Rules run amuck

I‘ve mentioned before the way that people learning a language (particularly people acquiring their mother tongue) tend to take a newly-learnt rule and test it to destruction:

It's fairly obvious to a  native speaker that the most common way [of forming a plural] is to add an s. In fact, this rule becomes apparent whenever a young language learner mistakenly adds an s to an irregular plural – sheep becomes sheepS rather than sheep, for example; and when an adult corrects mouseS to mice, the compulsion to keep faith in the add-an-s rule is so strong that the next attempt is quite often miceS.

More here

But a similar source of error is frequently met, particularly in a singer's life, with respect to the rules of foreign languages, and particularly (as in that add-an-s case) the rules of phonology.

The two that spring most readily to mind (I was going to call them "my favorites", but  favorite is not quite the word) occur in French and in German (both languages that I have studied). And although my O-level German knowledge,  as I have admitted before, is Best Before November 1969 [or whenever it was in that winter], I had to resurrect it in order to study Romance philology...

<EXAMPLES type="German scholars of Romance languages" need-to-know="0">

• Grimm (of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame); the brothers made a crucial observation, known as Grimm's Law.
• Meyer-Lübke, compiler of Romanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
  the bible of all students of this area – the one necessary reference
• Gerhard Rohlfs, editor of Sermo Vulgaris Latinus
  a collection of very early texts – including, for example, graffiti from Pompeii
• and many others

</EXAMPLES>

1 Thirteen waters

This error is so common that I have given it a name. The rule here is

When there's a written s at the end of a word, it isn't sounded 

unless the following word starts with a vowel.

There are provisos and exceptions, but that's the gist.

This is the rule that gets out of hand in the Thirteen Waters Error. One of the exceptions applies to a word that starts h+<vowel> (but not just any old h).  There is, in French, the hache aspiré, which the LawlessFrench site explains thus:

This error oftSuch a false liason often  occurs in the first line of the sublime Cantique de Jean Racine, composed by Gabriel Fauré ...

<PROGRAMME_NOTE>
when (as programme notes insist on saying he entered it for a "school prize". Sometimes they even say 'when he was only a schoolboy!!!' [if you'll pardon the screamer-orrhea]. But he was not a schoolboy in the Just William sense; he was nineteen, studying at the École Niedermeyer de Paris,)
</PROGRAMME_NOTE>

....which has the basses alone – as exposed as a choral singer can be. And this howler occurs between the fourth and fifth words:

Verbe égal aux très haut

I'm not sure about the transcription in that  LawlessFrench excerpt. (Note: that's my way of saying I am sure and am not impressed.) But it makes the point clearly enough :

 Some hs don't block elision
when they precede a vowel, so the s isn't sounded:
the h in haut is one such: so /trɛ.ɔ/ not /trɛzɔ/.

<DIGRESSION>
(and Les Halles, while we're at it: /le.al/)
</DIGRESSION>

There is no rule for remembering which hs are aspirés and which are muets.  Dictionaries* mark it in some way, but that's no help for regular speech. You can't carry a dictionary around everywhere you go.

<AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>
As a matter of fact, my brother did during an exchange visit, in his early teens. He was not a great linguist, but he was always very keen on communication.
</AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL_EXCEPTION>

You just have to know which is which. Just over a hundred words start with  an hache aspiré, so it‘s not a huge undertaking  to just learn them – which is all very well for people who hate hammocks; personally, I prefer a more humane approach to language learning.

I complained about this to a native speaker of French once, but he was not sympathetic  – particularly as people learning English have to grapple with a not dissimilar rule, telling honest with initial /ɒ/ from honk with initial /hɒ/.

But, returning to the Cantique, "aux treize eaux" (which the rule over-appliers seem to be singing) makes it sound as though the Cantique is being addressed to someone with thirteen waters (with the aux analogous to the aux in La dame aux Caméllias), or perhaps to a  Native American called 'Thirteen Waters'.

2 Sturm und wrong

The errant rule here, in German now, is this:

In some cases an s that precedes
another consonant becomes /ʃ/

(or "sh" if you must, but for more on my feelings about sounds-like transcriptions, see here; regular readers will already be accustomed to this fad.)

