Where have I heard that before?

Listening to BBC Radio 3 the other day I had an aha moment like the one I discussed here  – when I thought I had detected a link between Delius' On hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring and an American folk song. I had initially thought Delius must have been influenced by the cowboy song  Goodbye old paint while he was in Florida, but in the end (having heard a Tales from the stave programme on the Delius piece) I realized there was another reason for the similarity:

The influence I mistakenly suspected was from an American folk song to Delius. Many years ago, when my ability to read music was even more hesitant than it is now, I found the score of Goodbye old paint in a collection  of American folk songs. It wasn't a melody I knew, but the book provided chord symbols and I eventually worked out A tune that fitted the harmonies. But my grasp of the actual notes petered out after the first phrase

When I later heard the Delius piece I thought  AHA. While Delius was living in Florida he must have been exposed to Goodbye Old Paint.

But the BBC has now disabused me of this. The Delius piece was not an original idea (although I've never been a stickler for originality – as I've said often enough in this blog,  here for example); he got it from Edvard Grieg who he was with in Leipzig in 1887...

Grieg's source was the Norwegian folk song In Ola valley, which he included in a collection of piano transcriptions in 1896. But as that radio programme made clear, the atmosphere of the piece was very different. The story behind In Ola Valley is rather Scandi Noir:

More here

The Scandi Noir bit  is  a lugubrious tale about a lost (and ultimately dead) boy. The falling third of Delius' cuckoo represents, in Grieg's piece, a bell tolling. So On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring turns out to be not the direct descendant of Goodbye Old Paint, but the first cousin once removed (the Delius piece via Grieg's transcription, the cowboy song being a direct descendant of the Norwegian folk song).

My more recent aha moment happened 55'35" into an Early Music Show Special: Al-Andalus!

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>
I'm not a card-carrying early music nerd, but in the early 1980s I was working in OUP‘s office in  London, formerly the General Division‘s home, but then the home of a few General Division stragglers working on the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (3rd edn – the one with the pretty green  cover [and you must not forget the quincentenary colophon on the spine, Best Beloved]). The main body of the General Division (an internal admin  thing that is probably irrelevant to the present structure of OUP and  is of no great import) had moved to Oxford. 

The Early Music Department, working on another quincentenary  book The Oxford Book of Madrigals, were also left in London, and I joined a group of singers who sang from it at the launch party. One of the madrigals we sang was The Silver Swan, which became a favourite of  mine and – as the bass line is so  melodious  as a solo  – my usual audition piece (in the days when I did that  sort of thing).
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE> 

I  haven't listened to the whole thing, so this little observation may not be news to everyone, but the fact  that the programme was called Al-Andalus is indicative of a quirk of Spanish/Portuguese borrowings from Arabic.

The Berbers who occupied various parts of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 1492 had Arabic as a second language, and they automatically tacked on the definite article to nouns; this accounts for borrowings that start with al- (algebra etc) or a- {Sp. azucar/Pg açúcar...

<PER_CONTRA>
[meanwhile the Italian for sugar – as their borrowing came from mother-tongue Arabs – is zucchero. Similarly Sp alcotón/Pg. algodão  but It. cotone, the root (via France) of  our "cotton"]
</PER_CONTRA>

...) or sometimes just l- (the word lute is derived from words that mean the-oud, the oud being a stringed instrument.

<GUESS likelihood="minimal, but who cares?">
I suspect that Spanish láud may have been influenced by an imagined etymological association with the Latin laus (=praise) as in "praise Him with... stringed instruments", but don't quote me on that; it‘s just supposed folk-etymology. )
</GUESS>

In this case the Portuguese preserved the whole al- –  alaude.

Where was I?... Got it, 55'35". I didn't catch the title of that Hebrew song, 'Adonai <something>', but it's strongly reminiscent of the cor anglais tune at the beginning of the second movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez...

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>
I've been there (Aranjuez)... no. Irrelevant self-indulgence.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_NOTE>

... and some of the ornaments before the voice comes in are just like the later guitar reprise of the tune.

Time I was doing stuff  outside before it starts to rai.. Bugrit.

b

Schwarzkopf and the harpsichord

Quirks of a translator's life – sitrep

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

The syntax of the new function is

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

for example

 =GOOGLETRANSLATE(A4,"pt","en")

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

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

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

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

More here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b

Update: 2019.05.28.08:55 – Added PS

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

Knowing when to fold

I just heard Terry Wogan on Desert Island Discs Revisited using the expression (when talking about ending his career) "I'll fold up my tent".

