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.

Oops - cause célèbre or...

.... a storm in a twea-cup?

Just before 9.00 on 2  June 2017, James Conwyn M P tweeted this, shortly before thinking Tweet in haste, repent at leisure. There had been over a thousand retweets before (as I imagine^ud) it was taken down.

But the genie was out of the bottle. By midday, there had been well over 3,000 retweets.

Why did this happen? The Freudian slip theory. that he recognised Tory shortcomings and subconsciously wanted to "tell the truth", doesn‘t hold water (*KLAXON* Mixed metaphor alert: What kind of permeable bottle was this genie in?) Conwyn just wouldn‘t talk this way, whatever truths his id wanted him to  admit to.

So was it a simple typo? Unlikely. If he‘s right-handed and a one-finger typist (fairly safe assumptions for a late middle-aged male WASP in the Conservative hive) typing a T takes much more effort than typing a P.

I favour a psycho-phonological explanation: what makes the strong and stable jingle so memorable is the alliteration of the cluster /st/. If the tip of the tongue is accustomed to hitting the back of the upper gums once per  stressed word, the temptation will be to do the same even when the jingle has finished being uttered. Hunt-and-peck typists vocalize the words they type. So the /p/ dissimilates to /t/ in the typist's voice and this change interferes with the fingers.

<digression type="Aha but...">

In my efforts to find out more about Conwyn, I met this unexpected impasse:

So who is it with egg on
their face? A real Tory MP
or thousands of left-wing retweeters of a piece of fake news?

(Or me for overestimating the accuracy of the parliament.co.uk website?)

<digression>

b

Update 2017.08.05.10:55 – Added footnote

 ^ud My suspicion, entertained in that digression, has been confirmed. In a message I overlooked in late June, I've just read this in a private message:

There is no James Conwyn MP, and the picture shown is of my client, Sir Malcolm Williamson.

I'm not going to reveal my correspondent's name, as I don't know whether they want it made known. But it confirms my suspicion that the tweet was what would have been called by SOE "black propaganda", by modern commentators "fake news", or even more trendily "click-bait".

RT in haste. Repent at leisure.

PS: And here are a couple of clues:

• A German de facto translation making for waste disposal function  (10)
  
• Stymie, mistaking game for old taxman, top hole. (5,4)
  

Of crooks and crosiers

If you visited Iceland and asked someone what they called the smelling organ in the middle of their face, they'd tell you, nev. In Japan, it's hana. To Sar speakers in southern Chad it's kon, and among the Zuni tribe of the southwestern United States. it's noli. In fact, you could go to more than 1,400 places around the world, question speakers of more than 1,400 different languages, and hear 1,400 words that contain the sound "n." But all of them mean the same thing: nose.

So said the Washington Post last September.

Well   G O S H ... Given that N is the nasal consonant par excellence (if it's possible to achieve excellence in nasality. There are others, but N is the granddaddy of them all)...

<further_explanation type="egg-sucking for grannies">
Put the tip of your tongue behind your teeth and jam the body of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, then make a speech-sound. It'll come out of your nose and be something like [n]. That's what a nasal consonant is – not necessarily [n], that is, but a consonant formed by releasing air down the nose.
</further_explanation> 

... it seems to me that the question should be Out of 7,000 languages in the world, why do only 20% of them include a nasal? Surely it's just contrary NOT to include one? (Natural languages aren't invented; they evolve. And whatever mixture of sounds and gestures is involved in referring unambiguously to a nose, a nasal consonant is the first thing one would expect.)

Morten Christiansen, author of the paper that occasioned that article was on Inside Science last week, and he gave another body-part example: in languages that have a word for breast, many have the sound [m] in its name. I found this as surprising as the nose example: that is, nugatorily. Take a tube (a length of plastic drainpipe would be ideal) and make the  noise you make when the doctor tells you to 'Say "Ah"' – a continuous noise – down it. Then shut-and-open the free end of the tube, imitating a brass player with a mute. That's the noise a baby makes: ma. It would be surprising if words for mammary in natural languages FAILED to include the sound [m].

But as the Professor says at the end of that interview, there's something going on but we don't know what (that's not verbatim, but it gives the gist: the interview occupies the last 5 minutes of the end of that programme). The examples I've given are cherry-picked for literary effect (alias "cheap laughs"). There's more to this than meets the...er...ear, and while some of it can be explained with reference to articulatory physics there is much that can't be. By chance, I have been thinking about the not unrelated phonesthesia (first discussed here), which is due for a revisit.

