I'm interested in Canada and Canadians. It's a little difficult to explain why exactly. I can't remember when I got first interested in them, or why.
I can tell you that I like their dry sense of self-irony. I like their nature. I like their literature. I like their music. But Canadians themselves find it difficult to define themselves. Usually it's by defining what they are not - at least not Americans. So maybe it isn't so surprising that I can't put my finger on why they fascinate me.
I can truly appreciate the fact that their government and everything about their country is so well documented. They have all these wonderful sources online, available free for anyone to use! There are archival materials on, pretty much anything you might be interested in.
The annoying thing is, they're usually in pdf files, as you might expect. A colleague of mine (I don't want to describe people I know in too much detail so I'll use such a grand term) complained in his dissertation that there is a worrying tendency of uploading texts online in pdf files, rather than transcribing them at all.
It's something only a corpus linguist would complain about, but I completely sympathize now. For anyone else but a corpus linguist, pdfs are usually good enough. But they're simply not viable for including in language corpora!
I got hold of this splendid corpus of present-day Canadian English. But since I'm going to have a diachronic dimension in my dissertation, it would make sense to have historical Canadian English as well. Sadly, there is only one such historical corpus in existence so far, and even that isn't available to anyone else but its creators.
Since the aforementioned colleague collected a corpus of hiw own for his dissertation project, and since I helped categorize and update it, I'm not too shy about the idea of compiling a corpus of my own.
But finding old Canadian English online in a reliable format is such a hopeless task. If you find something that has been transcribed, there's always the concern about whether it has been modernized or not. If a text is only available as a pdf file, it's pretty much of no use, unless I transcribe it myself.
I'm not really afraid of doing a lot work for my project. I wouldn't mind transcribing texts in principle. The problem is that I know that it would probably postpone the gathering of my actual research data too far in the future.
If I were to do so much work, I would have to take into account so many issues related to corpus compilation. There are numerous different views on how one should compile a corpus.
Some are willing to overlook any bias in the selection of the texts, in their length and text type, register, time of publication, anything that might affect the language of a text in relation to any other texts.
Others believe that especially a diachronic corpus should be carefully constructed so that the researcher doesn't have to worry about distortions in their data sets. Personally I think that such corpora may lull the researcher too much into believing that whatever the corpus throws up, it must be the final truth.
On the other hand, it isn't entirely straightforward to take into account everything by yourself, especially if you want to create quantitative illustrations of your data. It's particularly annoying when you're using many different corpora that were compiled according to completely different parameters, yet you'd like to compare them.
So I suppose there isn't much I can do except try my luck with getting my hands on that already existing historical corpus. Always worth a try.
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label research. Show all posts
Friday, October 10, 2008
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
We quest for a grail of illusive perfection
I no longer regret joining the Linguist List. Recently a rather fiery discussion erupted concerning a review of the book Chomsky's Minimalism.
The main bone of contention was about whether semantics can come after syntax, i.e. whether the human mind creates syntactical structures first and infers the semantics from them only when reading or hearing them.
Personally I believe syntax and semantics are intertwined from the start, but I'm not really one to comment on the issue with any deep insight.
Be that as it may, it's always exciting to see linguists go ballistic. Most of the time, what linguists write in research papers and books is fairly dry.
It's not because the authors can't write in an interesting way. It's simply that it's practically impossible to use colourful language in linguistics without becoming too obscure. Not to mention that in all likeness you'd end up being frowned upon for not taking things seriously enough.
As in this case, the discussion got heated because someone not too informed in the field was stating their opinions a tad too strongly, not disrespectfully but somewhere along the way.
So of course people get insulted and they retort. Whoever started it will as a result get insulted back, because their pride is at stake. It isn't easy for anyone to admit that they're in the wrong and then apologise.
I sympathise and hope that I'll never be in that position. It's not likely, since I rarely feel the need to persuade other people to see things my way, let alone to inform them voluntarily about my opinions.
This incident reminded me of when I was doing background reading on my thesis. I found a couple of articles back from the 1970s where two authors exchanged extremely caustic language in a couple of issues of a linguistics journal. I recall someone referring to this exchange as some kind of "wars", I wish I could remember the exact term.
It was like reading an exciting story, biting your lip as you read on to see what the other person will have to say next about some particularly hurtful choice of term on the other's part. I shouldn't have fun at the expense of somebody else's hurt feelings, but I did.
It was such a rare, precious discussion because it had gotten so personal. Again, I hope no one will ever start throwing dirt on anything I might publish one day. Of course you shouldn't take it personally when the criticism is matter-of-fact and doesn't attack your person, but usually that's impossible.
I know that even very experienced linguists take criticism personally, even though rationally they know they shouldn't when it hasn't been intended as personal in any way. Especially if someone is questioning your competence in your own field, how could you not take insult. Just human nature I suppose.
It's a fine line to tread in general, making a text interesting and accessible while trying to remain scientific, accurate and credible enough. I think it can be done, however. One of my ambitions with my dissertation (the topic of which I haven't even chosen yet) is to make the text much less dry than in my thesis.
I truly believe that blogging has helped me improve my English. It gives an effortless opportunity and a reason to write more than I normally would.
What's more, my blogs are the only place I get to use less formal English. I think I'm on my way to finding that golden middle road to travel when writing matter-of-fact, yet lively language.
The main bone of contention was about whether semantics can come after syntax, i.e. whether the human mind creates syntactical structures first and infers the semantics from them only when reading or hearing them.
Personally I believe syntax and semantics are intertwined from the start, but I'm not really one to comment on the issue with any deep insight.
Be that as it may, it's always exciting to see linguists go ballistic. Most of the time, what linguists write in research papers and books is fairly dry.
