And he shall purify

 Good old Liddel & Scott (Ancient Greek dictionary known by its authors' names to all students of Ancient Greek) lists a number of words having to do with purity:

The key prefix is кɑθ- (kath-). The name Katharine in its various forms is a member of a cluster of words in this general vicinity. The Cathars, had this in common with the Puritans, though not in their beliefs (except in that they espoused a particularly purist form of their religion).

Katharine refers to purity ...

<papist_aside>
The innocent-sounding Catherine wheel refers to a particularly gruesome method of torture, which was meted out to St Catherine – though she was by no means its first victim.
<papist_aside>

...and many other girls' names are positive-sounding abstract nouns: Charity, Felicity, Gloria, Grace, Honor, Joy,  Lætitia (Latin for the same thing), Modesty, Patience, Prudence, Ruth, Verity, Victoria...

<parenthesis>
(not so much boys' names, I think – a legacy of the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice school? – Felix and Victor come close, but they means "happy"and "winner" respectively rather than happiness and "the fact of winning", and I suspect "Endeavour" was Colin Dexter's joke: this site calls it a girl's name. 

Maybe, though, there are boys' names that are positive-sounding abstract nouns; they're just less obvious than the girls' ones. Hmmm... 

<initial_thought> 

Is this just a function of an arbitrary (? – really? Maybe  the sugar-and-spice-and-all-things-nice school were involved in the assigning [that word is, of course, totally unrealistic. Language doesn't work like that. But the whole "school of thought"  idea is itself metaphorical – and language-users were involved in linguistic choices that shaped the language] of gender to those words... 

<a_bridge_too_far> 

But this thought is getting a bit more than "initial". Perhaps I'll do an update

<a_bridge_too_far>

...) fact about the Latin words for these abstract nouns – caritas, felicitas, gloria, gratia, honor, lætitia  ... etc. They are chiefly (all?) feminine; it'd be perverse to attach such a word to an unnamed male baby. 

</initial_thought>

</parenthesis>

.... I could (probably - given a bit of research) go on – not that I don't (go on, that is).

But what started me on this line of thinking (in case you've forgotten, kath- words) was

this article in the Observer, particularly this bit:

This is not the first time that a war of words has erupted over Greek.  [HD: The article is about the influx of Covid-related Anglicisms.] 

Arguments over the language, between proponents of change and traditionalists advocating a return to its Attic purity as a means of reviving the golden age, go back to the first century BC. Controversy continued through 400 years of Ottoman rule, becoming especially explosive in the run up to the war of independence in 1821.

The struggle over whether purist Greek, or katharevousa, officially inducted as the language of the state after the revolution, should prevail over demotiki, the commonly spoken vernacular, raged until 1976 when demotic officially replaced it.

 I first met the word katharevousa in 1979...

<autobiographical_note>
(or more probably 1980, having let the brooding presence of the huge scholarly manuscript haunt my guilt-pile for a few months. I say more about this daunting manuscript in an update to a very early post – the fourth, to be specific.) 

Arthur Toynbee's manuscript for The Greeks and their Heritages  

"[now out of print, but whose notes featured correctly inflected Latin abbreviations - not just idem , but eosdem, eamdem and so on]" 

early post

had been knocking around the editorial department at OUP's General Division for several years after the great man's death, ignored by less painstaking (or, let's be honest, wiser or at least  less stubborn) predecessors in my "Editorial Assistant" role.
</autobiographical_note>

Time I reappeared in the Real World.

b

Captain Corelli‘s Egg-Slicer - Pedants of the world unite, Part the second

In last week‘s Review (one of the many pull-outs of The Times that almost ALWAYS goes astray on the way from the warehouse and it‘s not the shop‘s fault, honest, there‘s nothing we can do, it‘s the wholesaler) someone had taken the trouble to write in with a bit of misplaced pedantry that I used to be a believer in myself. (And if you're a fan of  "in which", read this – you're damned if you do invert and damned if you don't; I've chosen my route to damnation.)

In a letter to the Feedback column, a correspondent said he was writing ‘as a science student‘, but I suspect he meant ‘as a schoolboy who did GCSE Physics' or – depending on his age – O-level Physics, or even (as in my case) O-level Physics with Chem (that hasty genuflection at the altar of Mammon that, at one time, we Lotus Eaters were allowed to make on the way to a Greek class).

I first wrote about pedantry over four years ago here (well, I‘m sure I had written about it many times before,  but that early blog post was my first airing  for the PEDAI gag: "you have nothing  to lose but your PEDAI [=‘chains' {Greek – I wasn't kidding in my opening para]" – geddit? It‘s an etymological joke... Oh well}):

One of the grammar checker's shibboleths [BobK 2017: the object of my disdain at the time was grammar checkers – particularly Microsoft Word's: "a sort of Strunk & White incarnate"] is 'that in defining relative clauses' (and now the gloves are off – the underline is RED.)

