Only a dead language is a good language

[oloriel]

Sometimes the kind of things that delight a mediævalist student are... astonishing.
Especially if it's really small things that shouldn't have such power to excite you as they do.
This is probably interesting only to me, but I must store it somewhere anyway.

So I've been looking up Genesis in Latin because I have to do a presentation on Pengoloð Ælfric Grammaticus, or rather his Bible translation, or rather the Preface he wrote for his translation of the first half of Genesis. (You'd think you wouldn't find enough material to do a half-hour presentation on a measly preface of four pages, but in fact there's so much in there that it's hard to limit the presentation to half an hour.) At any rate, like any decent mediæval scholar, Ælfric is kind of anxious about doing translation for various reasons, including the sanctity of the syntax of the original, the danger of under- and over-interpretation, and other fun stuff.

In his preface, he quotes an example from Genesis (1:26) in order to demonstrate how important it is to pay close, close attention to the very grammar because how easily could you mess up there, and give the words a meaning they don't have - or take away meaning they should have.

The sentence in the "original" - i.e. the Vulgate text Ælfric would have used - goes
Et ait: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram et præsit piscibus maris et uolatilibus coeli et bestiis uniuersæque terræ omnique reptile, quod mouetur in terra.

His point is that "God who dictated the text to Moses" - that is, whoever put Genesis to writing, and then Jerome who did the translation into Latin - wrote ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram, not ad imagines et similitudines nostras - or, in English: it's "to our image and likeness", not "to our images and likenesses". In other words, the subject and personal pronoun are plural - Faciamus, and nostram - but the object as such is singular - ad imaginem et similitudinem. This is proof that there's been a Trinity, a three - plural - in one - singular - all along. Even in the Old Testament. If you know how to read it. Quoth Ælfric.
Which is a fun game, and a nice thing to let the class puzzle over (the professor wants the presenters to include the plenum).

(Does anyone among you know, by any chance, whether Jerome would already have known and used the pluralis maiestatis? I know the Anglo-Saxons didn't, but I have no idea about that period of Latin. juno_magic? *hopeful look*)

At any rate, I looked this up in the Latin, and then I looked it up in Ælfric's translation - and found, in the very same sentence, two more awesome (...) things I can point out. So yes, there's actually three features in one inconspicuous sentence. (Three in one. HAH!) Here's where my excitement and utter delight begin.

This is what Ælfric made of the Latin:
ך cwæð: Vton wyrcan man to anlicnysse ך to ure gelicnysse, ך he sy ofer ða fixas ך ofer ða fugelas ך ofer ða deor ך ofer ealle gesceafta ך ofer ealle creopende, ðe styriað on eorðan.

(The strange hook thing is read "and".)

Those of you who are literate in both Latin and Anglo-Saxon may have noticed what I am aiming at:

1. For all Ælfric talks about how painstakingly careful the translator must be in order to be neither too literal nor too liberal, there's a grammatical blooper in the very phrase he has just brought to our attention.
Compare:
ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram
to anlicnysse ך to ure gelicnysse
Well? Well?
Exactly! In Latin the adjective follows any and all referents. nostram? Refers to both imaginem and similitudinem.
The way Ælfric put it, it refers to gelicnysse - "likeness" - alone. He could have followed the Latin literally, going to anlicnysse ך to gelicnysse ure. Anglo-Saxon grammar allows for that. But that he didn't do. HE MADE A MISTAKE RIGHT THERE. Well, not a mistake - but a change that may be stylistic but may also be relevant to the sense.

2. Ælfric also warns about adding stuff or leaving stuff out, because - as he tells us - it was all dictated this very way by God* and He had His reasons even for the things that look superfluous to us.
But if you compare the "original" and the translation again:

præsit piscibus maris et uolatilibus coeli et bestiis uniuersæque terræ omnique reptile, quod mouetur in terra
he sy ofer ða fixas ך ofer ða fugelas ך ofer ða deor ך ofer ealle gesceafta ך ofer ealle creopende, ðe styriað on eorðan

