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Section 13. Philology and linguistics
Linguists used to believe that idioms were completely arbitrary (based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system): that is, you couldn’t know or understand their meaning from the words they consist of. The words in the idioms usually come inseparable and express one unique meaning according their use. [2, 32-33] A helpful way of remembering idioms is to group them according to the domain (specific areas of experienced) that they are derived from, as follows the idioms derived from entertainment (the theatre, the circus etc)
behind the scenes- in secret
waiting in the wings — ready to act when needed.
a balancing act — a difficult compromise.
An idiom is fixed and recognized by native speakers. So we can’t make up our own. The English idioms are very important because they are common in people’s speech. It’s impossible to speak, read or listen to English without facing idiomatic language. You may see several of idioms in newspapers, tabloids and magazines. They are full of idioms and we can’t avoid it or leave it till later. The English idioms are used in both spoken and written form.
References:
1. Crystal, A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics, 4th edition. Oxford, UK: Blackwell publishers.
2. Jon Wright Idioms organizer.Copyright by Language Teaching Publication and R. A. close 1992.
Yanushkevich Irina Fedorovna, professor, Gorykina Svetlana Sergeevna, postgraduate student, Volgograd State University, Faculty of Philology and Intercultural Communication E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
Anglo-Saxon riddles: the language mirror of the world
Abstract: The article provides a detailed analysis of the conceptual structure of the Anglo-Saxon riddles which includes four thematic fields typical of the ancient people’s picture of the world: nature, everyday life, warfare, and beliefs. Representing part of the language picture of the world, the riddles allow reconstructing the peculiarities of the national world-view.
Key words: Anglo-Saxon riddle, language picture of the world, thematic fields.
The analysis of the language of the Anglo-Saxon riddles is part of a general analysis of the traditional English culture. According to W. Humboldt, the language is “the outer appearance of the spirit of a people; the language is their spirit and the spirit is their language” [1, 46], so the language of the Anglo-Saxon riddle is an important source of information about the English world of the Early Middle Ages and the place of man in it. In this paper we are going to analyze the language peculiarities of the Anglo-Saxon riddles and to show how the ancient people’s picture of the world was reflected in their language.
The ninety five riddles which have survived to the present days are collected in the Exeter book that includes, except the riddles, real masterpieces of the Anglo-Saxon work. The manuscript is supposed to be written or translated at the end of the tenth century though many riddles were first put down as far back as the end of the seventh or in the eighth century. By their sense, they are closely connected with the Latin riddles
written down by Aldhelm, a Sherborn abbot from Northumbria, whose works were based on the creations of Symphosius, a Latin poet of the fifth century. Aldhelm was the first who brought the riddle into common use in England. The author of the Anglo-Saxon riddles translated or adapted the Latin original riddles but some riddles may go back to the more ancient oral collections, allegedly of the fourth century [2, www]. Scholars think the Anglo-Saxon riddles are most likely to belong to the oral tradition (as it is the case with other cultures since riddle is nearly an universal folklore form), the oral and written traditions having interacted from the middle of the seventh century till the Norman Conquest.
Some riddles contained runes which implied listeners or readers who were familiar with the futhark. The runes had arrived in England from Germany and/or Scandinavia by the fifth century AD. Since the ninth century the runes had been used rarely and more likely for shorthand writing or as the elements of the language play than for their traditional purpose — magic, ritual, or mystic.
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Riddles give us an opportunity to look at the AngloSaxon picture of the world, their life and beliefs: marshes, rivers, the sea, the horror of the untrodden depths of the forest, the sun and the moon in endless chase of each other, the cuckoo and the swan, the plough directed by the “gray-haired fighter of the woods", the bull trampling down the clods of soil coming from under the plough, the falcon — the etheling’s mate — all this scenery, events and characters are typical of England of that period. More than that, the authors of the Anglo-Saxon riddles often borrowed the plots from the Anglo-Saxon folk tales and sagas (for example, the riddles about the storm and the iceberg vividly convey the sensations of an Old Scandinavian Viking). As well as Anglo-Saxon poetry, the riddles imply the feeling that practically everything in the universe is part of the life continuum, any duration of which can speak in its own voice.
