A metter for further discussion, don'cher'now

Geddit? Metaphor. Oh well... This post is a spinoff from my last piece, about food metaphors – specifically, the update about alcohol. In it, I admitted to a problem with the derivation of 'Madeira' from the word for wood –  it was the wrong kind of 'wood':

All the authorities I've looked at confirm this, but I can't say I'm entirely satisfied. Madeira is the substance rather than the silvan entity.

It's a happy(-ish, if that sort of thing floats your boat) coincidence that the part of Madeira awarded World Heritage status by UNESCO in 1999 echoes the penultimate word in that periphrasis, the  laurisilva. or laurel forest:

<potential_rant theme="laurel" suspected_agent="glyphosate" advice="Don't go there">
(which reminds me of Li'l Miss Lebensraum next door and The Curious Incident of the Laurel in the Night-time...)
</potential_rant> 

...But I am breathing deeply, and will carry on as normal.

Madeira is (or was, and  bits of it still are) densely wooded. But you don't call St Vincent 'Arrowroot'.

<autobiographical note>
This bit of useless knowledge comes from a calypso I was exposed to^※ at my primary school, about West Indian exports. The relevant lines were:

St Vincent is cute
For sea-islan' cotton
And arrowroot

</autobiographical note>

I don't  know what arrowroot is exactly, but I know it was one of St Vincent's two major export crops back in the day.

So anyway, what happened?

Portugal 'discovered' the island in the early 15th century, though –  like many discoveries of a geopolitical nature –  someone else got there first.

Latin had various words for wood; one was  lignum (particularly firewood  –  my old title-page-less nineteenth-century dictionary says it was '[Prob. from lig-o  "to tie"]' which makes sense –  but it was very flexible; Juvenal used it metonymically to mean a writing tablet^*. That dictionary also cites Horace's version of 'carrying coals to Newcastle': 'in silvam ligna ferre'  (spookily prescient of him when you think of 'lignite' and the Spanish for railway (ferrocarril) ...OK, not really). Wood as building matter was materia or materies. I think I've already mentioned (somewhere in this blog) Vulgar Latin's preference for first and second declensions over the less regular third, fourth, and fifth; less to remember – and we are often dealing with Latin for speakers of  a Second or Other Language (LSOL?)

Lignum is the root of the Spanish leño, and† ^{[not that simple...]} materia is the root of the Portuguese madeira (no prizes, by now, for recognizing metathesis here – the r and the i [swapping places]. This commonplace in language development is the subject of one of my more popular backnumbers.)

A Castilian monk (again not the first, but possibly – except for an alleged visit by the Vikings – the first in the post-Roman world) 'discovered' the island too:

a Castilian monk also identified the location of the islands in their present location, with the names Leiname (modern Italian legname, cognate of Portuguese madeira, "wood"), Diserta and Puerto Santo.

So says Wikipedia, and I don't have time to trace it back to a sounder source.

Then along came the Portuguese and spat in their beer (as it were), changing 'Leiname' to their own Madeira (even though I'm not  at all sure that 'Leiname' was a Hispanized word at all; maybe it was the name applied by the islanders to the land of their fathers, with no reference to wood. But this is entirely speculative. All I have found  so far is that there is no reference to Leiname in the Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch‡, the fount of all wisdom for Vulgar Latin. My next port of call, but not today, is an historical dictionary of Spanish.

Anyway, the  Portuguese version stuck. The marvellous  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch is in no doubt about the meaning: Holz 'wood' –  and you can't get much clearer than a monosyllable.

Must go. Other fish to fry (and there goes another culinary metaphor).


b
PS
The Book hasn't gone away. Read on...

Tales from the word face

Things have been a bit quiet (well, absolutely quiet) of late on this front. I have had a paid job (remember them?) since late Summer, and the bits of work I've done on When Vowels Get Together have involved casting bread on the waters (by which I don't mean feeding the ducks)

My latest wheeze has been a letter to the Open University's alumni magazine:

I have studied for two post-graduate diplomas. The first was in Computing for Commerce and Industry, and during it I was sponsored by my employer, Compaq when the course started (1999) and HP when it finished (2003). My aim was to extend my usefulness as an employee in the world of IT. Unfortunately, this did not work as I was laid off in 2004. 

