Species of Sound: Raindrops and Wristwatches.

     Music is of two species.  At least, there are two sounds which to me bring ineffable pleasure––I am sure for personal and largely forgotten reasons, though I might retrace these through their web of associations: They are the sound of the rain, and the sound of my wristwatch.

     The one is a cadence, and marks time, but unevenly, accidentally, and determined by unseen and unpredictable fate. Lyrical music, ballads, all songs sentimental and impassioned call this to mind.  Chopin is a soft drizzle, Wagner a roaring storm.  Teresa Teng is the warm rain of early Summer, Meng T'ing-wei the finest mist of the melancholic early Spring.  The other is unmistakably artificial, both with the metallic regularity of its sound and the refinement entailed in its purpose, of demarcating the seconds with precision.  It sculpts time.  Bach above all is the clock of the greatest intricacy, his songs making a sculpture of perfect similarity (I think of the enormous symmetry of his Mass in B Minor).  Vivaldi is an eccentric little wristwatch, ticking merrily; Palestrina an old grandfather clock, its pendulum swinging slowly and sonorously.

     And both of these species, by their frequency and consistency, create a sort of sonic "ritual space", as a mat may be used to demarcate the ritual space for making tea.  These sounds create a self-contained universe, especially in the case of the wristwatch, whose spring, gears, and escapement one can picture working indefatigably in a universe of mathematical perfection.  But one is nature raw and powerful, the other man's attempt at distilling nature's perfection. 

Un-Latin Sounding Latin Words

clam
instar
dumtaxat
vafer
vapilare
vindex
urbs

Florilegium Linguae Latinae Graecaeque Sinensisque.

a.d. VI Kal. Dec., a.u.c. MMDCCLXVII inchoatum.

Many terms are to be added yet after I can find them in my scattered notebooks. 

Latina.
auceps: > avis capere ("catching birds") : an eavesdropper.
lucubrare: to study by lamplight, to work by night (we have "lucubrate" in English).
mala aetas: "the bad period, age", old age.

[There is a long list of fascinating animal sounds in a fragment of Plutarch, De Naturis Animantium.  I include my favorites.]
minurirre: the chirping sound made by the smallest of birds.
gliccire vel sclingere: the sound of a goose.


Graeca.
ἀρχιπειράτης (archipeirátēs): a pirate chief, an "arch-pirate."
φθέγγεσθαι (phthéggesthai): to make a sound, utter.
εὐάνθεμος φυά (euánthemos phuá): youth, the "well blooming  (".
πομπαĩος οὔρος (pompaĩos oúros): a favorable wind, a "sending wind".
κελαδεĩν (keladeĩn): to sound as running water.
ἐρήμας δι᾽ αἰθέρος (erēmas di' aithéros): through the desolate air.
πολύμηλος (polúmēlos): abounding in sheep.
ἔτυμος (étumos): both true and natural.
ῥίπτειν (rhíptein): to snatch up.
ἱπποδάσεια (hippodáseia): bush with horse hair (said in Homer of a helmet).
δολιχόσκιος (dolichóskios): having a long shadow (said in Homer of a spear).
νυστάζοντες ἐγειρόμενοι (nustázontes egeirómenoi): "sleepy people being woken up".
νυστάζοντε ἐγειρόμενω (nustázonte egeirómenō): "two sleepy chaps being woken up".
θεοὶ ῥεία ζωόντες (theoí rheía zōóntes): the gods who live in ease, who live 'flowingly'.
μελίφρων (melíphrōn): like honey to the mind.
ἀντεραστής (anterastēs): one's competitor in love.
θυόειν (thuóein): to fill with a sweet smell.

Sinensis.
眼神 (yăn shén): the expression in one's eyes.
松濤 : the sound of wind blowing in the pine trees.
早霞，晚霞: (zăo xía, wăn xía): the clouds when lit by the sun in the morning/evening.
霽(jì): the clouds around the moon.
電影 (dìan yǐng): Movie. A common word, but very poetic: it literally means "electric shadow".
去見馬克思 (qù jiàn Mǎkèsī): to die, lit. "to go see Marx".
殉情 (xùn qíng): to die for love. (殉 is a very productive element, indicating "to die for X".  Hence 殉國, to die for one's country; 殉難, to die for a good cause; 殉職, to die while doing one's duty).  