<grammar_point importance="negligible" skip="yes, if you value your sanity" status="shibboleth">
Suppose I have two lawn mowers. The green one is in the shed and the red one ... is in the garage. Woe betide you if you refer to the green one as 'the mower which is in the shed'. However, you will have Mrs Thistlebottom*'s blessing if you say 'The red mower, which is newer, is in the garage.'
</grammar_point>

... I know the rule is hooey, but... 

And speaking of hooey, the other thing about using that in subordinate clauses is that it forces you to 'break' another 'rule', by relegating a phrasal verb's particle to the end. (I have mentioned this before, in the red excursus in the middle of this post).

And that is the point on which I shall end. 

*Mrs T is not my invention; I have mentioned her before. She haunted Dave Barry's Mister Language Person columns, which have gone the (sorely lamented) way of the songs of Tom Lehrer.

As I said, I was – until quite recently – a participant in this oft-repeated nitpick ("Quanta are really small, look at the ignoramus suggesting it's big"). But then I saw this explanation in a UsingEnglish forum:

According to quantum theory, electromagnetic radiation can only exist in certain values as opposed to being on a continuous scale. Passing from one value to another is taking a 'quantum leap'.

This has entered the language as a metaphor for abrupt or significant change in something rather than a gradual evolution.

Another response offered further clarification (together with a helpful link to more detailed stuff at Wikipedia):

The electron can't gradually change. It is either at one energy level or another. No inbetween.

As it moves from one level to another it emits or absorbs photons. The "color" (wavelength) of the photon depends upon the size of the leap.

So the  metaphor works perfectly: the nature of the electron changes suddenly and radically because of the quantum jiggery-pokery going on inside it, and as a result there's a significant change in the behaviour of the atom it haunts (I doubt if that's the right word... But what do electrons do? Whizz?).

Quantum Leap may well be, as the Times Style Guide says, a cliché (to be avoided like the plague [my silliness, not their word]). But it makes sense.

But the season of mists (chemical clouds?) and mellow fruitfulness is nearly upon us. The drive-by fruitings of the unreasonably prolific pear-tree are coming to an end, but things need doing to the apple-tree. I am going out, and may be some time...

b

PS: A couple of new clues:

• Immerse lowest ranker reportedly in the shallows here. (7)
• After play,  M. S. Dhoni gets a talking to. (8)

Update: 2017.10.20.10:55

Answers: DUNKIRK, ADMONISH

Fever isn't such a new thing

Everybody's got the fever, that is something you all know

Fever isn't such a new thing, fever started long ago.

Romeo loved Juliet, Juliet she felt the same*

When he put his arms around her, he said "Julie baby you're my flame"

Eddie Cooley and Otis Blackwell wrote about the physiological effects of sexual attraction "around 1955", says Wikipedia. By the time of Elvis Presley's cover, the example of Cap‘n Smith and Pocahontas had been introduced; a New World example from the seventeenth century added to an Old World example from the sixteenth.

But the clue is there in Cooley and Blackwell‘s lyrics:

Fever isn't such a new thing, fever started long ago...

... thousands of years ago. in fact.

Sappho was born around 630 BCE and very little is known about her. One of Natalie Haynes‘s Stands up for the Classics programmes (a series now in its third season of what I hope will be many) deals with this "distinguished Lesbian" (as she was described in a fairly recent academic French work – in which she had a blank page devoted to her).

Natalie Haynes says, about 19 mins in:

She pathologizes love in a way that nobody had before. So when Sappho writes about love it‘s a medical condition... She has fever... She‘s afflicted with madness... She‘s going green...She‘s sick... She calls Eros, at one point, a "melter of limbs". Literally any time you listen to any love song, and someone says "you give me fever",  it‘s Sappho...'.

So, assuming Sappho started producing poetry (not publishing, this was before the advent even of alphabetic script) in the mid-7th century BCE, Cooley and Blackwell‘s 'long ago' – written in the mid-20th CE – meant "well over 2½ millennia.

Just sayin'. But Kindle Direct Publishing calls.



PS A few clues:

• Out-of-town stadium with the aid of redrafting. (6)
  
• "Him!" moaned this sort of argument. (2,7)
  

Update: 2017.08.26.20:45 – Added this footnote:

*When I first heard this song – possibly in the mid-fifties (the Peggy Lee version , my oldest brother being a fan)...

<autobiographical_note>
[on one notable occasion he raised eyebrows by walking down Ealing Broadway in those unenlightened times singing : 

"I‘m a woman, W - O - M -A - N"  – 

</autobiographical_note>

... I heard this line as "Juliet she fell for same"  – a bit over-formal, I thought.

Update: 2017.12.30.18:45 – The answers: ETIHAD (a bit  gnomic, I‘ll admit, for those ignorant about the beautiful game); and AD HOMINEM.

Phrasal verbs and intonation

The British National Corpus reports 666 instances ...

<wonders_of_computicles>
(just click on that link and watch while the search unfold. 

