by JONATHAN HSY
ITM readers: Jeffrey posted about the "Burnable Books" blog earlier, and I wanted to bring your attention to a fun experiment unfolding there: the idea is the use social media to practice talking about our work! (Check out the writeup
on the blog and
on twitter - use the hashtag #3tweetsmax)
In the spirit of sharing, here's a half-completed essay that I've been working on (as Frankenstorm approaches...)
Sounds of nonhuman things: De voces variae animacium
St Gallen Stiftsbiblothek Codex Sang. 225 p. 132
[Embiggen or flip through the entire manuscript
HERE]
Animal
Voices:
I'm currently completing an article on medieval
animal-sound wordlists (often under the Latin title heading such as
voces variae animantium, which
translates literally as “the different voices of animate things”) for a
forthcoming essay collection. These lists took many forms, but the one thing
they have in common is (at the very least) a list of animals with the
appropriate Latin verb denoting the sound each one produces.
For
example, this page above transmits one such list (flip through the entire
manuscript
HERE –
and thanks to Chris Piuma for bringing this link to my attention!); see also a
transcription
HERE [If you don’t
read Latin, the first items on the left column read “Ovis bobat / Canis latrat
/ Lupus ululat…” which means something like “the sheep bleats / the dog barks /
the wolf howls …” etc.] These lists are interesting for
many reasons; among other things, they often break open our (modern
and Western) ideas of exactly constitutes an “animate” honhuman agent in the
first place; for instance, fire and running water among things that make sound.
Adding
to this complexity, some other Latin wordlists are accompanied by parallel
translations of the verbs into other languages. In thinking about these lists,
I want to concentrate just on the human/animal interface here, and take these
lists seriously as modes of enacting animal-to-human
translations.
These
lists, all their variety and complexity, provide exciting venues for
considering a range of medieval language-crossings – movements across species
boundaries, and movements across (human) cultures.
If you’ve ever compared animal sounds with
someone who speaks another language, it can be surprising to find out that an
animal “sounds different” in a different cultural environment – to an English
speaker, a dog goes
woof woof (or
bow wow); to a Chinese speaker this same
animal goes
汪汪 (
wang wang).
Some
of the broad similarities among animal sounds across languages could suggest a
certain pan-cultural onomatopoeia, inviting us to ask whether there is some universal
or deeply ingrained capacity for humans to mimic animal sounds in similar ways.
I would take the information on
this page with a grain of salt, but
assuming most of its entries are
more or
less correct it does nicely illustrate how even non-related languages can share
similar sonic strategies for animal-sound mimicry: cats across human cultures
utter
something remarkably like meow; snakes invariably
use some sort of sibilance (S-sounds); the rooster makes some sort of
multisyllabic sound full of voiceless
velar stops (i.e. consonant K). (Cross-linguistic research in the field of linguistic
anthropology can, at times, support possible points of connection between
animal mimicry and sonic features cutting across human languages; for instance,
the frequent occurrence of “r” and “g” sounds in frog names across two hundred
languages in New Guinea might be a case of a frog-imitating cross-linguistic
feature.
)
These medieval wordlists readily reveal the sheer
complexity of this messy zoo-anthro-linguistic soundscape we inhabit. The
phrase “lupus ululat” (the wolf howls), for instance, is a formulation that
appears in many Latin lists like these, and translating such a statement actually
poses a bit of a challenge; in this phrase, the verb actually denotes two things at once – the creature’s action,
and a mild imitation of the sound the creature produces. In “lupus
ululat,” the assonance of “u” sounds in the verb paired with the noun “lupus”
strongly reinforces the aooooo!!!
sound. But “ululat” is also employed (elsewhere in other lists) to denote the
utterance-and-sound of an owl, so one
might say the verb is something like mimetic homonym: the Latin “ululat”
splinters into two different the modern English verbs “hoots” (in the case of
an owl) or “howls” (in the case of a wolf).
I’m dwelling on this multivalent sound-action
“ululat” as an invitation to think more closely about the relationship between
animal vocalization (as ventriloquized via human language) and
bilingualism, and to more carefully
consider the role that animal sounds themselves actually play as didactic
strategy for second-language acquisition. Contemporary social science research
is quite interesting in this regard: one study on French contexts reveals that onomatopoeia
(including animal mimicry) can play a key role in language instruction.
