Cervin from a vantage point near Gornergrat, 4 Dec. 2011
I came across an interesting explanation for the name of Switzerland’s most famous mountain, ‘Cervin’ in French, ‘Cervino’ in Italian and ‘Matterhorn’ in German, yesterday in a book which is mostly a study on the toponyms (place names) of Switzerland.
According to the author, Jean-François Kister – in On megaliths, legends and gods (1998) –, who quotes the etymological derivations of other authors (including the famous 19th century Celtist Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville (1827-1910) and Georges Richard Wipf, a toponymist), ‘Cervin’ is derived from the Celtic word ‘carvos’ (deer), itself derived from the Celtic root ‘car’ (horn).
However, this was not an ‘eureka’ moment for me as the connection is so obvious (I studied Latin for a number of years (‘cervus’), I also know some Italian (‘cervo’) and, in fact, I had made the association myself). Far more interesting is Mr Jean-François Kister’s association (on pages 69 and 70) of the mountain with a Celtic deity, Cernunnos, often depicted sporting a pair of antlers (supposed to symbolise fertility, aggressiveness, power, according to him), as is the case on this parietal (rock painting dating back to prehistoric times) representation at val Camonica in northern Italy:
Rock painting in Italy (photo said to be by Emmanuelle Süss)
We know that the Celts and their forefathers inhabited some of the valleys in the area, so this hypothesis is really plausible. In fact, I am a strong believer in the idea that there must be some truth in names. Yet it also warrants further research. So many interesting things to find out about, so little time. 😦
Right now however, I am more interested in the fact that the Celts had a strong connection with water, unlike us (see my other blog).
Link
‘Deadly mountain’ (a post I wrote on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the first ascent of ‘Cervin’)
Lorsque mon épouse vint m’interrompre dans la lecture d’un ouvrage rempli de banalités sur les stratégies de contenu marketing pour la Toile parce qu’elle ne comprenait pas les instructions présentées au dos de la couverture cartonnée recouvrant le germoir qu’elle avait acheté quelques heures plus tôt chez un géant de la distribution d’origine germanique, j’attribuai cela un peu trop rapidement au fait que mon épouse est une ressortissante singapourienne établie en Suisse seulement depuis quelques années et qu’elle ne maîtrise donc pas toutes les subtilités de la langue de Molière.
Quelle conclusion ô combien hâtive et même présomptueuse de ma part ! En fait, la cause en était tout simplement que la traduction était épouvantable. De ma vie, je n’avais jamais lu une notice d’emploi aussi incompréhensible. Je dus même me reporter au texte italien, lequel était un peu de meilleure facture, pour comprendre le sens d’inepties (générées vraisemblablement par un logiciel de traduction automatique de tout bas de gamme) telles que « Couler soigneusement toutes les pièces », « chambre à gonfler », « La graine peut désormais gonfler un jour. Une fois que vous changez l’eau tous les jours.»
Je peux comprendre que le distributeur (germanique lui aussi) n’ait pas voulu dépenser de l’argent pour la traduction d’une notice en français pour un produit manufacturé en Chine qui ne coûte que quelques francs en grosse surface. J’espère seulement qu’il en va autrement lorsqu’il s’agit de notices concernant des produits pour lesquels il est essentiel de savoir comment s’en servir correctement… Cette course au profit effrénée me fait parfois penser à une enseignante de sciences humaines que j’ai eu la chance de pouvoir écouter durant ma scolarité postobligatoire à Genève et qui citait Lénine au sujet des capitalistes : « Ils nous fourniront la corde pour les pendre ». Evidemment, l’histoire ne lui a pas entièrement donné raison : nos usines ont été délocalisées en Chine et non pas en Russie ; de plus, aucun de ces deux pays n’est plus vraiment communiste, mais il n’empêche que Lénine avait quand même mis le doigt sur une faille qui risque bien de nous mener à notre perte : notre cupidité.
Le texte sur le dos de la notice d’emballage :
semence ensemble
Couler soigneusement toutes les pièces et placer le scion dans la coque grille Maintenant, vous saupoudrez d’un peu de graines à germer grille. Assurez-vous que la semence n’est pas trop serré, il a besoin d’une chambre à gonfler. Maintenant, vous versez délicatement assez d’eau dans la tasse, de sorte que la grille de scion facilement «flotter». La graine peut désormais gonfler un jour. Une fois que vous changez l’eau tous les jours. Après quelques jours, vous pouvez récolter vos choux de cresson.
