Archives for September 2007

I was googling for something else when I ran across “Pronunciation of Upstate New York Place-Names” in a 1944 issue of American Speech (which I was able to access thanks to the wonders of JSTOR and the Boston Public Library card); this struck me not only because (as regular readers know) I love local pronunciations, but because it was by L. Sprague De Camp, who I knew as a wonderful science fiction writer. Apparently he’d spent a long time making “a collection of the local pronunciations of names of places in the state north of Westchester and Rockland counties. I have obtained my information directly from local inhabitants where possible…”; he includes “(a) names of non-English (Iroquois, Dutch, etc.) origin, and (b) names of English origin whose pronunciation does not follow unequivocally from the spelling.” He uses phonetic transcription, but in my presentation of some of the more striking examples, I will respell them in a way that’s (a) easier on me than cutting-and-pasting special symbols (apart from schwa), and (b) easier on the reader not accustomed to phonetic transcription. (Incidentally, does anyone know if the lovely word “upstate” is used elsewhere than in NY?)

First off, a couple of general observations: foreign names are universally anglicized in what now seems an old-fashioned way (Java = JAY-və, Rheims = REEMZ, Valois = və-LOISS, Versailles = vər-SAYLZ, Medina = me-DYE-nə, Riga = RYE-gə, Borodino = boro-DYE-no, Cairo = KAY-roh, Athens = AY-thənz, Delhi = DELL-high, Faust = FAWST), and British names are Americanized (i.e., pronounced as spelled: Greenwich = GREEN-wich—but Worcester = WOOS-tər).

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I just picked up the December 15, 2005 issue of the NYRB, which is so fat (it’s a Holiday Issue) that I still haven’t finished it, and continued with Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Last Minstrel, a review of a biography of the novelist Henry Roth, whose famous Call It Sleep I own but have not read. I just reached the following passage, which discusses what I think a brilliant decision about representing immigrant speech:

With even bolder ingenuity, in order to confound further any facile assumptions about which culture is the “mainstream” for the novel’s troubled people, the young Roth had the original idea of representing the Schearls’ Yiddish speech not as it sounds to the American reader (awkward, halting, foreign), but as it sounds to the speaker: natural, even idealized—a pure English that is often poetic (“The sweet chill has dulled,” the mother tells her son. “Lips for me… must always be cool as the water that wet them”), and never less than beautifully proper (“Love, marriage, whatever one calls it, does that to one, makes one uncertain, wary. One wants to appear better than one is”). Even the awful father speaks in the cadences of one of the Prophets: “She’s jesting with the angel of death!” he snarls at one point, threatening his wife’s rebellious sister…
It is only when Roth’s characters speak English that we’re made brutally aware of how awkwardly “foreign” they still in fact are, how helpless they are in this new world. Confronted with an Irish policeman after her son has got lost, this same eloquent mother is reduced to a stiff, mechanical stutter: “Herr—Mister. Ve—er—ve go?”
Listening to these different registers of speech, it is hard for readers not to feel that Roth’s Yiddish-speakers are also the “last minstrels” of their particular linguistic music, and it is only too clear that a profound emotion moved Roth as a young writer to commemorate them.

And now, of course, I want to read the book.

Curious Expeditions has a post that makes me want to drop everything else and spend the rest of my life visiting as many of these wonderful places as possible: Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries:

For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library. We had a chance to see just such a library on our recent visit to Prague. Tucked away on the top of a hill in Prague is the Strahov Monestary, the second oldest monastery in Prague. Inside, divided into two major halls, is a breathtaking library. The amazing Theological Hall contains 18,000 religious texts, and the grand Philosophical Hall has over 42,000 ancient philosophical texts. Both are stunningly gorgeous.

I’ve been to Strahov, and to a number of others on the long page of photographs (I held my breath until I got to the Main Reading Room of the NYPL); now I want to visit them all. As I said here, “To me, too, great libraries are the closest thing to cathedrals.” Thanks for the link, Maus!

