Received: by ATHENA-PO-1.MIT.EDU (5.45/4.7) id AA07039; Sun, 29 Sep 91 14:30:08 EDT Received: from husc9.harvard.edu by Athena.MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA07874; Sun, 29 Sep 91 14:30:06 EDT Date: Sun, 29 Sep 91 14:26:38 -0400 From: polito@husc.harvard.edu (Jessica Polito) Message-Id: <9109291826.AA00495@husc9> To: sca@Athena.MIT.EDU Subject: Name Documentation Cc: polito@Athena.MIT.EDU, willson@Athena.MIT.EDU Yesterday, one of you (Dan?) asked if I could help you guys out with documenting the name "Mitgaard" (or rather, how he could get access to the Harvard libraries in order to do the research.) Well, my roommate is studying Old Norse, so I figured I'd ask her. In her own words, here's the result... (my opinion as a herald-wanna-be can be found at then end. Plus a capsule summary. She (my roommate) like to write....) According to Gordon, _An Introduction to Old Norse_, 1927 (proofread by J.R.R. Tolkien! An excellent book consisting of intrinsically interesting readings, plus an opaque grammatical description and a glossary, that for many decades was the only book around from which to learn Old Norse), mi[eth] means "middle, in the middle of," as in mi[eth] n[o accent aigu]tt "midnight," mi[eth]-sumar "midsummer." Gar[eth]r (the r is a nominative case suffix, which would normally appear with the word when it appears in isolation, but I trust you people to be able to weasel your ways around that, and after all we usually refer e.g. to Leifr Eiriksson (with an accent on the first i in the patronymic) without the nominative suffix...) is likewise defined as "fence; enclosure, court, farmyard; dwelling-place." For you techie types, an eth is the letter that looks like a partial differential with a hatch mark through it. Historically it indicated (and in today's IPA it indicates) the voiced dental fricative of English orthographic th in then, but in Old Norse the symbols thorn and eth (a thorn looks like a b superimposed on a p, and tends to indicate a voiceless dental fricative like the th in English thin, though the IPA symbol for this sound is a lower-case theta...) are used interchangeably, e.g. some manuscripts use thorn throughout and many use thorn word-initially and eth in other positions, but at any rate there is evidence that it did not corellate particularly closely with voicing. In modern Swedish the dental fricatives have disappeared and the forms mentioned above have been realised as mitt and g[a with a circle over it]rd (and Swedish a-with-a-circle corresponds historically and with other mainland Scandinavian languages to aa, which is for example why the way one gets that symbol in TeX is /aa) respectively; certainly rules transforming fricatives into the corresponding stops are common enough and if one really had to one could fake a phonological rule representing voicing as predictable by position etc etc etc, but at any rate I personally think that representing mi[eth]gar[eth]r (which is Actually Listed as a place in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson "[thorn] er go[eth]in h[o with a comma under it]f[eth]u sett Mi[eth]gar[eth] ok g[o with a comma]rt Valh[o with a comma]ll" "when the gods had established Mi[eth]gar[eth] and built Valhalla") as Mitgaard indicating "middle dwelling-place" or something similarly unsurprising (in the Edda, Mi[eth]gar[eth]r was the middle world, the world of men, containing the world of giants and the lands of dwarves and of dark elves; it also contained the spring of Mimir, one of the springs feeding a root of the world tree; so assuming the associations of the mythic status of the place might be considered slightly pompous...A Folklore and Mythology major friend of mine suggested that you ought instead to name yourselves after the place where they went to study black magic, but you probably don't want to hear about that...) would be perfectly legitimate. For reference, this was Old Norse spoken in Iceland (we have far fewer documents from Norway or the places (Sweden and Denmark) where East Norse was spoken) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Please do address any further questions to me if you have no Resident Expert in Old Norse locally available, as I would be delighted by the challenge of locating an answer, and it would help to reassure me that I am in fact receiving a practical education as a Scandinavian Studies concentrator at Harvard... --Kendra Willson (willson@husc.harvard.edu) _______________________________________________________________________________ This is Fiammetta again... in short, yes the name is period (although the "t" and "d" might have been pronounced as hard "th"'s -- like the "th" in "this" ) but unfortunately, not only is the construction of the name period, but it actually exists in Old Norse mythology. Which will be a real problem if you try to get it past (if any of the heralds recogize the name), as you're not supposed to use real place-names and especially not fantastic ones. As i understand it. Which may not be acurate. Well, good luck... --Fiammetta Adalieta di Damiano Leo borough of Duncharloc (insert obligitory gloat about the variety of courses Harvard offers here :-)