Lingerie

Her word is

Monroe doctrine

Perhaps the best example is Van Gogh. I don’t mean the pronunciation Van Go, that’s fine, that’s how Americans say it. I mean when certain Americans tell other Americans that their own Merkun way of saying Van Gogh is wrong.

(There is widespread misunderstanding about languages and their correct use in the world today, because of the co-dependent, spiritually homicidal tyranny of political correctness. About how you pronounce things in English, we Dutch have no say. If almost everyone on the Dutch media says trömp, it infuriates me because as a Dutchman I would have thought we spoke our languages better; but as an American I have no say in this. As a Dutch speaker, I have absolutely no say in how Americans call our country, for instance. Telling you that you shouldn’t say Holland in English but rather call it the Netherlands I believe is rude and arrogant. If this Monroe doctrine, English to the English speakers, Dutch to the Dutch speakers, is not followed, what we get is a co-dependency and all other kinds of psychological disorders. In the end, it means the abolishment of property, which means the abolition of freedom: it is with our property that we procure freedom. Without property, everyone’s life is at the disposal of others. Literally. If you can’t buy medical treatment because it is not for sale, others decide whether you can have it or not, which means others decide if you have the right to live.)

But back to Van Gogh. Every time I have seen an American correct another American with the pronunciation of Van Gogh, the correction was wrong. It makes me want to shake such man - most people who feel the need to correct incorrect use of language (to which group I definitely belong) seem to be men - and yell at him: FUN HhOOHh!!!!!! - or better, invite the man at my doorbell and dump a week load of Cleveland Brown on him. Like I said in another blog post, where I live we don’t have a second floor. 

(I was once thus corrected when in music theory class, a violist mispronounced the name Penderecki, saying it somewhat like you would pronounce it upon reading it in those letters. I corrected her, knowing something about Polish pronunciation, having been there and all that: penderets-ky - the -c is pronounced ts in Poland. She corrected me back. With her double major Dutch and viola (which probably didn’t give her enough time to practice the instrument) she ended up becoming the main reviewer in the Dutch equivalent of the New York Times, the latter of which I heard once was a prestigious newspaper).

It’s pronounced fun ḤOOḤ, (ḤOḤ for the British) with the Ḥ standing for that guttural throat sound we Dutch - and the Swiss and Ashkenazi Hebrew - are so well known for. There is no difference in pronouncing the first -g- and the last -gh-. The letter G as in gobbledygook doesn’t exist in Dutch. We know how to use it in foreign words like gamba and names like Goethe but even then, half the population retracts to our ‘Ḥ’ sound*. The -o- is actually like the British --o- as in “not a problem” (I love the way they say ‘problem’). In that respect, I am fascinated by the different way of spelling “mom”. The British spell and say ‘mum’. The result is almost the same. The only difference is the length of the vowel, which in America is long. Would that be because of the spelling?

Incidentally, in the south of the Netherlands, where Van Gogh lived, that guttural sound doesn’t exist either, and the sound is more like Spanish -j- or -x- as in their but not our way of saying Mexico. If he took after his mom, who was from The Hague, he would have said it the official Dutch way, with that sound of bad brakes on a car. If he took after his dad or his friends, he would have had the softer Brabant accent. I grew up 15 miles from where he grew up, though 120 years later. that may also make a difference.

Spelling is such a huge thing! How many mistakes are made just because something is spelled a certain way, for instance in semi-international phonetics. A Texan father called his daughter Mimi-san, Japanese style, the way I sometimes call my beloved colleague Mimë-san** (the male form is a distinction, a sign to be taken seriously on the work floor). But our Texas dad pronounced it rhyming with fan instead of fun, and that was just because of the way it was written. I wrecked a car in Iraq and I ran all the way to Iran. I tell Ian not to say Italian, and all that sort of things. Liddliddly is where the good food is. We used to say Peking, now we say Beijing, better, but still quite off the mark, not because we cannot say it better, but because the spelling stops us from saying it right. More about that at the end of this ridiculous article

And oh yes, it’s handle, nut hundle!! While it is true that Germans would say hundle to the word ‘Handel’ (it means “trade”), the name of the composer who wrote the Messiah has an umlaut*** on the -a, so Händel, or Haendel on a typewriter without umlauts (I think it makes it plural). An umlaut changes the vowel. Handel sometimes wrote Hendel when he was in Italy; in England, such was not necessary because the British already said it with a sound close to the German -e-. So here as well as there: don’t correct a totally fine pronunciation with the wrong thing! 

One grammatical mistake in English that began to pop up around the millennium change (I did not hear it before) is the incorrect grammatical use of the word I. In November 2008, president-elect Barack Obama said on TV that the president has invited Michelle and I for tea. That should be “Michelle and me”, because the personal pronoun is in in the accusative (direct object). ‘Dubbye’ has invited me, therefore Michelle and me. Me in many languages is colloquially used instead of I (“Me and Tim a-hunting went)****, which means there is a mysterious inner need to do so, and such violations against grammar rules I lovingly embrace, since grammar is only a thing professors have invented to describe what people are doing: language is a living thing and professors have no say in its development. But this mistake is because of political correctness. It is an overcompensation to make sure we don’t do it wrong, just like today’s inverted racism in our mainstream culture, which shows in the outrage when a black boy gets killed while a murdered white boy would not even make the news, is an overcompensation against racism. Regardless whether or not you agree with this political simile, mistakes because of an overzealous attitude toward correctness infuriate me. Dutch knows a very good example of that. In Flemish, which is as Dutch as American is English, there is a construction we don’t use in Holland: moest zij vaker plooirokken en hoge laarzen dragen, ik denk dat ik op haar zou stemmen, which doesn’t really translate in “should silk be used more in vacuum cleaners, I think I would use them more”, but the grammatical construction is preserved. I love that particular use of the conditional form. However, when I lived in Belgium, there were quite a number of teachers, Belgian, Flemish, not Dutch teachers (!!!), who would frown upon or even forbid the use of this construction, because we don’t use it in Holland! By what standards do they presume that we set the standard for how they want to speak?!!! Abolishing that beautiful construction, that I have only seen in Flemish and English, would mean a real cultural impoverishment. And for what a dumb reason!!! Professors trying to stop people from expressing themselves in their native tongue is already questionable, to say the least, but doing so because across the border, we are too stupid to use it? English seems have a similar issue with splitting infinitives and ending a sentence on a preposition, which seems to probably have been something “up with which” Churchill “would not put”… I understand that both constructions are frowned upon because Latin doesn’t have it!!! By the best of my knowledge, English is the only language that can do both things, and to abolish something so unique and colorful just because another language doesn’t have it, doesn’t make any sense. And even if my assessment is incorrect, or oversimplified, what’s wrong with either of these constructions, really? Who decides that it is wrong, by what authority? Language is a living thing.

