Aa, there's the Raab

<explanation subject="Dominic Raab">
People in the UK may know who Mr Raab is, and expect some satire here about monkeys and organ-grinders. Well, sorry about that. It was the just the /ɑ:/ sound that made me think of him. Generally I try to avoid thinking about that particular nonentity.

And people outside the UK are no doubt accustomed to my subject lines making no sense; so,  no change there.
</explanation>

It has often been pointed out that, at the time when English and French rubbed along together...

<aside>
 (with Norman-French being used by the nobs gifted all the plum positions by William the Bastard [who is now  better known as the Conquistador {or something}] and his cronies, while the horny-handed sons of toil used a less Latinate language)
</aside>

...the names of meat (for the table) had French-derived names like beef (boeuf), mutton (mouton), and pork (porc), but the animals themselves were cow, sheep, and pig (or in some parts) swine.

Earlier this month I visited a place that embodied a similar class distinction, but with pronunciation rather than vocabulary. Hardwick Hall has the /ɑ:/ sound adopted by the upper classes for certain words with an -er- spelling...

<digression>
English, in some parts of the world, still keeps this sound in words like clerk, derby, sherd, and serjeant...

<meta_digression source="WVGTbk2">
In the work-in-progress now in all good Kindle libraries as When Vowels Get Together with Sonorants I have written:

*ER* represents this sound in a dwindling number of words. For example, in the BBC Radio comedy series The Navy Lark recorded 1959-61, the rear end of a ship is called its /stɑ:n/, but I have only ever heard the /ɑ:/ pronunciation in that context. This sort of specialized argot – used in particular areas of work – may support the /ɑ:/ sound from time to time, but this pronunciation persists in only a small handful of words in British English (more so than in American English: BE /klɑ:k/ but AE /klɜrk/).

 </meta_digression>

...  although in, say, American English the first two still use /ɜ:/ while the /ɑ:/ sound of the last can be preserved by a revised spelling: sargent.
</digression>

... and to make sure the pronunciation didn't stray back to that /ɜ:/ the ruling classes changed the spelling.

But the sheep grazing in the fields surrounding the house were herdwicks (well, to be honest they may not have been that breed, but I'm not one to spoil a good story with mere facts – there are some of that breed on farms that need hardier livestock).

<unrelated_observation>
And I'll record here a totally unrelated observation, from the first part of a recently televised spy thriller. It was set in Berlin...

 <inline-p⁷s>
It was called Berlin Station; it just came up in conversation, and I thought I might as well record my findings – although if I'd known when I started that it would involve a record-breaking <inline P⁷S /> I probably wouldn't have bothered.
 </inline-p⁷s>

...and most of the key characters had the decency to speak English. But  there were bits of German dialogue that had English subtitles – one of which reminded me of an exercise we did in my CELTA course, to raise awareness of the problems caused for ELT students by English's predilection for phrasal verbs.

<autobiographical_note date="2006" subject="Phrasal verb exercise">
The students sat in a circle, and each in turn constructed a sentence using the phrasal verb pick up with a meaning that differed from all the previous examples.

I expected that with a class-size of 14 it would become increasingly difficult after the first half dozen, and impossible before the end. But the lecturer had done his homework and knew that the Collins Cobuild Dcitionary (a favourite at the time) lists 15 separate meanings (some of which can easily be sub-divided: for example it gives one meaning for what "a microphone or radio" does, and it seems to me that processing an audio signal that is clearly part of the soundscape  [as in "We're picking up the traffic noise in the background"] is quite distinct from being able to detect at all a radio signal that just doesn't get there [as in "We can't pick up channel X when we're <somewhere>"). So in other dictionaries I imagine the total is more than 15.
</autobiographical_note>

And to add to the difficulty, some phrasal verbs are separable (the verb and the particle can straddle the object), or not, or either. And in one of the local-colour subtitles the translator had got it wrong. At a service desk of some sort a German-speaker said "I want to pick up something" (sorry – no time to check the original German). What the subtitle should have said was "I want to pick something up"*,†. 

</unrelated_observation>

Is that the time? I must check the words/notes for tomorrow's concert (well worth a listen if you can make it):

b
PS: A couple of clues

• Rather draconian response to a failed marriage? (13)
• The deity's offspring, it's said, introducing energy to regulators. (11)

Update: 2018.11.11.19:30 – Typo fix, and added PPS

PPS And it was "well worth a listen".


Update: 2018.11.12.15:40 – Added PPPS

PPPS And here's a review...

Update: 2019.04.07.11:20 – Added footnote.

* Last night I witnessed another instance of that separability problem. In a subtitle to the Danish thriller Follow the money, towards the end of the first episode, one character said "We need you to take on this one."  What he meant, of course, was  "We need you to take this one on." 

<inline_p⁶s> 

Without doing the necessary research (which would involve close textual analysis of a lyric that even I can't muster the energy for), I suspect that the song "Take on me" was written by an ESOL student who can't use a learner's dictionary properly (and so missed the fact that "take on"  – in the sense "assume a burden" – is separable. )

</inline_p⁶s>

But I had known the translator was less than perfect ever since, earlier on, he had used the expression "big fry" instead of "big fish".  Fry are small; that's the point.

