The War Against Error, Take 2

Not too much of note happened in the last week of November 2015. Infoplease defines it with its two termini : the downing of the Russian aircraft in Turkey on the 24^th  and the beginning of the Climate Talks on the 30^th (both of which may come to generate much of import in the future (the latter for good and the former for ill) – but in between  the world news cupboard was bare. So the Independent published a strange filler:

The 58 most commonly misused words and phrases

(58; not a solecism more, not a solecism FEWER, as Jeffrey Archer might have observed.)

The piece starts out promising to be a review of  Steven Pinker's The Sense of Style:

The book is like a modern version of Strunk and White's classic "The Elements of Style," but one based on linguistics and updated for the 21st century.

Hmm. I'm not convinced by this use of linguistics as if it were some kind of magic added ingredient – Now with added Linguistics, they say, much as the makers of Pedigree Chum used to say Enriched with nourishing marrow-bone jelly in the '60s (not sure why that illustration swam up from the mental depths). Writing a style guide using insights provided by a study of modern linguistics (not "based on linguistics" whatever that means) is a good idea. I don‘t think "like ...Strunk and White..., but ... based on linguistics" quite does justice to the idea.

But the last six words of this sentence (a paragraph later) let the cat out of the bag (revealing it to be a pig in a poke...? a mixed metaphor too far, perhaps):

We've highlighted the most common mistakes according to Pinker using examples directly from his book along with some of our own.

As a result, it's impossible to identify the source of some of the slips (many of which I suspect aren't Pinker's, although I detect in some of his preferences that linguistic conservatism common in countries with a history of British colonialism: Canada, USA, Australia, India...).

You might be shocked by how many words you've been very slightly misusing.

it warns in the sub-headline. Well, no and no. I first discussed such nostrums here. More recently I wrote this. But this topic seemed worth yet another visit.

There is, in this list, a clutch of the Usual Suspects disinterested/uninterested, hung/hanged...

<autobiographical_note>
which I can never read without hearing, in my mind's ear,  Rex Harrison's

By rights he should be taken out and hung

For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue

in the soundtrack recording of My Fair Lady. Oh how we larfed.
</autobiographical_note>

... depreciate/deprecate, flaunt/flout, irregardless, practical/practicable, proscribe/prescribe, protagonist/proponent, unexceptional/unexceptionable, effect/affect (which I looked at a couple of years ago in a post entitled "Enother old favourite"}, lie/lay...   AHA

<eureka certainty="iffy">
Perhaps alphabetization/lack thereof in  the Independent's list is a clue to the provenance of different items: Pinker's are alphabetical and the Indy threw in a few at the end to make it up to a round ... hmm, not so much...58.
</eureka>

But there are odd omissions and strange choices, identifying a problem area but citing an uncommon  symptom – credulous, for example, rather than credible whereas the chief solecism I've met is incredulous/incredible (which aren't mentioned). BNC finds 35 cases of credulous and 428 of credible but 171 of incredulous and 1174 of incredible. OK, a total of 1345 instances of incredulous/incredible don't imply that many instances of confusion, but they far outweigh those for credulous/credible (3:1) – that's three times more occasions of sin (as my RE teacher would have said).

The fatal inter/intern confusion

And has anyone ever used urban myth to refer to someone like Al Capone,  confused meretricious with meritorious, or used New Age to mean futuristic? Does anyone confuse averse/adverse, inter/intern...? Maybe they do in Canada.

Also, there are assertions of "mistakes" that aren't mistaken, as for example:

Cliché  is a noun and is not an adjective

OK, some people believe that; British English dictionaries assert it. But Merriam-Websters, for example, accepts it as either a noun or an adjective. I suspect the Indy's simple (and simplistic...

<linguistic_mechanism>
Incidentally, this is how these once-decried (first deprecated, then depreciated, and ultimately accepted as standard) confusions commonly bear fruit. Cases arise where either is acceptable; and the process grinds on. And not just with words; also with grammatical forms. Guy Deutscher, recounts in The Unfolding of Language how the 'going to' future arose from usages that referred to both travel and futurity:  'they are going to see him'. More of this in an update...
</linguistic_mechanism>

 ...) "A not B" does not reflect Pinker's careful academic aloofness. I suspect that the careful avoidance of etyma (who could define "meretricious" without referring to ladies of the night?) derives from Pinker's studious avoidance of the Etymological Fallacy – discussed in several Harmless Drudgery posts. This "A not B" approach reflects that of the Reichenau Glossary, discussed here: VESPERTILIONES was right; CALVAS SORICES wrong. But, irregardless, a French bat is a chauve-souris. 

So I must read Pinker's book; surely the Indy's howler-ridden piece can't do justice to it?  Who knows what Santa may bring?

b

PS And here are a couple of clues:

Profoundly disappointing: baby's male – begone! (7)
Parental – sort of care before parturition. (8)

Update 2015.12.21.11.10  – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2015.12.22.11.50  – Added picture; really must get an artist 

Update 2016.04.06.17.25  – Added answer to 2nd clue (still working on the first...anyone?) and removed footer.

PS PRENATAL

Update 2016.07.30.12.15  – A couple of typo fixes. I STILL can't get that first clue. 

Once bittern, twice shrike.

Boom boom. That is all.

Nearly 7 years ago, with the chutzpah of a fairly sprightly (at the time) recent-notcher-up of the big 60, I wrote this:

I had a difference of opinion with MrsK the other day. We were in the seventh circle of la città dolente, or PC World as it is more commonly known, looking for a new laptop. In defence of one I pointed out that it did not have Windows 8 (which to me made it preferable). She wanted to know why this was an advantage, and I said that with any new operating system there's more to go wrong; tried and trusted software is no longer supported. 

This was further evidence of my defeatism, she said. Why expect things to go wrong? She asked a passing school-leaver if there were any known support issues with application software (I'm paraphrasing here, you understand) and the answer was, surprisingly enough, that everything was hotsy-totsy with Windows 8. 

