I learned of the Order of the Garter in Canterbury Cathedral, when I was a kid. I think the general awesomeness of Edward (AKA: “The Black Prince”)s armor.
My dad briefly explained the odd French of the slogan, which did not make any sense to me at all, at the time. I think I was probably around 11 or 12. But it was certainly the best example of high medieval armor I had gotten a close look at. I had also, at around that time, been reading Ronald Welch’s Knight Crusader series, which left quite an impression on me, especially the episode Bowman of Crecy. That may have been the same year I first saw Seven Samurai, and that sealed the deal: I was going to learn the sword. And, as it turned out, how to make the damn things. My father, an ardent peacenick (I rode his shoulders during the student riots at Columbia) was afraid that I might become a warmonger or cannibal or something, and never really understood that the more a young person learns about war, if they are observant, is that it’s not fun for the winners or the losers or by bystanders. I am also not a fan of Von Clausewitz, who is usually quoted at this point in a blog posting, but it’s important to realize that Clausewitz was what most of those who served in the 80s military would call a “REMF” – W.T. Sherman was right that it’s awful and best gotten over with quickly, and not glorified.
I used to be honestly surprised that The Black Prince was not a hollywood mainstay, or a character of note in Shakespeare, but then I found out that he died of The Shits. No jokes about The Brown Prince, dysentery was a huge scourge of armies on the march. [There is a great story of the Battle of Balaclava in which Sir Colin Campbell, who was an old campaigner, camped the Gordons up-stream from the British units so they could drink all the Scottish effluent they wanted. Dysentery was a problem there, too!]
Anyhow, back when I was sometimes war-chief for Clan Thunderhoof in World of Warcraft, I had a battle-cry which was “What is the worst that can happen?” I’m not bragging about my poetic martial brilliance here, but it was awfully funny to see a raid go in, with everyone yelling that as they attacked the foe. In war, you grab your laughs where you find them. So it occurred to me that maybe I should ask ChatGPT to translate it for me. Of course the key to getting it right is to know it’s ancient Norman French, otherwise it’s invalid modern French. I thought that the AI might turn it into something Trump-esque:
The translation of “What is the worst that could happen” into Ancient Norman French is:
“Qu’importe le pire qui advienne.”
Breakdown of the Translation:
- “Qu’importe”:
- Qu’: This is a contraction of “que,” which can function as “what” in certain contexts.
- importe: This verb can mean “to matter” or “to be of importance.” Together, “qu’importe” conveys the sense of “what does it matter.”
- “le pire”:
- le: This is the definite article “the.”
- pire: This means “worst” in both Old French and Norman French, derived from the Latin “pejor.”
- “qui advienne”:
- qui: This is a relative pronoun meaning “that” or “which.”
- advienne: This is the subjunctive form of the verb “advenir,” meaning “to happen” or “to come to pass.” The subjunctive mood is used here to express uncertainty or possibility, which fits the context of “could happen.”
Explanation of Word Choices:
- “Qu’importe” was chosen for its concise way of expressing the question of importance or concern, a phrase that encapsulates the idea of questioning the significance of something.
- “Le pire” is a direct translation of “the worst,” keeping it simple and to the point.
- “Qui advienne” captures the uncertain nature of future events, fitting the idea of “could happen.”
This phrasing is in line with the tone of medieval Norman French, which often used concise and direct language, especially in contexts of inquiry or hypothetical situations.
Naturally, this got me to thinking more about AI and the topic of “intelligence” and what it is. Sometimes I have encountered people who say things like that “intelligence” is the ability to do contextual learning, which is true, certainly, but I think there is more to it than that. One of my old tech buddies, Gary McGraw [gem] is an AI skeptic, taking a strong position that AI chatbots are basically probabalistic parrots. My usual response it so flap my wings, gain some altitude, and to try to poop on his hair. But we have had some wonderful tipsy debates on the topic, accompanied by uninterested cats and rapt golden retrievers, and one night I hypothesized that a good benchmark of intelligence and creativity would be to be able to explain oneself. Explaining anything is a creative task, not a probabalistic one. When you ask a chatbot to explain Newton’s laws, it might re-quote part of Wikipedia at you, but explaining oneself requires recursive analysis, and an understanding of “you” in context. If creativity is one hallmark of intelligence, explaining how you achieved a certain result requires a creative form of meta-analysis and at least a soupçon of self awareness. That is why I asked ChatGPT to not merely perform a translation, but to explain its process. A Markov-chain output system can’t do that, it’ll just produce more of the most likely text based on the keywords in the input, and will not “understand” the all important “you” in that query.
