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.

'I'm in a bit of a rush' said Tom...

... Swiftly. <bou_boum_and_indeed_tsh>

The topic of Tom Swifties was broached in this week's Museum of Curiosity (starting at about 14'30"). The Tom Swifty is an amusing ... form (I nearly wrote "art form", but to say that would be to depend on an overly etymological understanding of the word art; wordsmithery would be nearer the mark).

This mention of Tom Swifties reminded me of  an online community I used to be a part of. It was based on a 1980s bulletin board system – ahead of its time (in those days) called variously Notes, Notes 11, VAX NOTES, and ultimately (marking DEC‘s nod to UNIX – ULTRIX) DEC Notes.

The halcyon days of NOTES are detailed in an article published in Knowledge Management magazine (which explains the abbreviation used in the text – KM). It's pretty long, but this gives a flavour:

...The ability to find a subject matter expert quickly and get the answer to a question or assistance in solving a problem, is a key KM priority. It saves time (and money), enhances customer relationships and ensures that knowledge transfer happens to the right person at the right time. And yet we also know that tools are not the whole answer. Even the best tools will not give you a return on investment unless the employees of the company are committed to helping one another.


Employees of Digital Equipment Corporation worked in an environment that got this combination of technology and culture about right, back in the 1980s. The technology was a simple collaboration tool called Notes... that ran on Digital’s worldwide network, supported by the company’s VAX/VMS... software development tools group. Among the people who worked at Digital during that time, the nostalgia for that tool and the culture it enabled (and that enabled its success) assumes Camelot-esque proportions.

More here

<historical_aside>
Notes was what in Reading UK was known as a midnight hack, and in the USA a skunk-works project (done in the engineers' "own" time – not that they had any [in the eyes of the corporate lawyers: the contract of employment was referred to by one wag as "a certificate of brain donation" my own very late name for it – the staircase for this bit of esprit has been grinding away {must have been an escalator} for about thirty years – is a writ of HABEAS MENTEM]). It was a vehicle of creative collaboration between users of DECnet (the internal network used by over 100,000 employees).

<autobiographical_note>
The midnight hacking did not stop with DECnotes. In the mid-'90s a US engineer (whose name escapes me) wrote a PC client to run on Windows NT (maybe other flavours of Windows too); this was just a client – the server ...

<explanation type="more egg-sucking">
At the time (and possibly even now...yes) the client/server model was a common and very useful system for designing software. We normal punters usually aren't aware of it – anything we get to use is a client. But if you use an app on your mobile phone you already know what a client looks like. The server is the beefy code running somewhere Out There, supplying services as required by the many clients.
</explanation>

...still had to run on a VAX or ULTRIX machine.  I wrote the online help for this client (volunteering, of course, in a way that exemplified that ability to find a subject matter expert quickly – through Notes).

I don‘t know if  later, in the unfortunate but inevitable jargon, this PC client was productized.
<autobiographical_note>

I was told that the Project Manager wanted to enhance it so that it could handle, in addition to text, all sorts of other media. Her bosses said No, she took the idea to Lotus, and the rest is herstory.  I can't vouch absolutely for this story, though this extract from a user suggests that it might be true:

Len Kawell wrote Notes-11 (his LinkedIn profile says that this work was done “in his spare time”) and later worked with Ray Ozzie on Lotus Notes. Notes-11 was then taken on by Benn Schreiber and Peter Gilbert as a “skunk works” project within DEC Central Engineering and resulted in VAX Notes

More here  (my emphasis)

Anyway, apart from being used for work-based collaboration, there were Notes files devoted to leisure interests. As that memoir goes on to say, 

...[I]n August 1989, some 10,355 VAX Notes conferences were active inside DEC, 390 of which were dedicated to employee interests such as “Good restaurants in the South of France”...

