A posteriori

VARIABLE SYLLABLE: A syllable which can be either long or short, stressed or unstressed, depending upon context.

VARIORUM: A variorum edition is any published version of an author's work that contains notes and comments by a number of scholars and critics. The term is a shortened version of the Latin phrase cum notis variorum ("with the notes of various people"). The New Variorum Shakespeare is possibly the best known variorium edition in English.

VEGETATIONSDÄMON (Ger. "Plant-spirit"): A deity or spirit in mythology or in animism that represents (or is directly equivalent to) the vitality of domestic crops and/or native vegetation. This spirit would (in enacted ritual, in sacrifice, or in mythological narratives) grow and mature as the crops would grow and mature, but when the crops would be harvested, or when the seasons would change with autumn, the vegetationsdämon would either wither in death or would be struck down and killed in the harvest. Depending upon the mythic version, either the vegetationsdämon would be replaced by a new spirit with the new season, or the dead spirit would spontaneously resurrect and appear in the new season in young and vital form again. Analogues to this belief can be seen in Celtic "sacred kings," "Jack-in-the-Green" carvings, and the mystery cults of Demeter and Bacchus in ancient Greece. In the late nineteenth-century, German folklorists like Wilhelm Mannhardt studied Baltic myths and used studies of the vegetationsdämon to explain the origin of many cross-cultural myths in which a god dies and rises again. Later, British scholars like Sir James Frazer expanded upon Mannhardt's ideas and popularized them in The Golden Bough. Their work has since been criticized as a "one-size-fits-all" approach to myth (most recently and especially by Swiss scholars like Walter Burkert who focus on primitive hunting rituals as a source for myth). Likewise, the idea of a "seasonal dying god" makes much more sense in Northern Europe (with its fall and winter seasons) than it does in tropical locales like South America or balmy Mediterranean regions like Greece and Italy, where warm weather lasts year-round. In spite of those criticisms, Mannhardt and Frazer have been profoundly influential in mythological studies and on early twentieth-century poets and occultists.

VEHICLE: A means of conveyance or transport. In literature, vehicle extends to mean the method by which an author accomplishes her purpose. Thus, one might say, "Swift uses the vehicle of satire to express his ideas," or that "Darwin employs the vehicle of clear diction to best communicate a scientific theory."

VELAR: In linguistics, any velar sound involves the soft palate or velum--especially when the tongue touches against the soft palate.

VELLUM: The skin of a young calf used as a writing surface--the medieval equivalent of "paper." A technical distinction is usually made between vellum and parchment; the latter is made from goatskin or sheepskin. Uterine vellum--the skin of stillborn or very young calves, is characterized by small size and particularly fine, white appearance. As Michelle P. Brown notes in Understanding Illuminated Manuscripts, the process for creating vellum or parchment is quite complicated:

To produce parchment or vellum, the animal skins were defleshed in a bath of lime, stretched on a frame, and scraped with a lunular knife while damp. they could then be treated with pumice, whitened with a substance such as chalk, and cut to size. Differences in preparation technique seem to have occasioned greater diversity in appearance than did the type of skin used. Parchment supplanted papyrus as the most popular writing support material in the fourth century, although it was known earlier. Parchment was itself largely replaced by paper in the sixteenth century (with the rise of printing) but remained in use for certain high-grade books. (95)

VENODOTIAN CODE: See Dosbarth Gwynedd.

VERB: A word that "does" the subject's action in a sentence or shows a state of being or equation. For instance, "He sang to her." The word sang is the verb. Typically verbs can appear in various tenses (like past, present, or future), in various aspects (complete or not complete), in different voices (such as active, passive, or aorist) and in different moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, jussive, conditional). Many languages use one form of a verb for singular subjects and a different form for plural subjects.

VERBAL IRONY: See discussion under irony, above.

VERBAL NOUN: A noun that comes from a verb. For instance, peregrination comes from the verb peregrinate, and the gerund running comes from the present participle of the verb run. Contrast this with the noun timber, which does not come from a verb.

VERBAL PARADOX: See paradox and oxymoron.

VERCELLI MANUSCRIPT: An important manuscript of Old English religious poems and sermons--probably written in the late tenth-century. The name comes from Vercelli monastery in northern Italy, where the lost manuscript was rediscovered. This manuscript includes one of only two copies of the poem, "The Dream of the Rood." The other surviving copy of this poem is a set of partial excerpts from the work that appears carved in runes on the Ruthwell Cross near Dumfries in southern Scotland.

VERISIMILITUDE: The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable. For instance, the reader possesses a sense of verisimilitude when reading a story in which a character cuts his finger, and the finger bleeds. If the character's cut finger had produced sparks of fire rather than blood, the story would not possess verisimilitude. Note that even fantasy novels and science fiction stories that discuss impossible events can have verisimilitude if the reader is able to read them with suspended disbelief. Cf. Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

VERNACULAR (from Latin vernaculus "native, indigenous"): The everyday or common language of a geographic area or the native language of commoners in a country as opposed to a prestigious dead language maintained artificially in schools or in literary texts. Latin, for instance, has not been a vernacular language for about 1250 years. Sanskrit has not been a vernacular language in India for more than 2000 years. However, Latin in medieval Europe and Sanskrit in ancient India were considered much more suitable for art, scholarship, poetry, and religious texts than the common tongue of everyday people even though (or perhaps because) only a small percentage of the learned could read the older languages.

Usually, a race or culture writes in its native tongue during the early days of its civilization. For instance, the Chinese Wên Li was a vernacular language at the time of Confucius, and it would have been easily understood by most Chinese people in that dialectical area. Likewise, Saint Jerome translated the koine Greek of the New Testament into the "vulgate" or common Latin familiar to Roman citizens. As time goes by, and the early writings take on special cultural prestige, these older writings tend to be preserved and taught even after the original language changes or dies out completely. Often the classical languages are no longer understandable by common citizens--but these dead languages would still be used in the courts, in government documents, in poetry, and in scripture.

In the early medieval period, only Latin writings had much prestige. The medieval church was disturbed by attempts to translate the Bible into common languages like English, German, Italian, or French. In England, for example, Wycliffites and Lollards would be burnt at the stake for making illegal translations of the Bible into "base" languages less worthy than Saint Jerome's Latin. For this reason, little English literature survives between 1066 and 1300. The major literary works in Britain between 1066 and 1300 are primarily in Latin (and to a smaller extent, French).

Dante was one of the first major literary figures to break this stifling tradition by choosing to write his masterpiece The Divine Comedy in vernacular Italian rather than classical Latin. In England, he was followed by Geoffrey Chaucer, who chose to write The Book of the Duchess, Troilus and Creseida, The Canterbury Tales and other early works in English. This contrasts sharply with Gower, Froissart, Machaut, and other writers at the English court who wrote most of their work in Latin or French. Dante, Chaucer, and others in the fourteenth century made it acceptable to write in the vernacular tongues rather than classical languages, and readers of this webpage can thank them accordingly that they aren't reading the HTML code in Latin. Cf. Black Vernacular.

VERNER'S LAW: In linguistics, a codicil or addition to Grimm's Law that helps explain some exceptions to Grimm's Law of the First Sound Shift. The law was proposed by Karl Verner in 1875, and it states that early Germanic voiceless fricatives became voiced when (1) the Indo-European stress was not on the immediately preceding syllable, and (2) the word appears in a voiced environment (See Algeo, pages 81-82).

VERS: Not to be confused with verse, below, a vers is a song in Old Provencal almost indistinguishable from the chanson, but vers is the older term.