I wrote about metaphors for arriving and leaving over 3 years ago (here) but I think it's due for a new outing. As so often in this context, I quote The Man:

Elcock explains: 

While VENĪRE remained everywhere the usual verb for 'to come', two new terms conveying a more visual image were  borrowed from maritime language. The older of these, which prevailed in Spain, was PLĬCARE, first used with reference to the folding of sails (cf Port. chegar, Sicilian chicari). In Rumanian a pleca means inversely 'to go, to depart'; this is because the metaphor there was military, and referred to the folding up of tents  (cf. Eng. 'to decamp').  AD-RIPARE, 'to  come to shore', was a somewhat later creation which found favour in Gaul (cf Prov. arribá [HD: Elcock does not mention plegar here, but he has already mentioned it in another context]. From Provence it spread to Catalonia, and during the Middle Ages was carried thence to Sardinia, as arribare.   

The Romance Language (I've given this source more than once, but make no apology for that: it's very good.)

So, whereas I had hitherto relied on the decamp example as a metaphor for leaving in English, I can now add to my body of examples (in that Terry Wogan quote) the explicit metaphor of folding a tent.

<temporal_paradox>
As it happens, as that edition of Desert Island Discs dates from before the beginning of the Harmless Drudgery blog, in fact the example was already there, waiting for me to hear the repeat. But anyway...
</temporal_paradox>

But, I was thinking of the spoken language. As I said in that earlier post

<digression>
Catalan often straddles the French/Spanish camps, so I expected a pair like the Provençal ones. But Cat. plegar has a different metaphorical use: stop work, knock off  – reminiscent of primary school teachers' instructions: When you've finished, FOLD your arms on the desk in front of you.
</digression>

And the arm-folding image as a sign of work done is unequivocal ...

<digression>
(not the most apt of words in this context, considering the last two syllables...

<word_formation_speculation>
Hmm. There's something to be said on each side of that argument. If all the arguments were on the same side, it'd be univocal. 

<univocal_thought>
[The metaphor that evokes univocality is "singing from the same hymn-sheet" {unless harmony's involved, of course, but this is getting silly {Getting?}}]
<univocal_thought>

</word_formation_speculation> 

... but you know what I mean – clearly meaningful)
</digression>

...  in an English context (and I imagine in many others).

<rant>
And apropos of nothing (I just happened to see it in a fruitless quest for information just now)...

The dates of these restrictions 

may be subject to change.

No, no  no.  They ARE subject to change. What they MAY be is changed, in which case they would be subjected to change.

I do wish people wouldn't toss the subjunctive around willy-nilly with some vague it's-not-my-fault-guv "meaning".  But I must take a deep breath and ignore it. There are worse things, I know...
</rant>

Anyway, I think it's time I folded my arms.

b

Heaven, I'm in heaven...

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

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

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

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

Um elétrico is a tram. 

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

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

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

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

The tomb at Alcobaça

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

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

</autobiographical_note>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

b

Update: 2019.04.22.18:55 – Added inline PS.

That's easy enough for YOU to say

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

Source

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Portuguese=Brazilian Portuguese

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

</digression>

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

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

b

Update: 2019.03.25.11:10 – Added PS

PS

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

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

...lake...

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

...river....

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

...wolf...

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

</PIE_examples>

...salmon....

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

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

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

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

Enough I said.
b 

Veja o que fiz

That's Look what I did – and it's my way of introducing the idea  that the Brazilian magazine Veja has a title that means Look. This might go some way to extenuating the carelessness about verbs in a newspaper correction noticed by the News Quiz the other day:

"Eduardo Jorge likes to spend his time reading Tolstoy, not Toy Story as originally reported"

You don't read Toy Story.

This feature threatened the News Quiz's claims for topicality.  Pragmatismo reported the correction on 5 Oct 2014. Veja's gaffe was committed two days earlier – making the News Quiz‘s spot nearly 4 years old.

<digression>
(not that that is a bad case of déjà news – someone at the end of the same show read a report from a listener who claimed to have seen an old chestnut [the one about washing teapots and standing in the sink with bottoms in the air] that I first saw in the pre-WWW days of the Internet when bored office workers polluted the environment with pages and pages of "jokes"...

<aside>
A thousand curses be upon the inventor of Reply/All.
</aside>

...; and I've since seen many variants ["hot bottoms on the draining board", etc], all based on the same old misrelated clause gag.

