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Name: Toddy
Country: United States
State: Wisconsin
Metro: Madison
Gender: Male
Interests: Linguistics, History of Literacy and Book Culture
Expertise: The Letters J and V
Occupation: Refer Pro
Industry: Librarionics
Message: message me
Member Since:
4/29/2006
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| A book is a book is a beechI am taking a seminar this semester called the History of Readers and Reading, and have really enjoyed it thus far. I always thought that I am a more practical person and less of a theoretical type. This seminar has somewhat changed my opinion. So a few weeks ago we were discussing what the word book meant, so I did some work on that etymology and came up with the following answer.
I looked up the meaning of the word book in two places, the 1957 edition of the Cleasby Vigfusson Icelandic-English Dictionary and Ernest Weekley’s An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English. Both books state about the same thing. Bók (Old Norse) is related to Old Saxon Bôc, meaning a beech tree. In addition they mean book, in the modern or contemporary sense, but by the following way: bôc meant beech bark, upon which it is believed runes were written. In a sense the generalized and modern meaning of book to mean codex, is not how it began. Originally book was synecdochically related to codex, in that it meant more of a text or writing and not a volume per se. As one can see Modern English has two different words for Beech and Book, but they are related. Modern German has the Words Buche and Buch, Norwegian and Swedish have Bok for both, Icelandic and Old Norse have Bók for both, Modern Danish has Bøg and Bog and Modern Dutch has Beuk and Boek.
I find it fascinating that words are so intertwined. There are many words that can be traced, some that cannot, but each and every word has an entire history, family and path upon which it came to the present. I am a word nerd.
So this was out on State Street (the shopping street for the university here in Madison - Like Mill Ave in Tempe, 4th in Tucson, etc. etc.) Quite a "romantic" idea for Valentine's Day. Better than a greeting card, some overpriced and/or cheap chocolates, I guess. I don't know if I would trust a condom from a pizzeria...
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| My merry adventures with the color gray
So as a philology student and now certified and certifiable librarian, without-position, I have taken to working on investigations for myself and others, trying to create a position as a researcher. Perhaps, it is training for the one day that I become a librarian-with-position. Or perhaps it is for when I become a superhero, knocking down naiveté and fighting ignorance for the greater good, oh God who am I kidding, by the time I graduate from school, I fear that all positions as librarians and professors will be obsolete, or I will be dead. Anyway off the hyperbolic and on to the exciting story:
I looked up the use of gray in the Bible. The color gray does not exist in the New Testament at all, which is amazing when you think about all the possibilities, especially old people with out the modern wonders of hair dye in the Bible. Well there is henna/mendhi, but nobody, in my understanding, ever referred to the Israelites as the tribe of red headed elders. The Old Testament does have the color gray, though always pertaining to the color of hair and never describing a creature. Now I know, dear readers (wait, when did you become plural) that you will go out and look and perhaps you will find the Bible that mentions in Leviticus that one may eat a certain gray spotted locust and not offend God, well let me tell you, most Bibles do not translate it that way; the Hebrew word is quite different - Hargol, which oddly enough is transliterated into the Norwegian Bible. (I am really glad that I could look many of these passages up online and compare, rather than having to check out 15 different Bibles just to make a point. Thank you religious right!) So good news! Keep on eating those Hargol/gray spotted locusts and no need to fret about eternal damnation for doing so. I do not know Hebrew, so I cannot comment on the use of gray in Hebrew, however the modern word for gray is Ah-for, which might be related to the word for ashes. Canus seems to be the word of choice for gray hair in Latin, which also means elder. This to me suggests that Latin may not have had a word for gray and had to use Canus to describe being old. If this was done for the Bible or even earlier, I am not sure. It is through interaction with other languages that words coving such "new" concepts like gray come into being. Berlin and Kay go into more detail about the evolution of color terms in their book Basic Color. What I found most interesting about their investigation - which at its time was quite revolutionary, albeit slightly lacking in that its breadth is great but its depth leaves major holes in language families like IE - is the comparison of minority languages. But I will leave it at that...