So far I have taken on Americans (and a somewhat repressive, authoritarian part of Belgian educators). But this is of course an international phenomenon. The examples I know best are from my own native country, the former Republic of the Seven United Netherlands. Though every country is susceptible to this practice.

The Dutch, when saying USA in English, pronounce it you ezz A. I have not yet heard a Dutchman pronounce it right. This is not because we can’t say the -S. We think that this is how it is pronounced here, and when we hear an American say it, no one notices the difference. Our minds hear the American say it with a zz. That’s the fascinating part of the matter. We really hear you saying it the way we think you say it. And not many or most Dutch, ALL Dutchmen, even the flying ones. At least in my experience.

When I was a teenager, my mom at some point had ‘learned’ that the first syllable in privacy is not pronounced pry, but pri- as in prissy*****. It took me years before I realized that our “wrong” pronunciation of privacy is not erroneous, but American. Almost the entire Dutch population, at least in my time, seems to have had some form of contempt for American English, even though five times more people speak it as British, and it is closer to the original 17th century English before the two parted ways. 

This sentence only serves to retrieve a footnote I once made and have no idea where it belonged to.***** *

When saying the German phrase im Frage, which we have incorporated in our language - dat komt niet im Frage - we always say it with an -m-. At a certain moment, I realized that Frage was feminine and therefore cannot take the masculine dem or its contractions (im = in dem). So it should be “in der Frage”.  When I investigated, I found that the Germans do not use the article there, they say in Frage. No matter how many German books you read, you will never find the other phrase. It doesn’t exist. And they don’t say it either. We hear it in our minds, because to us the -n- eliding into -m- sounds natural, sounds “German”, while being impervious to the grammatical anomaly they hear. I once spoke to a Dutch cellist who had been living in Saarbrücken for ten years, teaching at the conservatory there, and whom I could not convince of this. He kept insisting that it must somehow be an exception. This is how our mind players games with us. 

Don’t think I’m above all these things: every Dutch mistake I mention here is one I had made myself up till the moment I started to realize it. I once stood with a mouth full of teeth (my favorite Dutch expression) when I was corrected by a French speaking Belgian (their French sounds very correct to me) in saying les jeux instead of les yeux. Ask a Frenchman to pronounce the two words, I can’t phonetizise it in English (lay zhee vs. lez yee is closest I can come). I clearly remember how I learned it in school, with the teacher saying it wrong. It sounded right. But it was wrong. My mom, whose French is very good, made the same mistake. I am confident that this is also one of those things we all say wrong. 

This article is about collective mistakes. I’m not saying there are never any exceptions, people who do say it right without having been told; especially in the bigger examples below there probably are many who have learned it right, but most of us did only after conducting a small investigation for themselves. Also, some words, like lingerie, have actually become American words, like our word paraplu (from parapluie) for umbrella. The somewhat bigger examples below are all things I used to wonder about, ask around, and persistently got wrong answers, or none. The first two examples come from the tenacious desire in most Dutch of my generation to think ill of Germans. The last two stem from an unbelievable intellectual laziness found in the highest echelons of our universities, an incapacitating specialism we already found in the article Margrave, that creates tunnels in plain open field. There have been people who flat-out refuse to believe me, without having a clue about German history. that’s perhaps the saddest part of this: people who know nothing refuse to believe those that do.

——

Footnotes:

* The insistence on our guttural [hh] sound shows in the Dutch image of Goethe as arrogant, since he signed every poem, play, essay or novel with goet hè, which sounds like goed hè? (ḥoot hèh = ‘good eh?’). For the correct Dutch pronunciation of goed ask Rebecca Landell-Reed, who in Holland would be Rebecca Reed-Landell and in Hungary Ríd Mátyásné, or Ríd Rebekka.

** I write Mimë, which is to indicate how she says it. Americans write Mimé because that’s how they say it - we want to avoid connection with the word ‘mime’, which means water in Hebrew and Mimë doesn’t want to get her cello wet - see how languages provide us with an unending chain of associations! … When I remember I call Mime Meiya, from 山広美芽 “Shānguăng Mĕiyá, her name in Chinese. The Chinese write Japanese names in their script (Japanese Kanji = Chinese Hanzi) but pronounce them in their own language. They say Dōngjīng for 東京, Tokyo. Its like calling Giuseppe Verdi “Joe Green” or Franz Liszt “Frank Flour” - Mimë means Beautiful Scion - (Alan or Mimë, please correct me if I’m wrong about any of this!).

*** Isn’t it funny? the word umlaut doesn’t have an umlaut….

**** This comes from a joke I can’t keep from you. At Harvard, Kate Bennet Wadsword’s “community college”, a poetry contest is held. Two candidates are left in the finale, Clive from Harvard and Dwayne from ‘Louieville’ (what’s the capital of Kentucky, Louisville of Louieville? —- it’s neither ;-). They each have 5 minutes to make up a quatrain with abab rhyme scheme, ending on ‘Timbuktu’. Here are the two attempts, the story doesn’t tell who won.

Clive Dwayne

Through the burning, burning sand Me and Tim a-hunning went

Trekked the desert caravan Found three whores in a pop-up tent

Man and camel, two by two They was three and we was two

Destination Timbuktu…. So I bucked one and …………. (when telling the joke, this should be left open)

***** Therefore not ‘ey’ as in eye, but ‘o’ as in ‘women’. This example comes of course from G.B. Shaw, who claimed that FISH should be spelled ‘ghotio’ or ‘ghoti’ (the first spelling I heard from a fun American girl in a delightful inn on top of the Gaisberg near Salzburg); -gh as in laugh, -o- as in women and -tio as in station.