This is not unlike a piece of family language we still use, ever since my son – then knee-high to something quite small [HD: Do grasshoppers even have knees? Granted there.s a bendy bit between the upper and lower leg, but is that enough for knee-ness? This is getting silly...] – asked "Are we having a dark lunch today?". A dark lunch (obv.) is the opposite of a light lunch.

Update: 2019.04.25.10:10 – Supplied answers to those clues.

P⁴S EXTERMINATION, PEACEMAKERS

Update: 2019.09.23.11:05 – Added footnote

† P⁵S I've  just noticed another instance of the separability problem, in an error message:

The Bluetooth device is not 

turned on. Do you want to 

turn on it.

I've been getting this annoying little error for some time now – so often that I've only just noticed it; and noticed how apt it was, in view of my feelings about the device in question

Update: 2021.11.11.17:20 – Added <inline_p⁶s />

Update: 2023.01.17.21:25 – Added<inline-p⁷s />

Asking questions

Addenda agenda corrigenda memoranda propaganda pudenda...

The time has come, unfortunately, for the pointless, annoying, never-ending discussion about the plural of THE R WORD.

Let's take as our starting point  The Speech of Cicero for Aulus Cluentius Habitus:

This referendum ad populum ["the putting of a question to the people"] was soon abridged to plain referendum; but the phrase shows that the word was, in Latin, a gerund. Now I'm not going to argue that English has to follow the rules of Latin. That ridiculous notion has long plagued studies of English. But to quote one distance learning site:

Forming the gerund: The gerund is formed much the same way... . All gerunds are considered neuter nouns and there is NO nominative case and NO plural form.

OK, there is no plural of referendum  in Latin; so how do we form it in English? There is little doubt about how plurals are formed in English. In most cases (and I wonder how to quantify that most – hmmm) the rule is simple: add an s. Phonologically it's not quite that simple: dependent on what's being pluralized, you add either /s/ or/z/ or /i:z/ or /ɪz/. But there are quite a few exceptions: sheep/sheep, man/men, ox/oxen, basis/bases...

Then there are foreign borrowings: Latin – medium/media, Greek  – criterion/criteria, Hebrew seraph/seraphim... as many as the language has borrowed, and as many as will be borrowed....This gives many opportunities for linguistic snobbery:

My dear, did you hear that?  "Criterions" – Where did HE go to school?

Naturally, in the face of this, hypercorrect forms such as criterias are common. People think they should use the foreign pluralizer, but  the native one interferes. And sometimes a foreignified version becomes so commonly used that it becomes standardized. This seems to be what has happened to referendum. It wasn't until I started researching for this post that I came across this:

Well as long as I live I'll keep saying referendums. But I'm afraid the feeling that "formal" contexts call for a parade of ignorance is gathering momentum.

b

PS

Here's a crossword clue:

Exaggerated merits of left-hand page in old wrapper – (8)

Update 2016.10.11.16:50 – Time's up: OVERSOLD

Update 2017.05.15.11:55 –  Added PPS

PPS 

I saw a programme in the Les Hommes de l'Ombre series last night, and it reconfirmed my belief. I have referred before to Gaston Dorren's Lingo . It's still on my Guilt Pile, but some day I'll finish it; and I have read the chapter on French, unfortunately called Mummy Dearest. Dorren's point is that the French language always has an eye on its mother, Latin. There are, of course, many Francophones who know no Latin; but his point is about the relation between the spoken and written language. When a French person says, for example, ils aiment, the -nt has no phonemic value. But in writing it resurfaces. Sometimes, one of these Latinate fossils reappears (resounds?) in speech, because of a phonological rule: il est aimable, for example.

extract from Lingo

Dorren's point could have been more carefully made (that chapter heading, for example). But there is a grain of truth in it:modern pronunciations in many Romance languages hark back to a Latin spelling; elsewhere I have mentioned Italian pronunciations of -ezzo:

...Italian native speakers pronounce mezzo with the voiced affricate /ʣ/ and prezzo with the unvoiced affricate /ʦ/ without – for the most part – knowing the reason: that the one with voicing is derived from MEDIU(M) and the one without voicing from PRETIU(M). Yet I've never heard a mezzo-soprano called (in English) a /meʣəʊ/. Of course I'm not saying the English pronunciation 'should' have the /ʣ/;  it's just interesting that it doesn't.

But French prends la galette, as it were, when it comes to harking back in this way: Latin is never far from the surface of French, and English has no equivalents of Augustan poets like Corneille and Racine. Pope comes close, but his classicism strikes me as more superficial.

Returning to that TV programme, one  of the characters said "Je n'aime pas les référendums". When I heard this I was relieved to learn that French hasn't been infected by the rot of  supposedly formal hypercorrection.

And here are a few more clues:

• Nips back for a spot of political track-covering, (4)
  
  
• In Cardiff perhaps, initial aspiration for reformed Luddite without it may – in case of emergency – involve these, (6)
  
  
• Hidden talent ripe for development. (7)
  
  

My soul doth magnify the problem

On Sunday I visited my alma mater....

<aside>
and no, I haven't forgotten the alma mater speculation I indulged in 2 years ago [about a possible link between nourishment and the soul].  My investigations aren't complete, but Romanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, my Bible for Romance origins says this:

The words I've highlighted in that excerpt all have to do with nuts/kernels/chestnuts/acorns, and the headword Seele, means 'soul'. 

