Idiosophy

A physicist loose among the liberal arts

Category: Vive la France Page 1 of 2

Religious Tolerance

It’s frustrating how poorly served Voltaire is by the World Wide Web. I needed the citation for one of his epigrams. It was actually faster to go down to the basement, get the two books it could have come from off the shelf, and leaf through them to find it.

It turns out that the reason I couldn’t remember which book it was from is that it’s in both the Lettres Philosophiques (1734) and in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764), prefaced in the latter by “it’s been said before, and I can’t say it better, …”

Once I had the right book, the Gallica app from the National Library of France was able to point me to the actual text.

Modern Transcription1

S’il n’y avait en Angleterre qu’une Religion, le despotisme serait à craindre, s’il y en avait deux, elles se couperaient la gorge ; mais il y en a trente, & elles vivent en paix heureuses.

Translation

If there were only one religion in England, they should fear tyranny. If there were two, they’d slit each others’ throats. But there are thirty, and they live happily in peace.

Descent into Madness

The team at the Oxford Dictionary have upgraded their text visualization tool. The first beta version was the tool of some idiosophizing a few months ago. This new version still has the 500-word limit, but it’s gotten  better at guessing which meaning of a word the author had in mind, and it handles Elvish words and proper names much more gracefully. That is, it ignores them.

The madness of kings and the damage it can do to a country has been on my mind of late, so today I used the new tool to look at Denethor’s first and last speeches.  Long-time readers know I’m an admirer.

Here’s the first thing of any length we hear Denethor say, after removing all the things that aren’t Denethor:

Dark indeed is the hour, and at such times you are wont to come, Mithrandir. But though all the signs forebode that the doom of Gondor is drawing nigh, less now to me is that darkness than my own darkness. It has been told to me that you bring with you one who saw my son die. Is this he? …
Verily. And in my turn I bore it, and so did each eldest son of our house, far back into the vanished years before the failing of the kings, since Vorondil father of Mardil hunted the wild kine of Araw in the far fields of Rhun. I heard it blowing dim upon the northern marches thirteen days ago, and the River brought it to me, broken: it will wind no more. What say you to that, Halfling?

As before, the size of the circle is how common the word is in English, the horizontal position is the year the word entered the language, the vertical position is how many times the word appears in the text, and the color of the circle is the language family whence the word came into English. Blue is Germanic (dark for Old English, lighter for German or Norse), red is French (and other Romance languages). Other languages appear in other colors, but these passages don’t have any of those.

Visualization of Denethor's first speech

This is how a great leader of men talks

And here is the last speech Denethor makes before he ignites the pyre, similarly edited:

Pride and despair! Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory. To this City only the first finger of its hand has yet been stretched. All the East is moving. And even now the wind of thy hope cheats thee and wafts up Anduin a fleet with black sails. The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves.
Hope on, then! Do I not know thee, Mithrandir? Thy hope is to rule in my stead, to stand behind every throne, north, south, or west. I have read thy mind and its policies. Do I not know that you commanded this halfling here to keep silence? That you brought him hither to be a spy within my very chamber? And yet in our speech together I have learned the names and purpose of all thy companions. So! With the left hand thou wouldst use me for a little while as a shield against Mordor, and with the right bring up this Ranger of the North to supplant me. But I say to thee, Gandalf Mithrandir, I will not be thy tool! I am Steward of the House of Anarion. I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart. Even were his claim proved to me, still he comes but of the line of Isildur. I will not bow to such a one, last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity’
I would have things as they were in all the days of my life and in the days of my longfathers before me: to be the Lord of this City in peace, and leave my chair to a son after me, who would be his own master and no wizard’s pupil. But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught, neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated.

Denethor's last speech visualized

Not the words of a well man.

When we meet him, Denethor is sane. He is firmly in command of the defense of the West. In a speech of 140 words he uses only three of French origin: sign, river, and march. Those are good, short words. You can barely fault him.

But the palantir is a dangerous thing. One must have a great strength of will to use it without being deceived. Mighty as Denethor was, madness took him, and we can see it in his speech: 37 French words out of 370.  Alas for the son of Ecthelion!  Sauron’s lies turned him 10% French, and from that there is no return.


