I’ve long been a fan of Adam Gopnik’s, and I greatly enjoyed his A Point of View: The curse of a ridiculous name, in which he laments his surname and worries about its effect on his afterlife:
Are there any big modern writers who have really funny names? Only Kipling, I think, and that is an accident of the participle.
More to the point, are there good writers who are now forgotten, as I am pretty sure I shall be, because their names are so funny?
Yes, I have to say with dread, there are – for instance, the 20th Century American poet WD Snodgrass. Snodgrass was a truly great poet, the originator, if anyone was, of the style we now call “confessional poetry”, a hero to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath and the rest. But he had that funny Pickwickian name, and he knew it. He used to make fun of his own name: “Snodgrass is walking through the universe!” one poem reads (I, too, make fun of my surname, in the hopes of keeping off the name-demons).
It even has a Russian aspect:
A gopnik in Russian, and in Russia, is now a drunken hooligan, a small-time lout, a criminal without even the sinister glamour of courage. When Russian people hear my last name, they can barely conceal a snigger of distaste and disgusted laughter. Those thugs who clashed with Polish fans at Euro 2012? All gopniks – small G. And I’m told that it derives from an acronym for public housing, rather than from our family’s Jewish roots, but no difference.
(Thanks, Eric!)
Who would not want to be named Anthony Trollope?
Anyone who knows what trollop means.
An enjoyable article, but I am puzzled by this sentence:
Only Kipling, I think, and that is an accident of the participle.
Does the author think that Kipling is the participle of a verb to kiple? Isn’t it more likely to include the suffix -ling as in yearling, duckling, gosling, stripling, foundling, nursling, changeling and a few others, built on a base kip (perhaps with a different vowel) which has been forgotten?
He means that it is only the fact that Kipling sounds like a past participle that makes it a funny name. It is not, so to speak, intrinsically funny.
He’s referring to the well-known joke
Q: “Do you like Kipling?”
A: “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.”
Snodgrass has been affected by his name, for me, at least. For some reason I assumed he was British.
I think this is the -ing of a clan name, and that the Kiplings are most likely the clan of Cyppel or something close to that. (Not Cippel, or it would be Chipling.) But it’s also possible that kippered (i.e. salted and smoked) herring has something to do with it.
Kipling has never struck me as funny, but maybe because it’s one of those names you know from early childhood. I do snigger at the name Gopnik though.
The first time I heard reference to Snodgrass (I’d nine or ten years?) it was in jest, and I thought it was a generic term for snobby, yet bookish, English gentlemen with awkwardly shaped noses.
Wilkes is talking about the lost office of the city poet, and says: “The last was Elkanah Settle…”
London’s city poet, though a poet, doesn’t seem to have been employed to write poetry. It seems to have been a Restoration post and I can only find one other besides Settle, someone called Matthew Taubman:
Hilda Doolittle, Edward Cummings, and William Williams all took corrective measures.
Could be worse. He could be named Katz and live in Italy.
On the literary front, Donald Westlake regretted naming his noir tough guy anti-hero Parker because it made writing “Parker parked the car” too ridiculous for words.
Agatha Christie once had a detective called Parker Pyne, who did not last. It helps to say the name aloud.
How about Tolstoy, the Fat One, Solzhenitsyn, the Lying One, or Pasternak, the Parsnip, not to mention Petrov-Vodkin?
I like Adam Gopnik’s columns too and I did see sniggering tweets by Russian listeners.
What a shame that Gopnik, who after all wasn’t raised Protestant, should settle on Elkanah Settle and skip over Augustus Toplady.
Ø, you mean a present participle I think.
And the way I’ve heard that joke is: “Which do you like better, Browning or Kipling?” “I don’t know, I’ve never kippled.” Ahem.
Yes, of course. Forget my own name next.
The Kipling jokes remind me dimly of a gag from the works of P. G. Wodehouse. Bertie Wooster talking to Madeline Bassett:
I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie. “A sensitive plant, what?”
Madeline: “Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.”
Bertie: “Oh, am I?”
I vaguely recall Parker Pyne, but I don’t think I see the problem.
Park or pine? It doesn’t sound like a natural parallel to me, so I had to struggle even to come up with it.
What a shame that Gopnik, who after all wasn’t raised Protestant, should settle on Elkanah Settle and skip over Augustus Toplady.
I had never heard of either of them and looked them up, but they could have exchanged their names: Toplady would seem to be a good name for the “show-woman” Mrs. Mynn, who commissioned some of Elkanah Settle’s work for the plays she put up at several Bartholomew’s Fairs. The hymn “Rock of Ages” by Toplady has endured, but Settle’s plays, though ephemeral, seem to have been a lot of fun to watch.
Elkanah: I suppose this is one of the many Bible names beloved of Puritans, which Settle obviously was not.
