Nowheresville

Hmm. This, new-to-me, wonderful word looks to me as though it should mean 'being in no place', not existing ANYWHERE rather than just 'non-existence'. But far be it from me to question the OED's authority. I should  at least look it up.

It seems to belong to a 'family' of words that refer to places in Latin:

• ibi = there/in that place
• ubi = where/in what place?
• alibi = somewhere else/in some other place (or, pleasingly if archaically, otherwhere)

I was tempted to suggest an Early Latin particle meaning 'place' that could be tacked on to a word. But I was misled by English's readiness to do this; if you want a new word, take one and tack another one on: egs. 'placeholder', 'weekend', 'good-for-nothing', 'sick-making', 'live-in lover'..... Latin, per contra, had case endings, and if you wanted a special ...errm, case of a word you changed the ending. Good old etymonline makes it clear in the reference to 'the alibi defence' (the accused was somewhere else) that alibi is the locative of alius [=(an)other]. Just for the heck of it I'll quote this piece of gentle understatement:

The weakened sense of "excuse" is attested since 1912, but technically any proof of innocence that doesn't involve being "elsewhere" is an excuse, not an alibi.

<digression theme="This is the way the world ends, not with a banger but with a wimpy"^‡> 
A similar weakening of a clear sense is happening to amnesty – the temporary suspension [or forgetting – think of 'mnemonic'] of a prohibition. This precise meaning works for 'gun amnesty', 'knife amnesty'... and so on - when people can hand in a weapon without admitting to illegal possession. But once a year, with a grating regularity that always seems to me to be quickening ('Time's wingéd chariot', I guess), Radio 5 Live participates in a Football Shirt Amnesty which when I first met it conjured up an image of shame-faced middle-aged men queuing up outside a Police Station to hand in a shirt: 'A friend wore it once, it wasn't me, honest... oh all right, it was me, but I was a lot younger then....'
</digression>

My Latin Dictionary doesn't have a separate headword nullibi (well, it wouldn't have), but I assume it's the locative of nullus. So here's a fourth for my list of place-words:

• nullibi = in no place

Returning to the marvellous (if rather arch^†) 'nullibiety', of which Onelook finds only nine dictionary listings, one of which is called Worthless Word For The Day, I have to admit that 'not existing' and 'not existing in a place' are often synonymous; it's useful though, on occasion, to be able to refer to 'the nullibiety of  comodo dragons in the wild in the UK' – not terribly useful, I grant.

But the hardcopy #WVGTbook calls. I should be getting proofs next week (or at least seeing them – I'm not sure of the actual nuts and bolts of the CreateSpace process).

b

^†It reminds me of flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification, a nonce word with legs, coined from a schoolboy mnemonic about a common clutch of Latin prepositions.
^‡With thanks to Frank Muir on My Word.

Update 2013.12.12.12:12 – Added this PS (actually at about a quarter past, but the timestamp  was just too tempting)

PS Native speakers  will know this already, because of anxiety, piety, satiety, sobriety, society, variety... and so on, but language students may not have this lexical background: it's /nʌlɪ'baɪǝti:/.

Update 2013.12.14.12:50 – Added purple passage.

Update 2013.12.15.16:00 –  updated footer

---

 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 if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 35,0300 views**  and  5,000 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 1796 views/838 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.





 

Enother old favorite

I was struck (more in sadness than in anger) by a blogpost, which signed off, with unbecoming self-satisfaction:

We hope you will never be confused about “affect” and “effect” again.

Now I wouldn't normally mind this sort of otherwise insufferable smugness if it'd been preceded by a halfway decent explanation. But instead of anything useful in the way of sound/accurate expression it tried to get away with BIG text and bad examples hiding behind sexy graphics.

The first major flaw in this piece has now been silently updated; someone must have noticed its inaccuracy. It said something like '99% of the time, effect is a noun... The other 1% of the time, it's a verb'. Close, but no cigar, as I gather they say in some circles. Well, not very close. In my own post, which referred tangentially to this issue last May, I wrote

The noun effect is just much more common than the verb [the British National Corpus has 22,887 case of effect, of which a  mere 137 are verbal.] Similarly, the verb affect is commoner than the noun – much more so).