The News Quiz editors really need to  exercise  some quality  control.
</digression>

But what struck me most about the slip was that it was a particularly Brazilian one. I know next to nothing about Brazilian Portuguese (which differs much further from its Old World antecedent than American English does from British English), and not  much  more about its phonology. The /l/ phoneme*, however, sticks out a mile, because of something known to students of phonetics as labialization. As the word suggests, labialization involves the lips – so that the continental Portuguese /brɐzil/ becomes the Brazilian Portuguese /brɑzilʷ/.

And "Tolstoy" becomes /tɔlʷ.../ – sorry, can't do the second syllable. In the first syllable something almost entirely (in some speakers, entirely) vocalic happens after the /t/.

Now we come to the "Toy..." (the non-English speaker's expectation of how it will sound). Learners of English as a Second Language (in this case, non-English speakers of a borrowed English word) have trouble with sounds that don't have a 1:1 correspondence with written letters. They learn that English doesn't work like that, but the written letters still intrude in the speech. In many interviews with non-English speakers, for example, you will hear "who" pronounced /wu:/.

In the English /ɔɪ/ diphthong there are not two vowels, although the transcription may seem to suggest there is. There is no /ɔ/ vowel in English in any case, but the end of the diphthong is not the equivalent of the /ɪ/ phoneme. So when a non-English speaker hears /tɔɪ/ it doesn't sound like a representation of "Toy"; that would be, in their mistaken expectation, more like /tɔ + <something>/. Maybe that <something> might be /lʷ/ (which, as I've said, can be entirely vocalic).

There are quite possibly other  languages that would predispose listeners to mistake "Tolstoy" for "Toy Story". I'm acquainted with only about 0.1% of the world's 7,000-odd natural languages, so couldn't say that Brazilian Portuguese is a uniquely favourable linguistic background for this mistake; but it's the most likely one that I've met.

Ho hum. Things to do (just less interesting things)...

b

Update: 2018.09.19.09:10 – Typo fix and added footnote

* A guitar concert I went to yesterday evening, which included pieces by Heitor Villa-Lobos, alerted me to this over-generalization; it is not the /l/ phoneme that is labialized. An /l/ in a certain  phonological context (closing a syllable, as in Brasil or Tolstoy) gets this treatment.

Update: 2020.01.05.12:45– Added PS

I've belatedly realized the importance of this: for the speaker (and for the journalist doing the interview) all the words involved – "Tolstoy", "Toy", and "Story" – were foreign.

A mole by any other name

Last week MrsK tried a new recipe for something called Turkey Mole. I had never met the word mole in a culinary context – though the fact that one of the ingredients was chocolate should have alerted me to the likelihood of a South American origin.

New words are like buses, you spend years not meeting a word and then two come along at once. In Saturday's Times Giles Coren  was reviewing a restaurant specializing in Mexican food, and he mentioned that one of the dishes came with a mole. I knew what it was,  just-in-time,  and tried to find other related words. Staying in South America, guacamole is a sort of mole – so there was another mole, hiding in plain sight.

Could this be related to our molars – the grinding teeth? Everyday English doesn't have any other word that preserves the "o" in a grinding word (as do Spanish and Italian [moler/molere] and no doubt many others. In French, it's become "ou" in moulin (and even the most monoglottally Anglophone will have met this in the trade-name  Moulinex). In English and German, different leaves of the PIE tree, we have mill and Mühle.

<digression>
Another way of smashing things up to release the flavour (apart from grinding, that is) is pounding or crushing, and words related to that are derived from the Latin pestare. The most obvious derivative from this is pesto, made with a pestle. This shows how a word that refers to a process can come to be used to refer to a sauce made with that process.
</digression>

Detail of the image in that video

But let's look more closely at that derivation of guacamole.   I knew before that avocado, the main constituent of  guacamole, is nothing to do with the similar-looking advocacy. Rather, it derives from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl (Nahuatl being the language spoken by the Aztecs).

<scatological_digression>
Watch the video here  to see that avocado means testicle – presumably because of the way they hang.
</scatological_digression>

But I had no idea until the last weekend in February that the "guaca-" of guacamole derived from ahuacatl.  Etymonline says:

So, it all looks pleasingly neat: Sp. moler, Pg moer, It. molere, Prov. molre, Cat. modre. Eng. mill, Ger. Mühle, Nahuatl molli ...{?} Hang on though, not so fast. Why should the language of the Aztecs (which pre-dates the Spanish which didn't begin to taint it until the late 15th century)  have anything to do with a PIE language? This is inviting further investigation, though I suspect the seeming relatedness between words to do with grinding (which on the analogy of pesto can  be used to refer to a sauce made with that process) and the Nahuatl molli is illusory and accidental. Shame....  Very probably molli has as much to do with grinding as ahuacatl has to do with advocacy.

b

PS – A couple of clues:

• Bi-polar longing to spill the beans. (6)
• Deserving opprobrium about sort of tail wrapped round first of belligerents. (13)
  

Update: 2018.06.04.12:05 – Added PPS

PPS
The answers: SNITCH and REPREHENSIBLE.