The language picture ofthe world in riddles is a pattern ofthe naive perception ofreality, peculiar ofthe nation and fixed in the language. Any riddle consists of two parts: a code and an answer. This two-part structure reflects the correlation of the two pictures of the world. The coding part serves as a sign (the signifier) of the cognition of the language personality. The answer (the signified) is the meaning of the whole riddle while the content of its text manifests the characteristics of the denominated object. The denomination of the objects in the language picture of the world reflected in the riddle is based on the imagebearing element of the description of the world-view. The coding, or image-bearing, part manifests the picture of the world by the language means; the answers are a thematic projection of the conceptual spheres which include cultural information about the three main forms of man’s being: nature — society — man.
The texts of the riddles are grouped under four thematic (conceptual) fields: the natural
phenomena influencing man’s life; daily chores; warfare as an important part of the relations between man and the world (“we — others"); spiritual life (mythology and religion).
The first field is presented by the lexemes denoting live and still nature: domestic and wild animals and plants (a calf, a badger, fish, a moth, reed, etc.), the sky and the earth, the sun, the moon, fire, etc.
The second field describes everyday life and embraces tools and produce of the economic activity (a churn, a weaver’s loom, wine, dough, etc.) and things intended for leisure (a harp, a horn, the bagpipes).
Natural powers, climatic conditions, flora and fauna played an important role in the arrangement of the tribal
life. According to J. Neville [3, 5-6], the severe climate of the British Isles didn’t allow cultivating the land in a proper way, so tilling resembled a battle in which the people did their best to benefit from their hard labour while having no special skills or technologies. A. Gurevich noticed that the tiller’s view of the world dominated in the mind and behaviour of the society. Being tied to the earth by his economy and preoccupied with working on the land, man understood nature as an integral part of himself and didn’t treat it as a mere object to apply effort to, to own or to dispose of [4, 48].
The third group includes words denoting items of armament: a shield, a sword, a bow and arrows, a battering ram, etc.
The Anglo-Saxons were mostly farmers; they were warriors only when needed [5, 60] but the warfare was associated with such qualities and virtues as courage, self-sacrifice, defiance of death, faithfulness, respect to the ancestors and the like. Warfare was one of the key subject areas of the Anglo-Saxon poetry; no wonder it took a proper place in the riddles.
The fourth — and the less numerous — group of riddles is connected with the spiritual life of the AngloSaxons. This group exposes the conversion to Christianity from heathenism: the Creation, a chalice, the relations between the spirit and the body, the Bible, and at the same time — the siren, a mythological creature. The sanctity of the subject doesn’t overcome the triviality of the form yet; the naive picture of the world reflects both the God and the pagan feelings of surprise at the wonders of the real world.
The peculiarities of riddle No 74 can serve an example. It should be noted that Anglo-Saxon writers did not put down the riddles. There are several translations of the riddles and their answers sometimes differ depending on the modern philologists’ understanding of the Old English text. We use M. Alexander’s translation [6]:
I was once a young woman,
A glorious warrior, a gray-haired queen.
I soared with birds, stepped on the earth,
Swam in the sea — dived under waves,
Languid amongst fishes. I had a living spirit.
The creature described in this riddle was once a live young woman (a living spirit, a young woman). The temporal characteristics of this creature’s life are not concrete; the spatial ones denote its ubiquity — in the air, on the land, in and under the water. It possesses special, magical features: it soars in the air but it is not a bird; it can step on the shore but doesn’t live on the earth; it swims and dives but is not fish; sometimes it can
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be among the fish but moves in a different way than fish (languid — slow, esp. in a graceful way) (the definition is retrieved from the Dictionary of English Language and Culture [7]). What is most important is that it is as mighty as a queen and invincible in battles (glorious — having or deserving greatfame, honor, and admiration) (Ibid [7]). This creature — mythical, fierce, warlike, mighty, majestic, resembling a bird, a fish and a woman at the same time — is a siren! In «The Myths of the Peoples of the World» the siren is described as a sea creature having a bird look and a woman’s head that carries the seamen along to the baneful places by singing [8, 438]. In Greek mythology the siren was born from the river Achaeloe and one of the muses and inherited wild spontaneity from its father and a divine voice from its mother. All peoples’ mythology mentioned various water nymphs (those were girls drowned in lakes and rivers): Slavic mermaids, West European undines which attracted travelers by laughing, but none of them destroyed ships — ships belong to the sea. Evidently, the Greek mythologema ‘siren’ came to the Anglo-Saxon folklore from the Latin original riddle. As is seen, this riddle is based on the mythology of the Germanic tribes which came from the rivers of Central Europe and on that of the tribes of seamen which came from other places, all that having turned into the Anglo-Saxon picture of the world.
