Cool Quotes #10: How to Read a Saga

If you've ever been annoyed by a friend who criticizes a book or a movie for not being realistic enough--if the words "Just be quiet and watch the movie" have ever dangled from your tongue--then know this is an age-old problem. The author of Göngu-Hrolf's Saga is right there with you.

Since this tale nor anything else can be made to please everyone, nobody need believe any more of it than he wants to believe. All the same the best and most profitable thing is to listen while a story is being told, to enjoy it and not be gloomy: for the fact is that as long as people are enjoying the entertainment they won't be thinking any evil thoughts. Nor is it a good thing when listeners find fault with a story just because it happens to be uninformative or clumsily told. Nothing so unimportant is ever done perfectly.

And the best line comes at the end:

I'd like to thank those who've listened and enjoyed the story, and since those who don't like it won't ever be satisfied, let them enjoy their own misery. AMEN.

German is Chic!

At least, "chic" is German, apparently. I've been periodically picking up the two volumes I have of Bastian Sick's Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod, a sort of German version of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves I suppose. Since I'm such a sucker for interesting or ironic etymologies, I loved reading about the word chic (that's French for 'chic'), which was borrowed into German with the spelling Schick.

But where did French get the word? From Latin? Nope. Says Sick: "The middle low German word schick stood for likeness, form, custom; schicklich had the meaning 'appropriate, becoming'." So the modern German Schick is a German-French-German loanword. And you thought the French had the monopoly on chic!

English: It's In There!

Looking back at the post I just wrote, my eyes (as always) gravitate toward the foreign words, and my mind (as usual as well) gravitates to any related words in English (or other languages.) I love how all 9 of the Latin, Old English, and Old Norse words in that post have cognates or descendants in modern English:

Villa is English, but so are villain + related forms, the -ville suffix, and nasty. Insula gives us insular of course, but also the 's' in 'island', which otherwise comes from Old English. No really: the 's' was added to iland by people mistaking the word's etymology as coming from French isle, from Latin insula. (Check out the Word Origins section at dictionary.com, s.v. "island".) Domus yields 'domestic' and related words.

The Old English words cot and hám, beget 'cottage', and 'home'. Seld is a tough one, but the same root can be found in familiar proper names like La Salle (one of many Germanic roots that survived in French).

Old Norse hýbýli became Norwegian hybel, and I'd be surprised if it isn't related to English 'hovel'. Hús, of course, is the same word in Old English that yielded 'house' (so that Scottish and Eastern Canadian pronunciation of house is really quite ancient), and garðr's Old English cognate geard had its 'g' pronounced like a 'y', hence the modern form 'yard'.

Postcasts and Podcards

Did I get that right? Anyway, I just got a postcard from Winchester from Agent 9, a friend whom I see too infrequently. It's got a picture of the statue of King Alfred I use as my avatar, as well as Winchester's High Street, and the Butter Cross (no, it's not a monument to Christian dairy farmers). Thanks, Nine! I deeply envy your trapsing around the British Isles while I schlepp around northern Virginia.

I also uploaded a bunch of files to the Bitter Scroll podcast. They're the recordings I made for the Gallery of Germanic Languages at AncientWorlds.net, so they're not new, but at least they're all in one place. (Thanks to Aelfwine Scylding to hosting them for a while.)

Other news at AncientWorlds includes the continued development of "neighborhoods"; they're about to start beta testing the ability to "move in" to places, in any of three types of houses (social levels). So in Rome they'll have insula, domus, and villa. What's more, it sounds like the more multilingual "worlds" like Germania and the Orient will have terms appropriate to each location within it--i.e., that if you move into, say, Winchester in Wessex you'll be able to choose to live in a cot, a hám, or a seld, but if you want your persona to live in Trondheim, he may have a hýbýli, a hús, or a garðr to choose from. More interactivity will be good. There are always interesting things coming down the pipeline at AW.

An Awesome Soccer Side-Effect

[slightly updated/edited]
These two articles, on a side-effect of the World Cup in the homeland I've never seen, heartens me to no end. I remember when the "collective depression" remark was made and was depressed for Germany; now I'm happy for her. Wow, do I wish I could be over there right now!

Feelings of patriotism stifled for decades by the Holocaust came to the fore...

