Recently in school Category

Great find at an antique store in Reykjavík, just down the street from where I’m staying:

The fantastic thing about Icelandic typewrites is that they contain all the glyphs necessary for reproducing North Germanic languages:

The four pangrams above use all of the letters for Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish, respectively.

Talking about “original” or “indigenous” musical instruments in Iceland is tricky. Unlike the continental Scandinavian countries, there’s little evidence of medieval musical culture — far fewer paintings, wood or stone carvings, that depict actual instruments. In fact, the earliest depiction of the national instrument, the Langspil (a bowed zither) is from 1836 — and from a French travel narrative, no less:

Twenty years later, the first signifiant work on the Langspil was published, a guidebook on how to play:

At its most basic, the Langspil is a variant of the instrument Americans know as a Dulcimer. Such instruments, which can all fall under the general term Zither, have a long history in Europe. A large part of the original settlement of Iceland came from Norway, and a zither known as the Langeleik are pretty well-attested there — the earliest surviving from the 16th century. (I’m not sure whether the current thinking is that the Langeleik/Langspil travelled with the Norwegians during the 9th century settlement period or much later.)

Regardless, we can probably treat the Icelandic Langspil as a local adaptation of a common European instrument class. In the engraving above from 1836, we see a farmer playing the instrument with a bow, instead of plucking with fingers or a pick. In modern instruments being produced today, both methods are supported. Sometimes the practice is to unhook one of two larger strings when bowing, reconnecting it when the player wants to use a pick. Below, a researcher plucks various strings while holding some of them down against the fretboard:

Of course, there’s a slippery slope between the specifically-Icelandic Langspil, and any zither produced in Iceland. Is the difference in the shape of the instrument, or its ability to be bowed, or the decoration carved or painted onto its surface? Below, an uncle-and-nephew team of Icelandic instrument makers consider a conventional zither, left, and a Langspil, right:

Both were made in Reykjavík in 2011, and both can be strung and played in a similar fashion. Besides the physical difference in the bodies’ design, the placement of the fretboard on the Langspil is different. But in general, as with all folk instruments, individual examples exist in a spectrum of different design choices and stylistic traditions, rather than inhabiting fixed positions such as Violin/Viola/Cello.

Suspended above the ceiling of the new Háskolatorg building at the University of Iceland is a bright yellow circle, with capital roman letters in stark relief:

VITS ER ÞÖRF ÞEIM ER VÍÐA RATAR.

The inscription is a citation from the Hávamál, — the Words of the High One, from the Poetic Edda which inspired Snori Sturlusson to write his Prose Edda. The first preserved text of the Poetic Edda is from the 13th Century, but it probably preserves parts of much older narratives. Why choose this particular medieval text for a new academic building?

The first word, cut off in my photo above, is vits, which we have in English as “wits” and serves perfectly well as the cognate it is: knowledge, cunning.

Þörf, “to need,” has disappeared in modern English, but is still present in Modern German as dürfen and Swedish as tarva. (The proto-Germanic word probably looked something like *ɵurfan.) So the first half-line is something like “Wits are necessary…”

Moving on to the second half-line: I always like to think of Þeim as “them” because it basically is, in a dative case here. Skipping to the end of the half-line, ratar, Zoëga’s dictionary of 1910 actually cites this verse in its definition of rata: to travel; rata víða: to travel widely. The verb “to be” is then used to build this construction meaning “for those that travel far.” So the message is: You’ll need smarts if you want to travel the world.

I don’t know if the inscription goes on around the back side, but if it does so, it continues:

dælt er heima hvað.

“Dæll” is an interesting adjective, meaning gentle or easy. But this passage from the Havamal is also cited in Zoëga, for the use of dæll in the set phrase above “anything will pass at home.” If I had to guess what the words are literally doing here, it would be something like “Easy: that’s what home is.”

Interestingly, the connection between idiocy and “the home” — in either the pure domestic sense, or in the context of international travel — is one common to many Germanic languages. Think of English’s “homely”, which has a sense of “OK for inside the house, but probably not a beauty.” Swedish goes even further, with hemsk, literally home-y, translating as “horrible.” The Icelandic Web of Science has an entire page on the question of the linkage between the home and cowardice and unmanliness, which cites this exact verse from the Hávamál. “Ekki þótti það karlmannlegt,” they write, “að sitja alltaf heima og fara ekkert.” (It wasn’t thought manly to sit at home all the time and not travel.)

