Talk:Ormulum

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	Ormulum is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. If you can update or improve it, please do.
Article Milestones Date Process Result October 25, 2005 Featured article candidate Promoted Current Status: Featured article

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Contents 1 NPOV 2 Queries 3 Orm the Ready? 4 Yuck, the Yoghs!

[edit] NPOV

Come now, this is Wikipedia - we can't describe something as "wholly devoid of literary merit" here. Besides, Orm does quite well on the drowsiness test. I can attest to once having read the first 50 lines of his magnum opus before I started nodding. That's 40 lines more than Finnegans Wake can claim, and I see people over there claiming they're writing about a masterpiece! Haeleth 15:45, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, I had planned to substantiate it a bit by pointing out that

1. It's derivative, lock-step, from Bede and Glossia Ordinaris
2. Its meter is bone-jarring
3. When it's not rattling your bones, the meter is dulling your brain
4. The allegory and typology are lacking in any references to actual life at all, so even the sermons don't give us a glimpse of anyone living
5. It's repetititititititive.

So I had kind of wanted to make the case that it was NPOV without any literary merit at all. It has a great deal of importance, but not as a work of literature. Oh, and if you think Orm's bad, try reading Cursor Mundi. I still have nightmares about having to speed read that before class because it had bored me to a coma the night before.

BTW, if you have more info on Orm, I'm going to try to work this sucka into Featured Article shape in the next few weeks. Your input would be a great help. (Reading 50 lines of Ormulum is rarer than even claiming to understand Finnegans Wake.)

Obviously, I don't have any problem with the NPOV version of the "no literary merit" claim, but I do think that saying that it has no merit is more or less incontrovertible. Geogre 16:42, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

I found a source that says that the work is without literary merit! (tee-hee) (No, I won't put it in, but I will cite it when making my own disparaging comments.) (Oh, and it's not JAWs Bennett.) Geogre 22:20, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

I should note for posterity that my tongue was firmly in my cheek above. I did once try to devil's-advocate Orm in a tutorial, but I must admit my argument was not wholly convincing. ^_^

Getting this featured article status sounds like a great idea. I'll see if there's anything I can add. Haeleth 23:05, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Do, please. I'm going to tinker with the lead a bit for a while, but I've finished researching it to the degree that I can. There are other things to say, but they're of the dreadfully dull variety (cataloging the ON doublets, picking some danged morphology and talking about how it shows up here then there then nowhere over X years, getting into a tangent about illiterate clergy in 1175, going on a tangent about vernacular masses in 1175, speculating on whether hand B is Walter or Orm still or none of the above, speculating on Hand C being Walter or Orm or the little boy who lives down the lane), and none of them would help make this story exciting. With a fair lead, I think the article would pass FAC, once the prose has been smoothed with rough hands. What I'm most concerned with, though, is whole angles that I've missed, as I'm sure I have. (E.g. I don't talk about patristic exegesis at all (and I don't think WP has an article on it), so explaining Augustine and Bede analyzing everything on a fourfold path is not here. It would only be here to explain how really bizarrely unhelpful Ormulum can be to moderns trying to understand the 12th c. church.) Any input welcome. (And yes, I saw the bulging cheek.) Geogre 01:37, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Hey, Haeleth? I was thinking. Perhaps this article needs a new template, one that says, "Kids, don't try (to read) this at home!" Figure folks are getting the message that reading this book is sort of like an autolobotomy? Geogre 02:05, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

Including a few more quotations should have the same effect, don't you think? ;)

The dedication, for example, being the most famous (or do I mean notorious?) passage - I can't imagine why B&S didn't include it; I have it in Treharne, but a diplomatic edition would be even better. Haeleth 14:11, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

I've only got B&S and no access to a full ed., although some Projector or other may have put it on the web (and then the authority has to be established). Not much point in putting in Orm's explanation of his spelling system, as it would do no one much good. Hmmm. I'm not afraid of translating myself, but I'll need some text that's worth the effort. Again, any from your quarter would be most welcome. Geogre 18:29, 18 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Queries

Order of C17th ownership: currently the article states "it was purchased first by Franz Junius and then Jan van Vliet, both Dutch antiquarians. It came to the Bodleian library as part of the Junius donation". I don't have anything that discusses the MS history ATM, but that looks odd to me. IIRC Junius acquired it from van Vliet's library after the latter's death - had he owned it previously too? Haeleth 22:06, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

Your version makes more sense, but I did get the information from a source (that Medieval Encyclopedia, I believe), and its sentence structure said that Junius and van Vliet owned it successively. That, of course, is one of those sentences that people write when they don't want to give the specifics, and it's fully possible (likely, even) that the author there got it wrong. We all know what fudging looks like, but, when I was making my notes, I didn't have reason to look closely. However, how it came to be the "Junius donation" when it wasn't Junius's has been bothering me some. We can fudge, too, or just put it right. Feel free. (You were also right about the thorn/eth.) Geogre 22:57, 19 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Orm the Ready?

It looks ready to me. Barring objection, I'll nominate it for FA tomorrow. Or, if you'd prefer to nominate it, Haeleth, I'll gladly give place. The point is, this is now a very, very good looking article on a very ugly book. Geogre 18:57, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

And now it is done. We wish ourselves good luck, I'm sure, and intelligent readers. Geogre 02:52, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Yuck, the Yoghs!

-or- Yoghi bare!