***** * On a walk near Neuschwanstein Castle, Bavaria, I ran into de then already quite old Dr. Schmidt-Gabel (or however you say his name) with his wife and one member of his boy choir, de Tölzer Knabenchor, which he seemed to have founded and brought to international status all by himself, a giant achievement. I joined the company on my way out. I remember him telling me that Neuschwanstein, Bavarian King Ludwig’s project, was created by a theater set director. Then I caught him asking the name of the chorus boy. Christoph. Ah, nice. Somewhere in the back of my head there was something wondering why he didn’t know the name of his own choir boys, didn’t he rehearse so much any more with them because of his old age? Later, a Bavarian organ builder told me the story. In the Tölzer Knabenchor, according to Bavarian custom, the boys, as soon as they have reached the legal age of five year old to drink beer, are called by their last name. It gives them recognition, they feel treated as grown-ups, which gives them the incentive to act more like grown-ups, because you become what you act like. So Schmidt-Grabner or however his name knew the boy’s name alright, but just his last name. By asking his first name, he allowed for a more intimate relationship, at least for the moment. A similar system of accountability we find in the army, or in sports. “Everyone was a cannibal,” I once heard a football coach say. I marveled at how far this coach took his metaphors. What he actually said was accountable….

——

Het Wilhelmus*

The Wilhelmus, which today is played four times (!) too slow**, is an war song from 1568 on Holland’s George Washington, William of Orange (1533-84), in English William the Silent, so as not to confuse him with his great-grandson William III, King of England (1650 - 1702), the text was traditionally attributed to Marnix van St. Aldegonde, the tune was from the Catholic war song O la Folle Enterprise du Prince de Condé. It was the fashion at the time for warring camps to take each other’s songs and change the texts, adding a that’s for you, jerk! to the main propagandistic meaning of the song. Songs like this are called contrafacta. This song provided also a good example for how past scholarship missed the point because of the unquestioned assumption that the way music wears played then just had to be the way it was played in the past - trusting more on the mouth-to mouth delivery of fantasy than the actual study of historical sources. In today’s tempo - it being a national anthem and all that - the second half, in three, does not make any sense textually. Here is the text, with music and my translation, keeping in sync with the agogic identities of the semantics. The “official” translation, though true to the facts, misses the epithet German, which is crucial to this article. 

Wilhelmus van Naffouwe William of Nassau, coated, 

Ben ick van Duytfchen bloet am I, in German dye

Het Vaderlant getrouwe my fatherland devoted

Blijf ick tot’s Land’s behoet (1607 blijf ick tot in den doot ) stay I until I die

Een Prince van Oranjen A princeling of “Orangia” 

ben ick vry onverveert, am I, free, without fear

Den Coninck van Hispanjen The ruler of Hispania

Heb ick altyt ge-eert Have I always held dear

‘Coated in German die’ should actually be am I of German blood; ‘until I die’ is the right translation of the now common second version, which is so much stronger than ‘to my land’s keep”; Princeling should be Prince, but I needed the extra syllable (in Dutch, the word is stretched out like “blessèd, which I’m sure has now two syllables only because of the hundreds and hundreds of prissy church songs needing to have it be two); “King” I replaced with ruler for the same verse reasons. Other than that, the schwerpunkte, the stresses, are kept the same. 

The 4th line shows Valerius’ 1625 version (“... stay I to the preservation of the land’). The final version (‘stay until I die’) I found already on a MS of 1607. The problem here is the rhyme. Doot (‘dote’) doesn’t rhyme with bloet (‘bloot’ rhymes with ‘good’). So either Valerius thought it necessary to change the text to a good rhyme, or the current (stronger) version was adopted in spite of the bad rhyme - quite similar to how Schiller replaced Bettler werden Fürstenbrüder from the 1785 version of his Ode to Joy into Alle Menschen werden Brüder in 1803. Not to just beggars become brothers of princes, but all humans become brothers. In this song but only in this song, we now pronounce dood as doet, rhyming with ‘loot’. I don’t think that this has ever been the pronunciation of that word (Tot in German), except in Limburg, where the accent resembles the Welsh actor Rhys Ifans in Notting Hill.

Except for the excruciatingly slow tempo in which marching bands now play the tune in the extremely rare occasions that a Dutch athlete actually wins something in the Summer Olympics (and all-round speed skating in the Winter Olympics do not get appropriate coverage in this country), the problem with the tune is the ridiculous emphasis on the words van (‘of) given by the music. Nobody in the 16th century would of course make head or tail out of this slow tempo, with every note played equal, that would be music from Mars. It simply was beyond everybody’s imagination. A reconstruction of the song can be heard on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YgurxOm_e4). Since I do not have access to all the scholarship about this topic, specifically the first documentation of the tune O la Folle Enterprise du Prince de Condé from 1574 from the Deuchdelycke Solutien, the following will be tentative. Regardless whether the French tune is original or a reconstruction from sparsely noted material, the 1625 version of Valerius, the prototype of our present anthem, must have been written down that way for a reason (a reconstruction of the French song can be found on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgECAmtABEM. If there is an earlier version that’s different, we need an explanation why it got changed. Besides, Valerius’ notes do not need a reconstruction! The song sings itself sings quite naturally where the right tempi are taken into account. 

16th century songs - and I have to take Valerius’ version at face value, especially since it is the version that ‘stuck’, and if I am right, the first melodic version of the Wilhelmus itself. Since I am almost certain of this, I think I can conjecture that the theme could have been in that form for a while. In another fit of rage at Wikipedia I totally disagree that Valerius had “slowed down the tune for church purposes”; Valerius’ version shows no tempo, and the music strongly suggest a fast pace. Most reconstructions do not take into account that bar changes in the 16th and 17th century were often also tempo changes, and that three meters were usually twice as fast as twos in those days. When the first half is sung in a light march tempo, say 120-128, then either the eight becoming the quarter of the second half, or the half becoming dotted half, present themselves as highly probable solutions; in both versions, the groove is preserved. Most importantly, the pointless stay on the words van in the second half turn into a perfectly set swing prefacing the main thing, Oranjen and Hispanjen respectively. The setting is superb. It also accounts for the song having 15 verses...

