Once again, a peaceful word. Tonight while I sleep, I’ll reconsider whether every word-play word needs to be “low” or “high” (or both). I suspect not. You’ll hear more about how I work with this idea in a later method post, Word Fans. For now, I will continue as I have been doing.
The census seems to be complete! We have 7172 total uncommon words in The Hobbit, and those turn out to represent 975 individual words of all categories. I knew my fellow Word Fans would want to know.
In yesterday’s 7172 post, I made a plan to next address the words which have some special tag in the OED, such as obsolete, archaic, rare, dialectical, or jocular words. Overnight, my plan jelled. My goal from the beginning was to distinguish between words which are high-register and low, ignoring the middle ground for now.
I’m going to use the tag “high” on the very few obsolete words, the archaic words, the rare words, and other words which contribute to high register, as labeled by OED.
The tag “low” is going on parochial words, dialectical words, regional words, cuss words, jocular words.
By making tagged entries for each of these, we’ll be ready to move forward with our lexomics analysis while still making entries for other words.
Update 2015.06.20: tagging things “high” or “low” is an even less exact science than picking cherries… I have thrown in the towel on this one for now.
After removing The Ten Thousand most common words in written British English from the approximately 96,000 words of The Hobbit, I took out those words such as “immeasurable” which are in the Ten Thousand when stripped to their base word (“measure”). I had earlier reported the total remaining words as “Seven Thousand and Change“. Since then I’ve spotted a few more words to eliminate for being common words with extra syllables.
At the moment, there are 7172, although that number may move a bit still. We have entries for 1618 of them; 2,360 original Middle Earth words such as names are being held aside for later consideration. So, for the remaining words, I plan to focus first on archaic and rare words, and poetical words and perhaps funny words because those seem to be the ones showing patterns of use. I will certainly also take pleasure in finishing all the entries of a particular letter just for that satisfaction, and I have planned one or two more grammar explorations such as “be-” prefixes.
My technical support person (thank you, my son) will be able and willing to help me with the Lexomics portion of our analysis in June, therefore the focus on those words first.
The prefix “a-”, as in aback, abaft, athwart, is actually six or seven different prefixes all of which happen to be spelled the same in Modern English, according to our good friends at the OED. Today, we explore our a- words.
Earlier discussion of a- as a gerund prefix used by Trolls.
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!
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.
Update 2015.07.09: I put them in.
As we explore the words, you may notice the tags which each word earns. I’m hoping at the end of the word-documentation to use the awesome lexomics software of Professor Michael Drout of Wheaton College and special guest lecturer at Signum University. This is why we are examining each word for interesting special categories which we might use to analyze the text and find the patterns. My data-moosher spent part of this morning looking through Dr. Drout’s code and is excited to help me use it in June.
We have discovered words which Tolkien reverse-engineered with his master philologist toolkit. These have earned the “JRRT” tag. This tag does not apply to his onomastics or his invented languages!
Tomorrow as soon as I can, I’ll retro-edit entries to date to change the archaism and obsolescence rating to that of the OED and fix citations. Learning every day! I hope that you’ve enjoyed today’s words beginning with “be-“, I know I have!
words that you were saying 