It's not because the authors can't write in an interesting way. It's simply that it's practically impossible to use colourful language in linguistics without becoming too obscure. Not to mention that in all likeness you'd end up being frowned upon for not taking things seriously enough.
As in this case, the discussion got heated because someone not too informed in the field was stating their opinions a tad too strongly, not disrespectfully but somewhere along the way.
So of course people get insulted and they retort. Whoever started it will as a result get insulted back, because their pride is at stake. It isn't easy for anyone to admit that they're in the wrong and then apologise.
I sympathise and hope that I'll never be in that position. It's not likely, since I rarely feel the need to persuade other people to see things my way, let alone to inform them voluntarily about my opinions.
This incident reminded me of when I was doing background reading on my thesis. I found a couple of articles back from the 1970s where two authors exchanged extremely caustic language in a couple of issues of a linguistics journal. I recall someone referring to this exchange as some kind of "wars", I wish I could remember the exact term.
It was like reading an exciting story, biting your lip as you read on to see what the other person will have to say next about some particularly hurtful choice of term on the other's part. I shouldn't have fun at the expense of somebody else's hurt feelings, but I did.
It was such a rare, precious discussion because it had gotten so personal. Again, I hope no one will ever start throwing dirt on anything I might publish one day. Of course you shouldn't take it personally when the criticism is matter-of-fact and doesn't attack your person, but usually that's impossible.
I know that even very experienced linguists take criticism personally, even though rationally they know they shouldn't when it hasn't been intended as personal in any way. Especially if someone is questioning your competence in your own field, how could you not take insult. Just human nature I suppose.
It's a fine line to tread in general, making a text interesting and accessible while trying to remain scientific, accurate and credible enough. I think it can be done, however. One of my ambitions with my dissertation (the topic of which I haven't even chosen yet) is to make the text much less dry than in my thesis.
I truly believe that blogging has helped me improve my English. It gives an effortless opportunity and a reason to write more than I normally would.
What's more, my blogs are the only place I get to use less formal English. I think I'm on my way to finding that golden middle road to travel when writing matter-of-fact, yet lively language.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Auld lang syne, Mr. von Schlegel's turn of phrase!
I know it's been only three days since my last post, but I'll soon revert back to my one-post-per-week policy anyway. Take this as a warning that in the future it may not be worth the trouble checking back here more than twice a week, at the most. Unless you want to explore the archives and discover the less than glorious past of this blog. Actually you should, if you only like the paintings. There's much less of these boring ramblings of mine over last winter.
Down to business it is. As I mentioned in my previous post, in Munich I bought an old German translation of Shakespeare's King Henry IV Part 1 AND 2 (I noticed later that both were included). I was annoyed to find no mention of when the book was printed.
I could guess that it must be old, at least -ish, judging by the yellowish paper and the ribbon bookmark (those ribbons you only find in Bibles these days), let alone the very-old-and-Gothic-looking font of the German text. Strangely, the English text is in a more modern font.
The translator, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), a poet himself, is still considered one of the best German translators of Shakespeare, according to Wikipedia. Someone else apparently thinks that Schlegel's translation is remarkably different from the original, for example as regards the verse style. Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse, which in his case means he wrote with an unrhymed iambic pentametre. This writer says that Schlegel transformed the blank verse into "the iambic pentametre with either male or female cadence", i.e. 10 or 11 syllables on each line.
Now I'm not very well-versed in these technicalities of poetic composition, but is the iambic pentametre with male or female cadence really so strikingly different from the regular one, which has ten syllables on a line? Anyone care to explain this to me? But be that as it may, I can appreciate the various problems Schlegel must have had, considering how different English and German are when it comes to word order and syllabic structure.
As for my problem of dating the volume. Schlegel's Shakespeare translations span the years 1797-1810. König Heinrich der Vierte was published in 1800. Obviously there have been reprints, through the 19th century until around the time of WWII. The later reprints, however, all seem to be collections including several plays. But I'm not sure whether that means that they were still printed as individual volumes or as a single book.
Down to business it is. As I mentioned in my previous post, in Munich I bought an old German translation of Shakespeare's King Henry IV Part 1 AND 2 (I noticed later that both were included). I was annoyed to find no mention of when the book was printed.
I could guess that it must be old, at least -ish, judging by the yellowish paper and the ribbon bookmark (those ribbons you only find in Bibles these days), let alone the very-old-and-Gothic-looking font of the German text. Strangely, the English text is in a more modern font.
The translator, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), a poet himself, is still considered one of the best German translators of Shakespeare, according to Wikipedia. Someone else apparently thinks that Schlegel's translation is remarkably different from the original, for example as regards the verse style. Shakespeare often wrote in blank verse, which in his case means he wrote with an unrhymed iambic pentametre. This writer says that Schlegel transformed the blank verse into "the iambic pentametre with either male or female cadence", i.e. 10 or 11 syllables on each line.
Now I'm not very well-versed in these technicalities of poetic composition, but is the iambic pentametre with male or female cadence really so strikingly different from the regular one, which has ten syllables on a line? Anyone care to explain this to me? But be that as it may, I can appreciate the various problems Schlegel must have had, considering how different English and German are when it comes to word order and syllabic structure.
(August Wilhelm von Schlegel)
As for my problem of dating the volume. Schlegel's Shakespeare translations span the years 1797-1810. König Heinrich der Vierte was published in 1800. Obviously there have been reprints, through the 19th century until around the time of WWII. The later reprints, however, all seem to be collections including several plays. But I'm not sure whether that means that they were still printed as individual volumes or as a single book.
