discussion

Sound Play

lfsaldenbirch ,

I am preparing to graph the frequencies of those words which show sound play – which we have tagged “onomatopoeia” in the word entries.  I cannot but help to include all of Gollum’s extra-sibilant utterances as well as his call-name.  Given that I’m counting the name “Gollum” in this analysis, I must use the best sound-names of the whole novel, Roäc and Carc. Their names suggest the entire Raven language and a suspicion that we readers have heard ravens talking among themselves, not making simple sounds, an idea we have encountered before.

Including those names and Gollumisms, there are 488 sound-play words in our spreadsheet of 7172 uncommon words.

Food v Sound

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There are forty three separate food words, about half as many as there are sound words.  They are repeated for a total of 125 food words, about one-third as many as there are sound words.  I have heard frequently about the food imagery – how it expressed the Baggins side of our reluctant hero – but not much if ever about the sound words.  Hmmm.  Is this a function of many food words being in the Ten Thousand?  Is it also a function of the sound words acting more subtly on us?

Vocables

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I learned many years ago from Professor Catriona Parsons that Gàidhlig waulking songs, the work songs which keep the rhythm for hand-fulling woolen cloth, are full of “vocables”.  In the first song in the linked video, the group’s words between the solo lines are vocables.

“These are not like fa-la-la,” she said. “They are very ancient sounds and they have meaning, but we have lost the meaning.”

She then taught us very carefully to pronounce these syllables, which usually alternate in the songs with phrases in current lexical use, just as she had heard them growing up on the Isle of Lewis.  I fancied that it did not matter if we knew the meaning, as long as those to whom we sang could understand.

Similarly, what’s up with tra-la-la-lally?  Corey Olsen, The Tolkien Professor, makes this point: ” tra-la-la-lally
here down in the valley!” [03.014] sounds very much like “tra-la-la-lally” is the name of the thing which is happening down in the valley.  These vocables are definitely sound play, only spoken by elves.  Do these sounds make those singers a bit alien?  Do they remind us that they speak other languages natively?  I believe they do.  In honor of the play of sound-on-sound in these vocables, I am giving them the ‘Onomatopoeia” tag.

  • 03.014 O! tra-la-la-lally
  • 03.015 O! tril-lil-lil-lolly
  • 19.002 Come! Tra-la-la-lally!
  • 19.003 O! Tra-la-la-lally
  • 19.004 Fa-la!
  • 19.004 Fa-la-la-lally
  • 19.004 With Tra-la-la-lally
  • 19.004 Tra-la-la-lally

I am separating out the Non-Lexical-Vocables after a bloody morning of trying to find a more suitable word. Haven’t found one yet, might have to ask my fellow scholar Jamie Stinnett.

  • 06.077 Ya hey!
  • 06.078 Ya hey!
  • 06.078 Ya harri-hey!
  • 06.078 Ya hoy!
  • 06.079 And with that Ya Hoy!

Onomatopoeia

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I hope you have enjoyed our survey of sound play in the uncommon words!  I am charmed to learn that eighty four of the words – more than 8% of our uncommon words! – were sound-play words such as “Hum, whistle, sh”.  Many of those words are repeated, of course: they comprise 316, about one-third of 1% of the total words of the book!

The formation of a word from a sound associated with the thing or action being named; the formation of words imitative of sounds.

The use of echoic or suggestive language

I began with the idea that sound-play words would be light and funny, and that I would be able to tag and track them to identify light-hearted passages.  Then a leaf rustled and the dragon hummed.  This poetic technique quite simply adds sensation to each scene, intensifying the mood.  Sometimes Tolkien even uses the onomatopoeic words to create tone – brightening the scariest parts of his children’s bedtime tale.

Alert Word Fans will see that I captured a few more sound-play words after this post – they are included in this post’s total.

“onomatopoeia, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 29 May 2015.

Tomnoddy

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“Tomnoddy” means a foolish or stupid person and Tolkien says right there in the text that it’s an insult.  We’re tagging it as “low”.  Trivia, Tom-Noddy is also a local name for a the puffin (Fratercula arctica).  Notice something that Tolkien does now and then?  He has made a compound word out of a hyphenated one (click here for our discussion of making hyphenated words out of two singles).  There are more examples which we will be interested in later, and these feed my theory of Tolkien reminding us that he is merely translating from Bilbo’s Westron writings.