[And if like me you aren't entirely at home with German {O-level Best Before End June 1969}, the bits before the italicized words are abbreviations of names of languages and dialects (for example, siz. = Sicilian, log. = Logudorese {spoken in Sardinia}  etc., and the words in quotation marks are definitions.].

          </aside>

And there we sang Dyson in D. I tweeted whimsically – not to say predictably ()– 

"What a polymath! Bet his organ doesn't lose suction."

But O2 gobbled up the tweet (not omitting, of course, to debit me for sending it: there it still is in my Sent folder).

And the words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted".

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ]) is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises – as is exemplified in this YouTube comment.

<note>
I must learn not to read YouTube comments  – bad for the blood pressure.
</note>

It's only the Magnificat, in Latin, that highlights this issue for me. My choir is singing lots of very different pieces at our forthcoming concert, and several of them use one of the words but not both. In Bruckner's Christus Factus Est, exaltavit, in a Palestrina piece Exsultate Deo, and in a Viadana piece, Exsultate justi. (The spelling with s comes from our scores, European Sacred Music, though other sources have no s [incurring the impotent wrath of yet another YouTube commenter on that Bruckner piece:

] (I really must learn...))

Under "exult" Etymonline says

exult (v.) 

1560s, "to leap up;" 1590s, "to rejoice, triumph," from Middle French exulter, from Latin exultare/exsultare "rejoice exceedingly, revel, vaunt, boast;" literally "leap about, leap up...

So in the root there was an s – the sort of s you get in somersault.

As so often when linguistic Nazis insist that only their truth is right (and they tend to congregate moth-like about the flickering light emanating from YouTube), both options are fine.

But times a-wastin'.

b

PS The concert, incidentally is by no means all in Latin. There are also George Shearing's jazzy settings of Shakespeare sonnets and other lighter songs. Well worth an evening out. 13 June.

Update 2017.09.27.14:15 – Deleted old footer.

A foghorn conclusion

Tales from the word-face

My trawl through words containing -el- has brought to my attention the words: haveli (an Indian English word that refers to a big/imposing  house/mansion) and "hovel". I wonder whether they are related in any way...

Etymonline, and other dictionaries (eg Collins) say  hovel's origin is unknown, and that it was first found in English written sources in  the 15th century.

..."shed for animals" (mid-15c.), of unknown origin. Meaning "shed for human habitation; rude or miserable cabin" is from 1620s...

          More here

Portugal, says Wikipedia, was the first European power with a presence in India, starting in the early 16th century.

I focused on "a European power" because that's in my comfort zone, and it seemed to me at first that the word favela  might be involved, though there's obviously a century[at least]'s dislocation in the timeline. But here‘s one view about this word:

The word favela is commonly associated with the word slum, shantytown, squatter community or ghetto. Each of these words carries a negative connotation, slum implies squalor, shantytown suggests precarious housing, squatter community hints at illegality and ghetto presupposes violence. None of these definitions do justice to the richness of favela culture or acknowledge the historical place of the favela in Brazilian history.

...The term favela is first found in 19th century Portuguese dictionaries, referring to the favela tree commonly found in Bahia.

After the ‘Guerra de Canudos’ (Canudos War) in Bahia (1895-1896) government soldiers, who had lived amongst the favela trees, marched to Rio de Janeiro to await their payment. They settled on what is one of Rio’s hills and renamed the hill ‘Morro da Favela’ after the shrubby tree that thrived at the location of their victory against the rebels of Canudos. 

favela trees

favela / hovel...? The alternation between initials f and h is not uncommon in Romance Philology, especially in the languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula: for example, Latin filiu(m) gives Portuguese filho but Castilian hijo; and then the h can lose its sound, and be dropped altogether.

But the dates are all wrong. Besides, why bring Portugal into it just because I'm more at home with European sources? Hovel could have left India in the 14th century on the back of Timur's conquests leaving behind haveli. After that, its route into English is anyone's guess. Maybe Arabic [or something Oriental] was involved: 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.

But why should one word have diverged into two opposite meanings? Well, that's quite common – as is the reverse (flammable vs inflammable, pace the Health and Safety Executive); I just used one such word (quite as in "quite reasonable interesting" and "quite extraordinary".  And after two words diverge, with different meanings, they are subjected to different phonological pressures (elsewhere I have discussed the strange case of grammar and glamour). Elsewhere (again!) I have written:

...in Portuguese there is formoso -a and in Spanish hermoso -a. (And that f/h thing, incidentally, is at the root of Ferdinand and Isabella's royal emblem - the fennel plant: Aragonese had a word starting with f and Castilian had an h for the initial letter of the word for 'fennel'. But that's a whole nother kettle of red herring.) 

So the case for a link between haveli and "hovel" is [at best]  not proven. But a man can dream. [What he can't do though, is put off any longer the resumption of that trawl {in preparation of that book of word-lists}!].

b
Update 2015.05.14.09:20 – Correction of example, in the colour of shame.

Update 2018.08.12.15:55 –Added clarification in last line, which made more sense unexplained three years ago.

