Margaret Gelling 玛格丽特·婕玲

Obituary
逝者

Margaret Gelling
玛格丽特·婕玲

 

May 14th 2009
From The Economist print edition

Margaret Gelling, an expert on English place names, died on April 24th, aged 84

玛格丽特·婕玲，研究英国地名的专家，于4月24日去世，享年84岁

AT WIVENHOE, in Essex, the low line of the hills has the shape of the heels of a person lying face-down. The name contains the shape: a hoh is a ridge that rises to a point and has a concave end. At Wooller in Northumberland, however, the hilltop is level, with a convex sloping shoulder. The hidden word here is ofer, “a flat-topped ridge”. Early Anglo-Saxon settlers in England, observing, walking and working the landscape, defined its ups and downs with a subtlety largely missing from modern, motorised English. Dozens of words, none of them synonymous, described the look of a hill, the angle of slope and the way trees grew upon it. And after the Anglo-Saxons, no one looked at the landscape in quite that way until Margaret Gelling.

Essex郡的Wivenhoe镇（Wiven的脚跟[0]），低矮的山脊线好像一个趴在地上的人的脚跟。这种形状其实已经包含在小镇的名字当中：hoh指的就是这样形状的山脊——一边陡，一边缓，缓那边在最低处成凹状。而Northumberland郡的Wooler镇（泉水山=well+ofer），山顶是平的，山坡则向外鼓起。Wooler这个名字里藏的词是ofer——“平顶山”。早期到英格兰定居的盎格鲁·撒克逊人在行走山间，开地垦荒的过程中，对山势的高低起伏观察入微，山有多少种形态，就被定居者们赋予了多少种名字。这种细微在急速膨胀而成的现代英语中已很少见到。而如今，开着汽车穿越群山的英国人，已几乎感觉不到这些细微的差别。古英语中会有几十个不同的词来描绘山的样与貌，坡的陡与缓，林的疏与密，并且每个词都有每个词的独特意思。而盎格鲁·撒克逊人后代们眼中的山已是“千山一律”，直到玛格丽特·婕玲的横空出世。

She was a neat, keen, merry woman, “prissy” as she described herself, and sensibly shod and clad. The gear was appropriate for slopping through slæp, fenn, myrr and slohtre (the disappointing origin of Upper and Lower Slaughter), or stomping through leah, hurst, holt and græfe, where trees were felled and coppiced and axes rang in the woods. Though she spent much of the time with her nose in one-inch Ordnance Survey maps, tracking the contour lines, she found them a “coarse instrument” for her purpose. When it came to understanding English place names, there was no substitute for donning your wellies and using your eyes.

婕玲是一个性格很阳光的女人，她对于工作充满了热情，而且做起事来有条不紊；她说到自己性格的时候用了“过分讲究”这个词，她对于穿衣戴帽也确实讲究。上面这些“装备”足以让她能够涉足经过slæp，fenn，myrr和slohtre[1]（这是Upper and Lower Slaughter[2]中slaughter这个词的由来，有点失望是吧）四块脚感不同的泥泞之地，或者脚踏实地地穿过leah，hurst，holt和græfe[3]（这里的树被一棵棵伐倒，锯木声响彻树林）四块树木高矮各异，疏密有别的林地。尽管她在那种比例尺为“一英寸比一英里”大小的地形测量地图上花费了大量时间，寻找等高线，她却认为地形图并不能完全满足自己的要求，因为它们太“粗糙”了。如果要寻求英国地名的正确含义，别无它法，只有穿上雨靴，实地观察。

Mrs Gelling worked for the English Place-Name Society, formally and informally, from 1946. From 1986 to 1998 she was its president. She never held an academic post, but lectured widely, wrote a dozen books and produced three of the county surveys of place names. She was devoted to the proposition that names drawn from the landscape were not or accidental, but original and important. All her passion for argument was employed to prove that hamm, a piece of land almost enclosed by water, was as vital a suffix as ham, a man-made enclosure; that an ending in -den might come from denu, a long and sinuous valley, rather than denn, a woodland pig-pasture; and that the hall in Coggeshall came from halh, a nook or a hollow, not some grand building. Cogg’s nook, a little recess tucked into the 150-foot contour line, was perhaps the best place where he could put his hut. With Mrs Gelling, topography always came first.

