Pater Familias

A MICROACCENT FROM 600 YEARS AGO. Ted Hughes not only took the title poem of his 1967 book WODWO from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he also translated parts of “Sir Gawain” in 1997. One of the reasons that “Sir Gawain” may have appealed to Hughes—aside from the fact that it is a great, great poem—is that the poem was written in about 1375 in a localized dialect, much farther removed from standard English than is the language of THE CANTERBURY TALES. Tom Shippey (in an essay collected in ROOTS AND BRANCHES) says that “the modern descendants of the Gawain-poet’s dialect are among the least-regarded and lowest-status dialects of modern England.” I posted earlier on how a linguist was able to identify within a block the home in the Bronx where my friend Dick Weisfelder grew up. Shippey says that philologists can identify — within one hundred yards— a location for the Gawain poet, who wrote over 600 years ago.

WHERE THERE ARE COINS, THERE MUST BE MARKETS. This article tells of the discovery in the Netherlands of Celtic gold coins which were minted by the Eburones (a tribe that Julius Caesar claimed to have wiped out in 53 B.C) and also of Celtic silver coins which were minted by tribes further north. Coins are strong evidence that there were local markets in Caesar’s Gaul.

NEBRASKA SPLITS ITS ELECTORAL VOTES. I have always skipped reading articles which argue for electing the president by popular vote or for electoral college reform. I can’t imagine it happening. I can’t imagine the smaller states voting to approve a constitutional amendment which would reduce their influence. It is possible, however for a state to divide its electoral college vote. Maine and Nebraska do. This year Nebraska split its electoral college votes between McCain and Obama.

GRIMSTON HYBRIDS—“VIKING” AND “ENGLISH” INTERACTING. (COMMENT). Matthew Byrne also argues in his comment that “place names didn’t necessarily describe the people of a particular place” and that Viking tags (“by” and “thorp”) are not a certain guide that a location was a Viking settlement. He endorses the possibility that the Vikings “actually adopted English fairly rapidly.” Michael Wood finds examples of mixed use of language which support Byrne. He points to the place name “Grimston.” “Grim” is a Viking name, and “tun” is old English for farm or village, so that the first element is a Scandinavian personal name and the second element is an English suffix. There are over 60 examples of what are known as “Grimston hybrids.” Grimston itself is apparently in what is considered Viking territory but near the edge of English territory. As further evidence of mixed influence in language, Wood cites the village of Laxton, which has an English name, but which has a number of fields with Danish words in their names.

VIKINGS AND ANGLES AND SAXONS LIVING SIDE BY SIDE (COMMENT). As it happens, Mary Jane recently gave me a copy of Michael Wood’s THE DOMESDAY QUEST, and I was reading it at the time Michael Byrne posted his comment. Wood provides support for Byrne’s arguments. Byrne describes settlement patterns where “certain Germanic groups settled long ago (Danes in some areas, Swedes in others and Angles and Saxons in others - with mixing in these areas) - maybe even before the Romans. With virtually no solid proof from these areas, how can we make sweeping racial, cultural or linguistic statements?” Michael Wood says, “[E]verything points to a mixed society right from the start of the settlement period” and “All the evidence suggests that [the Scandinavians] moved in alongside the native Anglian peoples rather than drove them out or made them subject.”

NINETEENTH CENTURY VIEWS OF “ENGLISHNESS.” (COMMENT). Tom Shippey, who is an authority on the languages of the British Isles, had a review in the Times Literary Supplement for October 17 of Robert J.C. Young’s THE IDEA OF ENGLISH ETHNICITY. Michael Byrne says in his comment that: “Most of the terms Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Scandinavian and well as Ancient Briton as mere modern inventions made by people with their own view of history.” Shippey makes a related point: “Possibly it was Walter Scott who popularized the idea, often repeated, that ‘Englishness’ never really existed per se, being instead a roll-up term incorporating native Celt, long-established Saxon, invading Dane, and invading Norman….” I take it that “Englishness” then is a term arising in the early nineteenth century that gives a name to a complex product of local interactions over hundreds of years.

LANGUAGES DEVELOPING LOCALLY (COMMENT). I posted in March 2007 on articles that asserted that a version of English was spoken in Britain before the Roman invasion and that argued against claims that Celtic was spoken in Britain up until Angles and Saxons invaded in around 500 A.D. My wife Mary Jane rightly pointed out that the picture should include a variety of tribes from different parts of Germany, each speaking their own dialects. Now Michael Byrne has posted a long comment which sheds a lot of light on the issues. You should check the comment here, but I want to highlight—I hope accurately–some of Byrne’s points in the next couple days. One of his major points is that we have no basis for making “sweeping racial, cultural or linguistic statements.” I think that the development of the French language gives a guide to what happened in England. I would take 19th century France and Italy as a guide to England one thousand years earlier. For centuries, language in France was local. I posted here that at the time of the French Revolution there were 55 major dialects in France and hundreds of subdialects and here that in the late 1800’s only one Italian in 40 spoke standard Italian. Applying terms like “English” or “Danish” or “Celtic” to the small tribal settlements in England has to be misleading.

NATURE RUNS SOME EXPERIMENTS. I have posted here and here on Professor John Meyer’s warning that “Nature does not run very good experiments.” That is, nature doesn’t make the right kinds of changes in variables to let us make a computer model of the economy or find out the underlying economic relationships. Among other problems, because a number of variables move in the same direction at the same time, it is difficult to untangle causation. It occurs to me that nature is running some very good experiments right now which will serve to provide graduate students with material for dissertations for years to come.

WE WERE HERE TEN YEARS AGO (COMMENT). The kinds of financial problems that we are seeing are not new, although the scale of them is. My brother Elmer commented here that we have had four crashes in the last twenty years, with excessive leverage featuring prominently in them. I have gone back and found this article from Business Week for September 21, 1998 about the Long-Term Capital Management crisis. Long-Term Capital Management was founded by brilliant men, two of whom had won a Nobel Prize in Economics, to engage in complicated trading strategies driven by computer models. The article was written just before the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had to organize a $3.625 billion rescue of Long-Term Capital Management. The following quotations from the article explaining what went wrong ten years ago hold true today: 1. “To work, the quant models need liquid markets on all sides of the trade.” 2. “The carnage was widespread because so many people were making the same kinds of bets.” 3.”[T]he use of more and more borrowed money, resulting in many trades leveraged to the hilt.”

AN EARLY THANKSGIVING STORY. On Thanksgiving two years ago, I gave thanks to the Americans who have gone before us for what they gave us (it was the 9th post on this blog). In that post I typed out the names listed in Herman Wouk’s WAR AND REMEMBRANCE of the 82 young men from the three torpedo squadrons who changed the course of the war in the Pacific at the Battle of the Midway. One of the names on the list was Wilfred N. McCoy. His granddaughter inquired about Wilfred N. McCoy in a comment, and the two comments of yesterday and today tell of how family members found each other through that comment on this blog. I am moved by this story which resulted from a tribute to heroism.