No gender please, we're Anglophone.

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

So I'm more circumspect about questioning musical  settings now.  But in the case of the Elgar setting of My love dwelt in a northern land I'm pretty sure there's something a bit dodgy about the words. My present score starts:

My love dwelt in a northern land
A tower dim in a forest green
Was his... 
[my emphasis; more here]

But the original text was by the Scottish poet Andrew Lang, possibly with earlier precedent. One site says.

It's a setting of a poem by Andrew Lang which if my memory serves me correctly is itself an adaptation of a far older Scottish poem.

         (more here)

I wonder whether the original was in a language that has gender...? According to this site Lang held that the beloved was female; and here she is dying in Elgar's setting:

"My love" dies

Two pages later, though. she's had another sex-change, back to the "his" of the opening bars:

Could it have been something like sein Herz? But maybe this suspicion  is related to the fact that I first sang this song in a programme together with a later Elgar piece with words by Alice Elgar, who I was ready to believe had got a translation wrong. But, as I said, it's from a Scottish poet; and he didn't use 'he' either; but nor did he use 'she'. He used 'My'....[curiouser and curiouser.]

English students of foreign languages that have gender markings have to get used to the fact that the English possessives are marked for the sex of the possessor; many other languages are marked for the gender of the thing possessed. This gender versus sex distinction was one pointed out to me by Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim [that's Latin for 'So often that I can't be bothered to check a reference']). "Concrete things have sex; words have gender." In English, we put a further restriction on the first part of that rule – "Concrete things have sex only if they're animate"; and we don't have the second part (about gender, with a few arguable  exceptions, like ships and old cars; the few words that look as if they are gendered – mostly pronouns and possessives – in fact denote sex.)

Isn‘t "only if they're animate" an improbably arbitrary restriction? Hardly. In The Unfolding of Language  Guy Deutscher writes of  an Aboriginal language that assigns the gender "edible vegetable" to an aeroplane. He sums up his point:

In linguistic jargon...'gender' has nothing to do with sex  and can refer to any kind of classification that a language imposes on nouns. While sex-based gender is an extremely common type of classification, some languages have special genders not only for 'male' and 'female' but also for classes of nouns such as 'long objects', 'dangerous things', or 'edible parts of plants'.

When there‘s a correspondence between sex and gender (une fille, for example, is both feminine and female, but ein Mädchen is neuter) a phonological rule can interfere; you don't say ma amie because of the initial vowel in amie.

<harebrained_notion>
Did Bizet make use of this rule in Carmen's claim to be going chez mon ami(e?) Lillas Pastia? Does she toy with Don José's jealousy with doubts about the sex of Lillas Pastia? Lilas is a girl's name; certainly, when I first heard the Seguidilla I assumed Carmen was referring to a woman; I couldn't hear the -ll- that Bizet gave it. Does this make it male, I wonder.... Bizet's only clue (well, I haven‘t read the libretto in detail)  is to write that Lillas is an aubergiste – and I think Mistress Quickly was one of those.
</harebrained_notion>

But I must get this post out there before the concert this Saturday.

b

Update 2015.06.12.11:55 – Added links and further Lillas speculation in purple.

Update 2017.05.25.23:00 –  Deleted old footer.

Smile when you say-that.

Why... is there a hyphen in the middle of the title of Liam Neeson’s new movie?

When I saw this I imagined it was a joke. There's a hyphen because either the scriptwriter or some publicist put it there. To quote President Bartlet, 'What's next?'

But no, the terrier-like writer had got her teeth into this non-issue (is that a nonissue?) and was intent on worrying it to death: she devoted to it another 500-600 words. Her penultimate paragraph was a gem (or maybe an antigem):

... I would make the argument that, regardless of its international pedigree, the movie should be called Nonstop. Non-Stop’s screenwriters are three Americans, one of its headliners (Julianne Moore) is American, and the film was shot primarily in New York (according to IMDb). Universal Pictures, the film’s wealthiest production company, is of course based in the States. Surely the country that pours the most money into a movie should get to determine how that movie’s title is spelled.

More here

(Make that spenlt....?)  And in her view the  answer to that rhetorical question is so unarguable that she doesn't even grace it with a "?" Well I don't find it that unarguable, but it occurs to me that someone could usefully read The Cherry Orchard on the subject of the value of culture and the matter of just what can be bought and sold.

There were two other posts that I wanted to comment on in this connexion (and I suspect this spelling may provoke an international incident; but MY house style requires it). I can't find them though, and didn't take notes. But I must get on..... Before which:

Notes from the word-face

I have the first tranche of the index (to #WVGTbook) ready to transfer to Sigil (as part of the process described here. But there is a good deal to be done before it sees the light of day. Broadly, I am using shades/colours to show half-a-dozen degrees of commonness, and I need to set up a <STYLE> for each one. This will make changing them a breeze (it says here – #readsUserGuide). I also need to link them to the rest of the text, something that I couldn't do with HoTMetaL Pro (my WYSIWYG HTML tool of choice). So don't hold your breath, but be assured that progress is being made.

b
Update 2014.03.10.21:20 – Typo fix. Spent passed muster a few hours ago, as it's just as annoying for some readers.

Update 2014.03.11.17:20 – Found one of those posts here
and I'll say more tomorrow.