Toplady is mentioned and pictured on “Theopedia”, a “Christian” counterpart to Wikipedia. On his page is an ad for a “Puritan Hard Drive” for use with both PC and Mac.
Sili: Parker Pyne : read it as one word, not two.
Parker Pyne’s
A Stachelschwein,
And his nick
Is “porc-épic“.
Reminds me of that scene in Robin Hood: Men in Tights (a truly stunning classical masterpiece of modern cinema, for those of you who have not seen it, you really must) where King John is having his fortune read by the witch in the tower, whose name is “Latrine”, and the subject of her name comes up:
“Such an unusual name, ‘Latrine’. How did your family come by it?”
“We changed it in the 9th Century.”
“…You mean you changed it to ‘Latrine’?”
“Yeah! Used to be ‘Shithouse’.”
“It’s a good change, it’s a good change.”
The scene in question 🙂
@John Cowan
‘Trollop’ is a good one, I’ve always personally had a great deal of affection for the word “strumpet”.
Cheers,
Andrew
Of course, it occurs to me the day after that Gopnik may have meant his question about Trollope ironically. That’s the trouble with po-mo faux-ignorance: it’s so easy to confuse with, y’know, actual ignorance.
I find from the WP article on “Rock of Ages” the following gem:
Yeuucch.
And thanks to Wikipedia and Wikisource, I also found this Latin version, by no less than Willam Ewart Gladstone:
It sings well to the traditional tune, whose name is apparently “Toplady” — who assigns the names of hymn tunes?
There was an Elzabethan poet called Thomas Bastard. Not often anthologised.
Andy Warhol’s name sounds funny in Polish. It has almost the same associations “Gopnik” does in Russian. Warchoł means “hothead, brawler, bruiser”.
Off topic: I need an circumflexed schwa for aomthing I’m doing. Soes anyone have one to spare? Can’t find one anywhere.
Second question: is there something weird about circumflexing a schwa?
JC: the traditional tune, whose name is apparently “Toplady”
Usually, the name of a hymn is the first line of words, but words have often been written for existing tunes, in which case the tune is referred to by the name of the original song. In hymn books you often find the note “sung to the tune of ‘XYZ'” where ‘XYZ’ is an older or more familiar song.
In this case, Augustus Toplady’s work was the poem, and the tune is by Thomas Hastings, an American. It think it is likely that A.M. Toplady did not give a title to his poem, “Rock of Ages” being just the first words, used in the hymn version. But “not published” does not necessarily mean “not circulated”. So Hastings may have had a manuscript version of the poem with the word “Toplady” included but without an explanation. This of course meant that Toplady was the poet’s name, but someone else may have misunderstood the word as the name of the tune (Hastings himself might have used the word as the name for his tune in familiar speech since there was no other title at the time). I can’t think of another explanation for a religious tune called “Toplady”.
The Latin version looks a little strange, but I am not proficient enough to fix it.
As for the vocabulary, the English words are conventional but not gruesome, unlike so many Victorian stanzas with “washed in the blood of the Lord” and similar gory metaphors. The Latin stanza (composed by one of the most prominent Victorians) which mentions “lympham” as well as “sanguinem” I find repellent.
Sir JCass: … in Polish … Warchoł means “hothead, brawler, bruiser”.
I found a nice children’s book about Andy Warhol and his family, written and illustrated by one of his nephews. It explains that the original name was Warhola and was (I think) Czech rather than Polish. Andy is the one who dropped the final a on his way to fame.
John, I can make you one as a photoshop jpeg image (obviously it won’t work as html).
Wasn’t Warhol Ruthenian (Ukrainian-speaking Uniate)? The spelling probably comes from whatever power (Austria?) was in charge in the Ruthenian areas in the 19th century
Cricketers have good names e.g. Arnie Sidebottom.
WKPD: “Arnie Sidebottom now … coaches cricket to young cricketers at Thongsbridge Cricket Club.”
There was a Donald Robert Overall-Hatswell (1898-1976) who was, naturally, a costume researcher on John Ford movies.
The Warholas were Carpatho-Rusyns (a subgroup of the Ruthenians? I can never keep the terms straight.)
There was a Donald Robert Overall-Hatswell
My late friend Len Coates had a dog named Mahatma.
My former postdoc had a dog named Genghis whom he brought to work. When we organized a seminar that was sort of modeled on the MIT topologists’ long-running Kan seminar, I called it the Genghis seminar.
I’m not sure I quite follow marie-lucie’s scale of comparative goriness-of-metaphor, but on a more purely linguistic note from “Rock of Ages,” should we suppose that “blood” and “flowed” actually rhymed in Toplady’s variety of 18th c. English, or is this just a close-enough-for-government-work slant rhyme?
