Here, in the introduction to his Beowulf translation, Seamus Heaney discusses the history of words and their subtle transfer of meaning. Owen Barfield expands on this sort of thing a lot in Poetic Diction. The last sentence here is magnificent.<\/p>\n
In my first year at Wueen’s University, Belfast, we were lectured on the history of the English language by Professor John Braidwood. He could not help informing us, for example, that the word “whiskey” is the same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water, and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent the River Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the stream was suddenly turned into a kind of linguistic river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some pre-political, prelapsarian, ur-philoligal Big Rock Candy Mountain – and all of this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon me.<\/p>\n
-Seamus Heaney, Beowulf, Introduction, p.xxv<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Here, in the introduction to his Beowulf translation, Seamus Heaney discusses the history of words and their subtle transfer of meaning. Owen Barfield expands on this sort of thing a lot in Poetic Diction. The last sentence here is magnificent. In my first year at Wueen’s University, Belfast, we were lectured on the history of … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “The linguistic river”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3834"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3837,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3834\/revisions\/3837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/moscowcoffeereview.com\/carpecakem\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}