As I was saying

The words "As I was saying" trigger in me a memory I described a few years ago, here

[<something>] reminded me of a story I heard in a half-remembered lecture, about Juan del Encina.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1971-1972">
In May 1972 I was ... not quite a world authority on sixteenth-century Spanish literature, but Professor E. M. Wilson, my lecturer for that year, was.  

Juan del Encina

Juan del Encina, author of some of the seminal works in Spanish Golden Age literature, was arrested by the Holy Inquisition in the middle of a lecture. He was away for some considerable time (years, I think, but I was never much of a note-taker; I'm sure the details are somewhere on the Internet, if you‘re that way inclined). 

When he returned, his opening words were Dicebamus hesterno  die [="{As} we were saying the other day"].

<digression>
It was partly because of Professor Wilson's specialism (he had just contributed the chapter on Calderón to the standard work on Golden Age Literature first published in 1971) that the Hispanic Society chose the play mentioned here.
</digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Back on terra firma (this post, phew)  this is in effect an update to one I wrote nearly five years ago, but it's a bit more than an afterthought. It hinges on some research notes I produced in the late 1970s – when my future had more in it than my past.

<autobiographical_note>
I found the notes during a massive clearout of things I had written. The earliest was a spy spoof I produced when I was still wearing shorts.

<disambiguation> 

(no reference here, for North American readers, to deshabille. These were the 'my mamma done told me' kind of dress: knee-pants, if you will). 

<disambiguation>

</autobiographical_note>

Just to recap the gist of my speculative idea:

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'.

...

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 (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'])? 

*[2019 correction] I was wrong about the AV, which has (Jeremiah 23:6) 'the Lord our righteousness' . The Revised Standard Version   has Jeremiah 23:6 translated as 'the Lord is our righteousness' (as do other versions)
. 

A French version of this battle cry might have been Dieu est notre droit, which in Old French could have had et for est; e before -st becomes acute, and all this correct spelling stuff wouldn't have bothered Richard I (or his advisers, or chaplain) when he adopted it as his motto at Gisors in 1198. And a few centuries later (as my original post said). it was in use at around the time that defining the divine right of kings became relevant.

<digression>

Getting One's Metaphors in a Twist

David Coleman is not the only source of Colemanballs. Sports commentaries generally offer a cornucopia of such infelicities. The need for a continuous stream of verbiage almost guarantees it.  In the half-time break of a recent Ireland/England rugby match an  example was produced and allowed to slip away unnoticed (apparently unnoticed in the studio, but linguistically aware observers were on the qui vive). 

England had dominated the first half, but in the last ten minutes Ireland were resurgent, and had a one point lead.  The person leading the panel of interested parties in the studio wanted to say Ireland's tails were up and Ireland's noses were in front. Given the positional sense of the two metaphors (tails up/noses in front) it's no surprise that what came out of the presenter's mouth was the posturally improbable mixture: 

Ireland have their tails in front.

</digression>

But those shelves won't clear themselves.

b

Crossed wires

Not for the first time, my Tai Chi class has set me off on what might politely be called a tangent (less politely another hare-brained reflection).

<digression theme="hare-brained">
Interesting metaphor, that; presumably not unrelated to the Mad Hatter: darting about, with random changes of direction. (They're not really boxing;  something to do with mating, I think. Wikipedia would know.) 

<meta_digression>
And another thing. In Western culture we have the association of the moon with lunacy (which does what it says on the tin, as it were), but many Eastern cultures see  not a Man in the Moon  but a Rabbit in the Moon. I wonder... (For Further Study, as they used to say in the ISO world: "FFS" [meaning "interesting, but don't hold your breath"])
<meta_digression>

</digression>

My teacher often teaches in mirror image, and refers to our bodies: 'Your right hand,' she says, demonstrating with her left. This is easy enough to understand, once you know the convention and have practised a few hundred times: the body just gets used to reproducing (or, at least, trying to reproduce) the movement demonstrated. But to a newcomer it‘s not so easy. What Wordsworth called our meddling intellect gets involved, willy-nilly.

This is reminiscent, I thought, of the Stroop Effect, 

...a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. When the name of a color (e.g., "blue", "green", or "red") is printed in a color that is not denoted by the name (e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color.