As I was looking up information on the topic of luxury marketing, I happened to stumble across an article published today in the New York Times about changes in the humanities in US universities. Ranked only fourth in the side box ‘most popular’ somewhere mid-screen on the right of the page I had read on new branding and marketing techniques in the Swiss watch industry, I found ‘College, Poetry and Purpose’ sufficiently attractive a title to prompt me to move my mouse, click on the link and then read this other article in full.
After having written about a ‘transformative educational experience’ in a previous column, the author, Frank Bruni, felt compelled to go and visit many, many years later the teacher responsible for this very highlight of his college days, which, unsurprisingly, had to do with Shakespeare:
And I remembered that smile from 30 years earlier, when she would expound on Othello’s corrosive jealousy, present Lady Macbeth as the dark ambassador of guilt’s insidious stamina and show those of us in her class that with careful examination and unhurried reflection, we could find in Shakespeare just about all of human life and human wisdom: every warning we needed to hear, every joy we needed to cultivate.
The article then proceeds to describe his former teacher’s feelings about the changes she sees as having happened since then in terms of the curriculum (which has become less text-centred and more politicised, less canonical and thus inclusive of non-literary genres), the students (be it their expectations, values, sense of self-entitlement, etc.) or the institution itself.
Complaints directed against the younger generation seem to have been made as far back as the Ancient Greek philosophers (Hesiod, Aristotle, Socrates), so the university teacher and Frank Bruni are in good company and I do not think that I can add much. However, I must admit that the following comment from the author of this article drew a smile of acquiescence from me as I really find this habit that some younger people have of almost peppering one out of every three sentences with a ‘like’ extremely annoying:
Yesterday, I came across an interesting explanation for the name of the city where I live. According to a book I borrowed from the main municipal library, the name of Lausanne is derived from two Celtic words, Lon, a word associated with the Celtic god Lug, and Sonna, the sun. Unfortunately, the author of Hauts lieux d’énergie en Suisse, Adolphe Landspurg, provides no bibliographic references to back his assertion. This left me pondering the validity of the claim. As I own several books on Lausanne*, I went to the living room and I picked up two books from the shelf I have allocated to my collection of ‘Lausannia’. I read the introductory sections, but I found nothing. Then I tried my luck with the index of one of the books, but there were no entries with the words ‘etymology’, ‘name’ or ‘toponym’. As I did not feel like doing the same exercise again with my other books (I can be a little impatient at times), I decided to resort to search engines.
Entry on Lausanne in Henri Jaccard, Essai de toponymie: origine des noms de lieux habités et des lieux dits de la Suisse romande
This yielded some interesting stuff. In a book on the cathedral of Lausanne (Merveilleuse Notre-Dame de Lausanne: cathédrale bourguignonne**), one author claims that the Latin name of Lousanna derives from Lou, Leu, the Celtic words for raven, a bird associated with Lug, a solar divinity. A book on the toponyms of French-speaking Switzerland published over a century ago (Henri Jaccard, Essai de toponymie: origine des noms de lieux habités et des lieux dits de la Suisse romande) does not include this derivation in this author’s review of the various possible origins for the name of our city. Nevertheless, he mentions a hypothesis that has struck the right chord with me, namely that the name could come from Laus, an alternative name for the river Flon.
Waterfall near the forest of Sauvabelin, 8 February 2015
I simply find this explanation highly attractive because I love the waterfalls that can be found along the river Flon. Moreover, the nicest stretch of the walk that runs along this river lies roughly on the bottom part (on the east, that is) of Sauvabelin, itself a mixture of Latin (sylva, forest) and Celtic (Belen or Belena) words. And to me what is even more interesting is the fact that the latter are the masculine and feminine forms that the Celts used to describe the deity they associated with the light (it owes something to the Greek god Apollo, unlike Lug). From the windows of our flat, there seems to be a perpendicular line that runs from the river Laus (to use its alternative name) to the cathedral, which the author who associates Lausanne with the raven claims that it was a place of worship for the Celts (the early Christians often built churches on former places of worship so as to assimilate the remnants of paganism into the new and victorious religion: Christianity).
I guess that the next time I find myself in that part of town I’ll have to keep my eyes open for any representations of ravens among the allegorical figures that adorn the west entrance to the cathedral in the light of the author’s conclusion: ‘So Sonna (the sun) associated with Loti reinforces the sacred meaning of this place: Lousonna, raven of the sun, raven of the light, the sign that Lug shines here.’ 😉
* because when I moved here in 2001 I felt that I had to learn a little more about the place, — also because I contemplated the idea of writing about my new home on the web, thus replicating what I had done for my hometown –, so I acquired a small collection of books on the capital of Vaud, on the canton itself as well as on other places within what is also know as le Pays de Vaud.