Its easier than that

The frequent substitution of its for it's, and vice versa, which some of you will have remarked on in my subject line (and those who didn't can expect a stern look from Mrs Thistlebottom), is not unlike a similar misspelling of two common French homophones, et and est. I'm not sure how to search for the origins of this confusion, but this exercise attests to the currency of the problem. If the confusion goes back long enough...

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972" theme="embarras de richesses">
When, at the end of my first year, I had to choose options for Part II of my language degree, I bore in mind the amount of linguistic data there was relating to French (my main language at the time) and its documentation. I knew I wanted to study Romance Philology, and there were also several papers called 'History of <language-name>'. But French was a huge area, with many internally contradictory records; and the lecturer on the History of French had written the one book all students would have to read. And his reputation as a lecturer was not inviting.

So in 1972 I took up Portuguese, with a view to studying the History of Portuguese in my final year, thus avoiding a field of study that would have given me some insight into the origins of the es/est confusion – central to the madcap theory I mentioned last time. For further details of that theory – which is mine – read on.
</autobiographical_note>

...I don't think my madcap theory is TOO mad. Unproven and undocumented, but not entirely implausible.

The royal coat of arms of Great Britain bears the motto Dieu et mon droît (a reference to the divine right of kings). Google finds well over 200,000,000 hits for the rather feeble (not to say meaningless) translation 'God and my right'.

Somewhere (when I had reading rights in the old BM reading room) I found a French bible with the words Le Seigneur est ma justesse, which appears in the AV (no refs. today, my battery's about to die, as is my brain) as 'The Lord is my righteousness'.

Jean Bodin, the French mid-late-sixteenth century jurist, first introduced the idea of the divine right of kings to govern, basing his ideas on Roman Law. It was perhaps this authority that appears (uncited) in Bossuet's "Sermons choisis de Bossuet": 

                                  Image in Google Books

James VI of Scotland published his Basilikon Doron in Edinburgh in  1599, but he obviously wanted the English to understand his view of The Kingly Gift, as a London edition followed in 1603.

The Scots textbooks of the divine right of kings were written in 1597-98 by James VI of Scotland before his accession to the English throne. His Basilikon Doron, a manual on the powers of a king, was written to edify his four-year-old son Henry Frederick [sic but I imagine at least a colon is meant, if not a new sentence] king "acknowledgeth himself ordained for his people, having received from the god a burden of government, whereof he must be countable."

From Wikipedia on the Divine right of k'ings.

Cutting to the chase, let's imagine Dieu e[s]t mon droît was the translation in some French bible of the verse that appears in the AV as 'The lord is my righteousness'. The French-speaking Plantagenets would have met it. What better motto for Henry V (the first king of Great Britain to adopt the motto) to adopt as a statement of a newly defined right (Henry having picked it up from his forebear Richard I, who favoured it as a crusading battle cry [meaning, roughly, 'God's on my side'])?


b


Update 2014.06.0910.16:10 – Added this PS:
PS
I must have dreamed my attribution of 'the Lord is my righteousness' to the Authorized Version: according to the searchable text provided by the University of Michigan, that exact phrase doesn't occur. A candidate for an alternative occurs at various places in the Book of Jeremiah, notably 23:6 – 'THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS'.

Update 2014.06.09.16:55 – Added this PPS:

PPS
The quote in blue explains the bit about James's view of Basilikon Doron. He was the first major contributor to the doctrine of the divine right of kings. Other blue phrases are additions that fill in other bits of the argument.

Update 2014.06.15.18:55 – Fixed typos and added editorial gloss.

Update 2014.08.01.21.15 – Added 'translation' in maroon.

Update 2018.06.04.11:00 – Various typo fuxes and deleted old footer.

It's easy enough for YOU to say that

A while ago, I lazily left it to a Wikipedia link to explain my use of a $10 word here: it was epenthetic.

<autobiographical_note date_range="2006" theme="word-initial consonant clusters">
During a practice lesson I gave during my CELTA training, with a polyglot class of learners one of whom was a Pole, I told my guinea-pigs, when we were working on a text that included the word 'zloty' (to my private shame, though my academic knowledge of phonology was greater than my trainer's – and he either didn't notice or overlooked it) that the consonant cluster /zl/ 'didn't occur in English'. Of course it does: 'prize list', 'has left', 'is like', 'grizzly'^‡.[avoiding possibly contentious examples – that call for footnotes  – there are a fair few one-word examples, but they are mostly proper nouns: Breasley, Dursley, Grazeley [that's one for the Berkshire readers], Hazlitt, Isley, Paisley, Quisling, Riesling, Rizla, Tesla.... The only common noun I can think of, apart from grizzly is gosling]. What I meant was that this consonant cluster doesn't occur at the beginning of a word.
</autobiographical_note>

Word spaces are a fairly recent convention. Many of the houses at Pompeii sported a mosaic like the ones spattered higgledy-piggledy about this page (victims of Blogger's whimsical attitude to graphics). Not only were these signs designed to be understood by people who couldn't read; they were created by artisans who couldn't read:

'Bewar eof thed og'                

 

was their stentorian warning; but nobody was going to ask 'What's an og?' – there was a picture of one  – so the signs did their job.

