Category: Uncategorized

For the first four days of my recent trip to England, I went to St Albans, a cathedral city 19 miles north of London, where the air is better but with London in easy reach. I stayed in an Air bnb, a small house built in the garden of a larger house but with its own patio and street entrance.

The garden wasn’t much of an asset in the biting chill but there were consolations in the form of a shower that worked (without the usual UK trade-off between heat and water pressure or switches to be turned on fifteen minutes in advance of a lukewarm trickle). There was also a fine expanse of work space and the hosts were friendly but kept their distance, just popping in once a day to restock the biscuits and make the bed. I could live with that intrusion.

There’s much to see in St Albans but I only managed a fraction as I had friends to meet and other activities in London and an old flat mate to visit in a care home in nearly Elstree.

So this time I didn’t revisit the wonderful Roman mosaic floor – huge and strangely abstract, without the usual gods and goddesses and sprinkling of beasts, mythological and real.

There’s also the cathedral and a lot of other Roman remains as the city was on Watling St, an important Roman road from the Channel through London and up to the north west.

It was then called Verulamium, the name’s origin uncertain but perhaps related to the nearby River Ver, which babbles happily on with its brythonic name, while the town became first Verulamacæstir under the Anglo-Saxons and eventually St Albans in Christian times.

St Albans was martyred close to the current site of the cathedral perhaps under the reign of Emperor Diocletian but maybe earlier, having given sustenance to a fleeing Christian priest. According to the British sixth-century writer Gildas, the first executioner couldn’t bring himself to slay this holy man. The second was more successful although his eyes then dropped out. This was in early Christian times when God was rather more robust and hands on but even so I am inclined to doubt this story.

I copied the appropriate pages of the local Pevsner and walked around the mediaeval quarter with its ensemble of fine buildings. The earliest is supposed to be from the 13^th century. One street called French Row fascinated me. Was it a place where French speakers congregated? French was still widely spoken in England in Chaucer’s time (1362) though declining and spoken with a strange accent. There was an old pub in French Row, the Fleur-de-Lys, under which name it existed from the Middle Ages until 2007 when some market barbarian decided that the Snug would be a better name…..

One of the things I love about densely packed England is that there is such a wealth of associations and things to know. We travel far in search of the exotic but if you train your mind and eye to look beyond false familiarity, strangeness and difference are all around us.

 

 

I love the Old Town’s denseness and richness of associations. Almost any fact or feature that you examine will lead to a fascinating chain.
Last week I was at a 50th birthday party at Skeppsbron 44, a building I’ve often passed with a cursory glance at its famous old restaurant Zum Franziskaner. But now I know that it was built in 1907 by the Jugend-inspired architect Fredric Dahlberg (whose work is also in Lärkstaden, a favourite area). The building has a justly praised staircase with window and wall paintings by Georg Pauli, of whom I knew nothing but want to learn more.
My focus at the party was, of course, on folk and not the building (you can get a bad reputation if you spend long periods at parties standing on the stairs staring at the ceiling…). But I will go back to see this as well as the Jugend details that I know are in the restaurant (I might have to eat there to see them, collateral profit rather than damage).

Some time I shall take a trip to the village of Henstridge in south Somerset and ask people the meaning of the name of the village. I suspect that most people wouldn’t know (I was equally ignorant when my parents lived there). Once you know Swedish though, it’s not so difficult – we have another village up the road called Horsington and then a village where the Knights Templar used to be so that Henstridge is probably simply the ridge where the stallions were kept (“hingst-rygg”).

Unlike Swedish place names, our English place names are often opaque, especially the ones formed during the period that Anglo-Saxon was spoken (500-1200). Anglo-Saxon is still a foundation of modern English but it has been so heavily overlaid with Norman French after England’s Norman rulers spoke French for 300 years that it’s almost a foreign language. I learnt hardly anything about it in school and I suspect that this is still the case. It’s taught as part of some university English Literature courses but I believe it has to fight for survival there and may often be an optional extra course at just a few universities. This lack of knowledge is not helped by there being so few inscriptions in Anglo-Saxon – they had quite an extensive literature but only the odd inscription has survived in churches.