Aside from the fun fact that obviously "to be" was still a full verb back in those days, you'll probably have noticed that Ælfric left out a lot of elaboration. Understandably, one might say - we all know that the fish are in the sea and the birds in the sky and the animals all over the place and the reptiles down on the ground, there's really no need to explain that kind of thing. Saying "fish of the sea" rather than just "fish" is just poetry, there's no important content transmitted there². But still it's in what Ælfric thought was the original (actually, it's in the original originals, too), and he just left it out. Perhaps he thought it was in the Latin because perhaps not everybody knew that fish tend to be in the water and flying things tend to be under the sky but surely we Anglo-Saxons are smarter than that and know where to find our co-creatures. But he left it out.
These days, of course, we could leave it out, because these days we know that the elaboration is just a remainder from the days of oral transmission, a mnemotechnic trick: It is easier to remember context-bound knowledge than random lists, especially when the context includes contrasting components that build up on each other. Besides, the story-teller has more time to plan ahead for the next sentences when reciting empty phrases like "of the seas and of the skies and of the earth", and the audience has more time to process the information they're hearing. There really is not much information as regards content; it's just frills. But still, in Ælfric's belief God Himself would have put the apparently superfluous "of the sea..." in there, so it's quite daring to leave it out. Especially after he's been talking about the dangers of translation as regards bending God's word to Our Feeble Understanding (tm).

Quite the little heretic, our Ælfric!

Anyway. See, see? Is not this awesome? Is not this exciting? Is not this brilliant?! And how the hell am I supposed to limit my presentation to half an hour when even one small straightforward sentence contains such a wealth of information? The preface as such contains information enough for a master's thesis, and I mean a proper master's thesis, not these infuriating adorable little dissertations from 1895 they have in our university library where people got a Ph.D. for 20 pages of text and five Works Cited, which would just barely suffice for in-semester credit these days. Oh, for auld lang syne.

... of course it's the rising standard of education and academia that makes it possible for me (a woman, what's more!) to triumph over Ælfric, who was one of the leading scholars in his day, at least on his island. The past is like Tôkyô, great for a visit but you wouldn't want to live there.

...
Sometimes the kind of things that delight a mediævalist student are... astonishing.

- - -
*We should not blame poor Ælfric for his naïvety in this instance, of course. He's been dead these past 1000 years, so he had no chance to change his mind. I hear there are still people who believe the same thing to this day - now those are a scary case!
²For anyone tempted to say that "fish of the sea" is, in fact, different from "fish in general" because the latter also includes "fish of the lakes and rivers and breakfast tables": Back in those days any conglomeration of water bigger than a pond could be called a "sea". As man was not actually extant yet at the point we're talking about, the breakfast table option is out anyway.

Comments

<3

[yoodi.livejournal.com]

There's few things more delightful than Geekery.

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

I find it interesting that Aelfric found this to be an argument for the trinity, as I've also seen the plurals in those verses in Hebrew used as an argument for the underlying polytheism of an earlier world-view.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

I can imagine that! But that wouldn't have been congruent with Ælfric's view of the world. I mean, he wasn't that much of a heretic. ;)

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

Despite not being a follower of the Levantine god myself, I have a lot of strange knowledge squirreled away in the back of my head about the bible, and its various stages of translation. For instance, the word which is translated in most English versions of the Bible as "The Lord," actually goes back to a Hebrew word which is plural, and is used as evidence that a lot of the origin mythology is actually about what the gods did.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Ælfric probably didn't know about the Hebrew in the first place, though - hence his belief in the sanctity of the Latin. And for him - staunch little Catholic - it would be obvious that the plural refers to the Trinity, and not to a multitude of gods like them pagan Danes had. Keep in mind that we're talking about 10th century scholarship here, not 20th ;)

[cowboy-r.livejournal.com]

Oh, I understand completely. I just find it interesting that he took the same (or similar) evidence, and used it to support a completely different conclusion than modern scholars (or at least some of them) do.