Other such mosaics at Pompeii had the word space as one might expect:

or none at all:

<digression theme="manufactured sameness">
There are hundreds of different mosaics at Pompeii, each one – of course – unique. When, later this century, London is inundated and left to rack and ruin to be discovered by 4th millennium archaeologists, how many different 'Beware of the dog' signs will they find, I wonder... A dozen? Maybe 20...? It'd be interesting to chart civilization in terms of the metric

        'Beware of the dog' signs per unit population.

</digression>

Where was I? Oh yes, word spaces. Moving on, let's consider the beginnings of words.

In The King's Speech the Geoffrey Rush character advises the king to deal with problem consonants at the beginnings of words by taking a run up: /maɪ əpi:pəl/ for 'my people'^†. Languages often take a similar course with outlandish phonemes or consonant clusters at the beginnings of words. Among the signs of this are changing names of places over time. Stamboul Train could have a 21st century sequel: Istanbul Plane. That 'I' is epenthetic.

There is a rather better-hidden epenthetic vowel in pairs of words that derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root but came to English by different routes, one of which added this sort of vowel: state, for example, and estate. The latter arrived at 13th-century English by way of a route that included languages that need a run-up before the consonant cluster. To quote that Etymonline entry:

early 13c., "rank, standing, condition," from Anglo-French astat, Old French estat "state, position, condition, health, status, legal estate"...

So far so good. But Modern French complicates the issue by hiding the 's' behind an acute accent:

...(Modern French état), from Latin status "state or condition," from PIE root *sta- "to stand"

Meanwhile, in Spanish for example, we see estado. There's an /s/ there all right., unlike French – which has no /s/ in the word as spoken, just its vestige when it's written down.

About that 'vestige' I have a madcap theory about the divine right of kings. But it has nothing to do with epenthetic vowels and I have things to be getting on with. So it'll have to wait for an update.

b
PS
In the event I made it a separate post.

Update: 2014.06.03.17:45 – Added this note:

^† I knew I had a reason for mentioning word-breaks, though the casual reader might have wondered what I was on. My point was that, for the King, /p/ at the beginning of a word was a problem. Adding an extra run-up syllable solved that problem by inventing a new word: /maɪəpi:pəl/.

Update: 2014.06.04.11:10 – Added this note:
^‡ And I don't think this word has a syllabic L (such as occurs in words like 'drizzle', which isn't /drɪzəl/ [except if you're listening to The Goon Show – Bluebottle would say /drɪzəl/

<autobiographical_note date_range="1972-1973" theme="The Goon Show>
John Trim, to whom I am indebted for my interest in phonetics, used to say 'The Goon Show may be said to be no more than applied secondary articulation.'
 </autobiographical_note>

 ]. A fractious infant is /grɪzĮi:/ [that's the best I can do for now: the typographical tools I know about aren't very open to the idea of syllabic consonants] but a bear is a /grɪzli:/ 

Update: 2014.06.05.10:45 – Added to /zl/ examples.

Update: 2014.06.06.10:15 – And some more.

Update: 2014.06.08.15:50 – Resisted the temptation to add some more, and added PS pointing to THAT theory.

Update: 2018.03.27.12:05 –  Lots of reformatting/replacing pictures that had got corrupted/clarifying text.

WTF

A COW HERD MAKES MORE

GREENHOUSE GAS A DAY

THAN A 3,000-MILE DRIVE

This startling snippet leapt out at me from a Times Magazine article just now. 'A single drover?' I thought, 'WTF!' – meaning, of course, 'What a Tremendous Fart'. Silly me, though, there was a word-space saving it from that hyper-flatulent meaning. But I wondered why the sub-editor had gone for that unnatural choice of words.

I looked in the text, and read this:

A herd of cows daily produces more greenhouse gas than a family car driven for 3,000 miles.

Now look back at the misleading subhead: it is in a 3-line box, with first and third lines very tight. 'A herd of cows' is three letters and a wordspace longer than 'a cow herd'. A monospace typeface such as Courier (in which an N takes up as much space as an M, and an I as much as an O, rather than the sort of proportional font that we are more accustomed to in print) accentuates this:

A herd of cows

versus  A cow herd

And if you made space for those three extra letters and one extra space by moving 'more' down to the second line, then that line'd be too full. So whether or not the medium is the message, the medium can certainly change the message in all sorts of risible (and/or calamitous) ways. I expect examples of the latter will come to me, but it's coming on to rain, and the washing's out.

(Just a quickie to let you know that work on V5.0 is under way, and V4.0 is still free to download!†)

b
Update, 20-13.09.29.18:00 – Added this PS:

And while we're on the subject of flatulence, I was dumbfounded by the ignorance and cultural insensitivity of the English-speaker from (or at least, resident in, Wales) who is reported as having said (one has to be careful – it was the Mail Online):

 'Just imagine how embarrassing it will be to have the word "fart" in your village's name .... I'd be humiliated every time I told someone my address'.

Oh dear.... The alleged speaker was not Hyacinth Bucket, but 'Sioned Jones' (who, with a Welsh-sounding name like that, should be ashamed of herself). OK, there'd be some sophomoric titters and photos of signposts, but that's par for the course when languages rub along together. It is, for example, only the most po-faced and socially insensitive English-speaking pedant who gives Immanuel Kant his native vowel; it's uncomfortably close to a taboo word.

