Language Stuff
| I really dig language stuff, in case you hadn't guessed. So here are a few recent pop-ups. 1. Dementors: I was just working on some article or another, rewriting some sentence or other with the word "demonstrate" and few synapses went off cause it sounds like "dementors" but the "de" functions very differently. To demonstrate something is to show how it works etc which is congruous with the original meaning of "monstr-" verb in Larin, so the the "De" is positive there. Whereas in "dementor" it is negative, like DE-boning a fish. Mens/Mentis is the word for mind, so a de-mentor is one who rips out your mind, your memory, your soul. 2. Avada Kedavra: I was recently trying to get back in the habit of brushing up on Hebrew and Greek and so was perusing the glossary I photocopied out of my first year Hebrew Grammar book ... one of the first words is the verb - "Avad" which means to die. Hebrew has a number of stems with different functions, one of which is the Hiphil stem which translates as causative - so in the Hiphil stem AVAD means to kill (to cause to die). Now, I don't suspect Rowling is proficient in Hebrew, and may have no familiarity with it at all ... I'm guessing it's mainly Greek and Latin for her because those are the one studied in Classics programs. But there are some words which "inherit" between languages ... obviously there are a lot that pass from Greek to Latin and from Latin to the Romance languages (French especially) ... but there are also a few that have been passed down from Hebrew, even all the way to English (ie thus passing through both Greek and Latin) ... the most common is the word "Amen," which in Hebrew would be pronounced "Amein." But there is at least one other that I know of, which is the word "cinnamon." So I'm wondering if this word for dying and killing made it down into some folk-lore story in Greek or Latin or Slav or something like that and Rowling picked it up there ... would be kind of cool |
Comments on "Language Stuff"
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jkr2 said ... (April 26, 2006 4:34 AM)
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Anonymous said ... (April 26, 2006 8:16 PM)
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Merlin said ... (April 26, 2006 8:47 PM)
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Merlin said ... (April 26, 2006 8:50 PM)
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Pauli said ... (April 26, 2006 9:38 PM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 12:55 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 12:57 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 1:03 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 1:07 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 1:11 AM)
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Pauli said ... (April 27, 2006 8:31 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 9:43 AM)
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Pauli said ... (April 27, 2006 9:49 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 27, 2006 12:42 PM)
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jkr2 said ... (April 28, 2006 8:24 AM)
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Merlin said ... (April 28, 2006 9:12 AM)
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post a commenti remember the first time i read 'avada kedavra' and got such a kick out of it.
cadava, cadabra all that... really cool and clever. so that's interesting about the first bit.
And I always thought it was just a variant of the Muggle "Abra-cadabra", where we're pretending wse can do magic!
Mankie
Well,
most terms even of that sort have something behind them ... sometimes fairly derogatory, sometimes not as much so.
I don't know what in particular is behind the common "abra cadabra" but I think Rowling's adaptation has something to do with something further back, otherwise it is a fairly odd thing for her to reserve this sound alike for the worst of the unforgivables, it would seem to be a pretty dark comment on magic in general (which I don;t think is what she is doing one way or the other, making either a positve or negative comment on "magical practice" - I think that for her magic is a symbol of the power of imagination).
but it seems pretty likely to me that while she is definitely playing on the sound alike with the common phrase she also has some literary tradition back there behind it.
An example of there usually being something back there behind phrases that have become commonplace and not many knowing their origin is the other magical phrase, "hocus pocus," which was originally coined as a "smoke and mirrors/superstition magic" phrase as a pretty derogatory slam on Catholic belief concerning the Mass and the Eucharist. It was meant to satirically parody the central words in the Latin Mass, the words of Consecration, "Hoc Est Meus Corpus," "This is My Body"
I always did think too that turning the sound alike in the second half of it into the word for a dead body, cadaver, was pretty witty
I'd heard the term "Abaracadabara" was a parody of the Hebrew for Father-Son-Spirit, kind of all the words run together.
The words "Avada Kedavra" are definitely the work of a genius because I think they include all this stuff and more, plus they have such a sinister sound to them
Could be a lot of different stuff ... I suspect none of it comes straight down from Hebrew but is muted through a number of Near Eastern Semitic Channels into Europe (Modern Arabic is actually, in a lot of cases, a lot better guide in studying ancient Hebrew than say is Aramaic, the Semitic language spoken at the time of Christ ... Arabic development has simply been much more conservative than Aramic was ... all 3 languages, Ancient Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, are believed to be descended from one parent language they refer to as "Proto-Hebrew" but of which we have no extant evidence)
I don't see the Hebrew or Arabic word for son in there ("ben" in Hebrew and "bin" in Arabic - as in Bin Laden), but it may be the Aramaic, which I believe is "bar" (as in Simon Peter being Simon Bar-Jonah, or son of Jonah ... I think I brough that up before with )
Ab/v is Hebrew for father (the b and the v are the same letter, the pronunciation depends on whether the letter beit has a dagesh in it)
The one I don't see in it is "spirit", which is "ruach" ... but interestingly I do see the word for "word" ... dabar/davar ... if I had to guess at it along Hebrew lines I would guess the "ca" is some form of the prefixable preposition that means "like or as" and the word dabar(a) - "like the word"
Dabar is the type of word that means a lot more than word, the Daba-Yahweh, the Word of the Lord, was a "Word" as an expression that was also almost a form of personal presence.