John E: There is no single schwa-with-circumflex character, but you can create one with the sequence of Unicode characters U+0259 followed by U+0302. In HTML, that is “ə̂”, which will produce ə̂. ə̂. How that looks to you depends on your fonts, your browser, and your operating system. As far as I know, no language uses this particular combination: in IPA it would mean a non-syllabic schwa vowel, since in IPA it makes no difference whether a diacritic appears above or below. (If you actually wanted a schwa with circumflex below, you would use U+0259 followed by U+032D, or HTML “ə̭” to produce ə̂.)
Marie-Lucie: It’s true that “the water” in the original poem probably refers to lymph emerging from Jesus’s side (implying that he was not dead: the dead do not bleed), but the Latin lympha just means ‘(pure) water, spring water’, not ‘lymph’ specifically.
Garrigus: The Warholas were Carpatho-Rusyns
… and the sentence continues “from the eastern part of Slovakia”.
http:// www. warhola. com/ uncleandys. html
(the page about the book I was referring to – with other relevant links contributed by the family)
JC: thank you for setting me straight on “lympha”. Still, those physiological details in the hymns turn me off!
There are two famous (and very beautiful) Russian ladies – Olympic champion figure skater Irina Slutskaya and businesswoman and celebrity Olga Slutsker.
Must have hard time being taken seriously by any English speaker who’ve seen their names spelled…
As well as being a very nice and modest man Robert Slutzky was a colour theorist who wrote the great and influential essay Transparency: Literal & Phenomenal, with Colin Rowe. It’s not the easiest reading but it’s useful if you want to understand Cubism.
All these names derive, of course, from wonderfully named medieval town of Slutsk in Belarus (I pity unfortunate ladies who have to write their place of birth in English documents)
Slutsk takes its name from river Sluch (etymology unknown, possibly related to Old Slavic sluti “to be renowned”)
Now, I don’t wish to speculate what exactly the female inhabitants of that river’s banks were renowned of, but one wonders…
Slutsk –
There is also a good Russian poet Boris Slutsky.
But I can assure you that it sounds a bit weird in Russian too because the word is phonetically close to случка/n. – sluchka, случать/ся/v. – couple, mate.
Slutsk, I think, comes from лука, излучина – a bend in the river. So Slutsk is a town on where the river bends.
There has been a debate among the Slutsk people on how to call themselves. The emerging consensus seems to be that it should be Случчына in Belorussian and Слутчина in Russian.
Anyone who has studied PhD-level microeconomics in the US is probably familiar with the Slutsky equation. “Slutsky” may be derived from the name of the river, not necessarily the town.
—Случчына in Belorussian and Слутчина in Russian.
That’s the name of the region, I assume, but how you call people from Slutsk?
Sluchchanin, sluchchane and sluchchanka, I suppose.
BTW, sluchchanka (female inhabitant of Slutsk) sounds in Russian uncomfortably close to female who engages in sluchka (coupling, mating)
Another possible connection of sluchchanka is to sluchai (chance, accident, occasion) and its derivative sluchaino (by chance, accidentally)
Sluchchanka – chance girl!
I didn’t know about случка and its corresponding verb. Does the identity in form between случиться ‘to couple’ and случиться ‘to happen’ create jokes/misunderstandings?
Full range of meanings in Dal’s dictionary
СЛУЧАЙ
муж. (со-лучать) быть или быль, приключение, происшествие, притча, дело, что сталось, случилось, сбылось; обстоятельство, встреча; все нежданное, не предвиденное, внезапное, нечаянное. У нас был неслыханный случай: мужик в ведре утонул; стала пить в наклон, а перевясло закинулось на затылок, и захлебнулся! Всякое дело до случая. Не скучай в нынешний случай (приб. время переходчиво).
| Случай, случайное или удобное, спопутное к чему время, пора, обстоятельство; нечаянное совпадение, либо встреча чего. Не найду случая. Не упускай случая. Купил коня по случаю. При случае исполню это. В случае, если, когда бы, коль скоро, буде. Возьми, про случай, топор с собою.
| Случай или случайность, безотчетное и беспричинное начало, в которое веруют отвергающие провидение. Все на свете случай, все случайность. Это не случай, а умысел, нарок. Случайность, нечаянность, нежданный случай.
| Случай, урал.-казач. женщины произноят слуцый, сговор, помолвка, обручение, свадьба наготове.
| Случай, ·стар. и случаи, дела или приключения служебные, кои вносились в послужной список, также называемый случаями; служебные награды такого рода, кои входили в рассчет по местничеству. После свадьбы… в случаи не ставить, кто кого в чину выше ни был, Котошихин. Указал государь у… Вяземского взять случаи. По тем случаям я, Мирон Вельяминов, больше (выше) князя Ивана Вяземского. Случайный, о деле, нечаянный, недуманный, случившийся, приключившийся собой, без чьего-либо умысла, намерения, старания. Удачная покупка дома дело случайное, по заказу не найдешь. Я случайно слышал об этом.