Well, twenty years of working with software engineers (actually, 19¾ - HP took the penny-pinching precaution of shafting me 3 months before they would have had to fork out for a 20-year award) has taught me that if anything can go wrong with new software it will. This was true of Windows 95, and with everything since. Working in 'Support', which I did for many years, involved me almost daily in fixes and workarounds and you-just-can't-do-that-any-more when people tried to get existing application software to play nice with a new operating system. 

So everything, I feared, was not hotsy-totsy. To quote Ogden  Nash it was coldsy-toldsy (and Google, incidentally, has just asked me whether I mean 'cold toddy'). New operating systems are great when all the dependencies work, but with each new operating system there are more dependencies; there's more to go wrong. I hold no candle for Windows 7; give me Windows NT 4.1 any day. But for me it's preferable to Windows 8 (just as Windows 8 will be preferable to - saints preserve us - Windows 9).

My fear in the last line was ill-founded. For reasons best known to the Microsoft marketing department, 'Windows 9' is The Operating System that Never Was. I wonder why... It's not as if it were Windows 13, or Windows 666 (due in some future century, perhaps)..

But earlier in 2019, Microsoft decided to pull the plug on Windows 7 (the home, at the moment, of Knowles family computing – although there are outposts of more recent operating systems on various less benighted devices). On some date in mid-January 2020 support will be withdrawn. This could be relatively painless, if things just stop being fixed. I suppose Anti-Virus software could be a problem. But, realistically, what are the odds against  hackers bothering with a ten-year-old system? We revert to the old tried and tested system: Security-by-Obscurity – as they used to say in the world of VMS.

<OpenVMS>
Not that that was the whole story. OpenVMS was a much more robust system than some I could name, and not a prey to nearly as many viruses as we have become inured to in the M$ world. But the fact remains that being surrounded by lower-hanging fruit, malware-wise, is a fairly good guarantee against infection.
</OpenVMS>

A less benign outcome seems possible though, in the light of the behaviour of tech firms in recent years, punishing users who are content with things as they are. For the TEMERITY of not upgrading, they are deprived of even what they had; that'll teach them not to genuflect at the altar of Perpetual Upgrades. Per me si va nella città d' aggiornamenti perpetui (which is the way I imagine Dante might have said perpetual upgrades).

<digression>
Hmm. What a charming way Italian has with the word for 'upgrade': aggiornare. Think of giorno. A bit like the Creation, in Haydn's version: And there was [wait for it] light.
</digression>

Still. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. Perhaps everything will be hotsy-totsy, as St Matthew might have put it.  And I have two weeks to find out.

<seasonal_novelty>
I'll sign off with something that came to me recently. It may have been the most middle-class of cracker jokes, remembered from Christmas 2018, or it may be original (not to say meaningless to most):

Q. What sort of hair conditioner does Santa Claus use?
A. Ho-ho-ho-ba. [Bou-boum and indeed tsh].

Like I said, meaningless to users of the – possibly more common,  – /ʤә'ʤәʊbә/ version (which is fine by me if that's what fleauts your beaut  – I'm not going to kick off the new year by laying down the law about talking proper (although  I haven't found a dictionary that recognizes the /ʤ/ version – just saying).
</seasonal_novelty>

Frohes thingummy.

b

Rules run amuck

I‘ve mentioned before the way that people learning a language (particularly people acquiring their mother tongue) tend to take a newly-learnt rule and test it to destruction:

It's fairly obvious to a  native speaker that the most common way [of forming a plural] is to add an s. In fact, this rule becomes apparent whenever a young language learner mistakenly adds an s to an irregular plural – sheep becomes sheepS rather than sheep, for example; and when an adult corrects mouseS to mice, the compulsion to keep faith in the add-an-s rule is so strong that the next attempt is quite often miceS.

More here

But a similar source of error is frequently met, particularly in a singer's life, with respect to the rules of foreign languages, and particularly (as in that add-an-s case) the rules of phonology.

The two that spring most readily to mind (I was going to call them "my favorites", but  favorite is not quite the word) occur in French and in German (both languages that I have studied). And although my O-level German knowledge,  as I have admitted before, is Best Before November 1969 [or whenever it was in that winter], I had to resurrect it in order to study Romance philology...

<EXAMPLES type="German scholars of Romance languages" need-to-know="0">

• Grimm (of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame); the brothers made a crucial observation, known as Grimm's Law.
• Meyer-Lübke, compiler of Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
  the bible of all students of this area – the one necessary reference
• Gerhard Rohlfs, editor of Sermo Vulgaris Latinus
  a collection of very early texts – including, for example, graffiti from Pompeii
• and many others

</EXAMPLES>

1 Thirteen waters

This error is so common that I have given it a name. The rule here is

When there's a written s at the end of a word, it isn't sounded 

unless the following word starts with a vowel.

There are provisos and exceptions, but that's the gist.

This is the rule that gets out of hand in the Thirteen Waters Error. One of the exceptions applies to a word that starts h+<vowel> (but not just any old h).  There is, in French, the hache aspiré, which the LawlessFrench site explains thus:

This error oftSuch a false liason often  occurs in the first line of the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine, composed by Gabriel Fauré ...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE>
when (as programme notes insist on saying he entered it for a "school prize". Sometimes they even say 'when he was only a schoolboy!!!' [if you'll pardon the screamer-orrhea]. But he was not a schoolboy in the Just William sense; he was nineteen, studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris,)
</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

....which has the basses alone – as exposed as a choral singer can be. And this howler occurs between the fourth and fifth words:

Verbe égal aux très haut

I'm not sure about the transcription in that  LawlessFrench excerpt. (Note: that's my way of saying I am sure and am not impressed.) But it makes the point clearly enough :

 Some hs don't block elision
when they precede a vowel, so the s isn't sounded:
the h in haut is one such: so /trɛ.ɔ/ not /trɛzɔ/.

