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Bæddel and bædling

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Bæddel and bædling (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

As of 27 January 2025, 18:04 (UTC), this page is active and open for discussion. An FAC coordinator will be responsible for closing the nomination.
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Nominator(s): Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 22:03, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've got a LGBT history and medieval history crossover for you guys. Bæddel and bædling are two obscure Old English nouns found in a couple of old glossaries and penitentials that refer to some sort of sexual or gender variance, but have absolutely no solid idea on what kind! If succesful, this FAC will be used for the WikiCup. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 22:03, 9 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Also, I will ping Urve and Tenpop421 since they have looked over and given advice on the article previously; no pressure to review, of course! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 00:53, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

  • Captions that are complete sentences should end in periods
Thank you as always! Fixed. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 06:05, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment. I don't believe in FAC, but the racial implication of cariar discussed by Wade (2024) is more involved than our summary of it suggests. Sayers is fairly similar in assigning some kind of racialized/socially stratified inflection of bædling. I haven't poked around but I'd be surprised if scholars haven't discussed these terms' influence on the journal baedan's name (as they acknowledge). I think, too, that there needs to be a more comprehensive discussion of these terms' relationship with pederasty; I know the Online Etymology Dictionary has glossed bædling as pederast, for example, though whether that's a reliable source I'm unfamiliar with. Urve (talk) 12:41, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Ah I wish I could through in a reference to the journal Baedan but none of the sources mention it so I don't think it'd be DUE. I added more context on cariar, and the stuff about the subaltern groups from Sayer. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 05:32, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Sorry, but I think there is more to say re pederasty and our text's suggestion that only Bell theorizes baedling's connection to it is somewhat misleading. Frantzen, who you already cite, suggests that the suffix -ling may indicate young age. Sarrazin's article should be cited if you can find it (which may require a librarian's help since I can't make sense of the citations to it I've found). Frantzen's argument re: bædling's connection to an oppressed state deserves more mention. I wonder whether any of the 70s-90s pederasty/so-called 'youth liberation' magazines, which are NOT digitized, have any discussion about the term?
    "While in some of the extant sources bædling seems to have denoted a passive partner in gay sexual intercourse, the reference to bædlings having sex with each other complicates this as a strict definition". ... how? The sentence that follows doesn't answer that. In any case, Frantzen argues that bædlings may correspond to intersex person precisely because bædlings could have sex with both men and each other. Frantzen's citation to a TLS article seems worthy of mention, and for that matter, why not discuss other newspapers/magazines (especially the gay press) that seem to have commented on the term?
    Honestly I'd probably lean oppose on comprehensiveness if I believed in this process. Urve (talk) 00:09, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Simply by way of example, see for example Davoud-Oghlou. Urve (talk) 00:26, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    To me, it seems beyond the bounds of DUE to dive into older material, especially 19th century works (which, if they're not being brought up in the modern scholarly literature, are probably not that helpful to begin with) or those 'interesting' periodicals of the 1960s/70s. I have searched for it in modern, more academically rigorous queer publications but have come up short beyond what I've cited. Until niche tumblr discourse gets academic coverage (and from what I have seen so far we're only a few years off from that), I don't think there's going to be room for coverage here beyond Old English philology.
    Now, that being said, I will try to incorporate a bit more from Frantzen. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 00:58, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Disappointing. It's undue to actually quote Sarrazin, cited in Liberman, but it's not undue to cite Wright and Meritt? Anything published in a gay circular is magically undue because it's not a 'modern, more academically rigorous queer publication' - an assertion based on, what, exactly? (I'm not talking about anything relating to tumblr; I have no idea what you're even referencing.) Urve (talk) 01:36, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It's academic history. I have to either use professionally peer-reviewed sources, or self-publications by subject matter experts; and unless they were getting professional historians to write in the 70s underground periodicals I am not really going to be able to use those per WP:V. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 01:58, 12 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support from UC

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A really interesting article. Brief comments for now:

  • Suggest adding a pronunciation guide to the first sentence.
    • These guides now need to go into (round) brackets. Suggest that a respell would be helpful as well, since a reader who doesn't know how to parse æ in Old English won't be able to parse it in IPA either.
      • Good point, added. - G
  • In the lead image caption, it would be helpful to translate homo delicatus.
  • The body only talks about the OED in relation to its first edition, while the lead seems to imply that the citation and definition remain in the current edition.
  • I think it would be helpful to give a sense of when the different scholars were writing: we variously quote people active today and those who died in the nineteenth century, without any real sense of which is which.
  • Sayers's title defines "Bædling" as "sodomite": that would seem to clash with some of what we've mentioned in the article, and seem to be germane for comprehensiveness?

