APPENDICIAL DANGLY BITS

(see also 2: SLIDES & REFERENCES)

Return (one of the post-talk next steps) to Lanfranc Cigala = Guilelma de Rosers partimen 282.14 and see how it’s changed in the light of these other (in talk) consensualities; also how it has done so with respect its own intertextual transtextual network, inc. contrafactum 282.6 & Gace Brulé, 282.10 Marian song, “ma mort non li consenta”; 282.12 ioi; 282.4 psychomachia

Concordance of Medieval Occitan further work…

CONSEN* + IOI* JOI* and other spellings

CONSEN* + SEN

CONSEN* + LEIAL, OBEDIENZ, & other terms of loyalty, fidelity, promise (exchange / interchange, interaction / transaction) +/- MERCE, ACORDAR

CONSEN* + NO* (same line, within 3 lines, 5, etc.)

Following up a hunch, checking if there are differences in usage between single-voice canso and plural-voice tenso and partimen; gender role positioning (which one might expect to be ambiguous); cross-permeation from the outside legal world into the poetic one, evidence for the flow going the other way too.

Tracking and mapping changes in usage, loading, associations, senses. Historical, geographical, cultural usage, manuscript witness and transmission. What happens with movement to Italy, Catalonia, Spain and inter- and translingual enrichment? Inc. accidental, serendipitous, and deliberate play with / against Latin etymology and false etymologies. Let’s recall our now several con phonemes: cum > com = prep. & later prefix “with / together with” (and more: see Lewis & Short, via Project Perseus), conj. “when / as”, com-/con- prefix for adding emphasis, the modern English –cum- and noun-form cum/come, and of course cuniculus > con, conres).

C-word poetics is a lovely case of polyvalent polysemic linguistic play. Associative and allusive crossings and mixings, a creative ambilingualism that makes up new connections between Old Occitan and Latin (and English), with the newer language and its playful innovations influencing perception of the older one (or infecting and tainting it), spinning new connections backwards and forwards in time, knitting up new networks of meaning, enriching all the languages concerned in the process: this is “la linguistique fantastique” (to riff off Bec’s term), making language anew and making (up) new language and languages (just as Flamenca and Guillem do… especially when going beyond human verbal language and its limits, into touch. That (and they) remind us that sen and sentir are about sensation, feeling, listening, and understanding; to quote the title of MLA 2018 session 92, about both thinking and feeling, together, at once.

We’re dealing with contrafactum in its extended / full sense (another of our several c-words): derivative rhyme and ambiguous word-play are poetic, imaginative, creative, world-making, and world-changing.

Putting all that together: shifts in sense, additional new senses through false (i.e. fictive) etymologies and associations via aural echoes, linguistic creation and expansion via rhyme and derivative rhyme (adnominatio, rime riche, paranomasia, puns) as an echoing (back-looking) and speculative (forward- and sideways-and outside-looking) making and worlding (a.k.a. trobar).

Here, for some further examples, are the COM consent instances that involve masculine voices; consent here tends to be that of someone else, and is often in a negative construction; and the raw texts (some with minimal superficial comments, annotated on photo) from the Harvey & Paterson Tensos & Partimens:

And another next step will be consulting the Dictionnaire de l’occitan médiéval (and its associated materials) once it’s hopefully got up to consent. As it were.

EPILOGUE