<INLINE_PS DATE="2019">
This has stopped working. You can run the search for yourself with the search string    run in    (no quotation marks, no vinculum, just those two words).
</INLINE_PS>

</wonders_of_computicles>

... of run in – a (suitably) devilish number – and devilish it is, for students of ESOL at least.

I've written before (here) about phrasal verbs:

...I hadn't realized, until I started to  teach ESOL, what a big hurdle phrasal verbs were. Try Googling English Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. You get (or at least I get – Heaven alone knows what customized search algorithms are at play) over 500,000 hits. That's a world of pain for ESOL students; who have to remember not only apparently-paradoxical meanings but a range of syntactic oddities. And to make things worse, we English-speakers keep inventing new ones....

(If you're new to this blog, you might want to have a read [and on the subject of problems for ESOL students, what about "have a read"?]

Phrasal verbs are a huge problem, even if you consider only the ones that are listed in the thousands of  dictionaries and web-pages and other lists of all kinds, but as I said in that excerpt we English-speakers keep inventing new ones. And a mis-reading on the news just now alerted me to a new one.

Intonation was the tell-tale slip (as it often is). The newsreader said [of a rugby player,  voicing over a bit of VT] "Here he is, running in a try". But run in, except in the context of internal combustion engines isn't usually a phrasal verb. It is very commonly (in most if not all of those BNC hits I mentioned earlier – here's one of the first of those 666: "...if we allow it to run in the way the government have in mind...") a prepositional usage; the verb run and the preposition in just happen to fall together.

So the voice said (or, to give him his due, he bailed out as soon as he realized that the words in a try were not a meaning-bearing unit [or semanteme, as I regret some linguists feel it necessary to say]):

 ... as he would have said if the words had been

Here he is, running in his Nth race.

He didn't know that in the world of rugby (I only have experience of Rugby Union, being a feeble effete Southerner, but I don't see why it shouldn't also be used in the world of Rugby League) run in is a transitive phrasal verb – referring to an easy, almost unopposed try (which, for our American readers, is not unlike a touch-down  – with the possibly counter-intuitive difference that it involves TOUCHING THE BALL DOWN).

The correct intonation would be one introductory phrase of three words, and then running in his Nth try in a separate and continuous rising and falling curve:

In a phrasal verb, both the main verb and the preposition (often, for clarity, called a particle in this context) usually (if not always – though I'll have to think about that) belong in the same intonational curve; by starting a new intonational curve at the onset of the preposition the speaker disrupts the meaning of the phrasal verb. But you can't get the intonation  right  if you don't understand the context. And phrasal verbs are readily created in specific contexts.

<autobiographical_note date_range="early 1971">
This puts me in mind of my days down and out in Barcelona. I didn't speak Spanish and hadn't done it at school; I had an O-level grammar book (not aimed at self-study), and was reading it. My daily budget extended to a copy of La Vanguardia (so not that down and out), which I scanned diligently. Articles in the sections dealing with international affairs, current events, politics and so on were not too difficult to make sense of: the vocabulary – with, on the face of it, "harder" vocabulary – was often guessable on the basis of cognates in other modern languages and/or Greek or Latin-based etymology.

Not so the sports pages  – and not just in sports I knew nothing about, such as handball, pelota, or (though the word sport is questionable in this case) bull-fighting. Even, say, reports about football (aka soccer) were a closed book to me. The words and the syntax associated with them was just not the same as you get from books.
</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, the point is this: phrasal verbs are, in the case I have looked at, just the prompt for the recognition of a problem with intonation. (Or vice versa. Often, in language teaching, a problem in one sphere points to a problem in another. So there's a lesson for teachers here: if you hear a problem, don't be satisfied with just "fixing" it – when you think about it, you might find that it's a symptom of another problem.)

Enough for now...

b

PS: A crossword clue:

• Weight of the Holocaust – he doesn't believe it. (6)
  
  

Update: 2017.02.11.14:15  – Added PPS


PPS And another:

• Leaders of other teams interrupt scrum – for keeping balls in? (7)
  
  

Update: 2017.02.13.15:15  – Added PPPS

PPPS

Added a clarification, in the main text, in blue, and yet another clue:

• Average quantity? Much more important than that! (9)
  
  

Update: 2017.04.15.15:55  – Those answers, at last: 

1. DENIER
2. SCROTUM
3. PARAMOUNT

Update: 2019.10.8.11:10  – Added inline PS

The coolness of Purcell

In my last post I wrote that my use of art in a particular context depended on "an overly etymological understanding of the word art". I've been thinking about this with a certain amount of self doubt, and have found that my use of the word etymological was dubious.

Etymology (the word) is developed ultimately from the Greek adjective ετυμος (there may be a diacritic or two there – we didn't do them at O-level ).  It means true or real. A calque...

<recently_provided_gloss date="2017-01-17" skippability="max">

<digression>
To form a calque the receiving language borrows the format that the donor language uses to construct a typically two-part compound, but not the word itself. It translates each element of the compound using a native word: for example Latin omni- + potens, Old English æl- + mihtig (whence our almighty), Spanish todo- + poderoso. [Incidentally, that bunch of examples isn't supposed to suggest a series of any kind, historical or otherwise; its just a bunch of examples.] ...
</digression>

</recently_provided_gloss>

...used by Cicero was veriloquium (says Etymonline); sadly there's no English borrowing *veriloquy.