<autobiographical_note>
I was reminded by Matt Damon saying the crucial word in the Monuments Men – which is why I have other things to be getting on with.
</autobiographical_note>

Update 2014.03.12.13:55 – Found the other one too, in spirit (no link):

The croissant post ends

Fowler... says that it’s alright to acknowledge "indebtedness to the French language" through "some approach in some part of the word to the foreign sound." He means by this that English-speakers can allow themselves just a touch of Gaul: Belle-lett-ruh not belle-letters.

<rant theme="They just don't get it">
[NO NO NO  – Fowler didn't mean just that. You say it that way because the 'r' comes immediately after the 't'. To say Belle letters would just be WRONG. 'Bell letters' are things like C and G (if bells are named after musical notes)</rant>

[But I interrupted.] ...Perhaps, then, Fowler would condone kruh-san: no final T.

Although I suppose that’s an acceptable compromise, it’s one that—it must be said—doesn’t live up to New World ideals. This is America. This is a melting pot.

<rant theme="Cultural insensitivity">
[Huh. That old canard. It usually means something like 'Place where everybody coalesces into something that fits in with  MY culture.' Which reminds me of the other post I meant to write about. I still can't find it. But it was the story of a Redneck complaining at a foreign language-speaker (who had been on the phone, speaking unintelligibly): 'If you want to speak Mexican, go home to Mexico.' The reply was: 'I was speaking Navajo. If you want to speak English go home to England.'
</rant>

[There, I've done it again] ...In this country we aim to fully integrate our immigrants instead of creating a permanent alienated class. Let’s not ghettoize pastries of French origin, let’s Americanize them. We accepted the restaurant with open arms. We should give croissants the same treatment.

More here

'We' accepted restaurant with open arms in the late 18th/early 19th century. We accepted croissant a century later.

<autobiographical_note>
Until MrsK put her foot down, I used to keep old editions of dictionaries, so that I could keep an eye on usages like hyphens in composite words (like 'non-stop') and the italicization (etc) of foreign borrowings. Misleadingly for the hen, which is brown, the word 'blackbird' started life as 'black bird' and then became 'black-bird' before becoming completely agglutinated into one word.

From memory, the 5th edition of COED dropped the italicization of 'rôle' but kept the circumflex. The circumflex was an optional variant in the 6th edition. but has now disappeared without  trace. I haven't checked (but will) – and I expect to find that 'restaurant' has lost its italics but croissant hasn't yet†.

And on the subject of croissants, I think it was my late lamented mentor Joe Cremona (see this blog, passim) who attributed its invention to a Parisian patissier, in celebration of a French victory over the Ottomans. I believe some spoilsport has since disproved this story, but se non è vero, è ben trovato.
</autobiographical_note>

It takes time for foreign borrowings to assimilate. Stick around.

Update 2014.03.12.16:55 – Added afterthought in blue.

Update 2014.03.13.15:55 – Added  this note:

†The actual story is rather different. The latest edition of COED doesn't use italics to indicate the degrees of relative  naturalization of the two words. It uses IPA symbols (which I wish some other dictionaries did: what does kruh-san MEAN FFS  – apart, of course from 'You know, like all proper Americans say, duh!)? 'Restaurant' has /rɒnt/, fully anglicized, without a nasalized 'o', but with a t (not present, according to the article, in American English).  'Croissant' has the French vowel [ɔ̃] [excuse the transcription: it was either that or  'ɔ with a ~' NOW FIXED], and no t.




Update 2014.05.01.14:15 – Added  this PS to that note  (†), and updated footer:
PS I've just remembered my first introduction to the IPA in a second-year French lesson: 'ɔ with a ~' would be wrong anyway. The crucial mnemonic is sans son sang: they aren't homophones – and croissant uses the sound used in the 1st and 3rd word (not the 'ɔ with a ~ ɔ̃' proposed by COED, but ã).

Update 2014.10.10.10:35 – Added  this PPS:
PPS
In further hyphen-related news, I've just found this undeveloped stub of a blogpost, started and discarded many moons ago:

My 2011 Christmas stocking contained a DVD  that I imagine the donors will be aghast to learn had the damning endorsement 'laugh-out [sic] loud'. What can  the copy-writer have had in mind with that hyphen? Maybe it was the typesetter (if such a person exists in the world of DVD covers) enforcing, mindlessly, a house style that said 'words that combine a verb with a preposition should be hyphenated'. Perhaps a 'laugh-out', in this hypothetical person's mind, was a bit like a blow-out, but with uncontained laughter rather than food.

That's a blow-out in the Grande Bouffe sense, of course – a feast that led to ruptured guts (like a blow-out in the motor-tyre sense) would not be funny. Well, not so as to make one laugh, out-loud or otherwise.

Update 2014.10.10.11:55 –  Fix in green

Update 2016.08.11.12:55 –  Typo fix (and deleted outdated footer).

Don't shay a word

For much of the past week, my Twitter timeline has been full of posts with the tag #IHDOS14. A very prolific source (thanks Sandy ) was following a talk given by Robin Walker, now available here.

My attention was first grabbed by this:



Only three? Listen to Ritula Shah (@ritula) saying 'Afghanistan'† and see if you dare say that again! Those three parts may be (? – I haven't really thought about this, but my brushes with other languages frequently leave me wondering at the phonological simplicity of English) sufficient for describing English, but many other languages use many more.

