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I was thinking about something slightly similar today - I was initially thinking about Charles Dickens books. Those books are harder for me to read than contemporary books because of the nuances of language. Some words undergo subtle changes in meaning, some words become archaic.
I was thinking more in terms of the specialized vocabulary necessary because of the technological changes - things that no longer exist but would have been commonplace, everyday items when the book was published.
I have another association with "discrimination", or rather with "discriminator" - in radiation measurement, a discriminator is used in circuitry to differentiate between pulses of various energies. This is a physical interpretation of "discriminator," and it relates more to the second, more neutral definition discussed above.
When I'm reading older books, I tend to rely heavily on the footnotes.
And as for Shakespeare, although we can still identify with the action, the tragedy and the human emotion, a lot must be lost from the comedies, since they were packed with topical satire that the audience in the Globe would have understood, but we don't.
I actually noticed this phenomenon over the weekend. I turned on the TV and "The Man Who Came to Dinner" was on the classic movie channel. One of the characters began telling a story about "smoking a cigar with one hand while making love to a beautiful woman with the other." Given that he was talking about doing this in a restaurant, that statement was rather shocking to someone in 2009. Except then I remembered that in the 1940s, the phrase "making love" had much more chaste connotations than it does today. And that's only within 60 years!On the Shakespeare issue, back when I was teaching ESL I remember being quite surprised at what a sophisticated understanding of the plays my Korean students all seemed to have. Then I realized that they'd all read them in translation, and they were actually probably more advantaged in their reading experience of those works than their native-English-speaking peers.
@Dana: Your point about the Bard reminds me of John McWhorter, who's commented in several of his books that Shakespeare's become such an icon of English literature that English editors are reluctant to "translate" the Elizabethan English yet no translation puts his plays into the 16th century equivalent of whatever language it's being translated into.
BunWat wrote: "That's an interesting point. However, Shakespeare has been such an influence on English that we still use his language in many ways. We still use his turns of phrase and his metaphors and his voc..."McWhorter's concern is that by deifying Shakespeare's language, we're making it less and less accessible to English speakers outside of the academic setting.
The language barrier isn't so high in the tragedies or histories but (for me) the greatest obstacle to enjoying the comedies is that a lot of it is topical and/or depends upon Elizabethan pronunciations that haven't survived. I don't want to refer to the notes every 2 lines to get what's going on :-(
I wonder if there's a similar concern in Japan over the continued relevance of Genji if, a couple of generations from now, only a JapLit major will be able to understand it?
I was just thinking about this topic a bit the other day...my husband was reading one of the Beatrix Potter stories to my 5 1/2 year old and had to ask me what 'larder' meant. Later, he told me there were quite a few words in the stories (we have a complete boxed set) that he has no idea what they mean.RE: Shakespeare - I don't read his works on my own, because the most enjoyable readings of S's work (for me) have been when I was in a group setting or class where someone could explain all the references to us. It really detracts from the story when you don't get the 'in' jokes or cultural references of the time they were written. He does such wonderful plays on words, that you just can't 'get' unless you're familiar with the background.
Reminds me of reading Chaucer in high school - thank goodness we got a translation of it...
Edited to add: Oh, and another word that has totally changed in meaning and connotation, which used to be used pretty often: gay.
I must admit that I've always been a bit odd and enjoyed Shakespearean language. I even enjoy reading some old English, though that can be quite difficult at times. After reading through the different comments, it got to me thinking of more questions.
What is important in storytelling? Is it the emotion that it invokes? Is it the thoughts? Is it the people in the story that we can relate to? Is it the story itself?
Could we take one of the Bard's stories, convert it to modern English and still keep the different nuances that help to make it what it is?
One of the things that makes reading older literature so intriguing is encountering words with archaic meanings. I can't help but enjoy seeing words like "gay" or "queer" used in an entirely different context that their modern interpretations. Coming across obsolete words like "afore" or "ere" (before) or anon (soon) or eke (also) is like stepping into a time machine.I can understand how people who are unfamiliar with these words can have a very difficult time grasping archaic literature. But I think it's quite enjoyable to read older literature if for nothing else than to get a sense of history for our constantly evolving language.
And yet . . . it is possible to pick up even something as old as Chaucer (in the original) and make out the meaning. It's work and there are certainly gaps, but its possible to see how the language evolve.One weakness of much current science fiction and fantasy is its failure to grasp the importance of language. Of course, with all the other first contact issues, it'd impede the story if characters couldn't communicate with one another, but--but there's more to communication that just solved by a "universal translator" module.
Timothy Zahn makes that point well in his "Thrawn trilogy" in which the title character bases his battle strategy on insights drawn from the art works of the culture he is fighting. John Scalzi makes a similar point in Old Man's War relative to one culture's motivation to combat having nothing to do with defending itself or conquering others.
How much would it aid a new English speaker to understand all that has been said above about Shakespeare (preferably without having to read it all).
I think language is one of those keepsakes that allow readers to be transported not only to another place, but time. When I read Beowulf, I get a sense of what it was like to live in a time when people still believed in gods and monsters. So much attention is paid to the warrior culture and the language used in Beowulf captures the essence of what it was to be Anglo-Saxon living in uncertain times.Reading MacBeth is a compeltely different experience. History is captured in the language of a people and each literary work created in different historical periods reveals not only the evolution of language, but the changing values of a society.