More here

In short, red is easier to make sense of than green. Presumably, colour is processed in a different part of the brain than writing, and the translation of writing to meaning in yet another, and the translation of writing to sound in yet another. So there's a huge amount of processing going on here, and if two  of those domains overlap (the written glyphs' meaning and their cognitive content – R-E-D) the brain has life a bit easier.

This crossing of wires, the interference of the intellect with a motor skill, is often apparent to a language teacher. Many years ago, when I was teaching Portuguese to a group of adults (people who've been taught at school the stifling and confusing and just plain WRONG lesson that the way to solve a problem is to turn the intellect loose on it) I drew this diagram to show what I wanted them to do:

There are many more steps on the left-hand route, each being error-prone. So there's a Chinese Whispers effect, which means that there's next-to-no chance of the sound output of the two routes matching.

The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to other motor skills (and speaking is unquestionably a motor skill).

<digression theme="Underhill talk">
I missed a recent talk by Adrian Underhill, in which he talked about decognitvizing the teaching of pronunciation to ESOL students. I must catch up with the transcript. Watch this space.
</digression>

So a teacher has to beware of the interference of intellect. On the other hand, though, it's easy (and fashionable) to go too far in what has been called, in another context, the romanticization of ... illiteracy (that "..." represents the one word musical, which is what I meant by another context. See this letter  to the Guardian from many leading musical lights).

b

Letters playing leapfrog

... or 'metathesis' as we say in the business - it's what relates 'wrought' ('strong' past form of) to 'work' (displaced in more recent English by the regular  past form 'worked'), and is why Chaucer called birds bridde and a widow a widwe. On the radio this morning (or yesterday morning, by the time I publish - and OK, it was Woman's Hour) Nigella Lawson pronounced 'mascarpone' à la Delia Smith - /ma:skǝpǝʊni:/. And this pronunciation accounts for all the 'mask a pony' jokes - if you haven't heard any yet, you can easily add to the corpus (delicti?).

Now I'm not a stickler for pretentiously 'correct' pronunciation of foreign words. But even with purely British English phonemes the word would be /mæska:pǝʊni:/. So I'd expect Nigella Lawson, who studied for a year in Italy (many years ago - but she has recently given live TV/radio interviews in Italian to at least ('when I split an infinitive it stays goddam split') use an English pronunciation that respects the Italian spelling. 'Jumping Jesophohat', I thought, 'so Delia Smith's not the only one, she just happened to be the first I heard - maybe this is metathesis.'

In a not-so-recent discussion in the UsingEnglish forums. We were discussing the expression the dog's b@llocks. I suggested:

I've heard from a fairly reliable source (Stephen Fry I think) a derivation for 'dog's bollocks' that is not mentioned on that Phrase Finder page. Some commodity (it may have been the toy construction set, 'Meccano') was listed in a catalogue as '<whatever> - Box (standard)/ Box (deluxe)'. From this we get two idioms; "bog standard" and "dog's bollocks".

Two for the price of one - neat! I'm not sure I believe, but I'm impressed.

This was questioned: one contributor said the idea involved 'a linguistic jump', and I replied:

'Linguistic jump'? Speaking as a student of philology, I can say that it's hardly a jump at all. Consider the French guirlande and the Spanish grinalda. We can ignore the u, as it just keeps the g hard.

So we've got French

G + I + R + L + A + N + D + <unstressed final vowel>

versus Spanish

G + R + I + N + A + L + D + <unstressed final vowel>

The beginning and the end are the same, but four of the middle five phonemes are in different positions, and the only 'stable' one changes in quality (it's nasalized [in French, because the consonant that follows it has changed - clarification for blog]). In language development, phonemes jump about.

I first noticed this, before I embarked on this field of navel-gazing, in a sea shanty, Bring 'em down:

Up the coast to Vallipo,
Northward to Cally-o
Them Vallipo girls I do admire,
They set your riggin' all afire!
Them Vallipo girls puts on a show ...

I shall draw a veil (sail more like) over the details of the show. Valparaíso => "Vallipo";  Callao => "Cally-o". This leads me to a bit of home-grown folk etymology, which I expect to be dismissed by readers who decry the efforts of the imaginary body CANOE - the 'Committee to Ascribe a Naval Origin to Everything'^† ).

