Translating the rules

Sometimes you need to widen your thinking just a little.

We have not yet dissuaded our tutoring consultant from posting things on his cubicle whiteboard that are, we think, just too hard or obscure.  A couple of weeks ago it was a riddle in Old English, a language no one else in the tutoring center understands.  (He did provide a translation.)  This past week it was the first canto of an epic poem in Spanish.  There are Spanish-speakers and Spanish students who frequent the center, so one might think it would present no problem.  However, this was in Old Castilian, an archaic form of the language actually almost coeval with the Old English riddle.  His point was that Spanish has changed much less than English in the interim and a speaker of modern Spanish should be able to understand the poem.

Students found it much more difficult than he expected.  A few picked out words here and there, but most concentrated on the unfamiliar features and went away rather baffled.  We’ve been trying to work out why.

The poem is known as the Poema de Mio Cid.  Two features are immediate to the Spanish-student eye: first, the capital “C” is spelled with a cedilla, an under-mark indicating that the sound is the soft “s” and not the hard “k.”  The letter is not used in modern Spanish, though it survives in French (apparently only in the lower-case: ç).  And the possessive before the Cid is nowadays “mi,” not “mio.”  The latter exists in Spanish, but is only used in a predicate.  English affords an exact parallel: we say “my house” and “the house is mine,” but not “mine house.”  So to read the old poem one must be willing to relax somewhat the rules of spelling and grammar.  This is particularly hard for students, who are just learning the rules and for whom any departure represents points off in a quiz or test.

[The above title is the one that’s used, but only by convention.  The single manuscript lacks one or more pages at the beginning, so we don’t know what the author called it, or indeed who the author was.  Scholars would give great amounts to have a title-page as books have now, with the official title, author, date and place of publication, and copious side-notes on this and that.  Alas, if any of that once existed it did not survive.]

Proceeding through the poem there are harder things, words that have disappeared completely and phrases that can only be worked out from a knowledge of Late Vulgar Latin, but the majority is comprehensible if one accepts a departure from the modern language in some ways.

But not in others.  Sounds like “b” and “v” can shift easily from one to another; migrating to “s” or “k” would be more difficult.  There are similar changes in words and wording, and how things are expressed; they go certain directions but not others.  Phonologists and grammarians study these things.  We are neither.  But, we realize, we have experience in several languages of various ages and we have read a lot of poetry.  That may be the key.  Maybe the best way to approach the Poem of the Cid is by way of other poems.