Would the five-hundred year rule have applied?
We were reading an excerpt from Robinson Crusoe in class this morning, which included an exercise in converting early 18th century English into contemporary English. One of the quotations, which come from near the start of the novel, was “crying everyone according to his usual note”.
I thought it was interesting for two reasons (and perhaps a third, although that’s a matter of editing). One is the use of “everyone”, which seems to be on the border between being a full-blown pronoun and simply a compounding of “every one”. It looks appositional to me, but I’m wondering whether this is an instance of a phenomenon which I’ve read about elsewhere in which some languages (e.g. Italian) tend to place indefinite subjects after the verb. Defoe only uses “everyone” a few times and only on this occasion in this particular construction.
However, some (most?) texts have “every one”, and most appear to have “crying, and every one according to his usual note”, but the text we’re using omits the conjunction. So it seems that I might’ve stumbled across some (incautious) editing, but I’m sure that our text lacked “and” at that point. [Later: checked the text; it does have “and”, but I think it does readers a disservice by treating “every one” as a single word.]
The other point was the use of “his” where we would have “their”, and a few zealots might have “its”, which prompted me to write a note on the board about the development of “its” in English, and how it took some time for the form to become established. I’ve read somewhere that Shakespeare used “it” for “its” on at least one occasion, although I’ve never been sure whether that’s a claim which can be substantiated.
But in turn, this had me recalling Chaucer’s famous line from Troilus and Criseyde about the mutability of language, which then made me wonder about my five-hundred-year rule. That is, the form of a language more than five hundred years ago is no longer fully comprehensible because the grammar and lexicon have undergone sufficient changes to render a lot of it meaningless. To me, for example, late Middle English looks like Modern English with brain damage, and Shakespeare is already largely incomprehensible, not because the plays were mostly in verse, but because the language is almost five hundred years old.
That had me wondering whether anyone in Chaucer’s day could’ve understood the Old English of the second half of the 9th century at all, or the effects of the Norman Conquest on the English lexicon, as well as the simplification of the inflectional system had so cut the English language off from its past that the older form of the language really was foreign. Mind you, I also have a theory that English didn’t exist as a truly separate linguistic entity from its Continental cousins until the Middle English period.
How many hornets?
I’ve just looked at the cover of The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and wondered whether the apostrophe, which is an orthographic marker of the genitive, is in the wrong place, being to the left of the inflection, indicating a single hornet, instead of the right, indicating a whole nest of them.
The Swedish title is Luftslottet som Sprängdes which seems to mean something like “The castles in the air which got destroyed”, which is no doubt a reference to the illusion of the decency of Sweden and its government. (Recent reports about immigrants in Sweden being targeted by gunmen seem to continue that demolition.)
In forme of land is chaunge, too.
香榭路 seems to be under complete redevelopment, although no one’s being stopped from using the street as a thoroughfare in spite of its resemblance to a building site with fencing at either end and gateposts (though no gates). The trees at this end have been heavily pruned and, I assume, are going to be removed. They’ll probably be replaced, but whether anyone has the wit to have the pavement run inside the line of trees rather than down the middle is for future revelation. In addition, the car park has been completely ripped up and some large holes dug in it. Anyone using the street is, however, deterred from falling into the holes by a line of small cones. Yes, it’s safety first in the imperium sericum.
Aierma appears to have been mothballed, and again, only posterity knows whether that’ll be a supermarket again. No sign that the place was going to be refurbished.
The houses down at the other end of the street have almost all gone, and a digger has been in creating a huge heap of dirt for no apparent reason. On the other side of the street the Jiulong Hotel has been gutted, although I’m not sure whether they’re going to demolish the building or it’s being stripped to the absolute bones.
[A few days later (06.11.10). 香榭路 has now been completely cut off apart from access at this end for the shops on the west side of the street and access to the flats behind them; and a break where the street which runs along the south side of the school intersects with 香榭路. The rest seems to have been cut off to cars, although pedestrians, electric bike jockeys, and cyclists can still get through. (Added while I was editing the formatting of this entry after it, the formatting, mysteriously vanished.)]
In other construction news, the bridge which was built to these two new buildings east of my place doesn’t just have coloured lights. No, for the amusement of the local spectators, it also squirts jets of water. Someone seems to have had the idea of combining a bridge and a fountain. Still don’t know what the new buildings are going to house, and the work over there has yet to be completed.