"Nesciens" - know what I mean?

... 'having no [carnal] knowledge of'.

Nearly 7 years ago, having mentioned german-ness (that is, I suppose, if you'll excuse the neologism (come to think of it, whether you excuse it or not) teutonicity, I remembered something I heard in a Golden Age lecture ...

<parenthesis>
Everyone in the Spanish Department seemed to assume I'd know what 'Golden Age' meant in the context of Spanish literature. With most of my colleagues (who'd been studying Spanish literature for 2 or 3 years) this was a reasonable assumption. As I was starting from scratch, without the benefit of Wikipedia, I didn't know that

[t]he Spanish Golden Age (Spanish: Siglo de Oro [ˈsiɣlo ðe ˈoɾo], "Golden Century") is a period of flourishing in arts and literature in Spain, coinciding with the political rise of the Spanish Empire under the Catholic Monarchs of Spain and the Spanish Habsburgs. It started in 1492, with the end of the Reconquista, the Spanish voyages of Christopher Columbus to the New World, and the publication of Antonio de Nebrija's Grammar of the Castilian Language. It ended with the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659 or in 1681 with the death of the Pedro Calderón de la Barca, the last great writer of the age.
Source 

</parenthesis>

...in my first year as a student (or "gentleman in statu pupillari" as we were known by the powers that ... were?  might be?)

I added this clarification:

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

And in that PPPS I added (years later):

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

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

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

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

Now then (getting to the point at last ;-)), if you will refer back to that Wikipedia snippet, the Golden Age is known among Spanish students (and Spanish people in general if truth be told) as "el siglo de oro"; which brings me to my main reason (excuse?) for writing: a virtual performance of  Mouton's ...

<inline-PS>
Revenons?
</inline-PS>

...Nesciens mater given by the choir Siglo de Oro

To hear the piece, click here.

It's a lovely piece, and brilliant in its intricate structure. To quote the note provided by their MD (and formerly Wokingham Choral Society's MD):

It's ... a quadruple canon at the fifth, at a distance of two measures. What that means is: the singers who start on the left of the screen are singing exactly the same music as those on the right of the screen, except a perfect fifth higher, and two bars later.

Sublime. Out of this world. But I must return to the land of lawn mowers, hedge-trimmers, and curtain rails (don't ask, but that sorry tale made me forget... [no, I won't go there; time for my walk]).

b

Update 2020.08.04.11:55 – Added inline PS (a bit of esprit d'escalier)

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

Alexa: What is alexia?

People of my vintage, hearing the prompt: "5½ yards?" will unhesitatingly respond "1 rod, pole, or perch" (well, maybe not all of them) , remembering those glossy red exercise books with tables on the back (I never did find out what "Troy weight" was, though I'm pretty sure the number 20 came into it somewhere; ounces in a pound, maybe.) Anyway, this information was hardly crucial to anything very much, and I don't think any less of people who don't have it at their fingertips.

<digression theme="5½ yards">
Although this measurement is not in wide use today, it may be of interest to those of an etymological bent. Another of those numbers on the back cover of 1960s exercise books was "22 yards = 1 chain".

That quantity crops up all over the place: in measurements (10 square chains = 1 acre); in the phrase chain boy (mentioned in a previous post...

But staying with the subject of measurements (the grit at the centre of this ... erm, whatever) someone on  that programme mentioned how memorable measures (resisting metrication) tended to be monosyllabic – foot, inch, yard, and so on. Which brought to mind another such monosyllable –  chain – which was mentioned too. But what wasn't mentioned, on the subject of persistent obsolete technology metaphors, was the surveyor's assistant: chain boy. (The term was current when my brother was one in the 1970s, and a quick Google search confirms that it's still in use [though sometimes, in a diverse workforce, with PC tweezers]).

...); (oh yes, this sentence is still going; it started back at "That quantity..."); in arbitrary measures, such as the length of a cricket pitch...

<sporting_aside>
On a Rugby Union pitch, early in my rugby-playing career, this arbitrary 22 yards thing was avoided. The line about a quarter of the way down the pitch was 25 yards away from the goal line. But the numerological gods were not satisfied: the number 22 ought to crop up arbitrarily in sports fields. Along came metrication to save the day; the "25 yard line", commonly referred to as "the 25", became "the 22 metre line". In fact, 25 yards is very much closer to 23 metres (22.86), but truncation rather than rounding was chosen; I suspect the numerological gods may have been involved.
</sporting_aside>

...(Phew, NOW the sentence is ended.) 