That would be, by my calculation, just under .6%, rather than 1%. In the larger COCA (which is perhaps more relevant to the writers at YUNiversity) the figures are 66,151 and 2966 – a higher percentage than in the British corpus (well over 4 %).

<interesting_observation qualification="but does it really matter?">
Present tense  forms of the verb outnumber the past 2353:613 – almost 4 to 1.
</interesting_observation>

But I can't point the finger too hard, as the offending text has disappeared. (I've just thought – maybe it was in a covering tweet†.) The first obvious error was this:

Ermm, up to a point. When I've heard it used in real life

<digression theme="crossword_clue">
I'm a cold prat, mixed up and shunning daughter – suitable treatment for Lear? (10)
OK, this one calls for knowledge of a trade-name, so I'm giving the answer in a footnote.‡
</digression>

it has meant the ability to feel 'emotion or desire', or – as COD puts it – 'emotion or desire as influencing behaviour'

<note_for_language_learners>
Beware of one-word 'synonyms'; they're often misleading or over-simplifying – and sometimes they're plain wrong.
</note_for_language_learners>

I've never had cause to use the word, but in  my experience it's not infrequently used by doctors. The picture that 'illuminates' this text, which you'll see I've cropped (rather than go cap in hand asking permission) is totally irrelevant. I think it shows someone texting and pulling a face. Perhaps he's displaying affectation (which is by no means the same thing as affect). It might have been more useful, to an audience of language students (which I suspect it is), to point out that when affect is a verb the first syllable is usually /ǝ/; when it is a noun the first syllable is always /æ/ because that syllable is stressed.

(My 'audience of language students' supposition is based on a gut-feel about the site in general, added to which is the fact that screensful of readers have either Liked the page [to show the teacher they've read it...?] or reblogged it. One of the latter understandably added:

lastweek-monday has my sympathy.)

OK; moving on to strike 2:

So far, so good. But hang on, look at the example:

What language does the writer speak? You can effect a policy; you can't effect grammar. Aha, perhaps this is the clue; when the writer says 'grammar' s/he is talking about a bunch of prescriptions, which – like a policy – can be 'effected', I suppose. So if you're so lacking in confidence about your use of English that you want a bunch of prescriptions, follow @The_YUNiversity. Personally, I wouldn't bother. (I'd find myself disagreeing and arguing and blogging so much that I wouldn't have time for anything else.)

b


† Found it! Here:

Another lousy/strained example. Just for clarity, the effect of your writing may be affected by ignorance of certain grammatical prescriptions. Grammar itself doesn't affect anything/

‡ Citalopram – a commonly prescribed anti-depressant.

Update 2013.12.08.19:25( and PPS 2013.12.09.11:00 in the cold light of morning) – Added PSs:

PS Before anyone actually goes to BNC to check my figures, I must 'fess up' to a peccadillo: I took the figures from my May 2013 post on trust. I hadn't at the time of writing got to grips with the search syntax, so while my overall figure was right ( '22,887 case[s] of effect '), I'm really not sure where my 'of which a  mere 137 are verbal' came from! I thought maybe that I had guessed that any verbal case of effect would be followed by a noun. But no: in that case, I would have searched for effect [n]and got the number 199. Perhaps I started with those 199, trawled through the results – and found 62 exceptions. I don't know; it was a long time ago.

PPS Using the right search syntax for this case   – [effect].[v]–  you get a figure of over 6% for verbal uses of effect in BNC; again, a far cry from the alleged '1%'. In fact, the difference is an order of magnitude greater that I first thought – 6x versus 0.6x. The verbal use of  effect  is A GOOD DEAL more common than Grammar YUNiversity claims. As Einstein  [I think it was him] said, explanations should be made as simple as possible and no simpler.

---

 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 if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 35,000 views**  and  5,000 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 1762 views/827 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.

Bobby Shaftoe's gettin' a barn

Borgen last week (and this week too, probably) reminded me of a setting of Bobby Shaftoe that we sang on the Wokingham Choral Society's tour of the West Country earlier this year, reported here.