| О времени или обстоятельстве, удобный, сподручный, досужный, свободный. Не случайная ныне пора, неудобная для чего. Не случайно мне было зайти, недосужно или неспопутно. Когда случайно будет, сделаю, при удобном случае.
| О человеке, кто в милости у начальства, в силе; любимец, наперсник, временщик. Случайные люди недолговечны. Случать, случить кого с кем, соединять в одно место или вообще сближать. Что Бог случил, того человек не разлучает. Нас судьба случила, знакомство сдружило. Случать гончих, собак, охот. скликать, сзывать.
| Припускать для приплода жеребца, быка. -ся, быть случаему.
| Делаться, твориться или сбываться, происходить, приключиться, статься. Что у вас дома случилось? доспелось. Беда случилась. Всяко случается, и пироги едим, и без хлеба сидим. Случалось ли тебе видеть пасолнца? При мне (со мной) денег не случилось. Не мути водой, случится черпать. Не плюй в колодец, случится напиться. Что ни случатся, все переварится. Случение, действие по гл. случать. Слука, пск. случай.
| архан. любовь или дружба, привязаность, приверженость; склонность.
| Птица слука, боровой кулик, вальдшнеп. Случка жен. припуск домашних животных, для приплода. Случная конюшня, случной жеребец, ко случке относящийся
| Случка, пермяц. случай, происшествие. Случатель, случник, кто случает, либо наблюдает за случкою.
Note wonderfully archaic 18th century meaning – to be favored by boss…
John Emerson—
I’ve had this problem myself (Schuessler, right?), & I’ve found this website to be the easiest way to type circumflex-schwas:
http://westonruter.github.com/ipa-chart/keyboard/.
Just click on the schwa icon & then the circumflex tone-contour mark (at the bottom right). They display correctly for me, unlike John Cowan’s above, but this may be a wordpress issue rather than anything else – let’s see if this one comes through ok: ɘ̂.
Oops, I mean ə̂.
Well, just like John Cowan’s version, that doesn’t display correctly for me, unlike the circumflexed high-mid central unrounded vowel I accidentally typed. Oh well… it works fine for me in other venues (like Word, etc.), though. I’ll stop talking about it now.
there is a surname Случанинов, so Slutsky – Sluchanin could be right.
Lithuanian town of Trakai (Troki in Russian and Belarussian) also produced several surnames, most famous of them being Trotsky
Anyway, people of Troki are called in Russian Trochane.
Halldór Laxness, a writer (and a Nobel prize winner).
Not exactly a funny surname but I’m sure it must sound a bit peculiar to English speakers.
The name comes from the farm where he grew up, Laxnes.
Lax means salmon and the ‘nes’ bit refers to the bend in the river nearby. The farmland juts into this body of water, so to speak.
I see. So it’s a pork/park thing. Very hard for me to make that merger.
Thanks.
Sili: It’s the NORTH=START merger, but pork (unlike fork, e.g.) happens to belong to FORCE rather than NORTH, so there is no pork/park merger.
pork, fork, force, North: What are you people taking about? I think that Canadians say all these words with the same vowel (which is not that of park or start).
Matt, it came out fine for me on the screen as ə̂, a schwa with a circumflex. But when I pasted it into a word document, the circumflex was off to the side (displaced towords the right, actually).
I second m-l’s comment.
I third it (though I’m not Canadian so I don’t count).
John Cowan, do you have a terrifically good ear for accents? Do people from the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan have different accents, nowadays? Did they ever, or was it more a class-related difference than anything about borough geography?
Thanks, Bathrobe. That’s quite strange, though, because, to me, it’s displaced to the right in Firefox but displays perfectly in Word. Oh well, I guess it depends on a lot of things.
@JC: Tell us more about the distinction between the vowels of FORCE and NORTH, please.
Well, I tried it in four browsers. Only in Chrome does it come out correctly. In Safari and Firefox, the circumflex is displaced to the right. In Opera, it appears as a box directly to the right of ə. So it depends on your browser, for a start.
As to Word, I’m using a Mac, which might have something to do with it.
Empty:
Historically there were two different o-like vowels before /r/, namely the THOUGHT and GOAT vowels, generating the NORTH and FORCE lexical sets respectively. These merged in many accents both rhotic and non-rhotic. Here’s the first paragraph of the Wikipedia description, with my annotations in double square brackets:
FORCE words are considerably fewer than NORTH words. Some orthographic rules and specific words are listed at Wikipedia, but the authoritative way to find out which is which is to look at AHD4. Words which have two pronunciations given, as “pork (pôrk, pōrk)” are FORCE, whereas when only one pronunciation appears, as in “fork (fôrk)”, the word belongs to NORTH.