But this digression started out on the subject of 5½. Probably – I haven't checked – the idea of a quarter of 22 yards is the root of the naming of a quarterstaff.

<Hmm>

I have checked now [couldn't resist], and Wikipedia says it's "probably" derived from something else. I'm not convinced.

Per contra,  a fighting implement 5½ yards long  would be pretty unwieldy even for Little John (who was wielding the first quarterstaff I ever met [in a picturebook, about sixty years ago]).

</Hmm>

</digression>

But a recent survey for Mashable (I say "recent" because the Mashable report is recent; the video itself has no datestamp). But the issue of telling the time on an analogue clock has been around for some time. The late lamented Dave Allen had a routine about it which is worth 6'03" of anyone's time. And many other commentators have said that telling the time from an analogue clock is not a crucial skill for a 21st-century child. (It's just struck me that the ability to read an analogue clock is as irrelevant today as, when analogue clocks were invented, the ability to read a sun-dial became – it can be an impressive trick, but that's all.)

It's not crucial; but losing any skill is a shame. And a risk inherent in any new  technology is that it fosters dependence on it. In case of power cuts it's wise  to keep a few candles handy; and a box of matches. (Luckily, when friction matches replaced tinder boxes, power cuts were a thing of the future.)  But how many new boxes of tricks erode our abilities? Since agreeing (reluctantly...

<comparative_linguistics>
I feel the word doesn't have the force of the Spanish a regañadientes, with its implication of gritted teeth.
</comparative_linguistics>

...) to the use of SatNav,  I've noticed a reduction  in the accuracy of my sense of direction (never great).

Which brings us to alexia (see the subject line). It's related (etymologically, at least, though I have no idea whether the two disorders share any part of the same cognitive mechanism) to dyslexia. but a- instead of dys- – so not-at-all rather than mistakenly).  I wonder what Alexa would make of that. And I wonder whether 22nd-century people (provided that homo sapiens's sapience extends to the avoidance of self-annihilation for that long) will have their ability to read – while probably not entirely eradicated – at least attenuated.

Anyway, cricket calls.

b

Quod erat pudendum

Prove is a tricky word; "to try, test; evaluate; demonstrate," says Etymonline
with the line  between test and show falling about halfway down that list. The idea of trying is (it seems to me – I can't think of a way to show this) waning in English; in Spanish, on the other hand, the trying end of the "meaning pool" is quite deep: a stall-holder in a food market in Barcelona will invite passers-by to probar their produce, whereas the equivalent stall-holder at a Farmer's Market in Swindon would say "Try some"; calling "Prove it" wouldn't help sales.

It was not always this way .  When a printer wanted to test how accurate his typesetter had been, he produced a proof copy – whence comes the use of proof as a verb meaning "read and correct a proof copy" (which is not to deny that proof was already a verb; Etymonline puts it at 1834).


Which brings us to "the proof of the pudding is in the eating", mangled by people who didn't understand this meaning of proof.  There are various juxtapositions of words beginning with p. Something is (?) "the proof in the pudding"...

<example source="Boston Globe, 2003, quoted in Quinion piece, vide infra">
"While the team’s first Super Bowl victory back in 2002 could be explained away by some skeptics as a fluke, the second victory is the proof in the pudding in cementing the Pats’ status as the cream of the NFL crop."
 </example> 

...but far and away the winner is "the proof is in the pudding". Google shows the size of the victory – about 6 times more for the meaningless newcomer.

Full form: 159,000 results

Demonstrative charcuterie:  1,080,000  results

In a 2012 edition of Morning Edition, Boston Globe language columnist Ben Zimmer anointed the meaningless interloper thus:

Well, the proof is in the pudding is a new twist on a very old proverb.

Hmm...."New twist", sounds pretty catchy. He goes on to fill in the back story:

The original version is the proof of the pudding is in the eating. And what it meant was that you had to try out food in order to know whether it was good....Back then, pudding referred to a kind of sausage, filling the intestines of some animal with minced meat and other things - something you probably want to try out carefully since that kind of food could be rather treacherous.

OK. That's the way language works: a sort of linguistic Gresham's Law:

Bad language drives out good

But I know what I know; my prescriptivist in descriptivist's clothing credentials are unchanged. My lip will always curl when I hear about the proof being in the pudding. And I agree with Michael Quinion's

The proverb is ancient — it has been traced back to 1300 in a rather different form and is recorded by William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain of 1623. It’s sad that it has lasted so long, only to be corrupted in modern times.

