Sorry, but I have to!
My friend Al Capone, of Sicily, told me -- and publicly too, (he was a student of Strawson at Oxford, DPhil and all):
"You are hopeless"
"You mean I have 'beautiful handwriting'? (We were playing on Grice 1961:
He has beautiful handwriting.
+> He is hopeless
which does _not_ project
Grice had horrible handwriting.
+> He was a serious philosopher alright.
(It works for 'medics', Grice notes, PPQ, vol. 63).
Some people (_Some_ people) think that 'spero' translates as 'wait':
But surely it's archaic to say,
"I'm hoping for the bus"
-- Wait at most, or hoping for the bus _to come_.
Grice knew this. The Short/Lewis go:
"spero":
means:
I. To hope (something desirable), to
look for, trust, expect; to promise or
flatter one's self
II. To look for, expect, apprehend that
which is _undesired_ (ironic use, in Cicero).
but never "wait" --
I guess one difference is that, unlike "hope", "wait" does not allow for a
'that'-clause? E.g. I can "hope for the best", but I can also "hope _that_
the Robert E. Lee will arrive" (or "hope the Robert E. Lee to arrive").
Now, while I can _wait_ for the Robert E. Lee (or await the Robert E. Lee)
I cannot really, grammatically, wait for the Robert Lee to arrive, can I?
As for "hope", Onions says it's only _late_ Old English anyway (n. "hopa",
v. "hopian"), and though with cognates in the West Germanic continental
dialects, it is "of unkn. origin."
Incidentally, there used to be a street called "Hope Street" in Woolwich,
London. When the popular Italian leader Garibaldi visited the area it was
cross-linguistically re-christened as "Speranza Street".
And then there's of course "Villa Speranza".
Etc.
Sperantia is actually of Provencal origin -- but my family is of course Ligurian. Elcock notes that Dante, while using it
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
was _exaggerating_: "The place had no keys: it wasn't precisely your average gated-community, so what the frig is he talking about?"
In opera, 'spes' is sometimes preferred, as per 'speme' but Puccini will have Calaf _scream_ over 'speranza' in Nessun dorma.
Etc.
The OED has an entry for "Speranza". The French, able to do so many things, are unable to pronounce 'speranza' Provencal, and have to intrude an 'e', 'esperance' as used by Shakespeare, as used by Henry VI.
Spenser, who some say was 'gay' -- those who say that Ellen DeGeneres is gay, too -- has a lady called "Speranza" in his "Faerie Queane". This is represented as bearing
a
ancora della speranza
in her lily white hand.
---
It's the ATTRIBUTE, in iconological terms, of "Hope".
Etc.
I cannot really, grammatically, wait for the Robert Lee to arrive, can I?
ReplyDeleteWas "for" a typo?
I don't know the name for the construction "[noun] [infinitive]" (e.g., "Robert E. Lee to arrive") but you can do with it pretty much anything you can do with a noun. So, although you cannot wait that the Robert E. Lee arrive, you can wait for it to do so.
Good to know. And yes, it was a typo. Short for typographical mistake, that is.
ReplyDeleteThis is interesting in that 'prepositions', Humpty Dumpty says, you can do almost anything with them.
Wait for. Versus Wait on. Etc.
Hope that-.
I hope that she will be pregnant.
I expect she will be pregant.
The obsession with Grice with the "that"-clause (so-called) was of course misguided. The 'that' was originally a demonstrative, and it's a pity it's dropped by some
I hope she'll come.
(or 'cum' as Geary will rudely spell it).
This means that it is within the intentional scope of the fulfillable content of the root of the phrastic, "That she'll come". You cannot hope for the moon. Or hope that your mother was born in Jupiter.
--- Unless you can.
In English they say, contradictorily, 'hope against hope'. I translate that, not as Kramer versus Kramer, but as Speranza contra Speranza.
Incidentally, what bothers me _slightly_ is the etymological nonsense that Speranza amounts to.
ReplyDeleteJulie Fields of the OED once told me, "It's so good to correspond with you. Especially on 'alethic'. Oddly, our first quote for that, which we didn't use, is one Sperantia. Any relation?"
---
Sperantia is indeed Esperanto, but the idea stuck.
Spero is from Sperare
as in
cum spiro spero
or
cum spero spiro
I forget.
But then you get the nasalised present tense participle nt.
sperant-
and then you add the intrusive i
sperant-i
and then, and this confuses me, you add the neuter plural, and get the whole thing, for some reason, into a passive rigmarole
sperant-i-a
things to be hoped for.
How THIS became a feminine thing -- as in Faerie Queene -- was a Roman _sin_, I submit.