A story by Lydia Polgreen in today’s NY Times [archived] discusses a plant used in Mali as a form of fencing that turns out to be “a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels.” It will be great if it turns out to save the world, but as you will understand, my main concern is with its peculiar name, of whose pronunciation and origin the story gives no clue, except to say that it “originated in Central America and is believed to have been spread around the world by Portuguese explorers.” Some sort of Indian language, then? It wasn’t in the OED (tsk), but I found it in Webster’s Third New International: it’s pronounced JAT-ruh-fuh. And the etymology? That’s so surprising (and yet obvious, once you know) I’m placing it below the cut, so you can speculate unhindered before checking.

Meanwhile, I’ll entertain you with an odd entry I found in the OED while looking fruitlessly for this word:

jau dewin

[Origin obscure.]

A term of reproach.

1340-70 Alex. & Dind. 659 Þ^e iaudewin iubiter ioiful ȝe holde, For he was wraþful i-wrouht & wried in angur.
c1362 Durham Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 565 Cuidam Istrioni Jestour Jawdewyne in festo Natalis D’ni, 3s. 4d.
1401 Pol. Poems (Rolls) II. 86 Thou jawdewine, thow jangeler, how stande this togider.

“Thou jawdewin” has a ring to it, doesn’t it? I may have to adopt it. (But why do they show it as two words when all the citations have it as one?)

OK, give up? Here’s the etymology:

Greek iatros ‘physician’ + trophē ‘nourishment.’ It’s originally a New Latin genus name, so Webster’s wants you to capitalize it: Jatropha. But I think we’re past that, now that it’s a world-saving wonder weed.

My wife and I are still getting used to the program schedule of our new public radio station, WFCR (FCR for Five College Radio, and I much prefer it, because they play classical and jazz music for most of the day in place of the earnest public-interest talkfests I used to skip on WAMC in Pittsfield); for instance, WAMC had Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! on from 11 AM to noon on Saturdays, and here it’s on from noon to one. Well, today (after remembering to listen to “Wait, Wait”) we kept the radio on and found ourselves listening to a hilarious, entertaining, and by-god educational word show called Says You!. Part of the show (my favorite part) is a version of the old Dictionary game, where panelists have to choose between the real definition of an obscure word and fakes dreamed up for the occasion; today one of the words was opisthenar (oh-PISTH-uh-nahr), for which the proffered definitions were “the Pharaoh’s symbol of authority,” “the proclamation of an Ancient Greek oracle,” and “the back of the hand.” I knew enough Greek to know which was correct (I’ll put it below the cut in case you want to guess), but it fooled the panelists. In between rounds of that, they play other games; today they had a joined-authors theme. If Dumas, Poe, and Thomas Mann had collaborated on a book, what would it have been? The Man in the Iron Masque of the Red Death in Venice, of course. Hey, it’s not Apostrophes, but it’s a lot of fun, and I’m glad I found it.

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The discussion of pair of stairs got onto the subject of compass(es), and after discovering there were three words in Russian (компас [kómpas] for ‘instrument for determining direction,’ буссоль [bussól’] for ‘surveyor’s compass,’ and циркуль [tsírkul’] for ‘instrument for describing circles,’ the last ultimately from Latin circulus—and why “describing” rather than “drawing,” now that I think of it?), I checked the OED and found the following extraordinarily messy etymology:

