James Joyce is a Linguistic Genius and I Want In.

Friends, I have looked in the face of a genius that can only be taken in small doses, and its name is Finnegans Wake by Mister James Joyce. I can't stand any of his other writing, but we read a section of the eighth chapter of the first part, the famous chapter where Joyce works in, by hook or by crook, the name of every major river in the world, and I'm in love. But only in small doses, mind you. FW, I think, is a work best taken by the shot glass and not by the tankard. (I'll take my Tolkien by the tankard and my P'OB by the pint glass, thankyouverymuch.)

When Max Eastman asked James Joyce why he had written Finnegan's wake in such a difficult, flummoxing manner, he replied (and I would here insert the adverbs 'unconcernedly' or 'confidently', as they seem to fit) "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years."

Well, he succeeded. It would probably be impossible on a physical as well as an intellectual scale to create a copy of Finnigans Wake with a complete gloss to this man's created words, mainly becuase you don't know where to stop glossing his words. Do I give him credit for managing to work in the Samoan for "What's new?" here? Does "your rere gait's creakorheuman bitts" translate to 'crake (monster) or human, creak (merely a noise made by your joints) or human, creak or rheum(atic) or creek (reference to ALP being river Liffey) or human? Why does he use the word 'beyant' here; is he trying to work in a reference to bezants or make the poolbeg flasher (who may be a man or a boat, you decide) more animalistic?

My point is, this book's insane, and people spend thier whole lives playing Joyce's ridiculous lingustic game. I jumped in with gusto and my copy of these five pages is marked high to heaven with notes that the glosses left out. And then -- And then! -- I decided we'd play a little bit of this game ourselves here at the Village Wordsmithy. I'm going to give you a sentence, done in Joycian style, and you're going to Guess the Gloss. Have you got your paper ready? Your pencil sharp and your dictionary flipping finger sharper?

Okay, GO!

Deyew kene, my eerie Ann, the thyme when t'bhoys of Gullwaye and Poolbleckt were gonne for schilders?

Are you working?
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Are you still working?

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Okay, now you can see the answers.

deyew -- i.e 'do you' or the dew (ref to foggy dew, irish rebel song) or yew, very poisonous tree that in irish mythology is either a symbol of long life or death, often planted in church yards. Yew is also used for english strongbows -- ref to Strongbow as conqueror of Ireland

kene -- ken, scots, 'to understand or remember' or keen, irish, to mourn

my eerie Ann -- Ireland as Eirann

thyme -- do you remember the thyme (we ate) when this happened or do you remember the time this happened, thyme as an herb used in death rituals in ancient egypt and middle ages "Thyme was also used as incense and placed on coffins during funerals as it was supposed to assure passage into the next life." (wikipedia)

t'bhoys -- i.e 'the boys' or 'the bhoys' (a slang term for a young irish american during the 1850s, specifically one from the Bowery in New York) or the hoys, "a small vessel, usually rigged as a sloop, and employed in carrying passengers and goods, particularly in short distances on the sea-coast." or "a strong but clumsy person"(OED)

Gullwaye -- Galway or the gull-way, the sea

Poolbleckt -- Poolbeg, a river near dublin, or pool-black, the meaning of Dublin, dubh-lin, or Blackpool, city in Lancashire, or poblacht, irish for republic

Gonne -- Maude Gonne, famous for her revolutionary activities during the twenties and being the subject of a series of poems by WB Yeats

schilders --soldiers, or children, or a reference to Robert Erskine Childers, an Irish Anti-Treatyite; 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go die for the dream of a free ireland?' or 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go fight a war' or 'do you remember when the boys of ireland went to go pursue childish dreams'


See, wasn't that fun? Did anyone come up with anything else?


Now, the fun part about this game is this -- when I wrote that sentence, I had one message in mind: Do you remember, Ireland, the time when the boys of galway and dublin were gone for soldiers? While I was making my gloss and playing around with the way words were spelled I found out that whole buisness about thyme as a symbol of death (it fits, but it wasn't intentional) and the significance of the yew tree (also a symbol of death; appropriate!) I'd forgotten who Childers was, but he worked out, too, and then when I realised I could swap Maude Gonne into the mix, in she went!

The point of this exercise, boys and girls, is merely fun, and also a kind reminder that Joyce could be a genius, or, like me, he could just be one extremely lucky bugger.