If however, as that dude in Wikipedia suggests, Praetorius’ was a slow-motion version for church, the time-signature change does not make any sense, since the French song doesn’t seem to have a time change, and slow singing would not need one.

The Dutch on line reconstruction resembles another such reconstruction from the 1930s I have studied decades ago. That reconstruction - which is perhaps the very one used on youtube - did not take into account the possibility that the Valerius version is not only sensible, but superb; because it held on to the tempo the then and even now current brass bands and symphonic orchestras used and use, without having a concept of the vastly quicker pace of the Renaissance. 

But this is not what I wanted to discuss here. The first verse has three nationalities in it (German, French - Orange - and Spanish), none of which is our own, Dutch - because that nationality didn’t exist yet. Ever since WW2, I believe, when the line German blood became unbearable, the Dutch invented the word diets word inserted for Duytsch: Ben ick van dietsen bloet. ‘Diets’ means ‘of the people, common’. A substantial part of the Dutch population still seems to believe that this was the original, or that Duits (Duytsch) and diets (‘deets’) are interchangeable. This actually is not just not true, it is the opposite of the truth. In order to drive my point home, and also because no one cares except us Dutch, I will make my point in Dutch first.

Op de eerste de plaats staat het woord Duytsch in alle originele versies van het lied. Verder was heel Nederland Duits: we maakten deel uit van was het Heilige Roomse Rijk, en de taal die wij spraken was Nederduits. Maar ook in de engere zin was Willem van Oranje Duits: hij was van Dillenburg dat als Diellenboergh uitgheschproek’n wordt, en waar het Niederdeutsch nirgends te beschpoiren fallt. Willem van Orange, die in Brussel werd opgevoed, als voorwaarde om in het bezit van zijn  landgoed in Orange te komen, schprak misschien helemaal geen Nederlands, en als hij het al sprak, zal het met een Prins Bernhardtaccent zijn geweest. Willem van Oranje, if we like it or not, was een Duitser. Wat hij zeker niet was was diets, ‘van het volk’. Hij was een edelman. Alles wijst er helaas op, dat “Duits” de enig juiste vorm is, en we moeten daar gewoon mee leren leven. 

In English: Duytsch, German, is in all the originals; in the 17th century, it denoted a greater area and ethnicity than today’s Germany, including the Low Countries (of which part was French speaking); William was a real German, he might not even have spoken Dutch at all; and he was certainly not deets, ‘common’: he was a nobleman, and ‘deets’ would have been an insult to him. 

This is another example of the the widespread phenomenon, part of the human condition, that we believe what we want to believe. 

This sentence has the words and and in in it. The space between the words words and and and and and and before in in the last sentence, unfortunately, is unequal.

——————

Footnotes:

* Canadian fortepianist David Breitman once pointed out to me that the Dutch cannot spell the.

** Only the second part is played four times too slow. The first half of this short song is only played twice too slow now, because it was sung half as fast as the second part.

——————

Deutschland

I grew up in the firm belief that the phrase Deutschland Deutschland Über Alles, set on Haydn’s Gott Erhalte Franz den Kaiser, which appears as theme in his Kaiserquartet op. 76 no. 2, was a fascist invention from the 1930 or 40s. When Germany was about to be unified in 1989, a Dutch comedian thought he summarized the general opinion when he began to sing “Deutschland, Deutschland ... that’s two Germanies and it should stay that way.”  

Wat Kan kan, kan Kan alleen …

This is a great example of the arrogance a generally accepted opinion can take on. Who is he, who are WE, Dutch, to decide whether Germany is or isn’t allowed to be one country? Such an opinion, again, throws everybody at the mercy of others, which in the end means: every human life is at the mercy of another. A unified Germany is a collective right that nobody can question except by denying every other nation the same rights. It was Hitler who didn’t think countries had rights. Assuming the right to veto a country’s unification is a hidden form of nazism in our own so “tolerant” nation ...!

(I feel grossly insulted by another Dutch comedian.These are all entertainers of the generation after the Great Threesome, Sonnevelt, Kan and Hermans, the champions of level of cabaret quality I have seen equalled but never surpassed, and which ended when the younger generation - like this “young” man - thought it necessary to become politically engaged, which immediately trivializes all humor. I felt personally insulted by him at a fundraiser to fight hunger in Africa, first by his telling a number of bad jokes in a lame attempt to make us ‘feel the concept of hunger’ by our thirst for good humor - by then his asking us to give money, saying, and I quote: They don’t have it, you have too much of it, unquote. Behold the same arrogant left-wing entitlement to what I have worked hard for. Who the fac ut ardeat cor meum!! is he to tell me I have too much money? Communism is the coverup under “fair” language of a system where we are at each other’s throat, where no one can ever be free because I decide what work you are allowed to do and how much money you need.)

In fact, Deutschland über alles comes from a song by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (his name may have been the thing that’s long and hard that a he brought to the marriage, like a Polish male). The song is called das Lied der Deutschen, from 1841, that’s before Germany even existed as a political unit! Here is the text: 

Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Germany above all

Über alles in der Welt, above everything in the world

Wenn es stets zu Schutz und Trutze when, for protection

Brüderlich zusammenhält. it brotherly stands together

Von der Maas bis an die Memel, from the Meuse to the Memel

Von der Etsch bis an den Belt, from the Adige to the Belt

|: Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Germany above all

Über alles in der Welt! :| above everything in the world

Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue, German women, German loyalty

Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang German whine and song (sorry, couldn’t resist)

Sollen in der Welt behalten shall retain in the world

Ihren alten schönen Klang, their ancient beautiful chime

Uns zu edler Tat begeistern inspire us to noble deeds

Unser ganzes Leben lang. for as long as we shall live

|: Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue, German women, German loyalty

Deutscher Wein und deutscher Sang! :|. German wine and song;

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit Unity, Justice, and Freedom

Für das deutsche Vaterland! for our German fatherland!

