Jumping to conclusions

The other day I met a word that was new to me, in a brief  More or Less programme. The contributors to that discussion used the pronunciation /'sʌbɪtɑɪz/, which gave me no idea about what it might mean – which is "to perceive at a glance the number of items presented" to quote Collins.

The reason for this is, I'm tempted to suggest, plain ignorance. The word has nothing to do with sub (/sʌb/) meaning "under". It's not about estimating numbers under 4 (as they said on the radio just now...

<parenthesis> 
[Collins was more generous, allowing estimates of up to 7, but who's counting? {That was a rhetorical question.}] 
<parenthesis>

...) But anyone who has a smattering of Italian (subito) or French (subite) or indeed Latin (subitus), or anyone with a passing knowledge of musical tempo markings...

<rant>
Any half-literate speaker of English, for the LOVE OF MIKE! as my mother...

<meta-parenthesis>
(and she would have known, although like many a woman of her day she left school at 12 – well, her father was a dominie (Scottish for 'teacher') and she was 'only a girl'
</meta-parenthesis>

..whom saints preserve [and they better had] would have delicately put it. Why is it elitist to expect a modicum of education on the BBC?  But I digress...)
</rant>

... would  guess that it has something to do with doing a thing quickly. A pronunciation with the sound /u:/ in the first syllable would make the word much more readily understandable; but that pronunciation seems to be rare.

A Onelook search for subitize yields this:

 

Most of these have /ʌ/. Some have no indication of pronunciation, and one (which shall be nameless ) has a meaningless roll-your-own system in which the vowel is anyone's guess. Only Dictionary.com has an unequivocal /u:/. But the Collins entry could suggest what may have been going on in that More or Less programme.

The first version it gives is something that it chooses to call "British English" (for reasons  best known to the editors); and for this it gives the pronunciation /'sʌbɪtɑɪz/. But scroll down a bit and you see this:

So possibly the US authors of Making Numbers Count (who were being interviewed) have got the idea that the British way (the obscurantist /ʌ/ pronunciation) is best for this interview (on the World Service of the BBC); and they'll revert to saying /'su:bɪtɑɪz/ once they're back home. I doubt it though.  I imagine that the people who coined the word (which is rare, and  chiefly  used in the field of psychology) knew about the etymology and used the /u:/ pronunciation. 

Subsequently it became all the rage in educational circles (My Learning Springboard gives a taste of the breathless earnestness that advocates this "important math skill") and people who thought it had something to do with subtraction did their worst with the pronunciation. But the this-is-a-new-word.-Just-learn-it school, who care nothing for the derivation of words, is in the majority, and  I'm afraid the linguistic version of  Gresham's Law (which I've mentioned before) has won the day: the meaningless (and misleading) pronunciation has driven out the etymologically sensitive one, but the language as is is what we have to live with. (But I know what I know, and if ever I use the word I shall use the /u:/)

L'Envoi

Amid all the anniversary shenanigans last week (commemorating the Falklands War) I heard this BBC programme. Towards the end a local was saying how she couldn't understand the attitude of Argentinians ...

<inline-ps>
(hostile and belligerent – she used the term 'sabre-rattling')
<inline-ps>

...('It's a little bit exhausting' was the way she put it) as both the Falkland Islanders and the Argentinians were remnants of European colonial powers. This reminded me of a piece I wrote six years ago, when  I reflected on the French origins of the name used by the current Argentine Prime Minister, Alberto Fernandes, in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of their defeat a regañadientes (sort of 'with clenched teeth', but with a subtext of entitlement and smouldering resentment): 

'Las Malvinas fueron, son, y serán Argentinas'

(The Malvinas were are and will [always] be Argentina's)

But that name represents yet another European power, not English, not Spanish, but French:

In September 1763 Louis-Antoine, Comte de Bougainville  ... set sail from St Malo on a voyage of discovery (as many ocean voyages were, at the time). In January 1764 he put in at an unclaimed group of islands, which – like so many explorers before and since – he named in an autocentric way (is that a word? Well it is now.) This is a theme I've visited before, here,)

He called the landing point Port Louis after the French king, and he named the islands after his point de départ: Les Îles Malouines. The islands were those known to Les Rozbifs as .... [but no, I know better than to spoon-feed my readers].