Hat: Is this still true in AHD5?
In the NORTH=START (“born in a barn”) merger, the vowel of NORTH moved down to merge with START, rather than the vowel of FORCE moving down to merge with NORTH. This merger also happens in both rhotic and non-rhotic accents, but is even more marginal nowadays. Wikipedia, from the same page:
In my own accent the NORTH=FORCE merger is complete but the vowel is raised, so I pronounce both horse and hoarse as [hoɹs].
I have a tolerable ability to both hear and pronounce these various vowels in isolated words, but not so much in running speech. All the experts say there are no regional variants within NYC speech, but all the locals swear they can pin someone down by speech to within a couple of blocks (20 blocks = 1 mile, 12 blocks = 1 km, very roughly.) I’m neither, so what do I know?
Varying degrees of residential segregation, of course, may make the locals’ claim more plausible, given that location can be a proxy for both class and ethnic origin (which may involve substrate effects). It’s also the case, however, that New Yorkers raise the class level of their speech in more formal situations.
M-L, Iakon: You’ll note that Canadian English is not listed among the unmerged accents.
JC: Canadian English is not listed among the unmerged accents
Indeed, but since more than one merger is discussed, it is not completely clear which unmerging is referred to. Also, not everyone speaks the same in English Canada. I don’t know anyone who would pronounce for and far (and similar pairs) the same, but bother has the same vowel as father. And all the or and oar words have a rather high vowel (as in more).
(or words) I don’t mean the word word itself, which does not rhyme with ford.
Halldór Laxness: If it were pronounced /ˈlæksnǝs/ I think it might sound funny, but I usually pronounce it /læksˈnes/, which doesn’t sound funny at all.
Specifically, then, CanE has the NORTH=FORCE (fork-pork, or-oar-more) and the PALM=LOT (father-bother) mergers, like most of North America now. It also has the LOT=THOUGHT (cot-caught) merger, which is also found in the Western U.S. It does not have the NORTH=START (born-barn) merger, which as I noted is incompatible with NORTH=FORCE.
The Wikipedia article “Phonological history of English”, together with the articles linked by “Main article” and “See Also” sections, constitutes a fully detailed monograph perhaps 120 pages (paper, not Web) long, providing a worldwide view of the subject. Yet it requires very little technical knowledge: the IPA, an understanding of < as “comes from” and > as “becomes”, and the convention of italicizing words used as words, and that’s about it.
By coincidence after this thread started I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s wonderful The End of The Poem , the only book I’ve ever come across that’s interested (among many other things) in the influence on poets of their own names: frostiness in Frost, fens and obsessive Moorish geometry in Marianne Moore.
Basil Bunting’s name seemed not so far from Snodgrass’s, but Edwin Morgan’s elegy makes it quite different. (In this post it’s after the introduction. There’s also a comment on Morgan’s impressive aluminium wallpaper, and a page of Buntings.)
Thanks, John.
It’s probably something like “LUXness”, although I don’t normally do Icelandic.
[hɐtltour lɐxsnɛs], as best I can make out.
Thanks,JC.
Words which have two pronunciations given, as “pork (pôrk, pōrk)” are FORCE, whereas when only one pronunciation appears, as in “fork (fôrk)”, the word belongs to NORTH. Hat: Is this still true in AHD5?
AHD5 has only “pork (pôrk).”
Bummer.
I guess it’s time to capture that data from AHD4 before it becomes electronically inaccessible.
And it is done!
