This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich
Category: Linguistics
This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich
The fact that he uses the word Nazgûl [~““35:51] from the Irish (nasc) and Scots Gaelic (nasg) words meaning “ring” to take a linguistic dig at Irish is notable. He was probably motivated by his political views of the time rather than celebrating (as one should) the value and diversity of all languages.
Tolkien once termed Welsh ‘the elder language of the men of Britain’; this talk explores how the sounds and grammar of Welsh captured Tolkien’s imagination and are reflected in Sindarin, one of the two major Elvish languages which he created.
Via https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/medieval-welsh. For those interested on Tolkien, they’ve got a huge list of other scholarly content on his work: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/keywords/tolkien.
This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich
This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich
Today I learned that the phrase “run the gamut” comes from Γ ut or gamma ut, which is the lowest note of the hexachord system on the Guidonian hand and is also used to describe all the possible notes.
And for some somewhat related musical fun via John Carlos Baez:
Guillaume Dufay (1397 – 1474) is the most famous of the first generation of the Franco-Flemish school. (This first generation is also called the Burgundian School.) He is often considered a transitional figure from the medieval to the Renaissance. His isorhythmic motets illustrate that—their tonality is dissonant and dramatic compared to typical Renaissance polyphony.
This post was originally published on Chris Aldrich