Next I tried to find information on the publisher, Der Tempel Verlag. It was founded in 1909, so my book can't be more than almost a hundred years old – not much, eh? Apart from these tiny parsels of information, google really isn't almighty when it comes to finding bibliographical information. I don't mean just old books, but even more recent ones are surprisingly non-existent in the virtual world of search engines. Yet things, or even people, aren't supposed to be important if you can't google them. Fiddlesticks,* I say!
My final resort was the university library's online search engine(s). It's a real drag to go through all sorts of collections on god knows how many different portals, because for each search it takes so long to process. The end result still zilch. I'm slightly disheartened now with my less than resourceful detective skills.
Something good came out of all this though: I stumbled upon a website which has pictures and transcriptions of American diaries from late 19th to early 20th century: www.writtenbyhand.com. Perhaps not eligible for including in a corpus, but interesting nevertheless.
(Picture from Written by Hand Manuscript Americana)
Speaking of corpora, it occurred to me that there might be a possibility of compiling an Edward de Verean corpus for the purposes of comparing his language with Shakespeare's. I definitely need to look into it, since it would make for such an exhilarating research project. I know some websites with transcriptions of his personal letters, draft interrogatories (whatever those are) and memoranda, so all I need to do is find out if they're up for grabs or not.
I do know of one linguistic comparison between these authors, aided by a computer, using statistical methods: Was Oxford Shakespeare? A Computer-aided Analysis. Needless to say, these guys with all their knowledge of statistics still err somewhat in other methodological issues. They assume too much, take so much for granted, and any complexities that don't quite fit are pummeled flat. All in a day's work for anti- or pro-Shakespeareans alike!
*Another Shakespearean term, from no other than 1 Henry IV! Says Falstaff, "Heigh, heigh, the Deuill rides vpon a Fiddlesticke: what's the matter?" Of course, not quite in the same sense as in present-day use.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Hawt and bothered, with every fibre of my being
I'm finally experiencing my definition of a true summer: +30 and sunshine all day long! I wish I'd known earlier that all I had to do was come to Germany. I wouldn't mind at all having a summer house here. Perhaps if I married someone rich. A rich German to be more precise.
I'd love to stay the whole week, to see what the workshops are like, but unfortunately I didn't expect to enjoy myself this much here. I like this a lot better than my usual visits to foreign countries, which almost always are package holidays.
It's nice to combine business and pleasure, or rather, educating the mind as well as your soul. What I don't like about package holidays is that the schedules for excursions are so rigid and you have to wake up very early. Here I am actually fully awake and appreciative of everything because I'm not sleep deprived.
It was a complete surprise to me to see so many BIG names on the programme. I had no idea ICEHL was one of the very few and precious conferences on English historical linguistics, or even historical linguistics in general! Someone said to me that it was very ballsy of me to come here and give my very first presentation in such a prominent conference, without having even started on my dissertation yet. It's funny because I didn't think of it like that at all. I was just trying my luck without knowing anything about this event beforehand. I'm glad I did.
What's also funny is that this nice man came to talk to me the first day, probably because I looked a little lost, and we had a nice chat. His name sounded familiar. Yesterday he gave a plenary talk, and it turns out he's the chief etymologist of the Oxford English Dictionary! The lecture was useful in the sense that suddenly I realized, seeing this actual person discussing his work, how there are real people behind dictionaries. In the end it's their personal opinions and analyses that are often taken at face value.
I bought King Henry the IV Part 1 in English with a German translation. Only 5€ (it's ancient), and I thought I could start learning German by reading one of my favourites. Just for the laugh, really.
I'd love to stay the whole week, to see what the workshops are like, but unfortunately I didn't expect to enjoy myself this much here. I like this a lot better than my usual visits to foreign countries, which almost always are package holidays.
It's nice to combine business and pleasure, or rather, educating the mind as well as your soul. What I don't like about package holidays is that the schedules for excursions are so rigid and you have to wake up very early. Here I am actually fully awake and appreciative of everything because I'm not sleep deprived.
It was a complete surprise to me to see so many BIG names on the programme. I had no idea ICEHL was one of the very few and precious conferences on English historical linguistics, or even historical linguistics in general! Someone said to me that it was very ballsy of me to come here and give my very first presentation in such a prominent conference, without having even started on my dissertation yet. It's funny because I didn't think of it like that at all. I was just trying my luck without knowing anything about this event beforehand. I'm glad I did.
What's also funny is that this nice man came to talk to me the first day, probably because I looked a little lost, and we had a nice chat. His name sounded familiar. Yesterday he gave a plenary talk, and it turns out he's the chief etymologist of the Oxford English Dictionary! The lecture was useful in the sense that suddenly I realized, seeing this actual person discussing his work, how there are real people behind dictionaries. In the end it's their personal opinions and analyses that are often taken at face value.
I bought King Henry the IV Part 1 in English with a German translation. Only 5€ (it's ancient), and I thought I could start learning German by reading one of my favourites. Just for the laugh, really.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Enough of it already
I've been thinking about something a certain nice Serbian girl asked me at the Helsinki conference.
She asked what linguistics mailing lists I'm on.
Erm, listS?!
I'm only subscribing Linguist List so far and I already feel bogged down by all the mail that I get.
It's mostly redundant. I find myself clicking delete delete delete oh that sounds interesting delete delete deletism to my heart's content* and then even more deletage!
It's annoying too, all these calls for papers to conferences I probably won't be able to visit. I need to figure out my financing before I start running all around the world. I need to dig too much out of my own pocket for the upcoming trip, even with my professor's kind assistance with getting a grant. Thankfully I know how to live hand to mouth.
Besides, the travelling aspect makes me uneasy. I hate it. Please someone develop a teleport right now!
