And the winner of the mostest ugliestest word goes to …

… “winningest”!

Seriously, who on Earth (or in America, to be precise, since to my knowledge nobody outside the US actually uses this linguistic abomination) thought that this word makes any sense? Did its coiner pause to reflect, even for a moment, about whether the structure of the word hung together in any coherent way? Or whether the meaning the word was intended to have (a) needed a single word to express it, and (b) was in fact expressed in some sensible way by this word?

And now, the New York Times, of all places, uses it. Admittedly, it’s only its Magazine section, but why oh why would someone use this horrid, cumbersome word at all?

If there was an annual competition for “hideousest word of the year”, “winningest” would be the winningest word.

“Two things stand like stone”

The words of the Australian poet Adam Lindsay Gordon ring especially true in these times:

Life is mostly froth and bubble;

Two things stand like stone—

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

On hunting birds and God

I just came across Galway Kinnell’s beautiful To Christ Our Lord on this blog post by Alan Jacobs:

The legs of the elk punctured the snow’s crust

And wolves floated lightfooted on the land

Hunting Christmas elk living and frozen;

Inside snow melted in a basin, and a woman basted

A bird spread over coals by its wings and head.

Snow had sealed the windows; candles lit

The Christmas meal. The Christmas grace chilled

The cooked bird, being long-winded and the room cold.

During the words a boy thought, is it fitting

To eat this creature killed on the wing?

He had killed it himself, climbing out

Alone on snowshoes in the Christmas dawn,

The fallen snow swirling and the snowfall gone,

Heard its throat scream as the gunshot scattered,

Watched it drop, and fished from the snow the dead.

He had not wanted to shoot. The sound

Of wings beating into the hushed air

Had stirred his love, and his fingers

Froze in his gloves, and he wondered,

Famishing, could he fire? Then he fired.

Now the grace praised his wicked act. At its end

The bird on the plate

Stared at his stricken appetite.

There had been nothing to do but surrender,

To kill and to eat; he ate as he had killed, with wonder.

At night on snowshoes on the drifting field

He wondered again, for whom had love stirred?

The stars glittered on the snow and nothing answered.

Then the Swan spread her wings, cross of the cold north,

The pattern and mirror of the acts of earth.

Reading it on the first clear night after the first real snowfall of this winter, I could not help but think of the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa and of the birth of poetry in Sanskrit. The great seer (and composer of the Rāmāyaṇa) Vālmīki witnesses a hunter killing one of a pair of birds mating. Appalled, and overtaken by grief, he curses the hunter with what forms the first poem in Sanskrit:

mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ |

yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam ||

I wrote about this poem and about its ingenious re-reading by the medieval Śrīvaiṣṇava commentator Govindarāja earlier on this blog.

The moral lessons of The Hobbit

After having defended Peter Jackson’s Hobbit from some of its most common critiques, I shall now turn to some of the things I enjoyed the most about the movie. Most of these come from Tolkien’s Hobbit, but again, just because a story sounds good in one mode does not automatically mean that it will “click” when told in a different mode.

The great challenge in a visual depiction of the Quest of Erebor is this: this is an event on a much smaller scale than the War of the Ring. For viewers who are looking for epic set-piece battles (or as a little birdie put it to me, for those “who don't necessarily share the love for the books and just walked in to see Orlando Bloom buckle his swash”), there really isn’t anything in the Quest of Erebor that provides this, except for the climactic Battle of the Five Armies. Even the One Ring, which is mildly important for the War of the Ring, plays a minor role here. Its importance wasn’t even recognized by most people at the time of the Quest!

But as Tolkien repeatedly tells us, small does not have to mean insignificant, and this applies to everything, from the hobbits to the Quest itself. 