It fascinates me though and improving my Anglo-Saxon will definitely be part of my personal plan for 2018 (it’s a very green plan as it consists largely of recycled goals).

Swedish is a great help here as the Scandinavian languages of the first millennium were not so far removed from Anglo-Saxon and speakers of the two languages could probably understand one another after a fashion (once they’d stopped hitting one another). I wonder whether some of the confusions in modern English spring from these meetings – for example, our horrible mess with “shall” and “will”,where two verbs have become entangled.

Knowing Swedish and Anglo-Saxon makes not just place names but other bits of English more comprehensible. For example, we have some churches that have a “lych gate”, a roofed gate used for sheltering coffins until the clergyman arrives. It doesn’t make much sense in Modern English (a vague meaningless association with “lichen” perhaps) but when you know that the Swedish word for body is “lik”, it all falls into place.

It’s amusing to think of what English might have been like had the Norman conquest not happened.

We would probably call a doctor a “leecher” and the science of medicine “leechcraft” (these words were “laece” and “laececraeft” in Anglo-Saxon).  In fact, I’m cheating a bit here as the words “leech” and “leechcraft” actually exist in English with these meanings but the words are archaic and hardly known (perhaps in Chaucer, I shall check).

We have similar words in Swedish, “läka” to heal and “läkare”. Oddly enough I’ve found no trace of a similar word in German where the word for doctor “Arzt” is derived from the Greek Archiatros (chief something…). Perhaps a word likes this exists in some German dialects. I have to include the history of German in my plan for the year….

Another interesting word here is “leech”, a worm-like parasite once used in medical treatment for removing blood from sick people. It seems to come from the same Anglo-Saxon word, laece. Could it have originated from an umbrella word for people (or animals) that heal before the profession of doctor/läkare/laece crystallised as a profession?

 

My third or fourth visit to Aix-en-Provence and the longest to date, two weeks. This time I thought and read a lot about Provencal and struggled to work out whether it should be regarded as a language or a dialect and what its relationship to the southern version of French, the langue d’oc/Occitan is. According to Wikipedia, it is “not to be confused with Franco-Provencal, a distinct language that shares features of both French and Provencal”. Despite this succinct warning, clouds of confusion swirl around my brain…

Last time I was in Aix, I picked up Etienne Garcin (1784-1845) “La Robinson Provencale/La Robinsouno Prouvençalo”, with bilingual text in French and Provencal. It’s undoubtedly much easier to read Provencal than it would be to read another unknown Latin language but there are quite a few grammatical differences to modern French, not just vocabulary differences.  Leaving me not much wiser as far as concerns the relationship between “dialect” and “language”.

I thought to start with that it was simply the story of Robinson Crusoe in French and Provencal but on closer inspection, I realise that it’s an adaptation where a group of Provencal folk are shipwrecked on an island and start to build up a new Provence and that Robinson Crusoe is not just the name of a book but of a literary genre as a device for social commentary.

Etienne Garcin also constructed a French-Provencal dictionary although it appears that his project was to help Provencal speakers learn French rather than focusing on the preservation of Provencal.

Other authors important for Provence and Provencal were the poet Frederic Mistral (1830-1914), awarded the Nobel prize in 1904 and one of the founders of the literary and cultural association, the Felibrige, Alphonse Daudet (1840-97) and Jean Giono (1895-1970).

With roots in the West Country and an intensive relationship with Dorset and Somerset, it’s not hard for me to relate to this French regionalism and it’s of great interest to me to compare the two processes.

In Dorset, Thomas Hardy towers above all else and much of the area’s regional identity feeds off his work. There is, however, a strong antiquarian tradition pre-dating and post-dating Hardy, for example, William Barnes and other authors, such as the Powys brothers, as well as groups of people active around the Dorset County Museum. This tradition made a major contribution to documenting the old Dorset culture and language and to staying some of the excesses of the Victorian church restorers. Unlike the Provencal authors, however, there wasn’t much of a political dimension to Hardy – he may have regretted the passing of the old ways and documented them as well as being critical of some of the harsh results of industrialism but, unlike, for example, Giono in Provence, he wasn’t involved in any kind of struggle to maintain a way of life that bore up the old culture. In other respects though, Giono is the French author, who reminds me most of Hardy, in his descriptions of and attitude to rural life and his “pantheist background universe”. Some of his ideological positions feel like precursors of the modern environmental movement, although tinged with the political atmosphere of the 1930s, which (from a very superficial study of him so far) feels doubtful.