In any case, I think I could aim for ICAME 29 next year. I found about it too late to send a paper this year. Of course they'll accept my draft next time, it's a given. Based on my hefty experience with conferences, they'll take anything they can get. (Hint: sarcasm in the air.)
By the way, ICAME 28 in 2007 took place in Stratford-upon-Avon! That would've been wonderful. The home town of the lowly actor who dared (or durst, since we're talking about ancient people here) to claim the works of the mighty Shakespeare as his own. Some nerve, huh!
Anyhow. I started looking for more interesting mailing lists. There's one about corpora that should be useful. Lately I've been thinking a lot about all these methodological issues related to them and it's very unnerving.
There seems to be no rhyme nor reason** to any of it among more experienced linguists, so I'm not too worried about it. You can always make up some ad hoc arguments for your choice of corpora if it comes to that. If your ethics so allow. But I don't mean to sound disillusioned or anything.
One list focuses on medieval texts. I'd like to find one specified in historical linguistics, but not that historical. Early modern English is as far as I'm willing to go.
* Originally used in Henry VI and The Merchant of Venice.
** As you like it.
She asked what linguistics mailing lists I'm on.
Erm, listS?!
I'm only subscribing Linguist List so far and I already feel bogged down by all the mail that I get.
It's mostly redundant. I find myself clicking delete delete delete oh that sounds interesting delete delete deletism to my heart's content* and then even more deletage!
It's annoying too, all these calls for papers to conferences I probably won't be able to visit. I need to figure out my financing before I start running all around the world. I need to dig too much out of my own pocket for the upcoming trip, even with my professor's kind assistance with getting a grant. Thankfully I know how to live hand to mouth.
Besides, the travelling aspect makes me uneasy. I hate it. Please someone develop a teleport right now!
In any case, I think I could aim for ICAME 29 next year. I found about it too late to send a paper this year. Of course they'll accept my draft next time, it's a given. Based on my hefty experience with conferences, they'll take anything they can get. (Hint: sarcasm in the air.)
By the way, ICAME 28 in 2007 took place in Stratford-upon-Avon! That would've been wonderful. The home town of the lowly actor who dared (or durst, since we're talking about ancient people here) to claim the works of the mighty Shakespeare as his own. Some nerve, huh!
Anyhow. I started looking for more interesting mailing lists. There's one about corpora that should be useful. Lately I've been thinking a lot about all these methodological issues related to them and it's very unnerving.
There seems to be no rhyme nor reason** to any of it among more experienced linguists, so I'm not too worried about it. You can always make up some ad hoc arguments for your choice of corpora if it comes to that. If your ethics so allow. But I don't mean to sound disillusioned or anything.
One list focuses on medieval texts. I'd like to find one specified in historical linguistics, but not that historical. Early modern English is as far as I'm willing to go.
* Originally used in Henry VI and The Merchant of Venice.
** As you like it.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
My bookshelf to me a kingdom is
Since I have a crappy camera in my cell phone, I thought I could take pictures of all of the books that I own, to be used as decoration when I discuss each of them in turn. Bar any embarrassing ones, but there are very few of those anyway.
So let this be an introduction into a series of posts where I bring to the public eye the contents of my bookshelf (and the floor next to my desk, where I keep my favourite ones). Because what could be more interesting than seeing tiny pictures of books in bad quality and reading about my take on them? Absolutely nothing, you guessed right.
But before I get down to business, I must bring to every reader's attention an interesting point that I found out about only recently.
The title for this post was derived from the poem My mind to me a kindgom is, published in 1588, traditionally attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (1543(?)-1607). I always try to come up with titles that have some pretentious, quasi-artistic literary allusions in them.
Dyer was a contemporary of Shakespeare's, a courtier poet whom inter alia George Puttenham praised in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), an account of notable English writers at the time. Which by the way I absolutely had to have on my laptop at home in its original spelling, so I can read it over and over so my heart with pleasure fills.
Wordsworth is quite alright you know. And I like linking every other word to a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is a good source for trivia that you don't want to memorize, especially if it doesn't matter whether the information is in the end accurate or not.
Now here comes the funny part. More recently (in 1975 in The Review of English Studies Vol. 26, to be accurate), the poem has been attributed by Stephen W. May to the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550-1604).
Before that, Alden Brooks had proposed in his 1943 book Will Shakspere and the Dyer's hand that the above-mentioned sir Edward Dyer was the true William Shakespeare. In other words, Brooks claimed that Dyer wrote the works of Shakespeare, not the man who went by that name at the time.
You may wonder what's so funny about that, because surely it makes sense that authorship questions often arise with several hundred years old texts? Well, in this case the question is of considerably more interest than in general.
I wrote a paper on the Shakespeare authorship question, and one of my sources was a dissertation by one Dr. Roger Stritmatter. He is a proponent of the Oxfordian theory which claims that it was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who wrote the works that are generally attributed to a man called William Shakespeare.
Dr. Stritmatter had included in his appendices the aforementioned poem, with the intention of demonstrating how similar Edward de Vere's and Shakespeare's writing styles were.
At the time of writing the paper, I didn't realize that the poem wasn't even originally attributed to de Vere!
I was aware that the traditional author of the poem, Sir Dyer, was an alternative Shakespeare candidate himself. But I never realized just how eager the so-called Oxfordians were in appropriating all the works in English literature to Edward de Vere.
Even without knowing about this, there were several problems with the analysis of the poem, and I simply dismissed it as one more of Dr. Stritmatter's farfetched, uninterrelated and badly argued points. In all fairness, though, he was relying on Stephen May's analysis.
