Re: How to pronounce "Aidenn"?

Daniel al-Autistiqui wrote:
On Fri, 30 May 2008 15:05:54 -0400, "CDB" wrote:
Peter Duncanson wrote:

'Prophet!' said I, 'thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird
or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both
adore -
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant
Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore -
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named
Lenore?'
Quoth the raven, 'Nevermore.'

In the poem Aidenn appears to be a place. It might be Eden and
pronounced as Eden.

Agreed, except for the pronunciation. Poe didn't hesitate, as you
have shown above, to rhyme "evil" and "devil", and it would have
been no surprise to see "Eden" rhymed with "laden"and "maiden":
the fact that he respelled it suggests that he wanted to change the
pronunciation too, to rhyme exactly with "maiden".

I remember finding this a curious word a while back, when I was
reading some of the early issues of _Word Ways_. They had been
constructing various "Raven" parodies, and "Aidenn" was in enough of
them for me to conclude that it must have been part of the original.
Maybe it was the double "n" at the end that made the word look
somewhat exotic. If Poe was coining a variant of "Eden" merely to
make that part of the poem rhyme (a *lame* thing to do, IMO), I can
understand him writing "Aden" or maybe "Aiden". Why add the
unnecessary second "n"?

As Donna has pointed out, the form was used by others too. I realise
that doesn't answer the question, but it lets Poe off the hook, a bit.

Back then, I had no doubt that "Aidenn" was pronounced to rhyme with
"maiden". I had thought of "Eden" as a possible origin and meaning,
but I did realize that the similarity between the two words might
have been just a coincidence.

For what it's worth, I believe the pronunciation of "Eden" in modern
Hebrew is \e'dEn\. Yes. I just checked the dictionary, which
confirms that the two "e"s are \e\ and \E\, respectively; and in the
official modern pronunciation the initial ayin is silent. According
to Wiki, the modern (Sephardic) pronunciation could have been
becoming more widely known in Poe's time:

"In the Modern Period, from the 19th century onward, the literary
Hebrew tradition as pronounced in Jerusalem revived as the spoken
language of modern Israel, called variously Israeli Hebrew, Modern
Israeli Hebrew, Modern Hebrew, New Hebrew, Israeli Standard Hebrew,
Standard Hebrew, and so on. Israeli Hebrew exhibits many features of
Sephardic Hebrew from its local Jerusalemite tradition but adapts it
with numerous neologisms, borrowed terms (often technical) from
European languages and adopted terms (often colloquial) from Arabic."

That still leaves the stress unaccounted for; conceivably, the second
"n" of "Aidenn" was meant to indicate an equal stress on the second
syllable. I find that that reading of the lines works well enough in
practice.


.

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