For Want of Words -- A few notes on Language and Identity

I know you are the Muskos' regiment:
And I shall lose my life for want of language;
If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch,
Italian, or French, let him speak to me; I'll
Discover that which shall undo the Florentine.
-Parolles, All’s Well that Ends Well, William Shakespeare

I must be an English major or something – I seem to be seeing patterns of the linguistic variety in more places than I ought. Consider this blog post a musing on language as well as a movie review.

Last weekend was a weekend for entertainments of the cinematic variety, and since the LOTR marathon got culled owing to many primary participants being in Cork at the time, we settled down to watch Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. A clever and violent little film, but very good; I recommend it to those of you have a strong constitution when it comes to your history being challenged and your usual dose of movie gore tripled in true Tarantino style.

The film, whilst it is being an inglorious bastard to many of its characters, is also making fun of a number of its own elements, including the genre of American war films in general. (This much most everyone who saw the trailer knew.) Here we have heroes doing unheroic things in an unheroic fashion, the momentum of this coming to a head in Hugo Stiglitz, the mass-murderer roped in by the Basterds who gets a superhero-esque title fly-in when his name is mentioned. The film industry gets another well-timed baseball bat to the knees with the premise of the film within the film, the propagandist Nation’s Pride (which, if you’ve been living where I have for two months, sounds a lot like a company that bakes bread.)


What little we see of the film is full of hammy, overdramatic acting at its finest, and from the reactions of the audience you’d think it was Oscar award-winning material. It is here that we find the angelic, pristinely uniformed, bring-him-home-to-your-mother-for-tea-and-scones hero we’re used to seeing in war films. Beside the Basterds, Private Fredrick Zoller (a very cute Daniel Brühl) is nothing more than a fop. And how we hate him!


The Basterds, headed up by their ridiculously other-end-of-the-war-movie-stereotype leader, Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt in a flash of comic genius) are the absolute parody of the World War two action hero. These guys aren’t fighting for nationalism – they’re just out to, as Raine succinently puts it, “Kill us some Natzis.” The Americans are counterbalanced by a brilliant cast playing the Europeans, and here Tarantino gets out the baseball bat again, this time taking a wack at American identity in the world today.

This is where the bit on language comes in – I told you I’d get there eventually! All the other characters in this film speak at least two languages – Colonel Landa, the German head honcho in France regarding the jewish problem, converses easily in French, German, Italian, and English, and I’m pretty sure if there had been a few Red Guards wandering in and out we would have found he speaks Russian, too. (The actor portraying Landa, Christoph Waltz, apparently had to study really hard to get his English as good as it is in this film. Lemme tell you, he nailed it. This man is AWESOME.) But the Americans only speak one language – English. This, of course, lands them into trouble when their more culturally competent allies (including a deliciously British, upper-crust, toffee-nosed-and-useless army officer/film critic played by Michael Fassbender) all get shot in an underground barroom brawl, leaving only one maimed moviestar (the always gorgeous Diane Kruger) to help carry out their plans.


The point is obvious – If the Americans really want their finger in every pie and their ear at every door like Landa is, they’d better make sure the ears at the doors know what’s being said about them and their average citizens can at least converse in something other than their mother tongue.

Language is always a great way to show intercultural competency (and I use that term only because it seems to be a concept being feted in the academic administrative world at the moment.) In Literature class now, we’ve just finished reading Brien Friel’s Translations, a wonderful little play about the land survey of the 1830s that went around ‘standardizing’ Irish placenames by Anglicizing them. The play is written and performed under the understanding that, while all the characters are delivering their lines in English, some are really speaking in Gaelic. The two British officers sent in to conduct this survey (only one of the many translations of the title) take two opposing roles, one the man willing to learn the language of the place he is in, and the other the consummate imperialist ready to let translators do his job for him even if some of his meaning is lost in the process.

Several of the characters speak in Latin and Greek as well as Gaelic and English, and Friel’s message with these characters is the same as Tarantino’s – the more languages you know, the more perceptive you are to the world around you and the more open you are to change.