An obvious case is a word like Sturm (as the st occurs at the  start of a word – habitual home of examples of this phonological rule); but the /ʃ/ remains even in mid-word, as in the derived word Regensturm

But often  this change is not applied . And in the musical world a common habitat for the misapplication of this rule is Liebestraum, Liebestod or Liebesliede (any word, I now realize, that starts with Liebes- – not to suggest that it doesn't happen after similar-possessives (it's just that all the examples that spring to mind use that word). In a week of not unusually dedicated monitoring of the airways, I've noticed two cases: the first was on Desert Island Discs (no names, no pack-drill; but it was the guest – young Lauren got it right after the excerpt from Liebestod).

In the second case there was no error – my life, like that of many another survivor of an RC education, is plagued by an eternal vigilance for what the Penny Catechism ...

<GLOSSARY further-info="autobiographical">
(the RC equivalent of Mao's Little Red Book. [If you're interested I can still reel off "The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost" or "The Twelve Fruits of the Holy Ghost"])
 </GLOSSARY>

... used to call "occasions of sin" (situations that invite misbehaviour). But the presenter of the same piece at the Proms (a supporting piece in the Mozart's Requiem concert) knew her stuff.

But this has gone on too long. There's an urgent bio-mass crisis in the front garden.

b


Update: 2019.08.23.10:20  – Typo fix

Update: 2019.08.26.20:20  – More typo fixes, and a couple of clarifications in blue.

Update: 2019.09.06.16:10  – Added footnote:

*A dictionary is of  limited (usually no) use with names.  Often (in  English-language news broadcasts) the French politician François Hollande was the unwilling recipient of trans-gender treatment (Françoise).  In such cases the best advice is to listen to a native speaker: if there‘s no liaison  before it, the h is aspiré.

Wringing out the old

Another of my occasional State of the Blog posts giving you a chance to see a stat display that is normally reserved for the blogger...

<so_whats_new>
(not unlike all the other stats I've blogged about over the years... But what makes these different is that the others have been the default Overview,  whereas these indicate which posts rank in the top 10 of all time [Year Zero being 2012].)
</so_whats_new>

Far and away the most visited, in spite of its age, is one about Latin phrases. It's coming up to six years old, and last time I looked the screen capture it was based on was missing. I've no idea what  makes it nearly nine times as popular as no. 2 on the list. I expect some Influencer has spread the word; maybe it's on a syllabus somewhere perish the thought.

The remaining nine fall into 4 broad groups:

• Two that use the same Pedants of the world unite joke (2 and 6)
• Three on various philological points  (3-5)
• Three relatively recent ones (7-9)
• One that, being on its own at ^no 10, is in no way a broad group; so sue me :-)

In an update (after the New Year's dust has settled) I'll add some links (though in the meantime you can search using dates (or guessed themes, if you're feeling really adventurous)  :-) But I want to get this out there before December 2018 goes down as The Month of the Solitary Post,

Happy 2019!

b

Update – 2019.01.02.16:55: Here are the links and a few descriptive pointers. I've also fixed a pretty gross typo, in blue.

• ^no 1 The web page this originally pointed to is gone now but here‘s the jpg it used.
• ^no 2  and  ^no 6 These are the two on pedantry.
• ^no 3 ,  ^no 4, and ^no 5 These are quite old (but rather fun,  TISIAS) philological stories.
• ^no 7  , ^no 8 , and ^no 9   These three, despite their recency, make the top 10 because I plugged them in an MFL Teachers' group that, for reasons best known to Facebook (and I've given up beating my head on that cyber wall), I can no longer access.
• ^no 10 On a machine translation boo-boo.

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/)

A flash in the pan

The orgy of on-the-spot fruitless speculation occasioned by the IED (Ineffectual Emphatic Deflagration) at Parsons Green brought to mind a phenomenon that I have mentioned before: the way metaphors freeze in time a technology that is time-specific and doomed to being superseded. In this post I started with this observation:

A few weeks ago I mentioned (here) a possible future post about the way obsolete arms technology is used to form metaphors that persist long after the arms technology is relegated to museums; it's not just arms-related vocabulary of course. Someone who has never seen a stair-rod or heard a telephone bell may give someone a bell and report that it's coming down in stair-rods. But arms-related (and armed-conflict-related) vocabulary is a particularly fruitful source of metaphor.