So I retrained as a teacher (a PGCE from a bricks and mortar university). But, meaning to specialize in ESOL/EFL, I returned to the OU to study for an MEd in Applied Linguistics. I found, though, after happily taking 2 or 3 courses (I forget the precise details) that to finalize the MEd I would have to take a course that was useless to me; as I was now self-financing, and otherwise unemployed, I had to bail out, taking the interim Advanced Diploma as a consolation prize.

Now, to fill the gap left by OU studies, I started writing a Dictionary of Vowels and their Sounds - which I entered for the ELTons 2012. The planned book (with a number of specimen chapters) was shortlisted but did not win. (My '15 minutes of fame' are at 19'17"- 19'30" of that video, or those with less time can scroll down to the foot of that page. You'll note that, with typical over-statement, Marshall McLuhan was out by about 14'47".) 

Rather than just forget the specimen chapters (which covered words containing all the vowel-pairs containing a U), I rethought my aims and started work on a new book - When Vowels Get Together. When I had done AA-AU, I sent it to my son for comments, and for ease of process I made it available on Kindle - I told only him though. 

To my surprise he announced it on Twitter, and in the first 5 days it had been downloaded more than 200 times. At this stage I felt I had to continue; and, with the intention of getting people interested in the progress of the then very partial book, I started a blog: Harmless Drudgery (I'm sure many of your readers will recognize the reference to Dr Johnson's definition of a lexicographer). It has now been downloaded well over 1,000 times; and while this does not mean it has that many readers, or anything like it  - as there have been repeat downloads by people tracking the book's progress - it's still a milestone that I find quite satisfying. 

In the mid-late-noughties, between my two OU courses, I had been to an OU seminar on digital technology, run by Simon <somebody> (not 'Buckminster-Fuller', but something like that) and made a number of new contacts, all of whom used Twitter, and most of whom worked for the OU - either as ALs or in a permanent position. 

Returning to my book, by September 2013 I had reached the vowel pair 'OU'; this was the culmination of V4 of the book (A diphthongs - V1, E -V2...). And to announce its near-readiness I devoted a blogpost to an excerpt from the 'OU' section, using the title 'OU, you are awful'. The pun (it was a Dick Emery catchphrase) was not entirely gratuitous. 'OU' is by far the most common vowel-pair used in the source dictionary I had used (both as a source of data [for each pair the book lists all the English words listed by that dictionary, with a few others where Macmillan had made what seemed to me a glaring omission]; and as a reference [each word listed is linked to the online Dictionary]). To quote my book: 

Of the 25 vowel pairs, 16 have fewer than 1,000 hits – most of which have fewer than 500, and about half fewer than 100. Of the remaining 9, 5 have fewer than 2,000. Of the remaining 4, OU is more than 1,000 hits ahead of the second-placed EA. 

                   Knowles, Bob (2013-11-19). When Vowels Get Together (Kindle Locations 5054-5056).  . Kindle Edition.

So it is 'awful', in a sense, for learners. 

However, I was deluged  with tweets [HD: A bit of an exaggeration, but I did get one.] from people who - seeing my title - assumed I was bad-mouthing the OU. But I wasn't, as this shows! 

I am grateful to the OU for indirectly leading me into the world of self-publishing. 

Bob Knowles 

PS I attach a flyer about the book in case you would think it appropriate to work this rather overlong letter into an article.

Update 2014.11.06.09:15 – added note:
† This is not to say that this is the only word. Among the options, Spanish has madera and Portuguese has lenho. By changing the name, Portugal was not saying 'A feeg for your feelthy leño. We are calling it Madeira, to remove all trace of your influence.' They were simply asserting their right to change the name, or perhaps covering their tracks – 'This isn't what others have known as Leiname, it's Madeira',  changing the name so as to stake their claim – in the way of all colonizing powers.