<DIGRESSION>
(and Les Halles, while we're at it: /le.al/)
</DIGRESSION>

There is no rule for remembering which hs are aspirés and which are muets.  Dictionaries* mark it in some way, but that's no help for regular speech. You can't carry a dictionary around everywhere you go.

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>
As a matter of fact, my brother did during an exchange visit, in his early teens. He was not a great linguist, but he was always very keen on communication.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>

You just have to know which is which. Just over a hundred words start with  an hache aspiré, so it‘s not a huge undertaking  to just learn them – which is all very well for people who hate hammocks; personally, I prefer a more humane approach to language learning.

I complained about this to a native speaker of French once, but he was not sympathetic  – particularly as people learning English have to grapple with a not dissimilar rule, telling honest with initial /ɒ/ from honk with initial /hɒ/.

But, returning to the Cantique, "aux treize eaux" (which the rule over-appliers seem to be singing) makes it sound as though the Cantique is being addressed to someone with thirteen waters (with the aux analogous to the aux in La dame aux Caméllias), or perhaps to a  Native American called 'Thirteen Waters'.

2 Sturm und wrong

The errant rule here, in German now, is this:

In some cases an s that precedes
another consonant becomes /ʃ/

(or "sh" if you must, but for more on my feelings about sounds-like transcriptions, see here; regular readers will already be accustomed to this fad.)

An obvious case is a word like Sturm (as the st occurs at the  start of a word – habitual home of examples of this phonological rule); but the /ʃ/ remains even in mid-word, as in the derived word Regensturm

But often  this change is not applied . And in the musical world a common habitat for the misapplication of this rule is Liebestraum, Liebestod or Liebesliede (any word, I now realize, that starts with Liebes- – not to suggest that it doesn't happen after similar-possessives (it's just that all the examples that spring to mind use that word). In a week of not unusually dedicated monitoring of the airways, I've noticed two cases: the first was on Desert Island Discs (no names, no pack-drill; but it was the guest – young Lauren got it right after the excerpt from Liebestod).

In the second case there was no error – my life, like that of many another survivor of an RC education, is plagued by an eternal vigilance for what the Penny Catechism ...

<GLOSSARY further-info="autobiographical">
(the RC equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. [If you're interested I can still reel off "The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost" or "The Twelve Fruits of the Holy Ghost"])
 </GLOSSARY>

... used to call "occasions of sin" (situations that invite misbehaviour). But the presenter of the same piece at the Proms (a supporting piece in the Mozart's Requiem concert) knew her stuff.

But this has gone on too long. There's an urgent bio-mass crisis in the front garden.

b


Update: 2019.08.23.10:20  – Typo fix

Update: 2019.08.26.20:20  – More typo fixes, and a couple of clarifications in blue.

Update: 2019.09.06.16:10  – Added footnote:

*A dictionary is of  limited (usually no) use with names.  Often (in  English-language news broadcasts) the French politician François Hollande was the unwilling recipient of trans-gender treatment (Françoise).  In such cases the best advice is to listen to a native speaker: if there‘s no liaison  before it, the h is aspiré.

Adeus, João

The name João has been causing newsreaders and sports commentators the usual problems, because of the success of Mr Sousa at Wimbledon (as far as the last 16, but no further) and the death of the father of bossa nova, João Gilberto. Radio and TV announcers see the diphthong ão, and give up before they've started: "Well that's a completely outlandish sound, I've got no hope."

But I've said before, here (and in other words passim)

Our minds are quite accustomed to instructing our vocal equipment to make 'outlandish' sounds, phonemic in other languages – it's just that we've learnt not to hear them (as a necessary part of becoming native-speakers of English)

Elsewhere, in the same post,  I discussed an example word that I used to use in Portuguese "Beginner" classes, to introduce the sound of the  word Dão:

Take a word like downtime. Because of the way it's spelt it's hard to avoid believing that it is made up of the sounds /daʊn/ and /taɪm/. But think about what happens where the two syllables meet. The airstream is directed up and through the nose. Meanwhile the tip of the tongue is resting behind the dental ridge (where it is to form an /n/). To form the /t/ it has to start in the same position. Air pressure builds up behind that closure, and then explodes forwards as the closure is released; that's why linguists call /t/ a plosive.

But before the release, the closure isn't complete. In making the /n/ the speaker  has left a way through the nose for the 'buzzing' sound. In other words, the /aʊ/ vowel is being nasalized. Normally, when pronouncing the syllable /daʊn/, the speaker releases the /n/. When it's followed immediately by a plosive that uses the same tongue position though, the release often doesn't happen. So the /n/ in downtime isn't realized as an [n]; it's realized as the nazalization of the previous vowel.

So a native-speaker of English is accustomed to making a vocalic sound not unlike the end of João.

The opening fricative is a little more challenging for a native speaker of English, as there's no English word that begins with /ʒ/; this doesn't mean  producing it calls for  a special  skill.  It occurs medially (as we say in the trade) in words like measure. And cookery programmes like The Great British Bake-off, Masterchef etc have (increasingly over the last twenty years, I would guess)  inured English ears (and mouths) to words like jus.

<epenthetic_speculation>
In an earlier post I discussed epenthetic vowels:

In The King's Speech the Geoffrey Rush character advises the king to deal with problem consonants at the beginnings of words by taking a run up: /maɪ əpi:pəl/ for 'my people'. Languages often take a similar course with outlandish phonemes or consonant clusters at the beginnings of words. Among the signs of this are changing names of places over time. Stamboul Train could have a 21st century sequel: Istanbul Plane. That 'I' is epenthetic.

Possibly (just an idea, which you don't have take as gospel) the usage "with a jus" is the result of a speaker with an English phonological background dealing with a word with initial  /ʒ/  by adding an epenthetic vowel and coining a new word /'əʒu:/ with the /ʒ/ comfortably supported by a vowel on each side.

