放牛班的课堂

      

　　On Language'Treasure Trove'By BEN ZIMMER Published: January 7, 2011 NYT

     In the Dec. 12 On Language column, I see that hackneyed phrase treasure trove. Since a trove is defined as 'a store of valuable or delightful things,' isn't treasure trove redundant? Has anyone ever spoken of a garbage trove?''

　　RelatedMore On Language ColumnsI'll cop to using a cliché， but treasure trove is hardly redundant. Trove has accrued its modern meaning of ''a valuable collection'' only because it has hung around treasure for so long.

　　Treasure trove ultimately goes back to a Latin expression, ''thesaurus inventus,'' which sounds like it ought to be the name of a book of synonyms in an invented language like Esperanto or Klingon. But thesaurus simply means ''treasure'' or ''treasury'' （a term that appeared in titles of Latin-English dictionaries before the Father of the Thesaurus, Peter Mark Roget, used it for his famous reference work）。 The inventus part means ''found,'' so the entire phrase referred to a rediscovered deposit of precious items without any clues to its owner. Under Roman law, such treasure was covered by the old ''finders, keepers'' rule, though the discoverer might have to share the wealth with the proprietor of the land where it was hidden.

　　In Anglo-Norman, the variety of the French language that came to England's shores along with the Norman invaders in 1066, ''thesaurus inventus'' turned into tresor trové， through a ''calque'' （or word-for-word translation） of the Latin phrase. Then, as so often happened with the conqueror's dialect, the French expression was adapted by English tongues into something more manageable: ''treasure trove.'' It still referred to found treasure, but under English common law the crown could lay claim to any hoard that had been stashed away rather than simply lost.

　　Since a treasure trove typically consisted of ancient gold or silver coins, the valuable nature of the hidden items soon came to dominate the expression's use, gradually extended to more metaphorical riches. Meanwhile, the ''found'' meaning behind trove （related to the modern French word trouvé） was forgotten, allowing English speakers to reinterpret the structure of the phrase. Instead of trove being understood as an adjective modifying treasure, it came to be thought of as a noun, one that eventually could stand on its own without treasure. Free-standing trove shows up as early as 1791, in Charles Hamilton's translation of ''The Hedaya,'' a classic manual of Islamic law.

　　So rather than being needlessly wordy, treasure trove is the etymologically complete phrase, misconstrued over time as a noun-noun compound rather than a noun followed by an adjective. Because of this, some historically minded quibblers even assert that there's no such thing as a trove. But it's not surprising that trove has been given a second life as a noun, since adjectives don't typically follow nouns in modern English, except in fixed idioms. Something similar happened with the noun patent, which comes from the noun-adjective combination letters patent, and laureate, from poet laureate （literally a poet crowned with a laurel wreath）。

　　Though we can put to rest the idea of treasure trove being redundant, that doesn't save it from being hackneyed. Perhaps it's the alliteration that makes it so inviting. I'll pledge to use the phrase sparingly in the future, lest the venerable old coinage lose its luster.

　　Ben Zimmer will answer one reader question every other week. Send your queries to <A href="mailtonlanguage@nytimes.com">onlanguage@nytimes.com. You can follow Mr. Zimmer on Twitter at twitter.com/OnLanguage and Facebook.

放牛班的课堂

On Language

The King’s Tongue Twisters



Aron Jancso By BEN ZIMMER

Published: December 10, 2010      



LinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink. “My Fair Lady” had “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain.” “Singin’ in the Rain” had “Moses supposes his toeses are roses.” To cinema’s pantheon of tricky diction, we can now add, “I have a sieve full of sifted thistles and a sieve full of unsifted thistles, because I am a thistle sifter.” Audiences for “The King’s Speech” can hear Colin Firth as Prince Albert, Duke of York (later King George VI), practice this tongue twister as part of the speech therapy conducted by Lionel Logue, played by Geoffrey Rush.



Photos reprinted with permission from The Logue Archive and The King’s Speech, © 2010 by Mark Logue and Peter Conradi, Sterling Publishing Co., Inc.

The King’s “eve of war” address has Logue’s annotations, marking pauses and replacing difficult words.