Danach lasst uns alle streben let’s together strive to that

Brüderlich mit Herz und Hand! brotherly, with heart and hand

Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit Unity Justice and Freedom

Sind des Glückes Unterpfand; Are good fortune’s good safeguard

|: Blüh' im Glanze dieses Glückes, Flourish in this fortune’s radiance

Blühe, deutsches Vaterland! :| Flourish, German fatherland!

Deutsche Frauen, deutsche Treue

All of this has tons be read against the background of 1841, when the Germans became aware that they too had the right to have country for all German speakers, just like everyone else. Expansion and colonialism, so present in later times, had nothing to do with it. Germany above all was directed to all those that were still tasking the interests of their own regions above Germany as a whole. In the movie Miracle, Herb Brooks playing Curt Russel or the other way ground makes a huge deal asking his m players over and over again their names and who they are playing for; until one guy, when everyone is at the end of their rope, gets it, and names instead of his particular college: the United States of America. A similar mood we find in the often willfully misunderstood last pamphlet aria of Wagner’s Meistersinger, where the integrity of German art is defended against the falsche, welsche Majestät, the (in Germany!) false, Romanesk fad that everyone in cultural circles was into, denying true German identity: was deutsch und echt, wüßt keiner mehr / lebt’st nicht in deutschen Meister Ehr - “what’s true and German, no one would know, if it didn’t live on in the German Masters’ honor”. Germany was crawling out of a very deep pit where the rest of Europe had left them; and when they were finally out, an other kind of patriots took over, as its happens so often, who were not interested in fair play, but only in German glory at the cost of everything. After that led to the WW1 debacle, Hitler, when he took power, found the first verse perfect for his purposes, misunderstood as he made it to be. This was the “man” who in the 955 battle of Augsburg changed the identity of the Hungarians to Huns because he did not want his present allies to ever appear as historic enemies! 

In fact, Hitler rejected the other verses: the 2nd because it was too bourgeois, the 3rd because it was too ... democratic. 

The icing on the cake: the third verse is currently used as Germany’s national anthem!!!  - 

Why didn’t I learn those things in school?

————-

If you want to play a d major chord in tune, do you have to I play the F# higher, lower than or equal to the F# on the piano? 

I once asked this question at the beginning of a talk to a hall full of high school students and their 2 music teachers. The majority of students raised their hands at “higher”. None but the two teachers raised their hands at “lower”. At that moment, one of the students said: 

“Shit...”

As a student I was always told that sharps are played high. Yet, in my mom’s musical theory book I read that a G flat was actually higher than an F sharp. As I intend to show in an upcoming chapter about intonation, things are more complicated than that, but yes, in the context of A = 440 (or any other pitch), a G flat is always higher than the F# in a D major chord. 

What the ….??????

When you divide a string length or an air column in two equal parts, the two equal parts sound exactly and octave higher than the original string length or air column. Twice the amount of Htz. vibrations produce a sound an octave higher. If you divide the same in three, you raise the vibrations with the factor 3, you get an octave and a fifth. When you divide it in four equal lengths, you get of course two octaves, because 2 x 2 = 4* . Dividing the string in 5 gives the major third plus two octaves, dividing by 6 gives of course the fifth again, plus two octaves, and dividing in 7 gives the 7th plus two octaves, which is generally considered “out of tune”**

So the mathematical ratio for a major third is 5/4, which is the 5th harmonic two octaves lower, therefore 5 divided by 2 x 2 = 5/4. 

If you take out your calculator and take the hypothetical number 1, which stands for any Hertz vibration you choose (it would be nice if you choose one you can actually hear, so not 1 or 8734687345$%^%$$£$%@££$$!!!!!). Let’s call this number 1 a C. When you multiply this number, 1, with 5/4, you get the decimal 1.25. That’s the E, a major third above our imaginary original C. When you multiply that with 5/4 (or by 5 divided by 4), you get 1.5625. This is the G# (I couldn’t do that of course without my calculator). Multiply that with 5/4, you get 1.953125. That’s the B sharp. You have now done the mathematical equivalent of a progression on the piano from C to E to G# to B#. On the piano, this B# equals c and is an octave higher than the original C, therefore should have the number 2. Apparently, a B# is about 2 1/2 % lower than a C. But I’m not done. 

So if I pile up 3 major thirds, the end result is a few commas lower than the octave. On the piano, where every octave is divided in 12 equal half steps, that compilation results in a pure octave, therefore, 2. From this follows that a pure major third is lower than on the piano. 

If you make a similar series based on the proportion 3/2 of the fifth, multiplying our imaginary C = 1 with 3/2 twelve times, following the circle of fifths via G, d, a, e’, b’, f#’’, c#’’’, g#’’’, d#’’’’, a#’’’’, e#’’’’’ to b#’’’’’, we arrive at a very high 129.746338. If we divide that by 64 (the equivalent of six octaves), we get 2.02728653. This B# is therefore slightly higher than on the piano. From which follows that the same B# can have multiple pitch values, dependent how you get here. It also means that the pure fifth is slightly higher than on the piano. However, if 12 steps result in a slighter difference than 3 steps, the major third must be much more different from the piano than the fifth. You can hear that on a well tuned piano. A fifth sounds beautiful, with only a slight wave. The major third plagues the ear with all kinds of troubled side effects, like an anti-depressant drug. That’s not because ‘the major third is an imperfect consonant’, but because it is really out of tune. On an instrument with less tolerance for deviating intonation, like the harpsichord, or a string quartet playing without vibrato, it would really not sound good. 

What’s important here is that both mathematically and according to the laws of physics, as expressed in harmonics on string and wind instruments, there is a perfect intonation in which intervals and chords are pure, and that those laws are often contrary to what string players have been taught to do. 

Then why are we strong players taught to play the shapes high and the flats low? Because in a melody, aside from chords, sharps are upward and flats downward leading tones. they want to approach their target note. When alone, pure intonation does not matter, we tune to our mind’s concepts, which are greatly different from harmonies determined by the laws of physics. The more tolerance our instruments, that’s the sound colors produced by them, have for deviations from pure intonation, the more ‘expressive’, our intonation can be. In jazz, pure intonation is even a non-issue. Jazz players, who are trained to think in the unbelievable complexities of 9, 11 and 13 chords, know nothing about this, because they don’t have to. But classical string players should. Especially when they play string quartet. 