[a. F. compas (12th c. in Littré) ‘measure, pair of compasses, circle’; in mod.F. also ‘mariner’s compass’; = Pr. compas, Sp. compas ‘pair of compasses, measure, rule of life, pattern’, Pg. compasso ‘pair of compasses’, It. compasso ‘a compasse, a round, also a paire of compasses’ (Florio); med.L. compassus = circinus pair of compasses (Du Cange). Cf. also Ger. compass, kompass, mariner’s compass, formerly also gnomon, sun-dial, portable dial, Du. kompas, Sw. compass, kompass, Da. compas, Norw. kompas, (all) mariner’s compass. (This is the exclusive sense in the Teutonic langs., as ‘pair of compasses’ is predominant in the Romanic.)
  The history of this word and its associated verb in the Romanic langs. has not yet been determined, and it presents many points of uncertainty. It is doubtful whether the n. is Common Romanic (the Sp. being app. from Fr. or Pr.), and as yet uncertain whether the n. is derived from the vb., or the vb. from the n. If the n. was the origin, it would predicate a L. type *compassus, f. com– together or intensive + ? passus step, pace; if the vb. was the earlier, compassare would be ‘to pass or step together’ or ‘completely’ (see Diez passare), and *compassus, compasso, the action of doing so. The early history of the senses of the n. is equally obscure: in OF., ‘measure’, primarily perhaps ‘measure kept in walking together’, ‘artifice, subtilty’, and ‘pair of compasses’, appear all to be early senses; it is at present impossible to say whether the instrument took its name from ‘measuring’ or from ‘equal stepping’. It is probable that the sense ‘circumference, circle, round’ which is slightly exemplified in OF., but has received so great a development in Eng., is derived from the name of the instrument; but the converse is also possible; cf. L. circinus compasses, from circa round, etc.; also Ger. zirkel, (1) circle, (2) compasses. The later application to the Mariner’s Compass, recognized in modern French, but chiefly developed in English and the Teut. langs., is also of obscure origin; it may easily have arisen out of the sense ‘circle’ or ‘circuit’, as showing the circle of the winds; but in German this sense appears to have been preceded by those of ‘gnomon’ and ‘sun-dial’, which may point in another direction. The Greek name of the circinus or compasses was διαβήτης, from διαβαίνειν to stride or walk with the legs apart, to stride, step, or pass over: it is not impossible that compassus and compassare may have been employed to render these words, and as διαβήτης also meant the gnomon of a sun-dial, it is conceivable that this indicates the way in which compassus came to be used for dial, and mariner’s compass.
  The OF. senses all appear early in ME. In the uncertainty as to the relations between these, it is impossible to arrange them in any certain order in Eng., and that adopted is merely provisional, and subject to alteration when Romanic scholars shall have ascertained the previous history of the word in their own domain.]

If somebody had asked me the etymology of compass, I would have said confidently “Oh, it’s from Latin compassus” and thought no more about it. This is a good example of why etymology involves a lot more than giving the earlier form of a word. (And I expect the etymology will get even longer and more complicated when they get around to revising this entry for the third edition.)

I was just looking up dinosaur in the AHD when my eye was caught by a photo of a graceful protozoan, Ceratium sp., illustrating the dinoflagellate entry. “Dinoflagellate?” I thought. “What’s so scary about that little creature?” I looked at the etymology, and it turns out the dino- isn’t from Greek δεινός ‘terrifying,’ as in dinosaur, but from δῖνος ‘whirling,’ which pleased me (though I had to then correct the Wikipedia article, which had given an incorrect etymology).

File under “weird coincidences”: last week I posted about my new copy of Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, and the first comment said “Any encyclopaedia that gives due coverage to Basque-Icelandic pidgin must be respected as comprehensive.” Then my online pal (and occasional commenter) kattullus came to visit Friday and told me about a Basque-Icelandic dictionary from hundreds of years ago; just now he e-mailed me some links, and I am duly passing them on to you.

Here is a brief description, with examples (at Luistxo Fernandez’s wonderful GeoNative site, which focuses on “minorities, little nations and native cultures” and specializes in toponymy—here‘s the main list of tables); here are “summaries of the lectures at a conference on the slaying of Spaniards in the West fjords in 1615,” one of which is on the bilingual vocabularies; and here is the meatiest of them as far as I’m concerned, a detailed discussion by Henrike Knörr of the vocabularies and what I gather was their initial publication:

In 1937 Nicolaas Gerardus Hendricus Deen, a linguist from De Hague, presented his doctoral thesis, entitled Glossaria duo Vasco-Islandica, to the University of Leiden. The thesis, under the direction of F. Muller, was written in Latin and was edited in the same language later that same year. It was a relatively small work of just 135 pages in length. The recognition that the book enjoyed was negatively affected by two wars: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which was being fought bitterly at the time, and the Second World War, which was soon to erupt. However, Deen’s thesis would almost certainly have been more widely acknowledged had the author published it in a modern language.

The subject of Deen’s work was two vocabularies taken from manuscripts written in Iceland at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the XVIIIth, accompanied by a commentary and a translation. The manuscripts had been made known to Deen by Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck (1866-1951), a well-known expert in Basque studies and lecturer at the University of Leiden. […] Deen travelled to the Basque Country in 1927 […] and studied the manuscripts […] At the end of the prologue, having expressed his thanks to Urquijo, Deen wrote these moving words: “Let us hope that the Basque Country comes back to life, stronger and more beautiful than before, and let us hope that Spain can soon live in peace!” (“Utinam renascatur pulchrius ac fortius Vasconia et bona cum pace iamiam vivat Hispania”). I would add that I, at least, know nothing about the life and works of Deen after 1937.