But what of art? There's nothing particularly real or true about the meaning I was referring to.  Etymonline says this:

art (n.)

early 13c., "skill as a result of learning or practice," from Old French art (10c.), from Latin artem (nominative ars) "work of art; practical skill; a business, craft," from PIE *ar-ti- (source also of Sanskrit rtih "manner, mode;" Greek arti "just," artios "complete, suitable," artizein "to prepare;" Latin artus "joint;" Armenian arnam "make;" German art "manner, mode"), from root *ar- "fit together, join" (see arm (n.1)). In Middle English usually with a sense of "skill in scholarship and learning" (c. 1300), especially in the seven sciences, or liberal arts. This sense remains in Bachelor of Arts, etc. Meaning "human workmanship" (as opposed to nature) is from late 14c. Sense of "cunning and trickery" first attested c. 1600. Meaning "skill in creative arts" is first recorded 1610s; especially of painting, sculpture, etc., from 1660s. Broader sense of the word remains in artless... _{More here}

So the words "Meaning 'human workmanship' (as opposed to nature) is from late 14c." hit the spot, but of course the meaning kept developing; the meaning I had in mind was not original (not that that matters, as I keep emphasizing, and as this blog argues – it was just one of many stops along the way).  A rolling word gathers dozens of meanings. In  fact, even stops is the wrong image – meanings are more like a river (which has different general characters at different points of its passage, but which at any moment can take on any new meaning or nuance of meaning, depending on context). 

 

See a bigger one here

My reason for making the assumption that human workmanship was the original sense was the text of one of Purcell's pieces that my choir will be singing in – oo-er – less than four weeks: Come Ye Sons of Art. When I first sang this piece (with another choir) I realized that sons of art weren't people like Constable (Junior) and his school-chums, assuming (stupidly) that this sort of art was the original meaning. Offshoots like artless and Bachelor of Arts should have saved me from leaping to this conclusion.

In that choir, our MD was a music teacher, and in one concert we sang part of Dido & Aeneas – possibly the sailors' chorus "Come Away, Fellow Sailors" where they...

...take a boozy short leave of your nymphs on the shore
And silence their mourning with vows of returning
But never  intending to visit them more.

(Age-old sailor behaviour – ‘doing a "Bobby Shaftoe"', as mentioned before.)

<FWIW>
Etymonline notes boozy as dating from 1719, and OED is one of its sources. So – unless Etymonline is missing a trick – Nahum Tate's libretto of Dido & Aeneas, written in the last years of the previous century, was putting a pretty untried neologism in the mouths of the sailors.
</FWIW>

Anyway, Dido. We  were singing from a set of scores borrowed from our MD's A-level set. And in the margin next to the marvellous descending ground bass at the beginning of Dido's Lament the previous owner had written

‘Purcell, you are so cool'.

Well, he is. Come and hear, on 4 March at Reading University‘s Great Hall.

b

PS And here's a clue:

• The pathologically dependent, in for a penny,  accuses. (7)

Update: 2017.09.09.15:55 – Added PPS

PPS
The answer to that clue: INDICTS

Bon voyage M. Dumollet...

♪♫ ♪ ...À St Malo débarquez sans naufrage 
Bon  voyage M. Dumollet

Et revenez si le pays vous plaît.

A quickie for the Quatorze Juillet

On 8 July 2016, the frigate Hermione sailed out of St Malo ...

<autobiographical_note>
("charming walled town city on the Emerald Coast of Brittany", as long-standing readers may recall from this – the blue bit at the end )
</autobiographical_note>

...bound for Brest (a little after we steamed out of St Malo – which accounts for a less than memorable photo. There are plenty of better ones here.

The Hermione is a 32-gun Concorde class frigate fitted for 12-pounder guns, completed in Rochefort by the Asselin organisation in 2014. She is a reproduction of the 1779 Hermione, which achieved fame by ferrying General Lafayette to the United States in 1780 to allow him to rejoin the American side in the American Revolutionary War.

Wikipedia entry for French_frigate_Hermione_(2014)

For the week leading up to the Quatorze Juillet there was a festival of world music at St Malo. On the 8th, one of the offerings was from an Argentine group. I imagine they knew of their link to St Malo, but I'll assume you share the ignorance I had until fairly recently

In September 1763 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville  (later to distinguish himself in that same war) set sail from St Malo on a voyage of discovery (as many ocean voyages were, at the time). In January 1764 he put in at an unclaimed group of islands, which – like so many explorers before and since – he named in a autocentric way (is that a word? Well it is now.) This is a theme I've visited before. here,)

He called the landing point Port Louis after the French king, and he named the islands after his point de départ: Les Îles Malouines. The islands were those known to Les Rozbifs as .... [but no, I know better than to spoon-feed my readers].