Caveat

The results of the visualizer can be sensitive to the date of the text. As you can see from the vertical red lines, I chose a date before the author started writing, not the date of publication. Using the later date means there’s a risk that the robot will discover some obscure technical term that came into existence just before the book hit the shelves. The OED knows everything, and that has negatives as well as positives. (In this case, the tricky word was “kine”.)

How to make a dictionary

In which we once again find our Idiosopher using insanely-powerful Internet research tools for frivolous ends.

A while back, Prof. Emily Steiner, who seems to be familiar with every medieval manuscript that’s survived to the modern era, tweeted an image of what she asserted to be a debate between a cockatrice and a wyvern.  It’s a snippet from Brunetto Latini, Livre du Trésor (1230?-1294). Manuscript BnF Fr 568, folio 48v (available via Gallica).

I can’t resist reading the captions on medieval illuminations, just to see if I can. The red letters looked to me like “De toutes maines de serpens”. Obviously this means “Concerning all kinds of serpents”, except for the word “maines”– what’s that?

all manner of serpents

“Why did it have to be snakes?” – Prof. Henry Jones, Jr.

I consulted the Dictionary of medieval French, and found definition 2 for “maine” is “manière, espèce”, with a citation to Le Roman de Tristan. So, fine. [1] But there’s one thing I overlooked:  that red curlicue over top of the word I’m puzzling over is a scribal abbreviation. After a couple of us got ourselves confused, Prof. Steiner let us know it stands for “re”, and the pen-strokes I read as “in” are actually “ni”. Properly read, that word is actually “manière” itself, and it hasn’t changed in 800 years.

That implies a nuance that hadn’t occurred to me about the lexicographer’s art: the scholar who wrote the dictionary included a word he knew didn’t exist and wasn’t used, just because it’s easy for students to read it that way in the text.  Awfully considerate of him.


[1] The Romance of Tristan is attributed to an author called Béroul, about whom nothing is known. The manuscript is in poor condition. The dictionary tells me the word “maine” is used in the phrase “male maine”, meaning intransigence or evil will, not bad manners. I tried to find the word in the manuscript, but failed. Maybe it’s underneath one of the coffee spills.

A Voyage in Middle-earth at the BNF

There was no time to get to Oxford for their big Tolkien exhibition in 2018 and I had too much homework to see it when it came to New York, but where will wants not, a way opens, and I was in Paris for the French version, entitled “A Voyage in Middle-earth”. It was the day after Christmas and despite the transport strike, the exhibition hall at the National Library of France was packed. Someone had to come out before the next person could come in. When I came out the exit, a cheer went up from the group waiting to enter. (It’s nice to be appreciated.) People of all ages were there, including both eager adults dragging recalcitrant teenagers and eager children dragging indulgent adults. I’m afraid I may have held up the line several times by stopping to read the Tengwar or the Old English, but I wasn’t the only one. It was fun to notice that Tolkien made spelling mistakes in Tengwar — the difference between creating a language and “just making stuff up” is that spelling mistakes are impossible in the latter.

Most of the exhibit was works by Tolkien or derivative works by Pauline Baynes, the tapestry-weavers of Aubusson, and plenty of others. (I had the Baynes poster on my bedroom wall, and now it’s in a museum. This is what getting old feels like.) There was a generous helping of Gustave Doré: about 10% of the exhibit. It works surprisingly well. For an example, here’s how Doré portrayed the arrival of Gandalf and Erkenbrand to lift the siege of Helm’s Deep.

Under the rubric “contextualization”, the organizers paired many of JRRT’s works with real-world analogues of things mentioned in his texts. I enjoyed seeing these as much as the directly-connected artifacts. They had a palantir, a credible Arkenstone, and they even made an attempt at the Silmarils. Those last were opals from NZ, Australia, and Mexico, illuminated so they glowed.

The fate of vanquished dragonflies

The exhibit had a bronze-age Greek sword that was the right size and shape for Sting. The Horn of Roland was a pretty good match for Boromir’s horn, especially since it has a big split in it. Elves love Art Nouveau, and the jewelers of Maison Fouquet were obviously in touch with the hero of “Errantry”.

Some items were included with only the most tenuous of connections (Charlemagne’s chess set?) but interesting nevertheless. At least there were oliphaunts involved.

