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Posted by languagehat

https://languagehat.com/burgesss-fancy-for-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18668

We’ve discussed Anthony Burgess before (e.g., Burgess’s Slang), but I thought this bilious and detailed passage from the Roger Lewis biography was worth sharing:

Burgess’s idea of order, and his mental make-up, is signified by his fancy for the discipline and formality of grammar and linguistics. Language, in Burgess, creates the content. His information about his ancestors is divulged in terms of how they spoke and sounded, and by the Lancashire hotpot they ate: speaking and swallowing. And of course he can’t mention Manchester speech without having a go at the ‘centralizing linguistic culture’ of London and the south, which ironed out regional dialects – yet where did his own sonic boom come from? Elocution lessons? ‘We provincials have suffered in forcing ourselves to conform,’ he announced in 1987, writing from 44 rue Grimaldi, Monaco. One of Burgess’s biggest inadvertent jokes was to call a book Language Made Plain, because he makes it complicated, in my view. When he talks about substituting ‘an alveolar nasal for a velar one’ or of ‘palatizing his unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring. He can’t have friends or cronies at school – they have to be persons ‘true to the etymology khronios’; even as a hungry baby he was like the vociferously verbose Leonard Sachs, compère of The Good Old Days, the music-hall show broadcast from the City Varieties, Leeds. Instead of crying for more milk, it’s a question of ‘the lactal ducts never refilling fast enough’. With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites, one of her symptoms (a distension of the abdomen), is the Greek askos, a wineskin, and that one of her last acts had been to rebuke a Singapore nurse in fluent Mandarin Chinese, ‘astonishing me with a sleeping knowledge of the language I never knew she had’.

Clamour and confusion are concealed by language, and for Burgess living details become a literary process. He reminds me, therefore, less of any modern (or Modernist) artist, where the many-sidedness of existence is acknowledged and presented in a multitude of experimental ways, than of a late Victorian or Edwardian man of letters – his equivalent in painting being William Powell Frith, whose vast, thronging canvases of Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day or railway-station platforms and booking halls prompted Wilde to enquire innocently whether it was really all done by hand? Such, too, are Burgess’s modes of exaggeration – the bejewelled vocabulary, the polishings of his prose – the effect, though picturesque, is that the books are assembled by clockwork. His love of words is robotic.

Who the goddess of love is we well know (in Greek, aphrodiastikos means ‘lecherous’, aphrodiazein, ‘to copulate’). The god of language was Hermes (or ‘the rogue god Mercury’ as Burgess calls him), often represented in Classical statuary as a priapus. In many parts of Greece (Peloponnese, Argos, Megalopolis, Kyllene), he and Aphrodite were worshipped together. They certainly commingle in Burgess, who even talks of taking his dictionaries, like mistresses, to bed. Homage to Qwert Yuiop contains several dozen fervid pieces on dictionaries and sundry encyclopaedia: a veritable seraglio. Burgess always kept on his desk the OED, the American Heritage Dictionary, a 1926 Webster, plus works on slang, etymology, quotation, euphemism, anecdotes and Yiddish, the effect of which touched his every sentence. A Malayan Trilogy is full of South-East Asian tongues. The Doctor Is Sick is about a phonetics expert and the language of the criminal underworld. Abba Abba makes John Keats a pioneering philologist. Honey for the Bears plays games with Cyrillic script, as Paul Hussey becomes Pavel Ivanovitch Gussey. (The flyleaf of Burgess’s copy of Waldemar Schapiro’s Russian Gem Dictionary [1959] is inscribed ‘Ivan Vilson’ in perfect Cyrillic.) And the neologisms in A Clockwork Orange derive from the cockney dialect upon a Russian base. Baboochka is ‘old woman’, droog is ‘friend’, pretty polly is ‘money’. To write the novelisation and script for Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, Burgess went back to Greek and Hebrew editions of the Gospel, discovering a Bible rife with puns. The famous phrase about humped beasts and needles’ eyes is a confusion of kamilon (rope) with kamelon (camel). On the cross, Jesus did not call out Eli, eli, lama Sabacthani, but Elie, elie … ‘This is the vocative of helios in its demotic unaspirated form. He was calling on the sun.’ In Amos, Chapter 8, verse ii, Burgess glosses ‘a basket of summer fruit becomes a portent of Israel’s end’ by informing us that in the original ‘basket’ is qais and ‘the end’ is qes. A play on words, in other words. Harlot to Chaucer meant ‘maid-servant’, knave once meant ‘young man’ (the German knabe), apricot comes from Arabic al-precoq which comes from Latin’s praecox, or early fruit. Such snaps, crackles and pops of information were put to use in Quest for Fire, a film about Stone Age man, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, in 1981. It was based on the novel La Guerre du Feu, written by J. H. Rosny-Aîné in 1909 and first published in 1911. Burgess devised a prehistoric creole, or a new language patched out of existing ones (crioulo is Portuguese for ‘a slave born in the master’s household’), by ransacking his grammars. To make a word, he says, ‘begin with a lip sound, continue with a back vowel, end with another lip sound’. In the film, dondr-dondr (a Chinese duplication from the Greek for tree) means ‘a forest’; a stag is tirdondr (German for deer, Tir, with the antlered branches). Juggling, somehow, Japanese and Russian, muuv emerges as the word for ‘breast’.

Could he conceivably have been taking the piss? Who did Burgess think he was being? James Murray? Murray, ‘a godfearing teetotal non-smoking philoprogenitive bizarrely polymath dominie’, was the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary – a great project which, by scientifically classifying the exfoliations of language, the evolution and pedigree of words, is related to Victorian biology and the work of Charles Darwin. Murray learned new lingos by translating the Bible (for instance, a Chinese Book of Genesis); and he was intrigued by dialects, those remnants of ancient tongues (Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh) which in his day were still spoken in remote regions, surviving like Romantic ruins. And the second wordsmith Burgess wrote articles on is George Borrow, a lackadaisical genius, in contrast to Murray, who was so formal he wore his doctoral cap even at family meals. Yet for all his sloppy manner (he was a supertramp happier living with gypsies than with gentry), Borrow knew hundreds of languages, attending the Great Exhibition of 1851 to be seen ‘yapping away in Armenian and Turkish and Manchu’. Burgess himself, having spoken Anglo-Saxon with Borges and read Don Quixote in Catalan, by 1989 was ready to learn Japanese (‘it takes me a week to learn one phrase. That can’t be right’). He wanted to be able to startle the Sons of Nippon, whom he kept running across in London or New York hotels, with the inscrutable information that ringo wa ume yori yasui desu: apples are cheaper than plums. He was also brushing up his Hebrew and encouraging Liana to learn Arabic. ‘Soon,’ he announced, ‘we’ll be able to read the Koran in the original to see if Salman Rushdie is mentioned by name. On the whole, though, I suspect the Koran’ll be a bore in any language.’

Poor Burgess! Yes, a lot of his theories were loony (or at least groundless), but he deserved better than to have a biographer who so smugly plumed himself on his ignorance (“I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring”). He was admirably besotted with language, and it’s fun to learn about the books on his desk; I myself have a prized copy of Waldemar Schapiro’s Collins Gem Dictionary, the first book of Russian instruction I ever bought (having been frustrated by the impenetrably Russian entries in a multilingual book).

Schapiro himself, incidentally, is a mystery; I was unable to find out anything about his life for his LibraryThing page, not even his birth or death years. (He should not be confused with this guy, who was murdered in 1933.)

https://languagehat.com/burgesss-fancy-for-language/

https://languagehat.com/?p=18668