Blowing hot and cold

 In  The Unfolding of Language.  Guy Deutscher asks "Have you ever wondered, for example, why in Italian caldo means not 'cold' but hot?" As it happens, yes. In this PP post (that's pre-pandemic – a usage I've borrowed from a recent suggestion to Newscast) I was writing about my time as an observer of language, and justified the early start in this note:

<autobiographical_note>
Really starting so young? Well yes. Before my tenth birthday, during a trip to Italy, I remember marvelling at the gratuitous mischievousness  of a language that marked a hot tap with a C.
</autobiographical_note>

Deutscher goes on to explain:

As it happens it is not the Italians who are to blame for this mismatch, but rather the English, who tum out to be of good Idlefordian stock [HD – the mythical town in Deutcher's fable is called 'Idleford']. Italian caldo and English hot both go back to similar roots that started with k- in the prehistoric ancestor language. Caldo ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *kel 'warm', and English hot goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kai "burn'. But whereas the forebears of the Italians didn't alter the shape of their *kel too much, the ancestors of the English happily followed good effort-saving principles. As can be seen in the diagram below, the k of *kai was weakened to ch, and then further to h.  And since in many varieties of English, the h of hot has been dropped, so that only 'ot remains, it's clear that the Idlefordian principle has been followed to completion:

Changes due to economy of effort: k -> ch -> h -> <null>

 

<commentary justification="Don't blame Deutscher">
As Google Lens (the piece of magic that lets me read text) threw its hands up at the diagram, I've had to copy it. As I understand it, the ( ) in the Proto-Germanic line show a via stage in the process (with each change marking the progress k -> ch -> h - <null> (mirroring the changes spelt out in the fable, with characters saying improbable things like:

 'Life has much improved since we started raising the tongue only half-way [HD: to produce a ch instead of a k],.... But just think about it like this: wouldn't it be even easier if we didn't bother with the tongue at all? For if instead of raising it half-way up to produce a ch, we only slightly constrained the air in what is known in my profession [HD: the speaker is a doctor] as the "glottis", just a little further down the vocal tract, we would get the sound h instead. This sound is not so very different from ch, but takes so much less energy to produce, since we don't have to go to all the effort of moving that big and heavy tongue.'  

<voice_crying_in_the_wilderness complaint="Publishers, hmphh"> 

I'm sorry about this 'ch sound' business: what's to stop the reader thinking of chat or chemise or chiropractor, or .... It's /χ/, OK? I imagine the publishers told Deutscher he couldn't use a decent transcription method, and as it was his first book he had to go along with them. And by the time he wrote his second, the pass was already sold: ironically, the principle of economy of effort took over. 

</voice_crying_in_the_wilderness>

...). The asterisk is a philological convention; it marks an unattested form. And the bold letters are simply a way of highlighting the change being discussed

</commentary> 

 

Unstressed vowels

(new header, to reset the margins, so that phone-users don't get illegible indents}

In another PP post about assassins I wrote:

<prescript>
Here , relatively early in the life of this blog, I was writing about a spiral ring found in Pompeii,  with an inscription that included the word domnus (sic, no i).

... no-one could presumably suggest that there was not room, in a 10...[HD: I over-estimated: the dedicatee, a maidservant, can't have had fingers as pudgy as I allowed for in my initial '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 {HD 2019: that is, after dropping the unstressed i it dropped the unstressed u}].)

It would have been less contentious to cite the Portuguese donna, as in current Spanish the change has gone further, with the introduction of the ñ.

Anyway, the same happened to the unstressed a in cannabis (though in a different context, of course ...to produce the word "canvas" ....
</prescript>

Well, we've been netless for a few days, and I couldn't post this till now, so you're spared further thoughts for today.

b

Update: 2022.09.05.10:45 – Fixed several typos (some introduced by the aforementioned Google Lens [optical character recognition]); not so magical.

Paths of least resistance

Guy Deutscher's Through the Language Glass,  mentioned in several posts before, explores an extended metaphor about language development and the path of least resistance in language acquisition;  I hope to  cite it in an update, but for now you'll just have to take my word for it.

<inline_ps>
Readers of the past 500 posts on this blog may have come to the conclusion that this sort of faith is sometimes misplaced. I've had a good look, and think it must have been a different author – Steven Pinker maybe; but I've done a Prospero  on the relevant book (except that in his case Sue Ryder wasn't involved). So the source of this extended metaphor must remain a mystery.
</inline_ps> 

 <inline__pps>
Whoops – right author, wrong book (a better one, if I remember right): The Unfolding of Language. 