Provencal is interesting too in a wider context of studying French as the most German of the Latin languages and English as the most Latin of the Germanic languages. German speakers had a profound effect on both England and what was then Gaul, with the Anglo-Saxons pushing aside or at least subjugating the Celtic British and the Franks building an empire across northern France.

English became very much a Germanic language until the new impetus from French with William the Conqueror which led to the French being the language of the aristocracy for three centuries in England. The process was different in Gaul where Latin had had a greater impact on the previously Celtic population than in England and where there was then a major German influence on the language at least in northern France.

My knowledge of French history is not what it should be (I intend to try to tidy up this shamefully scruffy area of my “formation”) but I believe that the impact of the Franks was less in the south and that there Vulgar Latin developed into southern French, the langue d’oc, with less external interruption. It would be interesting to compare words originated from the Franks in northern France with similar words in Provencal to see whether different “more latinised” words have survived in the south.

All of this (and against the background of recent developments in Catalonia) makes one realise what a work in progress national identity is. Had the Paris-based French rulers (and perhaps the Spanish) been less effective, it’s not hard to see that there could have been another political/national entity extending from Catalonia to Savoy (Provencal is related to Catalan), effectively crushed by the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars and the later weakness of the area after its time of glory with the troubadours.

To sum up, I need to look at some university reading lists in appropriate subjects to have a firmer basis for thinking about terms like dialect and language, to read more about the history of France and the French language, to study the history of the Felibrige and Provencal authors in greater depth and to try to achieve some order in my mind about the welter of dialects and languages scattered over the south in recent history and up to present-day France. I have at least quite a library of books to help (making my bookshelf even more of a statement of the person I would like to be…) and it should be enough to keep me off the streets during the dark months ahead…

First time north of Gävle for 35 years. Propeller plane to Midlanda, Sundsvall’s gateway to the world. Not normally a flying distance but there’s work on the line and few trains.

Drive to the “High Coast”, in my imagination high cliffs and coves like Dorset, encouraged by an English acquaintance saying it was the only place in Sweden where she could live. It’s not like this though, at least not what we could see from the landside. A bit disappointed. Beautiful landscape but it’s a Swedish beauty with slightly different rounded hills. A different sort of rock from Dorset although there are sandstone cliffs somewhere there. Must consult a geological map.

Not unpleasant once I adjust my expectations. To Bönhamn on the coast with its fishing huts closed for the season.

Gunilla leaves to give her lecture. Day starts well with good hotel breakfast. Clambering up damp steps to the old meeting place and cultural centre, Babelsberg. Informed that, in the days of Red Ådalen, 600 people came there to listen to Kata Dahlström, social democrat who became a communist, Swedish delegate to the second Comintern conference in 1920. But her views on Christianity and Communism brought critic from Zinoviev, among others. She later abandoned communism and regarded herself as a Buddhist towards the end of her life. Her daughter Ruth Stjernstedt, a lawyer, became a baroness through marriage and lived in Lidingö.

Rain intensifies. The bus station is deserted, the day’s bus to Ytterlännäs old church left at 06.45. The bookshop went bankrupt in 2015. No Akademibokhandeln.  The picture in my mind’s eye of ferreting around in a secondhand book shop looking for Ångermanland authors and buying a few books about the area fades into dystopic chill. The town is empty – a few refugees, mostly men with an occasional woman wandering around, integrating with a community that is nowhere to be seen. Södertälje-style immigrant owned food shop seems active and cheerful as does the immigrant-run station café. Coffee and a violently pink cake while considering next move.

An hour in the library. Rain intensifying. Disconsolate. Demoralised. Give up and retreat to hotel, some difficulty finding. Wet, sleep.