More here

But that corruption is terminal. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour. England hath need of thee..." Well, best not to make a fuss.  :-)

b

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.

Being in two minds

My attention was caught (while I was making other plans, as usual :-)) by a blog about bilingualism and its correlation with personality. I have to admit, though, that the distraction from those other plans was not as great as I'd hoped. Like many academic blogs it's more of an amuse-bouche than a main course.

It starts out with the less than flabbergasting observation that

You might think of the shy person who becomes much more extroverted when talking to family or close friends. Alternatively, we could think about someone who acts in one manner with his co-workers but acts very differently when having a drink with former college dormmates.
Source

Well GOSH. Next he'll be telling me the Pope wears a big hat. This observation seems to me like that Einstein line about time seeming to speed up when you're with a pretty girl [Einstein's sexism, yer 'Onner] and slow down if your hand's on a hot stove; it's  true but its relevance to Relativity (in the physics sense) is tenuous at best. What I wanted to be told about was whether processing different languages favoured distinct character traits (a point I touched on here, referring to a personal experience):

...[T]his has resonance in my own experience selling magazines in Spain. I found it much easier to be deceitful (not lying but painting a rosy picture of the future – I was selling subscriptions). My initial belief was that this was a feature of the language; this belief fitted in with vocabulary that related to my own position, back in England.

<autobiographical_note blush_factor="10">
I was a boy-friend to someone who thought I was a fiancé; the one word novio blurred the distinction. Did I love her?  I doubt it; but I was happy to say Te quiero, because – past-master as I was in the field of casuistry [fruit of an RC education] – I did want her, and querer can mean 'want' (cf. Kant's 'murderer at the door' dilemma, and this  [specifically 'All men are false']).
</autobiographical_note>

But maybe it's to do with speaking in foreign languages generally; maybe it works for any L1/L2 combination.

But, returning to that blog [do keep up] that disappointing aperçu was followed by a more promising  later reflection:

As I thought about it more, I realized that language might serve as a form of context that triggers certain memories. One interesting analogy comes from work with deep-sea divers. Divers often seem to forget what happened to them underwater. Follow up work on this observation has found that when divers are taught a list of words underwater they are better at recalling more of those words later underwater than they are outside water. The opposite was also true. They exhibited better memory for words learned above water when they were asked to remember outside of water. Hence, a particular context serves to elicit memories relevant to that context. In this view, memory is driven by a set of cues that elicit certain responses from us. 

Source [My emphasis]

But this is just about speaking different languages, not about bilingualism (growing up in an environment that uses two languages). Is a Catalan child cheekier, say,  when using Catalan than they are when using Castilian? And, given the same context, if they are being cheeky, are they more likely to use one language than another?

Dunno –  Maybe I'll have to take the course mentioned in that blog.

b

Phrasal verbs and intonation

The British National Corpus reports 666 instances ...

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

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

</wonders_of_computicles>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here he is, running in his Nth race.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enough for now...

b

PS: A crossword clue:

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

Update: 2017.02.11.14:15  – Added PPS


PPS And another:

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

Update: 2017.02.13.15:15  – Added PPPS

PPPS

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

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

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

1. DENIER
2. SCROTUM
3. PARAMOUNT

Update: 2019.10.8.11:10  – Added inline PS

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.

Tying up

A while ago I saw this tweet:

This evoked a charming picture of competitive laundry between washerwomen on a riverbank. But it also led me to reflect on other words for arrive (Fr arriver, It arrivare... etc obviously derive from one root, Sp llegar Pg chegar... etc from another, while Provençal (predictably) has a foot in both camps with both arribá and plegar (I expect there's a story behind those differing inflexions, but there are things to do). 

<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>

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.)

Other nautical metaphors have found there their(!) way to the meaning arrive. My Subject line gives one; another, from a more  obviously nautical source, is to be heard in the sea shanty Fire Marengo:

When I get back to Liverpool town

I'll cast a line to little Sally Brown

I'll draw a veil over the other things he plans to do to Sally Brown, although it is already cloaked in more nautical metaphors: 'Sally is a pretty little craft/ Sharp to the fore and a rounded aft'.

<autobiographical_note>
In preparation for my family's visit to Rome in 1961 (BCE  – Before Considerable Education, as I was not yet 10) I collected a few useful words.