As if there weren't enough reasons to doubt anything that Shakespeare authorship heretics write, I was confronted by yet another. The more I learn about the issue, the more ridiculous it becomes in my eyes.
I wish it didn't have to be like that, as in the beginning I was very sympathetic to their cause. But the fact that I like to call it a cause is itself telling. It aggravates me how political the issue is and has always been. Many people probably see no evil in mixing scientific research and politics, but personally I find it disturbing. I'm too much of an idealist, and politics really isn't for idealistic people.
So what I'm trying to say is, stay tuned for more discussion on the Shakespeare authorship question. I've got files and folders full of goodies related to the issue, just waiting to be ridiculed.
I'm not going to make fun of anything on purpose even when it's begging for it, since I'm fighting teeth and nails against becoming partial to any particular candidate.
I don't think I mind it either way, whether it was the earl de Vere or Shakespeare from Stratford, or anybody else for that matter, who wrote those famous plays and sonnets. No reason to mix 'n' match the author and the works, right?
So let this be an introduction into a series of posts where I bring to the public eye the contents of my bookshelf (and the floor next to my desk, where I keep my favourite ones). Because what could be more interesting than seeing tiny pictures of books in bad quality and reading about my take on them? Absolutely nothing, you guessed right.
But before I get down to business, I must bring to every reader's attention an interesting point that I found out about only recently.
The title for this post was derived from the poem My mind to me a kindgom is, published in 1588, traditionally attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (1543(?)-1607). I always try to come up with titles that have some pretentious, quasi-artistic literary allusions in them.
Dyer was a contemporary of Shakespeare's, a courtier poet whom inter alia George Puttenham praised in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), an account of notable English writers at the time. Which by the way I absolutely had to have on my laptop at home in its original spelling, so I can read it over and over so my heart with pleasure fills.
Wordsworth is quite alright you know. And I like linking every other word to a Wikipedia article. Wikipedia is a good source for trivia that you don't want to memorize, especially if it doesn't matter whether the information is in the end accurate or not.
Now here comes the funny part. More recently (in 1975 in The Review of English Studies Vol. 26, to be accurate), the poem has been attributed by Stephen W. May to the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere (1550-1604).
(Young Edward de Vere)
Before that, Alden Brooks had proposed in his 1943 book Will Shakspere and the Dyer's hand that the above-mentioned sir Edward Dyer was the true William Shakespeare. In other words, Brooks claimed that Dyer wrote the works of Shakespeare, not the man who went by that name at the time.
You may wonder what's so funny about that, because surely it makes sense that authorship questions often arise with several hundred years old texts? Well, in this case the question is of considerably more interest than in general.
I wrote a paper on the Shakespeare authorship question, and one of my sources was a dissertation by one Dr. Roger Stritmatter. He is a proponent of the Oxfordian theory which claims that it was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who wrote the works that are generally attributed to a man called William Shakespeare.
Dr. Stritmatter had included in his appendices the aforementioned poem, with the intention of demonstrating how similar Edward de Vere's and Shakespeare's writing styles were.
(On the cover of the dissertation is a photo of Edward de Vere's Geneva bible!)
At the time of writing the paper, I didn't realize that the poem wasn't even originally attributed to de Vere!
I was aware that the traditional author of the poem, Sir Dyer, was an alternative Shakespeare candidate himself. But I never realized just how eager the so-called Oxfordians were in appropriating all the works in English literature to Edward de Vere.
Even without knowing about this, there were several problems with the analysis of the poem, and I simply dismissed it as one more of Dr. Stritmatter's farfetched, uninterrelated and badly argued points. In all fairness, though, he was relying on Stephen May's analysis.
As if there weren't enough reasons to doubt anything that Shakespeare authorship heretics write, I was confronted by yet another. The more I learn about the issue, the more ridiculous it becomes in my eyes.
I wish it didn't have to be like that, as in the beginning I was very sympathetic to their cause. But the fact that I like to call it a cause is itself telling. It aggravates me how political the issue is and has always been. Many people probably see no evil in mixing scientific research and politics, but personally I find it disturbing. I'm too much of an idealist, and politics really isn't for idealistic people.
So what I'm trying to say is, stay tuned for more discussion on the Shakespeare authorship question. I've got files and folders full of goodies related to the issue, just waiting to be ridiculed.
(My "souvenir" from Edinburgh. It has served me well.)
I'm not going to make fun of anything on purpose even when it's begging for it, since I'm fighting teeth and nails against becoming partial to any particular candidate.
I don't think I mind it either way, whether it was the earl de Vere or Shakespeare from Stratford, or anybody else for that matter, who wrote those famous plays and sonnets. No reason to mix 'n' match the author and the works, right?
Monday, July 21, 2008
A Million dead poets would gladly attest - or would they?
In my view, the Shakespeare Authorship question is a tangled web that would probably take a lifetime to unravel in its entirety.
I was rather disheartened when I tried to find accounts of the matter which actually would have tried to remain objective. I'm still on a hunt for an author who's genuinely trying to find the truth, rather than trying to defend his or her respective candidate as the true Shakespeare.
But maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe you're not supposed to be objective. Maybe the only reason why anyone would be interested in the matter is that they actually care about who the author is.
Be that as it may, personally I still believe that you don't have to have a "favourite" candidate in order to be interested in the question. All this "bitter trench warfare", as it's been called, is entertaining and amusing in its own right.
I admit that my notion of "entertaining and amusing" may differ from the more generic meaning of those words. For instance, I couldn't resist a chuckle when I read the description of the Oxfordian Richard Whalen's 1994 book, Shakespeare - Who was he?. (There's an imaginative title for a book if I ever saw one.)