<I_KNOW_I_KNOW theme="wrong vowel">
(I've never heard an English chef even attempt the [y], but if you want to, pretend you're whistling and with the lips pursed like that try to say /i:/ – all right, "ee" if you must, but IPA symbols are so much clearer [and unambiguous {see this old post for a fuller explanation of my feelings about "sounds-like" transcriptions}.)
</I_KNOW_I_KNOW>

</epenthetic_speculation>

So anyway, there's little excuse for the repeated João-abuse. Start with a  /ʒ/  and then say "wow" (remembering to nasalize the diphthong – as  if you were talking about a clockwork mechanism that had wound down [and don't say the "d down" bit]).

b

PS I wrote this mostly before a break in the Somerset levels (very flat), but luckily held back from hitting the Publish button until I had the leisure to fix a couple of howlers – which may well have gone unnoticed,   but would have cost me a week's sleepless nights (before I logged in again).

Aspiring to pronounce Phelukwayo

 Teachers of foreign languages know that the last thing you do is write down a  word before students have learnt to say it. If they see the spelling before hearing the sound, their first reflex will be to attach to that spelling the phonological characteristics of their mother tongue – in most (if not all: discuss) cases, a pronunciation they're going to have to unlearn.

Which brings me to /p/, which (in most English speech I've met) is aspirated in some contexts (the allophone can be transcribed as [p^h]) but not in other contexts. It's something speakers of English as a mother tongue [henceforth "FLES" for "First-Language English Speakers"] find hard to hear: "  A p is a p, isn't it?". But if they know what to listen for, most FLESs can be taught. 

<experiment>
Wet a finger and hold it in front of your lips as you say "pin". You should detect a little puff of air.

<autobiographical_note>
When I first met this test, when the Cambridge Linguistics Department was a converted cricket pavilion in the early 1970s, no-one suggested wetting the finger. That's my own addition. The water makes the puff of air have a cooling effect, making the finger more sensitive.
</autobiographical_note>

Next say "spin". There's next to no puff of air  (I say "next to no" because the sound of the word involves the passage of air; but aspiration after the [p] is not a contributor).
</experiment>

When a FLES sees "ph" at the beginning of a word, it obviously represents /f/ (as it does in English words). This brings us to Phelukwayo (not an English word). When, in early June 2019 cricket commentators started to meet it most days (he had been in South African teams before then, but June 2019 – the Cricket World Cup in England and Wales – was the moment when it first started to register on my mentions-per-day meter) the English commentators had to learn from the South African ones. Some were quicker than others. For example, in early June Jonathan Agnew was saying /felə'kwejəʊ/ (with the /fel/ of *phel [except that there's no such English word] and the /wey/ of  English "way", but by mid-June he'd learnt. Some of the Test Match Special team have insisted on their Little Englander pronunciation. (No names, no pack-drill, but I bet they voted for Brexit.)

This question of aspiration is something I've dealt with before, here for example:

First World War Tommies, hearing the word blanc (used to refer to a drink of wine – which, in that part of France, was typically white), heard no aspiration after the b and heard p. When they returned home it was just 'wine', which – in 'San Ferry Ann' pronunciation – was 'plonk'. They showed little respect for its precise colour meaning....

Here, also, I mentioned Audrey Hepburn, who (raised in a mixture of Belgium, England, and the Netherlands) did not aspirate her voiceless plosives.

<mea_culpa>
I got it wrong first time around in that post, but fixed it in an update.
</mea_culpa>

It didn't give her a foreign accent, but it probably contributed to the je-ne-sais-quoi that made a viewer of her first screen test say "the kid's got something". It wasn't something that she had, but something that she didn't have – those little puffs of air following p and t and k ("aspirated voiceless plosives").

But aspiration wasn't my first port of call, surmise-wise. As South Africa was involved (and South Africa boasts many of the world's languages that use clicks), I initially went for the more exotic idea of a bilabial click (not unlike the little pop a child makes when imitating his^{(oh yes I did)}/her  mother applying lipstick).

Don't be misled by the Play symbol;
this is just a screenshot.

But this "masterclass" (what qualifies it for that epithet, I wonder –  just that it's from the horse's mouth?) shows that the initial consonant is just an aspirated voiceless plosive: Masterclass-what-masterclass?

That's all for now, Duty calls.

b

Update: 2019.07.01:14.30 – Added PS
When I first  noticed this, and heard the (Anglophone) South African commentators I wondered where their /f/ came from (as their first syllable seemed to be ...

<old_dogs>
That "seemed to be" indicates a certain diffidence here.
</old_dogs>

... /pef/).

I think what's happening is this: English has no phonemic /hl/, but in Phehlukwayo's own pronunciation there is some sort of aspiration before the /l/. As the lips of the speaker are close together after the initial [p^h], this takes the form of /ɸ/ (the voiceless bilabial fricative  used in Greek. In English, the nearest we have to that is /f/ (as in all those words borrowed from Greek, philosophy, for example) so the Anglophone South Africans hear an /f/. (Alternatively, though, they get it right, and I hear it wrong; my ear for this stuff isn't as keen as it once was.)

Schwarzkopf and the harpsichord

Quirks of a translator's life – sitrep

In the course of my translation work (towards the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation mentioned before in some recent posts to this blog), I've come across a word with a fascinating cluster of meanings. I've also started to use a new function of Google Sheets – a function that provides a Google Translate version (one word) on the fly.

The syntax of the new function is

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(<cell-to-translate>"<source->","<target>")

for example

 =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

(This function call tells Google Translate to look at the Portuguese word in cell A4 and translate it into English.).

As anyone involved with language knows, meanings of words depend almost entirely on context. So the disembodied words thrown up by Google Translate in its Google Sheets incarnation  can be a bit off-the-wall.