The payoff for translating these lines by hand is then you get to compare your work with W. H. Auden! Yes, everyone’s favorite 20th-century poet translated the Hávamál himself, and rendered this particular verse (in its entirety) as:

Who travels widely needs his wits about him,
The stupid should stay at home:
The ignorant man is often laughed at
When he sits at meat with the sage.

So this stanza sets up a tension between the expertise and knowledge required for the well-traveled, versus the low expectations present at home. An interesting message to hover over the heads of those studying at the University of Iceland in 2011.

Isn’t this a great bookplate? Charles Kofoid (1865-1947) served for twenty-six years as Chair of Zoology at UC Berkeley. A first-generation American, his father’s family came from the Danish island of Bornholm (where the name was spelled Kofoed, a very common last name there.)

There are a few interesting elements in the design. The wooden schooner sailing through the seas at the bottom seems a clear reference to Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, during which he collected many specimens of marine invertebrates. Kofoid himself continued this tradition through the invention of the “Kofoid horizontal net” and the “Kofoid self-closing bucket used for plankton collections in the field.”

The volume this bookplate was scanned from is, in fact, the Danish translation of the Voyage of the Beagle (Reise om jorden). Kofoid collected Darwin in Scandinavian translation, including important volumes brought to Danish through the writer JP Jacobsen.

Finally, you can see the Campanile through the windows of Kofoid’s library. (He lived in a house designed by Julia Morgan, and for all I know this might actually have been the view from that room.)

In the process of writing a book chapter about contemporary Swedish literature, I went over to the UCLA research library to check out a novel by Azar Mahloujian. Inside was this inscription from the author in three languages: Persian, Swedish and English:

Back from a quick conference in Washington DC, held at the newly-opened Swedish Embassy building:

Some nice use of pools and glass to evoke ice:

And from the balcony, a view over the Potomac towards Rosslyn, Virginia:

This falls under the category of questions that were too tedious to explore before mass digitization: How did Strindberg and other Modern Breakthrough writers express negation? There are (at least) three different words in Swedish for “not”:

inte

icke

ej

Thinking about these three words, we can imagine a few spectra upon which they fall:

informal <-> formal

spoken <-> written

neutral <-> emphatic

Which is to say, roughly, that inte is the most informal, spoken, and neutral word for “not,” with ej being the most formal, most-often-written, and emphatic form. There are a lot of exceptions to these generalizations, of course, including the use of icke in the sense of “non-“: icke-vÃ¥ld, icke-medborgare (non-violence, non-citizen). And some translations of the Bible tend towards ej, though that is similar in a sense to other languages (English thee/thy/thine as informal, which paradoxically seem antiquated and thus ultra-formal to modern readers).

Having said that, what happens when we take a play such as The Father (1887) and do a quick wordcount on the OCR’d text?

So this is not really unexpected, but what we could do to extend this and make it more interesting would be:

1) Changes over the course of the play — more emphatic negation towards the denouement?

2) Gendered negation — do women use more cautious language? (This requires coding each speaker as M/F, which is somewhat easier in a play than a novel due to the way the pages are laid out, but still labor-intensive.)

3) Changes over a long authorship — did early, national-romantic Ibsen use more flowery negation, while later realistic Ibsen use more terms associated with the spoken tongue?

4) When does the use of icke and ej really begin to disappear from the written record? Do these more formal terms hand on longer in scientific material than they do in literature? The linguists working with the Swedish Academy have, of course, their own databases of newspaper and literary material — how far back do those go, and do they match up with what is in Google Books?

The middle of October was taken up by the annual Swedish Teachers Conference, which came to Seattle this year. On offer were two days of language-teaching seminars, as well as a display of recently-published books brought by the Swedish Institute:

The guest speaker on the second day was Robert Charlson, professor emeritus in Atmospheric Sciences and Chemistry at UW. He has written on an early 20th-century scientist, Svante Arrhenius, who accurately predicted global warming:

Also presenting was Paul Norlén, who read from his new translation of Selma Lagerlöf’s Gösta Berlings saga.

One Þáttr, many Þættir: shot from a class on Old Norse short stories.

After Shanghai, a few days on the West Coast before heading off to the Jutlandic peninsula for a summer course: Paganism and Christianity in Old Norse Textual Studies.

All the participants in the Shanghai Ibsen conference: