Tonight on the telly

[eeyoresmum]

At 22:00 on BBC4 the movie THREADS will be shown again.

I vaguely remember watching it, a long time ago.
Very unpleasant prospect.

Have any of you lot seen it? What are your memories?

[tetsabb]

I don't remember seeing it back in '84, but we watched it last night. Utterly superb, especially considering it was done on a low budget, and shot in 17 days.
We had earlier watched a programme by the late Michael Mosley on Porton Down, and then one on Sellafield by Jim al-Khalili. So I went to bed in a great frame of mind!

[jenny]

We really don't have a 'tonight on the telly' date in our lives now, except possibly Sunday evening when we tend to watch PBS (which we can watch live because I have the Passport app because I send them money). Other than that, everything we watch is on streaming.

[jenny]

suze - we actually watched PBS live last night and saw a programme called Innu that I thought might interest you, though it is the Innu Nation in Labrador rather than the group whose language you studied. However, there were quite a few sections where they were speaking their own language and I thought if you could find it online somewhere you might be interested in seeing how the languages compare. It was an interesting documentary on the whole anyway - more Woodsman's thing than mine but it kept my interest anyway.

[suze]

The language spoken by the Innu* is called Innu-Aimun.  It's rather similar to Nēhiyawēwin (Cree), which is the language for which the Canadian Syllabics were devised by a bloke from Hull.  Relatively unusually for an indigenous language of Canada, the speakers of Innu-Aimun don't use the Syllabics and favour the Roman alphabet.

The Innu live in Labrador and there are some Inuit in Labrador as well, but in fact their languages are not related.  There are a handful of loanwords each way, and there is a fanciful - but not widely believed - theory that Innu-Aimun is related to Finnish.

Those who ever saw Due South may have heard some Innu-Aimun, because it's the language in which Akua Tuta is sung.

I'd watch that documentary anyway - I'll watch pretty much anything about indigenous people of Canada - so I shall try to find it.

* Formerly Montagnais, but that is a French word and is by now deprecated.  The people should really be collectively known by the plural form Innut, but they have adopted a convention of not using this form because it's too easy to confuse with Inuit.

[celebaelin]

I love hearing this stuff from you suze but you still (still?) aren't telling me where the verbs are in Tolkienian elvish!  I know I've asked before (it's been a little under 20 years since I last asked IIRC) but maybe you have an insight at this point?  Personally I haven't got the remotest capacity to guess.

I appreciate that this may be troublesome in that it's a madey-uppey context but surely there are clues even though the glossary at the tail end of The Silmarillion contains no doing words?

Callad ammen i reniar

O light to us that wander there

lyricstranslate.com/en/passing-elves-passing-elves.html

That we aren't certain (AFAIK) from word of mouth/published material what any of those words mean may of course be problematic.

ammen is believed online to be 'us' and renia- a root of 'stray or wander' leaving callad as yet another bloomin' elven word for light/shine/star!

www.elfdict.com/w/reniar?include_old=1

[suze]

As I understand it, no one knows a great deal about Elvish verbs because Professor Tolkien never chose to tell us.

"Published" literature in both Quenya and Sindarin is skewed towards poetry, which doesn't help.  It is possible to write poetry that doesn't use all that many doing words - the poem to which you link is an example - and in poetry you're "allowed" to break the "rules" about word order.  So far as anyone knows, default Elvish word order is Subject-Verb-Object, just as in English.  The cat sat on the mat, or whatever.  But in a certain kind of poetry you're allowed to render that as "Upon the mat the cat did sit", and there is a suspicion that elves too are prone to talking like Hawkwind (aka "pretentious wankage") when writing verse.

It's well known that Sindarin is based primarily on Welsh, but Tolkien himself admitted that "Sindarin verbal history is complicated" and it seems that most of the verbs are strong.  Quite apart from adding endings to indicate person and tense, the vowel in the stem often changes apparently at random when we conjugate.  Contrast with Quenya, which is based primarily on Finnish with a smidgeon of Ancient Greek and is believed to be almost entirely regular.

Another thing that doesn't help is that Sindarin doesn't use a "to be" verb very much.  The imperative form no (= let it be, more or less) is well attested, but the verb is omitted in statements like "I (am) the walrus".  Tolkien probably got that from Russian, where it isn't used mich either.