Studying as I am now in the Gaeltacht region of Ireland (essentially a linguistic heritage zone) I’m seeing and studying the importance of language as men like Douglas Hyde and Franz Fanon see it – as a tool for revolution and change. The language you use shapes the world you see – more languages, bigger world. Different language, different world, different identity. The gaelic speakers around here order their thoughts differently, becuase thier language is structured in a slightly different way. Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League (a community effort to revive the old pre-English Irish culture) and the first president of Ireland, postulated in his “Necessity for De-Anglicising Ireland” speaks along the same lines regarding language as Fanon does later in Les Damnés de la Terre regarding culture as a whole: “We must teach ourselves to be less sensitive, we must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves, because the Gaelic people can never produce its best before the world as long as it remains tied to the apron-strings of another race and another island, waiting for it to move before it will venture to take any step itself…I would earnestly appeal to every one, whether Unionist or Nationalist, who wishes to see the Irish nation produce its best … to set his face against this constant running to England for our books, literature, music, games, fashions, and ideas. I appeal to every one whatever his politics -- for this is no political matter -- to do his best to help the Irish race to develop in future upon Irish lines, even at the risk of encouraging national aspirations, because upon Irish lines alone can the Irish race once more become what it was of yore -- one of the most original, artistic, literary, and charming peoples of Europe.”

Language is powerful. Language shapes our thinking, and our identity. In my own writing, I love pulling in language phrases distinct from my own English base, though it’s often said that writers should avoid doing this. I believe the criticism comes from the manga fanfiction community where those fans with Japanese cultural jealousy (for a complete explanation of what that is, see my Galway Rover Blog) throw in their unnecessary token words with wild abandon to somehow prove they are worthy of writing Japanese characters in a Japanese context. There, the usage is to prove inclusion in a group – I use my foreign words to prove difference, because of that removal from the text that they create. If my readers don’t understand it, good. Now they know how it feels talking to my trilingual poet in real life. (I also find linguistics a good way to show off your research skills, but this doesn’t work all the time and sometimes it’s just plain annoying – see Kate Horsely’s Confessions of a Pagan Nun for token words at their translation foot-noted best.)

I shall lose my life for want of language, Parolles laments in All’s Well That Ends Well. I hope that doesn’t happen to me any time soon. Judging from the length of this blog post, I’ll probably lose my life for surfeit of it.

Tech-word origins: stranger than science | csmonitor.com

I love the Internet. Let's just put that on the table. I love the intertext I can create between the news stories I read on the Christian Science Monitor's website and my Facebook Page. (Or between...well, anything and my FaceBook page, really. I'm surprised no one else I know uses this functionality more.)I love that with the click of my mouse, I can send a recipe to my sister for her to look over. And now I've found a new functionality that I'm pretty psyched about -- any page with a ShareThis logo can now be posted to Blogger in link form!

Tech-word origins: stranger than science | csmonitor.com
Posted using ShareThis

People who read this blog on a regular basis know that I'm really getting into etymology, the study of where words come from. I wrote a term paper about fanfiction etymology, one of my favorite authors routinely borrows words from other languages in his work, and I even went so far as to write an entire fanfic based ariound the linguistic origin of the word checkmate. I am in so deep I have the OED on my bookmarks bar!

So it should come as no surprise that I looked at this article and immediately went "Wow, I should read that!!" But really, works like this do spark my interest, both because I like to learn where certain words come from and because I read science fiction. It's incredible to think that some of the words we use every day were once just a phrase someone made up to fill a void in a story or a conversation.

Like, for instance, this one:

Internet, n. -- [Shortened <INTERNETWORK n., perhaps influenced by similar words in -net (as Catenet (1972), Satnet (1973), Telenet (1973), etc.) after ARPAnet (a wide area network developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense, attested from 1971). In subsequent use denoting the global network, probably greatly reinforced by use in the compound Internet Protocol.

Originally (in form internet): a computer network consisting of or connecting a number of smaller networks, such as two or more local area networks connected by a shared communications protocol; spec. such a network (called ARPAnet) operated by the U.S. Defense Department. In later use (usu. the Internet): the global computer network (which evolved out of ARPAnet) providing a variety of information and communication facilities to its users, and consisting of a loose confederation of interconnected networks which use standardized communication protocols; (also) the information available on this network.

(Internet etymolgy courtesy of the OED Online -- no copyright infringement intended.)

Scholarship and Creativity Day

Today, as many of you who read this blog know, was Scholarship and Creativity day here at Saint Ben's and Saint John's. It's an opportunity for the students to present research that they've been doing throughout the year and be recognized by their peers and their professors.