I grabbed the words in CAAPR, the Combined Anglo-American Pronunciation Reference, that appeared to be in either the NORTH or the FORCE lexical set (CAAPR does not distinguish them) and verified its pronunciation in AHD4 electronically. I weeded out obvious derivative forms and compounds first, and got the following results:
NORTH words:
abhor abort absorb accord accordion amorphous amortize aorta assorted award
border born
California cantor Capricorn cavort centaur chortle churchwarden concord condor conquistador contort cordial cordite cordon corduroy corgi cork corm cormorant corn cornea corner cornet corporal corporate corpse corpulent corpus corpuscle corridor corsage corsair corset cortege cortex corvette
decor dinosaur discord distort dormant dormer dormouse dorsal drawer dwarf
endorse escort exhort exorbitant extort
for force forceps forfeit fork forlorn formaldehyde formalin formation former Formica formless fornicate forsythia fortify fortnight fortress fortunate fortune forty forward
George Gordon gorge gorgeous gormless gorse guarantor
headquarters horn hornet horse horticulture
immortal importunate
lessor lord lorgnette lovelorn
matador morbid mordant morgue Mormon morn morning morpheme morphine morphology morsel mortal mortar mortgage mortician mortify mortise
nor Nordic Norman Norse north Norway
or orb orbit orchard orchestra orchid ordeal ordnance ordure organ organize orgasm orgy Orkney ornery orphan orthodox orthography
perform popcorn porcine porcupine pornography porphyry porpoise
quart quarter quartet
record remorse resort retort reward
scorch scorn short snorkel snort sorbet sorcerer sordid sorghum sort sortie stork storm sward swarm swarthy sword
thorn thwart tor torch toreador torment torpid torpor torque tort tortilla tortoise torture
vortex
war warble ward warfare warm warn warp wart wharf
FORCE words:
abnormal aboard acorn adore adorn afford aforesaid airborne anymore apportion ashore
before boar board Boer bore borne
carnivore chloroform chord chore coarse cohort commodore comport concourse conform consort consortium coordinate cord core cornice corporeal corps course court cuspidor
davenport deplore deport discourse disport divorce door dormitory
encore enforce enormous explore export
fjord floor forbear forbore ford fore forebode forecast foreclose forecourt forefather forefinger forefoot forefront foregather forego foreground forehand foreleg forelock foreman foremast foremost forename forenoon forerunner foresee foreshadow foreshore foreshorten foresight foreskin forestall foretaste foretell forethought foretold forewarn foreword forgather forge forgo form format formidable formula forswear fort forte forth forthright fortissimo fortitude fortuitous four
galore gore
harpsichord hoard hoarse horde hormone
ignore implore import inordinate intercourse
lore
mentor metamorphose more mortuary mourn
norm normal
oar ordain order ordinal ordinance ordinary ore ormolu ornament ornate
pianoforte picador pinafore platform porcelain porch pore pork porn port portend porter porterhouse portfolio portico portion portly portmanteau portrait portray Portugal postmortem pour primordial proportion
quarto quartz
rapport recourse reform report resource restore roar Roquefort
score Scorpio scorpion seaborne semaphore shore shorn smorgasbord snore soar sophomore sore source spore sport stevedore store suborn support swore sycamore
therefore tore torn tornado torpedo torsion torso tortuous toward troubadour
unicorn uniform
wardrobe wherefore whore wore
yore your
I’d appreciate it if Hattics from Scotland, Ireland, Eastern New England, the American South, or the Caribbean (or who speak AAVE) could look at these words and see if any are obviously in the wrong group. If fork and pork rhyme for you, you probably can’t help with this one, unless you are John Wells (who has had a mild stroke, for those who haven’t heard; he’s cognitively unimpaired, fortunately).
whore: I learned that the classical pronunciation was as if spelled “hoor”. In one British novel I read a long time ago (I think one of Graham Greene’s) a girl says to her boyfriend or potential boyfriend “I am your whore” or “I want to be your whore” or something to that effect, and the omniscient author says she pronounces it “hore” (probably with the vowel of”more”) because she is uneducated and does not know the “correct” pronunciation, something which bothers the boyfriend. Someone here must know the current situation.
p.s. (hoor rhyming with poor, not with door)
I think that some people pronounce poor to rhyme with door.
whore: I learned that the classical pronunciation was as if spelled “hoor”.
When I first learned the word, in a Toronto junior high school, it was pronounced “hoor.” We knew the correct spelling and also knew from the dictionary (but never heard) the “hore” pronunciation.
“whore: I learned that the classical pronunciation was as if spelled “hoor”.”
i remember our english teacher taught us whore should be pronounced hwore, cz all wh words would sound so, for what is correct to say hwat, while hoor would sound [o:r]
so no any confusion for me there
who, whom, whose
whole
—i remember our english teacher taught us whore should be pronounced hwore
The English word “whore” is actually a cognate of Mongolian “hair” (love)
Eurasiatic: *ḳV(jV)
Meaning: to wish, like
Indo-European: *kā- (cf. also *ḱey- 1499)
Proto-IE: *kā-, *kā-r-
Nostratic etymology: Nostratic etymology
Meaning: dear; lover
Tokharian: śār- ‘köstlich, angenehm’, A krant, B krent ‘gut’
Old Indian: kā́yamāna- ‘gern habend’, cā́ru- `agreeable, beloved, endeared’, cāyú- ‘begehrend’
Avestan: kā- ‘wonach verlangen’
Baltic: *kā̂r-a- (1) adj., *kar̂- vb. intr.
Germanic: *xṓr-ōn- f., *xṓr-a- m., n, *xōr-iō(n-) f.; *xar-ig-ō f.