Let me quote whoever wrote the description:
To elucidate the terminology for everyone: Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare. Their candidate is usually called Oxford, though the man himself preferred to sign his letters as Oxenford. At least we know he had a sense of humour, or it's just another manifestation of the flexibility of Elizabethan spelling. Which is also one issue I must touch upon in the future.
So Hamlet, "the most autobiographical" of Shakespeare's plays. The "direct" parallels between the play and the earl's life are used as an argument on his behalf, because – here comes the gist of it – the play is the most autobiographical of them all.
Of course, whether a work is autobiographical or not can only be determined if you know who the author is. Please, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one! If I'm not, I've just found another ridiculous circular argument from the Oxfordian camp. (Not that the "orthodox" Shakespearians haven't excelled in that area for their part.)
To drive home the point of this post: even with a quick 5-minute search on the authorship question, you're bound to run into irrational, silly or just plain stupid arguments.
In countering the inevitably ensuing frustration from all that, my weapon is to make light of it. But even my sense of humour has its limits.
I was going to present a rough draft of all the issues that I'm going to cover in my forthcoming series on the authorship question. Turns out that instead, I was once again amused slash annoyed by an Oxfordian statement, and consequently thrown off course. This is going to be an interesting journey, I can tell.
I was rather disheartened when I tried to find accounts of the matter which actually would have tried to remain objective. I'm still on a hunt for an author who's genuinely trying to find the truth, rather than trying to defend his or her respective candidate as the true Shakespeare.
But maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. Maybe you're not supposed to be objective. Maybe the only reason why anyone would be interested in the matter is that they actually care about who the author is.
Be that as it may, personally I still believe that you don't have to have a "favourite" candidate in order to be interested in the question. All this "bitter trench warfare", as it's been called, is entertaining and amusing in its own right.
I admit that my notion of "entertaining and amusing" may differ from the more generic meaning of those words. For instance, I couldn't resist a chuckle when I read the description of the Oxfordian Richard Whalen's 1994 book, Shakespeare - Who was he?. (There's an imaginative title for a book if I ever saw one.)
Let me quote whoever wrote the description:
Most intriguing are the many direct parallels between Oxford's life and Shakespeare's works, especially in Hamlet, the most autobiographical of the plays.
To elucidate the terminology for everyone: Oxfordians believe that Edward de Vere (1550-1604), the 17th Earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare. Their candidate is usually called Oxford, though the man himself preferred to sign his letters as Oxenford. At least we know he had a sense of humour, or it's just another manifestation of the flexibility of Elizabethan spelling. Which is also one issue I must touch upon in the future.
So Hamlet, "the most autobiographical" of Shakespeare's plays. The "direct" parallels between the play and the earl's life are used as an argument on his behalf, because – here comes the gist of it – the play is the most autobiographical of them all.
Of course, whether a work is autobiographical or not can only be determined if you know who the author is. Please, please correct me if I'm wrong on this one! If I'm not, I've just found another ridiculous circular argument from the Oxfordian camp. (Not that the "orthodox" Shakespearians haven't excelled in that area for their part.)
To drive home the point of this post: even with a quick 5-minute search on the authorship question, you're bound to run into irrational, silly or just plain stupid arguments.
In countering the inevitably ensuing frustration from all that, my weapon is to make light of it. But even my sense of humour has its limits.
I was going to present a rough draft of all the issues that I'm going to cover in my forthcoming series on the authorship question. Turns out that instead, I was once again amused slash annoyed by an Oxfordian statement, and consequently thrown off course. This is going to be an interesting journey, I can tell.
Friday, July 18, 2008
[Insert witty title]
(WARNING: If you don't feel like reading a lengthy post about the author's boring life, this isn't for you.)
The yayness factor has re-entered my life again.
Let's conduct a detailed analysis of what that means exactly.
Since I like FPS (First Person Shooter) games, I chose bullet points as a method for structuring my post. (For the record: I'm a pacifist, but I like to shoot and kill pixely effigies of various kinds of animate beings.)
Yayness is a notoriously challenging concept to break down into distinct ingredients, hence the need for great care and caution when formulating the statements. In plain terms, this entails vigorous soulsearching.
Each of these points merits elaboration. Well, not the first one. Nor the second. Let's take point number three first under the microscope.
(a) I try very hard not to get too excited about my new idea for research, because I don't have much extra time at the moment (except for blogging, there's always time for blogging!).
Long story short, I'm not entirely happy with expanding the topic of my thesis into a dissertation. One reason is that it doesn't seem important enough as a (set of) research question(s). Another is that I feel as though it lacks challenge.
It was definitely a challenge when I first started working on it. The literature was full of studies on it, yet no one had anything particularly enlightening to say about it. By the time I finished my thesis, after tremendous amounts of working hours, I felt like there wasn't much more to say.
After 120 pages, claiming that you've only scratched the surface seems overkill. I plan to write an article or two on some particular issues related to it, because my results deserve to be published. But overall as a topic, it looks like a dead end.
As for my new idea, once I'd thought about it, I started wondering why I didn't think of it before. It's a topic I stumbled upon two years ago when doing background reading for my thesis. I never quite realized what a great topic it would make.
Now that I've been pondering on it, the possibilities and the breadth of what I could do is simply mindboggling. Finally a topic grandiose enough (to grammar geeks at least), and challenging enough for driving me up the wall. I don't see a point in researching something unless it's a challenge; something that seems impossible to make sense of at first sight.
The rest of the ingredients of my newly found state of yayness don't need that much explaining.
(b) I could really use new trainers.