I rather forced that incarnation into the last sentence, as it provides a link to one of the meanings of the keyword, the Portuguese cravo. This can mean "carnation", a meaning that possibly has a more than accidental link with "incarnation", if the derivation for that word (Etymonline lists several possibilities) is the Latin for flesh:

...Or it might be called for its pinkness and derive from Middle French carnation "person's color or complexion" (15c.), which probably is from Italian dialectal carnagione "flesh color," from Late Latin carnationem (nominative carnatio) "fleshiness," from Latin caro "flesh" (originally "a piece of flesh," from PIE root *sker- (1) "to cut"). OED points out that not all the flowers are this color. 

More here

Another possible meaning of cravo is (my source here is the Collins Portuguese Dictionary) "harpsichord". But these language1-to-language2 dictionaries often raise more questions than answers in a translator's mind; I suspect that the equivalent instrument might rather be a clavichord which doesn't sound or behave the same.

<example>
A strangely neglected album has Oscar Peterson playing with Joe Pass in an arrangement of excerpts from Porgy and Bess for clavichord and guitar, exploiting this unique quality of the clavichord: that the thing that strikes the string also defines its length. 

<aside subject="defines">
A deliciously apposite word. The word "determines the length" would be similarly appropriate for those of an etymological bent, as the tangent (that's what the doofer inside a clavichord is called) provides the terminus ad quem the string vibrates.
</aside>

This lets the keyboard  player bend a note, as does a blues guitarist.
</example>

In a harpsichord, on the other hand,  the strings are plucked.

<maybe_though>
(On the other hand, the clavi- bit of the word just means key [as in clef, clavicle, or the French clé] so any keyboard instrument might have been called a "clavi<something>". The makers of the Clavinova were the second (after whoever named the clavichord)  to exploit this neologizing open goal.)
</maybe_though>

Yet another possible meaning of cravo is "nail" or "stud", which – if you think of a nail driven home so that only its head is visible – accounts for the metaphorical use which for reasons best known to Google is the meaning fixed on by Google Translate (try putting that function call 

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

into a Google Sheets spreadsheet and you'll see what I mean: hint – Schwarzkopf.)

b

Update: 2019.05.28.08:55 – Added PS

PS In my rush to hit the <Publish> button yesterday I left out the one meaning of cravo that applied to the passage I'm translating. Again, it's metaphorical, but unlike blackhead (aha – THAT was it, Schwarzkopf, geddit?) which is animal, this meaning is vegetable: clove.

Heaven, I'm in heaven...

...When we're laid together rotting feet to feet.

This rather ghoulish image will be explained in the fullness of time. It's a long story:

<autobiographical_note date="Summer 1973">
After my first year of Portuguese I went to a summer school at the Universidade de Coimbra, which gave me both a tan and a useful addition to my stock of adjectives-turned-nouns, as every day I caught o eléctrico to the University.

<etymological_note>
I've mentioned this before. In short, one of the engines of word formation is that people get
used to dropping the noun in an <adjective-noun> pair. A peach is a Persian, and cheese is
formed or moulded in some languages. For the full story, see here.
</etymological_note>

Um elétrico is a tram. 

Every Saturday the students were  taken on a guided tour led by a little man who was a geographer, and obsessed with land reclamation. So everywhere we stopped he gave us a lecture on the particular sand of the area. There are several sorts of sand in Portugal, but more than that I couldn't say – as the Portuguese spoken by the students wasn't up to his patter. 

The one other recurring theme of his lectures was the tragic love affair of the prince dom Pedro and his mother‘s lady-in-waiting (Don't queens EVER learn?) Inêz de Castro. One Saturday we visited the Monastery of Alcobaça, where the lovers are buried. The Atlas Obscura recounts:

...King Afonso IV, Pedro’s father, finally had Inês murdered before her children’s eyes. Pedro, heartbroken and enraged, rose up in open rebellion against his father, but ultimately failed in his quest for revenge and justice.  

Two years after Inês’ death, Afonso died and Pedro became king; and here’s where things go a little sideways:  

The tomb at Alcobaça

Legend holds that Pedro ordered Inês’ body to be disinterred, her corpse dressed in finery and propped up in the throne room. Pedro then ordered his vassals to pledge their obedience and loyalty to this corpse he called his wife and queen, and further demanded that they kiss her dead hand. 

Formalities thus dispensed with, Pedro had his corpse bride installed in a lavish tomb...
 Source 

</autobiographical_note>

According to Camões (the author of the piece I‘m working on for the Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation) her burial place is no less weird – feet-to-feet with her prince, so that the lovers’ first sight (when ‘raised incorruptible’) would be each other....

<inline_ps>
Sounds odd to me (not that the whole thing is particularly unodd). I thought the God-fearing rules required the body to be buried a  particular way round. Besides, shouldn’t they have their minds on higher things? (If they had minds, of course).
</inline_ps>

...The notes to the World's Classics edition  say that the exhumation story "speaks of some derangement", going on

Yet his decree that they should be buried feet to feet... so that hers will  be the first face he sees at the resurrection, seems the action of a lover.

How old is this guy? Has he forgotten? Are passionate romantic love and derangement mutually exclusive?

I had come across the name Inêz de Castro in my study of Golden Age Spanish literature as the subject of a missing work by Lope de Vega (that 'missing' is shorthand for "well-we've-only-got-Lope's-word-for-it-that-it-ever-existed" – but he did write quite a lot of other stuff, so we've no reason to think he was just bumping up his cv by claiming to have written another work); but I thought no more of it at the time.

Interesting though this story is, it may not be suitable as an entry for the Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation. The rules restrict explanations to "a commentary of not more than 300 words". And as Os Lusíadas was first published when Shakespeare was only a

whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school

there are single phrases that call for 300 words of explanation. I've started the translation now though, so I'll finish.

b

Update: 2019.04.22.18:55 – Added inline PS.