I was fortunate enough to be chosen to present some of my linguistics research on fanfiction, and so I spent the rest of the afternoon putting together a YouTube video of a live audio recording of my presentation, with my slides, for everyone (family, freinds, writing buddies) who couldn't make it to Saint John's this morning to hear me speak.

Jingo-Lingo: Doublespeak, Fanfiction Vocabulary, and the limits of language

Noam Chomsky is trying to take over my life.

No, I am completely serious! He has shown up in every single one of my classes this semester, and that is an accomplishment, considering every single class I'm taking is from a different department. He's a linguist, which meant we read his thoughts for Linguistics (duh) on how languages are structured, in my Human Development class on how children acquire language, and in my Communications class on how we use language in advertising. Today he came up in Peace Studies because he is a political activist and theorist as well and we were reading an article of his on terrorism.

But today in Peace Studies we discussed something else that Mr. Chomsky would probably have a few thoughts about-- doublespeak, or the particular brand of language used by the government and by other various bureaucracies to make whatever they intend to say unintelligible to the average joe. And of course, I thought back to linguistics and my research project, which is on another type of lingo -- the vocabulary of fanfiction.

Just like doublespeak or the less confusing academic language of, say, chemistry, fanfiction vocabulary is an attempt to make what we do as authors seem like legitimate discourse as well as create the same barrier as doublespeak does, veiling us in our own elite little world of Mary sues and crossovers and canon 'shipping. By using these terms, we establish our experience level and our authority within our discipline the same way a chemist uses terms like valence electrons, hydrogen bonds and heterogenous solutions to show that he, too, knows what he is talking about rather than referring vaguely to the structures of atoms or mixtures of liquids that have differing properties. And chemists and goverment officials aren't the only ones using confusing langauge -- English speakers employ euphemisms, those phrases that drive translators wild with annoyance, every day of the week.

This is from my introduction so far:

The scene is a familiar one to anyone who reads on a regular basis – it is the last page of the novel you’ve been dying for months to read since you heard your favorite author was publishing again, and as you finish the final words, you can’t help feeling a sense of disappointment. That wasn’t the way you wanted the book to end at all! The hero was flat, the love interest was transparent, and there were entire scenes that needed to be explained! If you were writing the book, you would have definitely included more, like a chapter explaining how all the characters met each other. Most people never follow up on these notions of re-writing or filling in their favorite novels, but for a small community of writers, that idea forms the basis of their entire creative output. It’s called fanfiction, and it’s been around for hundreds of years, almost since the printing press created a mass market for books. These authors use texts ranging from Jane Austen to the latest comic book series as their source material, and their aim is simple – to write stories based on characters people already connect with for the purpose of improving their own writing and filling in gaps in the original stories. Since the advent of the Internet and sites that allow readers and writers around the globe to establish communities, fanfiction has grown dramatically, and as this style has grown in popularity, it has developed its own unique language, a codified and agreed-upon set of terms and vocabulary to help connect within the community and establish legitimacy among its members. Fanfiction is written with the aim of creating agency, space, and identity for its writers, and these three motives help explain why the vocabulary of fanfiction exists as well as why it is structured the way it is.

As you can see, it's going to be a riveting paper. But one of the other things the movie we watched in Peace Studies today discussed was how language, as well as how people use language, significantly impacts how we view the world. Jacques Derrida discusses this in one of his writings, talking about how using our language to discuss the way we use language is by the very nature of the proposition a play doomed to failure. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posits that different languages formulate different trains of thought, that if a language has more than one word for snow the people speaking the language will, of course, be more aware of snow.

Certainly this could be true with doublespeak. By using a disconnected doublespeak, we in turn disconnect ourselves from war, rearrange our thought process and make war more palatable -- an enemy solidier is easier to kill if he remains nameless and becomes Jerry, Gook, or Victor Charlie, a manufactured propaganda face with a leering grin and beady little eyes set on destroying the American way of life. We're not fighting a war, we're peacekeeping, and don't even think about calling them casulties. Talk about the body count instead, or the butcher's bill, if you're fighting in the South Pacific on a 19th century ship of the line. Using doublespeak can hinder our ability to look objectively at war.