Benedicite

In a choral singer's life, the pronunciation  of Latin is bound to become an issue. People learn one way in school, and can't help being infected. Fortunately, in the Venn diagram of my life,  Church Latin (which I started to ... enunciate at the age of about 7, as described here), school Latin (there are several of course, but mine was Church-Latin-speaking), and the Latin used in the study of Romance Philology (Vulgar Latin), all coincided.

I can't claim to know the whole story, but there are at least four gross variants – old and new Classical systems, Church Latin, and Germanic or continental Latin; there are probably more. And these are further compounded by  national phonemic peculiarities (sounds that are excluded – made effectively unpronounceable – as a necessary part of the acquisition of a mother tongue) such as those I mentioned here.

I  discussed one of the many problems arising from this clash of pronunciation regimes here. But in this post I want to talk about an old system that has almost died out but was once widely taught both in the UK and of course in many schools around the world in the British Empire (ensuring that the colonies paid at least twice for the dubious accolade of the imposition of the Pax Britannica).

Ask the search engine of your choice about Benedicite and you will be told this:

If you're not a user of the IPA, I recommend pressing the little loudspeaker doofer (in your browser that is, not on my screen-capture).

Elsewhere I wrote:

<autobiographical note>
In a choir I used to sing in, there was a great kerfuffle about how one should pronounce Benedicite. It couldn't have mattered less, as it happens, since that word does not occur in the [Ed: English] text.  But in  Benjamin Britten's world (and particularly at the school he went to when he went there) the first "i" (but not the second) had this same /ɑɪ/ diphthong.

<PS date=2017>
Benedicite was just the name of a canticle he was familiar with in the Book of Common Prayer: "Bless ye the Lord".
</PS>

</autobiographical note>

The first i has the same /aɪ/  diphthong as the mori that ends that poem: as I said here (a post that unaccountably has attracted nearly 1 in 3 of all 100,000+ page visits that all HD posts have enjoyed over the last 5 years):

... in the school where Wilfrid Owen learnt his Latin, the last two lines rhymed...

<WHOOPS>
The words are "old lie/mori", but it is an internal rhyme, I now see, as "Dulce" doesn't – as I had thought – start the last line.
</WHOOPS>

...(and they may have scanned as well – I dunno; even  if they didn't they probably did in schoolboy-speak, where the stress  is often inverted in memorized (and drilled) Latin. Think of aMO aMAS aMAT..., whose actual stress [Ed: on the first syllable] is attested by most [if not all] Romance languages [aimer, amar, amare, etc. etc].)

(Naturally, if you know and remember and love the poem with the sound /'mɔ:ri:/ don't let  me interfere. In my house there are many mansions/let a thousand flowers bloom/etc.)

Many examples in legal Latin show a similar vowel sound: prima facie (/praɪmә feɪsi:/), decree nisi (/naɪsaɪ/).... The same system of diphthong vowel sounds accounts for habeas corpus (/heɪbiәs.../) among others (although later "corrections" may have been made, especially in parts of the world where the English legal system was adopted).

But I have promises to keep, and files [sic] to weed before I sleep.

b

PS: A few clues:

• Do about 50, not completely. (6)
• Used up exemplary piece, in which to be used no longer. (9)
• Publish electronic Bible version? (7)

Update: 2017.10.07.15:30 – Added PPS.

PPS Just heard one on the radio (a misquote, FWIW, but enough to remind me: anno domini (the second i with an /aɪ/ sound). In fact, this phrase may have been the catalyst for the misquote, now I think about it: it was "laudato domini" ( for "laudate dominum"): <some-latin-stuff>o <more-latin-stuff>i).

But laudato means "to|by|with|from the praised [one]"; and domini means "of the lord". Put them together and... well, I imagine a Latin scholar could find a context that they would fit in, but that ain't me, babe.

Update: 2017.10.29.17:30 – Added PPPS.

And another (recalled by a Radio 3 playing of I was glad: "Vivat Regina".

And those answers: PARTLY, DESUETUDE and EVULGATE. Sorry about the "in which", which I'm afraid seems to have been an accidental typo.

