APPENDIX D

The Cook’s Counterpoint

The composer George Friedrich Handel was never renowned for the high esteem in which he held his colleagues. According to a well-known anecdote, when he was once asked what he thought of the composition skills of his compatriot Christoph Willibald Gluck, Handel retorted that Gluck was no better at counterpoint than his cook. When I first heard this story, I was struck by a grave existential question: whose cook? Was Handel referring to Gluck’s cook, or to his own?

I was only to settle the question when I eventually came across the original source of the anecdote, in the memoirs of the music historian Charles Burney. There, Handel is quoted verbatim:

I remember when Mrs Cibber, in my hearing, asked Handel what sort of a composer [Gluck] was; his answer, prefaced by an oath … was ‘he knows no more of contrapunto as mein cook, Waltz’.

So the mystery was solved. (In fact, Gustavus Waltz was not only Handel’s cook, but also a professional musician, a singer and an actor, so the insult was not as indiscriminate as it first appears.) The moral of the story, in any case, is that the pronoun ‘his’ can sometimes fail to point at referents unambiguously. ‘His’ refers to any male in the singular, and since both Handel and Gluck answer this description, the sentence ‘Handel thought that Gluck was no better … than his cook’ is ambiguous, because ‘his cook’ can mean either Gluck’s cook, or Handel’s cook. In this case, then, the grammar of English falls short in the task of disambiguating the two participants.

As was mentioned in Chapter 7, however, in some other contexts English has developed a clever mechanism, a particular category of pronouns called ‘reflexives’, which help in the task of fine-tuning the reference, and manage to eliminate precisely such ambiguities. Consider this example:

Gluck thought Handel admired him.

The pronoun ‘him’ also refers to any male in the singular, so in theory, ‘him’ should have been just as unclear as ‘his’ was in the first example. The sentence should have had two possible meanings: ‘Gluck thought Handel admired Gluck’ or ‘Gluck thought Handel admired Handel’. But in fact, any English speaker knows without a second’s thought that only the first of these two interpretations is possible, and that ‘him’ can only refer to Gluck. Why? The reason is that when English speakers want to express the other option, and say that Handel actually admired Handel, they always use a special type of pronoun, the reflexive ‘himself’. Reflexive pronouns are used to indicate that the two participants in the same action are one and the same. So in the example above, the possibility that ‘him’ refers to Handel is eliminated, because we know that if it were Handel, the sentence would have to be ‘Gluck thought Handel admired himself’. Quite an effective mechanism, then, for producing an unambiguous reference. Reflexive pronouns manage to eliminate the ambiguity not only by their presence, but also by their absence.

How can such a handy device develop? The clue to the origin of reflexives (in English, as in many other languages) is found in another group of pronouns, which share the same form as reflexives, but which are used for a different purpose: adding emphasis. Think of sentences like ‘guess who didn’t turn up to the launch party? The author himself’, or ‘the chess-computer Deep Blue defeated Kasparov himself’, or ‘the minister himself was spotted on the tube this morning’, and so on. In such examples, the pronoun himself is not used to disambiguate between two male participants (there is only one human participant in each sentence anyway). Himself here just serves to emphasize that it was the author ‘of all people’ (who didn’t turn up to his own launch party), it was the world-champion Kasparov ‘and none other’ who was beaten by a computer. In other words, a speaker would use himself when the identity of the participant is surprising or unexpected in the context (for example, when a minister takes the tube), in order to convey something like: ‘yes, I know it may come as rather a surprise, but I really do mean the person I have just named’.

So the same ‘himself’ seems to be serving two rather different functions: it can be used as an emphatic pronoun (‘the author himself never turned up’), and it can be used in the non-emphatic grammatical function of a reflexive (‘Handel admired himself’). Given all we know about the direction of change in meaning, it is not too difficult to work out what the historical relation between these two usages must be. Since meanings tend to erode over time, it must be the emphatic sense of ‘himself’ which was there first, and the reflexive function must have developed from it. Indeed, the records show that the emphatic use of ‘self’ goes back to the earliest attestations of English, but that the reflexive use is younger, and had not yet developed in the Old English period (roughly before 1066). The absence of a special reflexive pronoun in Old English can be surmised from sentences in which an ordinary pronoun is found where modern English would have to use a ‘self’ form instead. Here is an example from Beowulf where the hero dresses himself for battle, but the actual form used is hine ‘him’.

The word ‘self’ did exist in Old English, but at that time it was still emphatic in nature, and its reflexive function had yet to emerge. And how could this reflexive function actually develop from an emphatic sense? The change must be considered in the context of the common actions of life, which one generally directs towards others, rather than towards oneself. On the whole, one tends to ‘admire’, ‘liberate’, ‘hurt’, ‘love’, ‘resent’, ‘talk to’, ‘listen to’, ‘send things to’ others, not oneself. So when, for a change, one does direct an action towards oneself, this is often more surprising and less expected in the context. And here is the link between emphatics and reflexives, for as I have just mentioned, emphatic pronouns tend to be used exactly when a participant is unexpected in the context. The following example from Old English may help to clarify the nature of the link:

In this line from a religious poem, the word sylfne ‘self’ serves to emphasize that, contrary to what one might expect, God wanted to send us none other than God personally. So here, ‘self’ still carries special emphasis, and functions as a proper emphatic pronoun. Nevertheless, since emphatic ‘self’ forms came to appear more and more frequently in contexts where the two participants of an action are (surprisingly) one and the same, they gradually lost their emphatic force in these contexts, and speakers simply started expecting a ‘self’ form whenever the two participants in the action were the same. What had started as a mere inclination to add a ‘self’ form for extra emphasis became a trend, which then fossilized into a rigid rule: the ‘self’ forms became obligatory whenever the actor was doing something to ‘himself’.

The cleverest thing about all this is that once ‘self’ forms were no longer just an optional extra, but had come to be expected whenever the two participants were the same, then the absence of a ‘self’ form, as in ‘Gluck thought that Handel admired him’, could be taken as a definite statement that the action was not performed on oneself, that is, that Handel admired Gluck. And this is how the ‘self’ forms came to play a useful grammatical function even through their absence.

Unfortunately, English never got round to developing the same distinctions on the pronoun ‘his’ (otherwise I would have been spared years of uncertainty as to the object of Handel’s derogatory remark that Gluck was no better at counterpoint than his cook). But some languages have extended the reflexive versus non-reflexive distinction to possessive pronouns as well. In Norwegian, for instance, the pronoun hans means ‘his’, and sin means ‘his-self’, so that the following sentence:

would be unambiguous, since hans kokk can only refer to Handel’s cook, whereas sin kokk can only be Gluck’s cook.