nineweaving

08:28 pm: Inscape & Outlandishness
Thursday, February 24, 1994

"Some of the small word-endings end themselves with a dead breath-penning...[These] seem to betoken, mostly, an ending or shortening or lessening, in time or shape...of their body-words...Flap, flip, a quick flying; heap, hop, hip, small highenings or humps; pop out, to poke out quickly; clap the hands, to close them quickly; stub, a small stump; wallop, to wallow or well (roll) lightly...We may think that we have two very fine words in envelope and develop, whereas they seem to be nothing better than the Teutonic inwallop and unwallop...."

"-er (an ending). It means outeked in size or time:--Chatter, to chat much; clamber, to climb much; wander, to wind about."

"-sh (an ending). It means quickness and smartness; as, clang, clash; crack, crash; fly, flash; go, gush; hack, hash."

"-m, -om, -um. Words so ended meant mostly the outcome of the time- word, and were at first thing-names...Blow, bloom; go (with quick stirrings), game; glow, gleam, gloom; grow, groom; hollow, helm; harry, harm; sew, seam; stiff, stem; stray, stream; tang, ting (reach on), time, timber ( a very ontanging stick)...."

Who is this madman? you ask. And what is this stuff? William Barnes's An Outline of English Speech-Craft (1878), his grammar for the common folk, written "towards the upholding of our own strong old Anglo-Saxon speech, and the ready teaching of it to purely English minds by their own tongue." And English, he upheld, should be of good English roots, without outlandish borrowings. "So the forlessening names, leveret for a hareling, and cygnet for a swanling, are unwontsome, as being words of another speech." What the sturdy Saxon peasantry made of his grammar is a riddle.

Barnes was a Dorset dialact poet (there is an account in Kilvert's Diary of a meeting with the old fellow, got up as Merlin, "half hermit, half enchanter," as Kilvert said) and self-taught philologist. (It was in the air. The great Joseph Wright, author of the English Dialect Dictionary and Tolkien's teacher, was a Yorkshire mill child. He taught himself to read at fifteen, taught other laborers, and worked his way to Oxford and a full professorship. And if anyone comes across a copy of the EDD, let me know. I desire it with a mad unworldly passion, all six folios of it.) Barnes's passion was the rootedness of English, its power to create ungrafted words, of its own thorny and inalienable stock. A quickset tongue, hedge-English: tough and insular, flowering and thorny. Gerard Manley Hopkins read him with "almost great" admiration ("...he is like an embodiment...or manmuse of the country...."), and composed. "Worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie" is Barnesian. So are "unchilding," "fall-gold," "hornlight," "fire-folk," "fell-frowning," "earl-stars," "rook-racked," "dapple-dawn-drawn," and a hundred other wordings.

Not that Hopkins copied Barnes, I think, but saw a scholar of like mind.

It was in the air. There was "a movement afoot among philologists and poets to effect a renaissance in English diction by anglicizing the language. This movement would lead to the Early English Text Society [to which we owe Gawain and rare Arthurian texts] and the Oxford English Dictionary, would influence Hopkins, Hardy, Yeats, Pound, and many another. It was the feeling, both patriotic and aesthetic...that English can say anything it wants to in a native way without coining from French, Latin, or Greek.

"We ought, for instance, to say foreword rather than preface...We should say sunprint for photograph, inwit for conscience, wordhoard for vocabulary. The most rigorous of the anglicizers was not Hopkins but Charles Montagu Doughty, whose allegiance to pure English in his Travels In Arabia Deserta...and his great unknown epic, The Dawn In Britain, has had a lasting impact on style...for instance, by way of Joyce to Eudora Welty..." (Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination, p. 283)

And not only in the mainstream: there is a Barnesian thread inweaving still, through Morris and Tolkien into fantasy's common tongue. As the Celtic revival and its high deeds gave us geis, so the renaissance of English, that flowering of scholarship and poetry, has meant that we all know of runesmiths and riddlemasters, werelights and wolfsheads, that we've called friends to the farspeaker.

"There's glory for you!" as Humpty-Dumpty, that great philologist, has said. Remember Jabberwocky was first published as a "Stanza of Anglo- Saxon Poetry," with footnotes. Carroll knew his world's absurdities, and Beowulfery was in.

Hey, all of this was new, the stuff of romance, and parents were naming their daughters "Ethel" for the glamour of it.

Racy stuff, this inbred English, and a reaction to the orotund redundancies of high Victorian cant. And part of the greater movement toward the rediscovery of folk song and fairy tale. (Philology and fantasy go hand in hand. Think of Tolkien and the brothers Grimm.) Roots are a splendid thing, whose shadow (I am well aware) is insularity and mutterings of ethnic purity. (A gentle example: "What's that Senegalese/klezmer/Welsh/Chinese/Mongolian bivocal stuff? We came to hear folk music.") Sometimes it's good to hear the single voice, the panpipes or the nose flute or whatever and glory in the inscape of it all, the genius loci. Then after a while, I react, and go off toward the ethno-boogie, which in language is a glorious melange like the patwa of the Hellflower books. Sheer polylingual perversity.

Still, there's a crazy delight in reading Barnes's wordhoard:

abrade, To forfray, forfret.
absorb, Forsoak.
accelerate, To onquicken.
accessary, A bykeeper, deedmate.
adulation, Flaundering, glavering.
adverb, An under-markword.
adversative, Thwartsome.
alienate, To unfrienden.
allegory, A forlikening.
altercation, A brangling.
anodyne, Pain-dunting, pain-dilling.
apodosis, The hank time-taking to a hinge one: -- "If ye ask (hinge), ye shall receive (hank)."
aqueduct, Water lode.
atmosphere, Welkin-air.
bibulous, Soaksome.
botany, Wortlore.
comma, A mark for the offcutting of small shares of a discourse.
deciduous, Fallsome.
depilatory, Hairbane.
desecrate, Unhallow.
dormitory, Sleepstow.
electricity, Amberishness.
foliate, Leafen.
forceps, Tonglings, nipperlings.
fossil, A forstonening.
genitive, The offspring case.
horizon, Sky-sill.
hydrophobia, Water-awe.
inarticulate, Unbreathpenned.
indicative, The surehood mood.
iterative, Going over again and again.
letter, A book-staff.
machine, A jinny.
magnificent, High-deedy.
meteor, Welkin-fire.
panacea, Allheal.
paragraph, An offwriting, a wording-share.
participle, A wordling, a small shapefast word.
perambulator, Push-wainling.
plagiary, A thought-pilferer.
posterity, Afterkin.
solstice, Sunsted.
sophist, Wordwise.
sophistry, Rede-cunning.
spell, A bewording.

Nine