<autobiographical_note>
In the newspaper article about the festivities marking the end of the festival I saw the name of one of the groups playing at the Fest Noz that night. They were called Startijenn. This word had meant nothing to me until the night before, when I was reading the chapter on Breton in Lingo (a book that I'm deferring judgement on, as it refers to much that I don't know about but is not totally sound on the few things I do know about). 

But an amusing and intriguing feature of the book is that each chapter in this Language Spotter's Guide to Europe concludes with a word that comes from the language covered but has no equivalent in English. For Breton, it is startijenn.

No equivalent, that is, in formal language. But a fairly close gloss is provided by the colloquial kick-start. A startijenn is "a kick of energy, such as you get from a shot of coffee". Gaston Dorren, author of Lingo, calls it "probably derived from English start". I'd say  it's almost certainly cognate, though derived suggests rather more than that. I'll see what the  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch has to say, if anything. 

</autobiographical_note>

But that'll have to be in an update.

b

PS A clue:



Floor-covering including great, if questionable,  book. (5)

2016.07.15.11:30 – Report  on  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch

PPS Sorry – nothing. At a guess, I would suggest that the word is a combination of two roots:

• Start
  In the words of Etymonline
  ...from PIE root *ster- (1) "stiff." 
  
  From "move or spring suddenly," sense evolved by late 14c. to "awaken suddenly, flinch or recoil in alarm," and by 1660s to "cause to begin acting or operating." Meaning "begin to move, leave, depart" (without implication of suddenness) is from 1821. 
• -jenn
  Again from Etymonline, sv genus
  ...from PIE root *gene- "to produce, give birth, beget," with derivatives referring to family and tribal groups. 
  ...Cognates in this highly productive word group include Sanskrit janati "begets, bears," janah "race," janman- "birth, origin,"  jatah "born;" Avestan zizanenti"they bear;" Greek gignesthai "to become, happen," genos "race, kind," gonos "birth, offspring, stock;" Latin gignere "to beget," gnasci "to be born," genius"procreative divinity, inborn tutelary spirit, innate quality," ingenium "inborn character

Update: 2016.07.18 – Added PPPS

PPPS One possible (if linguistically naïve) objection to the derivation suggested in my PPS is that it makes startijenn a mongrel – derived from two sources (a supposed aberration, according to some observers).  But, as I wrote here, it is ridiculous for any language to lay a claim to a word  for all time – it's  a question of where you choose to stop the etymological clock [a metaphor I introduced here].

Television is my stock example of a word derived from two sources – a Greek prefix and a Latinate stem. A purely Greek version would be teleopsy; a purely Latin version would be ultra-vision. Another less obvious example (discussed here) is morganatic, a happy mixture of Germanic and Latin, which is more relevant as it mixes a Germanic stem with a classical affix (as startijenn does, if my guess is right).



And here are a couple more clues:

Arab returning soon, says Cockney (5)
Bloody truncheon here? (5, 5)

Update: 2016.07.2016.16:30 – Added P⁴S (last one, honest)

P⁴S Another mongrel that had always confused me until my recent visit to Bretagne is polyvalente – usually seen in the phrase Salle polyvalente; come to think of it, quite possibly some chemicals are polyvalent in English (yup). That word has a Greek prefix and a Latinate stem. In English a hall that can be put to various uses could be described as all-purpose, though in practice I've seldom met it in that context (except in special cases like "all-purpose sports hall"); we usually just say something more homely, such as village hall – although I'm probably betraying my South-Eastern commuter-belt background there. It goes without saying that such a hall is suited (or valid) for a range of purposes

This demonstrates the point first brought to my attention by M. Baring-Gould, that French tends to prefer hi-falutin (though he probably used a more diplomatic term) vocabulary.

<autobiographical_note>
The example he gave to class 2Ba...

<Pedagogical_Correctness_gone_mad> 

Oh no, none of this elitist ABC stuff, our classes were named after the first two letters of the teacher's name; it was entirely accidental that the boys who had come up from 1A had a as the teacher's second letter while the boys who had come up from 1C went into class By 

</Pedagogical_Correctness_gone_mad> 

...was carié. English does have the word carious, but the register is different. Dental professionals use it, but not the patient-in-the-chair.
</autobiographical_note>

So the words salle polyvalente, common on hitherto baffling signposts everywhere I've been in France, mean (presumably  – I haven't checked, it just seems obvious to me [NOW]) is just an all-purpose hall.

b.
Update 2017.10.01.15:15 – Added P⁵S   (so P⁴S  wasn't so final).
P⁵S: A few clues, the first being topical.

• I'm upset before one and after her– Harry's peer. (8)
• This way in Paris – about time! Gasp for a communard. (11)
• Adjustment to famine's a statement about direction of travel. (9)

And answers:
In PS: LINGO
In PPPS OMANI and BATON ROUGE (where it was relevant at tle time)

Update 2018.04.14.20:15 – Added P⁶S

P⁶S The answers: HERMIONE, PARTICIPANT, MANIFESTO
And here are some clearer photos from AFP.