<autobiographical_note date-range="1972-3">
I have mentioned Joe Cremona  – the man chiefly responsible for what little I know of Romance Philology –  before. At our first meeting, wanting to know how much I knew about Spanish (very little at the time, deriving chiefly from a short tour of the north of Spain, partially recounted here) he asked me what the Spanish was for 'broom'. I didn't know, but I did know that the family name of the Plantagenet  kings was Broom, and that their emblem featured the plant with the Latin name of Planta Genista (whence 'Plantagenet'). So I guessed at 'genista' – which told him what he wanted to know: when pronouncing a word with the letters 'st' my s was not apical.

FYI, the word for broom is hiniesta; but the point is that in this context the sibilant is produced by a closure between the very tip of the tongue and the alveolar ridge.
</autobiographical_note>

When I saw the offending tweet I posted this:

Different languages make demands on different parts of the tongue, and in the process of acquiring our mother tongue we learn not to pay attention to (and even to become oblivious to) speech sounds that don't belong to our mother tongue's sound system. And the process of learning starts in the womb (as I mentioned here):

"The dramatic finding of this study [reported here] is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation," said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany.

So I was not surprised when the next tweet  confirmed my speculation:

This is something that English-speaking teachers of Spanish often say. But /s/ and /ʃ/ (which I imagine is what /sh/ means) are not allophonic in Spanish; [ʃ] scarcely exists in Spanish. These English teachers are referring to the apical s; and the use of 'sh' points to a reason for the misapprehension. The reasoning goes something like this:

<misapprehension  commonness="5">

1. When Spanish students try to say /s/ in certain phonetic contexts, they make the wrong noise.
2. The wrong noise sounds like (there is a quite like/very like/exactly the same continuum which depends on the listener's hearing and training) the noise that we Anglophones associate with the spelling 'sh'. [The use of 'sh' concretizes the misapprehension:

<sub_misapprehension>
Anything spelt 'sh' must be 'like' the English sound /ʃ/
<sub_misapprehension>

and the concrete is quick-drying. English teachers who have been saying this for years can be hard to convince.]

3. Therefore /s/ and /ʃ/ are allophonic in Spanish.

</misapprehension>

 I summed this up in my next two tweets:

 

I don't have access to a spectrograph at the moment, or to a native speaker of Spanish, but I have an idea for a workaround‡ (more of a limparound really). Stay tuned to this frequency for an update that involves pretty pictures, but I must be getting on; that's quite enough for now.

b
 Update 2014.01.15.15.30
† PS To clarify, I'm not saying that that /s/ is apical (although it may be, my ear has lost the acuity it had in the early '70s). The point I'm making is that every phoneme in the word is more or less subtly different from its English 'equivalent' – and those quotation marks are meant to convey my hesitancy about saying that any speech sound in one language is the same as a speech sound in another language; that's why (as I said here) blanc became 'plonk' in the ears of the Tommies who first heard it.

 Update 2014.03.02.11.30
‡ PPS And here it is. I don't have convenient access to a native speaker of Castilian Spanish, so this recording is just of my voice, pronouncing the English s, the Castilian s and in between the two the English /ʃ/:

Two things leap out from this:

• The apical s used in Castilian Spanish has a higher pitch than either English consonant
• Whereas the first two fricatives here are confident and constant, the third is not at all. This is not a feature of the apical s, but it demonstrates a point I made earlier: native speakers learn to screen out foreign sounds. The frequency varies so wildly because the tip of my tongue is frantically dodging about trying to make a sound that I have learnt (but did not acquire as part of my mother tongue).

(Incidentally, I carefully specified Castilian Spanish, because there are many parts of Spain where the s is less [and sometimes not at all, I think] apical. In Andalucía for example, word-final s becomes almost inaudible: the difference between lo bueno [the principle of good] and los buenos [good people] is largely a matter of vowel length/quality in the final 'o' of each word.)

Update: 2018.04.26.12:50 – Deleted old footer.

Schottland the brave

A recent blog  on the derivation of brave caught my attention about ten days ago, but I was too busy with the ELTons submission at the time to do it justice. I just made a few notes, and – for unaccountable reasons [temporary insanity?] – gave it the title Schottland the Brave. Perhaps  I was conflating three ideas: the song, the germanness of the point of view, and the ruggedness of Scotland's coastline (reminiscent in some ways of the Costa Brava, so called for its ruggedness).

<digression theme="germaneness(sic)">
That's germanness. But while we're in Spain, I'm reminded of various Romance words for brother. In Italy (fratello), French (frère) (and I'm sure many others, which I can't recall off-hand) they used the Latin FRATRE(M) [and you really should recognize this convention by now; if you don't, have a look here]. But in the Iberian peninsula, this wasn't enough. As I remember (but don't have chapter and verse) according to one estimate there was a time when it was said that 1 in 3 adult males were in holy orders of some kind^PPPS; for this sort of 'brother' they used Spanish fray, Portuguese frade, Catalan frare.... A brother by blood, or a germane brother became in Spanish hermano, in Portuguese irmão, in Catalan   germã  .... As we've seen before (here again) an adjective in a Noun Phrase often comes to be a noun.
</digression>

Anyway, the title, whatever it means, has sentimental value for me now, so I'm sticking with it.