Update 2014.11.09.15:20– added note
‡ I spoke too soon. Well, I don't believe there is reference to the word leiname in that dictionary, but there is the next best thing – reference to the Italian legname and to the Spanish leñame.  Here's the article:

Vorrat von Brennholz auf Schiffen it says: 'Supply of firewood on ships'; which suggests that the island was known as a place where ships could put in to stock up on firewood.  That makes sense: the island was named after its usefulness as a source of wood for a particular purpose. It seems to me that the substitution of the name Madeira by the colonizing  Portuguese deprived the name of some of its usefulness. But as 'Ayers Rock', 'Rhodesia', 'Lake Victoria', and thousands (if not millions) of other colonial place-names show, usefulness is not a notable concern of colonial  powers.

Update 2015.12.06.22:45 – added note:
^*Another metonymical use, a bit closer to home, is the (Italian) score-marking that tells a string player to produce a percussive effect with the back of the bow: col legno.

Update 2017.07.07.10:50 – added note and deleted old footer:

^※ This seemingly arch circumlocution isn't just a rather clunky bit of elegant variation. I wasn't exactly at the school at the time. My older brother and sister were taught the song and brought it home.

Update 2018.06.12.10:40 – A few typo-fixes, and small clarification added.

A little something?

At the end of last year I blogged about 'crepuscular' and said:

Latin had the diminutive suffix -ulus/a, which we still see in quite a few words we use in English: 'cumulus', 'homunculus', 'tumulus' [that's one for the map-readers in the audience - 'a little swelling' - think of the word 'tumor'], 'Ursula' (which means 'little bear' - don't mess with an ursa protecting her ursulam!), 'formula'... We can also see it in a word like 'regular' (regula 'little stick', cf our 'yardstick'). Another adjective - one of my favourite derivations and demonstrating again Guy Deutcher's 'reef of dead metaphors' idea (mentioned in another post) - is 'muscular', from mus ('mouse')/musculus ('little mouse'), which is the way muscles looked to Early Romans - at least the ones who didn't get within gawping distance of auspice-reading: a little metaphorical mouse scampering about under a carpet.

The OED's word of the day a few weeks ago (no pointer, because after 24 hours the paywall goes up again; somehow WOTD engineers a page-specific suspension of the force field that protects the OED) was jentacular; we already know, from that other post

'*acul*' → something to do with smallness  

Now in French we have  déjeuner, which is a meal at some time other than morning (which itself is a bit of a problem for people like me, since jeûner, to fast – so why isn't déjeuner 'break-fast'? Maybe the circumflex means the similarity is only skin-deep...). As meal names are a moveable f... (oops, wrong metaphor) (look at our 'dinner'; or 'wedding breakfast' come to that – presumably everyone is too excited to break their overnight fast before the ceremony) this problem is more imagined than real.

In French (still) we have petit déjeuner, which many peope would say has a 1:1 semantic relationship with our 'breakfast' (although I bet you wouldn't get kedgeree or kippers (or bacon, come to that) on a French 'breakfast' menu).  Meanwhile, in Portuguese – while we're on the subject of skin-deep similarities – we have o jantar which I saw made diminutive in a Brasilian tweet the other day: jantarinho (or was it -inha? – @Daniela_JG would know; judging from the time of the post it wasn't JENTACULAR aha – got there in the end [ 'jentacular' meaning 'of or pertaining to breakfast']).

So, with a following etymological wind, which I hope may eventuate (though my tentative steps may well not survive the merciless scrutiny of RESEARCH) a 'little jantar' (like a petit déjeuner) is 'jentacular' .

Hope springs eternal in the – what makes the word tit come to mind? Oh well...

b ['I am going to a bookshelf, and may be some time.']

Update, 2013.07.3.16:45

The research hasn't got very far. There is a 'post-Classical' Latin word that refers to 'a breakfast taken immediately on getting up', ientaculum, it says here. But that source does not inspire confidence: 'pre-jentacular, applied to what is done early in the morning, as taking a breakfast before getting up' feels very iffy to me – I'd imagine that that word applies to things done before eating (as in the case of something like an early-morning run). Their definition makes it sound no more bracing than breakfast in bed. 