<digression theme="all men are false">
And on the subject of Bobby Shaftoe, I don't see why it's always presented as such an upbeat song.

 "He'll come back and marry me"...?                  Who are you trying to kid, sister?

"Bobby Shaftoe's gettin a bairn"...?                   oh yeah? You are  Take it from me    kiddo, you've seen the last of the aptly-initialled BS.

<meta_digression subject="All men are false">
The song Silver Dagger includes the verse

"'All men are false'
Says my mother,
'They'll tell you wicked loving lies.
And the very next evening
He'll court another
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.'"

At least, that's the way I know it, from a Joan Baez EP (Remember them?). In a play on Radio 4 last week (still catchable if you're quick) a character sang "All men are fools"; OK, that's the folk process. Words change from singer to singer. But 'my mother' didn't mean that men are fools: 'They'll tell you wicked loving lies" You wouldn't catch her singing "He'll come back and marry me".
<meta_digression>

</digression>

Where was I...? Borgen. Katrine was talking to Kasper about 'min barn' (Google Translate says the min becomes mit in that context, but I'm not convinced. I suspect a typo. I'm pretty sure I heard an [n].) Anyway, Danish barn means English 'child'.

In preparation for our tour, I downloaded a recording of  an American choir singing Bobby Shaftoe, and I was greatly amused by the words 'Bobby Shaftoe's gettin' a barn [sic]' The next line is 'For to dandle on his arm', and I thought the singers were just trying to 'repair' the rhyme (not knowing the Scottish pronunciation of 'arm').

Album containing
The Road t Dundee

The song The Road to Dundee includes the line '...she gave me her ar-m'. And the tune is a match for the strangely similar-sounding Streets of Laredo (totally different, and modal where Streets of Laredo† is in the major, but the rhythms are the same [Streets of Laredo=Gave me her ar-m] and the tunes are an inexact mirror image of each other). Arm is [eʀm]. (Other similarities include reference to the season in the first line, in a way relevant to the mode [Cauld winter was howlin' o'er moor and o'er mountain versus I left my hometown one warm summer evenin' in the warmer-sounding major tune, and a first-person narrative.])

So in Bobby Shaftoe, the 'bairn/arm' rhyme doesn't need repairing. Silly Yanks I thought (being a bit of a Chauvinist; apologies for the intemperate slur, which I'm about to retract, if you'll be so good as to read on); Fancy not knowing that.

But Borgen made me think again. The printed text in the musical score is '...bairn/...arm'; and a non-British speaker might not recognize the word bairn. But if one of the singers had Danish ancestry (as a good few North Americans do) they might have recognized it as barn. There was Danish influence on Scots and English. So my imagined Dane might well assume it was a plain typo. Not so silly.

b
PS
A while ago I noted this snippet somewhere, which seems vaguely relevant:

A linguistics professor at the University of Oslo has been making headlines with a controversial claim. He believes that English is, in fact, a Scandinavian language, placing it in the North Germanic language family rather [ed: 'than'] the West Germanic family, where it has traditionally been placed. Is English a Scandinavian Language? he asks in a K International blog.

But I must be getting on before the next episode starts and fills my head with more 'wild surmise'.

Update 2013.12.01.11:35 – Added links
† Johnny Cash's version doesn't have the 'warm summer evening'.  That's the folk process for you.

Update 2013.12.01.17:15 – Added this PS:

PS

Report from the word face

When  I last reported on #WVGTbook I was having trouble with conversion to hardcopy, partly because the only format Amazon would take was PDF, so I was forced off the WinWord I know (Word 2003) onto a new one (a beta test kit) that lets me choose .pdf as an output format.

Suddenly – though I suspect that if I read the right blogs I'd've known it was coming – they're accepting .doc, docx, and even .rtf as well. So I'm retracing my (very tentative) steps with Word 2013 and working on a plain .doc file. I should be done before Christmas. Stay tuned ....

Update 2014.05.06.12:15 – Updated footer

Update 2014.06.06.21:45 – And again.