Umm, the yoghs still aren't displaying properly for me, with Firefox. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, as I'd need to study some to get up to naif level with screen fonts. Geogre 03:13, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Working fine for me, also with Firefox. Do they work at Yogh? I copied the solution from there (Template:Unicode). So long as you have a font installed that actually contains the proper character, they should be fine. Code2000 has it, although it's a hideous font. — Haeleth Talk 13:42, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, no, now that you mention it, they don't work at yogh for me. So long as it's the fault of my old browser, I have no problem with it. You've coded it in keeping with Wikipedia standards. Beyond that, there is little that anyone can do except use pictures, and those, of course, don't work for text samples from Ormulum. Geogre 13:47, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Unfortunately, what is needed is a font which the reader of the article has installed. In this connection, the writer is relatively unimportant. Though it is not the answer of a purist, would it not be better provisionally, to use something like "ζ", together with an explanation of the diffuculty? While not ideal, it is better than the burst of machine speak, which I get now. (RJP 19:38, 23 October 2005 (UTC))

A better replacement would be ʒ... it's still not universal, but it's present in more fonts than yogh, and it's closer to the right character, too. Is it visible for you here: "þeʒʒre"?

Failing that, there's a hacky alternative: "þe33re".

It seems to work here (Firefox, IE, and Opera all display it "acceptably"), and it has the added advantage (?) of being legible even for Lynx users. Plus anyone who ever transcribed Middle English with a typewriter will surely love being reminded of this venerable technique. ;)

— Haeleth Talk 20:31, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Using Internet Explorer, these work for me on the formal discussion page but not on the edit or difference presentations of it. (RJP 22:16, 23 October 2005 (UTC))

"Turn platen one half line, type 3, backspace, type 3 again, turn platen back up half a line." Oh, yeah. Fortunately, I wasn't dealing with yoghs when I was dealing with typewriters (still thinking, at that time, that Modern literature was the coolest). All of the above work, but we really are at a difficult pass. To some degree, we can only do what we can do. Short of having articles in .pdf, we're always going to be limited to the expanded font packages. While the solutions above work for we three, we can't really tell what's going to happen to people with entirely different character sets (French, Swedish, Dutch) or those who use font translation programs (any oriental language). I'm content with things as they are, but an changing to another, more accepted, way is, of course, good. Geogre 02:11, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I think we do need to do something - a featured article, by its very nature, needs to be accessible to those unfamiliar with the field, and while you can obviously say "aha, missing character, must be yogh", a visitor to Wikipedia would say "dear me, looks like this site is buggy". I'm rather suprised nobody's brought this up on the FAC page. They probably all have Unicode fonts installed... :/

I've managed to rule out using ezh, since my Win98 testbed (with deliberately limited range of fonts) didn't manage to display that. The <3> hack is neat, but not nice, and I don't know if Wikipedians really approve of that sort of thing.

There are two alternative approaches. The first would be to take editorial liberties: I note that Orm doesn't appear to use <y> (at least, not in the quoted passages)... might it be reasonable to substitute that, with an appropriate note? We've already followed the editors we quote in silently replacing wynn with <w>, after all, and it's the traditional thing to do for Layamon.

The other approach would be to substitute an equally "representative" passage that doesn't use any yoghs.

Comments? — Haeleth Talk 13:44, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

There's always one guy who'll say, "Meh, close enough." I suppose I'm him, here, but, at the same time, you're absolutely correct. The Ayenbite that has been requested is another such instance. (I think with Layamon the argument is sometimes that it the consonant became /y/ in his case, so modern editors feel like they're helping readers by making him more obviously Lawyerman. All such things are excuses, though.) Given that we are always already out of compliance with some browser or OS (e.g. does anyone know how far "Windows MediaCenter" or "Longhorn" are going to shove the old fonts out of whack), the kludge-y but best solution might well be to use an unusable typographical symbol (*, ^, #) and have a "Key" that indicates that that symbol was used for the yogh. That would be the most honest way to do it, but it won't give the uninitiated any way to understand it. They won't attempt to read it in their heads (assuming they can read thorn, eth, and ash now). I just don't see how we can chase down the horizon with the reverse Procrustean effort of fitting everyone's bed at once. Geogre 18:17, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

Excuse my naïvety but is it not possible to ask for another character in the list at the foot of the editing page? Can they not be constructed from pixels? (RJP 22:03, 24 October 2005 (UTC))

You can't be more naive than I am when it comes to fonts, but I think that won't work. I think that what we're dealing with is less finding a way to insert a character as finding a way to ensure that everyone looking at the page can display it. Any browser can display them, if the browser's owner has updated his or her font package, but some do and some don't come with the various solutions already in the default set. Maybe I'm wrong, though. I don't even know what a unicode is (except a thing used by the unibomb). Geogre 00:10, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

It might be technically possible to insert characters as bitmaps; I believe that's the Wikipedia standard way of dealing with Egyptian hieroglyphs. It would also have been possible to include a little infobox like they have on articles about Indic languages, explaining that you might need to install a special font to see all the text perfectly.

Reading through the excerpt in B&S again, though, I was fortunate enough to come across a little passage that seems to be just as representative of Orm's delightful style, and doesn't use any yoghs. This struck me as the ideal solution - filled with accessibility and scholarly integrity. And it uses the word middellærd, so the article will now automatically appeal to Tolkien fans too. What could be better? ^_^ — Haeleth Talk 19:48, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, hilarious! "The learned scribe Orm did battle against the grimlic foe of sloppy pronunciation and speedy publication. 'Publish or perish,' cried the foe. 'Both,' replied the stout Dragonman." (And the article has made it to FA. So congrats and thanks to all.) Geogre 21:12, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I just read the passage. What a stinker! Let someone question the lack of literary champion after reading that passage. :-) (We kid because we love.) Geogre 01:23, 28 October 2005 (UTC)