Tai Chi, as so often, started the hare. My teacher often refers to what I hear as "the croix" (which she often explains by referring to the inguinal crease*). I make my francophone assumption by analogy with other linguistic relics of France's imperial presence in the far east, such as the name for a Chinese (ritually important) pony-tail  – the queue. But maybe, I've since thought, it's a native Chinese word that happens to share the crucial sound..

<autobiographical_note>
This sparked off a not entirely irrelevant memory of a conversation I had about 5 years ago with a fellow chorister  – a German national, but with impeccable English; impeccable, but not up to the term "cruciate ligament". She pointed to her knee and used the word she knew – Kreuzband. Although my German was immeasurably inferior to her English, I could translate (or at least make a pretty secure educated guess) on the basis of the /kr/ sound.

<meta_digression>
The title of this post cheats a bit. The words crook and crosier do share a reference to what Etymonline calls

perhaps related to a widespread group of Germanic kr- words meaning "bent, hooked". 

Presumably crochet, crouchback, and hundreds of other /kr/ words share this provenance; even, by a more indirect root, words like crotchet (that's an American quarter-note), half of which in French is une croche (the French care more about the image – a quaver looks much more hook-y than a crotchet). This recalls.... no, no time.

Anyway, cheating. The crosier is shaped like a crook not because of phonological relatedness but because it's symbolic of the role of the carrier as a pastor – it's interesting how much Christian imagery refers to sheep and shepherds: pastor (related to pasture), "Worthy is the lamb that was slain", "I am the Good Shepherd", "feed my lambs"... even the word congregation is derived ultimately from the Latin for flock: grex, -gis.
</meta_digression>

</autobiographical_note>

Anyway, that's enough for now. I have some serious word-bashing to do.

b


PS: A couple of clues:

• Tangled thread leads to scarcity (6)
• International security force tucked in to make a digression (11)

Update: 2016.11.23.22:00 – Added footnote and PPS.

* Investigation of inguinal crease will lead you into the sort of web-site that appeals to young men. who hanker after a six-pack, rather than to an old man with a Party Four.

PPS: And another clue – 

• Show about the Spanish  – bit rude. (10)

Update 2017.01.20.11:15 – Added PPPS

PPPS: The answers: DEARTH. INTERPOLATE. and ... no, can't do it! [got it: INDELICATE].

Update 2017.01.22.13:45 – Corrected PPPS.

Update 2018.06.14.09:45 – A few typo-fixes..

A dog's Brexit

What a mess. I blame Cameron for kowtowing to the hate-filled pseudo-politics of Little Englanders. Hate-filled...

<phonological_digression>
In my youth, hateful meant the first of these two definitions (from the Collins Dictionary of English):

I wonder if, in a country full of speakers of English as a second language, this anomalous definition (as opposed to the many -ful words that have a clear sense of filled-with-<noun>, like careful) the word was readily confused with the very similar-sounding hate-filled  [especially if, as is often the case, the /d/ is not fully released]). Not, of course – I suppose I still have to make this clear (although I keep making the same point) – that I'm saying the newer sense is wrong.
</phonological_digression>

Examples of hate-able-ness

• Trump, Farrage et al blithely going around, whether intentionally or not, inciting the sort of violence that claimed the life of Jo Cox; 
• as Caitlyn Moran called it in Friday's The Times (referring to Twitterstorms  – the sadly predictable avalanches of vitriol and bile provoked by Lily Allen and Gary Lineker's good-hearted expressions of compassion) "denouncing people for being kind"
• threats of death and rape made, criminally, to Gina Miller after her brave and constitutionally impeccable stand 
• etc, etc

For pity's sake, these are PEOPLE we're talking about. In the words of Sky Masterson. Let's keep the party polite.

Stats update

Back in January 2015 I wrote (on the subject of visits per day to this blog

Footfall (eyefall?) has been markedly higher in the first two weeks of 2015: a smidgen under 50 (49.85, as of midday on the 14th).