Update 2015.06.22.10:05 – And again, and added picture.

---

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:  Over 49,100 views  and nearly 8,000 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.

Look what I did

Guest writer today is, as usual, me - giving a summary of the ELTchat at midday (UTC) on Wednesday  28 Nov. (And, while I think of it, Happy Thanksgiving )

Student-Generated Content

There were twelve contributors, of whom five contributed a single tweet – so I’ve known livelier discussions. Perhaps lurkers could at least make themselves known (as those five did).

We spent a while deciding what SGC was, and decided not to count ephemeral scraps of language produced in class; bouncing off those is what teachers do

. Many ideas were floated, and experiences discussed, notably:

• Learner- generated coursebook
• Learner- generated tests
• Learner- generated lesson-plan
• Recordings (audio and/or video) for discussion and comment
• Ss suggest better image/layout/structure for coursebook

In any case, what was agreed to be essential was a vehicle (blog or wiki) for storing/organizing SGC. And whatever they had produced, students were more interested and motivated (and therefore learned more) if they were involved.

Not many links were posted, normally a feature of these chats, and these two books were mentioned:

      Books

• Something by Mario Rinvolucri (mentioned by @teflgeek, who said there was a long-term correspondence project discussed in it)
•  Scott Thornbury’s Teaching Grammar Creatively with CD-ROM/Audio CD

      

Links

• Textivate,  ReasonToBelieve (debate activity) also suggested by @teflgeek
• Yelp by @AmyDeLong
• Present.me | Free online video presentation software by @Marisa_C
• Motivating Students to Learn During the Holidays by @ShellTerrell

 (These bys are sometimes vias and sometimes authors; which is which should be obvious.) 

b

---

 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 if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 34,400 views**  and  4,800 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 1637 views/740 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.

Abbreviator

My theme today is not just a sophomoric joke: an early edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary glossed abbreviator as 'Vatican official who draws up the Pope's briefs'. Oh how we larfed! (The Thought Police at OUP have now fixed this, but my copy preserves it. People decrying the longevity of images posted on Facebook tend to say things like 'Once it's there you can never shake it off.' But that's been true since the days of William Caxton. The Internet is just more trivially searchable, but print media are just as long-lived. In fact, given problems of interoperability, things stored on computers are arguably more ephemeral. (My children's novel is a case in point; the sources are on a floppy disk from an old Amstrad PCW.)

This week's Book of the Week  on Radio 4 is a political biography that deals with Mitterand. In it, I caught' the phrase 'the romanesque side of Mitterand's nature' (his tendency to fantasize); and my translator's ears pricked up. I though it was Sarkozy who had high arches... [Think about it.... Arches....] Mitterand wasn't anything to do with architectural history. I thought the book must have been a translation  whose translator had misunderstood roman-esque – 'like a story (un roman)'. I started to listen more closely, meaning to note who the translator was.

But there was none. It was by Philip Short, former BBC Foreign Correspondent: Mitterrand: A Study in Ambiguity. Surely his mastery of French was unquestionable. I would have to reconsider my 'duff translation' diagnosis. But what I had forgotten was the credit at the end of the programme: '...abridged and produced for Jane Marshall Productions'. So there was a 'translator' of sorts; someone who takes an original text and rejigs it in a different format.

Hidden away about 20 seconds before 'romanesque', there was mention of Mitterand's brother. The first few words that followed that attribution were delivered in a 'Allo 'Allo accent that signalled 'These are the words of a Frenchman'. The cod accent had lapsed several seconds before the word romanesque. I checked in the full text:

So the man who had used the word romanesque had been André Rousslet, and it was a mistranslation (or possibly a pun). My old Larousse Pour Tous, bought from Heffer's secondhand bookshop (which I bet* is no longer there in Trinity Street [on the other side from the main shop, and nearer Caius], glosses romanesque as qui tient du roman. Perhaps the French romanesque has nothing to do with our 'Romanesque' (my dictionary doesn't mention architecture, but it's what used to be called 'a vest-pocket book' –  another source of mistranslation: 'But vests don't have pockets...?', I remember thinking when I first met this reference to an American English 'vest' –  so is far from authoritative). Or maybe Rousselet had met the architectural meaning (maybe in French, maybe in English) and was making a joke about Mitterand's height (only about 3" taller than Sarkozy: that link takes you to a Google table of world leaders' heights).