 One of this sort of metaphor that I listed was this:

Flash in the pan – in a flint-lock, the trigger sparked off an explosion in a pan which itself set off the main explosion. Sometimes there was a flash in the pan, but the main charge was unaffected.

In other words, as veterans of the Parsons Green coverage will  recognize, a flash in the pan was a deflagration. Of course, the exact configurations of initiator and explosive don't match; but the ignitio praecox of the Parsons Green bucket bomb was a deflagration.

But this was not the only case that the bomb coverage threw up. There were two more in the accounts of the expected investigation (though I suspect my memory may have added the verb). Police would be 'scouring  CCTV footage'. They would, of course, not scour anything; this is a metaphor (and not, I now realize, related to technology, so make that one more case – footage).

CCTV may once have used film, and a few possibly still do. But surely today they produce MPEG files (file – there's another one). But it's film that is measured in feet, and people who refer to footage in the context of CCTV (or other media) are evoking a past technology (not that long in the past, and I'm sure most users [today] of the expression could work out where the word comes from; but, Trump willing, to a 22nd-century user, the technological background will be much more opaque.)

<re_retraction>
When I said 'make that one'  two paras ago, I hadn't thought about a new development in the field of CCTV: if the CCTV automatically sends the file to a remote site (or even to the cloud – discussed here if you're that way inclined) it doesn't really deserve to be called Closed-Circuit TV)
</re_retraction>

In fact, film or tape has spawned quite a few of these fossils (traces of a former state)...

<digression>
This metaphor commonly used by linguistics academics came immediately to mind as I read Oliver Kamm's review of How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention when in the first paragraph he writes "unlike physical organisms, the languages of prehistory leave no fossilised traces". This is true, in a strictly prosaic non-figurative sense. But since philologists regularly refer to fossils, my background has led me to almost forget that it is a metaphor. (Read on, though: everything is.)
</digression>

... slow-motion, cut, fast-forward, rewind, flashback, inter-cut ...

<apologia theme="inter-cut">
There may be objections to this one, as it's use chiefly to refer to film technology (although cut itself freezes a bygone scalpel-and-sticky-tape process). But it is sometimes used to refer to other sorts of story-telling – in a novel, for example, several stories may be inter-cut.
</apologia>

...I'm sure there are many more. It's rather like the exercise of taking a square yard of meadow and counting the different species it contains; the longer you look at film and tape metaphors, the more you find (another illustration of Guy Deutscher's reef of dead metaphors view of language):

Guy Deutscher, in his fascinating The Unfolding Of Language: The Evolution of Mankind`s greatest Invention calls language (in a brilliant metaphor about metaphors - a 'meta-metaphor'?)  'a reef of dead metaphors'. In fact, Deutscher says more; it's not just words that were born phoenix-like from dead metaphors; dead metaphors are 'the alluvium from which grammatical structures emerge'.

More here

Thankfully, though, I've just heard on the News that all but one of the victims of that flash in the pan are now out of hospital . Which is not to say that it was a damp squib (see what  I did there?)

But the pyracantha ("fire-thorn-plant") is demanding the resumption of its annual trim, suspended when the heavens opened a while ago.

b

Shedding light...

... or smoke and mirrors

My attention was caught recently by this tweet:

I dutifully (well, some would say pursuing ideas is an act of self-indulgence rather than duty: discuss) followed the link and reached a linguisten.de page. But I like to know where what I'm reading comes from, and linguisten.de is really a portal; in their page was this link, to an elearning page that made this eyebrow-raising claim:

Barbara Malt, professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Science Program at Lehigh University explains: “The idea that language moves from describing concrete phenomena to abstract ideas has been around for a few decades. But, nobody has taken that idea and looked at how word meanings have evolved over time – until now.” 

Hmm. Concrete to abstract: then what about Ttaanic? Think about it:

Absstract: pertaining to the Titans, (jolly big): example: "a Titanic struggle"

|

v

Concrete: a particular ship: the SS Titanic

|

v

Abstract: pertaining to the fate of that particular ship

Example: "rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic"

In this case abstract and concrete applications dance a minuet with each other, now one thing, now the other, and back again. Admittedly, though,. concrete -> abstract is the more common direction of travel. But the words ...nobody has taken that idea and looked at how word meanings have evolved over time – until now. got my goat rather – especially the last breathless bit. The idea of a systematic mapping of how metaphors are formed is new, but the idea that "looking at" meaning development is new is just risible: 19th-century philologers were doing it, in a piecemeal and anecdotal way.