But fanfiction vocabulary does the opposite of doublespeak-- it seeks to open up and delve further into an artistic endeavor by making new words (or rearranging old ones) to better explain the unique animal of fanfiction writing. Mainstream writing doesn't need a word for the advocacy of a relationship between these two people or those two people, but fanfiction does, so we have shipping, a clipping of 'relationship' that's been turned into a verb, an appropriative vocab word for an appropriative art. My thought process is shaped by those words, but the very fact that they are new and that I have allowed them into my vocabulary speaks to my ability to influence by own thought process. It's not that we're more aware of snow becuase we have more words for it -- it's because we needed to be more aware that we came up with more words.

Fascinating world we live in, isn't it?

The Liberating Writer (and a few thoughts on Women's Studies)

I've blogged before about the nature of words in different langauges (A Million Words for Love, February 08) and I've found another that I think writers and readers everywhere will appreciate. And once again, this linguistic revelation comes to us courtesy of Arabic.

I'm reading a book now called "The Forgotten Queens of Islam" by Fatima Mernissi (University of MN Press 1993) and Ms. Mernissi, in explaining the difference between levels of power in the early Islamic state, has this to say on the subject of freedom and, by association, writing:

"In Arabic words like hurr (free) and hurriyya (freedom) have little to do with the modern human rights connotation....Hurr also has to do with the idea of resistance, since one says of a bride that she has spent the night hurra if she was not deflowered on her wedding night, since her husband could not penetrate her. This idea of resisting, of concentrated energy contained in hurr, is evident in the word harrara, which means 'to write.' When you decide to write a text, what you are in fact doing is liberating words (tahir al-kitaba). You are arranging alphabet letters in a specific order that makes sense and liberates meanings. Al-muharrir (the liberator) is one of the many words for a writer. One of the many duties of the hurr, the aristocrat, is to think globally..."

Being a liberator of words is a beautiful image of writing, if, of course, one writes well. I'm sure some of my writer freinds would say that bad writing does not liberate words but rather enslaves them for evil and terrible purposes(see Simon's The Coming of the Madness to see what I mean.) But more than being liberators of words, I would also contend that writing is a liberating of ideas. Certainly we have seen that many movements for change and political ideologies have come from written texts, in which words have been set down and the reader is inspired to think on them. With Mernissi's acknowledgement of a writer as al-muharrir, (and certainly she fills this position with her writing, ) English speakers can also consider the idea of the author as an authority (note similarity of root), the teacher and beginner of discourse, as theorists like Foucault ("What is an Author?") point out to us.

So far the book has been exceedingly interesting, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in Women's Studies. On the back, one of the commentaries from another academic, Ella Shohat, says this: "Mernissi's breathtaking investigation challenges both contemporary fundamentalist Islamic opposition to women in the public sphere and one-dimensional Western representations of Muslim women as completely lacking in agency..." {bold my own}

Ms. Shohat is also the author of "Unthinking Eurocentrism" so I think we all know what her aim in life is. But really, she has a point. We of the West never hear about exemplary women of other cultures, the Nur Jahans and Aisha al-Hurras and Trung Sisters of the world (It took me about five minutes to come up with that list, and I can only explain two of the three on it, so don't laud me just yet) while we valiantly praise the Victoria Woodhulls and Susan B. Anthonys and Gloria Steinams (and that list is entirely American, so that goes to show something else about my education, too).

When I came back to school, I began reading a lot of non-fiction books, and many of them had to do with the subject of women. I read Something from the Oven, a book on the culture of domestic perfection that grew up in American households after World War II, Hen Frigates, a book on the lives of women as wives and daughters of sailing captains in the 19th and early 20th centures, Women of the Raj, a book on the role of women in British Imperial India, and Women, Crusading, and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative , which kind of explains its subject matter itself. It was a Eurocentric reading list, to be sure. So, when I started this past weekend writing a Kingdom of Heaven fanfic based around the arabic origin of the word checkmate (shah-mat, the king is dead in Arabic or more appropriately the king is helpless in Persian) I realized I was woefully underprepared to deal with the Sultan Saladin (or Salah Al Din, as it is appropriately spelled) as a character.

Bearing this in mind, I went to the library to find a book on him. Easier said than done, but I did find Ms. Mernissi's book. After reading it I feel a little better about my reading habits (although I did find the book towards the end a little poorly organized, to be truthful) but I also realised something else, a unique similarity between women's cultures around the world.