A fanboy defends The Hobbit

Anybody who knows me knows of my obsession with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s legendarium. This is not the place to enumerate the reasons for my obsession. My goal is far narrower: to explain why I loved Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

The Critiques
In good Indic fashion, I begin with the pūrvapakṣa, the opponent(s’|’s) view. A number of criticisms have been leveled against Peter Jackson’s Hobbit enterprise. At the root of many of them is his decision to split the original book into three three-hour films, only one of which has been released so far. (His Lord of the Rings runs close to twelve hours, but then it covers nearly a thousand pages of text.) This opened him up to criticism from multiple directions, even before the movie came out:

• that his motivation is purely financial; that, since fanboys of Tolkien are going to watch whatever he serves up, why not make three times as much money by making three movies?
• that the original story is far too thin to support nine hours of film, which will force him to draw out some scenes interminably and possibly to add extra plotlines
• that his intended demographic is no longer the demographic that Tolkien targeted with his original book

I made some of these criticisms myself, while also recognizing (only slightly ruefully) that I fall squarely into Jackson’s target “sucker fanboy” demographic.

Now that “Episode I” is out, critics have duly rehashed all these critiques. They claim that the movie plods along interminably; that it should really have been trimmed down to 100 minutes (which would have the added benefit of making it more accessible to children); that a number of changes have been made to the plotline that simply make no sense other than adding screentime (stone giants! Jar-Jar Binks, I mean, Radagast!), and so on. They have also made two additional critiques:

• that the movie is far more violent than the book, and thus violates Tolkien’s vision (among other things)
• that the story has been changed fundamentally, in ways that are completely unnecessary (in particular, referring to the alteration of the Battle of Azanulbizar and the survival of Azog)

My Response
I loved every minute of the movie. There wasn’t a single instant when I was bored. Part of this is certainly because I’m a fanboy, but I also didn’t go in expecting to love it. Frankly, after having all these criticisms, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I loved it because of Jackson’s decisions, because of what he had added, and because of the changes he had come up with. Part of this post is me trying to reason out why these things matter to me, but not to other critics, fans, and critic-fans. I suspect at least part of this is that I explicitly hold the following view, which some of these critics may reject:

Peter Jackson’s Hobbit is not Tolkien’s Hobbit. And that is an entirely good thing.

Boredom

When asked to define “boredom” recently, I came up with this ‘masterpiece’:

Boredom: an external symptom of the deeper inability to be at peace with oneself, characterized by restlessness and by discontent at the inability of external stimuli to permanently fill a soul-shaped void in one’s life. 

(Yes, I did tag this wisdom. Tags don’t always mean what they mean; their vācyârtha can be overriden by a lakṣyârtha, and sometimes they suggest a vyaṅgyârtha over and above and/or alongside that.)

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

These lines from Tennyson’s Ulysses are recited by M (played by Dame Judi Dench) in the recent James Bond release, Skyfall. The whole poem, available here, is gloriously recited here by Sir Lewis Casson.

Alfred Lord Tennyson - Ulysses - Lewis Casson by poetictouch

Auxiliary verbs, a roadmap

Nothing of substance is discussed here. I just want to collect hyperlinks to all of my posts on auxiliary verbs in one place.

We began with auxiliary verbs in English.

We then turned to French, beginning with an overview of the French verbal system, and then turned to compound verbs, and finally concluded with a session on the vagaries of the French passive.

Finally, we moved to German, beginning with an overview of the German verbal system, and then finally getting down to auxiliaries, modal and non-modal, in German.

Fin.

Auxiliary verbs, in German, part two

Too long have I tarried; I shall finish this series ere dawn.

So what are the various forms that a German verb can take? We’re talking here not of specific conjugations but of different combinations of tense, aspect, and mood (usually abbreviated tam). Like  English, these are usually listed in infinitive form, but the sequence of infinitives in German is the reverse of the English sequence. In addition to the Präsens and Präteritum, we will see forms generated from (a) the non-modal complex infinitive, (b) the future infinitive, and from it, (c) the future perfect infinitive.

Participial Past Tense

The non-modal complex infinitive takes one of two forms: 
past participle sein, or past participle haben.