One of these employee-interest conferences was called JOYOFLEX, and harboured various sorts of discussion about language. A note in this conference was my introduction to Tom Swifties.
</historical_aside>

The Tom Swifties in this note had a twist: the punchline had to be the name of a language (but after a few weeks some latitude came into it – a contribution of mine, referring to the UNIX variant SCO and the name of the dialect spoken in Liverpool, was "'I prefer UNIX' said Tom, a Scouser". No...? SCO-user. Ah well. Some fell on stony ground. This one's less contrived: "Pass me the f...ing spanner' he called in French."

The idea of the Tom Swifty, at the time, was new to me. I expected that by the time I had got it (it wasn't very fully explained, as US-based employees already had the necessary cultural background), the well would have run dry  –  after maybe a dozen or so replies. But, rather like the holiday experience of Jack Waley-Cohen on Museum of Curiosity, the idea smouldered away for weeks, amassing eventually several hundred replies.

The memory stirred up by that programme was of my favourite (though I say it as shouldn't – TISIAS)

"'Just because the bread-mix is too dry, 

surely the recipe didn't say to do that' 

he said in Indo-European".

b

There's no 'ism' like sexism

In German man is not the same as Mann, and Germans presumably have no PC qualms about words formed with the morpheme man (if there are any – my specialist knowledge of German is limited, but the same must apply to many other words derived from PIE languages)  that refer to humanity as a whole..

In English, though, things are not so clear. On the one hand, traditionalists who insist on chairman to refer to a woman protest on linguistic grounds that the suffix -man does not refer to the gender of the occupant of that position (ignoring the fact that centuries of Anglo-Saxon culture have exploited just this ambiguity). On the other hand, strident feminists perpetrate linguistically naïve solecisms like herstory. Many English speakers insist on using chair, in the chairman case, when a woman takes the position (often betraying their cause by reverting to the [apparently] gender-marked form when the woman chair is replaced by a man).

<irrelevant_quibble water_holding="not really">
If a female chairman is a chair, what's a female spokesman? A spoke?
</irrelevant_quibble>

What can be said in public has certainly changed in my lifetime; but that 65 years is only a fairly placid codicil  to a much longer story. Here's what happened to mankind.

The 65 years from 1708 to 1773 marked a rise of many times the rate of recent decline (by eye, I'd estimate that the early rise is about six times as steep as the recent decline).

Meanwhile, what has happened to the PC replacement for mankind? It was fairly (surprisingly?) popular in the 18th century, but then tailed off throughout the 19th and most of the 20th. Then, in the late 1980s, the frequency rises steeply. It is tempting to think that the decline in mankind is directly related to the rise in humankind.

But on that scale, the demise of mankind looks terminal.  It was so popular in the late 18th century that at the beginning of the 21st it looks nearly extinct.  If you take a step forward (if you'll excuse the art gallery metaphor) and look more closely at the latest numbers (as shown on the right), the story is not quite so clear. They have fallen all right, but they have levelled off.

Presumably this means that there there are some dyed-in-the-wool mankind-users who have been unaffected by the rise in humankind.

But this isn't raking up the accursed sycamore seeds that threaten to increase the (already extreme) bio-diversity of my "lawn".

b
PS And here's a clue:

Can Mister Messy be the guilty party? (9)

Update: 2016.11.11.18:15 – Added PPS
PPS I meant to add that all those word frequency graphs come fro the Collins English Dictionary.  Sadly, they stop  at 2008, and the axes aren't usefully labelled.

Update: 2016.11.14.11:45 – Reinstated the latest picture (which was there once, but had disappeared).

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.

Reformed priest gives account of current doings (6)

Today‘s TEZZY (for a Time-wasting site) goes to this fascinating interactive effort – full of interest but (if I‘m being brutally honest) hardly of critical importance for the fate of Civilization as we know it. It‘s based on a corpus of reports by students of their teachers:

This interactive chart lets you explore the words used to describe male and female teachers in about 14 million reviews from RateMyProfessor.com.