<digression>
Incidentally, this reminds me of another Roman reminiscence I recounted here, in which I referred to ‘a sophisticated and improbable mistake for a 9-year-old, but I was there'. On a re-reading, I realize that this was ambiguous and could be thought insufferably conceited. What I meant by those last four words was not to imply ‘... so you could expect some linguistic fireworks' but simply ‘...so I know what happened' (not that any memory is especially reliable).
</digression>

One of these was arrivederci, which I broke down into ‘arrive' (natch) and ‘backwards' (partly under the influence of another foreign der- word discussed here). It seemed to me at the time that ‘arrive backwards' was quite a plausible take on the idea of  leave-taking. The truth is much more simple: apart from the -ci (=‘you') it breaks down into much the same components as au revoir  (or, for that matter, Auf Wiedershehen).
</autobiographical_note>

Time for bed...  No, I'll do some checking, and add a bit about Catalan before I Publish.

b

PS Next morning: There.  And here's another clue:

Wide boy's feet embracing current exercise fad. (7)

2015.12.23.10:20 – Added esprit d'escalier in blue.

2016.01.01.16:30 – Added PS

PS And, while we‘re on the subject of river-based metaphors, I'm reminded of a word I come across often in France, which until recently I tried in vain to guess from the context (dictionaries being for me a last  resort – while being of course, an essential resource)  It's a word that I don't believe I've seen in any other context – road signs that specify restrictions on parking or access, for example Accès interdit...sauf riverains.

As that Larousse entry shows, the toes of a riverain/e can be either wet or dry:

2016.01.02.16:40 – Added PPS

PPS Next day...  And here's another clue:

Wanting to embrace father, but sure of failure. (10)

Update  2016.03.12.17:30 – Added PPPS and removed footer.

Crossword answers:  PILATES and DESPAIRING

2017.05.12.17:35 – Added P⁴S

^{P4S – A recent visit to a museum in Rye (covered here) has added to my stock of river words. The museum was adorned with an embroidery/tapestry depicting various local characters. One of these is a rippier. An 1825 glossary with the snappy title} 

A Glossary, Or, Collection of Words, Phrases, Names and Allusions to Customs, Proverbs &c. which Have Been Thought to Require Illustration, in the Works of English Authors, Particularly Shakespeare, and His Comtemporaries

 ^{explains the word thus:}

The word doesn't seem to be in current use (see the Collins Frequency Graph included below), but according to Onelook it is included in two more recently published dictionaries.

Extract Collins page

Tortilla humps

Some time ago, in a PS to this,  I wrote:

The Tortilla Tie

A while ago (too long ago for me to find an exact match on the M&S site) I was given a tie quite like this. And the pun in my title has reminded me of its stock ID: Sartorial tie. But the person who programmed the stock control software – the magic stuff that makes receipts say so much – must have been dyslexic (or maybe it was just a Friday afternoon). As a result, the receipt said that what MrsK had bought was a TORTILLA TIE. 

And here it is, by the magic of Bluetooth.


Yesterday, the Tortilla tie had one of its rare outings, on the occasion of the wedding of two friends for whom I wish all good things; at last they have made honest women of  each other. All my love to Karen and Catherine.

Interesting word tortilla.... It is, etymologically, a 'little torta', or 'tart'. but it is savoury, and takes two forms.

<autobiographical_note>
The first meaning  I met improbably, at St Gregory's RC Primary School in the late 1950s (in the assembly hall, as it happens). We sat on the floor in the hall to listen to BBC Schools Radio (or whatever it was called then), though we didn't know it was radio. It was a huge lump of loudspeaker, a veritable ziggurat of a thing, too big to stand on a table, with none of the controls (none visible, that is)  that would have identified it as a wireless [or TSF as I would learn to call it a few years later, when I wondered Why does 'Barren telegraphy' mean radio? {Geddit? Sans fils. Bou-boum/Tsh}], except for a large Bakelite on/off switch. 

The programme was an 'opera' called, I think, The Midnight Thief, set in Mexico.  It was full of funny words. The opening chorus, for example, ended 

Cock-of-the-rock and cuckoo
Are our comrades and hobnobbers
But we think it right
To shoot at sight
All bandits thieves and robbers 

The main characters were Fernando and Frasquita, and I played the G chime bar. At one stage, Fernando 'packed his tortillas with cheese'.
</autobiographical_note>

This is the pancake-like tortilla. The other I met about 10 years later – the omelette-like sort.

<potential_digression reason="hedge-trimming">
Omelette, now there's a word....
</potential_digression>

Gotta go.

b

---

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:  Well over 49,300 views  and nearly 9,000 downloads to date**. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with nearly 2,700 views and nearly 1,100 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

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

.