Deen published these vocabularies in four columns: Basque / Icelandic / German / Spanish. […] It is surprising that the thesis is not in the rich library and archive of Urquijo: because of the incommunicaton in war times or because of a theft?…

Moral: do not publish your scholarship in a dead language, especially when the world is convulsed with war (I’m reminded of the saga of the Persian-Russian dictionary I recounted here). Also, people who steal books from libraries should be publicly flogged.

I just discovered, via aldiboronti at Wordorigins, the expression a pair of stairs, used to mean (in the OED’s words) ‘A set or flight of stairs or steps; (also) a portable set of steps.’ It strikes me as deeply counterintuitive, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard or seen it, but it clearly used to be in common use; here are the OED citations:

c1450 J. CAPGRAVE Solace of Pilgrims (Bodl. 423) 77 Thann go we down on a peyr greces in to a chapel thei clepe ierlm.
1530 J. PALSGRAVE Lesclarcissement 182 Vngz degrez, a payre of stayres.
1602 H. PLATT Delightes for Ladies sig. H3v, A maide that fell downe a paire of staires.
1628 J. EARLE Micro-cosmogr. xiii. sig. C10v, A Tauerne Is a degree, or (if you will) a paire of stayres aboue an Alehouse.
1684 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 14 443 Being.. not able.. to have past through a Gallery down a pair of Stairs into the Court.
1730 Inventory R. Woolley’s Goods 11 A Pair of wooden Steps.
1755 in J. A. Picton City of Liverpool: Select. Munic. Rec. II. 155 A breast wall and pair of steps from the shore or road up to the Ladies’ Walk.
1761 G. COLMAN in St. James’s Chron. 18 June 1/2, I could as easily have scaled the Monument, as have come at the Tip of her Chin without the Help of a Pair of Steps.
1839 DICKENS Nicholas Nickleby xli. 402 An old black velvet cap, which, by slow degrees, as if its wearer were ascending a ladder or pair of steps, rose above the wall.
1884 J. EASTWOOD & W. A. WRIGHT Bible Word-bk. (ed. 2) s.v., We still speak of a ‘pair’ of steps or stairs.
1903 W. D. HOWELLS Lett. Home v. 33 It all ended.. in our finding these two rooms, five pair up, in an apartment with respectable people who are glad to let them.
1923 Times 4 Dec. 16 (caption) Mr. Lloyd George is standing on a pair of steps steadied by porters.
1928 A. E. PEASE Dict. Dial. N. Riding Yorks. 92/2 Pair of stairs, the usual term for a ‘flight’ of stairs or a staircase.
1991 B. ALDISS Frankenstein Unbound (BNC) xx. 172, I.. seized a pair of steps, used to reach the higher shelves; I dragged the steps to the middle of the room.
1995 Daily News (N.Y.) (Nexis) 16 Oct. 20 The lines snaked around the block and down a pair of stairs, into a large exhibition hall.

I’m quite sure they’ve misunderstood the last quote, which must refer to two parallel staircases. I presume some of you have seen the expression used (e.g., in Dickens), but do any of you use it yourselves, or know someone who does?

(Oddly, a pair of arrows means three of them, or did traditionally: “Now chiefly… with reference to the ceremonial obligations of the Royal Company of Archers.”)

Weird etymology of the week: today I saw a reference to the verb cry being derived from an ancient Roman exclamation “Quirites!” ‘[Help,] citizens!’ Outmoded folk etymology, thought I, but no, the OED agreed:

[a. F. crie-r …:—L. quiritare to raise a plaintive cry, to wail, scream, shriek out, cry aloud, bewail, lament, orig. (according to Varro) to implore the aid of the Quirites or Roman citizens: ‘quiritare dicitur is qui Quiritum fidem clamans implorat’.]

As does the AHD:

Middle English crien, from Old French crier, from Vulgar Latin *critare, from Latin quiritare, to cry out, perhaps from Quirites, public officers to whom one would cry out in times of need.

So remember, every time you cry, you’re calling on the Quirites.