Exotic words
Jan. 4th, 2011 07:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI read a lot of fantasy and science fiction and what you get a lot in those is new words. They get dropped in like clues to something so new or strange our language doesn't have any equivalent for it. And that's a problem for the reader, because how do you figure out what the writer is on about? Done well it's a puzzle, an invitation to discover. You figure out the words from their context, from how they're used and how others react to them. Mostly word meanings are part of a set. They're a bit like x and a bit like y and nothing at all like z. We choose one word from a set to mean precisely what we say. But with entirely new words you first have to figure out what set they're from, and then how they map to the other words. Done carefully it can pull together a whole new value set around a word as crucial to that language as 'honor' is to us. Done less carefully... well, if you have two rodents, and one is small and cute and kind of friendly, and the other is large and mean and kind of icky, what do you have? Basically a mouse and a rat. And if they physically look like a mouse and a rat, but have different associations, then you have a mouse and a rat as understood by a different culture. Little rodent as evil and big rodent as good? Different culture. But if they physically look like a mouse and a rat, and have the same associations as a mouse and a rat, then all you've really got is a mouse and a rat in funny costumes. Local color. You unravel all the clues and all they mean is: you're not at home any more.
Which always irritates the hell out of me because hey, I applied brain to this! I know I'm not at home, it isn't called England, give me a bit more than that!
So: poetry.
Is all about the careful selection of words. There's less of them so they carry more around. You're working the connotations, associations, and denotations, basic meanings, so everything links up to create a specific effect. And where words come from can be incredibly important. One poem I went through an etymological dictionary for was in English from start to finish but compared England and Ireland through using Latin derived words for England and more local roots for Ireland. (At least as I remember it now. I can't remember which poem it was. Helpful, memory.) That's not something you're likely to notice consciously, but the different roots have different connotations, different registers, broadly speaking posh vs common. That you're more likely to get an impression of.
Some of the meanings shift over time. Reading Byron I have to be a bit careful because there's words like divan and kiosk that when I read them make me think of slightly cheap furniture catalogues and information stalls, but when he was writing he had to footnote to explain what a kiosk was. Our word absorption makes them common now, but you have to poke around a bit to figure out what was exotic then.
There's a bit in one of the theory essays I've read lately about how the translation of persian poetry imported whole new symbol sets into English poetry. Specifically the nightingale singing to the rose as a symbol of the lover courting the beloved. It has a lot less syllables before translation, gul and bulbul I think. Wiki has some on Ottoman Diwan. So that's an image and a set of associations that is new to English. You could write gul and bulbul and from those words not guess that one singing to the other meant nightingale and rose. New culture.
But there's also just a lot of new words.
The Corsair's first canto sticks basically with familiar words and classical references, Ariadne and suchlike being the bits I had to look up. I can mostly remember them though, I've mostly heard of them.
For Eastern words? Moslem, Sirocco (arabic by way of italian), that's about it until right at the end of the canto, where there's Pacha and Moslem again.
Canto 2 has a bazillion of them.
i. Pacha, firman, turban, Moslem
ii. turban, (bearded chiefs - beard are apparently out of fashion with the Europeans and in with the Oriental), pilaff, sober berrry's juice, chiboque, Almas, Koran, Pacha
iii. Dervise, Pacha
iv. Dervise, Saick, Allah, Moslem, Pacha, Divan, Sultan, Mecca, Afrit, Zatanai (instead of Satan), cloven turbans, Haram,
v. [make notes later]
I could go on. A lot more. At length.
But the way they're used, it's like:
Glared on the Moslems' eyes some Afrit Sprite,
Whose demon death-blow left no hope for fight.
It's not Afrit, leaving you to figure it out, it's Afrit Sprite demon. Three words from the same set just in case we were confused. And what does 'afrit' uniquely bring to them? Well, not a lot. My understanding of ifrits (and what dictionary.com has in the definition) is they can be good and good moslems as well as evil, they're not demons the same way christianity has demons, but is that a subtlety being added here? Don't reckon so. It's a list of supernaturally bad things that kill real good. So the only thing it brings is its origin. You're not at home any more.
They're all Turkish words, far as I can tell, properly belonging to the Ottoman Empire, not mashing up half the world. Not just generalised Oriental. Byron was writing about places he'd been, mostly.
But he's not writing about them on their own terms, within their own references, with their own unique understandings. He's not making fine distinctions. Like, there's a lot of turbans (and beards). If there were a lot of hats would he just say hat a lot? Not if his variety of words for sword or helmet or cloak is anything to go by. He'd mix it up, get different effects out of it, fit the rhyme and meter different. And with hats you know a top hat is not a bowler hat is not a stetson is really not a fez. Different hats, different associations. Are turbans like that? We'd never know from this. (And I don't know, really, beyond looking on wiki, which seems like a yes.) Turban just means hat what them others wear.