Update: 2017.12.09.12:45 – Added P⁴S.

Last one: ex gratia (/'greɪʃə/)

Update: 2018.02.19.11:30 – How many Ps for Pete's sake, and didn't he say...?

The ghost of  "Last One Yet-to-come": verbatim (/vɜ:'beɪtɪm/)

We, Paleface?

(Tonto's response to the Lone Ranger's Indians, Tonto. Hundreds of them. We're in trouble now.)

A while ago I wrote (here)

...whenever a dictionary says 'origin unknown' it's a fairly safe bet that a non-Roman writing system was involved. In fact, 'origin unknown' is a bit  like the geographer's terra incognita and 'Here be dragons'; it's a euphemism for 'outwith the scope of traditional scholarship'; and it's not a final sentence.

This is reminiscent of a trick question I remember from my schooldays:  

What was the biggest island in the world before Australia was discovered? 
Answer: Australia.

My point is that whenever someone does something, someone else may well have got there first. That Ecclesiastes bloke was right: There is nothing  new under the Sun. While we're on the subject of islands, I wrote here about how the Portuguese visited the island of Leiname in the early fifteenth century and named it Madeira.

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. 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)... 

† 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.

In their defence though, one should remember that in those days there was no international maritime registry – they weren't to know.

I was reminded of this by Jim Al Kalili's Science and Islam earlier this week (that's when I saw it, although it first aired  in 2009). He thought (as did many [all?] educated Westerners, that Egyptology began in the 19th century with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. But remember my ...it's a fairly safe bet that a non-Roman writing system was involved. About 40 minutes in, the learned professor...

<digression>
I'm drawn to the idea of Jim Al-Kalili having an evil alter ego called Midge Acid-id. The gag (if that's the word, perhaps I should just say conceit) works better with IPA  symbols:

Jim/Midge => /ʤɪm mɪʤ/

</digression>

...starts a quite lengthy piece about how Arabic scholars deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics much earlier. (I would quantify that much but my sound card is busy with other things...).

Speaking of which, I could be watching the cricket.   Stay tuned for an update about the word algorithm.

b

PS
And here are a few more clues:

• Reportedly, be accompanied by a criminal intermediary and be affronted – (4, 7)
• An amount worthy of consideration amidst your alternate arrangement – (1,4,3)
• Like the sky, learn cue after improvisation  – (8)

Update: 2017.07.10.12:15 – Added PPS

PPS

I promised an update about algorithm, and here it is. In the ninth century, long before William the Bastard conquered Britain, there lived a mathematician in a town now called Khiva. His name, according to one of the Oxford Dictionaries – Dominus illuminatio mea might as well be Dominus obscuratio mea when it comes to trying to work out just who is telling you something (anyway, the source is here) – whose name made its way into the catalogues of libraries that used Roman script as "al-Ḵwārizmī ‘the man of Ḵwārizm’".

<digression>
Long-time readers of this blog may remember about al being the definite article, marking many borrowings from Arabic, especially ones that came to English via Spain (whose Moorish invaders spoke Arabic as a second language). This explains why the Italian for sugar  is zucchero (as the Arab invaders of Italy through Sicily had Arabic as a mother-tongue), whereas Spanish and Portuguese words for sugar are azúcar and açúcar, bearing the trace of an article: Do you take the sugar in your coffee?

(As Etymonline says

sugar (n.)

late 13c., sugre, from Old French sucre "sugar" (12c.), from Medieval Latin succarum, from Arabic sukkar, from Persian , from Sanskrit sharkara "ground or candied sugar,"...

The Arabic root of sugar has no vowel before the s.)

</digresssion>

This man introduced the idea of solving problems in principle – without reference to specific values. The system he used involved formulating an <insert-word-here> and applying it to the problem. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader. :-)

Update: 2018.03.20.13:30 –  Added PPPS

PPPS Not before time, the answers to those clues (in PS): TAKE OFFENCE,  A TIDY SUM, CERULEAN

And this PPPS gives me tho opportunity to say a bit more about metathesis in Portuguese (which, you may remember, I mentioned in the context of the Latin  MATERIA becoming Portuguese Madeira). Whenever ...

<GENERALIZATION TYPE="questionable">
??? Maybe there are a few exceptions, but certainly nearly always.
</GENERALIZATION>

...you find an -eiro or -eira ending in Portuguese (that is, pretty often) you can trace it to an -ARIU(M) or -ARIA(M) ending, where the i and the r have swapped places.