Like French, but unlike modern English (if you exclude Tolkien-esque “Out of the Great Sea unto Middle-earth I am come” sentences), German uses both sein and haben as auxiliary verbs to give rise to the non-modal complex infinitive. Verbs strictly take one or the other (more or less—but this being German, less rather than more).

When haben is conjugated in the Präsens, the verbal form so generated is the Perfekt; when it is conjugated in the Präteritum, the verbal form so generated is the Plusquamperfekt. 

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?”

From the Choruses of TS Eliot’s The Rock:

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.

O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,

O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

All our knowledge brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to God.

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries

Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

Auxiliary Verbs, in German

After our long detour through the French auxiliary verbal system, it’s time to tackle something a little closer to home. German is often sold to native English speakers as a “harder” language to learn than French, and this is certainly true insofar as learning German requires us to learn lots of unfamiliar vocabulary. English has absorbed so much Latinate vocabulary that even without knowing no French or German, it’s far easier to understand les langages sont compliqués than Sprachen sind schwierig. But given German’s deep familial relationship with English, I would argue that in some ways German is actually easier to learn than French, because English speakers already possess a(n admittedly incomplete) knowledge of German structure.

This structural similarity is not very visible in the case of nouns, for modern English has almost completely abandoned the complex nominal declension system that Old English had and modern German and Icelandic still possess. Its remnants can be seen in the pronouns, where English him and her are clearly related to the German dative pronouns ihm and ihr, and your is similar to euer. To identify clear structural similarities between English and German, one must turn to their verbal systems.

An Overview of the German verbal system
German verbs fall into two broad categories: “strong” and “weak”. This terminology was developed by the Grimm brothers (yes, of fairytale fame!) based on the logic that weak verbs, being regular and predictable, were too weak to break free of the system of rules, whereas strong verbs were strong enough to behave unpredictably and break the rules. English verbs can also be classified into these categories; furthermore, if a verb is strong in one of the two languages, it will likely be strong in the other as well. Thus, knowing that “to sing” and “to swim” are “irregular” in English (see “I sang” and “I have sung”, and “I swam” and “I’ve swum”), we can guess that the German cognates singen and schwimmen are also strong (in the same order, ich sang and ich habe gesungen, and ich schwamme and ich bin geschwommen). This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, though, since English verbs have tended to weaken over time, becoming more regular. Witness that the English cognate of the German strong verb backen is the regular verb “to bake”.

But German verbs, whether strong or weak, are not so strong as to entirely eschew the use of auxiliaries. (The Germanic tribes served as a source of auxiliaries to the Roman legions, but I don’t know if that had anything to do with this!) Indeed, one of the most obvious differences between the English and German verbal systems on the one hand and the French verbal system on the other is precisely the fact that both English and German use auxiliaries much more extensively. 

In fact, given a German infinitive, only two purely synthetic verbal forms exist in the indicative mood: the present (das Präsens) and the preterite (das Präteritum or das Imperfekt). All other verbal forms are generated using auxiliaries. And like English (and unlike French), the auxiliary verbs are of two types, modal and non-modal.

• The non-modal auxiliaries, which also do double-duty as full-fledged verbs:
• haben (“to have”), used for the perfect construction
• sein (“to be”), also used for the perfect construction (like the French use of être)
• werden (“to become”), used in two roles:
• werden, for the passive voice of all TAMs
• werden, for the future aspect
• The modal auxiliaries, which (as in English) convey a whole host of modal nuance, and which are cognate with the English modal auxiliaries but often carry different meanings:
• können, cognate with “can” and meaning “to be able to”
• mögen, cognate with “may” and meaning “to like”
• dürfen, meaning “to be permitted [to do something]”
• sollen, cognate with “shall” and meaning “to be obliged / required [to do something]”
• wollen, cognate with “will” but meaning “to want”
• müssen, cognate with “must” and meaning “to have to”

Two pairs need a bit of clarification: wollen expresses a stronger desire than mögen; and müssen expresses a stronger need or compulsion than sollen (compare “I must eat” to “I should eat”). Wollen is also worth noting carefully, because its English cognate “will” has come to be used as the future aspect auxiliary in the third person. Its use in German shows how this makes sense: “he will go” must have meant at some point “he intensely desires to go”. The German usage also shows why “I will go” is seen in ‘propah’ English as less polite than “I shall go”, and why it may seem rude to some to say “he shall go” in place of “he will go”. In the first situation, the use of “will” comes across as rather insistent; in the second situation, the use of “shall” eliminates the third person’s personal agency.

