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.