Proto-Germanic: *xṓrōn, *xṓra-z, *xṓra-n, *xōriō(n); *xarigō
Meaning: whore, adultery
IE etymology: IE etymology
Gothic: hōr-s m. (a) `fornicator, adulterer’
Old Norse: hōra f. `Hure’; hōr-r m. `Hurer’; hōr n. `Ehebruch’
Norwegian: hora; hor
Swedish: hora; hor
Danish: hore; hor
Old English: hōre, -an f. `whore, harlot’, { hōr n. `overspel, echtbreuk’ }
English: whore
Old Frisian: hōr n. `overspel, echtbreuk’
Middle Dutch: hoere `Hure’, huerre `id.’
Dutch: hoer f. `Hure’
Middle Low German: hōre `Hure’, horre `id.’, herge, herie `Dirne’
Old High German: huora (9.Jh.) `Hure’, huorra `id.’; (9.Jh.) huor n. `overspel, echtbreuk’
Middle High German: huore wk. f. ‘hure’; huor st. n., m. ‘ausserehelicher beischlaf, ehebruch, hurerei’, huore st. f. ‘ds.’
German: Hure; (older) Herge
Latin: cārus, -a `lieb, teuer, wert, hoch im Preise’
Celtic: OIr caraim ‘liebe’, cara(t) ‘Freund’
Russ. meaning: любимый; любовник
References: WP I 325 f
Altaic: *kaje ( ~ k`-)
Proto-Altaic: *kaje ( ~ k`-)
Nostratic: Nostratic
Meaning: to love, covet
Russian meaning: искать, домогаться
Turkic: *Kɨj-
Mongolian: *kaji-
Proto-Mongolian: *kaji-
Altaic etymology: Altaic etymology
Meaning: 1 to seek, investigate 2 love, compassion
Russian meaning: 1 искать, исследовать 2 любовь, сострадание
Written Mongolian: qaji- 1 (L 911), qajira 2 (L 913)
Middle Mongolian: qairala-, qaijirala- ‘to love, treat kindly’ (HYt), qajirala- ‘сострадать’ (MA)
Khalkha: xaj- 1, xajr 2
Buriat: xaj- 1, xajra 2
Kalmuck: xǟrṇ 2
Ordos: xǟra, xǟram 2
Dagur: xairan 2 (Тод. Даг. 172)
Shary-Yoghur: χair 2
Monguor: xǝ̄ran 2; xǝ̄rla- ‘cher, chéri; aimer, gratifier’ (SM 167), xairGan 2
Comments: KW 180, MGCD 317. Mong. > Man. xaira- etc., see Rozycki 98.
Comments: A Turk.-Mong. isogloss.
i don’t know,SFR, you say something really doubtful sounding to me
how two so different meaning words could be conflated into cognate something is beyond me of course as always
SFReader, you present all those lists as if every Proto-whatever had been reconstructed. They have NOT. For closely related languages (eg Germanic, Turkic), OK (although the details of the reconstructions may not have been definitely established). Many other classifications are still highly speculative (eg “Altaic”, “Eurasiatic”) and “reconstructions” based on those classifications should not be presented as generally accepted. To say that Mongolian and English words are “cognate” is at best premature, and in any case very misleading.
My English teacher said the word whould be pronounced …
Not all English teachers (or second-language teachers in general) are or were equally competent in the language they teach or taught.
Oops! I meant … the word Should be pronounced …
—how two so different meaning words could be conflated into cognate something is beyond me of course as always
I thought the divergence pretty pretty obvious.
Original meaning ‘love’, ‘dear’ (expensive) and from then on just one leap required (‘expensive lover’)….
BTW, its Latin cognate cārus has produced many Romance variants some of which entered English (caress, cherish, charity, etc)
—you present all those lists as if every Proto-whatever had been reconstructed. They have NOT.
I can get a reference for every single Proto- reconstruction if you want.
Most long-range etymologies used this dictionary as I understand:
—
Aharon Dolgopolsky is today the leading authority on the Nostratic macrofamily. His ‘Nostratic Dictionary’ presented here is, of course, something very much more than a dictionary. It is the most thorough and extensive demonstration and documentation so far of what may be termed the â Nostratic hypothesisâ : that several of the worldâ s best-known language families are related in their origin, their grammar and their lexicon, and that they belong together in a larger unit, of earlier origin, the Nostratic macrofamily. It should at once be noted that several elements of this enterprise are controversial. For while the Nostratic hypothesis has many supporters, it has been criticized on rather fundamental grounds by a number of distinguished linguists. The matter was reviewed some years ago in a symposium held at the McDonald Institute, and positions remain very much polarized. It was a result of that meeting that the decision was taken to invite Aharon Dolgopolsky to publish his Dictionary â a much more substantial treatise than any work hitherto undertaken on the subject â at the McDonald Institute. For it became clear that the diversities of view expressed at that symposium were not likely to be resolved by further polemical exchanges. Instead, a substantial body of data was required, whose examination and evaluation could subsequently lead to more mature judgments. Those data are presented here, and that more mature evaluation can now proceed.