Finally! I've always been patriotic both for the USA and for Germany, but when people around you have knowledge of German history that stops at 1944 ... It's hard to explain to some people how you can be patriotic for what's good about a country that's done something bad, or for what came after the bad. The answer, of course, can be gleaned from statements like this:

Germany was always full of friendly and optimistic people like Klinsmann -- it's just that they were often drowned out by all the complainers and pessimists.

The good was always there. It's just sometimes like trying to explain to a friend why you still love your brother, who hurt your friend deeply long ago, but has since grown better and wiser. Still, I wonder if this German patriotism wasn't still easier here than in Germany sometimes. (How do my German readers feel about this?)

You know something seismic has happened when England fans who came to Germany with inflatable Spitfires singing " 10 German Bombers" suddenly start supporting the German national team.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair pointed out this unprecedented phenomenon in an opinion piece for Sunday's Bild am Sonntag newspaper, and declared: "The old clichés have been replaced by a new, positive and more fair image of Germany."

Again, I'm gladdened to no end, both that Germans are/feel different, and that people are starting to feel differently about them. I don't mind all that much that there are stereotypes of countries out there. Positive stereotypes, if rather useless, can be fun. (E.g., I now know to plan transportation for any outing with my friends, even ones I'm not technically organizing, and I'll just tell Mikaela it's b/c I'm half German.) ;-) Negative stereotypes, however, regardless of how often you think you see them coming true, are not only uncharitable, they're rather pointless and only hinder you from actually knowing someone.

Anyway, I'm glad Germany was able to put such a great showing of hospitality, friendliness, and yes, organization. They've done a lot to get past their somewhat recent history; now maybe everyone else can do the same in their preconceived ideas about them.

Said Britain's Times newspaper,

"Never mind the final, Germans are the real World Cup winners."

And this despite the temptations to despair and depression that preceded the Cup. A great line from the article:

It seems the only people who had any concerns ahead of the World Cup were the hosts themselves. In fact, capital-A "Angst" dominated the run-up to the tournament. Not just the normal jitters any organizer would have, but deep, ponderous Angst. The German kind.

Hm. Speaking of stereotypes, I guess I do get that quite a bit... At least I can also be organized when I need to be. And friendly. (When I need to be.)

Herzlichen Glückwünsche, Deutschland!



Update: The International Herald-Tribune has this article, perhaps a better expression of what has happened, and in context of Germany's "psychological journey" since WWII.

Simplified Spelling

From sauvagenoble's post on LingNews.net, I found this story about the ongoing desire to simplify English spelling. Here is an attempt to organize what I think about this.

1. Even if we start spelling English with the International Phonetic Alphabet, we will never be able to represent spoken English with complete accuracy. Every language, even more "phonetic" ones, like German and Spanish according to the article, has discrepancies between spoken and written forms. This comes about both from change over time and change across regions. How will you represent "talk"? With a closed aw-sound, like in England and New York, or with the more open ah-sound of the rest of North America? Will my three separate pronunciations of Mary, marry, and merry be taught as wrong if simplified spelling means there are no longer three different vowels (long a, short a, short e) in these words? Even the transcription on the IPA's own page chooses the r-less pronunciation of international, taking one side of a division that spans the entire Anglophonic world.

Language change over time is also a challenge to simplified spelling. Everytime we look at a word and realize we (or some of us) have changed how we say it, do we change spelling accordingly? It seems like simplified spelling will only reflect the pronunciation of those who enact it, at the time they enact it. And as for change over longer periods, simplifying spelling means Shakespeare--writing in early modern English and thus a challenging version of the same language we speak--will instantly become for students about accessible as Chaucer or even Beowulf.

The goal of matching spoken with written English will never be met because they serve two different purposes: Spoken language matches the varying situations of life, while written language holds them all together just close enough to preserve a fragile unity. We all have multiple versions of spoken language: public-speaking, job-interview, talking to grandparents, chatting with friends, talking to pets, cursing wayward computers, etc. And this doesn't just entail variance in vocabulary ("stupid" vs "ill-advised"; "not my F-ing problem" vs. "perhaps you should check with..."), but pronunciation as well ("gonna" vs. "going to", "nah" vs. "no", "yeah" vs. "yes"). And of course the fine line between what constitutes a different pronunciation vs. a different word (Southern "cuss" vs. standard "curse") itself only highlights the difficulty of trying to nail down standard English pronunciation into a simplified spelling.

