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I'm an amateur student of language, particularly English. This article taught me about kennings, or compound words in Old English poetry. At first I thought th
by combatentropy 8y ago
I'm an amateur student of language, particularly English. This article taught me about kennings, or compound words in Old English poetry.
At first I thought that the writer, Josephine Livingston, was saying that these were the main words --- like, the Old English word for sea is hronrad, "whale road." But no, if you look up "sea," that is Old English too. People normally said "sea," but sometimes if you were writing a poem you would make up these colorful alternatives. I think that's what she meant. It just took me a second reading.
At the end, she says this isn't possible in modern English. "We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able[...]. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary." She gives as an example that she wants to make a new kenning out of "poignant" and "solitude," but it won't work because today's readers would interpret "poignant solitude" as just an adjective modifying a noun, with no special poetical air. That's because she did it wrong.
At the beginning she defines a kenning as two nouns, but "poignant" isn't a noun, it's an adjective. She would need two nouns. And solitude, while a noun, is abstract. She would be better off with two concrete nouns, like the old kennings. The best I can come up with right now is "teardrop cloister." A more modern style, though, would be "cloister of tears."
I see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." The reader would have to rely on the context to figure out that you're using metaphors for the sea and the body, just like then. Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days. It sounds like back then that poets did it all the time. It was a meme. But modern poetry has this kind of wordplay here and there. And like I said, instead of doing it with compound words, they do it more by joining them with the word "of", like: "cloister of tears," "the road of the whales," "this house of bones." I could totally see any of those in modern poems.
- gerdesj 8y agoI see no reason why you couldn't write a poem today with custom-made compound words like "whale-road" and "bone-house." I agree with you - I suspect that modern english has far more in common with its predecessors than we might think at first. I'm pretty sure I have seen poetry and prose that riffs like that - bolting together nouns in a way that would invite inspection for meaning, some of which might become expected (formulaic) in a way that might be an in-joke or a shared experience or perhaps a description that can be considered a shared pseudo experience ("I know what you mean") Maybe it would be a little more jarring these days." We might consider ourselves more sophisticated in some way and yet the term "bone house" does still resonate in some way for me but not in the context of "general term for a body/person". It does work rather well in the context of war/battle/conflict. Kennings - seems to me to be cognate with "ken" (know). They seem to be designed for inventing nouns for context - a bit like the reverse of the effect of some adjectives. You include the adjective(s) within the agglomerate noun in some way, either explicitly or via convention (think of the imagery around: "bone house") I love language.
- combatentropy 8y ago> Kennings - seems to me to be cognate with "ken" (know). Yes, I think you're right, https://www.etymonline.com/word/kenning https://www.etymonline.com/word/kenning
- anyfoo 8y agoWhile in German, jamming an adjective and a noun together to form a new compound word is still totally common. Apparently it was common in English, too? (I don't know enough about the common roots of the two languages.) I just randomly mashed the words for "green" and "plate" together, and if I type the resulting "Grünplatte" into Google's image search, I see that LEGO had the same idea as me, apparently.
- jhanschoo 8y agoI'm quite sure that this way of deriving compound words is generally common among Germanic languages. On the other hand, Romance languages are more productive using standard prefixes and affixes. In English the putting two nouns together still exists, but the orthography is different: you write it as two words or with a hyphen in between, but the more common ones are written together. Loveseat, whorehouse, wheelbarrow, crankshaft, screwdriver, etc.
- saghm 8y agoReminds a bit of https://xkcd.com/1322/ https://xkcd.com/1322/
- mc32 8y agoOff topic, but when you look into Anglo-Saxon English, you come across some Anglo-Saxon/Celtic/Hibernian art/motifs[1] which are quite clean and elegant, some very meticulous and intricate (specially some metalwork). [1]https://brewminate.com/anglo-saxon-england-and-decoding-anglo-saxon-art/ https://brewminate.com/anglo-saxon-england-and-decoding-angl...
- mrami 8y agoModern 'street' poetry: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Danger%20Noodle&=true&defid=12082984 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Danger%20Noo...