Snowflakes and avalanches

In my days of thinly-disguised fascism I used to defend Latin in schools (which I still believe would be a good idea, by the way) by saying 'If what you think is a thought can't be expressed in Latin, it's not a thought.' I admit that this was a bit priggish, and it implied that logicality was a particular characteristic of Latin – a pretty silly implication. It's a not uncommon one, though – it rears its insidious head with respect to various languages; I've heard it said not only of Latin, but of French, of German... even of English.

But it hides a general truth about translation – that in order to translate meaningfully you have to grasp a text's meaning...

<autobiographical_note>
One of my few forays into  the realm of professional  translation (by which I mean I got paid for it, as opposed to having any professional training or standards or ethics or any of that good stuff) involved an article about aneurysms and arterio-venous fistulae, and I spent more time in a medical library than in a more general library with a technical Portuguese dictionary in front of me (this was in the mid-'70s, and the association of libraries with computers was yet to be made).
</autobiographical_note>

....(in a language possibly uniquely adapted to one area of interest), which makes it harder to translate into a language that is not similarly endowed. So it can be tempting to overlook or even ignore bits of sense

The translatability of Donald Trump's ravings has been in the news of late, in a way that I find unsurprising at best, and at worst  a non-issue flagged up by self-regarding elitists. Of course he's hard to translate; so was – to cite a more UK-based politician – John (now Lord) Prescott, of whom Simon Hoggart famously wrote

'Every time Prescott opens his mouth, it's like someone has flipped open his head and stuck in an egg whisk.'

Come to that, many politicians and off-the-cuff public speakers speak nonsense. Speaking nonsense is something that happens more and more in an increasingly unreflective world dominated by rolling news and its inevitable bastard offspring fake news (alias LIES).

On the subject of the Trump campaign, the word snowflake, used as an insult to the liberal intelligentsia (and anyone else with two brain-cells to rub together), easily disturbed and slipping 'in a moment out of life' has recently become popular. It is analogous to the rather more traditional 'hot-house plant'.

But the thing about snowflakes is that when they mount up and reach a tipping-point (or, more relevantly, a sliding-point) they start an avalanche. And that point is, we are told by 38 degrees – though I'm not sure it's as simple as that – the name of what Wikipedia calls

a British not-for-profit political-activism organisation. It describes itself as "progressive" and claims to "campaign for fairness, defend rights, promote peace, preserve the planet and deepen democracy in the UK".^[2] In October 2013, it was reported to claim 1.9 million UK members.^{[3][needs update]}

It goes on

38 Degrees takes its name from the critical angle at which the incidence of a human-triggered avalanche is greatest [THAT sounds more like it, though they give as a reference the same simplistic wording as the 38 degrees website gives –

the angle at which snowflakes come together to form an avalanche – together we're unstoppable

] Ah well, their hearts are  in the right place. I'm keeping my head down for the next four years – the Trump era (British English /i:rǝ/, and in American English – not without irony – /ɛrǝ/). See you on the other side, Gaia volente.



PS And here's a clue:

• Invalid given wrong sort of IUD is like a cup-cake (10) 

Update: 2017.06.21. 16:40 – The answer: INDIVIDUAL

Siege perilous

For the last month or so, though no longer – as atrocities redefine atrocity and the word enormity reclaims its self respect – I couldn't hear the name Aleppo without recalling an early Richard Curtis sketch.

<autobiographical_note time_span="1976.07:1976.09" venue-"Edinburgh">
Like much (all?) Richard wrote at the time, it was a vehicle for Rowan Atkinson. That star of the Oxford Theatre Group one-man show (with a cast of 9) – mentioned here and, briefly,  in the update to this post – was a conductor in tails and white gloves and with a baton, conducting (in the hilarious sort of random juxtaposition, so typical of Oxbridge humour at the time) a rehearsal of a scene from Othello. The Moor was delivering the lines 

"...that in Aleppo  once...

I took by the neck the smitten dog and circumcised him thus" 

[I've underlined the two typoes for the benefit of bardophiles who may know the original and gloss over them.]

At this, the conductor tapped his lectern, frowned, and indicated that Othello should try again. Othello did, still with the words "smitten dog ...circumcised". The conductor stopped him again. [Repeat ad lib as long as the audience is laughing]. Eventually, Othello got the words right: "circumcisèd dog...smote".

</autobiographical_note>.

Now though I can hear the word Aleppo without that irrelevant memory popping its irreverent head over the PC parapet. Now it's the word siege. that distracts me momentarily from the horror.