2. Moreover, simplified spelling rests upon the idea of representing spoken speech in written. Certainly this has been the goal of writing throughout history, but in this age of literacy and electronic access to written data, the relationship between a word's spoken and written versions is more complex, with each affecting the other. E.g., when I see the word pin, my mind thinks of the word as it sounds when I say it. Yet when I hear a word spoken, my mind really does three things: 1) it registers the sounds it heard and classifies them based on the categories I've already formed (learning more languages here definitely broadens the mind), 2) it recalls the spelling of that word, and 3) it recalls how I pronounce it (the 'right' pronunciation, in a purely referential sense). So when I hear my New York friend M say pin, I hear the sounds in my head, imagine the word 'pin', and automatically compare what I heard with how I say it myself. Ah, but when most of gaetanus' family says pin, I know that's how they say the word 'pen'. It's the written form that helps us both know what we're saying, as is obvious from the very simple act of saying "How do you spell that?" when you don't understand a word spoken by someone with a different dialect from you. This easy solution, referring to the unifying written form of a word, would be lost with simplified spelling; and when we have to ask someone to describe what they mean, rather than simply spelling it, we are talking about a completely different word from ours, which can mean the difference between two dialects and two languages.

3. The article says of simplified spelling proponents:

They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say "Enuf is enuf but enough is too much" or "I'm thru with through."

Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.

[To transliterate the last sentence, "They say the bee celebrates the ability of a few students to master a difficult system that stumps many others who could do just as well if spelling were simpler."]

First off: "th ability" ? Why not "the", or even "thee" in this case? And "fue"? Why not "fyu"? Granted, these were written by the reporter, not the proponents of simplified spelling, but I'd love to know what their system will be, because it's bound to have inconsistencies of its own.

Seriously though, the spelling bee isn't just a matter of fabricating a system for a few people to be good at, and then congratulating those few that they're good at it. The reason those talented young spellers are encouraged to be good spellers--and rewarded when they are--is because to be a good speller of English you must study a lot of worthwhile stuff from other languages. In learning the why behind the spellings of many even basic words, those bright young boys and girls learn a lot about Latin, Greek, Old English, German, Hebrew, French, Anglo-Norman, and myriad other languages that have contributed to the language we have today. They also learn rules for how English typically assimilates words from each language. One of the reasons English always seems like it has more exceptions to spelling and pronunciation rules than other languages is because we have multiple sets of rules we're drawing from.

(Note that I'm not talking about syntax, which in English has always been predominantly Germanic, even with non-Germanic vocabulary: Hence "attorneys general" is a construction that English speakers are generally aware of, but that always feels a bit foreign and awkward, hence the tendency to turn it from noun-adjective to compound noun and pluralize it as "attorney generals" (which is still currently grammatically incorrect). Anyway, the native Germanic syntax of English highlights again the absurdity of saying that we shouldn't split infinitives because they weren't split in Latin or some such. If we're going to not split infinitives, it should be for a reason internal to English, and be natural to native speakers, and serve some purpose related to communication: clarity, expressiveness, etc.)

Anyway, the rules of English are definitely complex, especially in America where foreign language are usually taught waaaay too late in school, and English is only taught as having a basic set of rules with a million exceptions, instead of several interacting sets of rules with a more typical amount of exceptions. As a learning tool, though, English can't be beat for what our own native words teach you along the way, and you might try teaching it better before you ditch its historical and international richness.

Mass Metrics

[Update: fixed links]

caelestis over at sauvage noble has written a series of posts on the new draft English translation of the Roman Catholic Mass, not from a theological point of view, but from one of metrics. Check out his analyses of the mea culpa, the gloria, and the credo. Those who know me know how much I appreciate translations that capture the rhythm and feel of their original (e.g., Tolkien's Gothic poem, Bagme Bloma), so caelestis' analyses were relevant to me, perhaps more than to fellow Catholics of mine who focus on meaning alone. I really like the words I say every day/week to be pleasing to the ear.