But I'm not sure that 'extended metaphor' does the passage justice. It is more of a fable, which seems to describe an unlikely tale called The Elders of Idleford: not so unlikely, as it turns out, since the very mechanism for language change that it describes, actually happened in English's treatment of 'hot'.  A future post will say more.
</inline_pps> 

In an early post  (nearly five years ago – a few months before the Brexit referendum, if you remember those halcyon days, when we had so much to look forward to) I discussed the way 'ain't' is so useful to learners of English as a Second Language (and to anyone acquiring the language):

<prescript> 

The fortunes of the word ain't provide a good example of the way language learners take the line of least resistance. Put yourself in the position of a European immigrant to America in the 18th or 19th century. The paradigm of the indicative of the verb be is not at all straightforward, especially in the negative:

• I am not, I'm not, [and not so long ago I amn't]
• You are not, You're not, You aren't
• He/she/it is not* (etc etc..., you get the idea)

How much easier than all these variants (with attendant phonological complications – for example, the vowel ['22 clarification: in the subject pronoun] does not  change between 'I'm not' and 'I am not', but it does change between 'You are not' and 'You're not' [but it's unchanged again in 'You aren't']) is the word ain't:

• I ain't
• You [sing.] ain't
• He/she/it ain't
• We ain't
• You [pl.] ain't
• They ain't

Language Nazis may deprecate this usage, but it certainly makes the language learner's life much simpler. 

</prescript> 

A similar (the mechanism is not the same – the motive is though) change happened with the phrase 'for aught I now'. This usage graph from the Collins online dictionary shows the decline of 'aught':

'Aught' has had mixed fortunes; it was big in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dwindled during the twentieth, and virtually disappeared in the twenty-first – living on, I suspect, among the few grey-hairs who insist on saying 'for aught I know' in preference to 'for all I know'.

<parenthesis subject="invitation to corpus gurus">
This conjecture could be tested, but I don't have the corpus nous to do it.  If you  know how, be my guest.
</parenthesis>

That phrase itself ('for aught I know' , rather than the version with 'all') is far from common: 11 is just over .01% of 817:

<apologia-pro-corpus-suo>

 

I've used COCA because the Collins online dictionary doesn't mention it in its 'British English' entries
but does under 'American English'

</apologia-pro-corpus-suo>

But that isn't the whole story. Though rarely outnumbering the 'all' version (only in the first half of the nineteenth century) , the 'aught' version was once a fairly significant competitor, as this historical query  shows:

But by the end of the century the 'all' version had a clear lead, and hasn't looked back since. Why?

There may be several reasons, but I suspect the path of least resistance in language acquisition...

<linguistese>
Excuse the $10 word. I've  inherited the linguists' opposition to the term learning for what is, outside the schoolroom, a simple process of picking up the system/rules (that's rules in the descriptive rather than prescriptive sense – the observable pattern of what's actually done, rather than a hodge-podge of prescriptions that some self-styled 'authority' lays down as a law).

</linguistese>

... had something to do with it. 

The Department of  Security's Yearbook of Immigration Statistic 2012  shows this pattern of immigration since 1820 (when 'for all I know' was unheard of): 

It's not difficult to imagine what was going on in the mind of the ESOL speaker: they hear a first-language  English speaker saying 'for aught I know'. The second syllable is a word they don't know (or think they may have misheard) starting with the vowel /ɔ:/, so when they reproduce the phrase they use the 'all' version. Contrast the upward trend in this graph with the downward trend in the usage graph for 'aught' over the same period (in a US cop show they'd superimpose them at the click of a mouse, but I shall just have rely on good old imagination).

Right; enough wild surmise for one day.

b

Update: 2022.08.23,14:20 – Added <inline_ps /> after first para.

Update: 2022.08.24,12:05 – Added <inline_pps /> after that.

Update: 2022.08.30,17:20 – Added link to that.

Update: 2022.10.29,17:00 – Added PPPS

PPPS

I've just spotted another example of this principle. On the news a few nights ago there was an interview with an Iranian woman who referred to a /'slægɔn/; from the context she obviously meant slogan, and I dismissed it at first as a one-off slip of the tongue. But she went on to use the same slip half a dozen times (if not more).