One of the blog's points is this:

The problems facing Romance etymologists are, in principle, not different from those familiar to students of Germanic, except that the Romance languages go back to Latin, while Proto-Germanic is a reconstructed language. Yet hundreds of words in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Romance languages, including even Italian, either do not have indisputable Latin sources or are not traceable to any Latin roots, so that their early history is as hard to find out as the history of many English, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian words.
More here

It goes on to say this:

The main handicap in connecting brave and barbarus is phonetics. Barbarus had to become brabarus by metathesis (ar to ra) and lose part of its middle or to turn some other somersaults in order to produce the form bravus (b to v after a vowel is “regular,” lautgesätzlich, to use the German term).
More here

At the first mention of Romance Philologists I bridled – unnecessarily. I expected a slight where there wasn't one. What there was though was a MISAPPREHENSION. Read that 'The problems ...' sentence again, especially the 'Romance Languages go back to Latin' bit. We Romance Philologists are different from philologists who use words like  lautgesätzlich, because we're not dealing with a reconstructed language. Oh yes we are: the spoken form of Latin, sometimes called 'Vulgar Latin'. The reconstructed words are distinguished by a preposed asterisk: eg. ‡ '*PARABOLARE, to talk'.

The trouble with giving the reconstructed language a name like this (after all, both German and French 'go back to' – whatever that means – Proto-Indo-European) is that it seems to have some chronological reality: there was Proto-Germanic and then there was something (Old High German? Middle German? I've no idea, but scholars of modern German think in terms of such a progression). Romance Philologists may be tempted to think similarly 'There was PIE, then there was Ancient Latin, then there was Classical Latin, then there was Late Latin, then there was Vulgar Latin then there were various Romance vernaculars, and then there was French/Spanish/Logudorese (spoken in Sardinia)/Breton/Catalan ....you name it'.

This was a mistake I made when I was writing my first 'Vulgar Latin and Romance Philology' essay (my main source for which was a Que Sais-je? book called Le Latin Vulgaire, the author of which, in response to the question in the series title, should have answered Pas Trop (I think my late lamented supervisor Joe Cremona made this quip, but it may be all my own work – in which case I'm on my own against Joseph Herman , author of  Le latin vulgaire). Vulgar Latin was not a stage. It is reconstructed from sources contemporary with the writers of the oldest Classical Latin texts. Inscriptions and graffiti from Pompeii are a major source. For example, a ring was found there, as reported here. "Dominus suae¹ ancillae" was the inscription, reported the Daily Telegraph. Well here's the ring (or one very like it):

Not 'Dominus', domnus. And no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10-15† cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel].)

Now we come to the metathesis 'problem' reported in that blog. I have blogged elsewhere about metathesis. It's not a problem ('handicap' is the word the blog uses: 'The main handicap in connecting brave and barbarus is phonetics. Barbarus had to become brabarus by metathesis (ar to ra) '). Metathesis is as common as muck. It's how a widwe becomes a widow and a bridde becomes a bird, and how (as I showed in that blog) Spanish grinalda is related to French guirlande:

Consider the French guirlande and the Spanish grinalda. We can ignore the u, as it just keeps the g hard.

So we've got French

G + I + R + L + A + N + D + <unstressed final vowel>

versus Spanish

G + R + I + N + A + L + D + <unstressed final vowel>

The beginning and the end are the same, but four of the middle five phonemes are in different positions, and the only 'stable' one changes in quality (it's nasalized [in French, because the consonant that follows it has changed - clarification for blog]). In language development, phonemes jump about.
More here

Back at my Vulgar Latin example, as we're talking about the 'handicap' of believing that ar can become ra (or vice versa, in this case) the unattested [*]PARABOLARE gives us parler,  parlare,  hablar,  falar....

But 'Show me the proof' says the cynic. ''[*]PARABOLARE is unattested'. Sheesh! Nobody's ever seen a quark. That doesn't mean they don't exist. If you don't understand something, don't just pooh-pooh it. Read a book FFS! 

We have (at least – I haven't given  it much thought) four reasons for knowing with confidence that PARABOLARE existed:

• the plethora of Romance words that need it as a source
• the existence of words like fable and parable; the noun PARABOLA existed
• the other instances (in many languages, not just Romance) of verbs formed from nouns using a regular verb paradigm
• the fact that learners of foreign languages find it easier to remember regular verbs (don't we all? – the clue's in the name). To take a Vulgar Latin example, CANTARE (first conjugation, regular – e.g. the third person singular in the perfect was CANTAVIT) was preferred to CANERE (third conjugation, irregular – not CANTAVIT but CECINIT); back at the ranch, [*]PARABOLAVIT (well, no, but for the purpose of argument...) rather than LOCUTUS EST.  (LOQUI  is not only in a conjugation that often houses irregular verbs, but it is also 'semi deponent' – passive in form but active in meaning: just the sort of oddity that a second-language learner can do without.)

Anyway. Gotta go. Because of the relief of submitting my ELTons entry (which I have done) I've spent too long on this.

b

Update 2013.11.22.12:15: red bits and many typo fixes
Update 2013.11.22.22:50: Added the "‡" recantation. (And there's ['there'=in recantation] another trace of CANTARE.)