On the other hand, I also acknowledge that theology is a science, and words that are synonymous in everyday usage can be the difference between orthodoxy and heresy, and I'd rather have people repeating something that's a little awkward metrically if it means they don't drift into an incorrect understanding of something important. Other bloggers, more qualified (or at least louder) than I, have already and will continue to pick apart the current (to be honest, kinda free and loose in places) translation of the Latin of the Mass. For my part, I can remember even as a kid looking at facing-page English-Latin missals and wondering if there was extra significance to phrases like "and with your spirit" instead of just "and also with you", or "that you should enter under my roof" instead of "to receive you". Knowing theology, there usually is--words mean things--and I hate that nagging feeling like I'm missing stuff, especially if it's because of a silly translation issue.

Maybe in a perfect world, or at least in the perfect language, what we say would be perfectly mirrored by our speech, so that words would always sound like what they meant. I suppose that would mean we'd be speaking a form of poetry all the time (maybe in heaven?).

I also noted caelestis' mention that English tends to have a higher register when more Greek and Latin/French-rooted words appear, versus a lower, more common feel when native Germanic roots dominate more. I'm sure this is an accepted observation by many linguists, and I've noticed it myself (before I heard others confirm my thoughts). I guess I just think it's interesting, and admittedly (given my stated interests), a wee bit gratifying, that after all this time, there's a deep-rooted, almost unconcious linguistic sense that Germanic words are more native or down-to-earth or something, even when the synonymous Latinate word has been around for centuries.

Finally, the Word Nerds podcast did an episode a while back about language registers, and (for example) how we are often able to recite prayers we have't said for decades, all because we remember that particular prayer-style rhythm it had. (Be forewarned: Howard Shepherd gangsta-raps the beginning of Beowulf!) I think this is related to the times in which religious training often proves useful in life: not just when we feel like talking or praying, or when we're deliberating what's right or wrong in a given situation, but (perhaps more importantly) when we're at a loss and don't know who to turn to, or when we don't deliberate about our actions. The reflex habits built into us, when done right, make us better prepared not just for the challenges life hurls at us, but for the challenges we breeze by and don't even recognize as challenges--but they would have been without a bit of training, or at least some vestige of a good habit (virtue).

Ite, blogga est.

[Go, it's gebloggedt!]

Old Germanic Sound Gallery & the Languages of the Franks

So I finally got myself to record something in six of the old Germanic languages that we have documents in (sorry, I didn't get to Old Frisian this time around) for a little event at AncientWorlds called the Thousand Years Faire. There's a thread there called the Gallery of Germanic Languages, and for each language I put together a little description, together with at least one audio resource. I'm the most confident about my pronunciation of the Old English since I've studied it the longest, then of the Gothic (just because I love its sound so much), down to the three Old High German dialects, which I'm the least confident about my pronunciation of. (Dangling preposition alert: deal with it.) :-)

Here are the posts for each (my persona on AW is Eirikr Knudsson, a nice Old English-Norse combo-name). Those of you who are actual current students or teachers of these languages are very welcome to correct my pronunciation (please). [Note: it's not supposed to work this way, but if you navigate to these links with Firefox, the embedded sound files of my readings start automatically (except for the OHG one).]

Gothic

Old Saxon

Old High German

Old English

Old Norse

Old Frankish

I called "Old Frankish" any language/dialect associated with the Franks, which as you'll learn when you read the last post, were a span of dialects mostly mutually intelligible, but which fall into what are today classified as two separate "languages": Old Low Franconian and Old High German. (Old Low German is the same as Old Saxon.) Funny how much human knowledge tries to chop up into measurable units realities that are in fact fluid and stretch across spectrums.

I've been especially interested in Old Low Franconian and the Franconian dialects of Old High German recently--an interest sparked several months ago by my musing at the Frankish tribe's switch from a Germanic to a Romance language, and wondering what language Charlemagne spoke. Does anyone know anything solid about when this change took place? It seems to me that the Franks moving into Gaul would have meant a lot more contact with native Latin (and even Celtic?) speakers. But surely it takes a while for an entire nation to switch languages. I imagined Charlemagne would have done much to effect this change himself, both by his promotion of schools and learning, and his (family's) close relationship with the Catholic Church. (My namesake in the kingdom of Wessex had similar interests in both regards, but found himself so frustrated at the state of Latin education in his land that he had scribes translate important texts into his native English until such time as people's knowledge of Latin good enough to render translations unnecessary.)

Back to the language of the Franks, then: the earliest example of Old French is the Strassburg Oaths of A.D. 842. This Wikipedia article has a great description plus the original Latin/Old French/Old High German text. (Notice the German dialect used by Louis the German's troops is Rhenish Franconian: politically it's Frankish, but linguistically it's High German.)