That was then. As I write, in the first 4.5(-ish – as I have said before. these stats are based on an Internet-day, based [presumably] on some arbitrary stretch of 24 hours: maybe PST) days of November, daily visits are averaging about 110 per day. So that growth over the last year (to August 2016) was fairly flat at just over 16,000; until the most recent quarter, when it was just short of 20.000. [Update: Just before midnight UTC on  5 November it was well over 120 per day.]

b

Update 2016.11.06.15:50 – Added PS
PS Stop Press – Daily Page Views now over 125  and counting.

Update 2016.12.13.15:40 – Added PPS

PPS: Another update: Novembers uptick is continuing; nel mezzo del cammin di nostro Adventu, as Good Ol' Mr terza rima himself might have put it, December's well on the way to matching November. But I have promises to keep etc, learning words for Saturday week.

Update 2016.12.21.16:55– Added PPPS

PPPS Last one, honest :-)

In the last fortnight the blog has gone from cliché to cliché. In the last 3 months there have been nearly 19 thousand  page views; and there are several more blogging days left before the month's end. In the previous 12 months there were just over 17½ thousand. An update to the graph is left as an exercise for the reader.

Crash--testing for dummies: hidden mesages

A little over a year ago I wrote,  in defence  of using an INTELLIGIBLE transcription system when writing about pronunciation, I ranted thus:

Excuse my use of IPA symbols...

<rant flame="simmer">
I have ranted about this before, somewhere  in the UsingEnglish forums, but I can't find where. So some readers may get a sense of déjà-lu  – but probably not. (And I did mean -lu.) Anyway, here I go again. 

When you know your audience (and that word is crucial  – when people can hear you) it's OK to say things like 'lear sounds like leer'. 'Sounds like' is meaningful only if there's a known sound to compare. But when you're writing – say, in an online forum – it's not so easy. What  if one of your readers has just learnt bear, pear, tear (NOT the lachrymal sort) or wear, so that the /eǝ/ sound is uppermost in their short-term memory of English sounds? You've told them that leer is pronounced  /leǝ/. 

Or suppose one of your readers mispronounces law as /lǝʊ/  –  a common enough mistake in an ESOL classroom   –  and you write that a word  'sounds like law'. Again, you've misinformed them. And I don't think that's too strong a word, at  least not in a language-teaching context.  If the teacher wants to communicate something, it's part of the job to make sure it's understood correctly. 

People complain about 'having to learn a whole new alphabet'. That's nonsense, particularly in the case of English  – which can be adequately transcribed using the letters of the alphabet (most with 'their own' sound – b ⇨ /b/, k ⇨ /k/, s ⇨ /s/, and so on) with a dozen or so new symbols). The system can be taught in a few lessons, makes dictionaries infinitely more informative, absorbing and rewarding, makes modelling and  correcting sounds easier and clearer, supports increased learner autonomy.... And yet many learners (and even quite a few teachers, to my utter bewilderment – as I can't conceive of learning a new language [except by total immersion] without using the IPA) resist the idea of learning/teaching IPA symbols. 

</rant>

And now the Mail has done it. Not that I'm surprised; I don't know of a more obscurantist publication. But it reminded me of  my ire. Unfortunately I failed to strike while the ire {SIC] was hot, and now the guilty party has covered his traces – a table that showed (?! perhaps show isn't quite the verb I'm looking for) how a word was pronounced in different regions, using a home-grown "system"  of phonetic transcription  based entirely on regular alphabetical characters (revealing, for the linguistically aware, more about the writer's accent than about the speakers').

I find it interesting how much a meaningless document can convey about the writer. A recent tweet alerted me to the latest parliamentary howler (the phrase crying out to Heaven for vengeance comes to mind from a God-fearing background, though I admit that an element of exaggeration may  have crept in there).  It is an opposition motion followed by a  hotch-potch of words masquerading as an "amendment" in the sense codicil that emasculates and sucks the life out of a document:

Exhibit A: the Motion

Exhibit B: the Amendment

Out of interest, I ran the text through the Text Analyser at Using English.com. Exhibit A shows the analysis of the original motion. Exhibit B is the analysis  of the amendment. They are broadly comparable – even to the word-count. They both have a preponderance of 2-, 3-, and 4-letter words; in fact the amendment has a slightly bigger proportion of them. But the amendment has a greater Lexical Density (defined in the tool's help  page in this way:

The lexical density of a text tries to measure the proportion of the content (lexical) words over the total words. Texts with a lower density are more easily understood.

