On Grammar

by Cate

“Surely this Alagaësia is a barbaric realm,” said the traveler, “for it hath fearsome grammar.”

• excerpt from the unfinished Lutefisk Yarns, recovered in the Library of Ellesméra

When I was younger, I might pass hours with my nose in the corner of a book like The Lord of the Rings, copying down the Elvish inscriptions Mr. Tolkien wrote on the title page, trying to fathom from “A Elbereth Gilthoniel” and Galadriel’s Lament how Sindarin and Quenya made sense of their syllables, even translating the Anglo-Saxon runes scattered throughout The Hobbit. I still love this stuff. And when handled correctly – i.e., by the master pen of Mr. Tolkien – fantastic names and languages can be one of the loveliest and most pleasing elements of high fantasy to read. I’m no writer, but I know my grammar well enough, especially English grammar. Which is why, in part, I’m so darn ticked off at Mr. Paolini’s Inheritance series.

Disclaimer: I harbor no great love for Eragon. I loathe Eldest. Any sarcasm in the following spiel is probably intended.

PART ONE

“Not that any of us knows all the words in the language, but you must be familiar with its grammar and structure so that you do not kill yourself…”

• Oromis, “The Secret Lives of Ants,” page 293 of Eldest, American edition

We all know by now that our young author prodigy has a bit of a problem with his prose; Eragon primarily reads like fan fiction written by a teenage boy, Eldest largely the same, but with strange little fits of violently purple prose and a tendency to put on airs, as if to remind us to what heights of superiority over the “merely human” masses Eragon has risen. But before I rail on about that – since it’s been well-covered by writers far more skilled than I – let us turn to examining one particular aspect of Paolini’s work that annoys the snot out of me. Or should we say annoyeth? Or annoyest?

Ah, yes, the slips into archaic English. Perhaps they lend a feel of gravitas to the story, suggest different levels of formality, give us a hint of the dialects of Alagaësia (for there must be many of them, given Alagaësia’s size and the apparent lack of effective communication between civilizations; surely Mr. Paolini is simply sparing us the trouble of having to wade through the unfamiliar turns of speech and the varied “feel” of all those different dialects when he has all his characters speak the same way). Perhaps the author just had a hankering to stick in ayes and thees as often as possible because they’re olde-soundinge, yet kewl and speshul at the same time. I’d vote the latter, given his penchant for doing so with characters, landscapes, random bits of history, random meditations on Elvish body parts…

Rant revving up.

Quick grammar review, in case you were wondering. Skip the next two paragraphs if you already know what I’m talkin’ about. Early modern English – which is the source of Mr. Paolini’s über-awesome olde-soundinge vocabulary – had a substantially more structured grammar system, in many ways, than the English we speak today. Nowadays, of course, if we want to talk to someone the only way to address them politely is you, unless you happen to be one of those privileged folks from a city where it’s considered normal to say y’all or youse. Before the year 1700 or so, however, this wasn’t the case, and thankfully still isn’t in most European languages (i.e. Spanish, German, Italian, Welsh, Russian, NORWEGIAN; French being a notable exception). Our word you originally was the second person plural pronoun, or why are y’all running. This plural pronoun evolved into a respectful way to address a single person – the same thing happened in Latin, French, and Spanish – and eventually replaced our original second person singular pronoun, which was thou, or hey you with the five-foot sword. Furthermore, thou was only used in the nominative case – when the second person singular performed the verb – and ye likewise for the second person nominative plural. Ye, by the by, subsequently died out and was replaced with the modern you, which had become the respectful form of address for both singular and plural second persons. There were the possessives (thy/thine and your/yours, respectively), and any other part of the sentence that required the second person got landed with thee and you, which will hence be called the predicate cases. If this makes no sense to you, think of our nominative, possessive, and predicate cases in the first person (I, my/mine, me, and we, our[s], us) and in the third person (he/she/it, his/her[s]/its, him/her/it and they, their[s], them), which we still use today.

Verbage was also slightly more complex. Let’s take the verb thwack for our example. All plural and respectful subjects (we, ye, the formal you, and anything they could be substituted for) simply used thwack as it was, without adornment – so we can say we thwack Eragon on the head, or Luke and Frodo thwack Eragon on the head, it makes no difference to the verb. Same with the first person singular; I thwack Eragon on the head is perfectly sound grammar. For the other singular subjects, thou and anything equivalent to he/she/it, there were special rules. Thou gets to end its verbs with –est; the he/she/it clan, with –eth. Therefore we must say thou thwackest Eragon on the head and Murtagh thwacketh Eragon into a pulp. And it should be annoyeth the snot out of me, not annoyest the snot out of me, since that would be insulting you, o esteemed second person singular reader.