从1946年起，婕玲开始在英国地名研究会工作，时而全职，时而兼职。1986年到1998年间，她是该研究会会长。她从未在任何学术机构任过职，却四处演讲，写了十来本书，并且编写了《各郡地名概览》系列丛书中的三本。她坚信从山水地貌中得来的名字并非不起眼，而是非常重要；并非是随意编造，而是各有各的来历。她在证明地名的由来上面投入了极大的热情；她证明了hamm（一块几乎被水包围的陆地）和ham（一种人造防御）（一片人工围起来的区域）一样都是很活跃的后缀；词尾-den可能来源于denu（狭长迂回的山谷），而不是来自denn（一块用来牧猪的林地）；Coggeshall镇（Cogg的藏身洞）名字里的hall来自halh（藏身洞），而不是什么高楼大厦。Cogg的藏身洞隐蔽在150英尺等高线处，可能是栖身的最佳选择。对婕玲来说，地形学是她最重要的研究武器。

No subtlety escaped her. The suffix fyrhth was not simply wood, but “scrubland at the edge of the forest”. The word wæss was not just swamp, but—she was particularly proud of this—“land by a meandering river which floods and drains quickly”. She had observed this herself at Buildwas, on the winding Severn in Shropshire, where between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon the flooding river drained from the land “as if a plug had been pulled out”. A feld was not necessarily ground broken for arable, but any open country in the almost all-covering fifth-century forest. And an ærn was not merely a house, but a place where something was stored in bulk and worked on: so that Brewerne, in Cambridgeshire, acquired a smell of beer, and Colerne, in Wiltshire, a dusting of charcoal.

没有任何细微之处能逃得过她的火眼。后缀fyrhth不仅仅指木头，应该是“森林边上的灌木丛”。wæss 这个词意为沼泽未免过于简单，而是“蜿蜒的河流旁边的陆地；如果河水溢出河岸，来得快，走得也快”，她对这个发现尤为得意。在Shropshire郡的Buildwas村，她在流经而过的Severn河边上看到了这种现象，溢上岸的河水在周六早上到周日下午短短的时间之内便退却了，“就像拔掉了排水塞一样”。Feld不一定只指开垦为农耕用途的土地，而是指任何空旷的地方（五世纪的英国，森林几乎覆盖了所有地方）。an ærn不仅仅是一个房子，而是成批地生产加工并且储存的场所：这样一来，Cambridgeshire郡的Brewerne镇（brew+ærn），当年一定是到处飘荡着酒气；Wiltshire郡的Colerne镇（cole/coal+ærn），空气中的煤灰好似浓雾。

Reading Spaghetti Junction

读懂“通心面”

This “obsession”, as she happily called it, seemed to have begun at St Hilda’s in Oxford, where she found her English course boring, but was encouraged by Dorothy Whitelock to look at place names. They appealed immediately to the socialist, even communist, instincts with which she liked to shock her parents. Most of the place names of England had been bestowed not by officialdom, or in deference to knights, earls or kings, but by ordinary peasants coping with flooded pasture or looking over the hills. That habit had long died out; but as a resident of Birmingham (“village of Beorma’s people”) for most of her life, she liked to think that Spaghetti Junction, the giant intersection of roads just north of the city, was a solitary modern example of the will of the people expressed in a name.

