Translating Shakespeare

[Grsartor at AOL.COM]

About translating phrases like "the more the merrier":
 
I would have offered the same suggestion as Edmund made. However, there  
definitely seem to be other reasonable possibilities:
 
The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary tells us that use of "the" as an  
adverb, or rather as two adverbs, in phrases like "the more the merrier" goes  
back to Old English. In this context "the" is not, of course, the article; 
it is  a relic of the instrumental case of "that", which was "thy/thon". 
Hence, in my  specimen phrase the sense would have been
 
 by that [much] more, by that merrier.
 
More logically perhaps, the sentence ought to be
 
 *why more the merrier,
 
the Old English instrumental case of "hwat" being "hwy/hwon". However, I  
have no reason to think it was ever expressed in that way.
 
The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following quote from AD 897:
 
Thaet her thy mara wisdom on londe waere, thy we ma getheoda  cuthon
= that here would be the greater wisdom in the land, the more of  languages 
we knew (?)
 
The OED also seems to imply that two distinct words, thy and the, had  
fallen together in Old English.
 
We could also consider cases from Icelandic.
 
I recall encountering, though I do not remember whether in the old or the  
modern language, a phrase like
 
"...er thvi betri sem meiri er..." i.e. [something] is the better as  
greater is [something else]
 
Here the second word in the Icelandic is the dative case of "that", but  
looks as if it corresponds to Anglo-Saxon "thy/thon". In any case, the dative 
in  Icelandic often seems to be used as an instrumental.
 
Cleasby and Vigfusson's Dictionary of Old Icelandic does not seem to  
mention any construction like the one I mentioned, but does indicate another  
similar possibility, using "thess", the genitive case of "that", instead of the 
 dative. It likens this to the German "desto". Here are two examples they 
give,  with my uncertain translations:
 
heldur var hon thess at litilatari
rather was she the humbler (?)
 
thess meirr er hinn drekkr, thess meirr thyrstir hann
the more that the  other (man) drinks, the more he thirsts (?)
 
Possibly these observations will give further ideas for inventing a Gothic  
construction.
 
 
 
 
 
In a message dated 22/10/2013 16:18:48 GMT Daylight Time,  
edmundfairfax at yahoo.ca writes:



I have looked through my materials, in vain. If you are unable to find an  
example in the Gothic corpus, you may wish to follow the construction in Old 
 English, as it is far more likely to be closer to Gothic than Modern  
English: 

Swa  he bith ieldra, swa he faegerra bith (Bede, eighth century) 
'The  older it is, the more beautiful it is' 
(lit.  'as it is older, so it is fairer') 

Yours  truly, 

Edmund 


---In gothic-l at yahoogroups.com,  <anheropl0x at ...> wrote:

So for a challenge I decided to translate the St.  Crispin's day speech 
(please refrain from telling me how fey it is to do so)  and I'm quite pleased 
with what I have so far. But I ask you, the line "The  fewer men, the 
greater the share of glory" is slightly troubling. I can not  shake the feeling 
that Gothic has a peculiar way of saying "the X, the Y" like  this. I also am 
unsure how to render "fewer". Any insight would be much  appreciated!





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20131024/cf10076f/attachment.htm>