Reading old literature is a great way to better understand our language.
Actually, I have read Beowulf in Old English. The edition I read had the English translation side by side with the original Old English text. I agree. The text is very musical when you read Beowulf in its original form out loud.
Whoops, I go out of town for 4 days, and people continue an interesting conversation without me!@Terence, yes, John McWhorter did write about that. I read his book that had that bit in it at about the same time I started teaching ESL undergrads, in a weird moment of synchronicity. Also, Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct" contains another reference to the phrase "making love" and how rapidly its connotations have shifted, so I was primed to notice it as well.
@BunWat, I agree, reading Anglo Saxon/Old English is definitely like another language entirely. Studying it made me feel glad we got rid of most of the case system. It was fun, though. I will say that the teacher's attempts to correct our pronunciation reminded me of Doomsday Book and the main character's discovery that her training in "authentic speech of the time period" was anything but. (Not that I pointed this out to the professor.)
Dana wrote: "I will say that the teacher's attempts to correct our pronunciation reminded me of Doomsday Book and the main character's discovery that her training in "authentic speech of the time period" was anything but. (Not that I pointed this out to the professor.)"Excellent observation (and funny!)
Dana,That is funny. My friends and I would read books with old names/cities/places and I used to have people ask me how they were pronounced because I always read them with confidence. I have no clue how they were actually pronounced, but then again no one else truly did either.
BunWat wrote: "Well we do have some idea, although I agree, not a definitive one. "I think part of the reason I found our idea of what the language would have sounded like frustrating is that it involved sounds that I had previously encountered in my German and Spanish courses, which I had, up until then, kept in strictly separate language camps. Now I had to try to mix two systems I'd spent so much time trying to keep apart! I never managed to pronounce every word in a whole sentence the "right" way.
Shakespeare's stuff is relatively accessible, despite its antiquity. Sometimes the dry and straightforward is more dangerous than the fruity and antique. Thomas Sowell made the point that almost no one who quotes Adam Smith or other early economists knows what they were talking about, for two simple reasons:
1. Essentially no one reads the original books all the way through.
2. The seemingly plain English in which these works were written features a host of words with meanings very different from modern usage. "Rent," "Demand," and "Natural" are among the trouble makers.
1. Essentially no one reads the original books all the way through.
2. The seemingly plain English in which these works were written features a host of words with meanings very different from modern usage. "Rent," "Demand," and "Natural" are among the trouble makers.
When I studied Greek a few years ago, the instructor admitted that we have no idea how classical Greek sounded but assumedly not how Greek sounds today.
English apparantly started as a german dialect spoken in one town, but like any language it's constantly evolving and adding words from other languages. There are french words in use in day to day life which are no longer used by the French. English also creeps into other languages.Carolyn
It depends where you live as to wether a word is in common use or not. In England the word larder is still in use, as is the word pantry.
There are lots of differences between today's English and today's American. Within a few decades they may be two languages.English didn't start in one town; it started on one island. With an undercurrent of Brythonic (close to today's Welsh) and Latin. And later overlays of more Latin and French.
And it, like most modern languages is evolving before our eyes. It's a great time to live.
Yes, I agree with Bun Wat. Although the various forms of English spoken in the US, Australia, Britain, New Zealand etc were drifting apart, the advent of films, TV and latterly the Internet has meant a greater homogeneity. We are all, more and more, adopting one form of speech and writing that is primarily based on American English, with some Australian influences and some techy contractions like text and chat speak. Complaining about it reminds me of King Canute...
hey, I have 3 teenagers. I can tell you they are bilingual. They speak english and teenlish. They are not the same language at all and the devergence only took a couple of years.
SciFi and Fantasy Book Club
Books mentioned in this topic
Doomsday Book (other topics)Authors mentioned in this topic
Thomas Sowell (other topics)John McWhorter (other topics)
"Discrimination." We know it now as a term meaning "unfounded bias against a person, group, or culture on the basis of racial, gender, or ethnic background." Prejudice, if you will.
The previous meaning of the word was: "to draw a clear distinction between good and evil, to differentiate, to recognize as different." Moreover, the connotations once associated with discrimination were favourable. A person of discrimination was one of taste and good judgment.
I’m sure we could think of plenty of other words that have changed in meaning over the years. We could look at words like “awesome” that have been used so frequently in our time that it has lost its significance. We could consider words like “cool” where our society has somewhat recently attached meanings to it that bear little or no resemblance to the original.
Aside from the change of the meaning of words most authors tend to carry cultural baggage or perhaps assumptions and preconceptions from the cultures that have influenced them.
Having said all that, how much do you think we lose, miss, or misunderstand when we read books from earlier ages?
I enjoy reading old books and have several that are more than a century old. I even have one that is about 400 years old that I picked up from a garage sale once. I also enjoy Shakespeare, Beowulf, Homer, and books like that, but sometimes I wonder how much I miss because of a different world view or because of the change of language.