PLUVIALIA.
聽雨軒 (tīng yŭ xuān): a pavilion built specially for listening to the rain; a "listening-to-rain pavilion".  One finds them esp. in old enclosed gardens.  Banana plants are grown outside the windows, that one may appreciate the rain's pattering on their leaves.

 

雨絲 (yŭ sī): a fine drizzle. The sī refers to a silk thread, hence 'rain as fine as the silk thread'.
細雨 (xì yǔ): a fine drizzle. The xì means simply 'fine', esp. of granulated things', but also of slender things, delicate things. The pictographic element of the character (糸) is of silk.
濛濛細雨 (méng méng xì yǔ): This is not a lexeme, but merely a combination of an adj. and a noun. Still, as so often in Chinese, the four characters denote a fairly fixed idea in a set phrase. 濛濛 refers to something misty, the underlying idea being 'blindness' or 'indistinctness'. Hence a misty sort of rain the makes it hard to see.
愁 (chóu): Gloomy, melancholic; anxious, worried. It comes from the combination of heart (心) and Fall (秋). Probably the 'Fall' element is primarily for pronunciation, but it grants the extended meaning to the character of "to take Fall to heart" (把秋放在心上). The Chinese lexicographers seem to think this is meant to refer to the worry one feels for the result of his toil, viz. of the crops in the Fall. I like to think that it might be connected with melancholy: black bile abounds in Fall.

English.
drizzle
horror
misprint (to my mind, the finest sounding word in our language for its consonants and the required mouth shape)

crump: "To eat with an abrupt but somewhat dulled sound; applied esp. to horses and pigs when feeding"  (s.v. OED 1), or the sound of the snow crushed under one's feet (OED 2).
crunkle: the sound that a crane makes. 

Characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Prince Myshkin (Sun Daolin)

Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin (Toshiro Mifune).

General Epanchin (Derek Jacobi).

Generaless Epanchin (Alison Steadman).

Dr. Chris Johanson, of U.C.L.A., said in his lecture at U.B.C. this week that, in his digital reconstruction of the Roman forum, he intentionally departs from realism.  One's avatar is any one of an host of clearly modern people; and the buildings themselves are meant to appear somewhat cartoonish.  Why?  Because realism, he believes, would lead a viewer to believe in the objectivity and finality of the reconstruction. 
     His logic is this, so far as I can gather: Modern learners attempt to construct mental models of the ancient world visually.  Each of us maps Rome in his head, and an image, once settled, is difficult to change.  Drawings and films fix these models all the more tenaciously and vividly in proportion to their realism, not their accuracy.  Hence Anthony Mann's 1964 film The Fall of the Roman Empire has done immeasurable harm to studies of the Forum, by propagating very realistic but inaccurate model.  To avert further damage, tentative models should use a tentative style: the cartoon.
    

Since cartoon's are, generally speaking, associated with fiction, a cartoonish representation would

A Hand from the Water.

An Icelandic classmate mentioned a story to me, apparently from a stage drama, which I shall investigate further, when I asked about Norse horror.  It is a Christian story, from the nineteenth century, somewhat resembling the tale of Faust.  It seems the plot is this: a wicked man goes to the diocese and, entering the crypt, takes a book of spells from a bishop's corpse.  With this, he sells his soul to the devil, whom eventually he tries to flee.  The climax is this: the man takes a boat onto the water, intending to sail westward to safety, when a great, hairy hand emerges from the water and pulls the boat and the man under.

I try to picture, whether the devil be a brachiate sea monster, or a hairy amphibian, or simply a swimming land mammal.  My favorite image, is of the seafloor opening and an great, long arm reaching from the fissure, like a pole, until the gaunt, hair-covered hand clamps around the boat and pulls it violently to the black depths.