The Death Dealer by Frank Frazetta

The more I think about it, the more I like the way they added the contextual objects. When I first read LotR, in the days when fantasy was strange and hard to find, anyone who wanted to know what unfamiliar objects looked like had to hit the encyclopedia. Therefore we found out exactly what JRRT meant by (e.g.) “battle-axe”. Today the supply of images of fantastic weaponry is unlimited. Everybody knows lots of examples of what a battle-axe looks like thanks to fan art, movies, anime, and video games… but 90% of those are not at all what Tolkien was thinking of. The historical battle-axe blade here was about five inches across rather than the 24-36 inches common in fantasy art.  Can you imagine Gimli running from Rauros to Fangorn carrying one of those monsters?

winged helmet

Wings are much more practical than horns.

One item particularly pleasing to this Idiosopher was a winged helmet such as they wore in Gondor. I got some pushback for saying Gondor was like ancient Egypt (lots of people want it to be Byzantine Constantinople), but the Wise Clerks of Paris assure us Minas Tirith’s soldiers were wearing hats from the 4th Century BCE.

Altogether a delightful way to spend a rainy December afternoon. My thanks to all the people who made it happen.


Coda

French Tolkien-nerds are better dressed than their US counterparts, but just as maladroit. We didn’t go three minutes without somebody triggering one of the infrared sensors that beep when you get to close to an artifact (only one was me). An informal scan suggests that less than a quarter of those incidents involved the artifact the person was actually looking at.

Jardin des Plantes

Swung by my old neighborhood today. The botanical gardens are dressed up totally-insane for Christmas. The Jardin des Plantes re-uses the estates of the 18th-Century naturalist le Comte de Buffon, one of my old encyclopedia buddies. It has a big statue of Lamarck, the “creator of the theory of evolution”, featuring a panel where his daughter reassures him that “History will avenge you, father”.[1]

At night this is all lit up, perhaps because the people who designed the exhibits were, too. However, the thing that really made the trip memorable for me was the way the sign out front has been defaced.

I completely understand anyone who loves Paris for the refinement of its cuisine, the elegance of its women, or the creativity of its artists, but for me the glory of the city shall always lie in the fusion of hyper-education and pointless vulgarity exhibited by its graffiti.

(Oh, all right, if you think it will help.)


[1] I have just learned from Wikipedia that Lamarck fought in the Pomeranian War, which must have been the cutest bloodbath in history.

Christmas in Middle-earth

Overheard in the Idiosopher’s house…

Mrs: I think we should celebrate Christmas with my family in France.
Me: Hurrah!
Mrs: … but, I’m going to need a day that’s just for doing sister-stuff. Will you be OK by yourself if I ditch you for that one?
National Library of France:

Me: I ought to be able to handle it.

Written by the Winners

Source: Wikpedia

I feel sorry for the bottom lion.

Shakespeare’s play Henry V came up on the BBC’s In Our Time podcast, in celebration of their 20th anniversary. Pretty impressive for a podcast! As the panel discussed all the Plantagenets in their turn, it reminded me of an experience from long ago.

An impressive theatrical company was performing the play in Paris while I was living there. Le Monde published a long review in their entertainment section. 25 years later I’m unable to track it down on line, so I’m working from memory here.

The writer pointed out a thing I’d never heard in any English-language source. All the carousing that young Hal did with Falstaff and the gang in the “Henry IV” plays has an important role in Henry V: because he had spent all that time in bars, he spoke fluent English. His rousing speeches to the troops at Harfleur and on St. Crispin’s day are a huge deal because no previous king since 1066 could have given them. From William the Bastard on, the kings only spoke French.  When history is written by the winners, valuable perspectives like this can easily get lost.

Disclaimer: Henry IV spoke English as his native language, according to the fountain of all knowledge, but this may not contradict the Le Monde reviewer. Henry grew up in aristocratic surroundings, and the gaps between classes in England were wide, and are still large today. Henry IV probably could not speak in an idiom that would sound congenial to the common soldiers, at least not well enough to pull off something like this:

Children and Unicorns

The Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris is running a special exhibition on unicorns.