Always mount a scratch monkey

Tales from the word-face

Today's subject line is the punchline of a joke (or maybe anecdote?) that I heard in the halcyon days of DEC (and there's no doubt a good reason for naming a particularly enjoyable  period after a kingfisher [for that is what a halcyon is]; but I don't have time for the resear... Heck, why not go mad?...

<digression>
halcyon days

noun

a period of peace and happiness; an idyllic time; also, a period of calm weather during the winter solstice
 

Word Origin

Greek Alkyone a legend of fourteen windless days

 ... says Dictionary . com, so it was the other way around I guess, the bird being named after such windless days – and in mid-winter, rather than those lazy crazy hazy days of summer.... But, hang on, the truth is rather more interesting:

halcyon (adj.)

"calm, quiet, peaceful," 1540s, in halcyon dayes (translating Latin alcyonei dies, Greek alkyonides hemerai), 14 days of calm weather at the winter solstice, when a mythical bird (also identified with the kingfisher) was said to breed in a nest floating on calm seas....

says Etymonline. Hmmm. For Further Study.... (as they used to say in the world of Nets-N-Comms standardization.
</digression>

I don't remember the joke, but I do remember it involved disaster recovery. Which has been on my mind since my little android thingy fell and broke its screen. That is, I was involved, but I didn't want it to fall; or break its screen for that matter.

But I had a day-old backup of my WVGTbk2 work, so I've only lost *il* words starting with s or the beginning of t. Not too bad really, and it's now all in the hands of the insurers. But normal service has taken a bit of a hit.

The silver-lining is that it's  forced me to start to get to grips with Linux.

bye for now.

Oh, and just because someone on Radio 4 this morning, talking about poetry,  provoked it...

<rant likelihood_of_deliverance_from_this_evil="none">
It's geneAlogy for Gad's sake. If you speak American English, you can stand down, as the American English /ɑ/ of anthropology is not unlike American English /æ/ of genealogy – not the British English /æ/, which is a whole nother thing. Sometimes my British English ear tells me they're identical. [I'm sure they're not, but the process of acquiring British English involves us in learning not to hear phonemic differences in languages that don't interest us {as speakers, that is, not scholars}])
</rant>

 b

PS A clutch of clues

• Look in the centre of Galway for a patch over the water. (8)    GALLOWAY
• Low centre of gravity takes cutting of holly. (4)                      VILE
• End of bow with misinformation about Resistance. (4)           FROG
• Musician, heathen (obvs.) (8)                                               PAGANINI
• Alteration embracing beginning and end of leptocephali,         ALLITERATION
  in the spirit of this PS. (12)

Update 2016.06.21.12:50 – Added answers in red and deleted footer (getting there, slowly)

A Tale of Two Typoes

A long time ago I commented here on an article in The Times on endangered languages. I was not very impressed by the article itself, although its heart was in the right place; my scorn was directed in particular at this quote/translation:        

"Que l'lingo seit bouan ou mauvais,

J'pâlron coum'nou pâlait autefais."

(Whether the lingo be good or bad,  

I'm going to speak like dear old dad.)

Especially the last three words:

No 'dad', no 'dear', no 'old'.

(Any argument about the difficulty of verse translations, and the licence for idiomatic embellishments, I said, should be ruled out in view of the narrow measure of a newspaper column – which makes it impossible to detect the need for suspension of accuracy on poetical grounds. The newspaper article, transcribed on a website devoted to Manx, is  here.)

In that piece I expressed doubts about two verb forms. A recent holiday led me to do a bit of research, and rather than write  yet another update to an already over-updated piece....

The Wikipedia article on Guernésiais has the same text for Métivier's verse but no "dear old dad". Possibly coum'nou pâlait (specifically the "nou + 3rd person singular verb") is an impersonal form; so the Wikipedia translation is good: I’m going to speak as we used to speak). But that still doesn't account for j‘ pâlron  which, as I said here, seemed most unlikely:

...here's why, if you really want to know. There are systematic features of Latin-derived verb endings. There are in some cases exceptions, but they tend to be noted in philology texts; examples from minority languages are  the stock-in-trade of philology – I explained here how and why I know a single word of Gascon. If there were a language that had -ron as the first person singular in the future form of a first conjugation verb (-er verbs in French, -ar verbs in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and so on‡) I'd very probably have heard of it. 'Nou' looks like we, which would make the ending -ait first person plural – which I'd very probably have heard of. If one language had both oddities....

I was wrong about nou. As I suggested just  now, it's probably impersonal (like the standard French on  –  as that Wikipedia article says in a regrettably sparse section  on phonology 'Metathesis of /r/ is common in Guernésiais, by comparison with Sercquiais and Jèrriais.' I wouldn't be at all surprised if metathesis were common with n as well. I know of no language that restricts metathesis [which I discussed here] to a single phonological context).

All of this leaves  J'pâlron as an object of my doubt. The only verb table ...