So the very first thing you (should) learn in Intonation 101 is: there are two kinds of intonation: the pure or scientific one, and the expressive one. Expressive intonation is basically playing ‘out of tune’ according to an emotional need.

That is what should be taught after the first name calling of the first class about intonation in your first day at the conservatory.

And yet, how many of even the greatest string players know this? I suspect that at least in latter half of the 20th century, there may have been a majority among the greatest who had no clue about this first rule. My uncle, who just passed away as the viola guy in three European countries, claimed that there was no one way of playing a major third in tune. That’s the exact opposite of the truth, there is, it is the 5/4 correlation, as you can hear in harmonics. “But harmonics are out of tune,” he would have said. That sentence is equal to “the Holocaust didn’t happen”***, “the landing on the moon was a fake”**** (or “they had been on the moon many times before Neil Armstrong”, I heard both conspiracy theories). Any piano tuner or harpsichordist can confirm that. Both my parents were (are) musicians, my mom was a very proficient assistant principal violist in the orchestra she played in, and my dad is simply a great musician (a great musician is someone who can express him or herself fully in the music he or she makes); yet they could not tell me anything of what I explained above, they instilled in me the false notion that: 1. sharps are high, 2. on the piano, no interval is in tune (which is not true, octaves are, barring an unnoticeable deviation for brilliance, perfectly in tune); 3. the fifths the cause of the evil (we saw that major thirds are much more out of tune than fifths). 

If what I think is true and the majority of the great string players have no notion about the first rule of intonation 101, what does that say about human civilization? If science is not taught, or denied, in music, in what other fields would science thus be ignored? Even in science itself, science is always limited to what is studied. 

It is my strong impression that in all disciplines of this culture, our cherished beliefs of what is true are moving more and more away from our human identities. Doctors don’t heal, they patch you up; philosophers go in all kinds of logical loopholes rather than teaching us how to live a useful and happy life; lawyers, instead of helping the laws to be enforced in a humane and fair way, have instead paralyzed this society with impossible legal fees in all its facets; almost all musicians create cacophony and find great meaning in doing so. I am not denying human quality in all this, or even relevance. Helmut Lachenman (Hahaha! Hahahahaha!!!!! Haha haha!!!!!!) ***** can be riveting, but to me it is noice - how to make noise meaningful is still making noise. When I’m typing this on my iPad, half the words are miscorrected, because the program I’m writing under thinks it is more valuable to keep us from learning how to typewrite rite, I mean right, than to respect foreign words in their true spelling. 

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Footnotes:

**Paul Erdôs (or was it another famous mathematician?) once faced a complaint that he almost never wrote on the blackboard, which made him hard to follow for his students. The next class, after another of his elaborate ex-tempore mathematical procedures, finished with “so you see, kids, it’s as simple as 2 + 2 = 4. Then he remembered - or pretended to remember - and wrote on the blackboard: 2 + 2 = 4

** The late Jim Caldwell may have been one of the 2 or 3 geniuses I ever met. Through his wife Cathy, pretty far up there as well - with mountain tops you cannot tell which one is higher from down at the base - I learned that he said that the most pure way of tuning a dominant 7th chord is to take the 7th as low as the actual 7th harmonic, which every theory book tells you it’s ‘out of tune’. Especially the minor third G-Bb in a C dom 7th chord would be ridiculously narrow, yet, he had said, somehow the pure vibrations make it work. So I went home and tried it. Every time I tried it, alone in a makeshift way, or with a colleague, it worked amazingly! We cannot always melodically fit that low 7th in the music, but when we can, it is the most pure way to tune that particular chord. I wonder how many of the colleagues I told this too actually took the trouble to try it out, and how many just dismissed an allegation that was so much outside their theoretical framework…

*** Whoever claims that the Holocaust didn’t happen has to tell me where my dad’s three grandparents and his aunt went after 1945. If that’s ‘not your business’, you’re not my business any more. I take this very, very personally.

**** David Letterman has been quoted to say that America is probably the only country in the world where a significant part of the population thinks that professional wrestling is real and moon landing fake.

***** Hahahaha! Hahahahahaha! ‘Lachen’ = ‘laugh’ in German. Hahahahaha!

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Miscellaneous

The line Cato the Elder ended all his speeches with in the 2nd century BC wasn’t “Carthago delenda est”, that is just a short form. He rather seems to have said Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam: “Other than that, I hold the opinion that Carthago should be destroyed”.*

Caesar’s last words, when he was stabbed to death by a score of senators, were not “Et tu, Brute”. That’s from Shakespeare’s play. Suetonius, Cassius Dio and “probably” Plutarch as well seem to have believed that Caesar died without saying anything. The first two however reported that according to others Caesar had spoken the Greek phrase καὶ σύ τέκνον (kuy sü, teknon?), “You too, child?”

Darwin’s magnum opus is not called ‘the Origin of the Species’, but (on) the Origin of Species, followed by by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It is about all species, not just ours.

Edward Gibbons’ great work about the Romans is not called The Rise and Fall, but the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

In Akron Ohio, Ghent Rd. is pronounced as ‘gent road’. After one of my gazillion girlfriends** pointed that out to me, I heard it confirmed by Tina Bergman, who is from the area. At an interview at WCLV pointed that out off the air to Bill O’Connell who had just done the traffic announcements. On the next announcement, he had the courtesy and the humor to tell the audience of my correction.

Gent wordt in Gent uitgesproken als gent, niet als hant; wel met een vette stemhebbende zachte G. ‘Hant’ komt uit Westvlaanderen, dus Brugge (bràhhah) en Kortrijk, waar ze de G niet zeggen en kunnen, zelfs niet in het alfabet, waar het H van benee heet. In het Westvlaams worden de woorden ja en nee vervoegd.