† I was crediting the poor serving girl with pretty pudgy fingers. 3 [because there are three coils] x π x the diameter of a woman's finger = about 10-15 cm.

‡ Well, I did say 'e.g.'.  I've checked, and as it happens PARABOLARE is attested; but the example, as an example, is OK. If  PARABOLARE were unattested, it would have an asterisk preposed. I've removed or bracketed the others; the argument still works, but it's not as neat as I would like. (I'm sure I saw that asterisk somewhere.) Even if PARABOLARE didn't exist, we could work out that something like it must have.

Update 2013.12.14.18:30: Added the PS
PS
Incidentally. it was the inscription on this ring that alerted me to the derivation of the English word ancillary and made sure that I'd never again confuse it either in meaning or in spelling with auxiliary.

Update 2013.12.14.20:05 – Added germane digression.

Update 2014.04.23.12:25 – Added PPS, and updated footer.

PPS
¹They obviously gave this job to a cub reporter who had neither studied Latin nor looked at the picture. The 'suae' comes after the 'ancillae'. It's very easy to mistranscribe a foreign language by rearranging the words to fit a more familiar pattern, (because of the phenomenon known to language teachers as L1 interference).

Update 2017.03.28.12:50 – Added to PPS and footnote in blue, and removed old footer.

Update 2018.04.11.13:10 – Tweaked format, redid graphic, and added PPPS (footnote)

^PPPS I have long felt, in a Wikipaediesque sort of way, that this needs further citation. I don't have it from a book, as I heard it from the mouth of Professor E. M. Wilson, dedicatee of the snappily-titled...

<digression>
This compound escapes my hostility to "titled" in a literary context, expressed in the rant here.
</digression>

...Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age: Presented to Edward M. Wilson (30) (Coleccion Tamesis: Serie A, Monografias)

and author of the Calderón chapter in the standard work on Golden Age Drama. In  fact, now I think of it, his influence may have been behind the CU Hispanic Society's choice of the play that marked my only outing as a tragedian, mentioned  here. Anyway,  whether the statistic (1 in 3 men in Holy Orders) was from his own (or one of his students') research or that of some other scholar, he regarded as authoritative – good enough for me.

White rabbits

Notes & Queries reports this in 1909, though it must surely date back further than that. I pride myself on (probably) being the first to use it for the first blog of the month. I wonder why white , though Wikipedia reports a colourless alternative: 'rabbits, rabbits, rabbits'.

The word bunny has been with us for some time. Etymonline dates it to the late seventeenth century Scottish dialectal 'bun'. It was suggested to me, by – I think – Joe Cremona (whom I have mentioned  several times before [and that's what meta data is for!]) that prim English nurses and governesses were keen to discourage their charges from using the word descended from the Latin cuniculus – whence come the Spanish conejo, Portuguese coelho, Catalan conill, and various other words including the English 'coney' (rabbit fur).

The word coney was used as a rhyming euphemism for the 'female intercrural foramen', as – like honey and money – it did rhyme with cunny (Latin cunnus in which the double n yields, as often the Spanish ñ  – whence  [] coño). Perhaps the stressed vowel in our 'coney' changed from /ʌ/ to /əʊ/ for  euphemistic reasons similar to those nursemaids'. I have not met the word cunny 'in the wild', but it was used in the script of The Unforgiven in that anatomical sense.

But I must get on. I want to get OA done by the end of the week.

b
Update 2013.08.01.18:00
Added to last (full) para.
Update 2013.08.02.10:00
PS I assumed that, among those words derived from cuniculus, I might include Italian coniglio. But I wasn't sure at the time. I have looked it up, and it turns out that I should have had the courage of my convictions. But the dictionary yielded two other bits of information:

• coniglio can also be used in Italian as a taunt to someone who's not brave: 'chicken'
• 'bunny' is coniglietto

In English, a rabbit isn't notably lacking in courage. The animals themselves are known to be timid, but the only usage that I know of that likens a timid person to a rabbit is this: the 'tail' of a cricket team – not inappropriately, given that Scottish bun, a hare's tail, is cited here as a possible source of the word 'bunny' – are sometimes referred to as 'bunnies'. I wonder if English is alone in not using some sort of rabbit as a term for a timid person. I am reminded of Le bon roi Dagobert:

Le bon Saint Eloi
Lui dit <o mon roi
Votre majesté
Est bien essoufleé. >
<C'est vrai – lui dit le roi – 
Un lapin courait après moi. >

 When I heard this [RIP Cedric Baring-Gould, a brilliant French teacher, ahead of his time, under-estimated by almost everyone], the irony was lost on me.

Coniglietto  is striking for a more formal reason. It has the Italian diminutive suffix -etto/a (as in many borrowed words familar to English speakers: libretto, cornetto, bruschetta...), but coniglio is itself derived from a Latin (-ulus) diminutive.

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

(Not sure why that came to mind:
Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/big-fleas-have-little-fleas-upon-their-backs-to-bite-them-and-little-fleas-have-lesser-fleas-and-so-ad-infinitum#ixzz2anpnfl3E )

Back to the grindstone...

b 
Update 2013.09.27.13:50
Header updated:

---

 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.0: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU, and  IA-IU, and – new for V4.0 – OA-OU.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 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 1570 views/700 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.

