Re: How to pronounce "Aidenn"?

On Mon, 2 Jun 2008 15:33:23 -0400, "CDB" <bellemarec@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

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.

OK, I missed the part where Donna said it was used by other writers.
I thought she was merely saying that it occurred in other works by
Poe.

In the paragraph above, what I was basically doing was using the
double-"n" spelling as a sort of "proof" that <Aidenn> was probably
not a nonce variant of "Eden" coined by Poe for the sake of a rhyme
(i.e., because <Aiden> would have sufficed).

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.

I knew that <Eden> was a very accurate transliteration of the Hebrew
word: <ayin daleth nun>, vocalized with <tzere> followed by
<segol>.[1] <Aidenn> made little sense to me at first, as the first
syllable has a pure vowel (not a diphthong that could reasonably be
transliterated <ai>), and the <nun> has no "dagesh forte" (indeed,
final consonants are almost never doubled in Hebrew). I guess that's
why I wasn't sure if "Aidenn" was a form of the word "Eden". However,
I recently thought of another possibility, namely, that the spelling
<Aidenn> form may have originated with a French speaker. According to
my French dictionary at home, the final <n> of the word <Éden> is
pronounced; it does not have a nasal vowel like <examen> does.
Although I don't really know all that much about the history of
French, I could sort of understand how some medieval writer might have
spelled the word as <Aidenn>. The system of diacritical marks that is
used in the modern language seems to be fairly recent: I know that
before French spelling was standardized, various other devices were
used to distinguish the sounds /e/ and /E/ (now often spelled <é> and
<è> respectively) from the "schwa" <e> of <petit>. So maybe some
writers preferred the <ai> digraph of <aimer>, <faire>, <maison>,
<français>, etc. Also, note that about half the consonants that come
at the end of French words are silent, and in particular a final <n>
most of the time just indicates a nasal vowel. Although I have no
proof of this, it seems conceivable that some people could have used a
double-letter spelling for a sounded final consonant that might
otherwsise look as if it should be silent, especially in borrowings
from exotic languages.

Thus, the reason the spelling <Aidenn> would have been used instead of
<Eden> would be that the latter form would have suggested a
pronunciation of /@'dE~/ or the like, instead of the correct reading
of /e'dEn/ (or perhaps /E'dEn/). Of course, there must have
inevitably been many English speakers who would have seen the form and
mangled the pronunciation in the natural way. And some of these might
have decided that the word should rhyme with "maiden".

[1] I was actually even more confused at first, as I had always
thought that "Eden" was a member of the class of two-syllable nouns
that Hebrew grammarians call the "segolates". Segolate nouns are
stressed on the first syllable. However, after checking my Biblical
Hebrew grammar book, I find that you seem to be right about "Eden": in
Hebrew the stress is on the second syllable.

daniel mcgrath
--
Daniel Gerard McGrath, a/k/a "Govende":
for e-mail replace "invalid" with "com"

Developmentally disabled;
has Autism (Pervasive Developmental Disorder),
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,
& periodic bouts of depression.
[This signature is under construction.]

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