But who could check the Norman French? Well, my dad was the chairman of a major university’s history department since 1066, so I called him up and read him what the AI said. His first comment was “remarkable.” Then “is this a joke?” [I have been known to play bad jokes on my dad between 1962 and 1985 when I grew up] He thought it over and said that he thought it was a remarkably good rendering. The next day I got an email from him that he had run it by a professor whose specialty is that period, who said it was pretty damned good, and that part of the problem, which the AI points out, is that nobody was writing Anglo/Norman French dictionaries and grammars at that time, so you’d get a different version depending on who you asked and how partially literate they were.
I have to say, I really liked that answer. And I think that what it came up with is pretty darned Tshirt-worthy. I know what you are thinking: ask Midjourney to design a noble logo of the battle cry. Sure, maybe I will do that as soon as my SPQR Tshirt wears out.
(courtesy of the bayeux story teller page)
I have been suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, namely the powerful urge to choke the shit out of Donald Turnip. I have been hooked to the portable, watching the US Justice System, of which we are apparently quite proud, prove itself completely ineffective against a resolute criminal if that criminal is a supposedly rich white man. Basically, he is putting to the test the question of civilization, which is that it is possible for evil-doers to bypass civilization’s attempts to do right, because they are more energetic at wrong-doing and are not delayed by silly considerations such as truth or following some rules. Such activity checkmates civilization with its own desire to do right – in a lawless civilization, the guy would just fall out of a high window or his plane would blow up, taking him and the worst of his asshole friends directly to hell – but instead they lark gleefully about knowing that they are untouchable without civilization compromising itself. It’s basically an advanced version of the obnoxious blog-commenters who try to push you into blocking them, thereby showing (in some imagined world) that you have compromised your principles. [Note, I clearly say in my commenting policy that I not have any principles, so good luck getting me to compromise them]. Anyhow, I wake up every morning thinking “god, just shoot him” and the idiot who tried missed. Why did he miss: here’s some irony – he used an AR-15. If he’d used a game caliber in a bolt action, he’d have aimed more carefully and Butler’s fairgrounds would be as famous as Dealy Plaza. Of course that would have brought problems but we must accept that since he’s going to cause problems no matter what I think someone should rid us all of this meddlesome and litigious piece of butt wipe.
Also, I’ve gotten involved in a couple of builds that have really consumed a great deal of my time and energy, and I am finding that my analytical energy is nowhere what it used to be. I teased some points about that over on PZ’s sortacast: [podcast] I think that may be why I mostly have been choosing to write about art, etc. I am a shadow of myself, pretending to be myself. I haven’t talked about it and I don’t know if I want to, and I don’t think you want to hear, so I’ll stock with the AI stuff. Oh, speaking of:
Yes, it was tempting to try to get the AI to render the Monty Python Black Knight instead of the Black Prince, at Crecy. He’s still there, by the way, explaining “Vous Anglais! Je vous emmerde!”
“Well, my dad was the chairman of a major university’s history department since 1066,”
Ah, so he chose his cup wisely.
personally i don’t think the best way to point out errors in a text is mockery, no matter how gentle. when people have done that to me in life, it’s always joined the list of “humiliating shit that happened forty years ago and I’ll remember forty years from now.”
My Spanish is something for which even my high school Spanish teacher would slap me, but with the help of my Barron’s Spanish Verbs book, it seems a modern Spaniard would understand your Norman French pretty easily:
¿Que importa? means “what difference does it make?”
El peor is “the worst”.
La semana que viene means “next week”, or “the week to come”, so que viene means “that which comes”.
These all appear to be phrases in common use today. For the whole sentence, Google translate went another way, but it really does seem that thousand year old French maps easily onto modern Spanish.
Well, that’s not too surprising. When you get right down to it, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese were all just provincial dialects of Latin, and a thousand years ago they were probably closer together than they are now.
The old joke (in a ‘ha ha, only serious’ way) is that the main difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has an army. So different countries’ languages drift apart over the centuries, but within a country the different dialects have tended to be pulled together by improvements in communication.
Of course, Norman French, like English, already had a bit of the more Germanic language handling merged into it, too…
@1: I’m not in a position to make any horological criticisms this week.
It is remarkable how the political vibe has changed in the last few weeks. The Willie Brown & helicopter lie is probably the funniest bit. I wonder if there is a way to turn that into AI art.
jenorafeuer, I think you missed my point. I did not comment on whether 11th century Spanish was similar to 11th century French. I’m sure they were. I said that a 21st century Spaniard could (apparently) understand 11th century French.
