I just committed to writing two entries for the very exciting upcoming JRR Tolkien Encyclopedia for Scholarship and Critical Assessment, and since one of them is on Old High German, I was going over my OHG primer last night. (By last night I merely mean that it's now after midnight, b/c after watching House, M.D., and going over the OHG, I stayed up even further to read ... *gasp* ... the newest Harry Potter book.) Maybe another blogpost will discuss Harry Potter and Tolkien and magic and the impressionability of children and such, this one's about Proto-Indo-European (PIE), or just Indo-European.

Right, well, those of you who are left probably know what it is, but for the internet initiate who just hasn't learned to click away fast enough, it's the *language that must have existed in order to explain the regular patterns of relationships between the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Persian, and other languages (the Indo-European family). It is a unique type of delight for an amateur (for now) philologist to see two words as different as 'hostile' and 'guest' and know that they came from the same root. (The common element is 'stranger'. Ironic, isn't it, that it was the Germanics that assumed a friendly connotation, while the Latin assumed the stranger was an enemy.)

So you have a proposed (hence the asterisk) form that would have looked (had it ever been written down in the Latin alphabet) something like *chost I suppose, where the 'ch' means the sound in the Scottish word loch, not the sound in English 'chest'. From here, the Latins lightened it to host plus a Latin ending ... hence hostis, 'enemy'. The Germanic tribes (all still speaking the same common tongue at this point) tended to turn the 'ch' sound from PIE into a 'g', and a's into o's, so they started pronouncing it gast. And in fact, that's still the modern German word for 'guest'. The reason the English word is different is that the Saxons who migrated to Britain changed the vowel further because of the letter 'i' in the suffix that used to be there but which is now gone even though its effect (i-umlaut) remains. It's all so wonderfully complicated.

So you have one type of philological fun, which is comparing cognates in different languages (let's call this horizontal), but you also have the fun of tracing one word through its history, with change after change in spelling and pronunciation, and perhaps even in meaning, until it's hardly the same word anymore (this would be vertical). When you look at that word, and you see in each letter all the versions that have gone before it--each consonant and each vowel seeming to recall its immediate ancestor--and what's more, when you use that word fully intending in one fell swoop several of the various meanings and nuances it had along the way (the more the better), as if having a little inside joke with yourself--if all this comes naturally to you, then you're probably a born philologist. And probably crazy, too, but that's not for me to decide. Just to relate.

The Magic of Trite Phrases

Channel surfing Sunday afternoon rendered this little nugget: "When we come back, Pompei reveals its treasures, and the city is resurrected through the magic of the computer."

Sigh. Silly me, I keep thinking we've progressed beyond the uncomprehending amazement required to use phrases like "the magic of the computer". Magic, in this sense, is used to mean "something that works although no one really understands why" (according to Merriam-Webster), or more precisely here, "...although I, the speaker, don't really understand why".

I'm sorry, but the word "magic" really is not meant for this kind of situation, unless you are dazzled by flying carriages and moving pictures and my boomstick! While computers are really cool and powerful and efficient and, for sometimes several blissful minutes at a time, even bug-free, I guess I don't want to believe that anyone in the 21st-century United States should still view them as "magical"--especially anyone hosting a tv show dedicated to the scientific investigation of mysteries of ancient history. I think it was Leonard Nimoy.

Why am I talking about computers in a blog about language? Well, it becomes a matter of language when you consider that the speaker, or actually the script writer for the show, may not really be as ignorant as his speech suggests--at least not about computers. It may be that he knows a lot about computers; almost any competent user in America under the level of hacker might use the phrase if they're lazy enough in their speech. The point is, it's a phrase that got used so much when computers were still all mystical and magical, that it's now one of those sets of words that people now think of in a group, and use without thinking. It's the linguistic path of least resistance: as soon as the concepts of "by means of" and "computer" appear in the mind, the words "through the magic of the computer" form naturally--and isn't it easier when we don't have to think about our words before we say them!

The quick-witted among my reader or readers (it is a new blog, after all) may at this point perceive a certain irony in the juxtaposition of my complaining about people not deliberating over every word, in a blog post that's hardly going to go through intense revisions and drafting before it gets published and, since it's 3 in the morning, probably repeats itself and probably repeats itself and may even use overused phrases of its own. But then, I'm not getting paid the big bucks for a national television show.

Time to click "Submit". Or should it say "mischief managed"?



Spooooock!

Another First Post, and They Might Be Bloggers

Why the Bitter Scroll? Maybe it's because only an intelligent allusion to an Old Testament prophecy can begin describe the eloquence of my tongue as it will spill forth onto this electronic page. Right, whatever. Maybe it's because I'm an embittered, hardline grammarian who bursts blood vessels just thinking about the possibility of language changing, and rules along with it. Or maybe I'm bitter in my own superiority because of the stupid typo in my own blog's title, which was supposed to be The Better Scroll.

It doesn't matter, and I'm not going to tell you. All you need to know (Business on this blog is definitely conducted on need to know basis, and as we used to say at my last workplace: your job is none of your business; be assured you will be chastized at the appropriate time) ... as I was saying, all you need to know about this blog is that its content will be generally language related--and which language is up to me. Be forewarned, you will not likely agree with, or even be interested in, any two consecutive opinions I express here, but I promise I have good reasons for them all (which I may or may not provide in a manner you can understand). I can speak, can read, or have dabbled in more languages than there are distinct ingredients in the typical Taco Bell menu item, and I have had more intense, analytical, and often petty discussions about English, or simply languages in theory, than anyone I know can stand (except maybe for gaetanus). But then that's the reason for the blog: so I can vomit forth my unabashedly nerdy yet uncomfortably sardonic opinions to people I don't know.

Now, as for the need-to-know-basis thing: Here are some things you need to know. I love the English language, with all its inconsistencies, absurdities of pronunciation, wildly meandering etymologies, and not least of all, its wonderfully down-to-earth Germanic roots. I love studying grammars and finding cognates between languages. I realize that languages change, yet at any given point, there are still rules that (usually) must be followed. The art of language is, when wielded well, stable but not rigid, flexible and dynamic but not amorphous and meaningless. Language is a convention, which means that words don't usually mean things intrinsically, but by common agreement. The parties to this agreement may all subconciously change what they mean by something, and if so, it is a historical reality to be reckoned with, for good or ill. I hold strongly to rules of grammar, because they exist and because ignoring them is usually a sign of the "uneducated" (don't worry, they're not offended, b/c they're not reading this blog in the first place). But I think that any rule followed by convention is liable to reasoned analysis and review, not blind adherence. This is why I believe that it is not heretical, un-American, un-English, or an offense against all that is good and decent to split an infinitive when it serves the purpose of clarity. And as to ending sentences with prepositions I say, along with Winston Churchill, that, "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put." [For those of you not reading this b/c you fall into the aforementioned category of "uneducated", that last sentence was a good example of the earlier aforementioned sardonic wit of your author.]

I think that'll do for a first post. Please go about your regularly scheduled lives.