In the last passage of her book, Ms. Mernissi says this:

"We, the inhabitants of medina democracies, are whirling around between Heaven and Earth, astronauts despite ourselves, without space suits or oxygen masks, launched into that planetary dance with bare faces and open palms. And there is one far from negligable difference; we women have to do all that whirling around wearing the veil. Heavens! When I think about our power! But shhh! We mustn't talk about it. We might attract the evil eye!"

After reading that, I recalled another saying, much in the same tone, from a western source --

"Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels."

I may not have understood the politics and various intrigues of the worlds and religious tones that Mernissi was talking about, but I did at least understand that what they did was exemplary.

(I realize, also, that this blog post was very poorly organized, but there was so much to be talked about!)

On this day in history, English changed forever...

From my quote of the day email:

It was on this day in 1066 that William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy,
landed 600 ships and a 7,000 man army on the beach at Pevensey Bay in Sussex.
Convinced that he was the rightful king of England, and with the full support of
Pope Alexander II, he prepared to attack King Harald's forces, which he routed
at Hastings a couple of weeks later. Thus England gained new laws, an overlay of Latinate vocabulary on her language, feudalism, and forks.

The quotes were on invasion, which, while a fascinating subject, is not why I brought this to your attention. Freinds, today marks a turning point in the history of the English language (and this might be on my Linguistics test next week, so I might as well re-hash what I know for practice.)

Besides bringing Latin into the language, William the Conquerer also brought French, the language of his court and thus, the language of his barons. They became the ruling class, and French, along with Latin, became the language of power. English was the third langauge in its own country, spoken only by the peasants who were working in the fields while important buisness was conducted in the language of the castles and the whole buisness was recorded in the language of the church.

After William's invasion, English got a whole new set of words from French, some of which I've already used in this blog post -- army, baron, castle. If you look at these words they're primarily about ruling and rulers. (They didn't just bring the words, either -- they also brought concepts. You'll find that prior to the Norman invasion, Britain didn't have many castles, and certainly nothing like the stone buildings that William put up.) As time wore on, though, different words emerged.

Melvyn Bragg in his "Adventure of English" (which I recommend to anyone interested in this subject -- purchase it at Amazon or Better World Books) notes that in some cases, words from French did not take the place of English words, but rather complemented them, taking on a fraction of the meaning. Here's an example.

When a black Angus is out in the field eating, it's a cow. Cow is Old English. But when we butcher the cow, cook it and serve it for dinner, we don't say we're eating cow, we say we're eating beef. Beef comes from the French boeuf. In almost all cases, when the peasents deal with something (like taking care of the live animal) it retained the Old English word, and when the French dealt with something (like the dead animal on thier dinner plates) it took on the French.

So. Today everyone should have a party and raise a glass to William the Conqueror, who, despite ushering the three-hundred year period where the Kings of England didn't speak English, was actually a good thing for the language in the long run. À Votre Santé and Wes Hail!

(That's French and Old English for basically "Good Health and just drink your mead already.")

Observations on Lord of the Rings

I decided, on a whim the other day, that I was going to watch "Return of the King" because it's my favorite of the three LOTR films and I was kind of in an epic mood. Don't ask.

Anyway, I made two rather interesting observations. One is that, during the Two Towers, Eowyn sings a lament for her cousin, Theodred, a list of the kings that have gone before him into death. One of the lines, the only one I ever remember, is "Frecan, Folcan," a reference to Freca and Folca, both of whom were kings in Rohan. The -n ending on the end is an inflection that deliniates what part of speech the name is functioning as. Rohirric is an inflected language, much like Latin or, of course, Old English, which is what Tolkien based both the langauge and culture of the Rohirrim after.

Of course, I knew that already, but my linguistics class (Thank you, Ozzie Mayers and Melvyn Bragg and The History of English) didn't make it apparent until now.

The second is much more movie-oriented -- during the siege of Minas Tirith, Pippin pulls Gandalf aside and says...

PIPPIN
I didn't think it would end this way.

GANDALF
End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take. The gray rain curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass. And then you see it.

PIPPIN
What, Gandalf? See what?

GANDALF
White shores. And beyond, the far green country, under a swift sunrise.

You know where else they have white shores and beyond a far green country?

The White Cliffs of Dover. See, there's the white shores and if you keep going over the little island they're attached to, there's another little island that a lot of people have taken to calling the Emerald Isle on account of its green-ness.

Funny, innit, how these things happen? Gandalf has just given us a vision of England as Valinor.

You're a sneaky one, PJ, I'll give you that.