Ink in the cloisters?

On Saturday I will be visiting my Alma Mater, and to celebrate I have found out what the Alma part means. I have hitherto assumed that it had something to do with the Spanish alma, which means 'soul'; and to call the scene of my studies in the early seventies my 'soul mother' seemed a bit excessive – fine though that time was.

But it doesn't mean 'soul' – which doesn't mean of course, that the Spanish alma has no connection with what it does mean, which is 'nourishing'. Perhaps the alma was so called in Spain because it was the part of the individual that was 'nourished by Divine Grace'. Hmm ... I may have more to say about this at some time in the future.

But nourishment will certainly be on the agenda on Saturday evening. Bread will be broken. And a 'companion' – as it happens – is someone who shares bread with you; and a 'company' is made up of companions (although the board of directors – hmmm.... 'board'... . – probably prefer Rich Tea biscuits to plain bread). When Caesar's troops made their inroads into what is now France and Germany, they found a very useful Gothic word that combined 'with' and 'bread' to mean 'mucker'/''mess-mate': GA-HLAIBA (if you screw your eyes up you can just about see the word 'loaf' there. They took the Latin words CUM and PANE(M), and coined the new word COMPANIO. 'Where...' (I hear you ask) did the second N in 'companion' come from, and why 'PANE(M)' instead of PANIS?'

Attentive readers may remember the post that explained the second of these:

(I'm using the Vulgar Latin convention of giving what a classicist would  call 'the accusative case marker' in parentheses, as the nominative rarely had much influence on the Romance languages.) 

And the answer to the first is my reason for using 'rarely' in that explanation.

The last category [the  author has been discussing different signs of case endings that survived in Vulgar Latin] in Vulgar Latin declension comprising words of the third declension that remain imparisyllabic [! the number of syllables differed in various derived words], is fully attested only in Gaul.... These words designate human beings and the persistence of the original nominative is undoubtedly due to its frequent use as a vocative.... The group includes in particular a large number of words designating agents [and] words formed on  verbal stems, usually those of the first conjugation, e.g. IMPERATOR from IMPERARE...

See more here.

Elcock  – for it is he – goes on to list about twenty examples, with their Old French and Old Provençal derivatives: e.g. IMPERATOR/IMPERATOREM, O.F. empere(d)re/empere(d)or, O. Prov. emperaire/emperador.

Later, when non-Latinate words were adopted into the new vernacular, 'nominative/accusative' pairs were created, following the Vulgar Latin pattern: bers/baron, gars/garçon, copain/compagnon and a handful of others. More often than not, only the 'accusative-based' half has survived, if ever the putative nominative half existed. A porpoise is a 'pig-fish' (porc + pois); but it's poisson that means 'fish' in modern French.

Anyway, the prospect of revisiting my old stamping ground has brought to mind the late/great Joe Cremona, whom I have mentioned before; he is the source of many of my unattributable tit-bits – which I explain away as 'private conversation'; not that they necessarily arose in private conversations, but the 'Vulgar Latin and Romance Philology' option was not over-subscribed. So even when there was a full turn out at his lectures the number of people in the audience could have been counted on one hand.

My last post mentioned the r in Fr. encre and It inchiostro. The root is the Greek ένκαυστον, adopted into Late Latin in the form encaustum – stressed on the first syllable, and with no r; in fact the Old French enque still had no r. This dictionary definition of ink  gives some background. Why the changes?  I don't think anyone knows for sure; they certainly didn't at the time of the lecture in which Joe suggested the following possibility:

The context for this speculation was a quote from Crystal from which I was ellipting a mention of the association of learning with religion (which didn't seem to me to be essential to an understanding of the argument at the time). Writing with ink was something that was done – predominantly, at the time – in monasteries. If the ένκαυστον was something that was usually found in chiostro [='in cloister'] that would explain both the change of stress and the addition of the r. 'Se non è vero è ben trovato*

b

News from the word-face
Dotting and crossing of the appropriate letters is proceeding with as much dispatch as Zeno's Arrow, but with slightly more hope of reaching its goal: 15 April looks like being the red letter day.

Update 2103.04.06: @BobK99 proposes and God disposes! I'd've lasted until mid-evening, but not been very good company - while posing a health risk. So I'm sitting this one out. But I can report, having just printed out V2, that the EA-EU section is about twice as big as the AA-AU section. I have a pretty busy week ahead, but it's still looking good for 15 April.

* Meaning, roughly, 'If not true it should be'. Some day I must write a novel with a happy-go-lucky character called 'Ben Trovato'.

Update 2016.07.28.15:15 – Deleted out-of-date footer.

A horse of a different colour

Today's title was provided by 'amigos4', a long-term participant in the UsingEnglish forums. We were discussing hair colour, and the reference set me off on another reverie about where words come from (which I didn't indulge there, for fear of 'scaring the horses').

Horses? In David Crystal's The Stories of English he discusses (on p.  58) the word 'blank'.

In Old High German there is a form blanc, which means 'white, shining'. In Old English, blanca turns up meaning a horse, presumably white or grey in colour. In Beowulf (l. 856) we read of beornas on blancum  'warriors on steeds'. It is easy to deduce what happened. Roman soldiers or merchants in Europe encountered the word used by the Germanic peoples and borrowed it.