Some of our Puritan friends in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held the belief that since all people were equal, they must refuse to use the respectful pronoun you to address anyone, even the king (which ticked His Majesty off to the point of kicking the Puritans out of England); instead they called everybody thee, which is unfortunately bad grammar. Were Mr. Paolini well-read in Puritan literature rather than in classic fantasy and über-kewl Old Norse, he might be forgiven by the archaic grammar police. Happily Unfortunately he is not.

While acknowledging the author’s rather feeble attempts at injecting dialects into his dialogue, I maintain that he needs a crash course in archaic English. “What has put me in mine shtate?” says Orik in Eldest, page 367. Probably hanging out with hairless hippie Elves or accidentally eating hallucinogenic mushrooms, as there isn’t a good reason for his using the word mine when he should have said my. Never mind, it’s his wife. This slip of grammar is permissible a page later when Orik says, “Thinkest thou I would marry outside my clan? She’s the granddaughter of mine aunt Vardrûn…”; since aunt begins with a vowel, mine aunt is rather like saying an aunt, but mine shtate is like saying an shtate…bad form, my dear dwarf. I would applaud him, however, for his excellent demonstration of subject-verb agreement in thinkest thou – except he has no reason to suddenly address Eragon with the archaic, non-respectful form of the second person when before and after they call each other you. There’s the same issue with Rhunön: “Zarroc,” she says, “I remember thee…As perfect as the day you were finished” (Eldest, page 302). Iech. For a people who place great emphasis on station and proper respect, Rhunön seems a tad confused; then again she is a bit quirky.

I don’t know, maybe (read: definitely) I’m just a nit picker, but these spasms of an older English don’t give me a sense of formality or history; they make me snort, or grimace at the more glaringly incorrect ones. The characters succeed in sounding pretentious, not mysterious or even drunk. These three instances were taken from about seventy of the thousand-or-more pages between Eragon and Eldest, and believe you me there are far more egregious mistakes than these. If someday I get around to slogging through Alagaësia again, I shall by all means revise this article; for now, though, I plead the excuse that I’m lazy and will tell you to just go and read the books again if you say, “Is that all you can come up with? Pshaw.”

PART TWO

Eragon’s ignorance of the underpinnings of the ancient language quickly became apparent. When he had traveled with Brom, the old storyteller had concentrated on having Eragon memorize lists of words that he might need to survive…

• “The Secret Lives of Ants,” page 294 of Eldest, American edition

Underpinnings, my foot. Several articles have already pointed out that the ancient (or Elvish) language in Inheritance is little more than a cipher for English, that translations between the two languages are nearly always perfectly linear affairs. However, it isn’t quite true – the ancient language seems to have no discernible grammatical structure at all, while modern English simply has a system that’s lost most of its inflections. English grammar is still hanging in there, but its inflections have spent so much time hanging out with other inflections that they’ve become almost impossible to tell apart. The ancient language…just…nuthin’. This is very alarming, considering that such de-inflectionizing trends are very common among languages; I shudder to think what kind of garble the common folk are speaking if even the ancient language wants for structure. Let’s have a look at a Quenya, or high-Elven, verse from Mr. Tolkien’s The Return of the King:

Et Eärello Endorenna utúlien | Sinomë maruvan ar Hildinyar tenn’ Ambar-metta.

Picking these lovely lines apart, we emerge with many delicious tidbits about the grammatical framework of Quenya, not least that it’s a highly inflected language, where it is necessary, for example, neither to say unto Middle-Earth – one can simply take Endor and add unto on the end, in the form of –enna; nor to say I have come – the I have is all incorporated in the prefix and suffix attached to the root verb túl. The members of the Romance, Celtic, and Germanic language groups (among many others) are or were similarly defined by their own sets of inflections; www.verbix.com/languages/oldnorse.shtml has a nice brief lowdown on Old Norse, which belongs to the Northern Germanic family, while http://hem.passagen.se/peter9/gram goes into significantly more detail about the language. And this is where I suspect Mr. Paolini got a little befuddled. To begin by examining the conversation around the infamous blessing-gone-awry given by Eragon in Farthen Dûr (“The Secret Lives of Ants,” page 294 of Eldest):

   “You blessed a child in the ancient language?” asked Oromis, suddenly alert. “Do you remember how you worded this blessing?”