(c) I've been avoiding the thought that I have to give a full 30-minute presentation in ICEHL in Münich in about a month. I go through these periods when I'm extremely antisocial and I hate the thought of any kind of social interaction. But the key in getting excited again about the presentation was to remind myself why my topic is so interesting, to me at least. If I focus on how interesting my message is, I don't even mind the fact that I'm in front of an audience.
I looked at the time table, and noticed that there are not only many many Finns, but also two more people from my university: my professor, and another senior colleague. I've never met him. We come from the same university, and I finally get to meet him - in Germany.
(d) Last but not least, I'm happy to have found some time finally for writing. For quite some time now I've preferred writing to reading.
I feel like I've partially lost my ability to focus on reading. It's not as bad as it was in the past, but it's still difficult for me. It's strange. I can literally stare at one sentence for 30 minutes, then move onto the next one. It's not convenient when you're trying to read several books for a test. I can manage, though - it just takes me months to read two or three books, that's all.
But writing I find very easy to focus on. Being able to arrange your thoughts in the process is a definite plus. More and more, I'm falling in love with writing for a blog. Even though I barely have any regular readers, it's therapeutic and exciting and useful for developing my writing skills.
In the name of preserving the sanity of my dear reader(s), I promise I'll keep it short(er) in the future. What's more, one of these days I shall post a new painting as well
The yayness factor has re-entered my life again.
Let's conduct a detailed analysis of what that means exactly.
Since I like FPS (First Person Shooter) games, I chose bullet points as a method for structuring my post. (For the record: I'm a pacifist, but I like to shoot and kill pixely effigies of various kinds of animate beings.)
Yayness is a notoriously challenging concept to break down into distinct ingredients, hence the need for great care and caution when formulating the statements. In plain terms, this entails vigorous soulsearching.
- I finished relinking the pictures. My blog looks pretty again. Sort of.
- The sun started to shine yesterday. I can't get enough of it. The winter will be long and dark enough.
- I came up with a new topic for research.
- My feet aren't sore anymore. I can go back to jogging almost everyday.
- It's only 4 weeks to my conference presentation and I finally got round to writing a draft.
- I have several writing projects, which is infinitely better than just sitting down and reading books and panicking about not being able to focus for five minutes.
Each of these points merits elaboration. Well, not the first one. Nor the second. Let's take point number three first under the microscope.
(a) I try very hard not to get too excited about my new idea for research, because I don't have much extra time at the moment (except for blogging, there's always time for blogging!).
Long story short, I'm not entirely happy with expanding the topic of my thesis into a dissertation. One reason is that it doesn't seem important enough as a (set of) research question(s). Another is that I feel as though it lacks challenge.
It was definitely a challenge when I first started working on it. The literature was full of studies on it, yet no one had anything particularly enlightening to say about it. By the time I finished my thesis, after tremendous amounts of working hours, I felt like there wasn't much more to say.
After 120 pages, claiming that you've only scratched the surface seems overkill. I plan to write an article or two on some particular issues related to it, because my results deserve to be published. But overall as a topic, it looks like a dead end.
As for my new idea, once I'd thought about it, I started wondering why I didn't think of it before. It's a topic I stumbled upon two years ago when doing background reading for my thesis. I never quite realized what a great topic it would make.
Now that I've been pondering on it, the possibilities and the breadth of what I could do is simply mindboggling. Finally a topic grandiose enough (to grammar geeks at least), and challenging enough for driving me up the wall. I don't see a point in researching something unless it's a challenge; something that seems impossible to make sense of at first sight.
The rest of the ingredients of my newly found state of yayness don't need that much explaining.
(b) I could really use new trainers.
(c) I've been avoiding the thought that I have to give a full 30-minute presentation in ICEHL in Münich in about a month. I go through these periods when I'm extremely antisocial and I hate the thought of any kind of social interaction. But the key in getting excited again about the presentation was to remind myself why my topic is so interesting, to me at least. If I focus on how interesting my message is, I don't even mind the fact that I'm in front of an audience.
I looked at the time table, and noticed that there are not only many many Finns, but also two more people from my university: my professor, and another senior colleague. I've never met him. We come from the same university, and I finally get to meet him - in Germany.
(d) Last but not least, I'm happy to have found some time finally for writing. For quite some time now I've preferred writing to reading.
I feel like I've partially lost my ability to focus on reading. It's not as bad as it was in the past, but it's still difficult for me. It's strange. I can literally stare at one sentence for 30 minutes, then move onto the next one. It's not convenient when you're trying to read several books for a test. I can manage, though - it just takes me months to read two or three books, that's all.
But writing I find very easy to focus on. Being able to arrange your thoughts in the process is a definite plus. More and more, I'm falling in love with writing for a blog. Even though I barely have any regular readers, it's therapeutic and exciting and useful for developing my writing skills.
In the name of preserving the sanity of my dear reader(s), I promise I'll keep it short(er) in the future. What's more, one of these days I shall post a new painting as well
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Afterthoughts
I'm still trying to gather my thoughts regarding a recent linguistics conference visit to Helsinki. It was my first time in a conference, and I didn't really have any idea what it would be like.
Thankfully, I didn't give a "real" presentation just yet, but only a poster presentation. Even so, I had to quickly introduce the topic of my poster in two minutes, and by the end of those longest minutes in my life so far, I could barely get the words out of my mouth.
But it wasn't critical, as I could explain everything without stress afterwards during the poster session to anyone who was interested. Quite a few of the people there were, probably because they couldn't hear anything from my stuttery introduction. But I don't really care. I'll just practise more for an actual presentation in August in München.
Maybe I should take lessons in producing speech properly, as one Scottish woman thought I absolutely should in order to survive in this world. Or not.