To
draw from a different cultural environment, Japanese researchers have suggested
that
verbs that have onomatopoeic
patterns – including ones that imitate animals – may actually facilitate their mastery
by schoolchildren.
In a
medieval
context, this animal-human interface plays a role in language learning as
well. In Aelfric's Grammar, for instance, the translation of Latin animal
sounds into Old English becomes a pivot point that establishes a shared
grammatical feature across languages while also opening an opportunity for
creative translation. The text translates a sequence of third-person Latin verbs
expressing the actions of nonhuman agents (e.g. Latin
pluit becomes
rinþ,
“it rains”); in the case of animal utterances the inherent
sounds of the relevant third-person Latin verbs only haphazardly
“carry over” into their Anglo-Saxon verb equivalents. Some of the Latin/Anglo-Saxon
pairs read as follows (and, once again, translation into modern English is
admittedly tricky):
ouis balat / scep
blaet = the sheep bleats (says baaa);
bos
mugit / oxa hlewð = the cow says moo
(the ox lows);
equus hinnit / hors hnægð = the horse neighs (whinnies, goes hinhnignnnh).
What
sort of
imaginative work are these bilingual animal sounds are performing? Rather
than thinking of these pairings as instances of the
same animal vocalization
replicated divergently in Latin or in the vernacular, I’d like to entertain the
possibility that the reader (medieval or modern) is actually invited to process
these disparate linguistic units
concurrently, approximating in one’s
memory to arrive at a zoo-vocalization that can never be transcribed (in
any
human language or writing system).
Dwelling on these bilingual examples
from Aelfric's Grammar allows us to approach the voces variae animantium wordlists in new ways. Rather than thinking
of a “one way street” of translation from animal sound to human imitation, I
would like to imagine medieval people entertaining the possibility of mutual
interspecies exchange or convergence, or uttering two species-marked languages
at once. I might suggest that each of these verbal vocalizations – rather than
providing inadequate anthro-imitations of animal sounds – are best construed as
ambilingual utterances that resonate across species difference.
All of this is just to say that we need not necessarily follow the lead of Priscian
and other medieval Latin grammarians by segregating the “inarticulate” animal vox (voice, utterance) from rational
human speech that can be set to writing. It's precisely the dynamic interface between species utterances – these near
and partial modes of understanding, and the perceived gap between inarticulate
sound and proximal modes of (human) articulation – that I find most worth
pursuing.
Languages
Collide:
These animal-sound wordlists are just one avenue
for exploring the contours of inter-species communication. A literary text like
Chaucer’s
Squire’s Tale offers the
fantasy of a “queynte ryng” which (worn on the finger) allows a Tartar princess
to understand the “leden” (speech or utterance) of a “faucoun peregryn [o]f
fremde land” (peregrine falcon from a foreign land) (435, 428-429).
In
this text, though, the bird’s “leden” is fully rendered as Middle English
discourse, and we actually don’t get any hint of the
sounds of bird vocalization through the text. Other literary texts
do find ways to more pointedly explore I might call a concurrent
trans-species language processing that
entails an overt mimicry of bird sounds. In Chaucer’s
Manciple’s Tale, the god Phoebus teaches his pet bird how to speak
(or to
imitate human speech – the
text is a bit unclear about the distinction).
The
bird witnesses Phoebus’s wife having an affair with another man, and when the
bird reveals the news to Phoebus the bird’s utterance is recorded as “Cokkow,
cokkow, cukkow!” (243). This moment is a “joke” on many levels. First of all,
in Middle English, this would have registered as a near-pun with the utterance
“Cuckold! Cuckold! Cuckold!” Second, the bird conspicuously speaks
Middle English here, breaking any
fiction that this exchange is happening in ancient Greek or whatever Phoebus
would have actually spoken “back in the day” with his bird. Third, the bird could
be interpreted as simply “being a bird” at this point in narrative – i.e., the
bird is making ordinary avian squawks that
accidentally sound as if it
is speaking in Middle English. At this moment in the story, Chaucer provides an
onomatopoeic transcription of bird vocalization that
simultaneously conveys meaning in a human language.