It's not clear from the full text whether it was Mitterand frère or Short who was quoting Rousselet. But the radio abridgement suppressed the very existence of a third person or of a quote from a Frenchman.

But I must get back in the saddle  – turning #WVGTbook into a hardcopy book. This will reduce its networked features, but makes it more useable in an unwired classroom (as many EFL classrooms are).

b

Update 2016.01.31.12:00 – Fixed a few typos and deleted footer (as I will do in other posts when I get 'a round tuit'. The latest info.  is on my other blog.)

Update 2016.04.07.14:40 – Added footnote

* It's certainly not there now. And it only  became Heffer's  secondhand bookshop in the mid-'70s. When I bought my dictionary there, it was Bowes & Bowes's  secondhand bookshop; it was subsequently  engulfed by Heffer's.

I once heard this round (sung to the tune of Frère Jacques by undergraduates of a certain vintage [preceding mine]), that referred to past booksellers in Cambridge:

Heffer's Bookshop, Heffer's Bookshop,

Bowes & Bowes, Bowes & Bowes,

Galloway & Porter, Galloway & Porter,

Deighton Bell,  Deighton Bell.

The last two of those had gone before I arrived, though I think one of them had a (slightly) extended life as Heffer's Art Books shop, or something like that. Being acquired by Heffer's seems to be an occupational hazard in Cambridge's world of bookshops.

The pulveropause

Last month, in my first anniversary posting I wrote this (about visits to this blog):

Birthday posts often include reams of statistics, but I'm afraid the schedule doesn't allow me to collect them. So here's just one: in the first 3 months of the blog (roughly BPS [Before Publication of the Schedule]) the site had under 1,900 visits – about 600 a month. In the 9 months since, the site had 6,700 – about 750 a month. This isn't a huge improvement (I reckon something like 25%), but given that it's been achieved in spite of (or because of?) less regular posts, and more work on #WVGTbook it's quite satisfying

Now that the dust surrounding the ELTons deadline has settled^† (I submitted it on the 21st, and dealt with a rather disturbing query first thing on the 22nd [they couldn't download it from the Kindle Store] and was told that afternoon that everything was OK [ or "παντα καλωϚ εχει", which I gather is Classical Greek for 'Everything's hunky dory']), I can look more carefully at the HD stats.

In the first full three months – Nov. 2012 to Jan. 2013 – the blog registered just under 1,450 visits (I don't know where the higher figure I reported before came from – I had other things to think of at the time); that's under 500 per month. In the most recent three months (well, 2¾) it's had nearly  over 3,200 (more like 3,500 by the end of the month). This suggests that interest has more than doubled. That sounds a bit better.

Here's a picture^‡†:

b

^† Pulveropause, geddit?
Update: 2013.11.24.16:45 – new picture and updated footer.
Update: 2013.11.29.11:05 – another new picture
^‡ Updated picture.
† Update: 2015.08.28.10:15 – and another:more recent months this time:

In the first, only 3 months exceeded 800 visits pcm.
But for the last year monthly visits have
always exceeded this number

---

 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 if you have no objection to such promiscuity, Like this.

Freebies (Teaching resources:  nearly 34,400 views**  and  4,800 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 1637 views/740 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.

Schottland the brave

A recent blog  on the derivation of brave caught my attention about ten days ago, but I was too busy with the ELTons submission at the time to do it justice. I just made a few notes, and – for unaccountable reasons [temporary insanity?] – gave it the title Schottland the Brave. Perhaps  I was conflating three ideas: the song, the germanness of the point of view, and the ruggedness of Scotland's coastline (reminiscent in some ways of the Costa Brava, so called for its ruggedness).

