Almost As Good As Chocolate

Catholic Bibliophagist not only loves reading, she loves languages. That's one of the reasons I fell so in love with The Lord of the Rings. For me, it was the philological groundwork in Tolkien's writing that gave such reality to the mythology of Middle Earth. I suppose that's why no other fantasy "in the tradition off J.R.R. Tolkien" ever seems to have the same depth and resonance.

I never had the opportunity to formally study linguistics, but I love catching glimpses of the connections between the different branches of the tree of language.

In honor of yesterday's Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Zero Summer has posted a link to a site which offers the text of the Hail Mary* in dozens of languages from Afrikaans to Zurituutsch.

By chance, I found myself looking at the Norwegian translation, trying to puzzle out possible links with English:

Hill deg, Maria, full av nåde, Herren er med deg, velsignet er du iblant kvinnene, og velsignet er ditt livs frukt, Jesus. Hellige Maria, Guds Mor, bed for oss syndere, nå og i vår dødstime. Amen.

Okay, maybe I'm jumping on a lot of false cognates, but I'm betting that "Hill" is the equivalent of "hail," and "full av" reminds me of "full of" in the phrase "full of grace." Could "kvinnene" be related to our word "women"? Hmm, would "frukt" be related to the English "fruit"? The Latin is "fructus" Did Norwegian do any borrowing from Latin?

"Hellige Maria" has got to be "Holy Mary" just from the position, "Guds Mor" -- "God's mother," obviously. "Bed for oss" must be pray for us since "bede" is a very old word for "pray" in English. "Syndere" must be "sinners" from its position, and now we notice that both words begin similarly. Looking at "nå og i vår dødstime" I'm guessing that "nå" means "now" just because I know what the prayer is supposed to say at that point. Since I can't pronounce Norwegian I have no idea how much it sounds like the English word. But look at the last word, "dødstime" -- doesn't it look like "deathtime"? The English at this point is "hour of our death."

That was fun! (Okay, not as good as chocolate, but what is?)
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*English text here if you aren't familiar with it.

Just Wondering

The other day I finished rereading Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott. At one point the book mentions that Ben, a young boy who has run away from his former life in a circus, is attempting to read a hymn book, but “the long s in the old-fashioned printing bewildered him . . . ."

When I was young they bewildered me too because they look so much like the letter f . I hadn't thought about them in a long time until last night when I was flipping through my copy of the Rambler. My eye fell on those funny s’s and I couldn’t help wondering what rules governed their use, for the regular letter s is also to be found scattered throughout the text.

After a bit of skimming I can see that the long s seems to have been used at the beginning and in the middle of words. A double s seems to have been written with one long s and one regular one. It also looks as though words ending in s use the regular letter. But why did they use the long s at all? There must have been some typographical reason, but I don’t know what it is or even how to look it up. Can anyone relieve my ignorance?

Update: The Wikipedia article to which Bill White links in the comments box gives links to two fascinating articles at BableStone:

"The Rules for Long S" which is far more detailed than than Wikipedia's description and "The Long and the Short of the Letter S" which discusses the origins of this letter form and includes lovely pictures of manuscript examples.