And perhaps I do underestimate its importance. Maybe there is an interesting conclusion to be drawn from  the fact that students are slightly more likely to call a female teacher happy, but much more likely to call a male teacher funny. I‘m not sure what it might be, but it‘s certainly fun toggling between the two and watching the blue dots change places with the pink ones (OK, they‘re not pink really, more like orange) in a sort of bird‘s eye view of a courtly dance. I think it‘d be more significant if one could compare ratings of the same-sex teacher by different-sex students, and then to compare S>T, S>T, S>T and S>T. (More significant,  but I‘d still be hard pressed to say exactly  what it signified.)

Tales from the word-face

I'm still trawling through the vowel+l pairs. L was a dispiriting letter to start with. I should have started with R or W – much more interesting. But I am a slave to the alphabet. I am nearing the end of the -el-s. On a hunch, I went back to check on the raw totals (net of any systematic exclusions I choose to observe). And the numbers of hits in the Macdonald English Dictionary (that is the UK site, despite the Mit) turned out to have an alphabetical regularity:

So...

<rant>
And that is a subordinating conjunction (or  something like that – the naming of parts isn't really my schtick). Another bugbear in my admittedly bugbear-ridden life is the growing and unaccountable and mindless and downright lazy  and otherwise lamentable...

<meta_rant topic="*laMENtable">
And there's another one. Get the stress right for Heaven's sake. I know it's easier to match the stress of the verb, but "them's the breaks, kid" as someone (maybe John Wayne) once said.
</meta_rant>

....tendency to use 'So' as an all-purpose linguistic tic that seems to mean something like 'Here comes a sentence, but don't expect it to have a link to anything that's gone before and I don't care about any fruitless efforts you may make to find one – you seem to have mistaken me for someone with a modicum of consideration for the people I talk to'.

</rant>  

...although I haven't finished -el- I've done more than half.

Enough navel-gazing; there's cricket to watch.  

b

Update 2015.05.31.11:35 – Sexed up picture.

Update 2015.06.01.15:15 – Added PS.

Another TEZZY observation: with a few exceptions, a male teacher is more likely than a female one to be assessed as fat. The exceptions are in Computer Science, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology. Make of that what you will; of course, in those (and all cases) the review might have said ‘<teacher-name> couldn't be called fat'. (Come to think of it.... Still, it's fun.)

Update 2015.06.06.18:05 – Added PPS.

...

And while we're on the subject of statistical anomalies, how about this (courtesy of Blogger, a record of page views [to Harmless Drudgery] for the past week):

Noted for Update, 2015.06.08

Update 2018.03.22.12:45 – Added PPPS.

Deleted old footer, and removed part of PPS that wasn't displaying properly.

Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra

Those words are from the text of the Requiem mass... 'when the heavens and the earth are moving'. 

The recent terrible events in Nepal reminded me of three things.

The first  was 'The Great Peruvian Earthquake' of 31 May 1970. Again there was a complete   breakdown in communications. As it happened there was something  else going on not too far away, kicking off on that very day: the Mexico World Cup. The father of a member of the group I sang and played with was Peruvian, and was trying in vain to get news of his family. It struck me as ironic that at a time when hundreds of journalists with millions of pounds worth of hi-techery (which we had been told about in awestruck tones for weeks beforehand by Jimmy Hill  and his fellow pundits – the instantaneous action-replay  was a new invention at the time

<weasel_words>
...well maybe not brand new. Perhaps like many technological sporting innovations it was known of but thought too expensive – until an excuse for conspicuous consumption arose (something REALLY IMPORTANT like the FIFA World Cup.)
</weasel_words>

, and was going to revolutionize football commentary) were so nearby (well, on the same page of the map at least), the plight of the Peruvians was so dire.

I being in my Peter  Starstedt  phase (Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  had spent 4 weeks at no. 1 a few months previously) I wrote a song – another of Paul Simon's 'songs that voices never shared':

<digression> 

In homage to Starstedt's whimsical Zeitgeist-y references ('You sip your Napoleon brandy, and never get your lips wet'...) I had odd portentous sallies like 'What have you done, Jules Rimet?' The most heavily ironic touch  was a setting  of the football chant

Ee Aye Addio We won the Cup

in a minor  key. Pretty poignant, I think you'll agree.  