It ain't over...

 ... till the fa... (Come to think of it, why did the coiner of that adage assume that prima donnas (whose big song tended to end the show) had to be fat; Brünnhilde maybe, but not Tosca...) ...till the fat lady sings

My inbox caught a whiff of musical history  last week:

Liszt began work on an Italian opera in 1845. He started composing in 1850 but abandoned the project after completing the first act. The score — written largely in shorthand — was known to only a small number of Liszt scholars who concluded that it could never be performed because the material was incomplete and largely indecipherable. [HD as Shaw (??*) said, it was not so much weighed in the balance and found wanting as found difficult and not tried at all.]

David Trippett, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Music at Cambridge University, saw it differently, and spent three years deciphering the forgotten 115-page manuscript, decoding Liszt’s notes and supplying a 20-bar finale. The result is the complete first act of Sardanapalo, Liszt’s only mature opera, based on Lord Byron’s Assyrian tragedy of 1821, Sardanapalus.
Source

I'm not sure why this became newsworthy on 19 March 2019, as the same article goes on to say

Between April 2017 – July 2018 Dr Trippett orchestrated the opera according to Liszt’s cues...

<digression>
HD: I DO hate this pleonastic use of "between" and  "–" , but don't let my bugbears interfere with your understanding of something that, admittedly, is perfectly clear. And while we're here, should that be sic – for clues?
</digression>

...based on the scores on Liszt’s desk during the 1850s. 
Source

In a post on The Conversation on 11 February 2019 Dr Trippett wrote

I am a musicologist and so my interest is primarily in musical sketches. These can pose challenges of presentation that scraps of poetry or incomplete drawings do not. However beguiling incomplete art may be, what are we to do with unfinished music?

And his answer to that question is implied by the title of the piece:

Editing unfinished music by a great composer is controversial – but sometimes it needs to be done

And as Colonel Pickering might have said "He did it".

Notes from a New Enterprise

When this was posted, 29 March was due to be a date that would live in infamy, but that's changed; though HMG's attitude to the revocation of Article 50 is implied by their choice of a date for a petition-inspired debate: April Fools' Day. And if you can't make sense of this paragraph you've had the good fortune to avoid the three years of unseemly wrangling that will perhaps come to be known as Cameron's Folly.

Anyway, that gives me 3 and a bit months to put my money where my mouth is. It's about 40 years since I did any serious translating, and we've all passed a lot of water since then.

So far I've made a start – chosen my author (Camões, in a nod to former glories ...

<autobiographical_note>
[last translation I did won the Camões Award, back in the days when arts funding was less pitiful than it is now; the award has been discontinued]. 

<inline_PS>
Not to be confused with the Camões Prize, first awarded in 1989 and awarded annually thereafter by the Portuguese Direcção-Geral do Livro e das Bibliotecas and the Brazilian Fundação Biblioteca Nacional. The Camões Award was made by the Luso-Brazilian Society, Canning House, and I submitted my entry in 1974.
<-inline_PS>

</autobiographical_note>

...) and chosen my extract (the Rules say "translate a poem" but Os Lusíadas runs to nearly 300 pages in the original Portuguese; that's not the original original, which was first published in 1572). More anon, when the weather is less inviting...

b

Update: 2019.04.01.10:45 – Added footnote,  added to <inline_PS>, and added PPS.

*
Regardless of the date of this update, I really got it wrong; well, right era, wrong opinionated ideologue. It was Chesterton who wrote "The Christian ideal... [HD And if I'd remembered this bit of context I'd have had a better chance of placing the source.  Added to this, the Colonel Pickering thought brought Shaw to mind] ...has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried."

PPS
Stop Press. My entry for the Stephen Spender Prize has met choppy  waters (quite appropriately,  given  the poem's subject matter: voyages of discovery). The Conditions of entry call for "a commentary of not more than 300 words", and – given that  Os Lusíadas was published when Shakespeare was still  a schoolboy – there are single phrases in it that would be quite meaningless to a 21st century English  reader without more than 300 words of explanation.

Update: 2019.07.01.13:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS
All is – if not well, exactly – at least settled. I chose another passage, less footnote-iferous, and submitted that. But the more interesting passage (discussed a few posts later than this one, with title Heaven, I'm in Heaven) wouldn't accept its suppression; so eventually I made a second submission (with a second entry fee – but hey, you're only old once).

That's easy enough for YOU to say

I saw a tweet the other day, which at first struck me as fanciful (or, maybe, even jocular):

Source

The article starts with a point that I have often made in this blog, but puts it rather better:

Babies have an astonishing talent that adults entirely lose. By the age of one, they can recognise the significant noises in the babble around them and group them into a language. When we have lost this capacity as adults, it becomes enormously difficult to distinguish between sounds that are glaringly different to a native speaker.

But I'm not sure what this has to do with the headline. So I'll quote from the abstract of the  actual research paper (not from the body of the document, which I can't see without spending money or knowing the secret handsh... erm... password.

Human speech manifests itself in spectacular diversity, ranging from ubiquitous sounds such as “m” and “a” to the rare click consonants in some languages of southern Africa. This range is generally thought to have been fixed by biological constraints since at least the emergence of Homo sapiens....

[W]e expect that any change in the human apparatus for production, perception, or learning affects the probability—or even the range—of the sounds that languages have. Paleoanthropological evidence suggests that the production apparatus has undergone a fundamental change of just this kind since the Neolithic. Although humans generally start out with vertical and horizontal overlap in their bite configuration (overbite and overjet, respectively), masticatory exertion in the Paleolithic gave rise to an edge-to-edge bite after adolescence... 

Chewing  roots and seeds altered what in phonetics classes we learnt to call "the buccal tract" – the stuff that we use to make vocal sounds: the teeth, palate, lips and so on. The suggestion is

... that this post-Neolithic decline of edge-to-edge bite enabled the innovation and spread of a new class of speech sounds that is now present in nearly half of the world’s languages: labiodentals, produced by positioning the lower lip against the upper teeth, such as in “f” or “v.” 