The article 'explains' the problem:

Campaigners say the ancient name^‡ should be replaced because there is no 'V' in the Welsh language

And I'll spell out the URL, as it is a gem: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430414/Varteg-Wales-renamed-Farteg-villagers-fear-make-butt-jokes.html#ixzz2gIbMlC56  – which invites the rejoinder 'No, it's not the making of butt-jokes they're worried about, it's fart-jokes.'

In fact, that explanation is a bit of an over-simplification. The written Welsh language has no letter 'v'. Welsh does have a voiced labio-dental fricative phoneme, to give it its $10 name; it has a /v/, and that phoneme is represented in writing as a single letter – which explains that old Ffion joke:

<political_history egg_sucker="grandmother">
Ffion was William Hague's wife, and he was PM[correction: ] party leader at the time.
</political_history>

'Why are there two 'f's in Ffion?'/ Because there's no effin' Prime Minister[correction: ] party leader' – /f/ is written 'ff'.

In short, when languages come together,  there is scope for double entendres. I'd rather live in a world with a bit of lavatory humour than in a world bereft of its minority languages.

Update 2013.09.30.09:45 - Added this PPS

And it's just occurred to me that that Ffion joke underlines my point about double entendres happening when languages meet (and if you thought I chose it because of that I'm sorry to disabuse you): here the two languages are the meta-language that addresses spelling and the informal speech that uses such defused (and so inoffensive) obscenities as "effin'".

Update 2013.10.02.15:55 – added this note:
^† Not any more

Update 2013.10.04.10:05  – added this note:
 ^‡I've only just appreciated the stupidity and insensitivity of this subhead. I might have guessed, given that it's the Mail. The 'ancient name' is 'Farteg'. A handful of centuries (maybe 6 –7 at the outside) doesn't qualify for ancientness. Farteg was called Farteg long before the Mail's Year Zero, 1066.

Update 2012.10.15.14:40  – Footer updated

---

 Mammon (When Vowels Get Together V4.1: Collection of Kindle word-lists grouping different pronunciations of vowel-pairs – AA-AU, EA-EU,   IA-IU, OA-OU, and – new for V4.1 – UA-UE.  If you buy it, contact  @WVGTbook on Twitter and I'll alert you to free downloads of the forthcoming volumes; or click the Following button at the foot of this page.)
And if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

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

'By oak and ash and bitter thorn'

Jack Orion swore a bloody oath -
By oak and ash and bitter thorn
Saying 'Lady, I never was in your house
Since the day that I was born.'
trad.

I was reminded of this song (itself brought to my attention by Bert Jansch's rendition many years ago, but I won't  put a link here because it seems to be impossible to visit a lyrics/music site without attracting a never-ending stream of ringtone-related spam) by a Richard Maybey programme I caught at the end of yesterday morning (which I haven't caught up with yet – but will do when The Schedule (for #WVGTbook) allows. At one stage, as I remember, Maybey said something like 'Ash comes from an old word meaning "spear"'; he may have said '...an Old English word....' – which would make sense as the letter 'æ' (incidentally, and I'm sure not coincidentally, called ash) is an Old English character.

My ears pricked up at that stage, as I caught a whiff of Proto-Indo-European. It seemed likely (and I'll write this before checking Etymonline) that the Old English word was related (by shared PIE ancestry) to the Latin word hasta. OK, here goes:

ash (2)
type of tree, Old English æsc "ash tree," also "spear made of ash wood," from Proto-Germanic *askaz, *askiz (cf. Old Norse askr, Old Saxon ask, Middle Dutch esce, German Esche), from PIE root *os- "ash tree"

Phew  – so far so good. But hereafter the definition sticks to the tree, mentioning the Latin ornus. I'm pretty sure hasta is lurking there somewhere though.

But what about that song? What had made Jack so angry? Well someone had been there before him, and he had guessed at the goings-on (prompted by her question):

'Whether have you left with me
Your hosen or your glove
Or are you returned back again
To know more of my love?'

No wonder he was miffed; presumably she had no sense of smell, or perhaps Tom had borrowed Jack's deod... whoops, anachronism alert. After his 'bloody oath', she confirms his worst fears:

'Oh then it was your servant, Tom,
That hath so cruelly beguiled me
And woe that the blood of the ruffian lad
Should spring in my body.'

Long story short, they all die, or as Stoppard's Player King puts it 'The good die unhappily, the bad die unluckily. That is tragedy.'‡

<autobiographical _note>
In my hitch-hiking days  I used to wile (sic†) away the time by singing. I had to watch my repertoire though. It took me a while to realize that songs like So Early in the Spring weren't conducive to drivers doing anything but put their foot down and leave the madman in the rear-view mirror, singing

'Oh curse your gold and your silver too 

And curse the girl that won't prove true...' 

†That's 'wile', as in 'beguile', cp other pairs like ward/guard, warranty/guarantee and so on. There's a strong move towards 'while away', and most people prefer the h spelling (which has the mnemonic advantage of referring to time). Far be it from me to say it's wrong; it's not. I'm just saying that when I omit 'the' h I mean to.
</autobiographical_note>

There's more to be said about trees and oaths/magic/significance, but it'll have to wait for an update (after I've listened to that programme).

b
Update 2013.06.27.16:20 Small addition (Esprit d'escalier)

Update 2013.06..28 Added this footnote:
‡Misremembered from a school visit ...