  • 08.097 Old Tomnoddy,
  • 08.097 Old Tomnoddy can’t spy me!
  • 08.098 and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.

“Tom-noddy, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 20 May 2015.

Yell

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I am fascinated to observe the gap in the uses of “yell” in chapters 9 through 16.  Surely, there was a good deal of noise being made in those chapters.

  • 04.015 Of course he gave a very loud yell,
  • 04.015 as loud a yell as a hobbit can give,
  • 04.016 Bilbo’s yell had done that much good.
  • 04.036 The yells and yammering,
  • 04.038 down more dark passages with the yells of the goblin-hall
  • 04.048 and gave one yell before they were killed.
  • 04.048 The ones behind yelled still more,
  • 05.137 With yells of delight
  • 05.138 They yelled twice as loud as before,
  • 05.141 This way!’ some yelled.
  • 05.141 That way!’ others yelled.
  • 06.028 As soon as Gandalf had heard Bilbo’s yell
  • 06.071 Then suddenly goblins came running up yelling.
  • 06.082 the goblins yelled
  • 07.084 They yelled with delight
  • 08.073 and though after a while it seemed to him they changed to yells
  • 17.050 The yells were deafening.

Food words

lfsaldenbirch ,

I hope you have enjoyed today’s run through the uncommon food words of The Hobbit.  “Cold” and “chicken”  and others were among The Ten Thousand most common words, so we don’t have the entire food picture of the book.  I have tagged all the food words, and I hope to use some of the techniques of lexomics in coming months to graph the progress from the unexpected party further and further away from The Shire until it’s nothing but cram as far as the eye can see.

Will one of my fellow scholars take on the challenge of charting all of the food words?  Possibly caloric intake versus miles  hiked as documented by the fabulous Karen Wynn Fonstad?  I hope you do – and I hope our little Concordance is of great use!

Hyphenated words

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Tolkien uses over 600 hyphenated words in The Hobbit.  Most of them, like “tree-trunk”, are words that go together easily in English.  Most of them use words from The Ten Thousand most common.  Why hyphenate?    I suggest that hyphenating words which don’t need hyphenation emphasizes that, as Tolkien would have it, we are reading a translation of the journal that Bilbo wrote.  There isn’t quite an English word to convey the meaning, so two words bound together will have to do.  Examining these words is another project in itself.  I am leaving them out of this edition of the Concordance, this work I am doing through July, 2015.

  • 19.048 and handed him the tobacco-jar.
  • 14.017 Just now he was enjoying the sport of town-baiting
  • 02.079 it was thick as a young tree-trunk

Update 2015.07.09: I put them in.

Gollum’s idiolect

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Gollum utters quite a few words which have common headwords, but did not get filtered out for three reasons:

S: Gollum either hisses or adds the S sound to 67 words.  Six times, “Precious” is spelled with two Ss on the end; twice there are three Ss, and once there are four Ss.  “Goblinses”, “eggses”, “losst”, “yess”, “uss”, “iss”, “quesstion”, and “nassty” all get an elongated sibilance.  He even adds Ss where there were previously none at all.

  • 05.022 and chats with it a bitsy,
  • 05.115 but it’s tricksy.
  • 05.117 and he’ll come creepsy

Onomatopoeia: Gollum does articulate that “horrible swallowing noise in his throat” (05.015) as well as several hisses.

Contraction: like one of the trolls, Gollum contracts “perhaps” to “praps”

  • 05.022 Praps ye sits here
  • 05.022 praps it does,

On the movement of language

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I have expressed poorly that older forms of language hang on in more rural places.  No language changes from its Middle to its Modern form in a day or even a decade.

Elizabeth Mary Wright has said with elegance what I have only grunted.

many a delightful old word which ran away from a public career a century or two ago, and left no address, may thus be discovered in its country retreat, hale and hearty yet, though hoary with age.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Annotated Hobbit.  Revised and expanded edition annotated by Douglas A. Anderson. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston. Print. p 211.