Think about that. It is difficult for a typical 21st century English speaker to understand Shakespeare, a difference of only 5 centuries and IN THE SAME LANGUAGE. I just think it is interesting that Spanish has apparently changed so relatively little in 10 centuries.
moarscienceplz @ # 6: … it is interesting that Spanish has apparently changed so relatively little in 10 centuries.
Amazing how much difference an official language Academy can make.
I’ve read that a typical dictionary for such languages (also French & Russian, e.g.) has about 60,000 words; the major ones for English have about 300,000.
Huh. When I was a Kingsman I had to know what the regimental motto meant. At the time I did wonder (but never questioned) the questionable French. Nice to have it explained – thanks.
Those two books are both called dictionaries, but they serve very different purposes and are different kinds of books. They’re as different as my slim volume of British Birds and a twitcher’s notebook. The limited dictionaries are the frozen document of record for what the language should be, the English dictionaries are a living report on what it is.
I’d be interested to know where Mandarin stands on the spectrum from one to the other. In meetings happening 60% in Chinese, I hear hardly ANY loan words from English, and obviously wouldn’t pick up on loans from anywhere else. (I do hear one of their common “filler” words (like “er” or “um” in English or “etto” in Japanese) which I discovered means “that” or “that one” but which caused me to do a neck-snapper of a double take the first time I heard it – and in any given one hour meeting I usually stop counting how many times I’ve heard it when I reach 50. It’s an incredibly common word in Mandarin conversation, but I’m not even going to write down what it sounds like.)
@sonofrojblake: Not an expert by any means but China is a fusion of states that had Mandarin imposed from above as part of a conquest and unification. So various words moved in and out of use but the overall language is effectively standardized. There are still millions of people who also know local dialects, but everyone knows Mandarin. English and French and Spanish were never imposed from above and shared words where they rubbed up against eachother, e.g. Occitan which is its own language that has bits of French and Spanish and its own grammar.
I’d say that Mandarin is a good example of the value of standardization.
sonofrojblake @ # 8: The limited dictionaries are the frozen document of record for what the language should be…
My point exactly: a prescriptive Academy constrains a language to a fairly rigid set*, while an unregulated language becomes a sprawling mess. Each approach has advantages and costs.
*Luther’s Bible and the standardized Quran have/had a similar effect in their respective languages, I suspect.
… one of their common “filler” words) … which I discovered means “that” or “that one” …
“Esé” (“that one” in Spanish) serves a similar role in New Mexican Spanish, also used for “Hey you” or “Buddy” in casual conversation – but I hardly ever heard it used that way in Spain. (NB: I do not consider myself fluent in Spanish, nor does anybody else.) Clearly this usage got transferred via the millions of Chinese troops reported lurking in US national parks and forests, awaiting the signal from
Hillary Clinton Joe Biden Kamabla Harris to seize patriots’ personal arsenals.I’m trying to render that into Old Norse, which results in;
Vas er inn verst at bekommt?
I’m sure that Gaul and Spain had languages which were very similar to Latin in the first place,(unlike Germanic or Brittonic languages) and were further standardized by the Vulgate Bible and missionary priests.
Frankish is a poorly attested Germanic dialect, but it does have a lot of Vulgar Latin influence just as Modern English has incorporated a lot of French and Latin. The interpreters that were sent to England along with Augustine to convert the Saxons in 595 were Frankish, so apparently they still found Anglo-Saxon mutually intelligible.
What nonsense. Gaul obviously had Gaulish, which was closely related to the Brittonic languages. In Spain more Celtic languages were spoken in addition to the Iberian languages as well as the ancestor of the Basque language. None of these languages were in the Italic language branch. But these areas were latinized long before the advent of christianity.
That’s utter gibberish. You just tried to directly translate the words from English. What is “bekommt” supposed to mean in Old Norse anyway?
Seriously Lasius? Please go learn Old Norse and discover that it’s 90% mutually intelligible with Old English. The pronouns and spelling are different, but both have the same system as regards case, inflectional endings, and genders.
This is OE,
Her com ingangan anspildewiht,
hæfde hin his haman on handa
Cwæð þæt þú his hæncgest wære,
lege þe his teage án sweoran.
ON uses a K rather than a C, and Hin instead of Han, but even with Hochdeutsch you should be able to translate those lines fairly easily.
Bekommt is obviously a conditional inflection, as opposed to verdandi, which is “becoming”.
At is denoting a particular time.
At bekommt is ‘that which might come”.
Perhaps you are confused by the similar verkommt?
No one who speaks German should find a third person singular verb inflection difficult to parse.
