16 Comments

It’s interesting that we now say “What for?” to mean “Why?,” constructed pretty much like “Wherefore?” On the other hand we don’t say “That for!” for “Therefore” — and “Wherefore” and “Therefore” were part of a regular pattern in which you stuck almost any preposition after “where,” “there,” and “here,” to make the equivalent of “preposition+what?,” “preposition+that,” and “preposition+this.” So, “wherein,” “therein,” and “herein,” or “whereupon,” “thereupon,” and “hereupon.” German still does this with da- or dar- (for prepositions with consonants and vowels respectively), like “darüber,” “davon,” “darin,” etc. (with their corresponding “wo-/wor-” and “hier-“ forms), and frankly I think it’s kind of a shame English has mostly lost the pattern.

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n. Wow nI ow what. W

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When I was in high school, i used to confuse a German exchange student staying with us by saying "how come" instead of why. lol

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"Slither hither"

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We still use “Thence” in aviation charts:)

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You sound like you are having good fun with a microphone and the 410 section of the library.

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'So we may also in heart and mind thither ascend.'

As a user of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (Church of England), I am a frequent speaker of C17 English. (Actually, it was probably archaic in 1662 and can be traced back to 1549.) The quotation is from the collect for Ascension Day. 'hither' and 'whither' also appear in prayers and psalms. You might like this (from the Baptism liturgy):

'Then the Priest shall speak to the persons to be baptized on this wise.

WELL beloved, who are come hither desiring to receive holy Baptism ...'

And I can assure you that the pronunciation of thither is ðiðer - both 'th' sounds the same.

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Coleman Hawkins - Body and Soul?

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Wonderful episode — all about dikdiks! No, not the African antelope. I mean deictics — words that “point” somewhere. I’m not a linguist, but I once took a class from Bill Hanks, the U of Chicago linguist who literally wrote the book on Yucatec Maya deictics. You cited a Caucasian language where “above” or “below” provides deictic richness; in Maya, it’s “inside” or “outside” (i.e., you use a different word if you’re in a house talking to someone outside of it, etc.)

One correction: For the third Spanish word (“way over there”), I think you meant to say “allá,” not repeat “allí.”

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So , I suppose "dither" is neither here nor there?

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I have seen prescriptivist complaints against saying "from whence" as redundant, since supposedly "whence" already includes "from" in its meaning.

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I have a soft spot for prescriptivists, as thoroughly unpopular as they are in the Americas.

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FYI Pevear and Volokhonsky use “Get thee hence, Satan!” as well (pg 335). I believe it’s the King James Version translation of a line from the Book of Matthew.

I think Pevear and Volokhonsky’s versions sound odd because Tolstoy sounds that way even in the Russian—same with Dostoevsky—and they preserve a lot of the authors’ own voices. Just like “people in Jane Austen sound odd.”

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Regarding your question about our pronunciation of Karamazov in American English, I would venture that it stems from the Italian pronunciation of the letter Z, and how we inherit that in some words borrowed from Italian such as pizza, piazza, and (perhaps most importantly for this case) mozzarella.

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Also — in fact, more likely — the German pronunciation of just -z-, as in Mozart.

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I thought that, but in German the book is Die Brüder Karamasow. So not via German.

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