More to come, as always.

Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch, part trois

Now that we’ve got a fairly good sense of the two main auxiliary verbs in French, avoir and être, let’s examine some of the more complicated stuff that inevitably comes along. Earlier posts on French auxiliaries are here and here.

The passive voice

As in English, the auxiliary used to form the passive voice is the form “to be”, which is être, colored dark red here as in an earlier post to distinguish it from both the regular verb être and the auxiliary être. In a way, it’s actually false to distinguish between the passive auxiliary être and the full verb être because both really behave the same way, including the question of requiring gender and number agreement of the adjective. The only reason, perhaps, to make this artificial distinction is to be clear that the passive auxiliary être takes as its adjective a past participle of the main verb.

That’s right: the structure of the passive voice is identical to the structure of the compound tenses using the non-modal auxiliary être. Talk about a recipe for confusion!

Except not really. Because the verbs we’ve seen so far that take être as their auxiliary are all intransitive verbs—they lack a direct object, and so there is simply no way they can form a passive at all. What this means is that it’s only really verbs taking avoir as their auxiliary that will form the passive with être.

And of course, once the passive is formed, it can form its own compound tenses. Since the conjugated verb in the passive voice is être, this means the auxiliary constructions will be formed with avoir + été + past participle (inflected).

So let’s take the sentence “I read a book” and look at every single possible verbal construction. This list will look slightly different from the list above because there I classified the verbs into seven groups based on the TAM in which the conjugated verb was conjugated. Here, though, I will be classifying them into the fourteen possibilities that we get by including the various compound tenses.

Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch, part deux

Last time, we took a very brief look at the general structure of the French verbal system. Let’s now take a gander at the auxiliaries! (For that was the whole point of this, n’est-ce pas?) 

Instead of getting bogged down in hypothetical forms, let’s start by looking at the compound tenses of the verb parler. Paralleling English, the structure of this construction is avoir + past participle (with the word avoir colored dark green to show that it is the auxiliary verb and not the usual verb avoir that means “to have”). We can conjugate the verb avoir in every tense and mood that we can conjugate parler in; these compound tenses have different names. To keep things simple, let’s just look at the first person singular I speak in all its various forms in French.

“Desiderata”

It was quite intriguing to learn that Cap’n Jack Sparrow bears upon his back a tattoo of a famous poem, now used as a devotional on occasion: Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann. Here is the poem (now ruled to be out of copyright even though its author only passed away in the 1940s), thanks to Wikipedia:

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,

and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible without surrender

be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly;

and listen to others,

even the dull and the ignorant;

they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,

they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others,

you may become vain or bitter;

for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble;

it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs;

for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;

many persons strive for high ideals;

and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.

Especially, do not feign affection.

Neither be cynical about love;

for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment

it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years,

gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.

But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.

Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline,

be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe,

no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God,

whatever you conceive Him to be,

and whatever your labors and aspirations,

in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,

it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

Auxiliary Verbs, auf französisch

Anyone who has read Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers and St. Clare’s series knows of the legendary terror French verbs struck into the hearts of British schoolchildren of a certain age. No Maiwand or Isandhlwana could have stopped the might of the British Empire, but the slightest whiff of l’imparfait subjonctif would reduce the stoutest-hearted Viceroy into a whimpering schoolboy. At least this was the impression I had of the power of French verbs over the British psyche while growing up.

