back-formation of Cypriot, from Ancient Greek Κυπριώτης (Kupriṓtēs, “Cypriot”).”)
PlasticPaddy : Linz wiki is absurdly detailed. And then there’s the site where you can find where to harvest walnuts and such.
@V
Had to go back three weeks to find my comment 😊.
There is a user Wirthi, who is either (a) a bot, (b) a copy-editor or (c) a sort of anti-Thomas Bernhard, with a passion for Linz and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Linz, past and present. There is an article about the street named after Bernhard but not about Bernhard.
Bryansk, Minsk, Smolensk, Pronsk
I have a friend in Minsk
Who has a friend in Pinsk
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk
Whose friend somehow is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.
And when his work is done
Ха-ха! – begins the fun
From Dnepropetrovsk to Petropavlovsk
By way of Iliysk and Novorossiysk
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk to Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run
Yes, to me the news will run!
—Tom Lehrer, “Lobachevsky”
Old Time Religion
We will pray with Aphrodite
We will pray with Aphrodite
She wears that see-through nightie
And it’s good enough for me!
[Chorus]
Gimme that old-time religion (3X),
It’s good enough for me!
We will pray with Zarathustra
We’ll pray just like we use ta
I’m a Zarathustra booster
And it’s good enough for me!
We will pray with those Egyptians
Build pyramids to put our crypts in
Cover subways with inscriptions
And it’s good enough for me!
We will pray with those old druids
They drink fermented fluids
Waltzing naked though the woo-ids
And it’s good enough for me!
We do dances to bring water
Prepare animals for slaughter
Sacrifice our sons and daughters
And it’s good enough for me!
I’ll arise at early morning
When my Lord gives me the warning
That the solar age is dawning
And it’s good enough for me!
it’s not one of the original five Patriarchates
Six: you are leaving out Ctesiphon, the Patriarchate of the (Extreme) East. Admittedly it has been in schism since the year 431.
Corvallisites
More formally known as “The Faculty Senate and People of Corvallis” [sic; no comma]
Ctesiphon might (have been) a Patriarchate. I know it chiefly as a particular geometry of arch — term in architecture. Inspired all those Gothic cathedrals. Being in Persia/Iraq, time, floods and war have not been kind to it.
Also an anagram of ‘phonetics’ — that’ll be handy to know for a crossword one day.
It can’t be emphasized enough: enoteca is acetone backwards.
I feel personally offended that Tom Lehrer does not mention my favourite Russian town with -sk, Arkhangelsk. In Bulgarian -ski is a productive suffix, I don’t know if it is in Russian.
Y : “It can’t be emphasized enough: enoteca is acetone backwards.” me : _boggles_
Arkhangelsk
Thread convergence.
The rule ensures that Election Day cannot happen on any day of the first week of November. While this avoids All Saints and All Souls, it also avoids another day that might have been more significant at the time, although it is largely forgotten in today’s USA: Nov. 5. Bonfire Night.
I don’t know for certain when USAians stopped celebrating that holiday, although I recall reading a letter by George Washington forbidding that American troops offend French (Catholic) allies by burning the pope in effigy.
WikiP:Guy_Fawkes_Night cites the letter, and also says:
The Talmud (Bava Metzia 59a/b) has a story about the sages arguing with Rabbi Eliezer about a particular type of oven:
Rabbi Eliezer argues from various phenomena that occur when he asks for it to prove that he’s right — a tree uproots itself and moves a few hundred cubits; a stream flows backwards; the walls of a study hall start to fall (but another rabbi gets them to stop). And each time, the Rabbis respond with: One does not cite halakhic proof from [this phenomenon].
Finally,:
@O-M
Are we sure that Rabbi Eliezer was not himself the source of the divine voice (using a practice more properly and defensibly employed when convincing simple-minded brethren of the rightness of some rabbinical insight)? Is it recorded that the divine voice could be heard while Eliezer was observed to be drinking water (or another permitted liquid)?
@Owlmirror: Your explanation for the dating of election day sounds clever, but I’m afraid it cannot be correct. You have misunderstood the rule governing when elections are held in America. They fall on the first Tuesday (strictly*) after November 1—that is, the Tuesday that falls during the seven-day period of November 2 through November 9. Obviously, this coincides** with Bonfire Night about one seventh of the time.
* Without my mathematical training, I would presumably not feel the need to add this caveat. However, ordering relations are prototypically inclusive in most higher math; strict inequalities are no longer the default.