<digression theme="germaneness(sic)">
That's germanness. But while we're in Spain, I'm reminded of various Romance words for brother. In Italy (fratello), French (frère) (and I'm sure many others, which I can't recall off-hand) they used the Latin FRATRE(M) [and you really should recognize this convention by now; if you don't, have a look here]. But in the Iberian peninsula, this wasn't enough. As I remember (but don't have chapter and verse) according to one estimate there was a time when it was said that 1 in 3 adult males were in holy orders of some kind^PPPS; for this sort of 'brother' they used Spanish fray, Portuguese frade, Catalan frare.... A brother by blood, or a germane brother became in Spanish hermano, in Portuguese irmão, in Catalan   germã  .... As we've seen before (here again) an adjective in a Noun Phrase often comes to be a noun.
</digression>

Anyway, the title, whatever it means, has sentimental value for me now, so I'm sticking with it.

One of the blog's points is this:

The problems facing Romance etymologists are, in principle, not different from those familiar to students of Germanic, except that the Romance languages go back to Latin, while Proto-Germanic is a reconstructed language. Yet hundreds of words in French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other Romance languages, including even Italian, either do not have indisputable Latin sources or are not traceable to any Latin roots, so that their early history is as hard to find out as the history of many English, Dutch, German, and Scandinavian words.
More here

It goes on to say this:

The main handicap in connecting brave and barbarus is phonetics. Barbarus had to become brabarus by metathesis (ar to ra) and lose part of its middle or to turn some other somersaults in order to produce the form bravus (b to v after a vowel is “regular,” lautgesätzlich, to use the German term).
More here

At the first mention of Romance Philologists I bridled – unnecessarily. I expected a slight where there wasn't one. What there was though was a MISAPPREHENSION. Read that 'The problems ...' sentence again, especially the 'Romance Languages go back to Latin' bit. We Romance Philologists are different from philologists who use words like  lautgesätzlich, because we're not dealing with a reconstructed language. Oh yes we are: the spoken form of Latin, sometimes called 'Vulgar Latin'. The reconstructed words are distinguished by a preposed asterisk: eg. ‡ '*PARABOLARE, to talk'.

The trouble with giving the reconstructed language a name like this (after all, both German and French 'go back to' – whatever that means – Proto-Indo-European) is that it seems to have some chronological reality: there was Proto-Germanic and then there was something (Old High German? Middle German? I've no idea, but scholars of modern German think in terms of such a progression). Romance Philologists may be tempted to think similarly 'There was PIE, then there was Ancient Latin, then there was Classical Latin, then there was Late Latin, then there was Vulgar Latin then there were various Romance vernaculars, and then there was French/Spanish/Logudorese (spoken in Sardinia)/Breton/Catalan ....you name it'.

This was a mistake I made when I was writing my first 'Vulgar Latin and Romance Philology' essay (my main source for which was a Que Sais-je? book called Le Latin Vulgaire, the author of which, in response to the question in the series title, should have answered Pas Trop (I think my late lamented supervisor Joe Cremona made this quip, but it may be all my own work – in which case I'm on my own against Joseph Herman , author of  Le latin vulgaire). Vulgar Latin was not a stage. It is reconstructed from sources contemporary with the writers of the oldest Classical Latin texts. Inscriptions and graffiti from Pompeii are a major source. For example, a ring was found there, as reported here. "Dominus suae¹ ancillae" was the inscription, reported the Daily Telegraph. Well here's the ring (or one very like it):

Not 'Dominus', domnus. And no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10-15† cm spiral ring, for one little I, or that this one-stroke character was too complex for an otherwise impeccable craftsman! No, people were dropping the unstressed I in speech; and this accounts for words like the Italian Donna and Spanish Doña when the  Latin was Domina . (I changed the sex of the lordly person, because in the masculine the attrition of an unstressed vowel has gone one step further in Spanish – Don [which dropped its unstressed vowel].)

Now we come to the metathesis 'problem' reported in that blog. I have blogged elsewhere about metathesis. It's not a problem ('handicap' is the word the blog uses: 'The main handicap in connecting brave and barbarus is phonetics. Barbarus had to become brabarus by metathesis (ar to ra) '). Metathesis is as common as muck. It's how a widwe becomes a widow and a bridde becomes a bird, and how (as I showed in that blog) Spanish grinalda is related to French guirlande:

Consider the French guirlande and the Spanish grinalda. We can ignore the u, as it just keeps the g hard.

