Nerd!Gasm

So, I'm obsessed with the Old English verb thyncan (yes, it has a thorn or an eth, but i'm too tired to type them). Happily for me, when I have to prepare comments on three aspects of vocabulary in Sir Gawain, i found its Middle English equivalent, and i went a bit nuts. My commentary on the other two bits of vocab won't be nearly this long, I swear.

THINKEN (v.1)

The verb thinken in Middle English in fact consists of two separate verbs with a similar range of spellings and- to the modern reader- similar semantic fields, which nevertheless remain distinct according to the grammatical constructions in which they are used.

• The first (v.1, according to the Middle English dictionary) appears on line 49:
With lordez and ladies, as leuest him Þoȝt. (With lords and ladies, as seemed dearest to him)

• The second thinken, which also appears in our text- is in fact in the same glossary entry- is the ancestor of our modern verb to think, and descends from the Old English Þencan, to think, to exercise cognitive faculty. Semantically and gramattically it is closer to the Middle English/ early modern ‘to ween’ than to its homophone thinken.

• The first thinken, as it appears in line 49, should be thought of in terms of the early modern methinks.
The important thing to note is the difference in the case of the pronoun. Dative case pronouns (me, you, him- these are also the accusative case pronouns in modern english, but OE has a distinction in the third person, not sure about ME) are used to express an indirect object. The thinker does not initiate the cognitive process- is not the subject- but is the recipient of a fully formed impression.

• An impersonal verb has no subject, nothing seeming. The Middle English Dictionary lists two personal constructions of thinken (v. 1): ‘to present the appearance of, to seem to be’; or ‘to seem proper, to seem good’. These two meanings occur in Old English as well, but they do not survive in the early modern methinks. The example here in line 49 is a personal construction; the lords and ladies are seeming dearest to Arthur.

• The Middle English Dictionary lists a further six impersonal uses of thinken, variations on ‘it seems (to me) that’, ‘as it seemed to him’, and so forth. An interesting use of thinken in both Old and Middle English is to present something which ‘seemed to him’ in a dream or vision- a phrase which would now present a sense of unreality, but I think conveys something more like passivity, lack of concious control, in the Old and Middle English. You can also find methinks associated with this sort of context in Shakespeare- there’s a nice big batch of methinkses used as the dreamers in Midsummer Nights regain their wits and marvel at their experiences.

Finally, coming back to our line 49 here, lordez and ladies, as leuest him þoȝt. It tells us about Arthur’s mind- his affection for the lords and ladies- and, rather than expressing the sort of doubt that would go with ‘to seem’ in modern english (well, they seemed lovely to him at the time…), I think it constructs Arthur’s attatchment to these lords and ladies as almost instinctive, a response bypassing cognition.

As another note- I can’t seem to see much in the way of personal verbs of cognition in this first 250 words. Lots of seeing and appearing, little thinking. Does this mean something? I don’t know…

(no subject)

This song is captivating:

There's an interesting discussion at slacktivist over whether or not it constitutes a prayer.