). The two texts are equally easy to understand (? – I would suggest that the total lack of punctuation [57 words without so much as a comma.... Can they seriously expect anyone to make sense of that?] in the amendment makes it significantly harder to understand; in fact it seems to me almost impossible to even parse: "into which will take place" ...???) But when I asked 'Can they seriously expect anyone to make sense of that? ' I expect the answer was  

"NO, OF COURSE NOT.  
MAKING SENSE IS NOT THE POINT, SILLY.

WE ARE KICKING DUST
IN THE EYES OF THE OPPOSITION"

The importance of the amendment becomes more apparent when (as they will be when put to the House): the motion and the amendment become one text. The Fog Index nearly doubles.

This is no surprise, given that the Fog Index is defined like this: 

The Fog Index is a readability test designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. It uses the following formula:

Reading Level (Grade) = (Average No. of words in sentences + Percentage of words of three or more syllables) x 0.4

If Fog Index is so closely linked with sentence length, and you double the word count without adding any punctuation...

There's  more to be said about that amendment, but the final  crop of blackberries is waiting to be picked, and fruit crumble doesn't taste the same if your fingers aren't tingling with splinters (whatever's in the freezer. :-)

b

PS A couple of clues:
Turn winch to have a good chat. (7)
Catchphrase uttered softly and repeatedly: gin, perhaps. (7)

Update: 2017.01.06.16:10 – Added PPS

PPS –The answers: CHINWAG, MANTRAP

Notes and queries

For the last few months – years, actually, but months with respect to this blog – I've been prey to self-doubt; I thought I was losing it. So it was with some relief the other day that I noticed the presence of two recent pieces in the "All-time" top-ten (that's what they call it at Blogger [omitting   the hyphen, of course, in the best tradition of Strunk & White], though I have an automatic lip-curl response to the word all-time, which seems to me to debase the currency [rather like a phrase I noticed in a recent ad for beds: "Have a great night's sleep". I wouldn't call that use of the word , erm, GENIUS.]):

Top-of-the-shop is an old piece about Latin; I've never been able to work out why this one is so popular – more than 3 times as frequently visited as any other. It must be linked to from some (or several?) influential sites; or perhaps some MOOC links to it. The next 3 or 4 are all at least 3 years old. But at 5 and 7 are two recent offerings  – the most recent being a reflection on the irony of Argentina's response to the colonial name "FALKLAND ISLANDS" by insisting on a name based on a much earlier instance of colonialism.

The Colour Carmine

I was leafing through this week's The Times on Saturday when my eye was caught by an advertisement for the new ballet based on Carmen:

And rather than make the obvious assumption that the designer had chosen red as the main colour for its association with blood and lust and bull-fighting I wondered if the pun on carmine was relevant. And from that idle (some would say pathological – or at least wild) surmise (see what he did there?) I progressed to the further speculation about a possible (PRO TEM – but read on) connection between red and carmina (Latin, = songs).

By chance this further speculation was reinforced by another ad:

red again – was I on the track of something thingish? Well ...NO. Sorry to disappoint, but some madcap seeds fall on stony ground, and no amount of John Innes No. 2 is going to save this one.

Spanish is graced by many seemingly oddball girls'  names such as Sorrows (dolores) or Pillar (pilar). They are all epithets attached to Mary: Nuestra Señora del Pilar for example (a sort of early Christian stylite). The name Carmen is an abbreviation of María del Carmen.

So the colour of those two ads has nothing to do with carmine, which is derived (ultimately) from the Arabic qirmiz:

          carmine (n.) 

1712, originally of the dyestuff, from French carmin (12c.), from Medieval Latin carminium, from Arabic qirmiz "crimson" (see kermes). Form influenced in Latin by minium "red lead, cinnabar," a word said to be of Iberian origin. As an adjective from 1737; as a color name from 1799.

[From Etymonline. That link to kermes is well worth pursuing, if you have a spare minute.]

Which I haven't.