<autobiographical_note meta="old fogey alert">
or paradigm as we used to say at school, before the word was exposed to such wanton over-use:

Collins frequency chart.  I rest my case

(and blame that Kuhn chap. His book was published in 1962 right at the start of that sharp rise).

</autobiographical_note>

...I can find gives "oimaïr - to love (regular conjugation)"; and that "regular" suggests that anything else is irregular. And among Romance languages, I can't imagine the word derived from PARABOLARE (the Vulgar Latin word for 'talk', adopted for its regularity) being irregular. Which would suggest that j'palron should fit this model:

oimaïr paradigm at  Wikipedia

An extraordinary feature that leaps out (eventually – it‘s so extraordinary that I missed it at first glance...

<autobiographical_note>
I'd no doubt have known about it if I'd bitten the bullet of studying the History of French (which I didn't do for reasons discussed in an  earlier post , I think)
</autobiographical_note>

)... is that Je (or j'  in this case) serves as both singular and plural,   so that J'pâlron[s?] in Métivier's poem means We will talk.

With curiosities like this lurking in every natural language, 20th-21st century mankind's insouciant destruction of the Earth's linguodioversity* is lamentable.

But there's a Velux to refurbish ...

b

PS 
<crossword_clue>
Flourish backfires. (5)

</crossword_clue>

Update 2015.07.09.16:20 – Added PPS

              <occasional_FOGGY_nomination explanation="here" perpetrator="mercifully anonymous">

This approach was on the understanding that these 11 units would not being [sic] subjected to any additional financial contributions, nor assessed against any policy, nor be included in any calculations which could result in affordable housing provision or environmental services that would not otherwise be expected via a prior approval and CLD application process.

           Wokingham Borough application F/2015/0346

              Hmmm... No idea what this means, but it imparts a nasty whiff of  nods and winks.
              </occasional_FOGGY_nomination>

Update 2015.09.09.17:20 – Added link to earlier post.

Update 2015.12.14.14:00 – Crossword answer: SERIF (easy enough, I think, but pleasing) and added this note:

* My model for this is 'biodiversity'; but if I follow that model (or paradigm as I'm sure a true modernist would say) I should mix Greek (βιος) and Latin (divertere). Some commentators decry this mixing, irrationally; mixed etymologies are common, useful, and sometimes necessary for the coiner's purpose. And where, in any case, do you draw the line between a language and its descendant? A morganatic marriage, I've  just discovered, is one that involves no transfer of property except for a morning gift (OE – morgengifu):

morganatic (adj.) 

1727, from French morganatique (18c.), from Medieval Latin matrimonium ad morganaticam "marriage of the morning," probably from Old High German*morgangeba (Middle High German morgengabe) "morning gift," corresponding to Old English morgengifu (see morn + gift)...

More here

But you'll look in vain for morganaticus in a Classical Latin dictionary, although the suffix -aticus was common. Television mixes Greek and Latin, but try calling it teleopsy.

So my linguodiversity ('pure' Latin) might better be glottodiversity (at the risk of sounding as though it could be thought to refer to trendy accents that affect a glottal stop [but inconsistently]).

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-paimercifullyrs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Well over 49,200 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.

I, Robert

<autobiographical_note> 

It was The Legacy that brought this issue to my attention (hemp, canvas, cannabis and related words).

</autobiographical_note>

I started by consulting Etymonline; and all roads lead back to cannabis:

          cannabis (n.) 

1798, "common hemp," from Cannabis, Modern Latin plant genus named (1728), from Greek kannabis "hemp" ... and English canvas and possibly hemp. 

Source: Etymonline

          hemp (n.) 

Old English hænep "hemp, cannabis sativa," from Proto-Germanic *hanapiz ... probably a very early Germanic borrowing of the same Scythian word that became Greek kannabis (see cannabis). 

Source: Etymonline 

          canvas (n.) 

"sturdy cloth made from hemp or flax," mid-14c., from Anglo-French canevaz, ..."made of hemp, hempen," noun use of Vulgar Latin adjective *cannapaceus"made of hemp," from Latin cannabis, from Greek kannabis "hemp"... 

Source: Etymonline

All those "..."s hide lots of examples from every language under the sun.

I don't like all those possiblys and probablys though.

<bilingual_pun value="nugatory, sophomoric"> 

(which raises the possibility of Signe demonstrating the versatility of hemp by making a picnic hamper out of hamp  [the Danish for "hemp" being hamp]. And the Swedish for "hemp" is hampa; so if she were Swedish it would be even better.)

         <afterthought viability="stillborn">

Hang on though.... Maybe that's why it's called a "hamper". Etymonline says not though. But there's that probably again....