** various texts collected by Paul Chaudet; this collection of texts on the cathedral is available on a pay-per-view basis on the book section of a famous search engine based in California; of course, I did not pay (why should I when the book is available at no cost in one of the Lausanne libraries?): I simply looked at the tiny excerpts (‘snippets’ in search engine parlance) available for free.
PLEASE NOTE THAT I EXPERIENCED A GENUINE EPIPHANY EARLY SEPTEMBER LAST YEAR WHEN I ATTENDED A LITERARY CONFERENCE. AS A RESULT OF THIS AND OF SUBSEQUENT EVENTS OF A GEOPOLITICAL NATURE, I AM NOW FULLY AWARE OF THE DARK FORCES AT PLAY THROUGHOUT THE WORLD, FORCES WHICH ARE BENT UPON STIRRING UP HATRED BETWEEN THE RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES. ALTHOUGH I AM ASHAMED THAT I FELL PREY TO THESE VERY FORCES, AND I AM THUS ASHAMED BY THE SAME TOKEN OF THIS VERY ENTRY, I HAVE DECIDED TO LEAVE IT ONLINE JUST SO AS TO ILLUSTRATE THAT ENLIGHTNMENT IS POSSIBLE WHEN ONE REALISES THE EXTENT TO WHICH ONE IS BEING MANIPULATED (THROUGH THE MASS MEDIA MAINLY) ON A DAILY BASIS. THE ONLY CHANGES I MADE TO THE TEXT ARE AS FOLLOWS: INSERTION OF ‘[sic in the text]’ AND SHIFT OF THE COMMA JUST BEFORE THIS COMMENT. DATED 4TH MARCH 2016.
The specificity of literature, the major art of a West which is nearing its demise before our eyes, is not very difficult to define, however. As much as literature, music can produce an emotion or a shift in emotion, sadness or absolute ecstasy; as much as literature, painting can generate amazement, a new look at the world. But only literature can give you this sensation of contact with another human mind, with the whole of this mind, its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with everything that moves this mind, interests it, excites it or repels it. Literature alone can allow you to get in touch with the spirit of a dead person, more directly, more fully and more deeply than would the same conversation with a friend — however profound, however lasting a friendship may be, never does one reveal oneself, in a conversation, as fully as is done in front of a blank sheet when writing to an unknown recipient. Michel Houellebecq, Soumission, Flammarion, Paris, page 13 [my translation]
On Wednesday evening, I felt I needed to read something other than a newspaper on my way back to Lausanne. As I could not find Magazine Littéraire in either of the two newsagents I went in at Cornavin railway station, I decided to try my luck at Payot after I had caught sight of the bookshop’s name on the escalator leading to the trains – after all, I had not yet set foot in the new outlet of what is now a totally independent and locally owned bookshop chain and I felt that if I had to spend money on literature I might as well give them my business (rather than have it go to a foreign group owned by some billionaire). Among the books displayed prominently on the wall just opposite the entrance, I spotted several copies of Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel, ‘Submission’, published only a fortnight earlier. I bought the novel, I read it on the train, then on the métro and finally at home. I finished it a couple of hours later.
The subject matter is simply incendiary: ‘Submission’ (or ‘Soumission’ in French) describes the life of a disillusioned and promiscuous university lecturer in French literature, François, against the backdrop of the rise to the country’s presidency of a ‘moderate Muslim’ [sic in the text], Mohammed Ben Abbes, through a Socialist-Muslim Brotherhood alliance. The country’s secular school system is Islamised and the new president quickly launches a Mare Nostrum policy. After a failed attempt to renew with his Christian roots during a brief stay at a monastery, François, in order to reintegrate university teaching and to continue to be able to enjoy young flesh, decides to convert to Islam at the very end of the novel, hence the title ‘Submission’.