   “Aye.”

   “Recite it for me.” Eragon did so, and a look of pure horror engulfed Oromis. He exclaimed, “You used skölir! Are you sure? Wasn’t it sköliro?”

   Eragon frowned.  “No, skölir. Why shouldn’t I have used it?  Skölir means shielded.  ‘…and may you be shielded from misfortune.’ It was a good blessing.”

   “That was no blessing, but a curse.” Oromis was more agitated than Eragon had ever seen him.  “The suffix o forms the past tense of verbs ending with r and i. Sköliro means shielded, but skölir means shield. What you said was ‘May luck and happiness follow you and may you be a shield from misfortune.’”

(Urgh, more pseudo-archaic language. Anyways.) This is all fine and good until it dawns on one that the whole conversation is ridiculous, simply another stab at making the book appear more scholarly than it truly is. Personally I’m rooting for the theory that the author’s trying to confuse the readers so that they don’t try to actually learn the ancient language.

If we accept that sköliro does in fact mean shielded, we must accept it in the context of what Oromis says about it: that sköliro is the past tense of skölir, which is shield – not to shield, mind you – skölir, then, is not even a proper verb, but a noun, and as such can have no past tense at all. But, but, you say, couldn’t skölir function both as a noun and a verb? All right, all right, perhaps it’s irregular; if this be the case, sköliro might well mean shielded, but in the sense of “I shielded,” not “I am shielded.” With verbs in English, this difference between the past tense and the past participle, in which a verb can function as an adjective, is not always clear. But if we replaced skölir- with rit-, rito would translate to English in the past tense, wrote, when the speaker wants the past participle, written. To further the confusion, we’ll loose the entire blessing-curse-critter upon this unhappy article. In full it reads: Atra guliä un ilian tauthr ono un atra ono waíse skölir fra rauthr, allegedly translating to May luck and happiness follow you and may you be a shield from misfortune. Immediately we’ve got a case problem on our hands: ono, which hopefully is the singular form of the second person (but it isn’t, based on other sentences) – otherwise Eragon could have been addressing the entire crowd at Farthen Dûr – is used without changing form for both a predicate position and a nominative position; in other words, ono means both thee and thou. Considering how inflected Old Norse should be, Eragon actually said either “May luck and happiness follow you and may there be a shield from misfortune for you,” or “May luck, happiness, and you follow [someone else around] and may you be a shield from misfortune,” or possibly even “Hey you, may luck and happiness follow [follow whom?] and may you be a shield from misfortune.” We’ll not go into the obvious one-to-one encoding method of translation, because I possess only a smidgen of the skill required for tackling such a task. But despite his intent, Eragon’s “atrocious grammar” bars the possibility of him saying what either he or Oromis discussed. Wait – never mind. I forgot to factor in the über-Stu kewlness factor.

Furthermore, verb infinitives (to shield, to run, to thwack) in Old Norse end with a. Translating the three parenthesized verbs into Paolini’s ancient language, assuming it’s essentially Old Norse, might give us skölira, hlaupa, jierda. Eragon, however, steers his Elvish horse with the words, “Hlaupa!” and “Letta!” – “To go!” and “To stop!” Wording is important, as we’re constantly reminded. Eragon ought to be commanding his horse; instead he ends up just yelping his word to nobody in particular. Steinr reisa succumbs to the same infuriating (just breathe slowly, Cate!) lack of inflection-reflection. The similarity to English, I personally don’t have a problem with; were it not for the spell’s…issues, I might even find it comforting, knowing that the ancient language is strange but not wholly alien. Which brings up an interesting question – if the two are related, and they obviously are, should it be possible to lie in Eragon’s language, an offshoot and extension of the ancient language? But I digress. Steinr reisa translates to [A] stone to raise up; yet steinr is in the nominative case, so it must be acting, NOT acted upon. To raise, we’ve seen its kind before. The folks at http://hem.passagen.se will tell us easily enough that I raise up a stone in Old Norse goes something like Stein reisi, and May a stone arise, Steinn rísi. Note the lack of atra, a word translated in Inheritance’s glossary as may; such a word isn’t often necessary in an inflected language.