Anyway, returning to that hyperlink-enabled paperchase: At last, I thought, I was getting somewhere. But man proposes and the Interweb disposes. At the end of a paragraph or two of press release there was yet another link, to this EurekSlert page. My quest was over: from...

How a word becomes a metaphor, new research , Lehigh University

...I had reached an article entitled

Analysis sheds light on how metaphors like 'sheds light' evolved

Oddly, though, the ultimate (?) source had the jokier title (a misleading one, as it happens, but a gag's a gag). This should  have warned me that my quest was not finished;  not by a long chalk. (Interesting, that; why not a short chalk) The EurekAlert piece said this:

...New word meanings come about when there's a need to express something new," says Barbara Malt, professor of psychology and director of the Cognitive Science Program at Lehigh University. "For instance, the original meaning of the word 'grasp' only described holding something physically. Later, 'grasp' also came to mean holding something in a metaphorical sense, such as 'grasping an idea.'"

Is this crossing-over from one realm of meaning to another random? Or does it follow a pattern?I

...The... findings will be published in an article in a forthcoming issue of Cognitive Psychology called: "Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium."...

The article is on a ScienceDirect site, where (of course) you can only read an Abstract of

Evolution of word meanings through metaphorical mapping: Systematicity over the past millennium

The next stage involves my enriching the coffers of Elsevier, which ain't gonna happen: here are Highlights, as advertised there:

So where has this daisychain of hyperlinks led us? The fabled infinite number of monkeys now have more than just a typewriter; they have  an infinite number of photocopiers. And it's getting increasingly hard to screen out the white noise of cloned bumf.

b

PS A few clues:

• Less than elegant in an ugly configuration, (8)
• Working class in typical fettle (2, 4)
• Compôte of pears left over. (5)

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.

Dangeur! Diphthongues inattendues!

In Brittany last week, home of NECESSARY BABIES (of which we had some once), and tourist bumph that recommended a visit to St Flavour's (St Saveur), and somewhere where we could see an extraordinary triomphe l'oeil painting (a bit like The Fighting Temeraire, I suppose  –  but it was raining so we didn't find out) I spotted what I assumed was a typo at the foot of a carte de vins. (I still think it was; I'm just covering myself with that assumed):

Attention: l'abus de l'alcool 

est dangeureux pour la santé.... etc

I thought little of it at the time, dismissing it as just another semi-literate typo; or, conceivably – if improbably – there was a thitherto unknown pair of words: dangéreux and dangeureux (the second having some specialist application – perhaps in official pronouncements). More likely, though, as MrsK said at the time, it was just the sort of spelling mistake that people make – even foreigners. (She also questioned my spelling – but I am a forgiving man.)

The following evening, though, I saw it on another carte de vins – reinforcing, to my chagrin, the official pronouncement hypothesis. On further reflection I found two other possible explanations, both with an interesting linguistic foundation.

1. Both cartes took their spelling unquestioningly from an official source (that just happened to have a typo in it). This would be reminiscent of the way students of philology can trace the provenance of a manuscript through their accumulation of  traits in successive generations. I mentioned one such manuscript-based linguistic happenstance in an earlier post about bald owls BATS (not exactly the same, but similarly depending on a chance mistake, concretized in subsequent usage).
2. A really interesting possibility, based on the phonology of Breton. A glance at  a map of the region will show several examples of place-names (the last refuge  of etymological nuggets) such as Saint Domineuc –
   
   
   
   – with the digraph eu where one would expect an i. Perhaps one could extend this to apply to vowels such as é (also a front vowel – one produced towards the front of the mouth [as opposed to back vowels such as a, o, or u]). Is Breton phonology characterized by a tendency to substitute  eu for a front vowel?*
   
   In that case, the dangeureux typo would be more likely to occur in Brittany than elsewhere in France – a possibility that is intriguing (if unlikely to succumb to further research, given the state of the hedge [which is in urgent need of a haircut]) 

b
Update: 2016.07.11.22:45 – Added clarificatory parenthesis in red.

