[Lexicog] Shakespeare and words

Wed Sep 24 17:12:09 UTC 2014

Dear Fritz,

Thank you for pointing to this Vikipedia article.
During my studies in Saint Petersburg University
in the beginning of the sixties I took a special course
of Prof. A.V. Fiodorov about Biblical translations and
Europe and origins of the national languages.
Luther's translation took a great part of this course.

Shalom,

Hayim

On Wed, Sep 24, 2014 at 12:34 PM, 'Dr. Fritz Goerling'
fritz.goerling at yahoo.de [lexicographylist] <lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
> wrote:

>
>
>  Dear Hayim,
>
> The following wiki article shows Martin Luther's accomplishment of
> translating the Bible into German and its role in the formation of national
> German http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Bible
>
> Shalom,
>
> Fritz
>
>  *From:* Hayim Sheynin hayim.sheynin at gmail.com [lexicographylist]
> <hayim.sheynin at gmail.com+[lexicographylist]>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, September 23, 2014 11:21 PM
> *To:* lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com
> *Subject:* Re: [Lexicog] Shakespeare and words
>
>
>
>  Dear Fritz,
>
> Thank you for forwarding the article about Bard. This article is very
> interesting. I can
> mention that in many national literatures appeared such outstanding
> personalities  as
> Shakespeare and Bard who influenced the language and phraseology. Usually
> they appeared in the period of formation of national languages. For
> Germans such
> role played most probably M. Luther (in his Bible translation) and Goethe,
> for Italians
> Dante, for Russians Karamzin, Pushkin and Griboedov, for Jews (i.e. for
> Hebrew
> language) - original Hebrew Bible and Ch. N. Bialik, for Yiddish Mendele
> Moycher
> Sforim (Sh. Abramowich) and Shalom Aleychem (Sh. Rabinowich).
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Hayim Sheynin
>
> On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 12:26 PM, 'Dr. Fritz Goerling'
> fritz.goerling at yahoo.de [lexicographylist] <
> lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>  I thought this would interest you.
>>
>> Fritz Goerling
>>
>>
>>
>> *a man of fire-new words*
>>
>> *Celebrating the Bard’s 450th birthday*
>>
>> by Richard Lederer
>>
>>
>>
>> On April 23, we will celebrate the *450th *birthday of the greatest
>> word-maker who ever trod the earthly stage. Of the 20,138 basewords that
>> Shakespeare employs in his plays, sonnets, and other poems, his is the
>> first known use of over 1,700 of them! The most verbally innovative of our
>> authors, Shakespeare made up more than 8.5 percent of his written
>> vocabulary. Reading his works is like witnessing the birth of modern
>> English.
>>
>> Among his verbal inventions arc: *auspicious, bedroom, bump, dishearten,
>> dwindle, hurry, lapse, lonely, majestic, road, sneak, *and *useless. *So
>> great is his influence on his native tongue that we find it hard to imagine
>> a time when these words did not exist:
>>
>> Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Now we sit through Shakespeare in order to
>> recognize the quotations.” Unrivaled in so many other ways in matters
>> verbal, Shakespeare is unequaled as a phrasemaker.
>>
>> A student who attended a performance of “Hamlet” came away complaining
>> that the play “was nothing more than a bunch of clichés.” The reason for
>> this common reaction is that so many of the memorable expressions in
>> “Hamlet” have become proverbial. In that one play alone were born: *brevity
>> is the soul of wit; there’s the rub; to thine own self be true; it smells
>> to heaven; the very witching time of night; the primrose path; though this
>> be madness, yet there is method in it; dog will have his day; the apparel
>> oft proclaims the man; neither a borrower nor a lender be; frailty, thy
>> name is woman; something is rotten in the state of Denmark; more honored in
>> the breach than the observance; hoist with his own petard; the lady doth
>> protest too much; to be or not to be; sweets for the sweet; the be-all and
>> end-all; to the manner born, *and, *more in sorrow than in anger.*
>>
>> Cudgel your brain, and you can append a sample of everyday, idiomatic
>> phrases from other Shakespearean plays: if you knit your brow and wish that
>> this disquisition would vanish into thin air because it is Greek to you,
>> you are quoting William Shakespeare in all his infinite variety. If you
>> point the finger at strange bedfellows and blinking -idiots, you are
>> converting Shakespeare’s coinages into currency. If you have seen better
>> days in your salad days, when you wore your heart on your sleeve, you are,
>> whether you know it or not, going from Bard to verse.
>>
>> If you break the ice with one fell swoop, if you never stand on
>> ceremonies, if you play it fast and loose until the crack of doom, if you
>> paint the lily, if you hope for a plague on both houses, if you are more
>> sinned against than sinning because you have all been eaten out of house
>> and home by your own flesh and blood (the most unkindest cut of all), if
>> you haven’t slept a wink and are breathing your last because you’re in a
>> pickle, if you carry within you the milk of human kindness and a heart of
>> gold (even though you know that all that glisters is not gold), if you
>> laugh yourself into stitches at too much of a good thing, if you make a
>> virtue of necessity, if you know that the course of true love never did run
>> smooth, and if you won’t budge an inch—why, if the truth be told and the
>> truth will out, what the dickens, in a word, right on!, be that as it may,
>> the game is up — you are, as luck would have it, standing on that tower of
>> strength of phrasemakers, William Shakespeare.
>>
>> The etymologist Ernest Weekley said of Shakespeare, “His contribution to
>> our phraseology is ten times greater than that of any writer to any
>> language in the history of the world.” The essayist and novelist Walter
>> Pater exclaimed, “What a garden of words!” In Sonnet CXVI, the Bard himself
>> wrote, “If this be error and upon me proved,/I never writ, nor no man ever
>> loved.” If Shakespeare had not lived and written with such a loving ear for
>> the music of our language, our English tongue would be immeasurably the
>> poorer. No day goes by that we do not speak and hear and read and write his
>> legacy.
>>
>> *(Reprinted from *Mensa Bulletin, *April/May 2014, ed. Roger Brooks)*
>>
>>
>>
>>
>   
>
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