** Actually, since voting takes place largely during the day and effigy burning during the following night, while the dates coincide, “election day” and “Bonfire Night” probably still have minimal temporal overlap.
@Brett: I was confused, possibly because “the Tuesday next after the first Monday in November”, made me think of it as meaning the “next Tuesday” — Monday, Tuesday, then the next Tuesday after that.
Actually, maybe I still am confused. Let me try making a little table (If November 1 is on {day-of-week}, then Election Day is on …)
N1.....ED
=========
S......N3
M......N2
Tu.....N8
W......N7
Th.....N6
F......N5
S......N4
I don’t think a November 9 election day can happen any more than a November 1 election day can happen.
@Owlmirror: You’re right about that. In spite of my blabbering about “higher math,” I bungled the basic arithmetic. The last possible election date is November 8.
@PlasticPaddy: I think we’re supposed to take the story at face value — if it says that a tree moved, then narratively, the tree moved by itself; it wasn’t done secretly by a team of stealth landscapers. If it says that the stream flowed backward, there wasn’t a secret team of stealth hydrologists with a pump. If it says the walls started to fall, there wasn’t a team of stealth demolitionists. And if it says there was a voice from Heaven, there wasn’t any secret ventriloquism or stealth sound FX team with a megaphone and good acoustics….
Hm.
I was pondering the story for a while, after writing most of the above, and I wondered, why were all of these miracles and wonders in the Talmud at all? The idea occurred to me that maybe the story was meant to inoculate against, or compete with, any tales of charismatic people (such as Jesus of Nazereth) trained in both rabbinical law and prestidigitation (which may well have included ventriloquism). The idea being that if some students were overly-impressed by such a person, or stories about such a person, their teachers could point out that Rabbi Eliezer, who could do all these miracles, and even had the voice of heaven on his side, was nevertheless overruled by the rabbinical majority.
Or maybe I’m overthinking it. There’s lots of miracles and wonders in the Talmud, and also stories which aren’t necessarily miraculous but are bubbemeises anyway.
I learned the diminutive of Einar which the only Russian-speaking woman who called her son so and who I know uses.
Énechka.
Is that ye- or yo-?
It’s e- (Эйнар).
I meant the diminutive form.
The default assumption is that it’s Энечка with e, as in the basic form of the name.
I meant the diminutive form.
Sorry, I thought it was obvious the diminutive would start with the same vowel as the base form.
As with Greek stress, doubtless it’s obvious to you, but (alas) not to me.
@jc
https://doukhobor.org/russian-female-names-among-the-doukhobors/
https://doukhobor.org/category/names/personal-names/
This is the best illustration I have found online with a compilation of Russian names, together with Cyrillic and loadsa diminutives for each name.
There are a few tendencies I can identify:
1. only one instance of initial ě (Erast), so not much precedent for Einar.
2. If the last cononant is a non-palatal consonant, ochka is highly favoured over echka/yochka. But if you want echka you can “cheat” by adding a palatalised suffix, e.g., Ninochka but Ninulechka.
3. If the last consonant is a palatalised consonant, echka is favoured over ochka. Again you can “cheat” by adding a non-palatalised suffix, e.g., -ot+ochka.
4. In these spellings, there can be found -yosh(k)a, -yokha -yozh(k)a and less frequently -yochek, but never -yochka. The speakers who say yochka in some cases where (ambiguous) echka is written for these spellings know who they are.
This is the best illustration I have found online with a compilation of Russian names […] only one instance of initial ě
Just goes to show you that not everything is online. My Petrovsky Словарь русских личных имен (5th ed., 1995) has 30 names starting with Э, from Эвелина to Эсфирь (not counting the colloquial forms in small type).
https://lexicography.online/onomastics/petrovsky/
As you say, more names (but the dukhobors record more diminutives, compare corresponding listings for Evgenii).
Also Petrovsky is fairly good about marking uncontroversial yo,
—
Лев, Льва, м. Отч.: Львович, Львовна. Производные: Левушка; Левуня; Левуся; Лёва; Лёня; Лёся; Лёка. [Греч. leоn — лев.]
—
but there are some controversial yo (e.g., Lev/Lyov). I have no idea whether any -echka endings have controversial -yochka doublets…
What is controversial about the forms with lyo?
@hans
Sorry, there is a doublet in the surname lyovin/levin, but perhaps not in those forms.
EDIT: although there is some discussion here:
https://tikhogrom.livejournal.com/5174.html
There have been several discussions of Lev/Lyov at LH, e.g. in 2010 starting here.