Words we don't quite get

[Peter]

I've never been sure what relevance "Morning has broken like the first morning, blackbird has spoken like the first bird" has to anything. (I'm not all that keen on the tune either, but as the thread title is "Words we don't quite get" perhaps that's off-topic!)

[Nick Baty]

Do you remember, "Let us talents and tongues employ..."?
Last line was: "Spread the word around. Loaves abound".
Which always made me think a half a dozen crusty cobs bouncing down the centre aisle.

[johnquinn39]

There is a delightful hymn called 'My God I love thee not' which can be found in 'The Catholic hymn book' - no.55

[Hare]

There is a delightful hymn called 'My God I love thee not' which can be found in 'The Catholic hymn book' - no.55

I haven't got a copy of that book, but is it

My God, I love thee not because
I hope for heaven thereby;
Nor yet that those who love thee not
Are lost eternally

If so, that makes perfect sense.

[Gwyn]

There's one in Hymns Ancient & Modern:

There is a book, who runs may read,

Eh?

[Lakelark]

"My God, I love thee" etc. is a version by Fr Caswall of the Oratory of "O Deus, ego amo te". The latter, the author of which is not known, is said to be a Latin version of a Spanish sonnet which may have been written by St Francis Xavier, who also possibly translated his own Spanish into Latin. What fun we had as boys singing the English version, with discreetly placed breaths in the wrong places!

While I am in schoolmaster mode, this evening's English homework is to parse the first line of an English version of a Latin hymn, which comes out as "The hymn for conquering martyrs raise." I have so far managed to parse this line in three different ways, and would be delighted to hear of a fourth, or a fifth . . .

[contrabordun]

I get at least 6, because you can interpret it as
(a) an instruction to the congregation (oi you lot! raise this hymn)
(b) an instruction to the martyrs (martyrs! raise the hymn)
(c) a general statement about what the martyrs do (they raise the hymn)

permuted with
(i) the sense that the hymn is the direct cause of the conquering - to raise the hymn is to conquer
(ii) the sense that the hymn is associated with conquering - on the days when we happen to be conquering, we sing this hymn (on other days, we might sing the approprate hymn for car washing)

[mcb]

Hmm. Not sure whether (i) and (ii) are different parses or just different meanings. But you could distinguish readings where martyrs is the subject of conquering (conquering martyrs are not to be trifled with) from those where it's the object (conquering martyrs is a risky business).

I'm sure there's plenty more.

[mcb]

Changed my mind - you were right, cb. There's a structural difference between (i) and (ii); like closing hymn vs. sprinkling song, one is a sequence of adjective plus noun, the other is a compound noun.

(Phew. Glad we've cleared that one up.)

[organist]

How about "O give me Samuel's ear" followed in the next verse by give me Samuel's heart?

[contrabordun]

Changed my mind - you were right, cb

In which case I can now admit that I didn't know that different parsings and different meanings were not the same thing

[mcb]

Yeah, well actually I think my last comment was nonsense anyway. Forgot what the original line we were talking about was - my comment only makes sense if it was conquering hymns, and it wasn't, it's hymns for conquering, which I think only has one parse (= grammatical structure). (If you ignore the ones where conquering forms a phrase with martyrs, that is. We've dealt with those already!)

So, as you were! If you can find two meanings in hymns for conquering, they're parallel to ingredients for baking a cake and first prize for baking a cake, and in those two phrases for baking a cake has the same grammatical structure; it's just that the expression for X-ing has two meanings, viz. (something like) in order to X and (something like) as a response to your having X-ed.

(...I think. I'm a phonetician, so I know nothing about grammar.)

[Mithras]

How about "O give me Samuel's ear" followed in the next verse by give me Samuel's heart?

Yes, our choir sang Sullivan's setting of that a few months ago when it fitted in with the reading. I remember remarking during reheasal that by the time we got the the end there wasn't much of Samuel left.

M

[Lakelark]

I say, chaps, especially mcb and contrabordun, - or possibly chapesses, you never know - I'm really rather enjoying this. To be a little more serious, parsing and interpretation are different, but the latter depends on the former, and the only purpose of parsing is to arrive at the meaning. So if the two get a bit mixed up in the process, I would say no harm was done: in fact, the opposite.

The Latin text of this (now infamous) line indicates that "raise" is intended to be imperative; that "conquering" is an adjective qualifying "martyrs", and that "for" means "in praise of". The problems are: (1) that "raise" could be indicative; (2)that "conquering" could be the equivalent of the Latin gerund, instead of the Latin participle; (3) that "for" could introduce a phrase of purpose; (4) that "for" could be the equivalent of the Latin "pro", and would mean "in favour of"; (5) that "pro" could mean "on behalf of". Someone other than me will have to do the maths, to produce the total number of possible meanings: I am a linguist, not a mathematician. What frightens me is that a process of this kind needs to be carried out in all translation work, and I do wonder sometimes whether the English versions that we have (and shall have) have been produced as the result of similar rigour.

As a tail-piece, how about "His watch the little Levite kept"?

[contrabordun]

Unfortunately, it's actually "hymn", not "hymns", else we'd have another possibility - that the hymns themselves were doing the raising.

Lakelark - there's a clue in my signature:P