So we've got French

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

versus Spanish

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

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

Back at my Vulgar Latin example, as we're talking about the 'handicap' of believing that ar can become ra (or vice versa, in this case) the unattested [*]PARABOLARE gives us parler,  parlare,  hablar,  falar....

But 'Show me the proof' says the cynic. ''[*]PARABOLARE is unattested'. Sheesh! Nobody's ever seen a quark. That doesn't mean they don't exist. If you don't understand something, don't just pooh-pooh it. Read a book FFS! 

We have (at least – I haven't given  it much thought) four reasons for knowing with confidence that PARABOLARE existed:

• the plethora of Romance words that need it as a source
• the existence of words like fable and parable; the noun PARABOLA existed
• the other instances (in many languages, not just Romance) of verbs formed from nouns using a regular verb paradigm
• the fact that learners of foreign languages find it easier to remember regular verbs (don't we all? – the clue's in the name). To take a Vulgar Latin example, CANTARE (first conjugation, regular – e.g. the third person singular in the perfect was CANTAVIT) was preferred to CANERE (third conjugation, irregular – not CANTAVIT but CECINIT); back at the ranch, [*]PARABOLAVIT (well, no, but for the purpose of argument...) rather than LOCUTUS EST.  (LOQUI  is not only in a conjugation that often houses irregular verbs, but it is also 'semi deponent' – passive in form but active in meaning: just the sort of oddity that a second-language learner can do without.)

Anyway. Gotta go. Because of the relief of submitting my ELTons entry (which I have done) I've spent too long on this.

b

Update 2013.11.22.12:15: red bits and many typo fixes
Update 2013.11.22.22:50: Added the "‡" recantation. (And there's ['there'=in recantation] another trace of CANTARE.)

† I was crediting the poor serving girl with pretty pudgy fingers. 3 [because there are three coils] x π x the diameter of a woman's finger = about 10-15 cm.

‡ Well, I did say 'e.g.'.  I've checked, and as it happens PARABOLARE is attested; but the example, as an example, is OK. If  PARABOLARE were unattested, it would have an asterisk preposed. I've removed or bracketed the others; the argument still works, but it's not as neat as I would like. (I'm sure I saw that asterisk somewhere.) Even if PARABOLARE didn't exist, we could work out that something like it must have.

Update 2013.12.14.18:30: Added the PS
PS
Incidentally. it was the inscription on this ring that alerted me to the derivation of the English word ancillary and made sure that I'd never again confuse it either in meaning or in spelling with auxiliary.

Update 2013.12.14.20:05 – Added germane digression.

Update 2014.04.23.12:25 – Added PPS, and updated footer.

PPS
¹They obviously gave this job to a cub reporter who had neither studied Latin nor looked at the picture. The 'suae' comes after the 'ancillae'. It's very easy to mistranscribe a foreign language by rearranging the words to fit a more familiar pattern, (because of the phenomenon known to language teachers as L1 interference).

Update 2017.03.28.12:50 – Added to PPS and footnote in blue, and removed old footer.

Update 2018.04.11.13:10 – Tweaked format, redid graphic, and added PPPS (footnote)

^PPPS I have long felt, in a Wikipaediesque sort of way, that this needs further citation. I don't have it from a book, as I heard it from the mouth of Professor E. M. Wilson, dedicatee of the snappily-titled...

<digression>
This compound escapes my hostility to "titled" in a literary context, expressed in the rant here.
</digression>

...Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age: Presented to Edward M. Wilson (30) (Coleccion Tamesis: Serie A, Monografias)

and author of the Calderón chapter in the standard work on Golden Age Drama. In  fact, now I think of it, his influence may have been behind the CU Hispanic Society's choice of the play that marked my only outing as a tragedian, mentioned  here. Anyway,  whether the statistic (1 in 3 men in Holy Orders) was from his own (or one of his students') research or that of some other scholar, he regarded as authoritative – good enough for me.