In a sea battle, the part of a ship where you could do most damage to an enemy ship was the poop (Spanish  popa) - the seat of 'intelligence'. A ship whose poop you had blown off could be said to be con ninguna popa - 'with no poop' - directionless, not unlike a dumb barge. Just give that phrase to the sailors who used 'Vallipo' for Valparaíso, and Bob's your hare-brained philologist.

However this is unproven, and - I think - unlikely. The n separated from p by an unstressed vowel could easily assimilate to the p, giving -mp- (because p is bilabial and so's m: there are about 400 English headwords* that  include the consonant  cluster /mp/ and few  - fewer than 100, more than half of which are 'un-' + <initial-p>' - that include /np/. [That volume of my dictionary - consonants - is a long way off but consonant clusters starting with a sonorant will be fairly high up the priority list.] Also, a few of the ones that have the spelling '-mp- don't have the phoneme 'p' - for example 'emphasis', 'emphysema'..., which have /mf/. And if an accident of word-building throws up such a cluster [as in 'unpleasant'] in informal speech the assimilation takes place, giving that word the same first syllable as 'umpire'; similarly a phrase like 'in present company' often starts with an /ɪmp/.) If anything, the derivation is suspect because there is too little change in the sounds. And g>c - that is, /g/ to /k/, is a change in the wrong direction.†

But I'll leave anyone who's that interested to do some research - starting from that Wikipedia link to Lenition  and pursuing this line of thinking to a more reliable source. In short, as in Latin acute ('sharply') being at the root of Spanish agudamente, a /k/ 'should' become a /g/ (and a /t/ a /d/ etc etc...), not vice versa - as for the -mente suffix, that would be a meta-digression. When I've got some reasonable progress on the book under my belt, though...it's extraordinarily interesting and well worth waiting for.  This digression (which doesn't involve metathesis) has already gone on far too long. As has this post - Christmas tree to light.

b

Update:1212.13:17.15 A few tweaks to the 'nincompoop' digression.)

Update: 2013.10.02.16:20
Footer updated.

Update: 2013.10.27.19:25
Added PS: 
*PS
.... in my dictionary of choice (but only because it is installed and lets me do useful wildcard searches): the Macmillan English Dictionary.

Update: 2014.04.22.15:05
Added PPS: Metathesis crops ups all over the place: I've been thinking recently about the derivation of Simnel Cake. Here's what Etymonline says:

"sweet cake," c.1200, from Old French simenel "fine wheat flour; flat bread cake, Lenten cake," probably by dissimilation from Vulgar Latin *siminellus (also source of Old High German semala "the finest wheat flour," German Semmel "a roll"), a diminutive of Latin simila "fine flour" (see semolina).

Just thought I'd mention it...

Update: 2014.09.29.14:15
Here's that -MENTE digression...

Update: 2014.10.02.14:25 – Added this PPPS
†PPPS I've come across what looks, on the face of it, like a counter-example (to the tendency of a /k/ to evolve into a /g/, rather than vice versa). When she was about a sixth of her present age (though she's never allowed to forget it –  aren't families wonderful?)  my daughter used to call spaghetti /pəsketi:/ (another case of metathesis, as it happens). The /g/ has become a /k/ though, not by a magical reversal of that lenition I linked to before but by another linguistic process – assimilation: briefly the voicing of the /g/ assimilates to the voicelessness of its new neighbour, /s/, and so becomes /k/.

Update: 2015.08.10.15:45 – Added this P⁴S

P⁴S A common source of metathesis in everyday speech is in the bastardization of borrowed words. People who should know better (#GBBO passim) often call crème pâtissière 'crème pâtisserie' , and you  don't have to listen to Classic FM too long to hear Cavallería Rusticana called /kævǝ'li:ri:ǝ.../. In both these cases, and often elsewhere, liquidity of phoneme-position (appropriately as /r/ is a liquid in the argot of phonologists) tends to favour phonemes near /r/.


Update: 2018.06.08.11:25 – Added this P⁵S

P⁵S
† This imaginary body is mooted in the penultimate paragraph of that piece on the derivation of brass monkies.

Update: 2018.10.03.09:25 – Added repair in red. (Over the years something got accidentally deleted.)