</digression>

The second was a reflexion on musical settings relating to earthquakes, which I wrote nearly a year ago here, and which I felt merited another airing:

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes). [Update: the main piece had referred to Verdi‘s Requiem, which, at the time, I had recently sung.]

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

The third was to wonder if there was any remote etymological link between 'terra-' and 'terror' – and it seems there's not.  It's just a coincidence that earthquakes (Sp. terremotos

<digression>
I use terremoto rather than tierra lest anyone think 'But of course  tierr- is not the same as terr-.'  A Spanish speaker wouldn't feel this, being used to the e/ie variation under conditions of stress in some sorts of /e/. This accounts for many irregular Spanish verbs, such as tener – with stressed tiene [='he/she/it has'] but unstressed tenemos ['we have'] (well, not totally unstressed of course, but unstressed in the relevant syllable). (Italian doesn't do this: terracotta but also terra.)

</digression>

) are both terrible and terrifying.

The Proto-Indo-European root for tierra is given in Etymonline‘s entry for 'terrain':

...from terra "earth, land," literally "dry land" (as opposed to "sea"); from PIE root *ters- "to dry" 

Meanwhile, under 'terror', the source is different:

...from terrere "fill with fear, frighten," from PIE root *tres- "to tremble" (see terrible).

         See more here (if you're that way inclined).

And the possibility of a metathetical link between *ters- and *tres- doesn‘t seem to me worth fretting about; that would be a supposed phonological development in a language that exists  only in  the minds of a few linguists.

OK – Real Life calls.

b

Update: 2015.04.28.11:20 – Added notes in red.
Update: 2015.04.30.09:20 – Added PS.

PS At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day), and the latest version of the graph I gave then reflects this:

Update: 2015.05.01.22:55 – Added illustration  from the Libera Me.
Update: 2016.01.23.11:30 – Embellished reminiscence in purple.

Hah, Bumhug

A seasonal thought to mark the beginning of Advent

As the strains of Wachet auf fade away (and I missed O come O come Emmanuel anyway [ a suitable case for iPlayer]) I reflect that orange didn't have its n by the time it was borrowed from the Old French in the 13th century. So the possibility of the n dropping out by false assimilation (that is, suspected assimilation where there had been none) from 'a norange' seems to me unlikely, although it is true that the initial n was there if you look back far enough, through Arabic naranj, Persian narang and Sanskrit naranga (where the trail goes cold, with the dispiriting words 'of uncertain origin' ['of uncertai norigin'?]):

c.1300, of the fruit, from Old French orange, orenge (12c., Modern French orange), from Medieval Latin pomum de orenge, from Italian arancia, originally narancia(Venetian naranza), alteration of Arabic naranj, from Persian narang, from Sanskrit naranga-s "orange tree," of uncertain origin. Not used as a color word until 1540s. 

           Etymonline 

I favour the 'perhaps influenced by French or "gold"' idea suggested further on in that Etymonline article. This would tie in with the Italian name of another fruit, though not the one excluded by WISE MEN (catch the topical reference? Magic  ) from a fruit salad: pomodoro.

But, in that quote from Etymonline, note the last sentence: Not used as a color word until 1540s. This explains the inappropriate ascription of red in many English expressions. The colour was named after the fruit; so if only the word 'orange' had been used to name that colour before it lost its n, we'd be talking about the norange squirrel being out-competed by the grey ones, the  norange deer 

<autobiographical_note date-range="late '50s?" theme="PG Tips British Wild Life series"> 
 a rarety, as I remember, not like the fallow deer, which seemed to appear in every other  packet
</autobiographical_note>

and – back on topic at last  – the robin norange-breast  – a bit of a mouthful, that; maybe that cheerful little cheeky-chappy would have evolved a name based on its colour, so that our Christmas cards would have been decorated with pictures of little NORRIES.