UndercoverClassicist T·C 12:25, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@UndercoverClassicist: There we go, got to all these! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 23:45, 10 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A couple more:

  • Both terms are connected to effeminacy and adultery, although bæddel is glossed as hermaphrodite: it sounds here as if this is always the case, whereas I think from the body this is a particular feature of one such glossary.
  • propose alternate origins: alternative, when there's more than one.
    • Fixed. - G
  • The Paenitentiale Theodori distinguishes men and bædlings: this text needs some kind of introduction in the lead, if only by date and rough geography. Likewise The Antwerp Glossary (many manuscripts/ancient texts are named for where they are rather than where they were made: cf. any number of Codex Oxoniensis manuscripts written in Constantinople).
    • Fair point! Clarified these. - G
  • The term may have included people assigned female at birth who took on masculine social roles or to intersex people: missing the word referred between or and to, I think.
    • Fixed. - G
  • While bæddel is generally associated with intersex people in the attested sources: is this quite right? We say that it's the case for the Antwerp Glossary, but I can't see any other examples here that explicitly link it with intersexuality.
    • Is a 'hermaphrodite' not inherently intersex? I added a cite from Wade about this just to clarify.
    UndercoverClassicist Ohhh, I see what you mean. Yeah, it's only in the Antwerp Glossary. Rephrased Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 22:07, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • including molles 'soft person': molles is plural; the singular is mollis.
    • Oops! Thank you. - G
  • During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars such as J. R. C. Hall and Ferdinand Holthausen have argued : needs to be a true past tense, as it's no longer the early C20th.
    • True. - G
  • a 17th century Arthurian ballad in Scots mentions a Badlyng, which the scholar William Sayers identifies as "sodomite" in a 2019 paper: we seem to be talking about the person here, so identifies as a "sodomite" (I would link that term). Alternatively, "a word which the scholar..."
    • Fixed! - G

@UndercoverClassicist: Thank you again for looking over this! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 20:25, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • One thing that strikes me while doing some pedantic copyedits: we don't actually give any sense of when, or for how long, these terms were used. If nothing else, could we explicitly say when Old English was spoken? I'd be interested to know if these terms cover the whole of OE, or if they pop up/die out at a known time.
    UndercoverClassicist Ope, yes; I added some footnotes since it turns out the specific dating on a lot of these texts is uncertain, and none of them even reckon a guess at when the terms themselves in use. I just put the dates on when Old English in general was spoken. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 15:48, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Another read through with a view to supporting:

