Donning my 'haubregon de fer'

Last Saturday I joined 157 other singers ...

<archivists-note nitpicking="Missing apostrophe explained>
(I was the 158th)
</archivists-note>

...to sing Karl Jenkins's The Armed Man. I have sung this piece three times in various formats...

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• The whole piece, imam and all
• The concert suite – just the choral settings of the traditional movements of the Mass: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, Agnus Dei (more accessible for both singers and audience, but omitting the song L'homme armé, which seems to me to be rather the point)
• Last Saturday's version  (much the most successful). The score for the concert suite asks the pianist to simulate a marching drum by tapping the piano with their bass hand – a feat of leftidigitation; but we had a percussionist with full drum kit. There was also a trumpeter, marked by the composer as 'optional' (though I'd rather have said 'crucial' –  especially her spine-tingling Last Post).

</parenthesis>

...  and every time I sing it I see the note in the score, which says it was commissioned by the Royal Armouries to mark their move. This note invariably triggers a memory of the visit to the Royal Armouries that led to this post back in November 2012.

The 2000 recording of the London Philharmonic with the National Youth Choir of Great Britain pronounces The first L'homme in the opening line...

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(L'homme, L'homme, l'homme armé)
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... ['lɔmɛ].

<parenthesis>
(You must excuse my use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Regular readers will know how I feel about 'sounds like' transcriptions. If you want to understand the depths of my loathing, click on IPA in the word cloud on the right. For the purposes of reading on, the funny thing that looks a bit like a reversed 3 represents an open e)
</parenthesis>

... rather than a schwa – as one would expect in modern French.

This sound is historically likely, though not to my liking – and not preferred by Saturday's MD George de Voil. The song L'homme armé was a popular French medieval French song:

L'homme armé
from the
Mellon Chansonnier
(late 15th cent.)

And generally, in Romance languages, (ones derived from Latin) nouns are derived from the accusative (linguists prefer the term 'objective', as in Vulgar Latin a generalized object noun was added to a <verb + preposition> pair,  rather than following a verb with a declined noun (one with case endings: CREDO IN UNUM DEUM rather than CREDO UNO DEO). Romance Philologists (a group of which I was a fully paid-up member 50 years ago, though I'm still an enthusiatic amateur) use the convention CAPITALS+(last-letter-of-accusative) to give Vulgar Latin spellings: for example HOMINE(M) [='man']; giving homme. This early post says more about this convention in some real-world cases..

Over the years, various bits of original words were eroded and/or changed in some way –  depending on the contexts they were used in; and the open e of the original HOMINE(M) evolved into the schwa of the modern French homme. So the e was open in say 100 CE, and it was schwa  by say 1850 CE....

<apologia-pro-indolentia-sua excuse="laziness">
These guesses are completely off the top of my head; during my studies I avoided a paper called The History of  French because there was too much conflicting data to wade through, and a tedious lecturer who had written the one, overlong, set book.
<apologia-pro-indolentia-sua>

...in medieval France, when the song first appeared, the odds are that it was fairly open.

<objection>
But what about the -MI-? That's why I said 'various bits of original words were eroded and/or changed in some way'. Unstressed syllables are often the frst things to go; DOMINA(M), for example, gave Spanish doña (where the ñ is a sign of the two nasal consonants left after the -MI- disappeared; it went one step further in Portuguese dona).

<meta-objection>
Only one? Spelling is only part of the story. The final a was reduced, becoming schwa.

<autobiographical-note>
In my time as a technical writer I worked on some software that had the internal  codename de Gama (pronounced with a schwa). I had come to the project too late to correct this to da Gama. See what I have to suffer?
</autobiographical-note>

</meta-objection>

This post says more about this sort of erosion, including a case involving an unstressed -MI- (in an inscription on a ring unearthed [unashed?]  at Pompeii).
</objection>

But what about that haubregon de fer? (This has gone one too long already. The haubregon will have to wait for an update, if I ever get a round tuit. Words for our next concert won't learn themselves.

)

b

Ex unibus plurum - gumbo diplomacy

 It's all very tiresome. The one  who 'loves uneducated people'...

<tangent>
Wisely he doesn't go on to say '...because they're easiest to fool into voting for me.'
</tangent>

...can be expected to behave like a spoilt toddler, but Rubio...

<tangent>
(who is virtually an acrostic for Rules-Based International Order)
</tangent>

... is a disgrace. As for Vance, he richly deserves the oblivion for which he's being so patently groomed. He confirm's archy the cockroach's observation that when politicians do get an idea they usually get it wrong....

<tangent>
'Needs citation', as our Jimmy would say. The wording is approximate. He (I think he was a he; he was certainly a foil for mehitabel, who often referred to herself as the old dame) said it in archy's life of mehitabel.
</tangent>

The one good thing about the reality TV show in Venezuela... 

<tangent>
(Natalie Haynes, a regular but occasional guest on Strong Message Here, recently observed that when Trump said 'It was literally like watching a TV show' her automatic 'Literally'-Abuse Antennae sprang  into action – only for her to realize that this use of 'literally' was unimpeachable...

<tangent ip="mine not hers"> 

(possibly a first for this president, who does so much else that is impeachable) 

</tangent> 

</tangent>

...is that it has thrown light on my feeling that American English is peppered with more accurate pronunciation of some foreign names, while  at the same time harbouring other foreign names that are less accurate.

It is a sort of linguistic Monroe Doctrine.

<parenthesis>
(The early nineteenth century, largely defensive, statement of a hemispheric 'sphere of inluence'. It was saying, in  the teeth of European powers wielding colonial (extractive, when not plain exploitative) might in Africa and Asia, 'Hands off anything in the Western Hemisphere; it's nothing to do with you and everything to do with us [you heard: US]'

Later it was Roosevelt that made it offensive (changing from  'Hands off' to 'We can do what we want', and Trump that made it OFFENSIVE ('We can do whatever the hell we want and anyway my daddy's a policeman.')

My understanding of the Monroe Doctrine is based on a Post-Graduate Diploma in Latin American Studies (Best Before End May 1975), and is sketchy. You can read more about the Monroe Doctrine and its Corollaries here (Wikipedia) or for more detail (but less actuality) try here – of which this Introduction gives a taste:

 

 

 

</parenthesis>

Foreign languages spoken in the Western hemisphere (and also in Europe, for obvious historical reasons) get a sensitive treatment in American English, 'Venezuela' gets an /s/ where BE has a /z/. But foreign languages spoken outside the Western hemisphere get a less sympathetic treatment: /ɑjræk/ ('Iraq') springs to mind.

I had in mind a reaction to the National Security Strategy, but that will have to wait for an update. Tempus as my maths teacher used to say, 'has fugitted'.

b

PS

If having a sing is on your list of resolutions, give this a go:

Of course, not singing is an option, but singing spots are about to sell out, and I wouldn't  want to disappoint.