English, in pronouncing foreign names, sometimes seems to have weird stresses. The way Magellan is pronounced with the stress in the middle does not seem to make much sense, it’s like saying WashINGton or something. . Still, I cannot by my life imagine a Portuguese saying it what way. The middle syllable is basically a sheva, as is Deborah. There, strangely enough, the Hebrew lays the stress on the last syllable, but without anything on the first, which, as said, is a sheva, therefore just filling. Many Dutch make the same mistake by accentuating the first syllable in Shelomo, also a sheca: the two [o]-s are the only real vowels in that name. Worse I find Melanchton, Luther’s comrade. Originally named Schwarzenerde, Black Earth he ‘graecified’ his name to Μελάγχθων, from μέλας, mélas = black and Χθών, khthón = earth. Note that the accent changes when the two words are joined together. Greek accents however didn’t use to indicate stress, they indicated pitch, like in Chinese. Listening to the modern Greek pronunciation of the name I find proximity to the English, so I stand corrected. Pronouncing ancient Greek words leaves us a choice between three possimpibilites: 1. the reconstructed classical method; 2. the Latin method, used by the Romans; and 3. modern Greek. The last option however is almost certainly by far the furthest away from the original. If Chausser’s English is already unintelligble to us, imagine how a language changes over 2,500 years. Reconstructions are based on a variety of different pieces of direct evidence from the time. Let me give you one example: the imitations of sheep sounds ancient Greek poets have left us. Aristophanes (ca. 450 - ca. 388 BC) writes: θύειν με μέλλει καὶ κελεύει βῆ λέγειν. ‘He is about to sacrifice me and make me say “BÈ”.’ (Fr(ogs?). 642? - could not corroborate this yet). Cratinus (5th c. BC), in a surviving fragment of comedy (in Dionysalexandros 5) states the following: ΄ο ηλίθιος ώσπερ πρόβατον βῆ βῆ λέγων βαδίζει - (and the fool goes about like a sheep saying "bè bè"). If beta β is pronounced as [b] and eta ῆ as long [è], we get the sound attributed to the animal by the Greeks of the time ("bèèh-bèèh"). If the letters are pronounced as in modern Greek, we get "vee-vee", which does not sound like a sheep at all by any stretch of the imagination.

My favorite example of poor English pronunciation of foreign words is orangutan. This comes from orang utan, ‘man of the forest’, it is Malaysian, and to use the Latin rules of pronunciation (third to last syllable) for that to me sounds idiotic. Such will of course have happened because of the ‘feel’ based on other words that go a similar way, like Magellan. We in Holland say DEtroit, I think because of the word REsearch. It sounds so deliciously “American”. Same with U Ezz A: because English speakers sometimes voice the [s], like in “it is”, we ‘hear’ it also in ‘USA’.

In any case, this is your language, so I have to accept your pronunciations; though I do have the right to point things out …

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Footnotes:

* Steffens translates Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?

** the number “gazillion” seems to have been defined beyond my knowledge by consensus among the pubic - correction public.

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Finally, the Dao of Dao. 

Have you ever wondered why we now have to say Beijing while we used to say Peking? Why Dao instead of Tao? Qin instead of the Ch’in dynasty?

I did wonder, and asked around, and of course nobody knew. The one straight answer I got was that in China, with the Communist takeover, another dialect got the upper hand and every Chinese pronunciation was changed. This is a very good example of an explanation that sounds plausible, well researched and all that - but is complete poppycock. Beijing’s pronunciation has always set the tone, like Versailles defined French, the BBC or Oxford British, and Haarlem Dutch (probably just because of one author). What changed was the romanization in our alphabet. 

Romanization of Chinese words always used to be every country’s own business. The Yi Jing, 易經, was written I Ching in English, I Ging in German, I Tjing in Dutch and Wrwhwzh Prmn in Russian. The Qingdao 青島 beer would be written Ch’ing Tao in Wade-Giles English, Tsingtao in German, Csing Táo in Hungarian, Tsjing Tao in Dutch and Wrwhwzh Prmn in Russian. My own self-invented Chinese name 渡復興, Du Fuxing (from 渡, Dù, ‘skipper’, and 復興, Fùxing, ‘Renaissance’) would have been Tu Fu-Hsing in the English Wade-Giles system, Tu Fuging in German, Toe Foe Sjing in Dutch, and Wrwhwzh Prmn in Russian. 

In the 1950s the Chinese government came up with its own romanization, about which I have mixed feelings. Chinese scholars creating a system in our European language system, really? If I just think of the myriads of grammars made by Europeans by forcing a Latin system on an Asian language, which did not make any sense at all - even Hungarian doesn’t have a gazillion cases, as our Latin-based grammar would prescribe, they have one, the direct object, the rest are suffixes, because that’s how Asian languages work, with suffixes instead of prepositions. So if our professors miserably fail in Asian languages, why should I trust Chinese professors messing with our letters? Also, how we decide to call Chinese names is our business, or the Chinese should write Beethoven instead of 路德維希·範·貝多芬, Lùdèwèixīfànbèiduōfēn. But with business and all that, and competing for their favor, we probably had to concede, so now the made-in-China pinyin system, half a century after its invention, has been pushed down our throats. Fine. It’s actually not a bad system at all, as far as I can see. It’s much better than most old European systems. Peking is an awful romanization from the linguistical Stone Age, and when the far superior Wade-Giles system arrived with Pei-Ching, the old form was only retained because it had already been generally accepted everywhere in the world. And the great advantage is of course that now everyone in the world at least writes not just Peking or Beijing, but all Chinese names the same way. And considering that many of those names look and sound quite similar to each other in our Yerpian ears, that is a true Godsend. I don’t think we Europeans could have achieved that by ourselves, politically.

The system uses letters that Mandarin Chinese, Beijing accent, doesn’t have, like b, d, g, q, x, z, zh, ‘to cleverly indicate sounds’ ‘which we don’t have letters for’. Those sounds are probably impossible ‘to really learn’ - but they can be approached. Just like the actual Dutch pronunciation of the name Bootsma in America ‘can almost be perfectly reached’ by writing Boat’s mah, or Bijlsma (‘Bylsma’ is actually incorrect) as Bile’s mah, all those Chinese chingchangs can be approached as well. It takes about 20 minutes to familiarize ourselves with these sounds. Below I will give a short and very general overview of the system. But even if we lack the time, it takes one minute to tell everyone that in pinyin, the letters do not sound like they normally do! 