And I think I know why. There are not many English two-syllable words that use the form "-agon". I can think off the top of my head of only three - dragon, flagon (which an ESOL learner is unlikely to have met), and wagon. But they outnumber two-syllable words that use the form "-ogan"; I can think of only one, slogan - apart from  names like Hogan, Logan, and Wogan. One could cast the net wider and admit polysyllables such as agony, but that would open the door to counter-examples such as mahogany.

<tangent>
In The Masochism Tango Tom Lehrer rhymed those two words.

Your heart is hard as stone or mahogany,
That's why I'm in such exquisite agony 

Now where was I?
</tangent>

The reason for slogan's uniqueness is that it is, of course, a borrowing; and borrowings don't follow the phonological rules of more common words. Here's what Etymonline says:

slogan (n.)

1670s, earlier slogorne (1510s), "battle cry," from Gaelic sluagh-ghairm "battle cry used by Scottish Highland or Irish clans," from sluagh "army, host, slew," from Celtic and Balto-Slavic *slough- "help, service." Second element is gairm "a cry" (see garrulous). Metaphoric sense of "distinctive word or phrase used by a political or other group" is first attested 1704.

A language-learner looks for patterns; and maybe there was an area in this Iranian speaker's brain that housed the group dragon, slagon, and wagon.

Afterthought: it's an interesting coincidence (to me, at least) that the formation of the porte-manteau word "slogan" took place on the field of battle. To most Westerners...

<inline-p⁴s> 

(that is, speakers of British English, American English, and second-language English speakers who know the word)            

</inline-p⁴s>

... I imagine, the word has more associations with advertising; its use in the Iran riots is truer to its origins.

Update: 2022.10.30.12:30 – Added <inline-p⁴s />

Do do do what you done done done before before before

... not mine, an Ogden Nash quote.

This week's You're Dead To Me dealt with the Terracotta Army protecting the tomb of China's First Emperor, of whom the National Museums Liverpool write:

A life of conquest shaped the man who would become China’s First Emperor. Born Prince Ying Zheng, he was just 13 years old when he became King of the Qin State in 246 BC. Initially supported by his mother Queen Zhao Ji and chancellor Lü Buwei who effectively managed the government, the young king took full control of his kingdom aged 22. With massive armies he overpowered the six remaining independent kingdoms of the late Warring States Period and unified China in 221 BC; putting an end to centuries of political turmoil, constant war and endless bloodshed.

Source

'Putting an end to ... bloodshed' is a matter of opinion. What he did was arrogate to himself the business of bloodshed. His mausoleum was not discovered until 1974, and the written history – including records of folk memory – does not mention the tomb with any specifics. This can only have been achieved by the deaths of all the thousands of unfortunates who toiled on that decades-long, 50 km², building site (which shows evidence of deformity [caused by hard labour] and possibly torture...

<tangent type="etymological nazi">
I admit, without pride, that when the learned guest on the podcast mentioned "leg manacles" I felt a reflex twitch on the grounds that manacles restrict the movement of manus (Latin "hands") a silly and trivial objection, I know. This blog has mentioned "The Etymological Fallacy" many times.
<tangent> 

...). The army was armed with bronze weapons, with cutting edges and  interchangeable moving parts: if the trigger on one mannequin's crossbow broke, for example, it could be replaced off-the-shelf. This was not bad for the 3rd century BCE.

Meanwhile – that is, over two millennia later – an Englishman recognized the benfits of standardization.

Prior to the 1840s there was no universal standard for thread pitch - every manufacturer was left to their own devices. In a way, any screw pitch ... 

<parenthesis> 

This was a new usage to me. The best explanation I've found is a picture in the Manual of Engineering Drawing:  

</parenthesis>

... you could make, you could use and no one would have grounds to complain. At the same time, the product designers of the time had no readily available standards to pull from or common choices to pick between.

Naturally this led to severe fragmentation and millions of incompatible screws, nuts, and bolts - each slightly different. Larger companies narrowed in and developed their own internal guidelines, but these lacked the reach and accessibility of a singular standard. That was the case until Joseph Whitworth took the stage in 1841....

Joseph Whitworth developed a screw thread design that was adopted by major English railroad companies and quickly spread across the country. His papers on screw threads exposed the “evils” of figuring out thread pitches without a uniform standard. While Whitworth admits that any standard would be based on largely arbitrary decisions, and there would always be special cases that don’t fit the standard, he cautions that there is more to be lost by delaying and urges the attention of engineers across the nation. With the support of the railroads, then the Royal Dockyards and shipping companies, Whitworth’s 55-degree thread... [held sway for a  blissfully unchaotic 20-odd years].

