Joel at Far Outliers is reading (and sharing excerpts from) Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch, and this post is obvious LH material:
Louis picked up much of his Lallans from a shepherd named John Todd, known as “Lang John” for his height, with whom he would tramp for hours in the hills while the sheep were grazing. “My friend the shepherd,” he said later, “speaks broad Scotch of the broadest, and often enough employs words that I do not understand myself.” Louis recalled Todd in an essay entitled “Pastoral”: “He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face.”
But it was Todd’s eloquence that captivated Louis. “He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard, and this vocabulary he would handle like a master. I might count him with the best talkers, only that talking Scotch and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you.” Many of Louis’s original readers would have recognized a famous phrase that Samuel Johnson composed in Latin for his friend Oliver Goldsmith, Nihil tetegit quod non ornavit: “He touched nothing that he did not adorn.” The allusion is a beautiful tribute to the old shepherd, ranking his skill in language on a level with a writer of great distinction.
It was Todd, Louis said, who taught him to appreciate the spirit of the hills.
He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centerpiece to all these features and influences, John winding up the brae [slope], keeping his captain’s eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind’s eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.
Though the shepherd’s casual talk might be “easy,” it was direct and to the point. In another essay Louis contrasted it with the conversational style in England, where “the contact of mind with mind [is] evaded as with terror. A Scottish peasant will talk more liberally out of his own experience. He will not put you by with conversational counters and small jests; he will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man’s chief end.”
Swanston people remembered that Todd used to say of Louis, “He is an awfu’ laddie for speirin’ questions about a’ thing, an’ whenever you turn your back, awa’ he gangs an’ writes it a’ doon.” A “speirin” questioner is prying and inquisitive. Years later some old-timers told a visitor the same thing. “Stevenson would dae naething but lie aboot the dykes. He wouldna wark. He was aye rinnin’ aboot wi’ lang Todd, amang the hills, getting him to tell a’ the stories he kent.” “Lang Todd” prompts one to wonder if John passed his nickname on to Long John Silver in Treasure Island.
RLS’s encomium on Lallans reminds me of Dorothy Richardson’s character Shatov on Russian, quoted in this post, and Russians have for a long time (at least since Karamzin) complained about the lack of “contact of mind with mind” in English conversation.
Qui nullum fere scribendi genus non tetigit; nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.
While I have no doubt that Johnson meant this entirely positively, it kinda suggests to me someone with a combination of scribendi cacoethes and Midas’ touch.
‘Speirin’ is just the Scots for ‘asking’ (cf Norwegian ‘spørre’), so while I do think that ‘speirin’ questions about a’ thing’ is intended as a criticism, I don’t think ‘prying and inquisitive’ is implied by the specific word. Has the author taken it as an adjective rather than a verb?
@jen
I am not sure prying is unjustified, although probing would be a better word. I have the impression that the shepherd was concerned about his standing in the community, of not being considered a Munchhausen, a gossip, a pander, or a person who is himself involved romantically with the stranger.
Perhaps Goldsmith and the shepherd Lang John were aesthetically similar due to common hostility to rapacious “capitalism” and so-called progress, whether manifested via the “Enclosure” trend or the Highland Clearances. Although of course the shepherds may have been the only ones other than the lairds who immediately benefited from clearing the crofters off the land so that it might more efficiently be grazed by sheep. (And this shepherd may have been tending a non-Highland flock in the Pentland Hills SW of Edinburgh.)
i’m not totally clear on “Lallans”, but I’d assume it indeed wasn’t spoken in the Highalnds.
Perhaps Goldsmith and the shepherd Lang John were aesthetically similar due to common hostility to rapacious “capitalism” and so-called progress
Dunno about the shepherd, but seems a fair cop for Goldsmith:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44292/the-deserted-village
Though it falls rather into the Merrie England camp that Hat (like Jim Dixon) was castigating the other day.
I’d assume it indeed wasn’t spoken in the Highlands.
Possibly by shepherds. As JWB says, they tended to be imported (the locals usually kept cows). But this is definitely on the outskirts of Edinburgh.
Merrie or not, Goldsmith was one of Yeats’ “four great minds that hated Whiggery … [w]hether they knew it or not,” but hated it from a decidedly non-pinko angle.
Shepherding has in recent centuries become a specialized enough calling that it has led to odd long-distance migrations – there are still parts of rural Nevada away from the massive population growth of Vegas where a material factor in the local demographics are the descendants of the Basques who immigrated a century-plus ago to work with sheep because apparently the U.S.’s other more numerous immigrant ethnicities weren’t as good a fit for that vocational niche. (The late Paul Laxalt, who served one term as Nevada’s governor and two as one of its U.S. Senators, was the son of one such immigrant shepherd, which accounted for his actually-exotic-when-you-focus-on-it surname.)
