relative "that" again

Herb Stahlke hfwstahlke at GMAIL.COM
Sat Feb 21 19:10:11 UTC 2009


I've started going through the facsimile, which is messy enough to be
difficult to interpret at times.  As you've found, Google's OCR
doesn't do very well with it and makes some unfortunate errors with
the medial <s> letter.

I've found two other headless relatives so far, 14:1 and 14:4, both of
which start with unstressed "that," so the stress on "that" in 121:3
may just be a result of the meter, not of a difference in category.  I
did notice some dactyls breaking up the otherwise deadening string of
iambs.

Herb

On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 10:14 AM, Randy Alexander
<strangeguitars at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Randy Alexander <strangeguitars at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: relative "that" again
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 10:07 PM, Herb Stahlke <hfwstahlke at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I would expect "now" to be stressed wherever it's used, and BPB
>> rendering of Psalm 121 uses "not" in both stressed and unstressed
>> positions.  In v. 4 the stressed "not" is postverbal, which is a
>> marked position for it.  I'm looking for a searchable copy of the BPB
>> to check further on the use of "that."
>
> If you find any, let me know; all I've found so far are PDFs of
> original editions, and one useless OCR attempt.
>
> I didn't want to say without anything to back it up (it's been 13
> years since I've spent much time with this sort of thing), but the
> stress in these early English metrical Psalms are not so strict, for
> example Psalm X:7-8:
>
> 7. His mouth with cursing filled is,
>    deceits and fallacy:
>    under his tongue perverseness is,
>    also iniquity.
> 8. In the close places of the towns
>    he sits, in secret dens
>    he slays the harmless: 'gainst the poor
>    slyly his eyes down bends.
>
> Stress on the second syllables of "under", "also", and "slyly", and
> stress on "the"!
>
> Haven't found any other headless relatives yet.
>
> --
> Randy Alexander
> Jilin City, China
> My Manchu studies blog:
> http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu
>
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