That's all. Now the green blade riseth; biomass reduction is the order of the day.

b

Update: 2022.04.20.11:35 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2022.04.20.15:35 – Clarified screengrab (links not live)

To Wordle or not to Wordle

You may have come across those shared grids that have begun to infiltrate the anti-social media. A picture being worth a thousand words, those 5x6 grids of squares of increasing verdure...

<parenthesis>
(which sounds inappropriately botanical; I just mean greenness, green being  the signifier of success – olive green for the right letter in the wrong place, and emerald green for the right letter in the right place)
<parenthesis>

... or 5x5, or 5x4, or 5x3, or even 5x2 (my PB^UPDATE, though someone interviewed on a fairly recent Newscast had got a first-time guess) say "look how clever I am" or, depending on your point of view, "Look how much time I've wasted", or "Look how sad I am, not waving but drowning in a sea of pointless guesswork."

But what's a winning strategy?

 

Ever since Sherlock Holmes told us, we've known that E is the commonest letter in English: "Elementary, my dear Watson"...

<parenthesis>

(which, in Conan Doyle's text, the great detective never said, although what happens in plays or on film or TV is anyone's guess)

</parenthesis>

.... Where would we be without E.? Lmntary my dar Watson. And Conan Doyle's source was presumably Samuel Morse's calculation:

Source

But look at the sample size – fewer than 110,000 letters, which, using the rule of thumb used in my publishing days (about 6 letters per word), amounts to fewer than 18,000 words. And that means that the balance is skewed towards whatever kind of text the "sets of printer's type" happened to include: if they were, say, recipe books, then words like boil and heat and teaspoon would be over-represented; it's hardly a representative sample.

As that Notre Dame page goes on to say, the problem of this tiny sample size is solved by using a dictionary as the source...

<parenthesis>
(and strangely, for a US seat of learning, they chose the OED  rather than say Webster's.)
</parenthesis>

See here for an explanation of the 3rd column

 

...with the result that, whereas Morse calculated that E was 24 times as common as Q, in the OED it is nearly 57 times more common.

More common in glossed words that is. Not content with this, real Wordle-nerds have calculated the relative frequencies of letters in 5-letter words...

<reservation>
Not that letter-frequency is anywhere near the whole story. What matters more is morphemes (word-building blocks, represented by groups of letters). To take a trivial example from a recent answer:

<example>
The target was CHUNK. By chance, my first guess ended CH. So I got two olive green (right letter, wrong place) squares. If I had been a devotee of the  "letter frequencies of  letters in 5-letter words" school, I'd have had to consider 4 possible alternative places for C AND 4 possible alternative places for H. But I imagine (if I were a betting man, I'd put money on it) that in any word... 

<inline-pps> 

(particularly in any short word; in composite words there are more opportunities for c to follow h; in spatchcock, for example, there's an -hc-, but 5-letter words don't allow for that sort of juxtaposition)

</inline-pps> 

...that includes both C and H, the odds are that they will fall together and in that order. So instead of the 4x4 set of possibilities, there were just 3; and among those 3, CH??? was by far the most probable.
</example>

Morphemes matter more than letters.
</reservation>

..so if that sort of thing floats your boat ...

<tangent subject="5-letter vessels">
CANOE, KETCH, SKIFF, SLOOP, YACHT...

<meta-tangent>
(incidentally, one of the few words that fit the pattern ??CH?; Onelook lists only 63 "common" words here, but a definition of common that includes words such as "zuche" and "elche" seems to me rather dubious.)
</meta-tangent>

</tangent>

... a Google search will lead you further down this rat-hole. And only wimps stop at a mere five letters;  there are more variants than most viruses.

But that's enough for me; and more than enough for now.

b

 

Update: 2022.04.15.15:40 – Added PS in red.

Update: 2022.04.10.17:20 – Added <inline-ps />

Update: 2023.06.04.17:25 – Added a few interesting solutions (where "interesting" is, as we used to say in the software engineering world, a signed variable.)