Now in the interest of feeling a bit nostalgic, I found the following website dedicated to Legend City. I remember I went there only once as a child and probably as a reward for some odd thing, like not sucking my thumb anymore. My parents were not big on theme parks and this one was riddled with problems. Nevertheless, it is really a trip down the old lane o' memories to see the website dedicated to it: click here. Back in the day, Phoenix was such a different place. Not to sound all crotchety or anything, sitting on my porch with my corn-cob pipe and talkin' bout them good ol' days when the youngin's respected their elders, but there was a bit of the old west - cowboy, Texas-style, big steak houses and women in long saloon style dresses and men in jeans, chaps and vests style, that is gone now, and I won't comment on exactly how I feel about that, because I am not quite sure, yet....
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| Tenure rhymes with manureV got Tenure! Thank God. The weekend has been spent trying to catch up on sleep and de-stress. And this week is Thanksgiving, so the semester's end is nigh...
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| TomorrowTomorrow V is voted on for tenure in the divisional committee at the U. It is extremely likely that he will get it.
Today, I have a big paper to finish up on the history of vernacular literacy in medieval Scandinavia and two manuscripts to analyze. I cannot concentrate. Ugggh!
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| Oh no, Oh no, I've done it all wrong, I thought they were chocolate, but they're chewing gum...Ok I know it has been a long time since I have written on this thing. I am actually only doing this because Anth,
the only person who reads this blog, is writing comments on my last
entry over and over again, so I decided that maybe I should write
something. So now I am back in the States, I have taken my MA exam in
Scandinavian Philology and I am on my way to PhhhhD fun. I am not
sure that it is official, since I have not received my diploma, but I
wouldn't expect anything different from this institution. I hope it
comes before I am finished with my PhD. Library school is almost done
for me as well. Since at UW-Madison it is a MA in Library and Info
Studies, instead of an MS or Master in Library Science or Master of
Library and Info Sciences, I will be Todd MAMA, how fricken boring!
Again I probably will not know if I received my degree for a bit of
time, since it is not the department, but the school that is so very
slow...
I have an entertaining schedule filled with paleography, library
preservation and the history of the book and print culture courses this
semester. In addition, I went to Baltimore to the Walter's Art Museum,
via the University of Virginia, Rare Book School for a week in October
to study Latin Codicology, with an amazingly brilliant scholar,
Professor Albert Derolez. Baltimore is a great city and the people in the program were fascinating. The course was so much more than I could have
ever expected. I stayed at the Peabody Institute and looked at over 60
manuscripts from medieval and Renaissance Europe, mainly in Latin,
though a few in German and Dutch. The collection that the Walter's has
is unbelievably large.
I am excited that there are only 5 weeks left of the semester, as I am
so exhausted from my last year of school, the summer of fun, but mainly
studying Norwegian, taking my MA exam, and then four days later
starting this semester. It has just all been a little too much. I cannot wait to be able to read what I want, eat home cooked food from mom and sleep when I want over Winter Break.
Anyway, in case you did not want to actually read what is above, look at the pretty pictures and see what is up that way.
This is a picture of Amsterdam that was taken by an elf - a little brown elf - on my camera...
Oslo harbor in front of the Rådhus
A building in Rjukan, Norway, where heavy water was made.
Stavanger Harbor at Sunset.
The new Berlin Hauptbahnhof
View from the New Berlin Hauptbahnhof. To the left is the Reichstag, in the center is the Swiss Embassy - once on the border, and a whole mess o' governmental buildings.
A bad picture taken with my phone of Washington Square in Baltimore...
Oh yeah, and while in Germany, on a train in some random Dörfli, I got a picture of a rather cute guy, while trying to take a picture of a Mama Africa - Miriam Makeba poster.
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