<autobiographical_note date-range="1989-1991" theme="double-lettered bird names">    

Back in the '90s, when I was starting (and indeed ending) my career as a compiler of 3-dimensional crossword puzzles [which call for a double letter when a word reaches a corner of the cube], I remember noticing the commonness of double letters in bird names:

albatross, bittern, booby, bullfinch, buzzard, chaffinch, cockatoo, coot, crossbill, cuckoo, dipper, dunnock, great tit, guillemot, gull, hoopoe, kookaburra,  mallard. moorhen, parakeet, peewit ('vanellus vanellus', since you ask), puffin, rooster, ruff, reeve, rook, sparrow, swallow, willow-warbler, woodpecker,  yellowhammer ...†‡

At the time I filled several pages of a notebook with obscure bird names that shared this trait. I can't see how this could be anything but coincidental, but still.... It seems to apply to other bird-related words:  broody, egg, cheep, chirrup, hoot, lesser-spotted, roost,  stoop, trill, tweet, twitter... But maybe this is some (possibly well-known) bias – whatever you're looking for [in some sort of corpus of data], you find it. Hmmm...

</autobiographical_note>

But it wasn't like that. Redbreast, says Etymonline, is 'early 15c., of the English robin, from red (adj.1) + breast (n.)'  – at least a century before the colour got its name. Until then, red – 'the only color for which a definite common PIE root word has been found' – had to do for all colours spectrally south of yellow. In that, though at the other end of the spectrum, it was like Russian and, I think, Mandarin (at least that's what my Tai Chi teacher said when I asked whether the dragon  was blue or green – though, now I come to think of it, maybe that was just iridescent ) 

Things Chinese provoke the thought that a piece on the mandarin might be more topical than one on orange – another time, maybe.

b

† Update 2014.12.01.21:14  – added afterthoughts in brown.
‡ Update 2014.12.12.16:25  – added afterthoughts in norange.

---

 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:  nearly 48,200 views  and over 6,500 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 2,400 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.

Werra werra werra

The possibility of paid employment has prevented me from posting since my holiday, and much of today's post is cut&paste shamelessly from an IATEFL scholarship application:

<cut&paste theme="classroom situation and reflection">
This is a general problem of a culture clash between students. Something of this nature arises from time to time, but I give here an instance where several points of friction – male/female + education + religion + race ­+ politics – combined to create a very combustible mixture.

The conservative side of the clash was represented by a young Frenchman. He was a very able student with an academic background, and an intellectual arrogance that I have met more than once among his countrymen (and women). Having visited France at the height of the OAS problems (in the ‘60s) I assumed that the French/Algerian friction was a thing of the past; I should have known, from the example of Northern Ireland, that these post-colonial matters have a half-life of several hundred years and smoulder in the most apparently pacific of breasts.

The ‘outsider’ (l’étrangère) was a young lady of 17/18 years, algérienne, swarthy (he was blond), not so academically gifted (apparently ­– though in the context of a summer school it was hard to tell ­– and besides she had been hamstrung for years by her lack of privilege). She had, understandably, an enormous chip on her shoulder, and was hyper-sensitive to any kind of assumed slur. Given his arrogance and contempt, it didn’t need any kind of sensitivity to detect an implied slur – pachydermicity was all that was needed. It didn’t make matters any more comfortable that he was short, pale, and slightly built – one of H.G. Wells’s Eloi – whereas she was one of the Morloks (by no means  Amazonian, but more than a match for him). But he gave as good as he got verbally, with a mastery of contemptuous arrogance: ‘Tell that woman’ – he said once, in a quietly menacing tone – ‘I NEVER want to hear a word from her again.’ (They could snipe at each other in their native French, but this was addressed to me.)

All it seemed I could do was separate them physically – different teams, different groups, never working together – and cast oil on troubled waters (praying there were no naked flames) as needed. In the event, a family issue called her away (at least, that was what the Director of Studies told me – though now I think of it the fact that the DoS was involved may suggest another explanation), so the problem went away. I suppose the alleged ‘family issue’ might have been a diplomatic fiction.