But even that is ignored by almost the entire culture…

So my problem lies not with the Chinese government (I’ m much angrier about their their decision to simplify 2,500 characters, thus making mainland Chinese half illegible to Japanese, educated Koreans and Chinese from Singapore, Taiwan and American Chinatowns - plus it destroys cultural heritage). My problem lies with the inordinate laziness of Western culture to teach this simple system, to even explain that it is the romanization system that’s new, not the pronunciation. Beijing has always been pronounced Pèichīng with the -p unaspirated like a French- or a Dutchman would say it, (or Hebrew פֶּה, ‘mouth’) with the first syllable in a decisive tone pèi! and the last with a high tone Ching!!!!! But why doesn’t anyone know that???? When in 2008 the Olympics were in China, not a single reporter I heard seemed to have a clue how to pronounce the names, and I had to listen to all those zhoos, ksees, kings, etc... 

The flight to China takes, what, 10, 12 hours? Learning the system takes 20 minutes. Why did no one take the time? Why, why, why?!!!

Still in Amsterdam, I was corrected in my pronunciation of the word Dao, by a then philosophy fellow, now a professor. I pronounced it tao with my unaspirated Dutch -t. Turns out that my pronunciation - before I knew anything about this, I had not studied Chinese yet, and it isn’t taught anywhere else of course - just happened to be spot-on, as far as my ears can distinguish it. The -D in Dao indicates exactly the unaspirated French or Dutch -t that I was using. And while I have heard some southern dialects that seem to have voiced d-s, and b-s, official Beijng Mandarin does not. But why was she not told that in her college? Why not begin a whole curriculum of Eastern philosophy classes 20 minutes of correct pinyin? 

Why do professors, part of whose entire job is Eastern philosophy, not know how to pronounce the names of their own field?

Here is a short list of the letters and what they mean. 

b unaspirated -p as in French elle pisse et fait caca à la gare.* - Wade Giles -p

c German -c or -z as in zahlen bitte! Wade Giles -ts or -tz

ch normal (aspirated) English -ch as in Chingachgook. Wade Giles -ch’ (ch’ang)

d unaspirated -t as in French tant pis, la terre est terrible. Wade Giles -t

g unaspirated -k or -c as in French elle pisse et fait caca à la gare (the -c, not the -g) Wade Giles k

j unaspirated dry -ty as in Hungarian tyúk, but most of you wouldn’t know that. Wade Giles ch + i

k -k as in every kiss begins with Kay. Wade Giles -k’ (k’ong)

p -p as in pumpkin pie or ping pong, or the sergeant’s I’m sure all you’re thinking of is peeing on my grave - to which the private answers SIR!!! No SIR!!!! Because when I get out of this SIR!, I swear I’ll never stand in line again! - Wade Giles -p’ (P’ang)

q aspirated -ch’ as in chubby chicks choke on cheese but with saliva in both cheeks. Ask Tina Bergman for a sound example. Wade Giles -ch’ (ch’ing)

r at the beginning: -zh as in French je joue. At the end, American -r as in your car? Wade Giles -j

sh normal English -sh as in heck is for those who don’t believe in gosh. 

t -t as in tempestuous Tina times her tones totally tailor made  

v Why didn’t they use this letter?

x -ssh (in front of mouth) as she sells sea shells by the sea shore, she said with shaliva in her cheeks.  Wade Giles (hsiang)

yi -ee as in heebie-jeebies, or Narnia’s Reepicheep and Peepiceek.

z unaspirated ts like the c in Václav Havel. Wade Giles -ts or -tz

zh Italian -c as in cello Wade Giles -ch

In an episode of Boardwalk Empire, this gorgeous and extremely well costumed TV series set in the 1930s (I think it was the third season) a dealer receives a crate from China with ceramic figurines in it. He throws one to the ground, and yes, they contain heroine. This could not have happened in the 1930s. On the crate, with big letters, was printed the name Zhang. By the best of my knowledge, that spelling did not exist in the 1930s, for sure not in the English speaking world. That’s pinyin, dating from the late 1950s. Even ads late as the 1989s mainland China may have used the Wade Giles system for trading with America, in which that name would have been spelled Chang. I tried to contact HBO about this, and other websites, but they all had more advanced viral technology than my computers could handle. That’s today’s word, folks! Hi tech everything, but historians knowing their languages, not so much ...

Footnote:

* οὐκ ἔλαβον πόλιν, άλλα γὰρ ἐλπὶς ἔφη κακά (they didn’t take the city, because (the oracle) Elpis said bad things about that) is a Greek sentence that if read aloud in classical Greek, it sounds exactly like the French “Où qu’est la bonne Pauline? A la gare. Elle pisse et fait caca.” (“where is our servant Pauline? At the station. She pisses and lays a dump there”)

Through the burning, burning sand, trekked the desert caravan …

Illustrations:

1. Marilyn Monroe, my dad’s all time favorite actress. Mine is Meryl Streep. She played the Woody Allen Character’s ex in one of his movies and did that so well that ever since I cannot stand her.

2. Mime-san Yamahiro Brinkmann in her palace - 2017. She may qualify to be the shortest adult professional cellist in Sweden.

2. The page with the Wilhelmus song, from Nederlandsche Gendenckclanck, by Adriaen Valerius, 1625

3. From a manuscript from Brussels, 1607, text of the Wilhelmus

4. William the Silent (1533 - 1584†), by Adriaen Thomasz. Key, 1580

5. Wim Kan, “de man die het veel beter kon”, Dutch comedian, who only talked about politics without ever taking sides, and who was known for scolding his audiences. the text on the picture translates as what Kan can do, only Kan can do. The Dutch in this note, a similar pun on Kan’s name, was from another Dutch comedian, who, just after Kan had passed, on New Years Eve explained why he chose not to make his conference about politics. “Because that’s already been done at the other station, and besides, there is someone who used to do that much better … “ - thus giving one of the most beautiful tributes to one of the greatest comedians of the last 50 years, with the past tense unexpectedly arriving at the end of the phrase, illustrating the greatness of the loss … “omdat iemand anders dat veel beter … kon.”

6. No idea where this dirndl came from, but the landscape could possibly be south Bavaria or Austria.

7. Chinese Garden, Sidney, Australia, probably

8. Anderson Japanese Garden, Rockford, IL