“Bekommt” is not an Old Norse verb. Simple as that.
And Old Norse doesn’t have a progressive aspect, so “there is no real “becoming”. The present participle of verða woud be verðandi not “verdandi”. And the conditional third person singular present inflection of verða is verði, not “bekommt”.
Und du hast bekommen der troll.
In English you turned into a troll, in German you got a troll. It’s the same word after 1000 years of semantic shift. English is heavily influenced by ON. That’s why we have two, ten, and twelve rather than zwie, zhen, or zwolf.
I did make a spelling error. It should be ‘Hvas er inn verst at bekommt!’ rather than vas, which is ‘was’ in ON.
German spells what as Was, but pronounces that W like a V.
Again, you try to translate by directly translating words into cognates. That is not how this works and it turns the sentence into nonsense.
“Bekommen” in German means to “receive”, and the whole grammar of the sentence is wrong.
A proper translation into German would be: “Und du bist ein Troll geworden.”
Your “Old Norse” translation is similarly nonsense, one of the many reasons for that being that “bekommt” simply isn’t an Old Norse word.
Feel free to demonstrate your superior Old Norse translation of ‘What is the worst that could happen?’.
Translate that OE too, since you are such an expert.
The first difficulty is the lack of a proper noun. The second is that the word happen doesn’t exist in ON.
The third is that there is no future tense in Germanic languages. You need to use will be in some form.
As to grammar, you really shouldn’t have any problem with dangling participles, such as bekommt. (will come)
German = will get, obtain, receive
I did not say you are being a troll. I said you have obtained (past tense) the troll. You are correct that I should have said ein troll.
I’ve never claimed any expertise with what you believe to be “proper German grammar”. I’ve only had it spoken to me by grandparents and they all have slightly different dialects. They also argued a lot about proper grammar.
Both my Rhinelander Platz and Plautdietsch speaking Nana looked at my copies of manuscripts in ON/OE, and pronounced them “illiterate pirate sprech”.
I’m not an expert in ON or OE either. Though I know one, I might ask him to come up with a proper translation at some point.
Yes. When you translate phrases, you have to translate ideas, not individual words. So the sentence would have to be altered significantly, I’ll talk about that later.
It is true that there is no one good translation for happen. The concept would usually be expressed by forms of “verða” or “taka”.
Correct, there originally was no future tense. Though as you see, neither the English nor German version of this saying use any future tense forms either. So for ON you could just use conditional forms too.
Another thing that Germanic languages originally didn’t have was articles. Modern German, English and the Nordic languages independently developed definite and indefinite articles from determiners (this, that, yonder), which is why their use differs significantly between those languages. Old Norse still was at the early stage where the “articles” were still basically determiners and often optional.
So you wouldn’t really say “inn verst”. And of course you’d have to inflect “verstr” for the correct case and gender. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t use “verstr” at all for a concise ON translation. More something along the line of “what can possibly come to pass?”. But I’d have to ask the ON expert I know.
The problem simply was, that “bekommt” is not an ON word.
In that case you still used wrong word order (past participles go to the end of the sentence) and neglected to inflect “ein Troll” for the accusative case. The correct translation would thus be: “Du hast einen Troll bekommen.”
Old Norse has multiple definite articles in addition to four cases and three genders. It makes German look simple. However, it also allows you to inflect verbs and adjectives as nouns, and has a very complex system for strong vs weak verbs when the noun is specified. There is no noun to govern gender so I inflected verst as a strong neuter noun rather than an adjective as in versti, versta, etc…. You can also append the definite article onto a noun. Øllu liðinu the whole troop.
Mun herr koma = an army will come
It þriðja sinn kom hon. = She came the third time.
It is a bit ridiculous to claim that I’ve translated it improperly when it isn’t even a complete sentence in the first place, and you’ve agreed with the difficulties I listed.
Well, you’d still have to inflect it as an adjective, and neuter and strong declension is not necessarily the default in ON. In modern Icelandic you would for example use the weak declension in this case.
Using a word (bekommt) that never existed in ON is an improper translation.
Since the adjective verstr is effectively being used as a neuter pronoun, it just uses the bare stem, and requires the separate singular neuter definite article inn as the effective strong adjective.
Neither mun koma or skál koma work without a noun, thus a dangling participal singular bekommt. I do wonder how you think modern German came to have the exact same word and spelling mit strong inflection, but Old Norse got it from Old English? Old Norse circa 1100 is post invading England, so it is not anachronistic.
Marcus, thanks for posting again. I’ve missed your thoughts, humor and smithing!
“What’s the worst that can happen?” An old REMF ducks down.