The fact that the conceptual sphere of Anglo-Saxon riddles includes denominations of natural phenomena, household things, warfare artifacts, and items of spiritual world is accounted by their axiological meaning for the Anglo-Saxon culture; it reflects the needs of the Anglo-Saxon language personality in classifying and categorizing the real world in the format of this genre.
The riddle is part of the system of folklore genres but it has specific features of its own. In particular, the peculiarity of the language picture of the world reflecting man’s naive beliefs about the reality is characterized by anthropomorphism, i. e. the tendency to personification — to the personalized perception and reflection ofthe real world. Many things mentioned in the riddles are considered living beings rather than fixed and static entities: for example, the parchment had suffered before it became the sacred (and magic) Bible (No 43): An enemy came and took away my life and my strength...
In early Middle Ages people lived in close connection with nature and assumed that every creature though dumb was live and had a personality of their own. In spite of the fact that it was not always possible to propitiate the powers of the earth, air and water, people identified these powers as live and treated them in a special — familial — way.
This feeling of man’s empathy towards natural powers was manifested in arts, especially in poetic art including riddles. In the act of personification the poet enlarged man’s perception ofthe nature and the world, on the whole. Though sometimes living beings were endowed with the properties ofthings (My beak was bound and I was immersed, the current swept round me as I lay covered by mountains streams; I matured in the sea... — this is a Barnacle goose described as a ship launched to the water, No 23).
Many riddles begin with a settled phrase “I saw a wonderful thing" or “I am a marvel". Such introduction might help the narrator draw the listeners’ or readers’ attention. But in no way was it just a form: the narrator seemed to see the world full of wonders, be it nature with simple tools or the wonder of writing, or the grandiose might of the Creator in His acts. The world of riddles appears to be, according to Meletinsky, a peculiar metaphorical code which models the structure of the world — both natural and social [9, 172].
The Anglo-Saxon riddle represents the language picture of the world as having, at least, three peculiar features: syncretism, selectivity, and systematic character. The syncretism of the Anglo-Saxon perception of the world appears in mixing the elements of the mythological and Christian pictures of the world. The selection of the phenomena denoted in the riddles is determined by the axiological conception of the society: man is the most valuable phenomenon in the life of the ancient society, and man himself, his home, his thoughts, and his world become the topics of the riddles. The systemic character of the riddle consists in using a limited number of language means for the image-bearing description of the objects and events of the surrounding world.
The study of the riddle as a minor folklore genre can be a step towards the understanding of the peculiarities of the national character.
As is known, the universal categories of culture are common for the human consciousness while the concrete images of the world are different. This difference depends, first, on the stage of the historical development when, by Gurevich, each civilization, each social system is characterized by its own way of perception of the world [4, 32], and second, on the national peculiarities, being manifested in the so-called “national images of the world” — “the variants of the invariant”, the determinants of which, according to Gachev, originate from the source which is characterized as a national integral entity including such elements as nature, ethnic character, language, history, domestic life and so on [10, 14].
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Every nation has some integral view on the world riddles, in particular, — can become one of the grounds which is manifested in the national picture of the world. for its reconstruction.
This national view reflected in folklore monuments —
References:
1. Humboldt W., von. On Language, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species/Ed. M. Losonsky. - Cambridge: CUP, 1999.
2. The Cambridge History. IY. Old English Christian Poetry. § 10. Guthlac, The Phoenix, Physiologus, Riddles. -Available at: www.bartleby.com (accessed 21.11.2013).
3. Neville J. Representations of the Natural World in Old English Poetry. - Cambridge: CUP, 1999.
4. Гуревич А. Я. Категории средневековой культуры. - М.: Издательство «Искусство», 1984.
5. McCrum R., Cram W., MacNeil R. The Story ofEnglish. - New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1986.
6. Alexander М. The Earliest English Poems. - Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
7. Dictionary of English Language and Culture. - Harlow: Longman Group UK Limited, 1992.
8. Мифы народов мира. Т. 2. - М.: Советская энциклопедия, 1997.
9. Мелетинский Е. М. Поэтика мифа. - М.: Наука, 2000.
10. Гачев Г. Космо-Психо-Логос: Национальные образы мира. - М.: Академический Проект, 2007.
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