Biomechanical models of the speech apparatus show that labiodentals incur about 30% less muscular effort in the overbite and overjet configuration than in the edge-to-edge bite configuration. This difference is not present in similar articulations that place the upper lip, instead of the teeth, against the lower lip (as in bilabial “m,” “w,” or “p”). Our models also show that the overbite and overjet configuration reduces the incidental tooth/lip distance in bilabial articulations to 24 to 70% of their original values, inviting accidental production of labiodentals. 

Interesting stuff. I'm inclined  to believe it, but also to wonder what other coincidental environmental changes affected (and sometimes, perhaps, caused) other phonological differences: why, for example, Hawaiian has 13 phonemes but other languages have several times that (Danish, for example, has 4 times as many, and Lithuanian has even more (two examples taken from this EU document ...

<digression>
Some of these figures look a bit off to me. Does Portuguese have only 9 diphthongs (as claimed in that EU document)? They must be ignoring something – nasals, I suspect. My bible for information about  Continental Portuguese is a typescript, possibly later published by L. W. Keates. He lists 10 oral diphthongs and 4 nasal diphthongs – two of which can be combined to form the triphthongs heard in words such as têm and põem. However you count it, that looks to me like more than 9.

<brazilian_Portuguese status="query">
Maybe, as is so often the case, the authors of that EU document have been led astray by the Internet default position that

Portuguese=Brazilian Portuguese

which would be ridiculous in a document dealing with languages spoken in Europe. But I know next to nothing about Brazilian Portuguese, so won't speculate further.
</brazilian_Portuguese status="query">

</digression>

... but still); why click consonants are confined to a handful of South African languages....

Another case of environment moulding language occurs to me, but I have notes and words to learn for next Saturday's concert (mentioned before in this blog, here), so I'll save it for an update.

b

Update: 2019.03.25.11:10 – Added PS

PS

Another case where environment has affected not phonology but vocabulary is that of Proto-Indo-European. I vaguely remember some research cited by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). The research placed the origins of PIE on the basis of vocabulary. Indo-European langages are spoken today in all kinds of environment, but common words like pond...

<PIE_examples case="pond">
Ancient Greek lakkos, Latin lacus, German lagu/, Irish loch/loch, Old Armenian լիճ (lič), English lagu/--, Lithuanian lekmenė, Albanian lumene, Old Norse lǫgr, Serbian lokva, Russian лужа (luža) (puddle)?
Source
 </PIE_examples>

...lake...

<PIE_examples case="lake">
Lithuanian ežeras, Latvian ezers, Old Church Slavonic jezero, Russian озеро (ozero), Illyr. oseriates, Ancient Greek Akherōn, Polish jezioro, Slovak jazero, Czech jezero, Old Prussian assaran Source
</PIE_examples>

...river....

<PIE_examples case="river">
Latin aqua, Russian Ока (Oka), Gothic aha, German aha/Ache, English īg/island, Sanskrit ap, Hittite akwanzi, Luwian ahw-, Palaic aku-, Old Norse á, Gothic aƕa  
Source
</PIE_examples>

...wolf...

<PIE_examples case="wolf">
Lithuanian vilkas, Latvian vilks, English wulf/wolf, Gaulish vail, Latin lupus, German wolf/Wolf, Ancient Greek lukos, Albanian ujk;ulk, Sanskrit vṛka, Avestan vehrka-, Tocharian --/walkwe, Persian varka/gorg, Old Prussian wilkis, Gothic wulfs, Old Norse úlfr, Old Church Slavonic vlĭkŭ, Russian волк (volk), Polish wilk, Slovak vlk, Kurdish/Zazaki gurg/verg, Luwian walwa, Welsh gweilgi, Pashto lewë, Serbian vuk Source

</PIE_examples>

...salmon....

<PIE_examples case="salmon">
Tocharian laks/läks, Old Norse lax, Lithuanian lašiša, Latvian lasis, Russian лосось (lososʹ), Polish łosoś, Slovak losos, German lahs/Lachs, English leax/--, Old Prussian lalasso 
Source
</PIE_examples>

...etc. etc. suggest that the language they derive from was spoken originally in a certain kind of environment. Of course, there are hundreds of attested words – and I'm using "attested" there in a loose sense . They are only attested to the extent that they are reliably assumed to have existed, on the basis of relatively modern examples of cognates.  There can, by definition, be no direct attestation of an unrecorded language. But a fellow can dream.

But that's enough navel-gazing for now. :-)

<For_further_research but="not by me">
Proposed study: on a possible relation between the number of phonemes used  in a language and the per capita length of the coastline surrounding its speakers: e.g. Hawaiian versus Danish.
</For_further_research>

Enough I said.
b 

Ö-Ö-Ötzi Goodbye

At the weekend Radio 4 Extra Radiolab dealt with Ötzi.

In September 1991 a corpse was unearthed (unsnowed, perhaps?) near the border between Austria and Italy. The nearness to  the border wasn't a matter of great import at first: it was just a question of whose authorities would handle the red tape – checking missing persons lists, informing relatives...

There were some living relatives as it happens:

Living links to the Iceman have now been revealed by a new DNA study. Gene researchers looking at unusual markers on the Iceman's male sex chromosome report that they have uncovered at least 19 genetic relatives of Ötzi in Austria's Tyrol region.

The match was made from samples of 3,700 anonymous blood donors in a study led by Walther Parson at Innsbruck Medical University. Sharing a rare mutation known as G-L91, "the Iceman and those 19 share a common ancestor, who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago," Parson said. 