<inline_PPPS>
I say  more about this visit here,
in  a later post: Beware worm-holes? The Harmless Drudgery blog welcomes careful time-travellers.
</inline_PPPS>

....to a press preview of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead that I went to in the late '60s. What the Player King actually said was

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily. That is what tragedy means.

Update 2013.07.12 Added this PS:
Further to my wile/beguile footnote, I was rehearsing for this tour ...

<missing_link>
There used to be a link to the tour poster here, but I can't find it in the choir's archives. I reported on the tour here.
</missing_link>

...(which is only a week away at the time of this update) when I noted a phrase that I hadn't thought about before, in the madrigal All Creatures Now, written during the reign of Good Queen Bess ('See where she comes, see where she comes with flow'ry garlands crownéd...'). I have sung this madrigal before, and as I say I haven't given this phrase a second thought: 'Music the time beguileth'.  It doesn't seem to belong semantically (or musically) with either what comes before or after it. So previously I have dismissed this line as just an Elizabethan filler that doesn't mean very much.

But having so recently written That's 'wile', as in 'beguile'... (in this post, a few lines back) I realized that Bennet (the composer) was referring to the way music has a beguiling effect on the listener's awareness of the passage of time; it wiles time away.

Update: 2018.04.16.11.35 – Added inline PPS and various format tweaks.

Update: 2019.03.13.15.15 – Added inline PPPS.

Siete voi qui...?

This morning's 'Start the Week' dealt with dystopias (not 'Dis topias' as I once thought – with an eye on Dante's Infernal City. And, on the subject of supposed etymologies, I got 'dystopia' right by a supposed antithesis to 'έυ topia', as though Sir Thomas More's Utopia had been a place where all things were well and all manner of things would be well (to repurpose Dame Julian of Norwich's words by giving her syntax a tweak). Error on error! Sir Thomas More's 'Utopia' was a 'not place' (όυ...), not a 'well place'.

So, in summary, the contrast between a utopia and a dystopia is not a 'good, well' place versus a 'Dis-like place, but just 'not place' versus 'bad, ill, abnormal place' – not a very  satisfactory contrast; not nearly as good as 'good, well' versus 'bad, ill, abnormal' –  as in the case of 'euphemism' versus 'dysphemism' ('pass away' versus 'fall off the perch') . But the language is more about what happens rather than what should happen in an elegant world.

But I must cut this short. I must be getting on with #WVGTbook.

b

PS And if you got the Ser Brunetto reference in my subject line, take a team point; double points if you both spotted it and realized that I'd put the old bugger in the wrong circle of the Inferno!
PPS
<rant>
And on the subject of old buggers, has anyone else noticed the recent ramping up of televised sex? In the attempt to épater le bourgeois it used to be that '...a glimpse of stocking/Was thought of as something shocking'. Then more and more explicit treatment of the Missionary Position became the norm. The latest 'advance' in the Grandmother's Footsteps-like game of 'How much can we get away with?' is, as my old drinking mate (well, fellow student) Steve Segaller† put it 'Anal entry, my dear Watson'. It started with the Politician's Husband, closely followed by The Americans (in the first episode of which it happened twice – once in a rape (message: 'This is Not Good') and once during an illicit affair (message: ... :-? 'What can we do to keep the viewers interested?'). What's the next step? 'Now Heaven knows/Anything goes' – in a race to the ... erm.
</rant>

Update 2013.06.17.11:03 Small tweak.
Update 2013.06.18.10:45 Added PPS.
Update 2013.06.19.11:55Added PPPS.

 PPPS †Maybe not quite an ale knight (with thanks to OED's word of the day; for more such gems follow @OED) but certainly an ale squire.


Update 2013.09.30.11:05
Header updated:

---

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

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

What's he been up to?

I see with horror that my last post was last month; I did warn you (here and here) that things might go quiet while I got stuck in to IE.

As a taster for the release next week of #WVGTbook (and if you don't know what that is you haven't been paying attention ), here are the notes from the IE section:

1. cockamamie
   The  Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with the sound /eɪ/ in the stressed syllable, but the audio sample has the sound /æ/. This word is not listed at all in the  British National Corpus but its American counterpart – the Corpus of Contemporary American ('COCA') –  lists 66, suggesting that this is primarily an American usage. It is little wonder that the pronunciation of the 'English' variant (according to the dictionary) is uncertain; it may very well be the first time the speaker has uttered the word! A speaker of British English would probably prefer the word  cock-and-bull.
2. hoodie
   The name of the garment (a sweater with hood attached) has spread metaphorically to its habitual wearer, in a way reminiscent of a similar metaphorical use of the word anorak – reminiscent, that is, in terms of process rather than semantics.
3. hurried
   The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with the ending /id/, but the Collins English Dictionary has the ending /ɪd/. Both pronunciations are common. In some dialects /id/ marks the past simple of the verb and /ɪd/ marks the adjective.
4. knobkierie
   Both 'ie' digraphs have the /i/ pronunciation. The Macmillan English Dictionary gives the variant knobkerrie, with the same transcription, but the audio sample has the vowel sound /e/.
5. ambient, convenient, obedient, resilient, subservient, and transient (unlike sapient)
   The Macmillan English Dictionary lists these words and the abstract nouns ending in '-ience' derived from them, but not sapience . This word is, however, listed in several other dictionaries. The link given here is to the Collins English Dictionary, but other '-ience' words are not separately listed.
6. brassière
   The 'è' is often ignored (as it is in the transcription and the audio sample provided in the Macmillan English Dictionary). Moreover, as in the  Macmillan English Dictionary, the 'ss' is realized as /z/. As a result, the only distinguishing feature between brazier and brassière is the stressed vowel (/eɪ/ versus /æ/).
7. costumier
   The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with the ending /iə/ but the audio sample has /ie/ followed by some kind of central vowel. This shows some awareness in the speaker of the French origin (unlike in the word croupier, which has a clear /iə/).
8. fluent^‡ and lenient (unlike salient)
   The Macmillan English Dictionary lists these words and the abstract nouns ending in 'ency' derived from them, but not saliency. This word is, however, listed in several other dictionaries. The link given here is to the Collins English Dictionary, but other '-ency' words are not separately listed.
9. orienteering
   The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with the vowel sound  /iə/, but the audio sample has the vowel sound /ie/. Both pronunciations are common..
10. skier
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with the vowel sound /i:ə/, as does the Collins English Dictionary. Confusingly – for the student who expects the pattern cry –> crier, fly –> flier, try –> trier ... to apply in the same way to the informal verb sky [meaning 'hit a ball very high, as if inviting a catch']† – that dictionary also lists the word skyer, pronounced with the vowel sound /aɪə/, but the  Macmillan English Dictionary does not. 
11. variegated
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with the vowel sound  /iə/, but the audio sample has the sound /ɪ/.
12. ancient
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this with /ʃə/, but /ʧə/ is also used.
13. ancien régime
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcription of the stressed vowel in the first word is /iæ/, but in the audio sample the vowel is nasalized.
14. fie
    The Macmillan English Dictionary does not list this word. The link given here is to the Collins English Dictionary.
15. biennial and triennial
    The Macmillan English Dictionary lists only these two words with the vowel sound /aɪe/ in British English, in this case two vowels. In American English this pair of vowels is much more common, given the /aɪ/ sound at the end of prefixes such as multi-. One example among many is multiethnic.
16. brier
    The Macmillan English Dictionary lists this as an alternative to the more common briar.
17. materiel
    The Macmillan English Dictionary trancription has the vowel sound /iə/, but the audio sample has /ie/ – matching the Collins English Dictionary entry. 
18. per diem
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this, with a matching audio sample, with the (unique) vowel sound /i:e/.
19. couturier
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcription of the final syllable is /ieɪ/, but the audio sample  has a clear /iə/ (as for croupier, which has matching transcription and audio). Both pronunciations are common in French borrowings ending '-ier'.
20. handkerchief
    The Macmillan English Dictionary list both this and the arguably archaic kerchief . The  British National Corpus has only 24 instances of kerchief, 21 of which are in prose fiction. (In fact, the category is called 'W_fict_prose', and I suspect the covers may  predominantly feature the colour pink!) In contrast, the same corpus reports over 600 instances of handkerchief – more than 24 x (24 + 1)*.
    The  Macmillan English Dictionary transcription of handkerchief has /ɪ/ in the last syllable, but the audio sample has  /i:/. For the less familiar kerchief, the audio matches the /ɪ/  transcription.
21. mischief and neckerchief
    The  Macmillan English Dictionary transcription of these words  has /ɪ/ in the last syllable, but the audio sample has  /i:/.
22. quietus
    The  Macmillan English Dictionary gives this transcription, but the audio sample has the sound /aɪeɪ/. The pronunciation of Latin tags reflects the four or five fashions for pronunciation that have prevailed in English schools from time to time. See also note ²³.
23. sine die
    The Macmillan English Dictionary  gives this transcription, but the audio sample has the sound /ieɪ/ 
24. clientele 
    The  Macmillan English Dictionary transcription gives this vowel sound, but the audio sample has the /aɪə/ of the more familiar (and fully anglicized) client. Both pronunciations are common.
25. eight 
    The many derivatives (eighteeen, eighty, eighteenth... etc) are not listed separately. The effective digraph in gaiety is 'ai', so the word is listed in the 'ai' section.
26. medieval
    The Macmillan English Dictionary transcribes this /i'i:/, with the two vowels separated to mark the onset of the stressed syllable. But in the audio sample this is not clear, and it might be felt that there is a single ('ultra-lengthened') /i:/. Both pronunciations are common – sometimes even in the same speaker, with the separation more clearly marked in more formal contexts. 

b
Update 2013.06.07.19:15
^* – maths was never my strong point.
Update 2013.06.07.22:55
^‡ – yes, yes, I know... That's what drafts are for.
Update 2013.06.08.19.50
† This funky sans-serif font marks an addition I have made to the skier note, which (belatedly) explains the apparently irrelevant mention of skyer.


Update 2013.09.30.11:05
Header updated:

---

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

Freebies (Teaching resources: nearly 32,400 views**,  and  4,400 downloads to date. They're very eclectic - mostly EFL and MFL, but one of the most popular is from KS4 History, dating from my PGCE, with 1570 views/700 downloads to date. So it's worth having a browse.)

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