30.3344, Review: Historical Linguistics: Gunkel, Hackstein (2018)

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Subject: 30.3344, Review: Historical Linguistics: Gunkel, Hackstein (2018)

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Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2019 11:36:19
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Language and Meter

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36518277


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-490.html

EDITOR: Dieter  Gunkel
EDITOR: Olav  Hackstein
TITLE: Language and Meter
SERIES TITLE: BSIEL
PUBLISHER: Brill
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

SUMMARY

This book is not, as the title might suggest, about poetic metre in the
languages of the world generally, but specifically about metre in ancient
Indo-European languages.  It is the product of a 2013 Munich conference on
“Language and Metre in Diachrony and Synchrony”.  After the editorial
introduction it contains fifteen chapters, written variously in German,
English, and French.  I list them here under the languages they principally
deal with.

Greek

Paul Kiparsky argues that a poetic metre is not a surface phenomenon but a
system by which varying surface patterns derive from a fixed underlying
template which is “typically … not consciously accessed”.  Consequently metres
“cannot be acquired and borrowed in a casual way like words”, and the
widely-held view that similarities between poetic metre in different
Indo-European languages stem from a common Proto-Indo-European origin is
necessarily true.  Kiparsky draws on this principle in offering an account of
the origin of the Greek hexameter, an issue which has been seen as mysterious.

Eva Tichy asks whether the Homeric epics were originally sung or spoken.  She
concludes that the answer differs for different parts of the texts; the metre
of the older stratum derived, like early Indic poetry, from
Proto-Indo-European oral lyric, but the evolution happened independently in
the two cases, and earlier in the Greek than the Indic case.

Claire Le Feuvre argues that the constraints of metre were capable of
affecting the syntax of Greek in general.  Something like this is
uncontroversial for the morphology of fixed formulae, for instance in the
Iliad a phrase meaning “broad sea” appears in the accusative as ‘eurea ponton’
rather than the expected ‘euryn ponton’, because the metre requires a dactyl
rather than a spondee.  Le Feuvre looks at ‘kamnō’, originally an intransitive
verb glossed by Liddell & Scott as “to work oneself weary, be weary”.  In
Homer and some other epic poetry (but not in other kinds of writing) the 3sg
and 3pl aorist forms ‘kame, kamon’ (each comprising two light syllables) were
used transitively, meaning something like “make with effort”, though this does
not happen with tenses of the verb which retain the -mn- cluster and hence a
heavy first syllable.  In Byzantine and modern Greek the transitive use
becomes standard (the word appears in the modern language as ‘kanō’, the
ordinary word for “do, make”).  Le Feuvre explains this as a consequence of
the epic metre requiring a word with light syllables in the relevant contexts.
 (Although Le Feuvre does not mention it, to complete her argument one should
add that the usual Ancient Greek word for “make”, ‘poieō’, has a heavy root in
all tenses.)

Alan Nussbaum discusses how a change in the spoken language, which could have
turned lines that scanned as hexameters into lines that failed to scan, was
reconciled with metrical requirements.

Joshua Katz discusses the opening words of the Iliad, ‘Mēnin aeide, theā’,
“Sing of the wrath, oh goddess”, in which the word for “goddess” contrasts
with general Ancient Greek usage, where ‘theos’ was used as either masculine
or feminine.  Katz, citing some parallel instances, claims that the vowel /ā/
is an “ideophone … which represents the idea of the sacred in its very sound”.

Martin West discusses lines of Homer which violate the usual metrical
constraints.  They could result from scribal errors, but West sees this as not
a main source of discrepancies.  Sometimes they are known to result from
language change:  the phoneme /w/ had dropped out of the language between
Mycenaean and Homeric periods, but (particularly in formulaic passages) lines
tended to scan as if /w/ were still present.  However, the Odyssey author in
particular (West believes that the two “Homeric” epics were brought to their
final form by different individuals) “must be convicted of occasional bad
versification”.

Italic

Vincent Matzloff examines two inscriptions in Italic languages from the middle
of the first millennium B.C., one in Old Latin and the other in South Picene,
which he uses to argue that early Italic metre depended on the number of
stresses in a line (rather than number of syllables, stressed or unstressed) –
which is interesting since Classical Latin poetry, whether because of phonetic
properties of the language or because of Greek influence, made no use of
stress.  Likewise, Angelo Mercado looks at how a Proto-Indo-European metric
system based on syllable quantity (the difference between heavy and light
syllables) was replaced in Italic languages by one based on word stress.