I don’t know what’s worse, consistent bad grammar or no grammar, but Mr. Paolini’s opted for the latter and even this warped inflection trend isn’t a uniform one. Not a few words of the ancient language, particularly those in Eragon, consist solely of their stripped-down elemental roots with no means to link themselves together.

There is one happy instance of proper noun inflection (at last! you cry) I noticed in the glossary, which made me very glad indeed. Unfortunately it’s the one inflection that we still retain in English – possessive – and was something of a letdown to me, who saw that watery ray of hope for the ancient language shine for a brief moment, just before the grammar dinghy was smashed upon the rocks again. Please forgive the purple prose.

A final bit of ranting is due, my inner stickler shouts at me, for the linguistic crimes of Domnia abr Wyrda, the Dominance of Fate chronicling the illustrious, bittersweet, and oh-so-original history of Alagaësia. Disregarding the fact that domnia at least is stolen and shouldn’t even be in the ancient language – we’ll get into that in just a second – abr wyrda shows the same ignorance of the basic workings of grammar. Dominance of Fate means Fate’s Dominance, yeah? Abr wyrda, however, means roughly over fate (the prepositions about, of, from, and over are often linked together in sense and use); fate isn’t dominating anything, it’s being dominated. While this is a possible sense in the author’s translation of the name, I find it an unlikely one. And now let us examine domnia, I.M.H.O. a blatant example of Latin theft. Dominance originates in the Latin word dominus, master or lord, which in turn comes from domus, house or dwelling. A dominus, then, was the fellow at the head of the household, who exercised control and held sway over all the other members. Sadly for Old Norse, the Romance language Latin is but a distant cousin and anything resembling dominus really has no business sticking its nose in other language families’ affairs. But it’s such a lovely word, cries Mr. Paolini, such a useful one, such a necessary one to the history of Alagaësia! Well, happily, the Germanic family have their own solution. With English, lord is derived from hlāf-weard, or bread-warden – a fairly similar sense to dominus, since the bread-warden or bread-winner of a house is usually the one in control. Sooo…etymologically speaking, dominance and lordship share much the same meaning and history. If you must steal someone’s nose, it’s less obvious when you steal it from your sister than when you take it from your Italian boyfriend. But better still than abducting an Anglo-Saxon word, Old Norse had herra, a word for lord implying age and wisdom, and þengill, with military connotations. I don’t have any useful knowledge of Old Norse; this information is easily obtainable from any Internet search engine. Þengill sounds like a perfectly satisfactory source to build a word meaning dominance from – better, actually, than dominance itself, what with its domestic roots. Just a short research jaunt, that’s all it would have taken to make the inner stickler happy…well, less angry. If the author had to sin, why could he not have kept it in the family?

Now, had Mr. Paolini used Old Norse as the touchstone for his ancient language, running the words through a series of pronunciation or grammar shifts to cook up a new language reminiscent of the one he started with, or kneading in his own major elements (silly words like zar’roc that look nothing like the main word body, and thefts like the one mentioned above, do NOT count), or even grasping the fundamental structure of Old Norse and actually utilizing it, I would have thought him clever. Perhaps he tried; I can’t tell; but he’s done a sloppy job of it regardless. What he accomplished was the creation of a cool-looking code with three ways of saying may. The scattered little bits of grammar that may still be lurking under Mr. Paolini’s ancient language are hiding themselves very well, perhaps to avoid being eaten. Rather than the rich, natural, true feel of a well-made language like Quenya or Sindarin or Old Norse, we are left with the bastardized shell of a tongue and the hollow, frail characterization of what should have been the most vibrant culture in Eldest. Most of the book is spent in Du Weldenvarden; is it too much to ask that real effort be put into crafting an element central both to the forest’s preservation and to the Inheritance series as a whole?

PART THREE

The traveler now removed his socks and took his leave of Alagaësia until the morn, writhing in pain as a passing Dwarf cried, “Good night to thou and thine kin!”  When he was once again in possession of his faculties, the traveler arose, barefoot, and thwacked the Dwarf thoroughly; and behold, he was well satisfied, and slept soundly through the night.

• excerpt from the unfinished Lutefisk Yarns, recovered in the Library of Ellesméra

That’s it. Hope it wasn’t too disappointing.