  • A third gloss from the Harley Glossary, cariar, is difficult to interpret and possibly a reference to the Anatolian region of Caria. ... The reference to Anatolia in the glossary -- we seem to have promoted the Anatolia hypothesis from a guess into a fact in the space of three sentences. Suggest "the putative reference" or similar.
    • Done. -G
  • The penitential also specifies that both adults and children can be bædlings, setting aside different punishments for bædlings of different ages.: can we say what those punishments were? I think it's germane to note whether we mean e.g. death or ten Hail Marys.
    • Clarified. -G
  • Indicated by an association in the Cleopatra Glossaries: introduce this source, as we have the others.
    • Done. - G
  • While bæddel is associated with intersex people in the attested glosses: sorry to keep beating this drum, but why is glosses plural here? Didn't we establish further up that there's only one gloss in play?
  • The term may have also referred to people assigned female at birth who took on masculine social roles, or (as with bæddel) to intersex people: another "promoted" hypothesis that now seems to have taken on the trappings of fact.
    • I'm a bit confused here, doesn't it already just say it's a possibility? -G
      • Ah - now you point it out, I can see that reading, but to me it's not the most natural. The "may have" seems naturally to govern "referred to", but not so naturally to apply to "as with...". Compare "John Smith may have (like Van Gogh) cut off his own ear": that implies that we known Van Gogh did it, and guess that John Smith might have done so. Perhaps amend to something like "as bæddel may also have done"? UndercoverClassicist T·C 20:29, 17 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
        • Done. - G
  • Sayers has an interesting line: "both OE and OIr ... exhibit a range of meanings from cognitive and mental deficiency to moral deficiency.". I've only got the first page on preview, but does this develop into something (that the word may have something to do with mental weakness/misdevelopment) that we can use?
    • Added. -G
  • It sounds from Sayers like the *baitos hypothesis owes a lot to Xavier Delamarre, rather than being entirely S's idea.
    • Clarified. - G
  • Anatoly Liberman, concurring with Coates on the etymological link to *badde, states that bæddel was formed from bad. While yfel was the standard word for "bad" during the Old English period, bad was established enough by the thirteenth century to become a common nickname (in the form bade).: as we've written it, this doesn't make a lot of sense, since in our formulation bæddel came about 300 years before bad. I think it would help to clarify when bad is first attested.
    • Done. - G
  • The Dictionary of Old English gives no etymology for bædling, only tentatively defining it as "effeminate man" or "homosexual": does this not more naturally belong in the section above, since it doesn't make any connection/reference to "bad"?
    • Good point, moved. - G
  • @UndercoverClassicist: There we go, sorry for the delay! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 04:52, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Sorry to keep prodding:
  • Just seen Like other glosses, the Cleopatra Glossaries (dating to the reign of Æthelstan, between 924 and 937) associate the term with effeminacy and softness: I'm not totally sure whether "the term" here is cariar, bæddel or bæddel.
  • Good point, fixed. - G
  • Separately, I wonder whether an EFN to explain the slightly odd name of the Cleopatra Glossaries would be enriching?
  • After quite a bit of searching, I legitimately cannot find a source which mentions why they are named that. The supposed etymology on their Wikipedia page is entirely uncited. - G
  • No, I can't find one either, so we'll have to leave this one. UndercoverClassicist T·C 11:30, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • this adjective could have been carried into Old English by the hypothetical form *baed, which would connote physical and moral deficiency, and perhaps shared "characteristics with the subaltern British".: something has gone awry here. Who/what, exactly, shared characteristics with the British? The word can't have done (unless the Britons themselves had four letters and a funny-looking vowel): do we mean that the qualities of physical and moral deficiency were associated with the subaltern British? On which: I might clarify here that "British" here has a very different meaning to what 99% of readers will assume, and explicitly excludes "English". UndercoverClassicist T·C 08:26, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @UndercoverClassicist: There we go, rephrased this sentence. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 22:41, 23 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm not sure that one quite got there: we still had the idea that the word was similar to the British, and by changing to "Ancient Britons", it made it sound like we were talking about inhabitants of other times rather than contemporary inhabitants of (especially) Wales, Cornwall and the north of Britain. I've made a fairly bold edit to characteristics perhaps associated by Old English speakers with the native British populations of the rest of the British Isles, and would be very happy to see that edited further. UndercoverClassicist T·C 09:18, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Yeah, that works for me! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:12, 24 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support from Crisco

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  • 'andreporesis, ie. man of both sexes' - ie. should be i.e.
    • Fixed! - G
  • I'd probably link philologist on first mention
    • Good idea. - G

Honestly, all I've got. Makes sense, though to be fair my educational background is in literature with a dash of linguistics. Happy to support, as neither comment is all that major. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 14:14, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Support from Tim riley

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An interesting and unexpected article. I cannot presume to comment on the substance, but here are a few minor thoughts on the prose:

  • blue links – I think some readers would be glad of links for "philologist" and "patronymic".
    • Added. - G
  • "the exact meaning of the terms (and their distinction, if any) are debated by scholars" – I have never been sure whether to use a singular or a plural verb for a sentence like this with the main subject out of the parenthesis and a subsidiary subject bracketed off. It looks a trifle odd as it is, but would probably look just as odd with a singular verb. I merely mention it and will say no more.
  • "citing German philologist Julius Zupitza" – clunky false title such as you avoid later in the text. (And is his nationality relevant here?)
    • Fixed. - G
  • "alternate origins" (and alternate definition and alternate etymologies later in the text) – wouldn't "alternative" (indicative of a choice between two or more things) rather than "alternate" (of two things, each following and succeeded by the other in a regular pattern) be the appropriate adjective here?
    • Good point, added. - G
  • "Bædling is likely derived from bæddel" – "likely" looks a touch strange here; one might expect "probably".
    • I am always caught offguard by this regional English variation - "probably" sounds pretty informal to my ears, but I've heard "likely" is only used in specific contexts in British English! Anyhow, since British English is def. preferable here, fixed. - G
  • "a connection with eunuchs, which were commonly associated with the Byzantine Empire" – I wonder about "which" here. Eunuchs were people, after all, and might be thought to qualify for "who" rather than "which".
    • Good point. - G
  • "leading philologists such as Herbert Dean Meritt ..." – I had to have two goes at this sentence. I took "leading" to be an adjective rather than a participle until the penny dropped when I clocked the comma rather than a stronger stop. I wonder if "causing" or suchlike might be less susceptible of misreading.
    • Fixed. - G
  • "The 1989 second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary and the OED Online continue to support Zupitza's etymology, dismissing alternate etymologies from Celtic words as "out of the question", while also suggesting a possible origin from bædan." – I can't comment on the 1989 print version of the OED but I have access to the OED's online version. Perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place but on the Etymology page for "bad" I can't find anything to justify "dismissing alternate etymologies from Celtic words as 'out of the question'."
    • Oops mistake on my part; that line is only in the 1989 print edition. Rephrased. - G

