Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book’s binding | Hacker News Reader

Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book’s binding

theguardian.com

98 pointsdiodorus36 comments

Reminds me of a section in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt:

I said What I mean is, though I believe the [Rosetta] Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity.

You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival.

What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island.

More on the book:

https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-helen-dewitts-the-last-s...

Interesting how stable French has been over the centuries - at least when judging from these four lines.

By no means the same, but much closer to modern French than the language of the sagas is to modern Scandinavian. Not to mention how far English has drifted.

French orthographic and grammatical history has been non-linear and it's not uncommon for texts from the 16th century to be harder to read than from the 13th c., while at the same time the Medieval texts have sometimes confusing syntax for modern French speakers because of the declensions. For example in the sample given by the article :

    Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit

It's not something that a modern native French speaker would understand at first sight. Li quiens (or li cuens in more standard Old French) is the cas sujet of "count", the form that survived in French is the cas régime, le conte.

For what it's worth, I understood at first sight "Mauvaisement, le <honorific title> Bertram a dit" which happend to be the intended meaning.

I actually had more trouble with "Bacin" starting with a capital B which would indicate a proper name. That's the only line I wasn't sure of.

I was surprised by the fact I could understand that while I know I can hardly understand anything from the 16/17th century old french. Thanks for your input for clarifying that.

Astonishingly accessible with a little knowledge of French:

“Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin,”

“He asks him, ‘How goes it with him?’ / ‘Badly,’ said Count Bertram. / ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.’”

TIL: garrison <> supply

Corn? Must refer to something else besides what we call corn today. A different grain? Or “corns” of salt maybe?

Although it has become associated with maize it is still used as a generic term for any cereal crop. At least here in the UK.

'ble' in the text probably means blé, which is french for wheat. not sure why translator would chose corn (maïs in french).

I'd ask the opposite question: Why wouldn't he choose that?

Corn was the name for all cereal grains in old english [0]

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn

You don't even need to go back to old english: per your source, definition 1 under english etymology 1 is:

(chiefly Britain, uncountable) Any cereal plant grown for its grain, or the grain thereof.

edit: but yes, in the context of discussing a poem from the 12th century, old English would make more sense :) Interesting that the translation is from the french ble , which I would intuitively associate with the modern french blé meaning[1] wheat

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bl%C3%A9

Corn originally meant “small seed”, and then was generically used to refer to what are now typically called grains or cereals (wheat, oats, rye, ...).

The new-world grain maize, which had no existing name in English, was called “Indian corn”. Later, that was shortened to just “corn”, which eventually resulted in the generic word “corn” losing currency in North America.

Relatedly, from roughly the same time period La Chanson de Roland / The Song of Roland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Roland) which has survived to the present day and is considered the oldest surviving work of French literature.

from the article, quoting and translating

> Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin

> ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine;

nope: ble is wheat in modern French, and corn had not been brought back from the new world yet when this poem was written.

Corn simply means “grain” in English-speaking places where maize is not a staple food.

Could you specify some places this applies to? It certainly isn’t the case with in New Zealand, and I’m reasonable certain that applies to Australia and the UK too.

John Barleycorn Must Die.

In German "Korn" means grain - e.g. "Vollkorn" meaning "whole grain".

UK. Though maybe Cambridge is slow/conservative in noticing usage change. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/corn

'Corn' alone is unusual I'd say, and someone saying it yes probably in agriculture and means any grain.

Otherwise 'sweetcorn' or 'corn on the cob' ('corncob') are common. But you can't have e.g. 'wheat on the cob' so it's not ambiguous.

Perhaps it is not current usage, but I guess it might have be common English usage till 19th century. I think that I have seen corn used generically in novels and other works from before that time.

May be you can find reference to corn in Chaucer, I don't exactly remember if it is there for sure.

UK farmer here - since childhood in 1970s we've always called it "corn harvest" when talking about wheat, barley, oats, rye, etc.; sometimes Maize is referred to as corn-on-the-cob.

Yeah, nah. Corn is maize in all the english speaking countries I've been to and lived in and used for nothing else.

Yes, but this is recent, hundred years or so.

The English countryside is an exception. Townies are more likely to use it in the American sense though these days.

Before 'corn' the vegetable, corn was used as a catch all in English for cereal grains. Sometimes it's used to evoke an antiquated feel in text.

Still means grain in German.

Also Dutch: "koren"

Same in Norway: korn

In English, it used to mean a grain of anything, not just a cereal grain.

This usage surives in "corned beef", which refers to granular salt used for preserving the meat, nothing to do with cereal grains.

"Corn" still refers to multiple cereals in British English; what Americans call "corn" is "maize". Or so it used to be; perhaps it is changing?

"Corn" also refers to a lump of hardened skin; but that has a different origin, related to "horn", going back to Greek. It shares with "cornucopia" and "cornet" and "keratin".

"acorn" is also not derived from "corn", interestingly; it has its own etymology. It is not a portmanteau of "aiken corn" (oak tree's corn) or anything like that as might be wrongly guessed.

"kernel" is related to "corn" though, not to horns or keratin. OS kernels are named because they are the central part, like a seed, not because kernel programmers have thick skins or devil horns.

>"Corn" still refers to multiple cereals in British English; what Americans call "corn" is "maize". Or so it used to be; perhaps it is changing?

In the UK, there are some exceptions, where it specifically refers to maize: cornflakes, corn on the cob, sweetcorn, and cornflour.

Corn (resp. maize) flour is also interesting for being an unusually 'correct' usage of 'flour' - if you look on Wikipedia it's easy to think it's 'incorrect', because it will show you 'cornmeal' and say 'for maize starch called cornflour in the UK' etc. but actually the starch, the endosperm, is the part of the grain (resp. corn! But that's too confusing) that when milled is properly called 'flour'. In general many 'flours' are more properly 'meals'. ('Cornmeal' is similarly accurate, but the meal vs. flour is a correct distinction, not a language error/regional difference that ought to lead to mistakes. I suppose it's just called 'starch' in the US hence the wording of the 'if you mean'.)

Proto-Indo-European *ǵr̥h₂nóm [0] So I would guess most European languages would have the same meaning in one way or another.

0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn

And it is perhaps worth mentioning that there was no "corn" ("mais", "maize") in Europe before the 15th century.

Corn only refers exclusively to maize in North American English. Corn is a catch-all term for all cereal grains. Maize is the cereal grain from Mexico that everyone makes tortillas from...

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