The French verbal system is no doubt more complicated than the English system, but this hardly means it’s utterly chaotic. With just a little bit of memorization and a little bit of thought (and some occasional hand-waving and some rather more frequent hand-wringing) it is possible to tame the system of conjugation. One of the reasons for the infamous difficulty of the French system is that it preserves many more synthetic (single-word) forms of its verbs than English does.

Auxiliary Verbs, en anglais

I can already see people running away from this post, terrified by its title. (This, of course, presumes that there are people coming to this site in the first place!) Grammar, perhaps because it is so awfully taught, if at all taught these days in school, tends to frighten people like no other subject save perhaps mathematics. This is a tragedy, for grammar is in fact quite beautiful and often very systematic, quite like mathematics. I'm going to focus on what may seem like a rather strange topic for now, but I will try to be clear (and will also use colors!) in order to convey a little bit of the ultimately systematic nature of this topic.

What is an auxiliary verb?

The word “auxiliary” usually means something supplemental, something additional, possibly accompanied by a sense of superfluousness. But let that not mislead us, for auxiliary verbs are by no means superfluous; indeed, their proper use is essential not merely to ensure that a verb is well-formed, but also to convey a whole host of additional meanings that are not present in the verb itself. (In this sense, the auxiliary verbs are much like the auxiliary corps of the Roman army: the Numidian light cavalry, Balearic slingers, Thracian archers and the like, whose specialized combat skills were absolutely essential to the success of the Roman legions.)

Since it’s hanami season …

and since I just mentioned A.E. Housman, and since all the lawns here are currently covered in a beautiful fine dusting of white April snow, I am compelled to put up his famous ode to the cherry, which first appeared in A Shropshire Lad towards the end of the nineteenth century:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

From Bartleby’s collection of verse.

Poetry according to A.E. Housman

In The Name and Nature of Poetry, the great Housman writes of his response to poetry:

“Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual. A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by the symptoms which it provokes in us. One of these symptoms was described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up’. Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear’. The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.”

What a line: ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear’! 

And how beautifully Housman describes the involuntary physical reactions that Sanskrit theorists have called the sāttvika-bhāvas: stambha (stupefaction), sveda (perspiration), romāñca (horripilation), svara-bhaṅga (voice-cracking), vepathu (trembling), vaivarṇya (pallor), aśru (tears), and pralaya (loss of consciousness).

For the preservation of the Oxford / Harvard / serial comma

As part of my drive towards the use of logic-driven punctuation, I must heartily recommend this post on why it is "vitally necessary to prevent the extinction of the serial comma". As with everything else, it cannot be blindly used: there are cases where a blindly applied serial comma can create, not resolve, ambiguity. I repudiate such reprehensible misuse of punctuation. However, in most cases it serves to disambiguate lists and to clarify information, and in general I prefer to err on the side of too many, rather than too few, commas.


The purpose of punctuation in a language like English must be to convey something of intonation and reading pauses, which are critical to conveying meaning and which cannot be indicated in the language itself, since English lacks the kind of particles that German or Sanskrit possess. Punctuation is like salt: everybody has their preferred levels, but there is always such a thing as too much, and such a thing as too little, of it.

American and British punctuation

All international students, especially those who grew up in the Commonwealth or went to a Commonwealth-curriculum school, will know the pain of having to switch to the American system of spelling and punctuation. Many refuse to spell words the American way, out of practice or out of a desire to not conform; others change their ways, but inconsistently, with their deeply-ingrained old ways of spelling and writing never really going away, like that accent that always leaves behind its traces.

Of all the differences in writing punctuation, the only one that I truly dislike is the American habit of having the quotation mark in a phrase come at the end of a clause or sentence. Having grown up with the British system, where the logic of the context determines whether or not the punctuation belongs inside or outside the quotation, I've always found the American system misleading. Here's an article that points to the difference between American and British usage, and offers a historical* reason for why this is the case.

I'm certainly guilty of inconsistency, but I deem that to be less of a problem than being guilty of an illogical consistency. I will try henceforth to place my commas and periods where they logically belong, at least in writing where I'm not penalized for grammatical errors!