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Fragment of lost 12th-century epic poem found in another book’s binding
- fsckboy 5y agofrom the article, quoting and translating > Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin > ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; nope: ble is wheat in modern French, and corn had not been brought back from the new world yet when this poem was written.
- stevula 5y agoCorn simply means “grain” in English-speaking places where maize is not a staple food.
- lostlogin 5y agoCould you specify some places this applies to? It certainly isn’t the case with in New Zealand, and I’m reasonable certain that applies to Australia and the UK too.
- infradig 5y agoJohn Barleycorn Must Die.
- junon 5y agoIn German "Korn" means grain - e.g. "Vollkorn" meaning "whole grain".
- morsch 5y agoUK. Though maybe Cambridge is slow/conservative in noticing usage change. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/corn https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/corn
- OJFord 5y ago'Corn' alone is unusual I'd say, and someone saying it yes probably in agriculture and means any grain. Otherwise 'sweetcorn' or 'corn on the cob' ('corncob') are common. But you can't have e.g. 'wheat on the cob' so it's not ambiguous.
- billfruit 5y agoPerhaps it is not current usage, but I guess it might have be common English usage till 19th century. I think that I have seen corn used generically in novels and other works from before that time. May be you can find reference to corn in Chaucer, I don't exactly remember if it is there for sure.
- iam-TJ 5y agoUK farmer here - since childhood in 1970s we've always called it "corn harvest" when talking about wheat, barley, oats, rye, etc.; sometimes Maize is referred to as corn-on-the-cob.
- smackeyacky 5y agoYeah, nah. Corn is maize in all the english speaking countries I've been to and lived in and used for nothing else.
- DoItToMe81 5y agoBefore 'corn' the vegetable, corn was used as a catch all in English for cereal grains. Sometimes it's used to evoke an antiquated feel in text.
- carlmr 5y agoStill means grain in German.
- dep_b 5y agoAlso Dutch: "koren"
- mzi 5y agoProto-Indo-European *ǵr̥h₂nóm [0] So I would guess most European languages would have the same meaning in one way or another. 0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn
- skinkestek 5y agoSame in Norway: korn
- kazinator 5y agoIn English, it used to mean a grain of anything, not just a cereal grain. This usage surives in "corned beef", which refers to granular salt used for preserving the meat, nothing to do with cereal grains. "Corn" still refers to multiple cereals in British English; what Americans call "corn" is "maize". Or so it used to be; perhaps it is changing? "Corn" also refers to a lump of hardened skin; but that has a different origin, related to "horn", going back to Greek. It shares with "cornucopia" and "cornet" and "keratin". "acorn" is also not derived from "corn", interestingly; it has its own etymology. It is not a portmanteau of "aiken corn" (oak tree's corn) or anything like that as might be wrongly guessed. "kernel" is related to "corn" though, not to horns or keratin. OS kernels are named because they are the central part, like a seed, not because kernel programmers have thick skins or devil horns.
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- Mikeb85 5y agoCorn only refers exclusively to maize in North American English. Corn is a catch-all term for all cereal grains. Maize is the cereal grain from Mexico that everyone makes tortillas from...
- keiferski 5y agoReminds me of a section in The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt: I said What I mean is, though I believe the [Rosetta] Stone was originally a rather pompous thing to erect, it was a gift to posterity. Being written in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek, it only required that one language survive for all to be accessible. Probably one day English will be a much-studied dead language; we should use this fact to preserve other languages to posterity. You could have Homer with translation and marginal notes on vocabulary and grammar, so that if that single book happened to be dug up in 2,000 years or so the people of the day would be able to read Homer, or better yet, we could disseminate the text as widely as possible to give it the best possible chance of survival. What we should do, I said, is have legislation so that every book published was obliged to have, say, a page of Sophocles or Homer in the original with appropriate marginalia bound into the binding, so that even if you bought an airport novel if your plane crashed you would have something to reread on the desert island. More on the book: https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-helen-dewitts-the-last-samurai/ https://www.publicbooks.org/b-sides-helen-dewitts-the-last-s...
- jhellan 5y agoInteresting how stable French has been over the centuries - at least when judging from these four lines. By no means the same, but much closer to modern French than the language of the sagas is to modern Scandinavian. Not to mention how far English has drifted.
- Bayart 5y agoFrench orthographic and grammatical history has been non-linear and it's not uncommon for texts from the 16th century to be harder to read than from the 13th c., while at the same time the Medieval texts have sometimes confusing syntax for modern French speakers because of the declensions. For example in the sample given by the article : Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit It's not something that a modern native French speaker would understand at first sight. Li quiens (or li cuens in more standard Old French) is the cas sujet of "count", the form that survived in French is the cas régime, le conte.
- _notreallyme_ 5y agoFor what it's worth, I understood at first sight "Mauvaisement, le <honorific title> Bertram a dit" which happend to be the intended meaning. I actually had more trouble with "Bacin" starting with a capital B which would indicate a proper name. That's the only line I wasn't sure of. I was surprised by the fact I could understand that while I know I can hardly understand anything from the 16/17th century old french. Thanks for your input for clarifying that.
- Abshire 5y agoA fraction from a 12th-century French poem beforehand believed to have been lost eternally has been found by a tutorial in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Dr Tamara Atkin from Queen Mary University of London was researching the reuse of books through the sixteenth century when she got here throughout the fragment from the hitherto lost Siège d’Orange in the binding of a e-book printed in 1528. Parchment and paper have been costly on the time, and undesirable manuscripts and books have been incessantly recycled. https://www.upsers.tips/ https://www.upsers.tips/
- perihelions 5y agoDon't click the above link; it's very likely a phishing attempt (or something worse disguised as a phishing attempt).
- singularity2001 5y agoAstonishingly accessible with a little knowledge of French: “Il li demande coment se contient il? / Mauuoisement li quiens Bertram ad dit / Tun frere n’ad ne pain ne ble ne vin / Garison nule dont il puisse garir / Mais ke de sang li lessai plein Bacin,” “He asks him, ‘How goes it with him?’ / ‘Badly,’ said Count Bertram. / ‘Your brother has neither bread nor corn nor wine; / He has no supplies with which to save himself, / Except for one basinful of blood, which I left him.’” TIL: garrison <> supply
- cwingrav 5y agoCorn? Must refer to something else besides what we call corn today. A different grain? Or “corns” of salt maybe?
- simonh 5y agoAlthough it has become associated with maize it is still used as a generic term for any cereal crop. At least here in the UK.
- nuclearwast 5y ago'ble' in the text probably means blé, which is french for wheat. not sure why translator would chose corn (maïs in french).
- jhgb 5y agoI'd ask the opposite question: Why wouldn't he choose that?
- el_oni 5y agoCorn was the name for all cereal grains in old english [0] [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/corn
- SECProto 5y agoYou don't even need to go back to old english: per your source, definition 1 under english etymology 1 is: (chiefly Britain, uncountable) Any cereal plant grown for its grain, or the grain thereof. edit: but yes, in the context of discussing a poem from the 12th century, old English would make more sense :) Interesting that the translation is from the french ble , which I would intuitively associate with the modern french blé meaning[1] wheat [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bl%C3%A9 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bl%C3%A9
- julienchastang 5y agoRelatedly, from roughly the same time period La Chanson de Roland / The Song of Roland (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Roland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Song_of_Roland) which has survived to the present day and is considered the oldest surviving work of French literature.