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/196512
—
SF Reader, I am sure you can produce references and that those reconstructions are not your own. That does not mean that they are all done right. Your quotation on Nostratic does not inspire confidence in the quality of the reconstructions either: even those who are partial to the hypothesis do not agree on the details. So, as I wrote above, quoting the classifications and reconstructions as if they are all equally accepted by the majority of linguists in the field is very misleading.
On the other hand, not everyone agrees on the finer points of PIE, even though work on that family has been going on for 200+ years, so it is not surprising that a) “Nostratic” is still hotly debated, and b) the details of “Proto-Nostratic”, even if it ever existed, are far from being established.
hair-ai-cārus-care sounds like as if plausible though (to me)
i don’t know,SFR, you say something really doubtful sounding to me
To me as well! I agree with marie-lucie; Nostratic is highly debatable.
It’s precisely because of the pronunciation /hur/ (“hoor”) that whore lost its /w/; the change /hwu/ > /hu/ also gives us “hoo” for who. The same process also accounts for how, which was originally closely tied to who. All this happened before /hw/ words became /w/ in most dialects, triggering the whine-wine merger.
“hoor rhyming with poor, not with door”
Um – m-l, for me, South of England, “poor” DOES rhyme with “door”. Are you pronouncing “hoor” and “poor” like German “nur”?
Zythophile: Yes, more or less. Historically, the relatively small CURE lexical set was so pronounced (and in my accent still is), but many accents have merged CURE with FORCE (as well as with NORTH in dialects that merge those two). Typical CURE words are boor, poor, tour, endure, lure, pure, gourmet, assurance, mural, plural, curious, fury, lurid, purity, Europe. In many cases, including cure itself, a /j/ precedes, but not always.
SFReader: whore : Original meaning ‘love’, ‘dear’ (expensive) and from then on just one leap required (‘expensive lover’)….
The evolution is a lot more complex. See for instance (among other sources) the several paragraphs dedicated to this word in the Online Etymological Dictionary (see the right column under “language resources”).
While you are at it, look up the etymology of care (separate entries for noun and verb), which is not a borrowing from Latin but has cognates in the other Germanic languages, with meanings quite different from love, etc.
If care was a true cognate of latin carus, it would be “*hare”, or the Latin word would be “*garus”, according to the normal consonant correspondences between Latin and Germanic.
“Whore” is an interesting one. In parts of northern England (such as where I live), there is a broad pronunciation hu:@ (using SAMPA). Many years ago, I remember listening to the band Type O Negative and hearing this pronunciation. This made me wonder where they came from. It turned out that they were from Brooklyn.
–The evolution is a lot more complex. See for instance (among other sources) the several paragraphs dedicated to this word in the Online Etymological Dictionary (see the right column under “language resources”).
You mean this?
“whore (n.) Look up whore at Dictionary.com
O.E. hore “prostitute, harlot,” from P.Gmc. *khoraz (fem. *khoron-) “one who desires” (cf. O.N. hora “adulteress,” Dan. hore, Swed. hora, Du. hoer, O.H.G. huora “whore;” in Gothic only in the masc. hors “adulterer, fornicator,” also as a verb, horinon “commit adultery”), from PIE *qar-, a base that has produced words in other languages for “lover” (cf. L. carus “dear;” O.Ir. cara “friend;” O.Pers. kama “desire;” Skt. Kama, name of the Hindu god of love, kamah “love, desire,” the first element in Kama Sutra).
Whore itself is perhaps a Germanic euphemism for a word that has not survived. ”
Yes. So English whore is related to Latin car- as in carus ‘dear [friend, etc], beloved’, but Eng care is not (look up that word, as both noun and verb).
From this NY Times article (archived) on the (fairly bizarre) wedding of Nadya Tolokonnikova and John Caldwell:
>whore: I learned that the classical pronunciation was as if spelled “hoor”. In one British novel I read a long time ago (I think one of Graham Greene’s) a girl says to her boyfriend or potential boyfriend “I am your whore” or “I want to be your whore” or something to that effect, and the omniscient author says she pronounces it “hore” (probably with the vowel of “more”) because she is uneducated and does not know the “correct” pronunciation, something which bothers the boyfriend. Someone here must know the current situation.
I assume that’s meant to be funny. It’s a little different, but reminds me of:
>Don’t say stinkin’. It’s vulgar. Say reekin’.
– Zosh to Frankie, in Algren’s Man with the Golden Arm.
It says a lot more about the guy than his girlfriend – he didn’t notice his girlfriend was a little plebeian till she called herself a whore, but then noticed because she called herself a whore the wrong way? I wouldn’t count on his pronunciation as being educated just because hers is called out here for being uneducated.