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

We certainly agree on that. :)

[ladyelleth.livejournal.com]

Insert squee here. :)

Unfortunately I'm in a bit of a hurry, so can't elaborate (and probably won't have to as my thoughts are with yours pretty much, and will need more time to puzzle over the ure sentence - I see what you mean, my only initial response aside from 'mistake!' so far would be a faily 'liberal Anglo-Saxon syntax because after all there is a fairly clear referent', or maybe 'is he trying to avoid being blasphemous (even if that again would be quite daring and disobeying his own maxims on translation), because after all, what about making no images of God?' Forgive my faily OE, but surely they would have a different word than anlicnysse for that.

As for fish and the birds and the beasts and other co-creations, as you said, sǽ would be applicable to most kinds of water (iirc), but their vocab wasn't so impoverished that they couldn't distinguish the usually big and salty kind of water (Belegaer gársecg!), so he could have as well put it in, since even though it was poetry it was God's word and ought not to be altered (as you said, no need to elaborate on my position here *cough*). Surely God wouldn't need mnenotechnic tricks, and it would only be more to write down for poor Moses. *is struck by lightning* But... again, I don't know how it is for Anglo-Saxon, but as it was pointed out to us during one of the 'History of English' lecture sessions, OHG was pretty liberal in the application of these terms, e.g. 'Fugel' including birds and bats, bees and butterflies; with similar groupings for their words for fish and deer denominating swimming creatures and those that walked around on land. If there was any similar notion in Anglo-Saxon England, that would have been more of an incentive to keep it in, if anything. Or maybe he thought the Latin version was making that same distinction by using those terms? Does that even make any sense?

And now, ironically, this turned out far longer than initially imagined and there's no use heading to the library to do my History of English homework. Irony. But yep, you're definitely not the only weird person going into a squee puzzling over some textual mysteries. ^^

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Mwahahahah.

what about making no images of God
Well, obviously God Himself would be allowed to make images of Himself. I mean, He did, if you follow the mythology, or none of us would exist. ;)

As I said, Ælfric wouldn't have known about the mnemonic trick part. I think the fish = swimming things and fugel = flying things (note that the Latin says volatilis, "flying things", not aves "birds", too) applies to both the AS and the Latin, so there's not actually a problem there. He probably really thought something along the lines of "well, that's just useless frills" when he left it out. Or he was lazy and didn't want to have to scrape and stretch yet more vellum just because of a few superfluous words. ;)

As for the ure, it really is a tricky thing. Very strictly speaking, the ure COULD refer to both even as it is - but on first sight one would apply it to the word it precedes, not to both, so even if it isn't necessarily wrong, it does invite the reader to draw wrong conclusions. Of course if he'd written ure anlicnisse and gelicnisse one might still say that he did interpretation he shouldn't have done, because technically the nostram MIGHT just have referred to similitudinem after all. The safest way would really have been to anlicnisse and gelicnisse ure - grammatically acceptable, congruent with the original, and leaving all responsibility with the reader. ;)

[satismagic.livejournal.com]

The history of the Bible and its translations is full of fun. And a good reminder never to discount the human factor i.e. translation mistakes (or not even mistakes, but translate something from Hebrew or Old Aramaeic or whatever the original was in to Greek to Latin to Old English to Modern English and it is actually a surprise it still makes any kind of sense at all, ahem).

As for the Latin question, I couldn't say - while I keep being surprised at how much Latin I still know, I never delved that deeply. HOWEVER, may I refer you to the very friendly and as a Latin teacher also very knowledgeable sc010f on my flist? I'm sure she'd be happy to answer your question! :)

[oloriel.livejournal.com]

Well, they didn't actually translate it from Hebrew to Greek to Latin to Old English to Modern English. Just Hebrew -> Greek (the OT - the NT was first written in Greek anyway, or at least that goes for all known manuscripts, IIRC); Hebrew (OT) + Greek (NT) -> Latin; Latin -> Old English; Latin -> Middle English; Latin -> Early Modern English; Hebrew + Greek -> Early Modern English; Hebrew + Greek -> Modern English. Still confusing, and with occasionally hilarious results ("Thou Shalt Commit Adultery", although that was a typesetting error rather than a translating error), but not nearly as tapeworm-y as expected ;)

Darn, I'd hoped you might have gotten that bit of information while dealing with medieval Latin. Alas. - Asked sc010f, will see whether she answers. It's not vital information, really - it'd just be nice to know, additionally.