Next day much more satisfactory. By car to Ytterlännäs, the old church reputedly from 1200 with its paintings and intensity. Summer is over and it’s locked, see a bit by peering through a window. Pleasing archaic environment. Across the Ångerman river, follow the waterside, and across Sandö bridge to Lunde Folkets hus from where the demonstration against strikebreakers started in 1931. Military preparations with machine gun in place, the officers in charge do not want to repeat the humiliation of Seskarö in 1917 where the soldiers were disarmed. Five killed in Ådalen, one bystander. Token punishment for military.

Social democratic prohibition against their members attending the funerals as the demonstration was organised by the CP. Could it really have been so. Must go to KB’s newspaper library to read the papers from 1931 – ages since I’ve been there. Monument to the victims by a Södertälje sculptor, Lenny Clarhäll. Raining hard.

Back through Nordingrå to the coast at Norrfällsviken. Buy a Swedish translation of Genet’s Notre-Dame des Fleurs at a small hut selling bric a brac to avoid the shameful feeling of slithering out empty handed. Lunch at a fish restaurant about to close for the season. Pile of tins of fermented Baltic herring. Then Mannaminne, the art museum near Nordingrå, weird and wonderful with its Norwegian and Estonian exhibitions, an old metro carriage, a jet plane and trams, aiming to show the interconnectedness of everything (picture folk adrift in the world of words…).

Back to the E4 highway and down to Sundsvall. No time for Härnösand, worth a visit, nor energy to look at buildings in Sundsvall. Härnösand previously just a station where I got off to hitch-hike to the north in my early days in Sweden. That journey a blur, snapshot memories of the swimming pool in Luleå, making my way inland to Jokkmokk, the Same museum, in the evening to Arvidsjaur, put up by a family, given gruel (välling) for breakfast, uncertain whether it was really for me.

We try to have a Swedish trip once a year. Last year to Gotland, before that Bohuslän and Värmland. Places flashed through expand – Medelpad is here and Ångermanland there. I saw Bo Widerberg’s film Ådalen 31 in London in the radical 70s but now I know where it is.

Moving country is to be uprooted, to be separated from everything familiar, a long struggle to obtain nutrition from a thin soil (thin with its lack of associations rather than thin per se). Work to make the soil richer, often hard work in Sweden, where we are not spoon fed with the historical and curious as in larger cultures but have to winkle it out. But this work is important to feel at home, to be enriched and not diminished by a life lived abroad.

First-class train to Stockholm, the world feels soft and problem-free for three hours. We left Thursday lunchtime and return Saturday evening. Usual weird effects on sense of time.

 

 

Unless the devil pops up with a draft agreement for a Faustian pact to keep the grim reaper at bay for say another couple of centuries, I’m not going to get where I want to with languages. But like the proverb, I will travel hopefully and the unfinished journey will still be fun.

Studying an Asian language reveals interesting links between East and West. I’ve just seen (from Wikipedia) that 1-10 in Romany is ekh, duj, tritt, štar, pandž, šov, ifta, oxto, inju and deš. Apart from 7-9 where Greek seems to have got in on the act, this is very close to Bangla. Even given what is known about the Indian origins of Romany, it’s amazing it’s so similar (I wonder if this is the case for all versions of Romany). Sheep-counting systems in the Lake District (yan, tan, tethera) among other places in Northern Britain, linking back to Brythonic, offer more examples of this persistence of numbers.

Going back beyond Bangla, I increasingly feel that a knowledge of Sanskrit should be part of every well-educated person’s “formation” (along with Hebrew, Roman, Greek and, perhaps, Farsi). At least I’ve now used Sanskrit for the first time (with more than a little help from someone sitting beside me telling me what to repeat).

We are very fortunate in English to have such an abundance of etymological resources (compared with, for example, Swedish) and the work of the etymologists deserves great respect and gratitude. But I wonder about their conceptual universe when it came to possible source languages. Were some languages more or less under the radar (a small wince at the anachronism allowed) or at least not enjoying at all the same level of expertise as Latin, Greek and Hebrew as sources.

An example the other day made me think – the slang word “dosh” for money given in the Concise OD as “1950s of unknown origin”. However, “dosh” in Romany means exactly money so it seems a strong candidate (and perhaps even further back the word “ten” in Romany and Bangla).