Emmanuel Dupraz examines the Iguvine Tables, a set of texts in Umbrian of the
third to first centuries B.C. which specify a range of ritual sacrifices. 
Dupraz argues that although the language is prose rather than poetry,
grammatical and semantic parallelism between successive sentences is so
striking that it should be categorized as ‘Kunstprosa’, “artistic prose”. 

Indo-Iranian

Martin Joachim Kümmel begins by urging that whether metre is based on syllabic
quantity, on stress, or on numbers of syllables will normally correlate with
phonetic properties of ordinary speech in the relevant language.  This leads
to a question why the metre of the Old Avestan Gāthās depends exclusively on
syllable-counting, ignoring quantity and stress, and casts doubt on a common
origin for Vedic and Greek metres.

Dieter Gunkel and Kevin Ryan argue that in two metres commonly used in the
Rig-Veda, both based on eight-syllable lines, a complete definition of
metrical constraints requires pairs of lines to be treated as larger units.

Tocharian

Michaël Peyrot examines differences between the metrical traditions of the
closely-related languages Tocharian A and Tocharian B.  It is agreed that in
many respects Tocharian B influenced Tocharian A after their separation, for
instance loanwords and orthographic conventions were borrowed in that
direction.  Peyrot asks whether features of Tocharian A metrics which differ
from those of Tocharian B reflect a tradition independent of the latter.  He
concludes that no, the differences represent elaboration by A poets of a
tradition taken over wholly from B.  Melanie Malzahn studies Tocharian B
metrics, in order to distinguish archaisms from innovative features deriving
from idiomatic speech, more fully than has been done before.

Germanic and Celtic

Rosemarie Lühr discusses the metre of Germanic ‘Stabreim’, the German term for
alliterative verse such as (to quote English examples) “Beowulf” or “Piers
Ploughman”.  She notes that Eduard Sievers’s 1893 analysis, which divides
lines into four “limbs” each containing a single main stress, has in some
scholars’ eyes been superseded by an analysis due to Andreas Heusler (1925) in
terms of musical rhythm.  Lühr defends Sievers, saying that Heusler’s analysis
makes the system so complex that poets could not have learned to use it.  She
accepts that the Old High German alliterative verse of the “Hildebrandslied”
departs in some respects from the strict rules of (other) Germanic ‘Stabreim’,
but claims that it embodies principles of its own which are “no less
artistic”.

Lastly, Paul Widmer discusses relationships between ‘dróttkvætt’ (“court
poetry”), the main metre used in North Germanic skaldic poetry, and poetic
metre in Celtic languages.  He notes that scholarly study of the latter has
tended to limit itself to looking at the Irish tradition; Widmer redresses
this by bringing in the Brythonic Celtic languages, such as Welsh.  (Welsh
certainly merits consideration in a book on “language and metre”; according to
the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Welsh ‘cynghanedd’, which
involves both alliteration and rhyme, is “the most sophisticated system of
poetic sound-patterning practised in any poetry in the world” – though its
present-day level of sophistication evolved only in the modern period.) 
Widmer sees the metrical traditions of both Insular Celtic and North Germanic
languages as having emerged through contact within the British Isles between
inherited native structures and early-mediaeval Latin-derived models.

EVALUATION

As is often so with conference proceedings, the contributions here are rather
unequal in weight.  By far the most significant, to my mind – both deeper, and
of wider interest to linguists generally, than other chapters – is Paul
Kiparsky’s contribution.  (This is also by a large margin longer than all
other chapters except Alan Nussbaum’s, which is about the same length.) 
Kiparsky’s central aim is to explain how the hexameter characteristic of Homer
and other Greek epic poetry came about, but in doing this he ranges widely
over metrical phenomena in other early Indo-European languages and indeed
non-Indo-European languages, such as the Finnish Kalevala.  Kiparsky’s theory
is abstract, and I am not knowledgeable enough to judge whether it is
ultimately compelling; but Kiparsky makes an impressive case, and anyone
interested in metre cross-linguistically (and many other linguists too) will
want to read the chapter in order to reach their own conclusions.  Thus many
people will seek this book out for the Kiparsky chapter alone.