I've done it in 2 before
bu not after so inauspicious a start

A Christmas tree, and all bright green

1,2,3,4,5, and still bright green

Not so symmetrical
just frustratingly regular

And an epic fail

ning

Update: 2023.06.08.16:25 – Added PPPS.

PPPS A rather different five-letter based word game is this.

Update: 2023.08.18.19:45 – Added P⁴S.

No longer: this happened this morning:

The app, which comments on a successful guess, was rendered nearly wordless: 'Genius'. I'm not so sure. Maybe Someone was saying 'Ha! Thought you could kill another 10 minutes? Think again, sucker.'

What's in a name?

The answer, of course, is Intellectual Property Rights ("IPR" to friends), though Shakespeare didn't know that when he was writing Romeo and Juliet; so naïve; well, they were in those days.

When I started this blog – which is coming up to its tenth birthday, having started in  October 2012 – it was a source of some (admittedly pointless) satisfaction that in a Google search of Harmless Drudgery it came first in the list of results. It still does.

But if you search for Harmless (tout sec [that's French for that, no just that, ONE word for Pete's sake, give me strength] the top of the list is  a blog with the same title by Kory Stamper, author of Word by Word. And when I first noticed this I suspected some fancy SEO jiggery-pokery. Search Engine Optimization is a dark art that let's you steal a march on other less savvy web sites. I thought momentarily ...

<parenthesis>
(and I use that word in its relatively meaningful sense,  rather than  the execrable "in [not for] a moment" sense, which I fear will ultimately displace it; but over my dead body – a small delay which I imagine will be acceptable to the linguistic gods)
</parenthesis>

... that some arriviste (French for "carpet-bagger) had employed an SEO wonk to deprive me of my rightful primacy, Google-wise.

But there's nothing new under the sun. Another writer wrote a blog with the same title in 2007 (Lexicoblog); it seems that "Harmless Drudgery" is low-hanging fruit when it comes to naming a blog about language. What would Dr Johnson have thought (not that he could have)? Besides, my blog isn't exclusively about language; it was originally named to refer to work I was doing at the time. A lot of it is about language, but I think other bloggers have as much right to the name as I do, if not more.

But the topic of intellectual property cropped up in a recent edition of Past Forward which took as its point de départ (French for fons et origo) a recording of one of Cecil Sharp's main contributors to Folk Songs From Somerset: Gathered And Edited With Pianoforte Accompaniment, singing a song that one contributor regarded as paving the way not only for Vaughan Williams and Elgar  (sorry – no time to find the exact quote) but also the folk revival; (she mentioned Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (many of whose sources were English – though in that context I'd have mentioned English singers, like Martin Carthy, Bert Lloyd and Ewan McColl).

Cecil Sharp collected folk songs that had almost died out since the Industrial Revolution, arranged them for piano and had them sung in schools (in the days when cultural enrichment was still allowed in schools, before the National Curriculum put paid to all that nonsense), I was at school during those folk-singing years. I mentioned this a while ago here (in the context of the carol Joys Seven, which uses the same tune as The Lincolnshire Poacher):

<pre-script>
That's something they don't seem  to do in  Primary Schools any more  – communal singing of  what were known as "Folk Songs" before the Revival of  the late '50s–early '60s.. I remember at St Gregory's RC Primary School singing with gusto

When me and my companions were
    setting of a snare
'Twas then we spied a gamekeeper
For him we did not care
For we can wrestle and fight,
    me boys,
And jump o'er anywhere...

A one-time colleague of mine, who already played the piano and the violin, during her teacher-training was required to learn the guitar so that she could maintain eye-contact with her pupils. As a consequence of this sort of thinking, today's schoolchildren can sing Kumbaya but not Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.
</pre-script>

I always thought that Cecil Sharp was an unmitigated Good Thing. But that programme opened my eyes to the Dark Side of what he did: gentrification of working class music, doing nice little arrangements suitable for the parlours of the bourgeoisie, copyrighted it and monetized it. And did the contributors get a royalty? Of course not. But the singer of the song that started so much got a concertina and a copy of the book (with the unintentionally ironic inscription Exchange is no robbery).