Another language or perhaps rather cryptolect, which is rather under the radar is Shelta, a language spoken by Irish travellers and also known as Cant or the Gammon. There is Old Shelta with a heavier input from Gaelic and New Shelta where English has taken over (grammar and vocabulary). Wikipedia has two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in old and current Shelta.

“Our Father who art in heaven” becomes  “Mwilsha’s gater, swart a manyath” in Old Shelta and “Our gathra, who cradgies in the manyak-norch” in current Shelta. Gathra cradgying in the manyak-norch seems rather jolly in a Lewis Carroll kind of way compared with “who art in heaven”. Maybe should find some more academic tomes on Shelta….

One wonders whether “gaffer” has come from Shelta (of unknown origin, perhaps from Godfather in the COD).

At least the Concise Oxford Dictionary has picked up the etymology of “bloke” which we have imported from Shelta, which may also be related to a Gaelic word.

Shelta has some grammatical quirks which are reminiscent of French argot.

Wikipedia has a nice list of various argots and cryptolects including Rotwelsch spoken by covert groups in Switzerland and eastern Germany (probably from Welsh, being an old Germanic word for foreigners, the inobservant Anglo-Saxons never quite getting their heads around Cymry). Rotwelsch is interesting because we have a word “Rotvälska” in Swedish defined as “double Dutch” (hets mot folkgrupp here…) and Gibberish.

Rotvälska always reminds me of my spoken Swedish. My mother really wanted me to be a good linguist so she took me to the river that runs around the Tower of Babel as she had heard that those immersed in the river were given the gift of languages (God’s test to see if the inhabitants of the tower could overcome their mutual incomprehension and cooperate by holding one another in the river without dropping the other person – they couldn’t). My mother was more but not completely successful – I became quite good at languages but she held me by the ear so I don’t hear them at all well and go rootwelshing my way through the languages with my Achilles ear.

There is a certain amount of poetic licence here by the way and perhaps it’s time to meander off to bed….

 

 

I’m trying to read fewer books that I agree with as I think it’s healthier for the intellect to have to struggle to understand alien arguments than to be lulled by the apparently reasonable. However, I had to make an exception for Phillip McCann’s recent work “The UK Regional-National Economic Problem. Geography, globalization and governance” (Routledge/Regional Studies Association). It expresses succinctly many of the ideas that I’ve dimly perceived and confirms my feeling that the lack of ability to explain what was actually happening in the UK was an important ingredient in the successful defrauding of the periphery by the Brexiteers. It’s a bit of a struggle as it’s quite dense and I only have an electronic copy on my mobile (the hardback is four times as expensive) but I am plodding through it.

A few quotes from the introductory summary to provide a taste of the work

“The  UK economy is internally not only diverging but it is now disconnecting, decoupling and dislocating into two or possibly three quite separate economies….While London and its hinterland regions perform strongly, almost half of the UK population live in regions and cities whose productivity is similar to, or even below, that of the poorer regions of the former East Germany and weaker than many regions even in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Slovakia….At the same time, the overly centralised UK government system has not only failed to respond to this dislocating and decoupling for many years but in some ways has acted so as to exacerbate this”.

“The weak long run productivity performance of the UK is largely a result of the fact that productivity benefits do not spread across the country but remain largely localized in the south generating large interregional inequalities.”

“…large sections of the UK media and political circles appear to be largely unaware of where the UK as a whole actually sits in international rankings in terms of economic prosperity…much of the reason for this is that the UK media and political circles are dominated by the day to day experience of London and its hinterland, and, as such, the media and political circles frame discussions of these issues entirely with a London-specific backdrop, one which is not even approximately reflective of the UK as a whole.”

… “At the same time, the rest of the UK is relatively much more dependent on trade with Europe than is London, which is rather more global in its economic orientation”.

It’s well worth reading (I suspect there will be a cheaper paperback in the course of time). It feels as if one should have been reading much more about Britain much earlier in one’s life. Perhaps a case of Minerva’s owl flying out at dusk – flapping around a bit in front of her nest anyway..