<autobiographical_note>
But before I go I must just record a (vanishingly small) victory. A recent edition of Great Lives started with Matthew Parris asking 'Why hadn't I heard of him before?' Well I had, by chance. During my brief stay at OUP in and around 1980, my friend and mentor Richard Brain (sadly no longer with us) edited a book about the extraordinary Muir of Huntershill, and as his assistant I had some dealings with it (not as many as I should have, as Richard – for all his many talents – was not terribly good at delegating, but the author was a personal friend).
</autobiographical_note>

b

Biased news: Cockneys' kosher butchers, we hear. (10)

Update: 2016.12.30.11:25  – Time's up (long gone, more like): PROPAGANDA

Update: 2018.04.30.11:40  –  Added PS

PS I was brushing this post up, in preparation for an update, when I realized that the history of this blog was rebooted when I discovered the MFL Teachers' Lounge and started  recycling earlier posts that dealt with language. So whereas I had been heartened by the fact that two relatively recent (recent at the time, that is) posts had already made it into Blogger's "All-time" stats, the story now is heartening for a different reason.

In this chart, there are three pieces all written since the time of the original post; theses are marked as Brand new.  But three older pieces, boosted by the MTL (MFL Teachers' Lounge) Effect, are new arrivals. And one of the two new pieces I'd previously hailed as a Promising Newcomer has been left in the dust (and fallen out of the top ten because 325 just doesn't register any more):

Thassall, except for a few new clues:

• Argot Frenchwoman used to make early ripener. (9)
• Pointy cover for fruit salad making French jam. (9)

Update: 2018.06.08.11:00  –  Added PPS

PPS – The answers: JARGONELLE and CONFITURE

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.)

stress on fo'reign words

Some time ago (a little over two years ago, in this post) I wrote this:

In my youth I spent a few months selling magazine subscriptions, as mentioned in a previous post. ... 

One of the English titles that I had for sale was Motor Sport. So  into my fairly competent spiel (I had learned the necessary Spanish off pat) I dropped these three totally unrecognizable syllables: /məʊtəspɔ:t/. The Spanish for 'Motor Sport' included an /r/ sounded before the epenthetic vowel that precedes the outlandish^‡ consonant cluster /sp/. 

‡  Outlandish, that is, at the beginning of a word.

In my transcription I overlooked what may be a crucial point: in English, stress is on the first syllable; the Spanish is /mɔ`tɔr.es`pɔrt/.

Of late I've been noticing cases of mistaken stress, sometimes occasioning further phonological mistakes. In no particular order they are

• Boris
• Karel
• Roland Garros

Boris
There's a problem here. In Russian an o in an unstressed syllable is reduced to something a lot more central; I know no  Russian, but I think of this sound like the Portuguese /ɐ/ (and don't get me started on people who  overpronounce Portuguese as though it were Castilian Spanish: that's OK for Brazilian Portuguese, but in Continental Portuguese it's a sure sign of foreignness). So English speakers are stuffed either way. Putting the stress on the first syllable is wrong; but if you do put the stress on the second syllable then the o has to change – resulting in a noise that is going to be simply unintelligible to other speakers (either of English or of Russian).

Karel
This is a related problem. My taiji teacher's husband, Czech by birth, has this name. Many English speakers (myself included) pronounce this as we would say Carol (which at one time was optionally male...

<autobiographical_note>
... which reminds me of a Carroll Gibbons 78rpm record in my father's collection  – on the Brunswick label, I seem to remember. On the air is the one tune I remember from it. The balding pianist on the jacket was obviously a man. (Aha – faulty memory, it must have been an LP, with a jacket like that; and come to think  of it the Brunswick 78 may have been The Little Fiddle

Oh what a tangled web we... trawl(?)

When first we practice to recall. 

as wossname so nearly said).
</autobiographical_note>

...).

But stress is on the second syllable of Karel. Some students, noticing this, adopt that stress (as in some way "better") . However , they can't keep themselves from enforcing the English phonological rule that requires unstressed syllables (with a few exceptions, notably /ɪ/^PPS) to be reduced to /ə/. So they say /kə`rel/ which is wrong in spite of their assiduous striving towards linguistic purity.

Roland Garros

PS: Aha, that was it

The BBC, like most English speakers, uses the anglicized /`gærɒs/. But MrsK often prefers the Eurosport coverage – which exposes the viewer to advertisements aimed at a wider audience. The sponsor of the French Open (whose name, the marketing department will be disappointed to hear, escapes me) regularly announced "Longines,  proud sponsor of Roland Garros".

But here's the thing: they assigned the correct stress to Garros, but at the expense, ...

<digression type="sophomoric"> 

as with "Karel" [vs, as they used to say in Latin (vide supra="see above")
at the risk of sending musicians into a frenzy of page turning (volta subito). #BouBoumTsh ]

</digression>

 ... of reducing the /a/ to /ə/.  And, to compound the injury, they didn't change the stress on "Roland", indeed they made no attempt at all to disguise their obvious feeling that this was an Anglo-Saxon name: /`rəʊlənd/ – "demmed Frenchies", as the Scarlet Pimpernel might have said.