And you could say fair enough, he's mostly writing a story about Medora dying and Gulnare kicking arse. But if the dude from the familiar culture gets a lot of specificity and the other culture gets one description among the lot of them (beard and turban) then that leaves a certain impression.
Also in a theory essay it described The Corsair as a white man being saved by a brown woman. It was comparing it to a different poem so it was making big broad categories. But Gulnare, while calling herself Eastern, is described in terms of how white she is. White arm, cheek so fair, foot like snow. There's not a lot about skin color as a racial indicator here. Women are fair-white-pretty, is what gets emphasised. Gulnare's eyes are dark, her hair auburn, Medora blue eyed and fair haired. So there's contrast, but it isn't brown. Possibly the reader supplied the brown?
Back to fantasy and science fiction:
I think basically it helps to be aware of the patterns in 'exotic' word use in mainstream lit because a lot of it left traps lying around. Orientalism that I'm meant to be looking for in this essay, binary oppositions defining Us against Them, stereotypes that defined a lot of Them. It's not just the big things like animal imagery, lazy and violent tyrants. It's throwing a few funny sounding words in for local colour and to make the Others look unusual, and then leaving it at that. It's not trying to understand the fine distinctions or the different references. Even if you've made up your Other from scratch, it's going to clunk into grooves left by such treatment of your actual fellow people. Sometimes that might be the effect you're going for. But clunking into it unawares will skew the effect for some readers. If you want to say what you set out to say then it needs some thinking on.
Which always irritates the hell out of me because hey, I applied brain to this! I know I'm not at home, it isn't called England, give me a bit more than that!
So: poetry.
Is all about the careful selection of words. There's less of them so they carry more around. You're working the connotations, associations, and denotations, basic meanings, so everything links up to create a specific effect. And where words come from can be incredibly important. One poem I went through an etymological dictionary for was in English from start to finish but compared England and Ireland through using Latin derived words for England and more local roots for Ireland. (At least as I remember it now. I can't remember which poem it was. Helpful, memory.) That's not something you're likely to notice consciously, but the different roots have different connotations, different registers, broadly speaking posh vs common. That you're more likely to get an impression of.
Some of the meanings shift over time. Reading Byron I have to be a bit careful because there's words like divan and kiosk that when I read them make me think of slightly cheap furniture catalogues and information stalls, but when he was writing he had to footnote to explain what a kiosk was. Our word absorption makes them common now, but you have to poke around a bit to figure out what was exotic then.
There's a bit in one of the theory essays I've read lately about how the translation of persian poetry imported whole new symbol sets into English poetry. Specifically the nightingale singing to the rose as a symbol of the lover courting the beloved. It has a lot less syllables before translation, gul and bulbul I think. Wiki has some on Ottoman Diwan. So that's an image and a set of associations that is new to English. You could write gul and bulbul and from those words not guess that one singing to the other meant nightingale and rose. New culture.
But there's also just a lot of new words.
The Corsair's first canto sticks basically with familiar words and classical references, Ariadne and suchlike being the bits I had to look up. I can mostly remember them though, I've mostly heard of them.
For Eastern words? Moslem, Sirocco (arabic by way of italian), that's about it until right at the end of the canto, where there's Pacha and Moslem again.
Canto 2 has a bazillion of them.
i. Pacha, firman, turban, Moslem
ii. turban, (bearded chiefs - beard are apparently out of fashion with the Europeans and in with the Oriental), pilaff, sober berrry's juice, chiboque, Almas, Koran, Pacha
iii. Dervise, Pacha
iv. Dervise, Saick, Allah, Moslem, Pacha, Divan, Sultan, Mecca, Afrit, Zatanai (instead of Satan), cloven turbans, Haram,
v. [make notes later]
I could go on. A lot more. At length.
But the way they're used, it's like:
Glared on the Moslems' eyes some Afrit Sprite,
Whose demon death-blow left no hope for fight.
It's not Afrit, leaving you to figure it out, it's Afrit Sprite demon. Three words from the same set just in case we were confused. And what does 'afrit' uniquely bring to them? Well, not a lot. My understanding of ifrits (and what dictionary.com has in the definition) is they can be good and good moslems as well as evil, they're not demons the same way christianity has demons, but is that a subtlety being added here? Don't reckon so. It's a list of supernaturally bad things that kill real good. So the only thing it brings is its origin. You're not at home any more.
They're all Turkish words, far as I can tell, properly belonging to the Ottoman Empire, not mashing up half the world. Not just generalised Oriental. Byron was writing about places he'd been, mostly.