Other literary texts find inventive means to
encode
intra-species avian
communication as well. In John Clanvowe’s
The
Boke of Cupide, a cuckoo and nightingale engage in an extended debate, and
the literary discourses employed by these two different birds are
differentially encoded
as if through two
different human vernaculars – or at least two distinct sociolinguistic
registers
within a single language (Middle English). Throughout this
text, the cuckoo asserts that his language is clear and plain, and his simple
English diction conveys this effect; the nightingale – whose sonic performance
considered much more sophisticated – utters a “nyse, queynt crie” (strange,
unfamiliar cry) that employs obscure forms of French-inflected vocabulary (133).
She (the nightingale) utters “Ocy! Ocy!” – a common way of transcribing
birdsong
in French, enacting a
longstanding literary French-language pun on the imperative form of
occrire: “Kill! Kill!”
The simple
(English) cuckoo does not understand what this (French) nightingale-vocalization
means, and he requires verbal translation (126-135). In this case, two different
types of bird vocalization awkwardly clash across two languages within a single
literary text.
Further collision of animal sounds across
languages can be enacted through
versified
animal-sound lists as well. For instance, Walter of Bibbesworth’s
Tretiz
sets out to teach the reader how to speak French; within this work, a versified
list of the sounds of animals in French (“la naturele noise des toutes manere
des bestes”) is recorded alongside marginal gloss “cribs” written out in Middle
English.
Reading across these glosses, one can discern cases when some aspect of onomatopoeia
is preserved (“louwe oule” = “wolfe yollez,” 256); in other cases consonant
clusters are slightly transmuted (“gruue groule” = “crane crekez,” 250), or the
strategies of animal mimicry are transmuted (the French “vache mugist” – with an
implicit “moo” sound in the verb – gives
way to a repetition of vowels in the English “cow lowes,” 250).
In the bilingual (bird/English) episode in
Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale, the
inter-linguistic (French/English) translation of birdsong enacted by Clanvowe’s
nightingale, and the glosses in a bilingual versified wordlist, animal
utterances serve as a disruptive and generative force that tests the very
limits of language and mobilizes expanding strategies of (human) vocalization.
Rather than conceiving human and nonhuman utterances as operating on separate
tracks – or thinking of animal vocalizations by means of analogy to
human linguistic utterances – we can entertain a collaborative processing
of languages: the human and (with, alongside) the nonhuman.
But
Wait...
In concentrating on sonic phenomena as the
privileged mode of interaction between species, it may be the case I’m “on the
wrong track” (trailing a “red herring,” or “off the scent” perhaps?). As anyone
who has pets (or interacts frequently with animals) would know, much
inter-species communication is non-verbal
and also non-sonic – facial expressions, somatic mimicry, physical contact
(aggressive or playful), biting, motion (e.g. pointing, blocking one's path),
sniffing (and emitting pheromones), leaving excrement or other internal fluids
where one should not, among other modes of interaction.
As a gesture to an inter-species world of
interaction beyond the sonic, I’ll just end by suggesting one medieval venue for
human mimicry of animals that is enacted through
somatic, nonverbal expression. In his fascinating study of the
practices and social meanings of silence in medieval monastic communities,
Scott Bruce traces the nuanced role of (deliberately minimalist) systems of
gestures; since monastic communities were obliged to take a vow of silence, a very
rudimentary form of nonverbal communication was permitted – and only in limited
contexts – as a substitute for speech.
In a
discussion of one medieval Latin record of the Cluniac sign lexicon, Bruce notes
that the acknowledged (permitted) “sign for a book written by a pagan author
involved a gesture that mimicked a dog
scratching its ear because, as the author of the sign lexicon
explained, people without faith were comparable with dogs” (64).
In
this suggestive system of codified gestures, those who are “not like us” – those
who inhabit an existence across a boundary of religious difference – are
equated with animals. While this exclusionary sentiment effectively dehumanizes
other people, this compound sign requires a humbling form of embodied mimicry:
a human must enact a silent becoming-animal gesture.
I
am still sorting out where essay is going, but in the end I hope to get us out
of the false dichotomy of meaningless, inarticulate animal sound vs. rational,
transcribable human speech. Rather than reifying species difference or even
stabilizing one cultural mode for encoding animal sounds, medieval wordlists and
literary texts encourage us to think more creatively about inhabiting that
blurry and fuzzy communicative zone where anthropocentric and zoocentric worlds
meet, shape, and transform one another.