她乐于把自己对于地名研究的喜好叫作“痴迷”，这样的“痴迷”应该最早源于她在牛津的圣·希尔达学校求学期间，讨厌英语课的她却被多萝西·怀特罗克鼓励去研究地名。这些地名当中体现出的社会主义甚至共产主义思想立刻就合了她的胃口，她还喜欢用这些“异端邪说”吓唬自己的父母。英国的大多数地方都不是由官方命名，也不是为了表示对骑士，伯爵或国王的顺从而得名，这些名字是来自那些普普通通的农民，这些人会修复被淹的牧场，会在群山间行走巡视。这样的人早已消逝远去；且慢，她喜欢拿Spaghetti Junction（通心面立交桥）做例子，认为这个称谓是现代仅有的可以体现民意的名字。Spaghetti Junction在她住了大半辈子的Birmingham市（“Beorma人的村庄”），位于城市北部，是一座巨型立交桥。

She was less egalitarian when it came to the business of sorting out what names meant. There were too many snares and snags involved “to invite general participation in the process of suggesting etymologies”. Who, for example, would catch that Chiswick and Keswick both meant “cheese-farm”, or that the tasty-sounding Fryup, in Yorkshire, meant “Frig’s remote valley”? Who could safely sort out ea, as in Eton, meaning a river, from ey, Old Norse for island? Who would dare to hazard a meaning for Wixhill and Wingfield, if she herself left them as “obscure”?

她的这种平等思想却无法被她拿来用在地名研究上面。“如果所有的地名都参与到寻祖寻根中来如果普通大众都参与进来的话”，会遇到许多阻碍，或是走入歧途。比方说，谁能解释清楚为什么Chiswick和Keswick都指“乳酪作坊”；为什么Yorkshire郡的Fryup镇，名字听起来能让人流口水，意思却是“Frig的遥远山谷”？谁能分辨出Eton[4]中的ea（意为“河”）和古诺斯语[5]中的ey（意为“岛”）之间的异同，并敢肯定自己的结论确凿无差。谁敢自作聪明地臆测Wixhill和Wingfield两个地名的由来？要知道婕玲早已给这两个名字贴上了“难以解释”的标签。

Nonetheless, she was grateful when locals got in touch with her: telling her, for example, that the stream at Winsor in Hampshire was too tiny to carry the meaning, “river-bank where boats are pulled by a windlass”, she had posited for Windsor in Berkshire. She was delighted to think that the public, reading her books, would suddenly learn to read their habitat, and see it with completely different eyes. At Hartside in Cumbria, for example, a white deer would suddenly flash through the woods; at Earley, in Berkshire, white-tailed eagles would fly above a clearing. And better still, in the soulless suburbs of south London, Penge now marked “the wood’s end”, and Croydon became “the valley where wild saffron grows”.

但是，她很感谢那些与她接触过的当地人：她从他们那里得到许多有用的信息；比如， Hampshire郡Winsor镇的人告诉她，当地的那条小河根本就是名不副实，因为它实在是太小了，“河里的船靠着河岸上绞盘拖拉前行”，于是她又将词的来源定位到Berkshire郡的Windsor镇。当地的那条小河实在太小了，因此“河里的船靠着河岸上绞盘拖拉前行”（她对“Windsor”的解释）这个说法有些名不副其实。她很希望人们读了她的书后，马上就学会读解自己的居住地，换一种全新视角来看待这个地方。比如，在Cumbria郡的Hartside镇，一头白色的鹿会突然从眼前闪现，穿过树林；在Berkshire郡的Earley镇，白尾鹰会在空地上方盘旋。更好的例子在这里：在了无生气的伦敦南部郊区，Penge那里其实原来是“树林的尽头”，Croydon则变成了“生长着野生藏红花的山谷”。

注：
[0]文中斜体部分为译者添加。
[1]slæp，fenn，myrr，slohtre这四个词是古英语，意思上都接近mud或marsh，但是之间应该有细微差别。
[2]Upper and Lower Slaughter分为Upper Slaughter和Lower Slaughter，是两个比邻的小镇。
[3]leah，hurst，holt，græfe这四个词在古英语里表示四种样貌不同的林地。
[4]Eton来自古英语Ēa-tūn, = River-Town
[5]古诺斯语（Old Norse）又称斯堪的那维亚语，当年被斯堪的那维亚人带到英国，对古英语有很大的影响。

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