PS And a trilingual crossword clue (a  new invention – the clue is followed by its character count and indications of three languages, the first two representing languages used in the clue, and the last indicating the language used in the answer)

Expression of gratitude interrupted just before the end by article reversing, for example, Ash. (8,  Fr – D – Fr)

Update: 2017.01.06.11:15 –  Added PPS

PPS: Answer: MERCREDI (Came to me in a boulangerie [with an horaire {mot juste?} showing opening times]).

Update: 2018.03.31.12:35 –  Added PPPS

PPPS: Added explanatory parenthesis in blue to PPS. Without it, the detail was pointless – just an old man's memory (which it was, of course; but my point was that seeing the word was the stimulus for the cruciverborhoea [and don‘t bother looking that up 😐] )

Update: 2018.10.12.16:15 –  Added footnote.

* This lumping together of e and i for special treatment is not random. As an example , consider what happens tn to a c in Spanish or Italian when it precedes an e or an i. The sound becomes /𝜃/ or /s/ in the former case. and /ʧ/ in the latter. (This does not involve the modification of the vowel sound itself – my argument is just about anything [any linguistic change, that is] that happens only to e and i and not to other vowels.)

Strassbourg Revisited

<autobiographical_preamble theme="DIY, Velux"> 

The Velux refurbishment is in hand [after a few ruffled feathers – for details of the Storm-in-a-YouTube see here].  As usually happens when I, with my retired technical writer's hat on, broach a DIY job,

...I am pained by standards of technical writing. My experience was mostly in the field of software, and mostly for System Managers rather than end users  – real-life punters, that is – but many of the issues are the same.

         More here (from one among several such rants)  

This time the villains are Velux. To quote their website, which surely qualifies for a FOGGY,

All VELUX products come with easy to read, step by step illustrated installation instructions.   

<rantette flame="medium">
The dreaded words The products [sic, not that the missing apostrophe bothers me that much] PDF instructions  are available for download, which follow  those irony-laden words, remind me of this ubiquitous road sign: 

The underlying message is 

STOP DOING WHAT YOU CHOOSE TO DO AND START DOING WHAT WE ALLOW YOU TO DO,  PLEB 

'Take a chill pill'  I hear the cry. "What's wrong with PDF?" Here's what's wrong with it: it restricts information to readers with the right setup (as opposed to HTML, which will happily respond to any browser in the world that understands HTTP).
</rantette>

Well, the 'easy to read, step by step instructions' [hollow laugh] are here. (Those aren't the actual printed ones, which have the added complexity of numbered insets that might or might not refer back to the other numbers^{†See update}, but they share this crucial feature: Velux have solved the problem of international applicability by the simple expedient of NOT HAVING ANY TEXT). I'm not sure how a document that includes no text can be EASY-TO-READ (with or without the hyphens that make the word itself slightly easier to read.)
</autobiographical_preamble>

Where was I...? Oh yes, Strassbourg. I wrote some time ago (here) about

Les Serments de Strassbourg –  or 'The Strassbourg Oaths' as we called them in my Romance Philology days.

In that post I quoted the Wikipedia article on these

...mutual pledges of allegiance [in 842] between Louis the German (876), ruler of East Francia, and his half-brother Charles the Bald (877), ruler of West Francia.  

This much is true. But the next sentence in that article is not (although I ignored it because my memory of what I had learnt was faulty).

They are written in three different languages: Medieval Latin, Old French and Old High German. 

No. They were written in only two languages  – the vernaculars of the two testifiers. To quote W D Elcock, in The Romance Languages, who cited  Professor Ewert's The French Language:

Professor Ewert's approach... merits further attention. It my be assumed, he observes, that both versions are translated from an original draft in Latin, Latin being ... the  common language of all notarial documents. He then attempts a hypothetical reconstruction, employing the phraseology of like documents....

This reconstruction makes sense, accounting for my misremembering and for Wikipedia's lapse (which I mean to correct, when I get a round tuit): the 'three languages' version makes a pleasing parallel with the  Rosetta_Stone,  (as a way of getting to grips with obscure languages).

