How English became English: “The earliest fragments of English reveal how interconnected Europe has been for centuries. As an exhibition in London brings together treasures from Anglo-Saxon England, Cameron Laux traces a history of the language through 10 objects and manuscripts – including a burial urn, a buckle with bling, and the first letter in English.”

Some people in Ohio and Toronto are trying to make opera cool: “Few scenes from Greek mythology are as well known as Orpheus’s descent into the underworld. After the death of his wife, Eurydice, the hero plays music so beautiful it moves the gods, and they permit him to enter the shadowy realm and retrieve his late love. At an empty theatre at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last July, nine musicians attempted to conjure the moment when Orpheus enters the hellscape. But their sound was weak—hardly the eardrum-rattling sensation such a scene demands. Topher Mokrzewski, music director and founding member of the Toronto opera company Against the Grain, paced the auditorium shaking his head. ‘We need the intensity of a rock concert, but we’re sounding like Tafelmusik’.”

The finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award have been announced.

Want to improve your life? Read Aristotle: “In the last decade, the ancient Stoicism articulated by the Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius in the second century has re-emerged as self-help for the smart set — a way of regulating our passions, doing our duties and resigning ourselves to the things we cannot change. The Stoics are wildly popular among readers (predominantly men) who want to train their stiff upper lips. Silicon Valley moguls, N.F.L. stars and Olympians flock to ‘Stoicon,’ an annual conference of modern-day Stoics who spend a week attempting to “think like a Roman emperor.” There are probably worse ways to spend one’s time, but according to Hall’s Aristotle there are also far better ways to approach life.”

China says it has sprouted a plant on the moon: “You’d think if you just supply plants with the right temperature, some sunshine, and some water, you could farm pretty much anywhere—even the moon. It turns out moon-farming is much more complicated than that, with hazards coming in from all sides. Yet despite all the challenges, representatives working on the Chinese moon lander Chang’e-4 announced this week that they had successfully sprouted a plant on the moon for the first time ever.”

Richard Reinsch revisits Orestes Brownson’s defense of the American constitution and a certain kind of liberalism.

Essay of the Day:

In The Times Literary Supplement, John E. Joseph writes about the life and work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure:

“His Mémoire appeared in print a few days after his twenty-first birthday, and linguists across the globe were stunned by its brilliance and daring. In Leipzig, too, jaws dropped, but for a different reason. Some of his teachers thought he had used ideas of theirs without proper acknowledgment. Saussure, who had feared that they might plagiarize from him, saw only their differences, and treated what they agreed on as received knowledge not requiring scholarly citation. The accusatory whispers shook him, and left him embittered and bereft of his youthful boldness. He got his degree, for a different thesis, but all he would publish for the rest of his life were brief articles on very precise topics.

“That is all he would publish, but by no means all he would write. His archives contain manuscripts and outlines of long articles and whole books addressing central questions raised in the Mémoire. How does a language function as a system, and what does this imply for studying how languages change over time? How do the elements of a language signify, for an individual speaker or hearer, and for the community of speakers as a whole?

“A crippling perfectionism set in. He rewrote sentences twenty times or more, struggling with terminology for such basic concepts as language, speech and sign. Many of the manuscripts were produced in the 1880s in Paris, where he taught the linguistics of Gothic and Old High German, and more after his return to Geneva in 1891, when the University created a chair for him in Sanskrit and Historical Linguistics.

“The number of students taking these subjects was low. In 1895–6, just a single student enrolled in his courses. This did not go unnoticed by government officials overseeing education. When in 1906 the Professor of General Linguistics retired, the University was able to save some face, as well as money (it was a Calvinist institution, after all), by assigning the general linguistics course to Saussure. He had little choice but to accept, without enthusiasm. In his view, whatever general principles of language may exist are best deduced from the close study of texts in a particular language or set of related languages, rather than taught axiomatically.

“To prepare for these lectures, he returned to the questions he had explored in all those unpublished manuscripts stacked in his office. He gave the course three times, developing it significantly on each occasion. The first course of 1907 was something of a warm-up. At this point he still saw the language system as a property of the individual, and the speech produced with it as lying in the social dimension. This would be reversed in the subsequent courses: the language system (langue) is a social fact, whereas speech (parole) belongs to the individual. The first course is much concerned with the psychological process of analogy and its role in language change. The emphasis on the second course (1908–09), however, is on value, which is socially determined.”

Read the rest.

Poem: Amit Majmudar, “Altarpiece”

Photos: The world’s largest single-terminal airport

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