RLS may well have been probing or prying. However, if I rewrite Todd’s comment in English English (I’ve left the syntax alone), this is what it says:
“He’s a terrible boy for asking questions about everything, and whenever you turn your back, away he goes and writes it all down.”
I don’t think anyone would look at that and decide that an ‘asking’ questioner has special characteristics. ‘Asking’ is just the usual thing that you do to questions.
But there’s a tendency – I don’t know if it has a fancy name – to feel that if a word is unfamiliar to you, there must be a deep special meaning to it, even if it’s just an ordinary word for the person who used it.
Xenologophilia?
This has happened with the Welsh words bro, hwyl and hiraeth, though I think that this has been pushed by Celtic-twilight romanticists among actual Welsh speakers as much as by obligate-Anglophones yearning for the exotic. (The Welsh word hwyl actually does have the “divine inspiration in oratory” sense given by my English dictionary, but it’s hardly the primary sense. Most often, you’ll hear it used for “Bye now!”)
Ubuntu is another where the exoticising seems to have been initiated by actual speakers. “Of course, when we say ‘humanity’, it means so much more than it does to Europeans.”
I think these are all manifestations of the unkillable “the X have a word for it” trope (or its evil twin “[language of deprecated group X] has no word for [desirable thing/institution/concept].” Sometimes turned around: Isaac Bashevis Singer ludicrously claimed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that Yiddish has no words for weaponry, IIRC.)
@jen
I agree that there is nothing in the text that gives a significant support for my impression (“awful” could be replaced by “terrible” or “real”, and it would have the same non-pejorative connotation). I am perhaps drawing too much on experience as a “stranger” in small or tight-knit communities (or among infrequently seen relatives).
Reminds me of Mark Rosenfelder’s observation (I think it was) that the Daleks may very well have the word “mercy” in their lexicon, contrary to popular belief; however, it is glossed “temporary failure to exterminate due to software problems.”
A Primer in SF Xenolinguistics, no source cited
That’s the one.
How disillusioning to be told “there are no exotic alien worlds called Stritty or Thudgewundle.”
They sound as if they’d fit in fine in the universe of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Isaac Bashevis Singer ludicrously claimed in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech that Yiddish has no words for weaponry
o bashevis! the most useless try at paraphrasing weinreich ever.
and he knew damn well that it’s got plenty – from generic (װאָפֿן | vofn [weapon]; ביקס | biks [rifle]) to specific (שפײַער | shpayer [revolver]) to brand-name-derived (נאַגאַן | nagan [pistol]). it’s not quite as etymologically neat a set of vocabulary as bicycles get (ביציקל, װעלאָסיפּעד, ראָװע | bitsikl, velosiped, rove – the last from the Rover company who made the original “safety bicycle”), but it’s cute nonetheless, and not even small.
Thanks, Jen. Obviously it’s complicated.
nullum quod tetigit non ornavit.
Is this actually good Latin? We are talking about repeated actions in the past. In line with modern Romance languages shouldn’t this be in the imperfect in classical Latin? I.e.“ nullum quod tangebat non ornabat“?
Either that, or the “komplexives (konstatierendes) Perfekt”. For my reader’s intuition, an imperfect would feel wrong in this case. The sentence concentrates on a typical case, the repetition is simply implied; there are even many examples of the perfect being used with adverbs implying repetition: Hae permanserunt aquae dies complures is from Caesar’s Bellum civile. Multi saepe com obesse vellent, profuerunt et cum prodesse, obfuerunt is from Cicero’s De natura deorum.
Btw, more recent editions of this Grammar have been issued under the names of the editors (Burkard and Schauer) because the book has little to do with anything originally published by Hermann Menge. It’s simply a modern Syntax based in part on the material collected in Menge’s legendary Repetitorium.
I’m not at all keen on ‘Lallans’ to mean ordinary spoken Scots, and I can’t decide if I’m just being precious about it, or if it really does make more sense to keep that name for the ‘literary’ Scots of the early 20th century, in the sense that most people who have ever heard the word will expect it to mean that.
—
As far as Scots in the highlands goes, I think it would depend a lot on who your neighbours were, and when Gaelic stopped being commonly used. Perthshire absolutely, and around the Cairngorms with the strongly Scots-speaking Aberdeenshire as neighbours. The further north and west you go, the more I think you’re likely to find Gaelic and Scottish English as the options, and that was probably even more true in the past. (This is a wild generalisation at best, obviously.)
But a kind of ‘Greater Glaswegian’ accent is still spreading north, and I have no idea how much vocabulary it’s taking with it.
It’s true that when sheep were first taken into the highlands experienced shepherds from the south of Scotland (and probably the north of England) went with them – but I wasn’t really suggesting that RLS might have learnt Scots from a shepherd in the far north.
@JWB: Yes, the book names Pentland Hills near Edinburgh as RLS’s stomping and learning ground.