But he's not writing about them on their own terms, within their own references, with their own unique understandings. He's not making fine distinctions. Like, there's a lot of turbans (and beards). If there were a lot of hats would he just say hat a lot? Not if his variety of words for sword or helmet or cloak is anything to go by. He'd mix it up, get different effects out of it, fit the rhyme and meter different. And with hats you know a top hat is not a bowler hat is not a stetson is really not a fez. Different hats, different associations. Are turbans like that? We'd never know from this. (And I don't know, really, beyond looking on wiki, which seems like a yes.) Turban just means hat what them others wear.
And you could say fair enough, he's mostly writing a story about Medora dying and Gulnare kicking arse. But if the dude from the familiar culture gets a lot of specificity and the other culture gets one description among the lot of them (beard and turban) then that leaves a certain impression.
Also in a theory essay it described The Corsair as a white man being saved by a brown woman. It was comparing it to a different poem so it was making big broad categories. But Gulnare, while calling herself Eastern, is described in terms of how white she is. White arm, cheek so fair, foot like snow. There's not a lot about skin color as a racial indicator here. Women are fair-white-pretty, is what gets emphasised. Gulnare's eyes are dark, her hair auburn, Medora blue eyed and fair haired. So there's contrast, but it isn't brown. Possibly the reader supplied the brown?
Back to fantasy and science fiction:
I think basically it helps to be aware of the patterns in 'exotic' word use in mainstream lit because a lot of it left traps lying around. Orientalism that I'm meant to be looking for in this essay, binary oppositions defining Us against Them, stereotypes that defined a lot of Them. It's not just the big things like animal imagery, lazy and violent tyrants. It's throwing a few funny sounding words in for local colour and to make the Others look unusual, and then leaving it at that. It's not trying to understand the fine distinctions or the different references. Even if you've made up your Other from scratch, it's going to clunk into grooves left by such treatment of your actual fellow people. Sometimes that might be the effect you're going for. But clunking into it unawares will skew the effect for some readers. If you want to say what you set out to say then it needs some thinking on.
The Corsair, Eastern words
Date: 2011-01-04 09:31 pm (UTC)(I think the start set the scene and there will be not so much as it goes along, and vanish again in 3)
v. dome + minaret, Haram
vi. Alla il Alla!
vii. Haram, dome (I know it's not strictly Eastern as a *word*, but like beards, in this poem only the East has it.), Pacha
viii. ix. x. -0- no East words
xi. Pacha xii. Pacha
xiii. -0-
xiv. Pacha
xv. xvi. -0-
Pacha and Seyd are like Corsair and Conrad, just titles now, not particularly noteable. so he spent a couple of stanzas painting it with exotic words, and then let it go and went back to classical references.
don't forget names: on the one hand Conrad, Medora, Juan, Gonsalvo, Anselmo, Pedro. Lots of names, including subordinates.
on the other: Seyd, Gulnare.
Medora is apparently a literary creation. It sounds like the parts are Me and Adore. It's hard to get geography out of a made up name.
Juan, Gonsalvo, Anselmo, Pedro, all Spanish.
... well, if I tweak the spelling on Gonsalvo, and reckon the o ending makes the German Anselm into a Spanish...
Conrad is plain Old German with an English spelling.
(English uses C for K, and mostly not the rest of the world. I did looking for names recently, I rediscovered this. Puts in a new light the Highlander tendency to have good guys start with a C and bad guys with a K.)
Seyd is Arabic and Gulnare is Persian; Byron says it means Pomegranate flower.
Re: The Corsair, Eastern words
Date: 2011-01-04 09:58 pm (UTC)i. minaret, mosque, kiosk
break in quite deliberately on a lot of Greek classical references.
then we're with Medora and away from the Eastern words
then as soon as we're back to Seyd and Gulnare
v. Haram, Stamboul (place name), Arab Tales, Giaour, Serai
then nothing, back to usual, until
viii. starts all augurs omens western, then
Pacha, Eastern heart, (Gulnare)
scimitar (Conrad)
ix onwards, nothing again
xiv Allah
xvi she drops her veil
Eastern associated signifier, not an Eastern word
also, in context, that's probably 'cover her face', but it's not clear.
And that's it. That's all for Canto 3.
So the Eastern words are basically there in canto 2 just to set the scene and show these new guys as new and different. Then they're called back briefly to remind you when they change scenes.
They're deliberately compare/contrasted, and don't come off looking better. Medora can come down from her tower, Gulnare would have burned to death in her haram. Pirates are all Enterprise and busy work, turban and beard means having a big party with exotic delicacies and reclining and dancing girls and also means random violence for the hell of it. Eastern words are not associated with virtues- with the exception of Moslem, and Dervish, which is associated with Conrad, and likewise scimitar. Conrad is an interesting figure then. He's wearing signs from both cultures, and can fit in both. He's an honorable man in ways described as 'more than Moslem'. Is it compare and contrast, his western inflected warrior ascetic stands next to Moslems and makes them look bad? Or is it just compare, he's doing what the Moslem rules say he should?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-04 09:32 pm (UTC)