Although I closed the book with a faint feeling of nausea, as the ending of ‘Submission’ somehow reminded me of George Orwell’s 1984 in that both François and Winston Smith ‘willingly’ submit to the forces of totalitarianism, I nevertheless enjoyed the way in which the plot of the novel parallels the spiritual quest of the 19th century French author Joris-Karl Huysmans, on which François wrote his doctoral thesis and to whom he constantly refers throughout ‘Submission’. More than that, and so as to steer away from any controversial issues and thus move to a less depressing topic, I simply loved the fact that literary scholarship is another important theme in the novel, even though Michel Houellebecq uses it as kind of cautionary note that there is no escaping politics, even for those who feel safe in their ivory tower…
I have used the word ‘scholarship’ rather than ‘academic life’ because of the former’s etymological connection with the Latin word ‘schola’, itself derived from the Greek term ‘skholē’. Given that Latin was the language of the Roman church, which set up the first schools in the Middle Ages (after the disappearance of their equivalents in the Roman and Greek worlds with the disintegration of the Roman empire), the Latin word ‘schola’ ended up being used to describe this institution in most European languages: ‘école’ (French), ‘Schule’ (German), ‘scuola’ (Italian), ‘escuela’ (Spanish), ‘escola’ (Portuguese), etc. Incidentally, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Houellebecq’s quasi double in ‘taedium vitae’ (weariness of life), was well versed in Latin and its literature:
[…] I prefer the language of the Vulgate* to the language of the age of August, or even to the Latin of the Decadent Period, however more intriguing I find it with its smell of cooked waterfowl and its parsley shades of venison. To me, the Church, which, after having disinfected and rejuvenated Latin, created, to deal with an order of hitherto unexpressed ideas, grandiloquent vocables and diminutives of exquisite tenderness, seems to have fashioned itself a language far superior to the dialect of Paganism[…].
Preface to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against the Grain [À rebours], which he wrote 20 years after the novel was first published [my translation; the text in French is available here.]
The cult of instant gratification so prevalent in our times, whether it is achieved through watching televised sport, through a voyeuristic prying into flesh-flashing celebrities or, in a quasi Pavlovian fashion, as a result of the notification that somebody has liked one of our comments or pictures on social media, certainly seems at odd with the calm and patience one would associate with the reading of literature or the pursuit of literary scholarship.
As is the compiling of dictionaries of medieval Latin, a language which had been at the heart of the Christian West for so many centuries, by a group of British enthusiasts over nearly a century:
On this point, I would certainly agree with Mr Houellebecq that the West is nearing its demise, being so infatuated with the present, being so oblivious of its own cultural traditions and achievements.
* revised version of the Bible produced by St Jerome based on the original texts as well as on his revisions of the texts translated into Latin from Greek; more here.
Links to (mostly positive) reviews of Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission:
Caveat [Latin, 3rd person sing. pres. subjunct. of caverebeware.]
As explained in my post ‘To submit or not to submit, that is the question.’, I have serious doubts about the purpose of most of the terror attacks which were perpetrated in the West and which received such considerable emotional coverage from our media. I suppose that one day I shall write a little more about this topic. For the time being however, let me leave you with this quote from a French author (Guy Debord) who, in 1988 (in his Comments for the Italian edition of his The Society of the Spectacle, section IX), wrote the following incredibly prescient lines:
This democracy, so perfect, fabricates its own inconceivable enemy, terrorism. It wants, actually, to be judged by its enemies rather than by its results. The history of terrorism is written by the State and it is thus instructive. The spectating populations must certainly never know everything about terrorism, but they must always know enough to convince them that, compared with terrorism, everything else seems rather acceptable, in any case more rational and democratic.
[…]
We should expect, as a logical possibility, that the State’s security services intend to use all the advantages they find on the terrain of the spectacle, which has exactly been organised with that in mind for some time; on the contrary, it is the difficulty of glimpsing this which is astonishing, and does not ring true.
I do not know the name of the translator; I found the translation on the Internet; I have left it mostly as is.
The first title I had in mind for this entry was ‘Words matter’, but I decided to go for a title with the phrase ‘of Latin origin’ in it after having realised that the word which I had found so objectionable of late had been in fact coined by the Romans. This word is the noun ‘militant’ and it is a word we see in the headlines far too frequently — unfortunately this has been the case for a number of years now.
I feel very unhappy whenever I see the noun ‘militant’ being used in connection with an act of extreme violence that involves many deaths and is usually perpetrated against non-combatants. In such cases, I feel that to use the noun (or adjective) ‘militant’ is almost an insult to the memories of those who have been murdered (i.e. through premeditated killing).
‘Terrorist’ seems to have fallen out of favour because this noun has come to be associated through some perverted logic with some kind of moral judgment on the part of the writer (or the speaker) who uses this word – hence the terrible cliché ‘One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’. However, ‘terrorist’ simply means ‘A person who uses violent and intimidating methods in the pursuit of political aims.’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2007). Interestingly, the word first served to describe the supporters of the Jacobin repression during the French Revolution between June 1793 and July 1794, a period known as ‘La Terreur’).