<for-further-study>
Who was  it who said 'There's nothing so easy as stealing a culture from people who don't  know they've got one'?
</for-further-study>

 There's more to be said, but not now; I'm off to the frozen north.

b

 

 

Wither... shall... I wonder

 As I was mowing a small lawn the other day...

<parenthesis>
(its size matters, because it would have been silly to mow it boustrophedonically [that's 'up and down' to you],...

<meta-parenthesis>
(Marvellous word, "boustrophedonical"; the bou- bit means "bull" [think of bovine]. So the picture behind the metaphor is of oxen ploughing a field. I've only ever seen it used with reference to dot matrix printers like the one built into my Amstrad word processor 30 years ago...

<meta-meta-parenthesis>
(and I can date it because I used the Amstrad to write a novel entered for a competition for writers of under 40; I just slipped under the bar)
</meta-meta-parenthesis>

...that have a printer head that prints one line from left to right and the next from right to left.
</meta-parenthesis>

... so I went round and round)
</parenthesis>

...I wondered (again)  what they called "clockwise" before clocks were invented: counter-widdershins?

And the word "widdershins" came up recently in that Christmas book I mentioned in a recent post:

A story needs an opponent, a threat if not a monster, someone for the hero or heroine to defeat. Every protagonist needs a wiþer-wengel.

Wiþer-wengel (adversary) comes from [HD: sic, and I'm profoundly unimpressed with this form of words; let's just say "related to"] wiþer (against, in opposition) and... wengel? Wengel doesn't appear on its own in the surviving Old English texts, so it's hard to say what it means (if anything). Wiþer is unrelated to modern English 'wither', to become dried up or shrivelled up - that comes from [HD: ahem?] the verb 'weather'. A piece of outdoor furniture can be 'weathered' from the sun and rain. You can 'weather' a storm or even a serious illness. It is from this weather-'wither' that we get withering stares and glances, pointed looks meant to make someone feel ashamed.

The 'wither' that comes [HD: Enough already!] from Old English, meaning 'hostile' or 'against', became obsolete after the Middle Ages, although it still appears as a prefix in Scots: a 'witherweight' is a counterbalancing weight, and 'withershins' (or 'widdershins') is the wrong way, anti-clockwise.

<mini-rant>
And while we're on the subject of "the wrong way", I wish people would agree that turning things clockwise is doing them up and turning things anti-clockwise is undoing them. This applies to screws, but also to twistee ties in the garden or the Christmas tree [undoing those things can be a nightmare], taps. and anything else where rotation relates to doing up/undoing; window locks are particularly inconsistent in this regard. Is it too much to ask...? (time for my medication).
</mini-rant>

I didn't know it was Scots. I guess my mother's vocabulary was influenced by her parents Archibald and Bertha; with the result that I regard words like  "widdershins" and "outwith" as plain English.

Which brings us to "shall" (which sprang to mind because of the whither shall I wander? quote...

<tangent>
I wonder if gander ever rhymed with wander, or whether it's the sort of lame  eye-rhyme that writers of nursery rhymes thought they could get  away with because the little darlings wouldn't know any better. Hmmm..?
</tangent>

... but stayed there [in mind] because it was the answer to Tuesday's Wordle  (on which I registered a PB, and stifled an unwarranted warm glow of 'achievement'  when the app said "Magnificent". But then I thought

SHUT  YOUR PATRONIZING MOUTH; 

GETTING IT IN 2 IS DOWN TO LUCK

).

"Shall", as is often the case with words that are dying out, is the subject of many a prescriptive rule – the sort of shibboleths up with which younger users (and they're the ones that matter when it comes to usage trends) will not put. And it's those words (the moribund ones) that harbour exceptional pronunciations too; rather than learning and applying the rule ...