I discussed  chairs a while back, here, but said nothing about siege at the time. In Mallory's Morte d'Arthur the vacant seat at the Round Table was the siege perilous, and this was the earliest meaning: a chair. Etymonline says

siege (n.)

early 13c., "a seat" (as in Siege Perilous, early 13c., the vacant seat at Arthur's Round Table...[F]rom Old French sege "seat, throne," from Vulgar Latin *sedicum "seat," from Latin sedere "sit" ...

Only then does the entry go on:

...The military sense is attested from c. 1300; the notion is of an army "sitting down" before a fortress.

That is to say, siege had been around for about a century with the meaning chair before it acquired its military sense. Sadly (considering the fate of the besieged) the military sense became the predominant one

But that "Vulgar Latin *sedicum" (and its more reputable Latin relatives) left many other traces, from courts in session to recording studios (with session musicians); in a less formal musical environment, a guest musician may sit in (and of course they don't just sit). In Portuguese, where Spanish has catedral (which Portuguese [Continental Portuguese, that is; to call my grasp of Brazilian Portuguese rudimentary would be a gross overestimate]  can also use, having many such pairs*), the word is sé (in Coimbra, in the summer of 1973 I used to catch the eléctrico at a stop called Sé Velha). The Holy See is a Santa Sé. 


Of course, English too has see in this sense (that is, not just in the abstract sense of Holy See, but in the concrete sense of bishopric). Cathedrals, sees and all sorts of hierarchical seats...

<digression type="potential" status="LOOK IT UP">
When discussing hierarchies it's worth remembering what ἱερός  means.
</digression>

...form an all-enveloping web of words and meanings.

Back to Real Life...(at present I'm caught in the crossfire of two WSIWYG tools, which disagree about what constitutes well-formed HTML – aha, that's it, #headslap [different versions of HTML]!)

b

 *Eça de Queiroz  is notable for using such pairs: a bottle, for example, is sometimes uma botelha and sometimes uma garráfa.

PS And here's a clue:
 Feigning incapacity when malign reign gets the treatment. (11)

Update 2016.11.03.09:10 – Added PPS

PPS The penultimate sentence in that Etymonline entry for siege ended ...from Latin sedere "sit" (see sedentary). The entry for settle (the noun) ends with the same cross-refernce:

settle (n.)

"long bench," 1550s, from Middle English setle "a seat," from Old English setl "a seat, stall; position, abode; setting of a heavenly body," related to sittan "to sit," from Proto-Germanic *setla- (source also of Middle Low German, Middle Dutch setel, Dutch zetel, German Sessel, Gothic sitls), from PIE *sedla- (source also of Latin sella "seat, chair," Old Church Slavonic sedlo "saddle," Old English sadol "saddle"), from root *sed- (1) "to sit" (see sedentary). 

That [PIE] root has many progeny.

PPPS – And here's another clue:

Unprepossessing discount store stocking entertainer. (8)

Update 2016.11.03.14:35 – Correction in red.

Update 2017.12.19.19:30 – Added P⁴S

The answers: MALINGERING, GRIMALDI.

Shedding light on sounds

<autobiographical_note theme="sound and light" time_span="1971"> 

When my family was in Rome in the Summer of 1961, we went to a presentation that my parents, for some reason unknown to me at the time, referred to as Son et Lumière; why French?, I wondered  (or rather, as I was in only my tenth year, why not Suoni e Luci as the posters said? Why not, indeed, the rather pedestrian Sound and Light? (though what was the point of that  for pity's sake [as Auntie Katy might have said in a moment of extreme confusion])? 

For a 9⅞-year-old it was pretty tedious stuff anyway. The only lasting impression it made on me was the recurrent Senatus Populus[Q]ue Romanus booming out every few minutes. Otherwise it was just some words, accompanied more-or-less randomly by floodlights picking out bits of ruined Forum; I wasn't paying enough attention to make the link between the commentary and the lit ruins. How did they dare to charge for what anyone could see just as well in daylight? (And an additional point of interest was the actual lights, which you couldn't see in the dark. Even then I was more interested in causes than in effects) 

But this tangent from an accidental pun in the subject line is pushing it – even for me. 

</autobiographical_note>

But coming to the point (if that's the word for my latest TEZZY nomination [Time-Wasting Site of the Year]): researchers at "Cambridge and Oxford" ...

<parenthesis speculation="north_south_divide_query"> 

(as the article says, though I suspect most native speakers of English would reverse that order [perhaps the provenance of the article, http://www.cam.ac.uk/, had something to do with it...?]) 

