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.[1] 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.[2] 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.[3] 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).[4] 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.[5])
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.[6] 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.[7]
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).[8] 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).[9]
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. [10]
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).[11] 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).[12] 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!”[13] 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.[14]
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.[15] 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).[16] 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.
[1] For an overview of this medieval list tradition, see
D. Thomas Benediktson, “Polemius Silvius’ ‘Voces
Varie Animacium’ and Related Documents of Animal Sounds.” Mnemosyne LIII, I (2000): 70-79; see
also D. Thomas Benediktson, “Cambridge
University Library L1 1 14, F. 46r-v: A Late Medieval Natural Scientist at
Work.” Neophilologus 86 (2002):
171-177. For an important early study, see Wilhelm Wackernagel, Voces variae animantium. Ein Beitrag zur
Naturkunde und zur Geschichte der Sprache (Basel: Bahnmaier, 1869).
[2]
Bottom of right
hand column: “Ignis crepitat” [fire crackles], “Cursus aquarum murmurat”
[running water murmurs].
[3] Although it’s more accurate and nuanced to refer to
a distinction between “human and nonhuman animals,” I will simply refer (for
the purposes of this venue) to the categories of the “animal” and the “human.”
In my usage of these terms I’m more or less trying to follow the lead of Karl
Steel, How To Make A Human (Ohio
State UP, 2011), 19-20.
[4]
It is interesting that this instance of onomatopoeia is polysemic; the “water”
radical in the character 汪 is an indication of
its use in literary contexts to refer to the sound of water (especially when
its broad and deep).
[5] Terence E. Hays, “Sound Symbolism, Onomatopoeia, and
New Guinea Frog Names.” Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology 4, 2 (1994): 153-174.
[6] Brunet, Jean-Paul. “L’Onomatopee dans la classe de
français (Otomatopoeia in the French Class).” Canadian Modern Language Review 45, 1 (October 1988): 139-145.
[7] Imai, Mutsumi, Sotaro Kita, Miho Nagumo, and
Hiroyuki Okada. “Sound symbolism facilitates early verb learning.” Cognition 109 (2008): 54-65.
[8]
Full passage: “Manega word synd, þe ne magon habban þa twegen forman hadas,
ac habbað
þonne þriddan: tinnit
swegð, pluit rinþ, tonat ðunrað, fulminat hit liht […]. Ealswa be
nytenum: canis latrat hunt byreð, lupus ululat wulf ðytt, equus hinnit hors hnaegð, bos mugit oxa hlewð, ouis balat scep bleat, sus grunnit sing runað” [There are many verbs that may not have the
first two persons but have the third one: it sounds, it rains, it thunders, it
lightens (i.e. lightning strikes) … It is the same way with animals: the dog
barks, the dog wolf howls, the horse neighs, the ox lows, the sheep bleats, the
pig grunts]. J. Zupitza, Aelfrics
Grammatik (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880), 128-129.
[9] This is a tangent, but for the voces variae animantium as a memory tool, see Carruthers, Book of
Memory, 138, 158-160.
[10] At this point let me just note that I’m well aware that there is a
rich scholastic discussion how vox is
defined, particularly along the lines of human/animal difference; see for
instance Karl’s discussion on ITM a few years ago; see for instance Karl’s book at 20 (note 69) and 49 (note 40); see also
Eco, Umberto, R. Lambertini, C. Marmo, and A. Tabarroni. “On animal language in
the medieval classification of signs.” In On
the Medieval Theory of Signs, ed. Umberto Eco and Costantino Marmo
(Philadelphia: Johns Benjamins, 1989), 1-41. At this point, though, I'm trying
to avoid scholastic taxonomies of vox articulata
and vox inarticulata etc. as I feel
that “buying into” such vocabulary too soon can constrain how think
about these medieval lists and prevent us from imagining what sort of sonic or sensory worlds such lists might
seek to inhabit.
[11] The meaning of “leden” is disputed; in the Riverside Chaucer, 3rd Edn (gen. ed.
Benson, Oxford UP, 2008) this word is glossed as “language.” The Middle English Dictionary
additionally provides a slightly broader meaning of “speech, utterance” (def.
2a) or an additional definition of birdsong or animal noise (def. 3a and 3b).
Robert Boenig and Andrew Taylor (The
Canterbury Tales, Broadview, 2008) capitalize the word “Leden” with this
explanation: “The
term “Latin” here can be taken to mean ‘foreign language,’ since in the Middle
Ages Latin was the universal second language” (232, note 2). In this literary
context, of course, this polysemic term could mean all of these things simultaneously.
[12]
The narrator states that Phebus “taught it [the crowe] speke as men teche a jay
… And countrefete the speche of every man/He koude, whan he sholde telle a
tale” (132-135).
[13]
V.J. Scattergood, The Complete Works of
John Clanvowe (Cambridge: Brewer, 1975), 84n124-135. See also Elizabeth Eva
Leach, Sung Birds: Music, Nature, and
Poetry in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell, 2007), 244; on “oci” as
the stylized song of the nightingale in medieval French culture, see 91.
[14] William Rothwell, ed. Walter de Bibbesworth: Le Tretiz (Aberystwyth: The Anglo-Norman
Hub, 2009). In the longer version I will also engage with an excellent article
by William Sayers, “Animal vocalization and human polyglossia in Walter of
Bibbesworth’s thirteenth-century domestic treatise in Anglo-Norman French and
Middle English.” Sign Systems Studies
37, 3/4 (2009): 525-541.
[15] Scott G. Bruce, Silence
and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition c. 1900-1200
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
[16] Transcribed in Bruce, footnote 43 (Cluny, no. 73): “Pro signo
libri secularis, quem aliquis paganus conposuit, premisso generali signo libri
adde, ut aurem cum digito tanga, sicut canis cum peed pruriens solute, quia nec
inmerito infidelis tali animanti conparatur” [quoting Signa Loquendi,
ed. Jarecki, 134].