So sometime between the arrival of the Germanic Franks into Gaul in the 3rd century, their conversion to Catholicism in the 4th, and the Strasburg Oaths in the 9th, this wholesale language change took place. My sources list the Old Low Franconian dialect I recorded as being "east", associated with Limburg and Aachen. Obviously these areas retain Germanic dialects today (Dutch and German respectively). Moreover, not only was Aachen Charlemagne's palace-home, but the Eastern section of the Frankish kingdom (Austrasia), covering roughly northern Germany and the Low Countries, was the home of Charlemagne's line of Mayors of the Palace (pre-Pippin) / Frankish Kings (post-Pippin). Thus my conclusion that Charlemagne's line would still have spoken Germanic dialects--something between Rhenish Franconian (=Old High German) and Old East Low Franconian.

Feedback is welcome!! (Must ... refrain from ... obvious ... pun about ... being frank ...)

GGL Repost: Old English

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Old English

Old English is probably the most familiar (if any) of the old Germanic languages. Bede lists the tribes that sailed over to Britain in the fifth century as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. the Angles came from the small area jutting out into the Baltic Sea called Angeln (named for the people's primary occupation of fishing—hence 'angling'—not for its shape, since this geometric meaning of 'angle' is ultimately Latin, not Germanic). The Saxon homeland, of course, was and still is in northern Germany; and the Jutes came from what is now mainland Denmark (Jutland, now called Jylland).

Besides these three tribes, it seems likely that the migration also included a fair number of Frisians, both because their home, Friesland or Frisia, lay in the Angles' and Saxons' path to the sea, and because Frisian even today is arguably the closest language to English.

The different tribes settled in different areas, creating the various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, as well as different dialects. The Angles formed the kingdoms of East Anglia in the east, Northumberland in the north, and Mercia in the midlands. (JRR Tolkien, whose family was from the west midlands, made the Mercian dialect of Old English the language of his Riders of Rohan.) The Saxons settled the very logically named Essex, Sussex, and Wessex ("East Saxons", "South Saxons", and "West Saxons"). The Jutes settled in Kent and southern Hampshire.

The standard form of Old English first encountered by students today is West Saxon, due to the great efforts of King Alfred of Wessex, not just to increase learning, but also his shrewd policy of having important religious and cultural works translated into English until his subjects' knowledge of "book Latin" (boc-læden) had improved enough to make translations unneeded. See this post for more on the dialects of Old English.

In some ways, modern English has retained much of its Germanic heritage. Some sentences can be fashioned that are exactly the same in Old and modern English. E.g.: "Harold is swift; his hand is strong and his word grim." "His cornbin is full and his song is writen; grind his corn for him and sing me his song."* For the most part, though, Old English is undecipherable to the modern English speaker. Partly this is because of the influx of vocabulary from Romance languages that English experienced, even while its basic grammatical structure remained Germanic. Between the Norman Invasion in 1066 and the incredible influence of scholarly Latin in the Middle English period, English is like a Germanic tree with Romance leaves grafted over one side. (Approx. 25% of the English words in this post are ultimately of Romance origin.)

Old English has some characteristics in common with its long-lost cousin on the continent, Old Saxon, such as dropping nasals (n's and m's). Compare:

us: OEng/Sax ús/ûs, versus OHGer. unsih, OFrank. uns, Gothic unsis.
known: OEng/Sax cúð/cûð, versus OHGer. kund, OFrank. kundo, Gothic kunþs.
five: OEng/Sax fíf/fîf, versus OHGer./Gothic fimf.

Following are several sound files demonstrating Old English. First is the Lord's Prayer, recorded by yours truly in the standard West Saxon dialect. I've recorded the same prayer in each of the old Germanic languages to make comparison easier.

The Lord's Prayer, in Old English

Fæder úre, ðú ðe eart on heofonum,
Sí ðín nama gehálgod.
Tó becume ðín rice.
Gewurde ðín willa
On eorþan swá swá on heofonum.

Urne dægwhamlícan hlaf syle ús tódæg.
And forgyf ús úre gyltas,
Swá swá wé forgyfaþ úrum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd ðu ús on costnunge,
Ac álýs ús of yfele. Sóþlice.


