A young girl at a window muses about names...

I’ve been talking about names, as you’ll have seen from our Word of the Week, where I took us from a saintly Anglo-Saxon princess named Etheldreda to country fairs in the town of Ely to the word tawdry. Now, it’s one of the absolutes of modern linguistics to say that names are entirely random, and that the sounds we make with our lips and tongue and teeth and palate and epiglottis and nose and vocal cords have nothing to do with any meaning. Sure, there’s a lot of truth to that, but I don’t think it’s the last word on the subject. The Hebrew word for night — and think how beautiful the night sky is in the Mediterranean world, where there aren’t many clouds, and the sea and the sands seem also to dance with starlight — is leylah, a lovely word for a lovely thing. The great titan of language and art, J. R. R. Tolkien, invented a whole language, Elvish, to express most beautifully the bond between meaning and sound.

Tolkien said, by the way, that for a language to be capable of the greatest beauty, it should possess two sounds, one of which is rather uncommon among the languages of Europe, and the other, only to be found in about 10% of languages all over the world. English has got them both: the consonant w and both consonants, voiced and unvoiced, that we spell with th. It doesn’t matter how you spell them; just whether you have them. Italian and French have the w sound; Castilian Spanish has the th sound, as do Icelandic and Greek; German and Russian have neither. Welsh has both, and Tolkien thought Welsh was supremely beautiful, giving it credit for English’s keeping both sounds. Tolkien was also steeped in Scripture, and he knew Hebrew, too (one of his R’s is Reuel, that is, Reu-El, Friend of God; that’s the other name of Moses’s father-in-law, the priest and shepherd Jethro). He knew that naming is a big deal in the Bible. I think that it is so in every human culture. We don’t just use words as markers to impart a meaning. We dwell on our words; we utter them; we play with them; we turn their sounds this way and that; we do all kinds of things with them that no machine can ever do.

On Monday I brought up what Juliet said when she was standing on her balcony, and she was mulling about the name Romeo. She says that there’s nothing in a name. We could call a rose by some other name, and it would have no effect on the rose. I guess we could call it a stunchwort or something like that — I guess; but would we do it? In any case, the name troubles her, not because he is Romeo (and I mentioned where that name came from, as I believe Shakespeare knew very well), but because he’s a Montague. The two families, the Montagues and the Capulets, have been feuding for a long time. The play actually opens with a street brawl, and the ruler of Verona, the reasonable and wise Prince Escalus, who has had enough of both families, lets old Capulet and old Montague know that he will not put up with any more of their outrages. The streets of Verona are for common town life, for talk, for business, for cheerful meetings of friends, not for bloodshed. Indeed, it appears that old Capulet himself, a generally reasonable man with a bit of a temper when he’s crossed, knows that the Prince is right. So when Romeo shows up at the masquerade ball at the Capulets’, the old man absolutely forbids his nephew Tybalt to pick a fight with him. Romeo is reputed in Verona to be a handsome and modest young gentleman. Tybalt goes away in a simmering rage. But Romeo and Juliet see one another, and in the whirl of their youth, and maybe also in their unsettledness, their wanting not to be a part of what their kinsmen, or some of them, have made of Verona, they fall in love, immediately and dangerously.

If the Montagues and the Capulets had been reasonable people, Romeo and Juliet would be free to do the right and decent thing. Be assured that Shakespeare did not believe in secret marriages, and nobody in his day thought that a marriage concerned only the bride and groom and not their families. But that’s been foreclosed for them. Even Friar Lawrence, the good priest and “ghostly father” for Romeo, can think of no better solution to their situation than to perform a secret wedding, hoping not so much to indulge their passionate feelings for each other, but to bring the families together despite themselves. It doesn’t work out. That is an understatement! But as you listen to the lovely words, full of youth and passion, remember that the names are important because the families are important, and that the young people are entering dangerous territory. That makes the beauty all the more poignant and tragic.

“Dame Ellen Terry as Juliet,” Laura Wilson Barker. Public Domain.