<rule>
Monosyllables spelt with the ending "-all" (like all, ball. call, fall, gall, hall, pall, small, spall, stall) have the sound /ɔ:l/. There are two exceptions: mall and shall, which typically have the sound /æl/. I say /mæl/ because that was a street name in the Ealing of my youth, and there are two (The Mall and Pall Mall) in London. But shopping malls (the most common habitat of the word in the 20th and 21st centuries) are usually /mɔ:lz/.
</rule>

... people just stop usinng the word. The usage graph given in the Collins English Dictionary Online shows this:

After an explosion at the end of the 18th century it declined steadily over the next two centuries.

<wot-no-data>
It was a shame when I first started using these graphs (in 2012) that the data came to an end in 2008. Now it's just embarrassing.
</wot-no-data>

The picture with "mall" is less smooth but more dramatic:

But the message is clear: words with exceptional pronunciations get used less often.

That's enough wondering for now.

b

Awake the harp

The first two words of the concert my choir is presenting next Saturday are Urah hanevel: "Awake the harp".  And the first time I saw them I thought (as one does, at least ONE does) Which word is which?

And, with less than a week to go, I thought I had it.

The dawning of this aha moment is based on a coincidence  involving another stringed instrument – the lute, which is related to the "oud".  An initial l can sometimes be a relic of an Arabic definite article. 

 

I mentioned this here:

<pre-script>

The Berbers who occupied various parts of the Iberian peninsula between 711 and 1492 had Arabic as a second language, and they automatically tacked on the definite article to nouns; this accounts for borrowings that start with al- (algebra etc) or a- {Sp. azucar/Pg açúcar...

<PER_CONTRA>
[meanwhile the Italian for sugar – as their borrowing came from mother-tongue Arabs – is zucchero. Similarly Sp alcotón/Pg. algodão  but It. cotone, the root (via France) of  our "cotton"]
</PER_CONTRA>

...) or sometimes just l- (the word lute is derived from words that mean the-oud, the oud being a stringed instrument.

<GUESS likelihood="minimal, but who cares?">
I suspect that Spanish láud may have been influenced by an imagined etymological association with the Latin laus (=praise) as in "praise Him with... stringed instruments", but don't quote me on that; it's just supposed folk-etymology. )
</GUESS>

In this case the Portuguese preserved the whole al- –  alaude).
</pre-script>

Suppose that urah was related to "lyre" ; what then of hanevel? Well, isn't it obvious? (SPOILER ALERT: NO). What about "reveille"?

But beware of coincidences bearing aperçus. Before committing this brilliant deduction to print,  I checked here:

The Hebrew verb ‘urah means, “to be awake, to stir, to start to move, to agitate, to disturb.” 

Oh well. Back to the drawin...; no, I must learn the words. There are still seats, and it'll be great:

This Saturday's concert
(for earlier reflections, see here)

 

In other news. I've been thinking about Christian festivals overlaying  pagan ones. (for example Christmas falling just when there happened to be a pre-existing midwinter celebration, the Feast of All Souls and the Día de los Muertos, etc. A while ago, I wrote here,

<pre_script>
Ferragosto is the heathen name of the feast known to the One True Church as the Feast of the Assumption....This tourist site , though, suggests that (like most 'Christian' festivals) Ferragosto has deeper roots.:

Ferragosto, the Italian name for the holiday, comes from the Latin Feriae Augusti (the festivals of the Emperor Augustus) which were introduced back in 18 BC ..., probably to celebrate a battle victory, and were celebrated alongside other ancient Roman summer festivals . These festivities were linked to the longer Augustali period - intended to be a period of rest after months of hard labour.

</pre_script>

But reading a Christmas present (I'm possibly the world's slowest reader), I've come across a lovely example of this sort of cultural appropriation, with added linguistic jiggery-pokery. The author is talking about a tenth century text in which the writer, an English abbot, explains the derivation of the name "Bethlehem":

This reasoning from the tenth-century English abbot is lovely, metaphorical and appropriately Christian, but the name of the town existed long before Christ's birth. Over 1,000 years earlier, the polytheistic Canaanites settled in the region and dedicated their town to Lachama, a fertility god of the Chaldeans (who called him Lachmo). The town's name, Beit Lachama, meant house of Lachama'. When the Hebrews - faithful monotheists - arrived a millennium or so later, they decided a town named for a Chaldean fertility god would never do. They altered the name ever so slightly to Beth-Lechem, which was Hebrew for house of bread'. There was plenty of grain in this fertile region, so even before Christ, 'the living bread' [HD: quoted from the Old English text], came along, the name made sense. Really, it isn't surprising that Hebrew and Chaldean, both Semitic languages, share a common root for 'bread' and 'fertility'.