</parenthesis>  

...have done (or have convinced themselves they have done) something that generations of philologists have dreamed about).

Clicking back from link to link I find  that the announcement is old news:

But in my defence  I was getting ready for my choir's tour, mentioned here; so it was only last week that a Cambridge Research paper first caught my eye:

The Daily Mail article, of course, gets the wrong end of the stick. If there's a stick to get the wrong end of, you can rely on the Daily Mail to grasp it firmly with both hands.

... [R]esearchers have recreated what they claim is the mother tongue of one of the largest group of languages spoken around the world - the Indo-European languages. 

...However, as no texts exist from the time, linguists have struggled to reconstruct this original language and the way it sounds remained a mystery. 

The researchers have now recreated it

[I suppose I have to keep this in, though  I don't like to encourage them: ]
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3698184/Listen-mother-language-Researchers-recreate-words-spoken-8-000-years-ago.html#ixzz4Hxmx3z2T Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Recreated PIE? Of  course they haven't, and only a fool would believe they either had done or had claimed to have done.

But in fact I find it hard to work  out what they have done. The examples they have collected on another site show "progressions" from one language to another, as if French had, in some sense. "MORPHED INTO" Italian (an extravagantly silly idea). And there is my old bugbear, the widespread assumption that Portuguese tout sec (rather than Brazilian Portuguese) is what they speak everywhere that Portuguese is spoken.

Here are some of the paths (???) they track:

• the acoustic-historical path from Latin [u:n-] via Portuguese [ũ]
• to French [œ̃]...
• Spanish [seis] → Portuguese [seiʃ]... [OK, but...]
• Postalveolarization plus affrication is also seen in e.g. French [set] → Portuguese [setʃ]

That's the way it's pronounced in Brasil.

And can they really believe that vernacular speakers in Gaul waited for Iberians to demonstrate how to mispronounce Latin, remaining tongue-tied until about the seventh century AD? Indeed, there are even greater anachronisticals at work in that last bullet: French grew into Brazilian Portuguese, by-passing the Iberian version (which derived from Spanish according to the previous bullet), even though a Latin-based vernacular in Portugal had at least two centuries' start on Spanish because of the pattern of the Reconquest).

I suspect the researchers have been seduced into playing with some clever tech and just churning out "examples"  – which they would know better than to produce if they had studied a bit of philology. But before I risk venturing any further into the I'llEatMyHat zone I'd better read the accompanying papers (which I've only just found). Stay tuned for an update.

b

PS Meanwhile, here are a few clues:

• Reportedly small jail break best planned here? (4,4)
• Flag shows impolite degree of interest and removes clothes after Eastward migration (5,3,6)
• Felon is in the clear after retrial, considering their endless omissions. (9)

Update: 2016.08.25.15:50 – Add PPS

I've looked at one of the papers (sorry, PDF). The Abstract reads:

The process of change, particularly understanding the historical and geographical spread, from older to modern languages has long been studied from the point of view of textual changes and phonetic transcriptions. However, it is somewhat more difficult to analyze these from an acoustic point of view, ...

 !!! 

You don't say

...although this is likely to be the dominant method of transmission rather than through written records.  

!!! 

Of course it was. Has any philologist ever suggested it wasn't. Texts are no more than clues to what sounds were happening at the time. 

Here, we propose a novel approach to the analysis of acoustic phonetic data, where the aim will be to model statistically speech sounds. In particular, we explore phonetic variation and change using a time-frequency representation, namely the log-spectrograms of speech recordings....

At this point they lose me – going off into statistical analysis, and talking about log-spectrograms. When I first saw the (very impressive) picture that is, of course, front-and-centre in that Daily Mail article I was confused*. The spectrograms I had met in Cambridge in the early '70s were all two-dimensional. I wondered where the third dimension came from. That prefixed log- must be a clue. The third dimension is supplied by something statistical.

Having no grounding in statistics, I'm not qualified to criticize, however much I'm inclined to. The authors of the paper are widespread:

1 Statistical Laboratory, DPMMS, University of Cambridge 

2 Department of Statistics, UC Davis 

3 Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford 

4 Statistical Laboratory, DPMMS, University of Cambridge 

I imagine this made for communications problems. And three of the four are statisticians. I suspect that this may have hampered the philological input. I suppose the philologist did originate some of the text. But I doubt very much that he wrote the abstract, which even I can see is philologically naïve.

These sound files are fun to play with, but I'm not convinced they're of any use to philology.

Update: 2016.08.25.23:00 – Added footnote, having repaired brain-fart.

* Just checking to see if you were awake.