I was particularly struck by Kiparsky’s approving quotation of an idea of
Ulrich v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1898: 148; 1902: 886), according to which
most or all Greek metres (or perhaps poetic metres in general – the scope of
Wilamowitz’s claim is not entirely clear to me) descend from an abstract
primordial four-syllable metre, which became complicated in response to word
inflexion and quantity and stress differences among syllables.  This
interested me as a Sinologist, because the early Chinese poetry of the Shi
Jing (“Book of Odes”, 10th–7th centuries B.C.), in a language without
inflexion, where the concept of syllable quantity has no application, and
whose “telegraphic” grammar means that wholly unstressed syllables are
infrequent, is predominantly in a metre matching Wilamowitz’s primordial
pattern:  lines of four syllables, often grouped into eight-syllable couplets.
 This is probably a coincidence, but it is an intriguing one.

By comparison with the Kiparsky chapter, some other contributions seem rather
slight, prompting the reflection that in an area which has been studied so
intensively over so many centuries, most low-hanging research fruit must have
been gathered long ago.  Gunkel and Ryan themselves point out that pairing of
Rig-Veda lines into couplets on syntactic and semantic grounds is generally
recognized.  Their demonstration that statistics of phonological features such
as hiatus reinforce the same groupings is worth having, but perhaps not a
major advance.

If Claire Le Feuvre is correct to claim that the requirements of poetic metre
triggered a change in the syntax of everyday spoken Greek, that would be
interesting – we do not usually think of poetry as having such power.  But she
does not suggest that there are examples other than the one she discusses; and
if that case is a one-off, how convincing is her claim that poetry caused it? 
A verb changing from intransitive to transitive, with modification of its
meaning, is the sort of thing that often happens in the history of a language,
and we do not usually look for a cause more specific than speakers’
inventiveness.  That does not explain why the new usage occurred in epic
poetry in particular; but any innovation has to begin somewhere, and should we
be surprised if it was a poet who first found himself wanting to adapt a word
to stand for “make with effort”?

A particularly lightweight contribution, in my view, is Dupraz’s discussion of
the Iguvine Tables.  Rather than grouping the chapters by theme as I did in my
Summary section, the book prints them in alphabetic order of author; the
result is that Dupraz’s chapter comes first, and might give someone who
examines the book casually a misleading impression of its overall content. 
Again as a Sinologist, I found myself thinking that if the parallelism in
these Umbrian inscriptions requires us to categorize them as ‘Kunstprosa’,
then much Classical Chinese prose would have to be classified the same way;
yet in the Chinese case parallelism seems to be motivated by a feeling that it
is a hallmark of sound argument, rather than by a desire to create “artworks”
(though in any case “art” is not a concept with clear boundaries).  I do not
say that Dupraz is wrong, but (unless I have missed something) I do not see
what he has added to our understanding of the material he discusses.  Other
contributions are more substantial than this.

The standard of book production, as usual with this publisher, is superb.  I
noticed only a tiny handful of (trivial) misprints, and the typography and
binding are handsome.  I was particularly impressed to notice that on two or
three pages of the Nussbaum chapter, a handful of words are printed in red or
green (for reasons which are not clear to me).  I would not be optimistic
about persuading a British academic publisher to go to such an expense,
whatever the intellectual justification might be.

REFERENCES

Heusler, A.  1925.  Deutsche Versgeschichte mit Einschluß des altenglischen
und altnordischen Stabreimverses, vol. 1.  De Gruyter (Berlin).

Sievers, E.  1893.  Altgermanische Metrik.  Niemeyer (Halle an der Saale).

v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U.  1898.  Review of Kenyon, The Poems of
Bakchylides.  Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 160th year, vol. 1, pp. 125–60.

v. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U.  1902.  Choriambischer Dimeter. 
Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol.
34, pp. 864–96.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent
some years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South
Africa. Sampson's most recent book is ''The Linguistics Delusion'' (Equinox,
2017). He is currently working on a translation of the Chinese ''Book of
Odes''.





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