Interesting stuff ... I think she has some knowledge of something about the origins (I found a site comparing the bird flu in MN with the Bubonic plague in medieval Europe that listed some interesting things people thought would ward off the plague, like charms containing the word abaracadabara) and is also realy creative at adapting its sound and the broadnes of its history of meaning into, like you said, a really sinister sound and feel
Pauli's impression of how sinister the words sound is affected heavily (as is my own impression of the same) by the way Jim Dale does Voldy doing the curse ... very sinister
PS Pauli, that has to be the damned funniest picture I have seen in a long time ... brilliant (or "wicked" as the bostonians would have it)
Once again, forgot to finish a thought:
I brought up before the Aramaic word for "son" in the name Bartimeus - which I think would be "son of timidity" or "son of fear"
Mankie,
who's pretending ... I really can do magic! ... just kidding (although I'm sure you occassionally wonder if I have been using one of Fred and George's gag spell-checking Quills to write my posts lol)
but thanks for joing in :)
But seriously, Rowling seems to be heavily into names and realy enjoys making them up too.
In that interview MBR gave the link to she said taht "Quidditch" is one she made up, and I love it ... "Quid" means pretty much "what" so the name is sort of like "whats-it" - like this catch-all word for something you can't describe or thing of the name of, or the name is on the tip of your brain but you just can't nail it down and remember it (my sister, Pauli's wife, used to have one for people whose names she couldn't remember, "what's-his-guts")
It also contains the words "itch" and "ditch" ... very rich word as the name for a very rich symbol
But seriously ... and also ... I am going up to the boys' dormitory and climb into my 4-poster now LOL
Here's a page with some insight.
Re: my new picture: I had this idea for a long time but finally got around to having Lissa take it. It would have been best to do it out at the interstate, but oh well. Do I look crazy enough?
Oh, definitely crazy enough LOL
That was a good page ... except I think that Rolwlings more resembels the Chaldean than the Aramaic
But anyway, it does seem that there is a sort of actual "magic" background to the phrase, people using it on amulets to try to get rid of sickness etc. so somebody studying classics would have probably had some at least passing familiarity with the theories of origin
(somebody once was trying to convince me that Rowling is this uber-archivist of black magic etc, based in something she said in an interview about having boxes and boxes and boxes of research for writing Harry Potter ... in any event, it does seem like she has done a lot of research on things like thie phrase)
Hey, I'm really digging this Michael Quinion's site. Check out his piece on the slang uses of the word "banana". Lots of great word stuff here, humorously presented.
all I can think of is that old kids vowel changing song " I like to eat, I like to eat, I like to eat, eat apples and bananas"
But as for the picture, I think we should have one taken to put in small in the side-bar as a link to view it full size:
It would be both of us like that but sitting on the curb in front of a Panera or Strabucks or someplace with wi-fi, sitting there working on our laptops the sign would be a big one, like on a cardboard box or something, and beside us would be my Volvo with the hood up and some obvious contraption for converting power from the battery terminals to power the computers
seriously, if you wouldnt get in huge copyright legal trouble with whichever corporations name was in the pic for the wifi connecion - I bet you could sell a picture like that if you did it right lol ... great idea
just interject with a bit of something on topic. apologies guys ;-)
got a little book out of the library yesterday. it's hardly deep scholarship, but fun to blunder about in.
called 'the magical world of harry potter' by david colbert.
he gives this background to abracadabra as being from aramaic.
the phrase abhadda kedhabhra
meaning 'disappear like this word', used by witchdoctor types to make an illness disappear.
developing into abracadabra it was
a 'prescription' given, writing it eleven times on a piece of paper.
ABRACADABRA
ABRACADABR
ABRACADAB
ABRACADA
ABRACAD
ABRACA
ABRAC
ABRA
ABR
AB
A
(it looks more symmetrical in the book.)
just thought that was interesting too.
another tidbit was credited to rudolf hein who has some website.
a connection that salazar was the dictator of portugal (1932 - 1968) where jkr lived for a while. he was known for very harsh policies.
cheers.
jo
Rats! Rats! Rats!!!!
you stole my thunder I forgot I had, Jo.
I kept meaning to put that in about Antonio Salazar ... I discovered it working on this encyclopedia project I am freelance editing on - there is an article on him in it, on how he was a dictator ... and being as he came out of power in 1968 memory of him would have still been very strong when she was living there (Every time I ran across that article I thought ... gotta remember to put this in on the blog)
Well, that guy's that you listed seems to me to mount evidence for there being strong strain in the history of of abra-cadabra of the "perish/disappear like the/this word" (on the site Pauli linked to this meaning was given a Chaldean origin, which is in that same group ... one of my "school books" was a gift from my former undergad advisor and Greek teacher, his "Hebrew and Chaldean Analitical Lexicon")
I think, like Pauli said, it contains at least a little of all those meanings ... I'm just pleased with myself that I can actually say that I did discover actually discover part of one of the legit meanings
But I am also pleased to have some more confirmation on my own theories of material coming so strongly from Hebraic tradition down to the Medieval and writers like Rowling (I was originally, when I started reading Potter, going to write an essay called "Harry Potter and the Inkling's Torch" about Rowling carrying the torch of writers like Lewis and Tolkien - LEwis was very into George McDonald, who has a novel called, Lilith, named after the "first wife of Adam, before Eve" in Hebrew apocryphal lore [which I have but have not read, but Whitney over at Rialb's blog seems to be pretty knowledgable on it], which name of course Sarah McLaughlin took for her she-rock tour when she started it up :) ... all that to say that, while one still has to do one's homework to support one's theories, the evidence does seem stronger to me that these sorts of things have made it that far, down from Ancient Hebrew times)