</afterthought>

</bilingual_pun>

And finally I'll give myself a post-Fathers-Day, non-cannabis-related (except for the first syllable) pat on the head. One of the peripheral baddies in Humans has the name "Capek". Maybe this will be worked into the plot in the fullness of time, but I imagine it's just the writer's hommage (or just chapeau, perhaps)... all right, NOD...to the Czech playwright Karel Čapek (who I thought, before doing a bit of digging, coined the word 'robot' – he didn't: it's just Czech for 'worker'). Presumably the actor who said the name in episode one didn't pick up the reference. They said it with a /k/ instead of the whatever – something palatal, I think.

b

PS: And here's a clue for ... whatever these things are for:

Bishop embraced revised rite before anyone could write about it. (11) ^*

PPS A little later, the same day:

But the point (without which this post is pretty flimsy) is, what is  the mechanism for the development of *nab* to *mp*? The short answer is apocope – or perhaps syncope, I forget –  and assimilation. The longer and more helpful answer is the dropping of an unstressed vowel between two consonants. and then one of those consonants changing so that it shares some characteristic with the other: /n/ is a labiodental nasal but /p/ (/b/ after voicing's been dropped) is bilabial. So, after the unstressed 'a' has been dropped, the /n/ assimilates to the /p/, becoming the bilabial nasal /m/.

<aside>

In the case of words that use the Greek ɸ, such as 'emphasis', 'symphony', etc. this assimilation is masked. (There are  languages that do use the voiceless bilabial fricative (IPA [ɸ]), but English doesn't.)  The Castilian equivalents show the change: énfasis and sinfonía. Meanwhile, in words such as 'conflagration', the assimilation of the original Latin cum has gone ahead without anyone ticking the NO PUBLICITY box. In 'inefficient/impractical' there is the opposite change  – not from m to n, but from an original n to m.

<aside>

<example>
An interesting example of assimilation turned up on the news last  night – in the report on  a bionic eye. The context was generally optical, so when the reporter referred to a cure for sight loss I thought I heard a cure for Cyclops. I was just thinking this through, and correcting what I thought had been a mis-hearing, when MrsK asked "Did he just say a cure for Cyclops?" 

Here's why. In forming an /l/ the sides of the tongue touch  approach the sides of the mouth (which is why the $10 word for describing /l/ is lateral – there's a central closure, and the air escapes at the sides of the tongue ). Depending on the thickness of the speaker's tongue and the curvature of the palate, this can cause a closure between the body of the tongue and the palate, normally associated with /k/. So the reporter's /ǝ kju:ǝ fǝ saɪt.../ became /ǝ kju:ǝ fǝ saɪk.../ and the listener's expectations supplied the final /ps/.

So this is an example of the sort of  'accidental' assimilation I mentioned many posts ago, here. 

..well, not assimilation to another phoneme. I think it was John Trim (mentioned elsewhere in this blog: let the word-cloud do its thing if you're interested)  who pointed out that a speaker's  simply closing his/her mouth at the end of an utterance could make a final consonant 'assimilate' to the appropriate bilabial phoneme... 

The example he gave at the time was when people say 'Fine' at the end of a conversation it  can often make the sound /faɪm/.

</example>

Update 2015.06.23.14:25 – Added afterthought:

PPPS
When I started writing the PPS I stumbled over the first consonant [in cannabis/hemp], but parked the problem [as they say in some circles]: how does [k] become [h]? It's been simmering away on the back burner, and so far all I've got is an example of hyper-correction in the Satyricon.

In Roman Italy there were many speakers of Greek, and resultant borrowings of Greek words that used both κ and χ[; an educated speaker knew where to make the distinction, and a poseur made similar distinctions when there were none to be made]. One of Trimalchio's guests is a social climber, and like the English social climber adding unnecessary /h/s in words that have no 'h', he adds a χ-like sound in words that have a simple [k]: in Language and Society in the Greek and Roman Worlds James Clackson [sic, not him] writes

I'm not saying this is where 'hemp' got its "h", but is seems to me possible, given the κ as the initial – attentive readers will remember Etymonline's

... from Latin cannabis, from Greek kannabis "hemp" 

Update 2015.06.24.08:55 – Added clarifications in red.

Update 2015.07.21.16:30 – Added answer to crossword clue:
^*OK ‐ Time's up. PRELITERATE.

Update 2015.07.22.15:00 – Added inline example in purple and shortly afterwards a correction highlighted like this.

---

Mammon When Vowels Get Together V5.2: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs. Now complete (that is, it covers all vowel pairs –  but there's still stuff to be done with it; an index, perhaps...?) 

And here it is: Digraphs and Diphthongs . The (partial) index has an entry for each vowel pair that can represent each monophthong phoneme. For example AE, EA and EE are by far the most common pairs of vowels used to represent the /i:/ phoneme, but there are eight other possibilities. The index uses colour to give an idea of how common a spelling is, ranging from bright red to represent the most common to pale olive green to represent the least common.

I'm thinking about doing a native iBook version in due course, but for now Mac users can use Kindle's own (free) simulator.

Also available at Amazon: When Vowels Get Together: The paperback.

And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this. 

Freebies (Teaching resources:  Over 49,100 views  and nearly 8,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

** This figure includes the count of views for a single resource held in an account that I accidentally created many years ago.