You've got to hand it to Christianity; it's awfully good at covering its tracks. 

b

Letters and phonemes

This. not for the first time, started life as an update but got bigger. I'm aware that my less-than-serious  reference to a "tetraphthong" ...

<apologia subject="dubious neologism?">
(a vowel sound having twice as many contributing vowel sounds as a diphthong has; I'm not sure if this is a word with a track record, but it is now)
</apologia>

...in my discussion of the word Kyiv here  may  have  seemed to suggest that I hold the naïve view that written letters must always represent phonemes – that Kyiv's yi must represent two sounds just because there are two letters there. This would be easy to argue against. My  When Vowels Get Together ...

<inline-ps>

Depending on your platform, you may need to instal an e-book reader (Google has a free one, where "free" has the usual online meaning: "terms and conditions apply..."; but in order to read this you've already put your neck in Google's cyber-noose. 😉)
<inline-ps>

...gave thousands of counter-examples in the case  of English, and I have no reason to think that something similar should not apply to Ukrainian.

In the Foreword to my unfinished sequel to that book I wrote

 <pre-script>

My justification for this [glossing over the distinction between letters and phonemes] is based on the history of language development. Sounds always precede letters (except in special cases such as acronyms). People don't feel the need to write until they have speech sounds to represent. Sometimes, the link between letters and phonemes remains firm (as in Castilian Spanish, which has a fairly reliable correspondence between letters and phonemes – nearly one-to-one, with a few exceptions). But in English this link is shakier.

The link is still there, though, when you consider the history of spellings. The common silent "gh" for example was originally an attempt to represent the sound /χ/ as in the Scottish "loch" or the German "Bach". In parts of Scotland, indeed, "night" is pronounced /nɪχt/ (as "night" was, at one time, in English); and in Northern Ireland a lake is a "lough", with (uniquely, among British English words – along with the Scottish "loch") the final consonant /χ/.

In some cases letters have no phonemic value – as is often the case with silent letters. There are various reasons for this. Two examples will give a hint of the (often meddlesome) justifications:

• The "b" in "debt" (Chaucer was writing "dette" in the fifteenth century, but later scholars imposed the "-bt" spelling in deference [some would say craven deference] to the Latin debitum.)
• The Greek "ρ" with a spiritus fortis (also known as a "rough breathing") persuaded scholars to take the word "rime" (as used by Coleridge, for example) and insist that it should be spelt with an initial "rh".

In other cases a "silent letter" spelling was imposed by false analogy with another word with a silent letter that had once had a phonemic value. For example both "should" and "would" had one of these "real" silent letters (the words were sceolde and wolde, the past tenses of sculan and willan). But the past tense of another word that came to be used as a modal verb (like "would" and "should") was a word that Chaucer, for example, had spelt "koude" – with no phonemic "justification" for a silent l. So, basing their suggestion on a false analogy, language "experts", (thinking "modal verbs that end /ʊd/ should share the spelling '-ould' "), introduced the spelling "could". (I wonder if the irony was intentional in Dr Johnson's definition of lexicographer as "a harmless drudge"; some would say that the harm that lexicographers have done has sometimes been a major contribution to the complexities of English spelling.)

But quite often (I would guess more often than not, excepting Magic E spellings [where the presence of the e makes its presence felt, audibly, although it itself is not sounded]) the presence of a silent written letter does have some force with reference either to pronunciation – at some stage in the development of the language – or to etymology.

So while it would be wrong to say that written letters in English correspond to phonemes, quite often they make some reference to a real sound produced at some time in the chequered history of English (though, on reflection, a chequerboard seems an inappropriately regular image; a fiendishly irregular patchwork quilt, with the colours bleeding into each other seemingly randomly, would be nearer the mark).