If it was (a possibility that has only just occurred to me) I failed. I suppose that, while maintaining a cordon sanitaire as already discussed, I should somehow address the problem. But it is a secular one, and the handling of open aggression is not something that comes naturally to me. I discuss the issue with other teachers from time to time (less often as retirement beckons!) but I have not yet found an answer (although it would have been a start to police more punctiliously a ban on back-channel/native language jibes).
<cut&paste>

What these two were engaging in was WERRA (not the noise that introduced Tigger [? – I've looked for confirmation of this, to no avail. The Internet insists on taking me down Disney-based sidetracks] but  a Germanic word [and as my two combatants spoke French, I'm using the Frankish variant] – Etymonline says the PIE root was *wers- with cognates suggesting an original meaning of  'to bring into confusion' – used by the barbarians who wouldn't stand up like a proper Roman and have a good old proelium – the sort of pitched battle that the Romans usually won). My young Frenchman was a Roman (educated, arrogant, urbane, with overwhelming cultural resources) and the young étrangère was a Barbarian (refusing to fight on the terms of the habitual victor).

When Latin speakers, with no W in their alphabet, met a useful foreign borrowing like this, they often replaced it with GU. And Romance languages reflect this: war but guerre . And sometimes one language, formed on the basis of several Romance vernaculars, yields pairs like warranty/guarantee, ward/guard, wile/guile^† ... (the last of which I've discussed here).

To complicate matters still further, English has borrowed a diminutive from Spanish. guerra/guerrilla but war/guerrilla (and indeed guerrilla warfare)

b

Update 2014.07.25.14:55 – Added PS

In my closing sentence I referred to 'complicat[ing] matters'. The only complication is for fellow sufferers from the Etymological Fallacy (discussed here)

<rantette>
There is a tendency to use the suffix -itis to form jocular names for maladies (such as memory-itis – an affliction that I'm suffering from at the moment, as I can't  recall any). Hitherto I (in company with many a misinformed pedant) have typically objected: but what's INFLAMED? An -itis has to involve inflammation – as in gingivitis, tonsillitis, etc.

Well, up to a point. According to Etymonline it is

... Modern Latin, from Greek -itis, feminine of adjectival suffix -
ites "pertaining to." Feminine because it was used with feminine noun nosos "disease,"

<autobiographical_note 1966-8>
Speaking of which, irrelevantly, a list of 'femine nouns ending -os' comes to mind: '...nesos, nosos, basanos [a touchstone FFS: what use was that knowledge to a twentieth century scoolboy, let alone his twenty-first century later{sic} ego] and taphros'.
</autobiographical_note>

Although the Etymonline gloss does start 'noun suffix denoting diseases characterized by inflammation...' it is probably just accidental that it typically refers to inflammation. The four classically recognized signs of disease/disorder are 'calor, rubor, tumor, and dolor' (I imagine there's a useful Wikipedia reference available to the time-rich), so the odds are in favour of an '-itis [via calor] → inflammation' link. But there's no strictly etymological reason for it.

I do try, with varying degrees of success, to avoid the Etymological Fallacy. But it seems that even the most dyed-in-the-wool etymoholic [GROOGH; apologies to fellow haters of the widely abused '-holic' pseudo-suffix] isn't justified here (even if etymology can ever be argued to be a[n] ever-fixed key to meaning).

</rantette>

;[where was I? Oh yes, 'The only complication...']  in Spanish (and many other Romance languages), there is a clear link between guerre/guerra and its diminutive. It is only the 'silly Cnuts' of England (discussed in a footnote to this blog) who feel the lack of a clear etymological link.

Update 2014.07.29.14:30 – Added this note:

^†I knew I'd seen this somewhere before, in a Crystal book I mentioned here. The list I was thinking about is in one of those badly presented asides, for which someone at Penguin should be SHOT.

7.3
Norman loan    Parisian Loan
.
.
.
reward              regard
warden             guardian
warrant            guarantee 
wile                  guile

(An earlier entry in that table isn't relevant to the w/g argument, but it's Quite Interesting: 'gaol' is a Norman Loan, and its Parisian pair is 'jail'.)

22016.10.10.14:15 – Fixed a few typoes and deleted old footer.