The conference was held in an old auditorium where they used to cut bodies open to show medical students what people look like inside. Fascinating. I've always wondered how doctors can understand anything of what they see inside a human's body. To my eyes, the viscera are just a bunch of some red stuff all jumbled up together.
The makeup of the auditorium wasn't too ergonomic, though. If you sat in the front row, your neck would be really stiff because of having to look so high up on the projection screen. And if all the listeners where sitting in the highermost rows, the speaker would get their neck stiff from having to look upwards so much.
I was quite nervous the first day, and drinking a glass of wine into an empty stomach in the evening didn't help my mood much. But by the third day, I was already trying to chat up other people. I congratulated myself on that.
The first day was very computational, and I couldn't really make sense of anything because of my non-existent background in statistics. However, I think I understand better now why many linguists these days have endorsed number crunching.
I suppose I was preinclined to think it's all rubbish to play around with numbers too much, in a way distancing yourself from actual manifestations of language use. I had let myself be influenced by other, more experienced people who didn't see much use in statistics. One more reason why you should look up to your elders and betters, but always take their advice and opinions with a grain of salt.
It really isn't about distancing yourself from language. I think it's just about linguists wanting to gain more credibility for their field of research, a problem I suppose any subject in humanities must face. In a twisted way I'm even looking forward to learning more about statistics. This from a girl who wanted to escape mathematics forever by studying language.
The second day was more about syntax, which is a field I'm sort of working in myself. Alas, I was still tired from sleeping only 5 hours on two previous nights, so I can't recall much from those presentations. To my relief and joy, the conference organizers emailed today to announce that they're going to put up the presentation slides online for everybody's viewing pleasure. Plus a plethora of somewhat amusing photos.
On the third day, there were some presentations about cross-linguistic typology. It's immensely intriguing from a theoretical point of view, and kudos to all who are courageous enough to try and create some rhyme or reason into such an endeavour.
It all made my own research project seem so small and insignificant. At the moment, I'm fervently trying to develop the topic so that it would seem more worthwhile. One of the linguists at the conference even plain laughed out loud at my poster and then walked away. So officially of course I'm proud of and confident in the importance of my topic, just in case I ever run into more people of his kind.
It didn't really help though to hear from my French friend what his doctoral thesis will be about. I often think he's a jackass (and he doesn't mind me saying so), being French and all that, but he's also a bit of a genius. It boggles my mind how different it is to study history in France. Let alone English. Yes, they do study English over there.
(Picture 1: www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/tapahtumat/qitl)
Thankfully, I didn't give a "real" presentation just yet, but only a poster presentation. Even so, I had to quickly introduce the topic of my poster in two minutes, and by the end of those longest minutes in my life so far, I could barely get the words out of my mouth.
But it wasn't critical, as I could explain everything without stress afterwards during the poster session to anyone who was interested. Quite a few of the people there were, probably because they couldn't hear anything from my stuttery introduction. But I don't really care. I'll just practise more for an actual presentation in August in München.
Maybe I should take lessons in producing speech properly, as one Scottish woman thought I absolutely should in order to survive in this world. Or not.
The conference was held in an old auditorium where they used to cut bodies open to show medical students what people look like inside. Fascinating. I've always wondered how doctors can understand anything of what they see inside a human's body. To my eyes, the viscera are just a bunch of some red stuff all jumbled up together.
The makeup of the auditorium wasn't too ergonomic, though. If you sat in the front row, your neck would be really stiff because of having to look so high up on the projection screen. And if all the listeners where sitting in the highermost rows, the speaker would get their neck stiff from having to look upwards so much.
I was quite nervous the first day, and drinking a glass of wine into an empty stomach in the evening didn't help my mood much. But by the third day, I was already trying to chat up other people. I congratulated myself on that.
The first day was very computational, and I couldn't really make sense of anything because of my non-existent background in statistics. However, I think I understand better now why many linguists these days have endorsed number crunching.
I suppose I was preinclined to think it's all rubbish to play around with numbers too much, in a way distancing yourself from actual manifestations of language use. I had let myself be influenced by other, more experienced people who didn't see much use in statistics. One more reason why you should look up to your elders and betters, but always take their advice and opinions with a grain of salt.
It really isn't about distancing yourself from language. I think it's just about linguists wanting to gain more credibility for their field of research, a problem I suppose any subject in humanities must face. In a twisted way I'm even looking forward to learning more about statistics. This from a girl who wanted to escape mathematics forever by studying language.
(Don’t laugh. It’s hard to come up with pictures that are actually related to the topic. I'm doing my best to make this post more reader-friendly.)
The second day was more about syntax, which is a field I'm sort of working in myself. Alas, I was still tired from sleeping only 5 hours on two previous nights, so I can't recall much from those presentations. To my relief and joy, the conference organizers emailed today to announce that they're going to put up the presentation slides online for everybody's viewing pleasure. Plus a plethora of somewhat amusing photos.
On the third day, there were some presentations about cross-linguistic typology. It's immensely intriguing from a theoretical point of view, and kudos to all who are courageous enough to try and create some rhyme or reason into such an endeavour.
It all made my own research project seem so small and insignificant. At the moment, I'm fervently trying to develop the topic so that it would seem more worthwhile. One of the linguists at the conference even plain laughed out loud at my poster and then walked away. So officially of course I'm proud of and confident in the importance of my topic, just in case I ever run into more people of his kind.
It didn't really help though to hear from my French friend what his doctoral thesis will be about. I often think he's a jackass (and he doesn't mind me saying so), being French and all that, but he's also a bit of a genius. It boggles my mind how different it is to study history in France. Let alone English. Yes, they do study English over there.
(Picture 1: www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/tapahtumat/qitl)
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