We can be grateful that the notaries involved in the drafting did not take the Velux way out and dispense with words entirely.  

b
PS
And here's a clue:

Qualifiers for the Dunmow Flitch must avoid this sort of thing. (10)

Update 2015.07.24.20:35 – Added footnote:
† Here's what I mean:

Excerpt from the soi-disant 'manual', (REWOP, so sue me)

Having lived with this for a while, and watched that much more helpful YouTube post, I think I've worked it out: "1, 2, 3", and "4" are in fact 3₁, 3₂, 3₃ and 3₄. It would have been helpful if the double-size 3 (1,2,4,5, 6, and the unnumbered last one, which one must suppose to be 7, all take up one 'page' of the 'manual') had had a frame to show this hierarchy^‡.

Update 2015.07.25.12:15 – Added afterthoughts in green.

^‡I've just noticed a very faint background wash, confirming my supposition.

Update 2015.09.21.11:45 – Added PPS

PPS And here‘s the answer to that clue: CROSSWORDS

(Quite neat, I thought, though I say it as shouldn't. It'd be fairer though – and easier to solve – if it were set in the context of a crossword puzzle (where the double entendre would be more apposite – that is to  say, AT ALL apposite.  )

---

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.

Andrew Marvell and Bert Jansch

Marvell wrote:

Now therefore, while the youthful hueSits on thy skin like morning dew,And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires,Now let us sport us while we may...

More here 

Or, as Bert Jansch put it [with more brevity if  less decorum]:

Love be bold,

We're not so old,

Don't you be afraid to lie

By me, my love,

Your father will not know.

More: here 

This sort of correspondence strikes me quite often. In a summer concert (probably called Music for a summer's evening  – they usually are [see here]) given by a choir I used to sing with we were singing, inter alia [or should that be aRia? {bou-boum-tsh  – Ithangyou}],  Verdi's Va Pensiero and Borodin's Polovtsian dances [victim of many a metathesis, but I digress]. They seemed quite dissimilar, until you look at the lyrics – particularly the metaphors in them:

Verdi's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)

The words are translated ('after a fashion' as my brother once said in response to a sales assistant's 'Are you being served?') in this Wikipedia article:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild, the sweet airs

of our native land smell fragrant!

Borodin's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as Stranger in Paradise)

– translated as

Fly away on wings of wind

To native lands, our native song,

To there, where we sang you freely,

Where we were so carefree with you.

There, under the hot sky,

'Fly', 'wings', 'native land'  – it's all there in both of them., because the people singing, in both pieces, are expatriated slaves. Moreover, the Wikipedia translation does the correspondence no favours: Borodin's sky is 'hot', but Verdi's 'sweet airs' are 'mild' – a flamboyantly inappropriate translation of tepidi (which you'll see towards the end of the second line).

In our coming concert it took me a while to make this sort of link between seemingly disparate pieces. But I've finally got it; it's not  matching words, but matching structures, between Palestrina's setting of Psalm 42 (Sicut cervus) and Elgar's setting of Longfellow's 'As torrents in summer'. The first word gives it away ('Sicut...' vs 'As...'). They are both extended metaphors.

In the Palestrina† (sung here beautifully by the Cambridge Singers) the deer (cervus) occupies the first third; and although the 'That's the way...' (Ita...) bit starts at 1'15", God doesn't get a mention until quite near the end (2'23", the whole piece taking only 3'16"). The text is:

Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.

<philological_note comment="insufficient data">
In  my youth I would have hazarded a guess [okay, I do now too, though with less confidence] that the writer of that translation into Latin had links with the Iberian peninsula. I've not met this use of desiderare ad elsewhere. It is reminiscent to me of the Castilian desear a.
</philological_note>

The Elgar/Longfellow is more evenly divided – into two verses. The first verse is about torrents in summer (duh), and the second verse starts with 'So hearts that are fainting' – in a Mills & Boon novella tears would suddenly well up, reinforcing the generally wet theme – and God enters the picture only in the closing bars.

Is that the time...

b

PS:
Many of my posts kick off from something I've heard on the radio. This time, the radio has followed the blog. After writing about Bert Jansch – who was big in the '60s and early '70s and active until his death in 2011 – I caught on Radio 3 a recording I have, insulated in vinyl. (That's my word of the day; on In Our Time just now I heard the phrase 'insulated Christians'‡ and  it's inspired me to find innovative uses of the word. My vinyl records are an island of unplayability [well, not unplayable, but just not easily playable given the technology I have]).