Those Roman soldiers or merchants spoke Vulgar Latin, and so many other languages descended  from Latin have similar words. ('Romance languages' is the accepted term, which I have been hesitant about using since an encounter I had with a young lady's father - whom I proudly told I was studying Romance Philology. He was not impressed: 'Romantic philosophy won't put bread on the table.') Anyway, apart from French blanc, there is  Catalan blanc, Italian bianco, Portuguese branco, Spanish blanco ...

But if blanc had Germanic origins, and was indirectly borrowed into French in a reference to horses, the story does not stop there. French returned the favour, sending the word to English in a rather different guise.

In English, there are several differences between /b/ and /p/ (which are articulated in the same place - using both lips [bilabially, to use the $10 word].) The most obvious one is voicing, the feature that distinguishes g from k, z from s, and so on). But there is another feature in our pronunciation of /b/. The onset is preceded by a little puff of air, confusingly known as 'aspiration'. The /p/ and /b/ in French don't; it's little things like this that make it difficult for us to speak French with a convincing accent - we often wrongly assume that their b is the same as our b.

<soapbox>
To learn to speak a foreign language, we must regress to our infancy and learn to make speech noises the way a baby does. Even infancy is a bit late; there is evidence that growing familiarity with speech sound starts in the womb. Here is just one such study).
</soapbox>

(The following explanation comes from a half-remembered 1972 lecture - given, perhaps by John Trim, perhaps by Joe Cremona [see others of my posts, the first one being this].) 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, in a way strangely reminiscent of those Roman soldiers' or merchants' disregard for the original equine application - the Germanic blanc referring to 'a white or grey horse'.

The history of languages is full of such tangles, where etymological paths criss-cross, with echos and pre-echoes of common themes.

Ho hum. So many words, so little time...


b

PS * To quote from an article based on that study:

"The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation," said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany.

 From the Science Daily article mentioned in my main text.

Update: 2018.04.06.12:30 – Deleted old footer. I've left the original "-"s in my text, where there should have been "–"s (as in the previous line), out on unaccountable feeling of nostalgia for my former, pre-&ndash; blogger .:-)

What's BALD about a bat?

On the TV the other night (last night at the time of writing, but later at the time of publication) I learnt that the name of the vector of puerperal fever was named after the Greek for a bunch of grapes, staphylos, because that's what the bacteria look like. (Bacteria, from the Greek for a small stick - because that's what the first ones discovered looked like.... this game could go on forever.)

On the journey from metaphor to regular lexeme (that's 'word' in plain English), accidents often happen - puns interfere, false etymologies affect spelling, and so on. But it's not so common for a simple manuscript miscopying to affect a word as radically as it affected the French for bat - chauve-souris. But before expanding on that I should justify my offhand use of the word 'metaphor' in my opening sentence - as if all words started life as metaphors.... the very idea!

Well, there is evidence that they did. Looking out of my rain-streaked window I see clouds - cumulus clouds. Cumulus is Latin for 'little heap' - which is what the cloud looks like. Now after the rain, a house-proud property-holder will go out and sweep the dead leaves on the new patio 'into a little heap' - ad cumulum. The Romans had a word for that - not for sweeping up dead leaves (which I'm afraid is a bit of a personal obsession at the moment), but for collecting stuff together: accumulare - whence our 'accumulate'. Guy Deutscher, in his fascinating The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention calls language (in a brilliant metaphor about metaphors - a 'meta-metaphor'?)  'a reef of dead metaphors'. In fact, Deutscher says more; it's not just words that were born phoenix-like from dead metaphors; dead metaphors are 'the alluvium from which grammatical structures emerge'. But that's the stuff of another blog. Revenons à  nos chauve-souris.

First, a little background:

The best-known collection of Latin glosses, certainly the most informative for the student of Romance philology. is the so-called Reichenau Glossary. The ...manuscript ... formerly belonged to the Abbey of Reichenau... [But] its most recent editor attempts to situate it... at the monastery of Corbie [Thinks - should I pursue a rathole about the Scottish 'Corbie', a crow (cf Fr. corbeau), a symbol beloved of Benedictine monasteries? No, better not, we'd be here all day...{but see Update}], in Picardie.

(Don't you just love that 'attempts'? I suspect W.D. Elcock, the writer of The Romance Languages , had his doubts.)

The word VESPERTILIONES was glossed in this document as CHAUVE-SOURIS. Elcock goes on:

.... In fact, bats are not noticeably bald ['Nor are coots!' "Down Knowles."], and one is tempted to infer that CALVAS SORICES is a product of 'popular etymology', hiding a quite different word. In most French patois bats are called 'flying-mice' or  'bird-mice'; it may well be that CALVAS is in reality *KAWAS [the asterisk is a convention used to mark a supposed, not attested, form], the Germanic word which survives as the root of Fr, chouette 'owl'.

'Owl-mouse' - for chauve-souris - would make much more sense. But what caused the change from *KAWAS to CALVAS? The careful Elcock doesn't suggest a mechanism. But Joe Cremona, mentioned in a former blog, postulated one in a private conversation (or lecture, to be entirely accurate, but you could have counted the audience on the fingers of one hand). And this idea - though unpublished - strikes me as pretty likely. In some scriptorium a monk asked  'What's this funny squiggle?' Latin and Gallo-romance, had no W: it was many centuries later that the French  borrowed the spelling of whisky and wagon-lits. The monk did his best, with the uneven pen-strokes of a beginner.