There are any number of "learned treatises" on Elvish verbs to be found on the Interwebs, all of them written by enthusiasts and almost entirely made up.  Many of them assert the existence of a future tense formed by the ending -tha, but no such tense appears anywhere in the corpus and it seems entirely likely that Tolkien didn't believe the language to have a future tense.  Finnish doesn't, and English scarcely does.  Apparently Welsh does, but in practice only in North Wales; South Wales does without it.

As far as I can tell, all that Tolkien ever actually told us in so many words is that there is a verb sila = to shine (and yes, the elves had lots of words of much that meaning), which is the first bit of Silmaril = shiny jewel.  The genitive form of Silmaril is Silmarillion, and after that your guess is as good as anyone else's!

[tetsabb]

Indeed in tge present tense Russian has no verb 'to be'. Я морж is 'I am the walrus', or, indeed, 'I am a walrus', seeing as they don't bother with articles, either.
Я буду морж is 'I will be'. Я был морж is 'I was a walrus'

[jenny]

Sila meaning to shine makes me think of Hopkins' poem The Windhover and the beautiful line about plough down sillion shine, fall and gall gold-vermilion.

[suze]

There's every chance that Tolkien was well aware of that line when he came up with the world Silmarillion.  

Hopkins died three years before Tolkien was born, so they never met.  But they were both converts to Rome, both Oxford men, both non-native Welsh speakers (despite his "Welsh-looking" name, Hopkins was a Londoner), and both had connexions with the Birmingham Oratory.  Hopkins didn't quite make the word sillion up.  It already existed in French but was archaic, and Hopkins was the first to use it in English.  Few have used it since unless consciously borrowing it from Hopkins, and consciously borrowing from Hopkins is a thing that Tolkien is perhaps more likely than most to have done.

[tetsabb]

I studied Gerard Manley Hopkins for A Level. While I could appreciate some of his technical tricks, I could not 'get' him. Perhaps it was because I was starting my conversion away from Rome, that I did not have great regard for anyone going the other way. 
Perhaps I also found him a bit Fotherington-Thomas

[jenny]

I love Hopkins' poems, much though I find his spiritual convictions unconvincing. It could well be that Tolkien had "sillion" in mind. Hopkins' poems were not published until 1928, when Robert Bridges (at that time the poet laureate and a lifelong friend of Hopkins) issued them, some years after Hopkins died. Tolkien began writing Lord of the Rings in the late 1930s so would have had every opportunity to be familiar with Hopkins' work, especially given the personal coincidences that suze points out above.

[suze]

Bridges had his anthology of Hopkins' poetry placed in the Bodleian in 1918, before it was made more widely available.  Bridges lived near Oxford after he retired from the medical profession, and his circle included Robert Graves, John Masefield, and T E Lawrence, all of who were acquainted with Tolkien.  Tolkien had probably met them in the pub; he liked going to the pub.  Indeed, it is claimed in one of the Inspector Morse novels that a young E Morse had himself once encountered Professor Tolkien in the pub.

Tolkien was at Oxford from 1911 to 1959, save three years in the Army and five years teaching Sir Gawain at Leeds.  So yes, he'd have had plenty of opportunity to read the poems that were being championed by a friend of friends.

Getting back to the telly, we were a day late watching yesterday's Only Connect, but TGH got a 5.  That doesn't happen to either of us very often!

[tetsabb]

Oct 15, 2024 22:30:27 GMT suze said:

Getting back to the telly, we were a day late watching yesterday's Only Connect, but TGH got a 5.  That doesn't happen to either of us very often!

Oooh! Impressed! How did he manage that?

[suze]

He knows only one thing about lacrosse, and it is the relevant thing!

In theory I knew that thing about lacrosse as well - it came up on the old forums a couple of times - but it didn't come to me at the appropriate second and so I can claim no credit.

[Bondee]

I think I've only ever scored a 5 once too. It was the music round, and the first clue was Iron Maiden by Iron Maiden, which, being from the album Iron Maiden, led me to guess that the connection was "self-titled songs from self-titled albums".

