CHITIKA

Hyperbaton

Hyperbaton – is a generic term for changing the normal or expected order of words.
E.g. "One as does not a survey makes."
The term comes from the Greek for "overstepping" because one or more words "overstep" their normal position and appear elsewhere.
For instance, Milton in Paradise Lost might write, ‘High on a throne of royal gold . . . Satan exalted sat.’ In normal, everyday speech, we would expect to find, ‘High on a throne of royal gold . . . Satan sat exalted.’
Subtypes of hyperbaton appear below the examples here:
‘Arms and the man I sing’-Virgil
‘This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.’-Variously attributed to Winston Churchill or Mark Twain
‘I was in my life alone’-Frost
‘Constant you are, but yet a woman’-1 Henry IV, 2.3.113
‘Grave danger you are in. Impatient you are.’ --Yoda, in Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones
‘From such crooked wood as state which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned’-Kant
Thus, we can apply the term hyperbaton to any mixing up of the order of words in a sentence in order to try to make it more arresting or vivid. It seems to me, that it is absolutely correct, that language must be freed from the wooden necessity of "proper" or "natural" word order.
I think he is incorrect when those words are considered as fixed entities, unlike the stones that can be polished and cut and fit into their "proper" place in a wall or arch. Not only did the ancients have ways of shortening or lengthening words, but we can also imagine ourselves inventing new forms of as we verbalize nouns (e.g., "task" as a verb), shorten words, place something in the middle of words by tmesis or lengthen them. Yet, rearranging word order is often the way that poets (and those who would like to explore eloquence) can speak.

No comments:

Post a Comment