‘Militant’, just like the adjective ‘military’ and the noun ‘militia’, comes from the Latin word ‘miles’, the generic term used by the Romans to describe a warrior (as opposed to ‘soldier’, which implies remuneration – as derived from the French word ‘soldat’ 1475, itself from the Italian word ‘soldato’ circa 14th century) which one author claims to be derived from ‘mile-goer’ (‘millia passuum euntes’, Roland Kent, 1910).
Etymologically, ‘militant’ therefore means ‘a person engaged in warfare’. Its second meaning (i.e. to ‘advocate or employ militant action in pursuit of a political or social end’ – Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 2007) appears much later, i.e. circa 17th century with the sense of ‘to contend’ and 1794 (during the French Revolution!), for the French language, in the sense of ‘militant action’ (i.e. social advocacy, political activism, etc).
Although I realised that the original meaning of ‘militant’ was related to warfare when I did my shopping this evening (‘millia passuum’?), I still object to its being used to describe indiscriminate mass killings of civilians carried out through extreme violence for the furthering of whatever political objectives because this is not in keeping with its original meaning, namely to describe war (i.e. the killing of combatants normally). If journalists or editors feel obliged to pander to political correctness, I suggest they use ‘fighter’ (without ‘freedom’, of course). However, I still feel that ‘terrorist’ is the only noun which can describe the extreme act of barbarous violence that was perpetrated today against the most innocent of all: children.
I am extremely sad for the parents and the relatives of those killed. I also know that the survivors, even if they were not wounded, will bear the psychological scars of this extreme tragedy of horror for years to come (for my part, I can still remember very vividly the face of a former colleague who had survived the Mumbai terrorist attacks when I saw her the following Monday). May the parents, the relatives and the survivors find the strength to go through this most terrible and horrific tragedy.
On 30 October 2014, I heard my Singaporean wife utter a word of ‘franglais’ for the first time and this is the reason why I feel compelled to record the date — probably not for posterity, but rather for our own list of special dates. ‘Franglais’ is the combination of French and English (French + anglais) words, a linguistic mangling which I am familiar with as my mother is English and my sister, brother and myself were brought up in a French-speaking region (‘Suisse romande’), so that we would sometimes lapse into such linguistic faux paswhen our brains were tired and we could not remember the proper word in English — although this might be more adequately described as ‘Englais’ I would suppose. 😉
So what was my wife’s first word of ‘franglais’? Well, as it is still the mushroom season (although I guess it must be drawing to a close by now), my wife’s first word of ‘franglais’ was « cueilling » (PS I have used French quotation marks to make it more French), from the French verb ‘cueillir’ (to pick, to gather) and the English gerund form — thus a bit like the (now fully accepted) ‘franglais’ word ‘parking’ (car park).
Did I frown when I heard my wife use this word of ‘franglais’? No, not at all. On the contrary, I was rather quite pleased. Not only because it reminded me of the times when we used to resort to such linguistic combinations at home in our Italian-English household, but also because my wife is in good company.
No, I was not referring to Miles Kington’s famous series ‘Let’s Parler Franglais’, but to the Bard himself. To illustrate to my wife the linguistic licence she had taken, I went to my bookcase and pulled out a copy of Shakespeare’s Henry V — she was quite lucky because most of the works of literature I own are in the cellar (shame on me!)…
In Henry V, Shakespeare’s jingoistic play about an important episode of the Hundred Years’ War which pitted the kingdoms of France and England against each other for over a hundred years, there are unsurprisingly several instances of ‘franglais’. However, to make my point more forcefully, I opted for one of the more salacious parts (‘lavatory’ Shakespeare as one my lecturers, George Steiner, would have described it in his lectures on Shakespeare at Geneva University), i.e. in Act III, scene four, where Catherine de Valois (or Kate, to use her English name), the daughter of the French king, asks her gentlewoman to give her some basic instruction in the French tongue:
KATHERINE Le foot et le count! O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames de honneur d’user. Je ne voudrais prononcer ces mots devant les seigneurs de France pour tout le monde. Foh! Le foot et le count! Néanmoins, je réciterai une autre fois ma leçon ensemble: d’hand, de fingre, de nailès, d’arm, d’elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, le count.
Act III, scene four as played by Emma Thompson in Kenneth Branagh’s (acclaimed) cinematographic adaptation (1989) of Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Okay, okay, technically, this is a case of salacious double entendre and I would be inclined to say ‘please pardon my French’, as they say in England, but I think it will have illustrated the richness and the long history of ‘franglais’…