Henry Higgins in “My Fair Lady” (and its predecessor, “Pygmalion”) trains the flower girl Eliza Doolittle to lose her Cockney diphthongs. Similarly, the voice coach in “Singin’ in the Rain” tries to steer the silent-film star Lina Lamont away from a grating New York accent inappropriate for the talkies. But “Bertie,” as Firth’s character is known to his family, has much graver concerns: he is crippled by a stammer that makes public speaking a devilish chore. Logue prescribes a regimen of vocal calisthenics, tongue twisters among them, to improve the mechanics of Bertie’s speech. After the abdication of his brother, Edward VIII, in 1936 opens the throne to Bertie, the therapy has geopolitical consequences, permitting the new king to address the nation in live radio broadcasts on the brink of World War II.

When David Seidler began working on the screenplay for “The King’s Speech,” the tongue twisters were one of the few publicly known details about the real-life Logue’s techniques in working with Bertie. The historian Denis Judd, in his 1982 biography of George VI, reported that Logue’s vocal exercises included the sentences “Let’s go gathering healthy heather with the gay brigade of grand dragoons” and “She sifted seven thick-stalked thistles through a strong thick sieve.” As it happens, variants of the “thistle sifter” tongue twister date back to 1831, when American journals reported that this “unutterably curious sentence is frequently used in schools for the correction of stammering.”

Why should an “unutterable” sentence be thought of as a boon for those who have such trouble uttering in the first place? In the 19th century, tongue twisters were developed by experts in elocution as a means of mastering proper enunciation. Logue trained as an elocutionist in his native Australia, and from that work he began taking on students for lessons in “speech correction.” Along with the tongue twisters, Logue was known to draw on other time-honored elocutionary exercises, like having a stutterer shout vowel sounds out of an open window for long periods.

“These mechanical techniques,” Seidler explained to me in a recent interview, “are incredibly useful once you’ve overcome your stutter internally. They don’t, as far as I’m concerned, cure the stutter.” Seidler knows whereof he speaks, because he himself grew up with a stutter. He drew on these experiences to build a rich, believable portrait of Bertie’s speech impediment and Logue’s unconventional approach to helping him overcome it.

“If the stammer had been inauthentic, we would have had no film,” Firth told me on a recent visit to New York to publicize the film. In preparing to play Bertie, Firth carefully studied the available audio and video recordings of his public addresses. Newsreel footage from one speech, delivered at the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow in 1938, made a particular impression. “You see him manage for a while, and then you see him disappear into this terrible silence,” Firth said. “I saw a kind of heroism in the fact that he just goes on. He goes on because he has to.”

Firth, Rush and the film’s director, Tom Hooper, were also able to draw on newly rediscovered diaries and other personal records from Logue himself. This treasure trove of material was only recently brought to light by Mark Logue, his grandson, who has written a companion book for the film with Peter Conradi, also under the title “The King’s Speech.” The medical appointment card that Logue wrote for the Duke of York after his first consultation in 1926 notes, among other things, a “very flabby” waistline and poor control of his diaphragm. (Logue sought to toughen up Bertie’s diaphragm by having his wife, Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, sit on his stomach during breathing exercises on the floor.)

The Logue archive also contains intriguingly annotated drafts of the King’s speeches, beginning with his momentous “eve of war” radio address in September 1939, which serves as the film’s climax. Logue drew lines between words to indicate when to insert pauses, and he swapped out words that he thought would be problematic. Since Bertie stumbled on initial “k” and “g” sounds, Logue amended the Christmas 1944 address so that the word calamities was replaced with disasters and goal with end.

Few, if any, of Logue’s linguistic techniques, from the tongue twisters to the word substitutions, would be used by modern speech pathologists, according to Caroline Bowen, an Australian speech therapist who maintains a Web site with information on Logue. But for Logue, the focus on vocal mechanics was most likely just a means to an end, enforcing a bond of trust with his royal patient. Seidler’s screenplay imagines how Logue might have worn down Bertie’s inhibitions about speaking by encouraging him to sing his words or to indulge in colorful cursing (so colorful, in fact, that Firth’s ad-libbed obscenities have earned the film an R rating in the United States).

Reflecting on Bertie’s struggle to overcome his stutter, Firth says, “It’s actually friendship and intimacy that galvanizes him, not diaphragm work.” Logue may not have “cured” the stammer, but by instilling a sense of confidence and chipping away at Bertie’s anxieties, he made it possible for the king to untwist his tongue and find his voice at a moment when his country most needed to hear him speak.


Ben Zimmer will answer one reader question every other week. Send your queries to <A href="mailtonlanguage@nytimes.com">onlanguage@nytimes.com. You can follow Mr. Zimmer on Twitter at twitter.com/OnLanguage and Facebook.

ClariceChen

标题是传说中的哥特体咩~~~很赞