Nine creatures posing in front of obnoxious wallpaper

Barthélémy l’Anglais, Livre des propriétés des choses BNF Français 216 f. 285r

While I was there, a teacher was explaining to a group of 7- and 8-year-olds how unicorns were hunted: “A young woman, who’d never had a baby, and who was … very nice and very pure…” OK, she should have planned ahead about how to dodge a discussion of virginity here, but I thought it was a good save. Alas, she then continued, “… sits down in the forest, and the unicorn would come lay its head in her lap. Then the hunter would come out of hiding and grab it to take its horn.

The children all looked at each other. The bravest one spoke up: “Well, she’s not very nice, then!” Euphemisms always get me into trouble, too.

The exhibit also amused the children with this sculpture, the attitude of which explains why unicorns don’t come around much anymore. I shall quit blaming the scientific revolution.

Sculptured unicorn scat

“Unicorn Droppings”, by Sophie Lecomte

My Favorite Bookstore 

Whenever I’m in Paris…  OK, that sounds really pretentious, so let me make it clear that a “trip to Paris” for me means that I’m in France visiting my in-laws, and I’ve escaped from their house in the suburbs for a day. Still, going to Paris is always awesome. Everybody should do it as often as they can.

At the end of a day pretending I’m a flâneur, I always arrange to wind up at my favorite bookstore, “L’Écume des Pages” on the Boulevard St. Germain. Don’t bother trying to translate the name – it doesn’t mean anything without you have read a book called L’Écume des Jours by Boris Vian If you like beatnik surrealism, I highly recommend that.  Come to think of it, that website is lame.  Listen to this instead.  (Lyrics in English here, but they should have said “systematically” where they said “automatically”.)

Anyway, this is my haul from my latest trip:

Books purchased on my latest trip

Booty

Learn to Philosophize with Bourdieu, by Adelino Braz; Vian and ‘Pataphysics by Thieri Foulc & Paul Gayot; and The Roman Empire through its Menus, by Dmitri Tilloi D’Ambrosi.  Bourdieu may have said the most intelligent things of anyone we had to read in the Literary Theory course I took last winter, but he writes in such an elevated style that I’m grateful to have a pedestrian commentary to clarify exactly what he was talking about.  The ‘Pataphysicians are always fascinating. They appear to be doing nothing but jerking people’s chains, but underneath may be completely serious. And I always love to read about ancient Rome. I could never pass up a book that contains a recipe for rose petals with fish sauce.

The Physics of Street Signs

There are little jokes about science all over the roads in France. I have no idea whether they’re intentional or not.

Last week I was gallivanting around Provence.  I know; somebody’s got to do the dirty jobs, right? On the departmental routes (like state roads in the USA), there are little rest areas where you can pull off. Like on the New Jersey Turnpike, they’re named in honor of people. They aren’t symmetrical, the way Americans do them. Instead, the northbound rest area ends where the southbound begins.

french rest areas look like sine waves

Rest areas on french country roads

The result is that the areas look like a sine wave.  On the road through the Camargue, one of them, to my delight, was named “de Broglie“. If we consider the rest area as a quantum-mechanical system, estimate its wavelength, and use de Broglie’s formula to calculate its momentum, the number will come out to be unmeasurably tiny.  That’s good; we want civil-engineering projects to stay where we put them.

map to the Parking Lagrange

Parking garage on the Rue Lagrange, Paris Vme

Once a person with a couple of years of physics is sensitized to them, these little landmark jokes appear with suspicious frequency.  The first one I noticed was a parking garage called “Lagrange”.  Makes perfect sense, since it’s on the Rue Lagrange in Paris. But you don’t even have to formally study physics in this case.  Just read enough science-fiction, and you’ll know the Lagrange points by heart.

Also, the Rue Coriolis is a one-way street, running counter-clockwise around a big apartment building.  As it must, since it’s in the northern hemisphere.

Am I just imagining there’s a pattern here? Probably.  But the elves distinguish two things that English calls “hope”.  Amdir is when you express a desire that some event with a calculable probability will come out in your favor. Estel is when you’re expressing faith in the divinely-ordained course of the universe. The modern world doesn’t have much call for estel, usually. But that’s exactly the word for my hope that somewhere there’s a civil engineer doing these on purpose.

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