Source

That use of quotation marks about "evils" struck me at first as the sort often used by naive writers to denote emphasis. But in his paper addressed to the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1841, Whitworth did use the term "evil" (although there was only one, albeit a pretty heinous one – the "embarrassment" of specifying thread pitches that are not "a multiple or submultiple of the common inch measure":

 The screw threads which form the subject of this paper are those of bolts and screws, used in fitting up steam engines and other machinery. Great inconvenience is found to arise from the variety of threads adopted by different manufacturers. The general provision for repairs is rendered at once expensive and imperfect. The difficulty of ascertaining the exact pitch of a particular thread, especially when it is not a multiple or submultiple of the common inch measure, occasions extreme embarrassment. This evil would be completely obviated by uniformity of system, the thread becoming constant for a given diameter. 

Source

). That's enough for now. I can't even give an unalloyed endorsement of You're Dead To Me; it's fun and informative, but I struggle to filter out the self-congratulatory sniggering of the presenter.

b

A bit of kulcher

So shaken as we are, so wan with care,
Find we a time with frighted peace to pant

as Shakespeare put it in the opening lines of Henry IV, Pt 1. I expect there were alarums and excursions. What he meant was "Well it's all go isn't it? Time for a breather". Which is what I'm doing, in the midst of wrestling with Linux. I've got somewhere, I'm just not sure where.

At Prom 19a last Sunday I recalled a rookie mistake I made when trying to send myself a test message (the relevance of which will become apparent...

<autobiographical-note>
When I was working on an X.400 Gateway (the Bluffer's Guide explanation for X.400 is "email for Europhiles", but if you want the nitty gritty pick the bones out of this) in the late '80s, I used the country code UK when I was specifying an address for my test message; and I had no idea why my Gateway wasn't recognizing me.  The reason was that the code for the United Kingdom is, for reasons best known to the Founding Fathers of X.400, GB. The code UK meant (at the time) Ukraine; it has since been changed to UA, according to this list...

<paranoid-supposition>
(or maybe I was just being hazed; writers were not always the most respected of colleagues in the IT world). In an earlier post I recalled this exchange:

I remember a conversation I had  with a Software Engineer more than 30 years ago, shortly after I started work with the Digital Equipment Corporation as a Technical Editor. He was trying to work out just what Technical Writers did (at the time I was at one remove from that, but if he could only get to grips with what Writers did he could then see what I did).  I  said things about making information clear and consistent and with repetition only when appropriate, and he raised an eyebrow and said "What, like the comments we put in our code?"

</paranoid-supposition>

...).
</autobiographical-note>

And Prom 19.a featured the Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra (whence that memory, which has been skulking around undisturbed for nearly forty years). The orchestra was

[b]rought together by the Metropolitan Opera,  New York, and the Polish National Opera.... [L]ed by Canadian-Ukrainian conductor, Keri-Lynn Wilson. [It] includes recently refugeed ...

<hmm>
[sic: is this a word, 'To  refugee'? Not sure what I think of that.]
</hmm>

...Ukrainian musicians, Ukrainian members of European orchestras and some of the top musicians of Kviv, Liviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and elsewhere in Ukraine.

The Ukraine Ministry of Culture is granting a special exemption to military-age, male members of orchestras inside the country, enabling them to participate in a remarkable demonstration of the power of art over adversity. Following the inaugural concert in Warsaw, the orchestra’s first stop will be in London at the Proms ahead of concerts in European destinations including Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh, Hamburg and Munich before culminating with concerts in New York and Washington. 

Source

The Ukraine Ministry of Culture granted a similar exemption for the singers I heard/felt (the basses were pretty fundamental) at the Cathedral of the Holy Family in 2014, accompanied by my two locally-based sisters, one of whom is now writing stern letters to the Celestial management  (dear old Jo, who was a great fan of the Proms).

Time I returned to the land of the living. But before I go, I just happened on this advert (but forbore to click on it; 

I've a pretty good idea how he pronounced 'research', but he's the sort of gosht writer I can do without).

b

Update: 2022.08.04.15:40 – Fixed a typo and linked to a source for the Prom quote. It's still not 'proper formated' though.😉