That's all from me. I hope there's something of use in some of these comments. – Tim riley talk 15:01, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

All now fine as far as I'm concerned (and some useful late additions too such as the "hermaphrodite" explanatory footnote). More than happy to support promotion of this excellent article to FA. It isn't lavishly illustrated – and I'm sure can't be – but the prose is clear and a pleasure to read; the article seems balanced and is well and widely sourced; it meets all the FA criteria in my view. – Tim riley talk 20:57, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support from Gog the Mild

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Recusing to review.

  • The caption of the first image, you need a cite for "Homo delicatus means a soft or effeminate man."
    • Added. - G
I have problems with this. The actual dictionary definition does not define Homo delicatus as an effeminate man. Instead you have a modern academic writing 350 years after the dictionary was published that when the term was used on a single, specific occasion 1,900 years prior to the dictionary being current it was understood to mean an effeminate man. Why should the dictionary definition mean what the words on the page means. Or change that part of the caption to something like 'It is believed that 1,900 years earlier Homo delicatus meant a soft or effeminate man. When effeminacy meant something rather different.
  • Fair enough. I just removed the image since a) it's from a later time period than we're talking about here, and b) the other sources don't touch on that dictionary's definition for it. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 19:11, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly more later. Gog the Mild (talk) 15:55, 11 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

  • "bæddel is defined as "hermaphrodite" in the two surviving glosses". "the two surviving glosses" implies that they were the only glosses to survive. Is that correct?
    • Yep. - G
  • "The early medieval penitential Paenitentiale Theodori". "penitential" is unlikely to mean much to most modern readers. Could you add a brief in line explanation?
    • Good idea - added. - G
I'm not seeing it. Am I being slow?
Gog the Mild not slow - I just added the definition to the first mention of penitentials in the very first paragraph. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 22:20, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, I was looking at the "penitential" next to Paenitentiale Theodori. D'oh! And after the first use in the main article?
Gog the Mild Oops, got to that too. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 06:04, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "early medieval" is a wide range, I understood the Paenitentiale Theodori to be more closely dated than that. And you don't date it at all in the main article.
  • "No reference is made to the word in the late Medieval period". Perhaps insert a "known" or similar?
    • Done. -G

Nicely written. Gog the Mild (talk) 19:02, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just one come back above. Gog the Mild (talk) 22:14, 15 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comments Support from MS

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Lead

  • Fine as it is. Just one minor comment-"philologist" could be delinked but I suppose you consider it to be a non-common occupation (and hence linked it).
    • It's a bit borderline, but I prefer to air on the side of avoiding confusion with links. -G

Definition

  • -

Etymology

  • Writing in 1988, Richard Coates... Coates could be described as "the linguist" here for clarity and concision.
    • Done. -G

That's all from my end Generalissima. MSincccc (talk) 17:42, 14 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Source review

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Source formatting seems consistent. Is Anatoly Liberman a reliable source? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:23, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Jo-Jo Eumerus: I think he counts as a subject matter expert here - his University of Minnesota page says he specializes in Germanic philology, medieval languages, and etymology, and he's recently had a book on etymology published by OUP. Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 17:40, 16 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Borsoka

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  • ..outside the norm.. I would make it clear here that we are in early medieval/post-Roman/pre-conquest/... England.
    • Done. - G
  • ...in some of the extant sources... Name one or two.
    • Rephrased this a bit to flow better. - G
  • A link to "emasculated"? Borsoka (talk) 15:45, 20 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    • Done. - G

@Borsoka: Thank you very much! Generalissima (talk) (it/she) 21:15, 21 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for this interesting article. I support its promotion. Borsoka (talk) 01:17, 22 January 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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