</pre-script>

I have no idea about  the details of Ukrainian, or to what extent written letters correspond with actual speech sounds in  that language. I'm simply saying that the spelling "Kyiv" suggests to me that there is something going on between the /k/ and the /f/...

<parenthesis>
(I think that's what the written v represents – based on info gleaned from a recent Newscast, at some time in the last two weeks [but I find the whole sorry tale too depressing to do the necessary legwork (earwork?}
</parenthesis>

... that is more than just a simple /i:/ sound. 

(In that parenthesis I nearly put "sometime", which reminded me of this notice:

Seen somewhere Oriental (where it seems slut-shaming is the norm. 😉) 

). Bye for now

b

Update: 2020.03.10.14.15 – Added <inline-ps />

 

"Stopping to VERB"

I've been thinking about prepositions, prompted by this picture posted in that Facebook group I mentioned last month:

Seen in Tierra del Fuego

This seems an unlikely mistake on the face of it: Spanish por => English "for"; why complicate things by changing the preposition? Shouldn't "L1 interference" (the influence of the language learner's mother tongue) have prevented this slip? But it's the verb that does the damage: visitar => "to visit". (And "thanks to" does have a meaning; just not the right one.

 I wrote about this sort of thing here.

<pre_script>
One of the most striking things we did on the first day of my CELTA course.was....

<half_remembered_context>
I think we  may have been brain-storming a list of problems confronted by learners of English. (although maybe that's a false memory – the course had too tight a curriculum for that sort of thing; more likely chalk and talk or perhaps felt-tip and... umm THING 

<2022_afterthought>  

Interactive whiteboards were a thing of the future, or possibly they were just coming onto the market – in which case my trainers  would certainly not have forked out for new technology. 

</2022_afterthought>

).
</half_remembered_context>

...).Anyway, we got onto the subject of phrasal verbs, and English's tendency to string together a verb and something else (often a preposition, but the right-thinking Phrasal-Verb-ese buzzword is particle) to form a new meaning  leading to memory-taxing seeming-paradoxes like You cut a tree down before you cut it up. There were 14 students on the course, and that activity I found so striking was that we each in turn had to construct a sentence using the phrasal verb pick up  in a way different from all previous ones. We managed 14; my trusty Cobuild dictionary lists 15 (though I'm sure various one-off contexts could support new coinings).

<2022_EXAMPLE>
As I remember, among those 15 one was something like "receive a radio signal"; but this could easily have two separate meanings as between these two contexts:

• "We can't pick up Times Radio; we don't have a DAB set."

• "We can't pick up Five Live Sports Extra down here; the signal's too weak"

</2022_EXAMPLE>

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

</pre_script>

But, returning to the picture that started me down this avenue. It recalled for me a diagram (I won't say picture) that I used to use to show the difference between "stop + infinitive' (the right-thinking word in the ESOL world is "to-infinitive"...

<parenthesis>

(come to think of it if the teacher in the Tierra del Fuego tourist office had made the to-infinitive/bare-infinitive distinction maybe the writer of that sign wouldn't have been misled down the 'to visit' route)

</parenthesis>

... and "stop + gerund*"
):

And by chance I heard an example of this slip (with the same verb as I used in my diagram – "stop" is a real problem for users of English as a second language), on the radio last night: Moral Maze (about 10½ minutes in); a fluent speaker of academic English says "they [young people in Russia] have stopped to know what it means to live in an autocracy".

But I must stop writing for now.  (That's the problem; I'm always stopping to write😉)

b

Update: 2022.03.04 – Added footnote.

*

<eppur_si_muove>
[for which, incidentally, the approved CELTA-speak is "-ing form", which always seemed to me an over-simplification too far. A gerund behaves like {that is, is} a noun – as in "Eating is necessary", whereas a present participle is an adjective – as in "they were eating"; that is a distinction worth making, and it seems to me to be patronizing, insulting to the intelligence of the student, to act as if students of ESOL needn't be aware of it.]

</eppur_si_muove>