PPS (later the same day, after rehearsal): added this footnote:
^† Oops, no – this piece has been axed. Shame.

Update 2015.06.05.10:25 – Added this footnote:
^‡ By this she didn't mean 'uninfluenced by non-believers' – which depends on a more common application of the insulation idea (cut off  – in an intellectual sense). This is a usage (perhaps a common one among religious historians, but one that's new to me) that refers to physical isolation.

Update 2021.10.18.15:30 – Deleted old footer.

Lettuce, galaxies, and milk-wort

Milk, milk products, and plants associated with milk have been exercising my mind of late. Here‘s what Etymonline says for lettuce (n.)

late 13c., probably from Old French laitues, plural of laitue "lettuce," from Latin lactuca "lettuce," from lac (genitive lactis) "milk" (see lactation); so called for the milky juice of the plant

Probably?  I'd say it was a pretty safe bet. A common process in Romance Philology (and possibly others – I wouldn't know, though I can't think why it shouldn't be so) is palatalization:

...the production of consonants with the blade, or front, of the tongue drawn up farther toward the roof of the mouth (hard palate) than in their normal pronunciation.

Palatalization can take many forms, often in the same language. In  Portuguese, for example maré  cheia-(='high-tide' – literally full-sea) and praia (='beach') both owe their initial consonant to Latin PL- , although [ʃ] and [pr] could hardly be less alike.

Elcock's The Romance Languages refers to ‘the evolution of the group -CT- to -it- which took place all over the [BK: Iberian] Peninsula cf. Port. noite,  Cat. nit, Arag. nueyt' and then mentions lahtaira "yellow goose-grass" (< LACTARIA, Cast. cuajaleche).'

Cuajaleche (gallium verum is its $10 name) is more commonly known (in my dialect) as ‘lady's bedstraw' [or in some gardens as that bloody weed]. It is very acidic (as is suggested by its Latin name...

<autobiographical_note>
I never did ask, in Scripture lessons, what "flavoured with  gall" meant, but the context (the Crucifixion) suggested a certain degree of  bitterness.</autobiographical_note>

...)  and as the Castilian cuajar means ‘curdle'

<speculation type="For Further Study">
I wonder if "coagulate" is involved...?
</speculation>

I suspect that  the Castilian name has more to do with its properties when added to milk, than with its the milky appearance – of its sap   – as in the case of the French laitues or the English milk-wort for that matter.

And if you follow that Etymonline link to lactation you'll find that that word [BK  – and lots of other lact- words] is

...from PIE root *glakt- (cognates: Greek gala, genitive galaktos, "milk"), which, along with  *melg-  (see milk (n.)), accounts for words for "milk" in most Indo-European languages 

       <digression>

I wonder if they knew... 

Or was it just an extrapolation from Milky Way?

       </digression>

Anyway, you may have noticed that Etymonline took care to say ‘from lac  (genitive  
lactis) ' [my emphasis] to explain the appearance of 't' in the root. I've mentioned before (here and in several other posts)  the way Romance philologists explain this, without mentioning one grammatical form that is almost always irrelevant in matters of the formation of Romance vernaculars  (the nominative) and one that is always irrelevant thereto (the genitive): the root is LACTE(M) (and if that sort of thing floats your boat you could call it "the accusative with the 'm' ending in parentheses". And this strikes me as more convenient and more accurate  – it's certainly more efficient .

<digression type="bee in bonnet">
that is if you don't have to keep justifying yourself to  Classical scholars – who often seem to have a keen sense of ownership [custodianship?] of Latin.
</digression>

But the most interesting topic for further study is mentioned in that Etymonline piece on lactation: After citing the PIE *glakt- and *melg-: '(the absence of a common word for it is considered a mystery)' Hmm.

Time to be getting on. But here are a couple of clues to keep you going:

Knockout? Yes  and no. (10)
Feudal lord – about time for such a wedding. (7)

Update 2015.05.19.09:30  – Amplification in red.

Update 2015.07.13.10:50  – Added PS

PS Time for the answers:
OUTSTANDING and SHOTGUN.

Update 2019.06.27.10:20  – Deleted old footer.