What I want is the derivation of the Latin ientaculum and the Portuguese jantar; and for that I need the Romance philologist's bible,  Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch von W. Meyer-Lübke, which is in the Reading University library; it's also available online, but in a version that's incredibly slow to navigate, so I'm taking the Luddite's way out and going to browse in the real thing. I still want to get to the bottom of this, so stay tuned; but don't hold your breath.

Update 25.07.2013.09.30/10:50
HeadFooter updated:
Update 2013.10.14/10:50
PS – A note about the title, for readers not conversant with Winnie the Pooh

 (and note also that in that link I've avoided what calls itself  'the official site'. Since oficinalis was used to designate plants used in cookery, perhaps that rehashed concoction – something cooked-up by the bean-counters of Disney Inc. [or whatever the hell it's called] – perhaps 'official' is appropriate)

'A little something' is a tactful way of saying 'an insignificant (that is, not counting as a meal) amount to eat'. 

(and header updated) 

Update 2014.05.27.16.55  – Added this note:

<autobiographical_note>
Followers of my Twitterstream may have noted that I went to a lunchtime concert on the Whiteknights campus (featuring, as it happens my daughter's erstwhile swain on trombone) and while I was there I hoped to  visit the university library. But during the exam period (that is from  April to June) they impose the unusual rule of silence being observed... as if it were a LIBRARY OR SOMETHING FFS So we noisy riff-raff are excluded, and the promised research must be deferred again.
</autobiographical_note>

PPS And while I'm here I'm updating the footer.

 
Update 2014.09.25.12.25  – Added this note:

At long last I've been able to consult the extraordinary Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch von W. Meyer-Lübke. And the answer to the jantar question I asked over a year ago: we can forget ientaculum (which is no doubt related to the shorter answer: jentare:

See quote in situ here, on page 331

Presumably his aspan is Old Spanish, but modern Spanish has (and has had for centuries) desayuno, which – given  the French jeûner [='to fast'] – means the same as BREAK-FAST (geddit?). So the nearest neighbour (to Portuguese) is Asturian.

Next on the research agenda is this: which way was the loan-borrowing, or to give it the $10 word 'calque' : breakfast to desayuno or desayuno to breakfast? Another time, maybe.

---

 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:  nover 46,000 views  and nearly 6,200 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 over 2,300 views and nearly 1,000 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.

Ice and a slice

'A slice of what? - of lemon, of course if you're a 20th or 21st century barkeeper in an English-speaking country. Not so in the Greek-speaking enclave on the Mediterranean coast of Gallia Transalpina, or the South of France as we say nowadays. There it would have been a τόμος (cf our 'atom' - 'that which can't be sliced') and it would have been a slice of cheese - OK, the 'ice' was a bit of a red herring, but you get the point: foods (and other things, but food is what I'm thinking about at the moment - food tends to weigh heavily on the mind [not to say the stomach] in certain households at this time of year) can get named after the shape they come in. And the French tomme is a case in point.

The shape they come in, hmm. It seems that cheese (not a staple of the early Roman diet) was imported from Germanic 'barbarians'; hence Eng. 'cheese', German käse ... etc on the Germanic side of the tree, but also Sp. queso, Portuguese queijo ... etc on the Romance side. But that last 'etc' doesn't include all the mainstream Romance languages. The Catalan is formatge, the Italian is formaggio, and the French is fromage (courtesy of that 'metathesis' that I've mentioned elsewhere). Where did they come from? (You might like to refer back to my first paragraph and think awhile. The key word is 'shape'....)