Source

When it was found that the corpse was a mummy of a man who lived and breathed (and suffered and feared and bled) 5,300 years ago the nearness to the border took on a heightened importance. The fact that the mummy is now in a custom-built museum in Bolzano indicates that the Italian claims won (by a few metres).

The mummy, as shown in Wikipedia.
(See note)

Ötzi ...also called the Iceman, the Similaun Man (Italian: Mummia del Similaun), the Man from Hauslabjoch, the Tyrolean Iceman, and the Hauslabjoch mummy, is the well-preserved natural mummy of a man who lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE*.The mummy was found ...on the border between Austria and Italy. He is Europe's oldest known natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view of Chalcolithic (Copper Age) Europeans. His body and belongings are displayed in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, South Tyrol, Italy.

*HD note: The numbers differ between reports ("...may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago" versus "lived between 3400 and 3100 BCE") because  Ötzi's remains have been the object of nearly 30 years of speculation and study during which there has been much speculation punctuated by actual finds.  

Note on the image: the Radiolab programme says his right arm is raised, suggesting that the jpeg is displayed back-to-front. 

Source

Ötzi was in his mid-forties at the time of his death – making him relatively old, for his day (long before the founding of the NHS, or indeed  the founding of the Roman Empire, or the building of the pyramids). He had had what some would call a good innings, although that "good" is questionable given the signs of wear and tear:

The 40-something's list of complaints include worn joints, hardened arteries, gallstones, and a nasty growth on his little toe (perhaps caused by frostbite).  

Furthermore, the Iceman's gut contained the eggs of parasitic worms, he likely had Lyme disease, and he had alarming levels of arsenic in his system (probably due to working with metal ores and copper extraction). Ötzi was also in need of a dentist—an in-depth dental examination found evidence of advanced gum disease and tooth decay... 

Despite all this, and a fresh arrow wound to his shoulder, it was a sudden blow to the head that proved fatal to Ötzi. 

Source

But it was the contents of  Ötzi's gut that are of particular interest; and findings based on his gut contents are relatively recent as at first his stomach seemed to be missing; but they were found in 2010. And the intestinal tract is 'like a map and  a diary' – to quote one expert interviewed for the programme. The contents of his innards show that he was high in the mountains drinking water containing fir pollen, then down in the valley drinking water containing traces of hornbeam pollen, and then back up drinking water containing traces of fir pollen.

And before his final killing (brought down by the arrow and then dispatched with blows of a rock to the  head) he had cooked and eaten a feast  – 1½ pounds of cooked goat meat (a heavy meal by any standards, and so heavy that it  made flight impossible). Which one of the presenters said, showed that 'he felt safe enough' to build a fire, cook his meal and eat it.

In my view there's another explanation. Maybe, foreshadowing Marcus Aurelius, and even the Stoics who inspired Marcus by several thousand years, he had accepted his fate:

Soon you'll be ashes or bones. A mere name at most—and even that is just a sound, an echo. The things we want in life are empty, stale, trivial. 

Meditations

He  was tired of running. Let his pursuers see the smoke of the fire. He was bleeding and tired. His village in the valley had been overrun (and maybe his family had  been killed or worse), and there was nothing he could do about it. But he was going out with a full stomach: Never weather-beaten sail more willing bent to shore.

In Passing

I ordered these the other day:

When I searched for them I used the search string pink tepe.  But I held the e key down for a millisecond too long, and got this helpful alternative:

Be careful what you wish for, especially when AI's involved. (And I bet Ötzi's  teepee wasn't pink.)

But I must be getting on (which I am of course, but you know what I mean: both getting on and getting on).

b

Update 2019.03.14.09.05 – Added PS.

My note on the mixed reports was correct in general but unnecessary in this case, as the speaker was referring to a shared ancestor  " who may have lived 10,000 to 12,000 years ago" which of course isn't incompatible with the "5,300" claim; silly mistake, reminiscent of the Darwinian  "descended from apes" mistake.

Up the creek, sans pagaie/senza pagaia/sin remo...

This tweet led me to a timely Guardian article:

Brexit Britain cannot afford to be laissez-faire about its languages crisis

Of course it can't. A post-Brexit exporter won't get very far by talking English slowly and in a loud voice, or by using home-grown machine-translated customer-facing materials such as this:

Customer misguidance originally shared on Facebook.

<inline_PS DATE="2019.12.20">
I've belatedly realized that the fault wasn't all machine-translation's: it's the unholy alliance of Optical Character Recognition and machine-translation, leaping from disculpen to discuss via a misread discuten.  Or maybe it was just a tired monoglot restaurateur jumping from disculpar to discutir in a dictionary.
</inline_PS>

Over the centuries, we Britons have come to believe that we are naturally proficient – exceptional, even – in certain pursuits. These include engineering, literature, the classics, pop music, geography and football...

But it is instructive, when thinking about the UK and Britishness and what might lie in store for us in the future, to consider the pursuits about which we do not feel so confiden, t. Of these, by far the most significant – and the most worrying – ' other languages. 

Source

But another tweet via the same source underlined the short-sighted idiocy of the government's decision to make languages optional after year 9 (or what we used to know as the third year):

(I'n not  sure how the dates work n this tweet, but the tweeter's heart is in the right place.)

To quote a BBC article published in January 2011:

The requirement for teenagers to take a language at GCSE was ended by the last Labour government in 2004. It led to a massive slump in the numbers taking languages.

Back then it seemed as though some reversal of this obscurantist decision was on the cards.

L‘Envoi

But in a more recent article (February 2019) the BBC quoted Matthew Fell, chief UK policy director for business group the CBI.

"Employer demand for French, German and Spanish skills have significantly increased over the last few years. 

"The decline in language learning in schools must be reversed, or else the UK will be less competitive globally and young people less prepared for the modern world. 

"As well as speaking a foreign language, increasing young people's cultural awareness and their ability to work with people from around the world is just as important."

But I must get on.

b

Update: 2019.12.20.15:10 – Added inline PS