The second sound file is from the Lowlands-L website, dedicated to preservation of languages and dialects related to the Lowlands (Low German, Dutch, and the like).

The Wren, in Old English

The modern English version of this story is here. Samples of many other languages are here.

Finally, I read, translate, and discuss the first part of the Dream of the Rood in this episode of my Bitter Scroll podcast.


* Taken from Bruce Mitchell, An Invitation to Old English and Anglo-Saxon England.

GGL Repost: Old Franconian

Gallery of Germanic Languages: A Look at Old (Low) Franconian

The Frankish tribes, and later, the Frankish Empire, spanned across Germany and France, and from the Netherlands to southern France. Obviously the language spoken by the people was bound to develop regional dialects. And although speakers of these dialects could all pretty much understand each other, in some of the Frankish dialects, people started pronouncing b’s like p’s, g’s like k’s, and in general, participating in the High German Consonant Shift.

Since this particular shift is what modern linguists use to distinguish the High German language from the Low Franconian (and Saxon) languages, we have the interesting factoid that some of the Franks spoke High German dialects, while others spoke "Low Franconian" dialects. But don’t worry—they didn’t know!! As far as they knew, they all spoke (with inevitable variations) roughly the same Germanic language: the language ‘of the people’ (diutisc, hence the modern word deutsch), or specifically ‘of the Franks (frankisc, hence the words ‘Frankish’ and ‘French’). Only when the language of the Franks was no longer Germanic, but Romance, did frankisc mean something different from diutisc.

The Frankish dialects that are NOT classified as dialects of the Old High German language are called Old Low Franconian. The dialect in the west (around Flanders, Brabant and north in Holland) would end up being the ancestor of modern Dutch; this dialect is called by the logical but long name of Old West Low Franconian.

The dialect in the east, probably what Charlemagne would have spoken, is the only dialect that we have anything written in (at least not until the "Middle" stage of its history); this dialect is called—you guessed it!—Old East Low Franconian. This dialect was spoken around Limburg, and Aachen, where Charlemagne had his capital.

Old Low Franconian as a language obviously shares many characteristics in common with Old High German (such as retaining nasals [n’s and m’s] where continental Saxon and Anglo-Saxon dropped them). It also shares others with its fellow "low" Germanic language, Old Saxon (such as dislike for diphthongs in some cases).

Here is one sound file in Old Low Franconian. The Lord’s Prayer is not documented in this language, as far as I could tell, so I’ve recorded Psalm 61 (60 in King James or Douay-Rheims bibles). Given the special relationship the Franks had to the Church, we can certainly imagine some young lad in a monastery or school around Aachen in the 9th century, struggling with his Latin and praying the psalm in his own Germanic tongue…

Psalm 61 (60) in Old Low Franconian

Here's the text of this Psalm:

2. Gehôri, got, gebet mîn, thenke te gebede mînin.
3. Fan einde erthen te thi riep, so sorgoda herte mîn. An stêine irhôdus-tu mi;
4. Thû lêidos mi, uuanda gedân bist tohopa mîn, turn sterke fan antscêine fiundis.
5. Uuonon sal ic an selethon thînro an uueroldi, bescirmot an getheke fetharaco thînro.
6. Uuanda thu, got mîn, gehôrdos gebet mîn, gâui thu erui forhtindon namo thînin.
7. Dag ouir dag cuningis saltu gefuogan, jâr sîna untes an dag cunnis in cunnis.
8. Foluuonot an êuuon an geginuuirdi godis; ginâthi in uuârhêide sîna uua sal thia suocan?
9. Sô sal ic lof quethan namin thînin an uuerolt uueroldis, that ik geue gehêita mîna fan dage an dag.

And here's the English:

2. Hear, O God, my supplication: be attentive to my prayer,
3. To thee have I cried from the ends of the earth: when my heart was in anguish, thou hast exalted me on a rock. Thou hast conducted me;
4. For thou hast been my hope; a tower of strength against the face of the enemy.
5. In thy tabernacle I shall dwell for ever: I shall be protected under the covert of thy wings.
6. For thou, my God, hast heard my prayer: thou hast given an inheritance to them that fear thy name.
7. Thou wilt add days to the days of the king: his years even to generation and generation.
8. He abideth for ever in the sight of God: his mercy and truth who shall search?
9. So will I sing a psalm to thy name for ever and ever: that I may pay my vows from day to day.