Is that the time? I'll wrap this up another day.

b

Update:2016.06.06.17:00 – Added picture

Update:2016.06.07.12:05 – Added PS

PS re Boris
Another bit of autobiog: I first became aware of this when I was rehearsing with a balalaika player who wanted me to adopt the name 'Boris', and as it happens one of the tunes we played was Korobeiniki (neither of whose os makes an o-like sound). I was reminded of this by a recent radio programme that used the soundtrack of the GAME BOY game Tetris (which, I'm obviously not the first to discover, is the same tune).

Update:2016.06.07.16:30 – Added PPS

PPS
I just remembered that I wrote this snippet about five years ago – for the forerunner of When Vowels Get Together, but at a time when my vaulting ambition extended to all  vowels everywhere. I've brushed it up a bit (but left the period detail – notably the reference to ol' red eyes):

Unstressed i is regularly – in Received British English (RBP) – pronounced /ɪ/. But in many variants, particularly ones with Estuarine tendencies, /ə/ is used –(especially in words that already have a stressed /ɪ/). For many speakers, for example, Tony Blair was the /praɪm 'mɪnəstə/, with the second i of minister reduced to /ə/. 

Also, even in people who think of themselves as speakers of RBP,  this reduction may occur: demonstrations may, for example, be accompanied by acts of /'sɪvəl dɪsə'bi:djəns/, although those speakers, if asked 'How do you pronounce C-I-V-I-L?' would say /'sɪvɪl/ (possibly adding /əv kɔ:s/).

Long time no screed

See what I did there?

I was thinking last week about Maundy Money, and of course its derivation – the derivation not just of the word Maundy but of the ceremony itself (the distribution of largesse [well, not that LARGE]). What was given  out at the ur-ceremony was not so much largesse as a service.

The One True Church commemorates this in The Washing of the Feet.

<autobiographical_note theme="Been there, done that">
At the service on Maundy Thurday

<digression>
THINKS: must look up the other day names: I can do Easter Sunday, Holy Saturday, Good Friday, Maundy Thursday OK, and I think it's Spy Wednesday (ridiculous, really, as if Judas was a Fifth Columnist rather than a flawed bloke – as was Peter in the same story); but I have a feeling there are epithets for Monday and Tuesday too.
<digression>

The celebrant (priest numero uno, in my case Father Abbot) re-enacts Christ‘s emblematic washing of the apostles' feet – except that they were really dirty after a typical dusty Palestinian...

<digression>
Always with the dust,  already. In Saturday‘s concert we sing, in Laudate Pueri, about the Lord de stercore erigens pauperem, "translated" as "raising up the poor from the dust". But dust was the least of your worries in ancient Palestine; stercus means something a lot more organic than dust: dung, says Etymonline under scatology. (And if you think you've detected metathesis there – see Letters playing leapfrog [and elsewhere] – you're learning)
</digression>

... day in sandals, rather than still smarting from Auntie Katy‘s attentions with nail brush and pumice stone (as the part of the apostles was played by a dozen altar boys).<autobiographical_note> 

Mandatum novum do vobis, ("I give you a new commandment...") said Christ (according to the Vulgate).

French made this order mandé, and that nasalized a became in English aun.* At least, that was the story we were given at the time. In later years I have to admit that I suspected a trace of pious folk etymology – as with the Doomsday Book (which I long believed came from Domus Dei, an inventory of newly Christianized Britain (not that Christianity hadn't been around for several centuries – it's just that William was a True Believer): the House of God. Plausible, but rubbish).

So I did a bit of checking, and found that Maundy is related to  mandé:

          Maundy Thursday 

Thursday before Easter, mid-15c., from Middle English maunde "the Last Supper," also "ceremony of washing the feet," from Old French mandé, from Latin mandatum "commandment" (see mandate)...

(Courtesy of Etymonline as usual, with no apology for recourse to the usual source; I can't afford an OED subscription. But in case you want another reference, they're easy enough to find. Here's one, for example or  here, or ...)

And while we're on the subject of the etymology of Easter words, try this. Fancy simnel cake being related to semolina (spot the phonological change process: hint – look at the consonants in simnel/semolina).

