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>