Letter of Recommendation: Old English
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
At first I thought that the writer, Josephine Livingston, was saying that these were the main words --- like, the Old English word for sea is hronrad, "whale road." But no, if you look up "sea," that is Old English too. People normally said "sea," but sometimes if you were writing a poem you would make up these colorful alternatives. I think that's what she meant. It just took me a second reading.
At the end, she says this isn't possible in modern English. "We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able[...]. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary." She gives as an example that she wants to make a new kenning out of "poignant" and "solitude," but it won't work because today's readers would interpret "poignant solitude" as just an adjective modifying a noun, with no special poetical air. That's because she did it wrong.
At the beginning she defines a kenning as two nouns, but "poignant" isn't a noun, it's an adjective. She would need two nouns. And solitude, while a noun, is abstract. She would be better off with two concrete nouns, like the old kennings. The best I can come up with right now is "teardrop cloister." A more modern style, though, would be "cloister of tears."
I see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." The reader would have to rely on the context to figure out that you're using metaphors for the sea and the body, just like then. Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days. It sounds like back then that poets did it all the time. It was a meme. But modern poetry has this kind of wordplay here and there. And like I said, instead of doing it with compound words, they do it more by joining them with the word "of", like: "cloister of tears," "the road of the whales," "this house of bones." I could totally see any of those in modern poems.
I agree with you - I suspect that modern english has far more in common with its predecessors than we might think at first. I'm pretty sure I have seen poetry and prose that riffs like that - bolting together nouns in a way that would invite inspection for meaning, some of which might become expected (formulaic) in a way that might be an in-joke or a shared experience or perhaps a description that can be considered a shared pseudo experience ("I know what you mean")
Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days."
We might consider ourselves more sophisticated in some way and yet the term "bone house" does still resonate in some way for me but not in the context of "general term for a body/person". It does work rather well in the context of war/battle/conflict.
Kennings - seems to me to be cognate with "ken" (know). They seem to be designed for inventing nouns for context - a bit like the reverse of the effect of some adjectives. You include the adjective(s) within the agglomerate noun in some way, either explicitly or via convention (think of the imagery around: "bone house")
I love language.
Yes, I think you're right, https://www.etymonline.com/word/kenning
I just randomly mashed the words for "green" and "plate" together, and if I type the resulting "Grünplatte" into Google's image search, I see that LEGO had the same idea as me, apparently.
In English the putting two nouns together still exists, but the orthography is different: you write it as two words or with a hyphen in between, but the more common ones are written together. Loveseat, whorehouse, wheelbarrow, crankshaft, screwdriver, etc.
[1]https://brewminate.com/anglo-saxon-england-and-decoding-angl...
When I first started learning Russian I couldn't believe how easy it was. Once I could hear and pronounce the differences between ы / и and ш / щ / ж I could guess how to spell or pronounce a word and I'd be right like 90% of the time. I don't even hit that with English words I know, but rarely use.
But the ridiculous spelling situation in English is caused by the same thing that lead to it becoming an analytical language with all these helper words in the first place: It's a disastrous mismash of at least 4 different languages.
Our grammar couldn't grow to handle the complexity. In a Bayesian free energy sense, the complexity got pushed into the language instead. But this actually makes English much easier to use for commerce because partial speakers can stumble word to word without having to think it all out first. It's a smoother learning curve.
With Russian it's the opposite. The grammar is how the words all apply to each other, so the word order is very flexible. Instead it's used to indicate emphasis, which is why Russians can sound kinda displeased when they talk. Well, one of the reasons why, anyway. It's why their literature is so great. We have to do all these gymnastics to avoid using italics to indicate emphasis, whereas it just falls out naturally.[0]
Longterm life goal is to get to at least a strong B1 / weak B2 with Russian and to read the classics slowly. Right now I'm stuck with side-by-side English-Russian short stories.
[0] Though our language does have the advantage of a huge vocabulary, so though our literature might not be quite as good as Russian it's still pretty great.
I suspect this was still a dialectic distinction by the time of the Norman conquest; I suspect the distinction survived much longer in more linguistically conservative regions like what is now Yorkshire (which was also more heavily influenced by the danish.
I believe they can still have distinct pronunciations in Icelandic.
I do recall that ð was voiced in the old norse that I was taught in college. It probably doesn't matter too much since you don't have an old englishman to speak to.
The presence of two different characters has something to do with the integration of Latin and runic alphabets, but the choice of which was used isn't clear to me.
The above variations are in a tiny subset of en_ and across a probably tiny piece of time. Nowadays we have phones and TV etc which I think probably works towards homogenising our vocalisations.
I suspect that Old English was a bit more complex than is generally thought, if care is not taken.
I remember realizing at one point that I had read everything in Old French in the university library, and thinking that that probably meant I had probably read everything surviving in Old French.
I recall my sister in law studied Occitan. Oh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French - another rabbit hole to bookmark for spelunking.
p.266 > Of these additional letters þ and ð were borrowed from Old English. The rune þ was known already, but its use in manuscript came from England.
p.268 > þ in the oldest Icelandic manuscripts was used both for the voiceless sound of th in English thin and the voiced sound in then. About 1225 ð was introduced, and gradually þ came to be used only initially, and ð in other positions. þ then represented only the voiceless sound, while ð, except when following a voiceless consonant (rare, as ð then usually became t) was voiced, as in faðir, við.
This is where I got the impression that ð is voiced.
*: An Introduction to Old Norse, E.V. Gordon, Oxford Univ. Press.
Icelandic employs a 19th century reconstruction of the old norse alphabet noting that "Various old features, like ð, had actually not seen much use in the later centuries" - which corresponds to their merger into one digraph 'th' in English. The article also notes that the letter ð undergoes a devoicing depending on its surroundings.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_orthography#Histor...
Noticed last year that Icelandic is kind of similar, so it may eventually prove useful beyond aesthetics.
An accusation that might be levied against any language vs another. Funnily enough I found Ms Livingstone's final para a rather good example of the sheer power of modern english to concisely link several concepts when wielded with precision.
That said, I rather like the sound of the freedom that is implied in her description of these kennings constructs. At the moment things like "banhaus" sound more like a slang term to me. Did OE (at some stage) have a separate word word for "body" or was bone-house it?