The Italian pipistrello
no longer shows the Latin
relationship with evening: vesper

A subsequent copyist, in the scriptorium of Corbie, or wherever, read the wobbly W as an LV, and a chimera was born - at the (misread) stroke of a pen. The Gallic 'owl-mouse' became a 'bald-mouse' (unlike the Italian pipistrello - derived from VESPERTILIO, and recognizable in the English 'pipistrelle bat' - or the Spanish murciego [that's Old Sp.; today it's murciélago]).

Anyway, time's a-wastin'.

b

Update, 30 November 2012:
The rathole I had in mind referred to this emblem of a school in the road where I grew up. The school was set up and run by the monks of a Benedictine abbey. (I still don't mean to develop the idea, but just throw it out as a talking point. It was at a youth club called 'The Corbie' that I made my debut as a folk-singer.)

PS A merry tale from the lexicographical world

The software that I use when compiling my dictionary is The Macmillan English Dictionary. A feature of this is that when you look up a word the computer pronounces it. When you search for a range of words it pronounces the first one it finds. Yesterday, while checking on the hyphenation or not of 'leasehold' I did a search for the string *se* .The first on the list of *se* words was arsehole (which the computer duly enunciated - but in a very polite voice, so I didn't take it personally.)

...

Update: 2015.06.14.10:20
Added picture.

Update: 2015.06.15.10:45
Added clarification in an appropriate colour (the colour of Bene... sorry, it just slipped out).

Update: 2018.03.25.19:55
Removed old footer

Hello 'dolly'

The late great Joe Cremona, not Professor of Romance Philology at Cambridge University (but should've been), told me about pupils - the ones in your eyes. As Guy Deutscher said in the The Unfolding of Language, vocabulary is 'a reef of dead metaphors' (and ΜΕΤΆΦΩΡΑ is the word emblazoned on removals trucks in Greece to this day).

What do you see in someone's pupil? - an image of yourself, but tiny. A little person. (And the image of yourself is enhanced if the person into whose eyes you gaze has used belladonna to dilate the pupils; but bella donna^†, or 'beautiful woman', is another story.) The Latin for 'little girl' is pupilla (French speakers will remember poupée; and the -illa ending is just a diminutive suffix.)

When Dr Cremona told me about this he explained that the same image was not used only in Latin and its descendants; he listed examples from all over the Indo-European world, which I have shamefully forgotten. I think Arabic was one, and probably Farsi... I'm guessing. And to reinforce the lesson he referred to the tool that layers of pavements use - a dolly (shaped like a legless doll, whose arms are the handle and whose torso pounds slabs into place). I had not met this, and looking in various online dictionaries I've only found this - '...4 historical a short wooden pole for stirring clothes in a washtub' - not at all the same tool, but similar in structure.

I was reminded of this during one of the earlier rounds of The Great British Bake-off (no useful link, as the TV series is over). The contestants were required to make a pie, not in a case or tin, but formed* manually using a wooden mould called - no prizes for guessing - a dolly. I was sure there'd be a DVD spin-off; apparently not - but there are more Mary Berry and Paul Hollywood books out there than you could shake a pie-dolly at).

b

*And on the subject of 'formed', I must write about formaggio and fromage some time.  
Update 13.01.01.14:33 Done it at last: here it is.
...

Update 2015.11.08.17:25 – Added this note:
^†I can't believe I resisted the temptation here to talk about mustelidae. The date explains the omission; I was in the thick of lexicography.

The Raised Faculty Building
(see more here)

Taboo is where language meets belief. Depending on how strong the belief is, the care about pussyfooting around it can be huge. Somewhere – possibly  in a lecture note somewhere [well, the note itself is in the loft and the lecture hall {or more probably seminar room} would have been in the Sidgwick Site's Raised Faculty Building] – there is a tribe of hunter-gatherers for whom the word for eye is taboo (for everyone, not just the hunting party) while the men are hunting.

<digression>

Apropos of that sexism , I can't hear the words men and hunting without thinking of that loathsome song from the end of The Jungle Book:

Father's hunting in the forest  

Mother's cooking in the home. 

I must hone my sexual stereotypes 

Till the day that I am grown

[I may have remembered the third line wrong; the scansion‘s not great.] 

</digression>

Now we come to those weasels. Dangerous or mischievous animals can acquire taboo-affected words. Bella is obvious as a root of the French bellette. But the word for weasel in Portuguese is doninha, and in Italian is donnola – both meaning little lady.

That example comes from that lecture; this is my speculation – it seems to me that there might have been an element of placating the gods of the jungle in the naming of the Boa constrictor: pretty again, and female, though you couldn't call her a little lady. But Etymonline (spoilsport) says the origin of the Latin boa, mentioned in Pliny‘s Natural History, is unknown. Hmmm...

Meanwhile, here's a clue:
Weapon that brusque potter might demand. (8)

Update:2018.05.21.16:45 – Repaired broken link. And here's the answer at last: CLAYMORE