A friend asked why I'd never figured out my vocal range. I thought I was a light tenor as that's where my tessitura lies. Well, after a bit of a struggle finding middle C (see, on a piano it is easy. It's the one in the middle. For synthesized instruments it can be harder to determine the octave), I sung my highest comfortable note and my lowest comfortable note and they were exactly the notes identified as typical range for baritone. So I'm mildly disappointed at that, but at least I know now.
I'm also still struggling with the "high C" on the trumpet. That's the C above the treble clef. Trumpet players throw around the term "double C" and what they usually mean by that (unless they are very inexperienced) is the C an octave above that. No two can agree on whether a double F is below or above that double C.
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Still struggling with the book. Still on a key scene that brings out and will largely define the inner and outer conflicts, all the way out to the meta level. I just dropped a major character from the scene along with all the stuff I was going to do with him. I think I may have added a new person, though. I'll have to see.
Reworked the first part of the first scene to make the camera guy a proper character and it helps. I'm going to take another crack at it, though; going to try doing their first meeting in-scene -- if for no other reason than it allows someone to say the name of my protagonist and allow her to have some conversation as herself before she gets into character for the video.
I'm also still on the fence about the scene where the goddess Athena shows up in disguise to drop some cryptic hints. I've spilled a lot of ink -- err, electrons -- pondering the many and varied pros and cons involved in the scene and what underlies it.
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I'm trying not to do much free research now because I don't want new ideas. I'm tugged in too many directions already. But read about a private museum in Japan that may have bought up a whole hoard of looted artifacts over a short period. It was funded by a person close to the charismatic leader of a weird and controlling cult and it has a fancy modernist building that is described as including an entrance that wouldn't be out of place in a James Bond villain lair.
I was also looking up nothing more than a possible surname for a character. I looked for the author of Captain Michalis (famed Greek writer, but that was all I remembered at the time). One link later and there was the intriguing mention of the "accent wars." I think the editor flubbed that one, because what it actually was, was the struggle to define modern Greek.
And it is a fascinating read. Short form; when Greek Independence finally came, the elite (academics and politicians) saw the need for a national identity, particularly, one that was clearly linked to the classical past. They rejected what they saw as a "debased, shopkeeper's speech" and, like the French Academy, tried to define a proper grammatical language with a standard orthography that preserved as much as possible the classical heritage.
Not the first culture that has gone through this. I might venture a majority of nations have had something like this when they grappled with the idea of nationhood. The Chinese and Japanese both went through major orthographic reforms, English speakers fell in love with latinate grammar and tried to impose that on a hybrid germanic language, meaning even today almost no-one can explain who went to the shop with them without stopping to think about it).
The Greeks managed to get it worse than most, in part because they came up with a sort of hybrid, a language that was sort of a simplified classical greek combined with vaguely familiar "demotic" (the most common name for the Greek equivalent of vulgate) and a whole bunch of often-clumsy neologisms.
So the new language fought with not just language as she was spoke but also retrenched classicists, a battle made all the more confused by the fact that almost nobody actually understood the rules of classical Greek that they shouted at each other, and the Katharevousa was still very much a work in progress and nobody could agree on its rules. Oh, yes, and some people were fighting for demotic but it didn't have any standard written form and was split into far too many dialects.
It got so bad that generations of school children spent all their time being told all the words they already knew were wrong and being taught how to spell words that not even the adults could agree with; leading to generations that were nearly illiterate and an elite that was more and more divorced from the general populous.
Eventually, though, demotic won -- but it was a hard struggle, especially as the nationalistic aims of the Katharevousas (the language of a unified Greece versus the degraded polyglot of immigrants and modern metics) cross-bred with accusations of populism, communism, atheism, and of course class struggle. The identifications of language with political aims got so strong and so weird that when the Junta took over in the 60's they threw out the demotic textbooks and forced the poor students back to Katharevousa.
So it is a fascinating story of the process by which language can be used (and mis-used) to define common culture, common cause, and convenient or inconvenient divisions of class and politics and national identity.
Thing is; demotic wasn't a wonderful thing when it started. What is now standard Greek has borrowed some of the more structured grammar and more flowery terms from Katharevousa. It is itself a hybrid language, and stronger for it. But what the academists missed is that demotic remained connected to spoken, and common, language. People were able to (learn to) read a language that was similar enough to what they spoke to feel natural, they gained from what they read a wider vocabulary and more powerful grammatical forms that could, in turn, be used in speech. And that speech was the basis of further codifications of the language.
(And not to overstate; diglossia is a natural state of many languages, from those where the distinctions are difficult to draw -- spoken versus written English, for instance -- to places where there exist simultaneously a commonly used language and a more formal language used in special circumstances.)
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