[tetsabb]

HIGNFY should be good tonight-- chaired by by Prof Hannah Fry, with guests Carol Vorderman and Phil Wang

Then, an hour later, Graham Norton has among his guests Bruce Springsteen and Bill Bailey. I will be intrigued to see Mr S's reaction to Mr B!

[efros]

Graham Norton seems extremely popular among people who don't go on chat shows, he gets people on that show who just don't do any others on the chat show circuit. I think it's because it's one of the few where they have as much fun as the audience and it isn't the publicity chore that others seem to be.

[jenny]

Oh I'd love to see Bill Bailey and Broooce on the same show. I suspect they'd actually get along very well.

[tetsabb]

Oct 18, 2024 15:50:03 GMT jenny said:

Oh I'd love to see Bill Bailey and Broooce on the same show. I suspect they'd actually get along very well.

They certainly bonded over guitars. A bit was shown of Mr Springsteen's new documentary. It featured him coming on stage clutching his 50-year old Fender Telecaster, possibly even the one from the cover of Born to Run.  Mr Bailey got quite excited over it. Mr S related how his mother bought him his first guitar in the early 60s-- $35, which would have been a lot of money in those days. Mr Norton remarked that Bruce's mum must have reckoned the investment had paid off.

To close the show, St Vincent played a song. I was rather hoping that someone would ask her if she will still be playing her guitar in 50 years.

[tetsabb]

New series of QI-XL tonight Beeb 2 2, 2200!

[crissdee]

Wanted to watch Mr Springsteen on the iPlayer earlier, but it wants me to register. Will my lack of a TV licence be a hindrance if I try?

[tetsabb]

Bugger. It was on at 2100. We missed it.
Piffle

[suze]

It will be a hindrance insofar as you will be committing a criminal offence if you do it.  Accordingly, the management of these forums would advise you not to do it.

But the system won't actually prevent you doing it.  It will ask you a question to which you'd have to give an untrue answer, but once you've given that untrue answer it will let you in.  That may have possible consequences down the line.

[crissdee]

I suspected as much. Right now, the last thing I need is extra hassle, especially financial, from any even vaguely official body, so I will have to give it a miss.

[jenny]

Somebody will undoubtedly upload it to YouTube, and then it will be perfectly legal for you to watch it.

[Bondee]

I'm glad suze got there first. Last time I answered a question about the legality of watching the iPlayer without a TV license, GB threatened to smite me/the forum unless I apologised for encouraging him to break the law.

[suze]

Over the course of the day we have watched the first three episodes of the new season of Masterchef Colon The Professionals, since we were away when they were actually on.

One of my favourite annoyances with the BBC was well to the fore in the third of them.  The contestants were asked to cook something using a specified ingredient, and the specified ingredient on this occasion was black Irish beer.  This being the BBC we can't call it Guinness so we shall call it stout.  It's a bit silly, but that is longstanding BBC policy so we'll go with it.  But while we are falling ourselves not to use the G word, we are still allowed to see the bottles that it comes in.  Now OK, we are not actually shown the G word on the labels, but we are shown the harp!  

When a contestant a couple of years back used Newcastle Brown Ale in his dish, they masked the blue star on the bottle.  Why is the Broon blue star (a registered trade mark of Heineken NV) unacceptable advertising, but the Guinness harp (a registered trademark of Diageo plc) is fine?

[tetsabb]

Now, that is odd, because, back in the 70s, the Beeb was allowed to mention 3 trade names -Rolls Royce, , the Times, and he Irish stout to which suze refers. 'Sellotape', famously, was referred to on Blue Peter as 'sticky backed plastic '.
The great Dave Allen remarked that he had no jokes that began "I was sitting in my Rolls Royce, drinking Guinness, and reading the Times, when..."

[suze]

TGH is not having this!  He asserts that "sticky backed plastic" was the BBC name for Fablon.  They don't make Fablon any more, but he thinks it was possibly made by what was then ICI.

Sellotape was made by DRG Limited in Welwyn Garden City, and on the BBC it was called "sticky tape".  "Sticky backed plastic" would be a silly thing to call Sellotape, because Sellotape is obviously sticky fronted plastic.