But I must go and prepare for the Big Day. –

b

PS: a couple more clues:

• Nothing but going over the same ground again and again – dull as ditch-water,
  for example. (12)
• Onset of season after climate change makes a climber. (8)

Update 2016.04.04.17:35 – Added link to review.

PPS – And here's a review of last Saturday's concert.

Update 2016.04.19.11:00 – Added footnote:

* Looking for something else (as ever) I just saw this confirmation of the "French -an => English -aun" spelling on David Crystal's blog:

 ...France is usually spelled France in the First Folio, but it is spelled Fraunce when the French are speaking (suggesting a pronunciation of 'frawnce'). Henry is also given this spelling when he is trying to speak French to Kate - and he has it just once when he is speaking English. 

Update 2016.05.16.10:25 – Crossword answers: ALLITERATION and CLEMATIS

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)
  
  

Making whey (with whetstones?)

Almost a year ago I wrote here about words making way for other words in dictionaries. My use of the evanescent word burgher ...

<digression>
whose evanescence...

<meta_digression>
longtime readers may remember that I wrote here about the inchoative infix -ISC- {with its legacy of  English words that contain the letters 'sc' and have something to do with a  beginning or gradual process}
</meta_digression>

...has been dragged out over more than a century
</digression>

... led me to think, not about words replacing others but words dying out while others become more popular – even though they're completely  unrelated.

<digression>
This happened in the case of let (meaning obstacle), because of a pun caused by the Great Vowel Shift (which led to the words for obstacle – as in without let or hindrance or a let in tennis...

<rantette>
... and gawd 'elp me I'll swing for that tennis commentator who insists on saying "let-cord" (which is, for the record, hyper-correct)...
</rantette>

... and (not because of the vowel this time, but because of RBP's careless conflation of the sounds [w] and [ʍ]* into a single /w/ phoneme) in the case of whet (meaning sharpen).  

* [ʍ] is the "whispered" /w/, sometimes represented  in print as hw – still apparent in the spelling "wh" (making the word whispered strangely appropriate). 

AND I'VE COLOURED IN THIS STACK OF DIGRESSIONS 

TO MAKE IT SLIGHTLY EASIER TO MAKE SENSE OF. 

</digression>

In that blog I wrote of  "the burghers of Ealing"  – which itself seemed rather strange.

<digression>
Incidentally, burghers collocates with the and of about 10 times more frequently than burgher, as this BNC search shows; and for some reason the burghers of Ealing seems much less resonant than the burghers of Hamelin.
</digression>

But while I was looking up the spelling here I glanced down out of interest at the Usage Trends – which made me wonder what occasioned the change. Was the relative neologism burger involved?

The word burger was shortened from hamburger in 1939 – that is, 1939 was the earliest attested usage; it was no doubt gathering a head of steam throughout the inter-war years.

Here is what Etymonline says (about hamburger, as burger just has a terse cross-reference):

hamburger (n.) 

1610s, Hamburger "native of Hamburg." Also used of ships from Hamburg. From 1838 as a type of excellent black grape indigenous to Tyrolia; 1857 as a variety of hen; the meat product so called from 1880 (as hamburg steak), named for the German city, though no certain connection has ever been put forth, and there may not be one unless it be that Hamburg was a major port of departure for German immigrants to United States. Meaning "a sandwich consisting of a bun and a patty of grilled hamburger meat" attested by 1909, short for hamburger sandwich (1902).

So in 1902 hamburger sandwich was attested in American English; and a few years later the unrelated [w e l l... the burg- part of it was, via the placename, but the concepts burger and burgher are unrelated] burgher started to dwindle in  popularity.

Started to dwindle? How do we know? Collins helpfully lets you specify different extents for a word's changing fortunes, and taking the word frequency back another two hundred years we see something of a roller-coaster. The general trend was up throughout those first two centuries, though with many ups and downs; and there was a marked peak at about the turn of the century. But the story has been one of fairly consistent decline throughout the twentieth century and beyond – which I think justifies my use of the word started.

Of course, many other things have changed – politics, various kinds of context... Besides, I am the last (excuse the hyperbole, maybe ante-pre-penultimate) to make the rookie mistake of confusing correlation with causality. And anyway, the slide in frequency was well under way before the abbreviation was coined.. Still, it all strikes me as rather THINGish.

b