...Time's up. The Latin for 'shape' was forma, and - eschewing the punning bellum, with its irregular plural when it was the noun meaning 'war' (well not the irregular sort of irregular, just a plural that didn't end in -i or -ae or -es - the sort of thing that makes a foreign language easier to acquire) - the Vulgar Latin word to describe a form that we might describe as 'shapely' was FORMOSU(M). (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.) Bellum was not displaced throughout the Romance-speaking world, There are still beau (sometimes bel) and belle in French (and their many derivatives in English, 'beau', 'belle', 'beautiful' ... etc.), bell -a in Catalan, and bello -a in Italian. But in Portuguese there is formoso -a and in Spanish hermoso -a. (And that f/h thing, incidentally, is at the root of Ferdinand and Isabella's royal emblem - the fennel plant: Aragonese had a word starting with f and Castilian had an h for the initial letter of the word for 'fennel'. But that's a whole nother kettle of red herring.)  Provençal has a foot in both camps, with both bel and formós.^‡


Cheese 'made in a mould' was CASEU(M) FORMATICU(M), and the shape became the noun in some parts of the Romance-speaking world - so fromage was interspersed with tomme.

More generally it could be said that things come to be known either by their shape or by an adjective that describes them - so one might go to 'the Orthopaedic' to have a cast taken off, punters bet every year on 'the National', cinemagoers go to the nearest 'multiscreen' and have a drink after the show at 'the local'. After your cheese you might have some fruit - and I'm not going to get into an argument about the order of courses at  a Roman feast: that 'after' was a literary device, dammit. The new-fangled import that was de rigueur in all the best Roman fruit bowls was an exotic fruit shaped a bit like an apple - imported from Persia. And it was the adjective (PERSICA) not the apples (MALA) that gave many Romance languages their name for this fruit. It's quite heavily disguised by the vagaries of French phonology in the word pêche, but it's more clearly visible in the Catalan préssec (there's that metathesis again) and in the Portuguese pêssego; the Italian pesca, similarly,  is fossilized evidence of the disappearance of the r, warned against in an early word-list:

 PERSICA non PESSICA

W D Elcock, in The Romance Languages, says of this list:

We...incline towards the idea that the list was compiled by a [ed. third-century] schoolmaster, much as a teacher of English today might draw up a list of common errors in spelling culled from the exercises of his pupils; but in a Roman class-room, just as they would nowadays, many such errors had their origin in current pronunciation.

 That's from p. 29 of the first edition (as given in the link). At the time, the 'Roman' view was rather leading-edge. Previous scholars had favoured Carthage. And in the new edition (1992, I think 1975*, in fact) the Rome versus Carthage debate may have been settled. Next time I'm passing a decent library I'll check. (Maybe - I'm considering a New Year's resolution about not saying things like that.)

But in Spain they avoided the pessica/persica problem - having flirted with the Castilian prisco - and stuck with the MALA root, or possibly the Greek μήλον, with another word appended to describe the texture of the skin: melocotón, 'a cottony sort of fruit'.

Right. I must go and think about that resolution....

b
Update: 2013.01.31 *Went to a university library, and checked the details. Sadly, the book was out on loan.
Update 2013.07.15: 'Tempus', as my old maths master used to say as we neared the end of another lesson, 'has fugitted'. See below for the latest.
Update 2013.07.25: ‡Catalan should be in the 'foot in both camps' camp.  See the first comment.
...

Update: 2015.01.18.12:40 – Further thought on queso/queijo, in blue.

PS Looking again at this piece  – in the aftermath of a conversation I had yesterday with a Flemish-speaker about the derivation of the word flamenco [watch this blog... I hope... soon...] –  it's occurred to me to wonder why, among all these FORMATICUS-based Romance examples, it's only Spanish and Portuguese (and maybe some other Iberian dialects) that use the CASEUS bit†. It seems to me possible that this may have something to do with Spain's imperial links with the Netherlands (and nearby parts, which use the Flemish kas [Flemish transcriptions dodgy – for lack of Google Translate support].

† Bonggg. So much for my thought.

Here's an extract from Meyer-Lübke's Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch:

I don't know what all those abbreviations mean (specifically tergest. and vegl.) But the others offer several counter-examples: Romanian, Italian, and Logudorese (spoken in part of Sardinia)

Update: 2018.03.23.18:10 – Deleted old footer.