Maksym Eristavi has a Substack post RC101 movie night: Alim (“a gem of the Ukrainian-Qırımlı indigenous art”) which goes into some cultural history that’s largely forgotten:
Alim (1926) is a gem of an ancient tradition of cultural solidarity between Ukrainian and Qırımlı indigenous artists. A prominent historian of Russian colonialism, whom I endlessly admire, Rory Finnin, has recently written an amazing book about this special cultural bond that Russia worked hard to break and erase.
This movie is the first Ukrainian Western to retell the story of a Crimean Tatar folk hero who stood up to Russian colonial authorities abusing, pillaging, and exploiting the indigenous people of Qırım. Apart from the storyline about Russian colonialism that remains as relevant as ever, the additional value of the movie is its rare aesthetics and the creators behind it. “Alim” shows you the authentic world of Qırım-Crimea, which was unfortunately completely erased by Russia’s 1944 genocide of the Crimean Tatar people and the following aggressive settler colonialism.
“Alim” is based on a play by a legendary Qırımlı writer Ümer İpçi, whom Russians sent to a concentration camp and then imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. In the 20th century, so-called “corrective psychiatry” was widely weaponized by Moscow to eliminate an endless number of indigenous artists and thinkers.
Mykola Bazhan, a genius of Ukrainian modernism, wrote the script based on Ipci’s play. He will later barely survive the Russia-committed genocide of the Ukrainian people, which wiped out the entire intellectual elite, too. But the price for it would be his artistic freedom. Several years ago, some of his earliest works were packaged into an amazing ‘Quiet Spiders of the Hidden Soul’ volume and published in English.
The main consultant for this movie was Üsein Bodaninskiy, the founding father of modern Qırımlı ethnography and the National Qırımlı Museum. Russians killed him in 1937 in the mass massacre of the Crimean indigenous intellectuals.
The movie’s main lead is Hayri Emir-zade, a legend of early Qırımlı cinematography and one of the most demanded (and hottest-looking) actors in Eastern Europe at the time. In the 1944 genocide, Russians deported him from Crimea and banned him from acting. He died in exile in the 1950s, and his grave is lost.
There are photos and more links at the post, along with information about a streaming service launched by Ukraine’s Dovzhenko Center where you can see such films. Tatar Wikipedia gives the writer’s name as Гомәр Ипчи (Gomer Ipchi), with Ümer İpçi as the Crimean Tatar equivalent; it gives the name of the film as «Галим» (Galim), but the Ukrainian article (linked to his name above) gives it as «Алім» — I don’t know the background of the name (though there is a Crimean Tatar word alım ‘tax’). Thanks, Nick!
Gomer and Ümer are not cognate names, although (as I can certainly attest), that does not mean they cannot be used as equivalents in different languages.
JFC, the Crimean Tatars are not “indigenous” to the Crimea. They just descend from an earlier wave of invaders and conquerors than the various subsequently-arriving factions of Slavs (whether Communist or non-, whether labeled “Russian” or “Ukrainian”). I mean, not to pull rank when it comes to oppression, but they oppressed and/or assimilated the world’s last Gothic-speakers, didn’t they? (Who were themselves descendants of a prior invasion.) No doubt lovely people, who were treated loathsomely and despicably (probably not strong enough adverbs, to be fair) by Stalin, and who thus deserve better than to have their story twisted to appeal to “North American” (as we learned from that other thread) college-town activist cliches and rhetorical tics.
Don’t get me started on the romanization scheme that runs wild with the “Q.” Expressed more softly, if you want to honor the lengthy linguistic/cultural tradition of the Crimean Tatars, stay away from romanization schemes devised by 20th-century ideologues, whether Bolshevik or Ataturkist. JFC, use a modified Arabic alphabet like your ancestors were happy to.
All of that said, I very much doubt that ordinary Ukrainian peasants of prior generations had any significant feeling of solidarity with the Crimean Tatars as fellow sufferers under the yoke of Muscovite oppression, but it is indeed genuinely interesting that someone from the Ukrainian-nationalist intelligentsia was apparently trying to work that angle. At least until we actually google the name of Mykola Bazhan and learn that after having narrowly escaped very bad consequences during the dreadful days of 1937* he became a very loyal Stalinist until he pivoted to becoming a very loyal Khrushchevite and then very loyal Brezhnevite.
*If you believe wikipedia, Stalin was so impressed by his translation of Rustaveli from Georgian into Ukrainian that he caused him to be awarded the Order of Lenin for it.
Gomer and Ümer are not cognate names, although (as I can certainly attest), that does not mean they cannot be used as equivalents in different languages.
Thanks, I was wondering about that.
i don’t know much of anything about historical ukrainian-crimean tatar relations. but in the brief revolutionary period during and immediately after the civil wars in the russian empire, there were a lot of cultural projects specfically cultivating solidarity among the various non-‘great’-russian peoples in the new ukrainian SSR. they didn’t come from nowhere, and they weren’t any kind of ivory-tower efforts.
yes, they were largely driven by the various cultural-nationalist intelligentsias, but since one of the main things they were all doing was creating massive-scale cradle-tongue literacy programs, school systems, and publishing (and other media) operations, the breadth and impact of their efforts are hard to overestimate. and it’s important to bear in mind that those intelligentsias were very quickly composed mainly of people who were recent products of those very educational efforts.
what i know best, of course, is the yiddish piece of the overall picture, where the 1920s saw a massive efflorescence of publishing, especially by young women and people from outside the rabbinic elite families (khane levin and shifra kholodenko are among my favorites), whose work emphasizes precisely the kind of land-based multi-cultural localism in opposition to russian colonialism (cultural and territorial) that has come to be marked by the term “indigenous”*. there’s a lot of exceptionalisming about these different efforts – but their shared emphasis on solidarity not only gives the lie to any version of that, it makes it clear how interwoven the cultural workers themselves saw their projects.
a film like this was not made for some non-existent art-house circuit, any more than the 1920s yiddish translations of shevchenko** were written for salon audiences – their entire point was to be seen and heard by peasant and other village audiences. in the 1930s, when the comprehensive crackdown on what space the Bolsheviks had been forced to allow for national-cultural autonomy (to use the Bundist phrasing that set the terms of debate in 1917) hit its full stride, radical cultural workers jumped lots of different directions. it sounds like bazhan and bodaninskiy took different paths; they were likely facing different sets of alternatives as well, shaped in part by the different ways the bolshevik state treated ukrainians and crimean tatars.
.
* a term which is about a specific relation to colonialism, as yásnaya elena aguilar gil writes in ayuujk (here translated into english from (i believe her own) spanish rendering).
** hardly a natural choice, outside that context of revolutionary solidarity and shared resistance to russian colonial cultural policies, given his enthusiasm for khmelnitsky in particular and cossacks in particular.
The film being Ukrainian, would they transliterate (ie, if the need arose) and pronounce it Homer?
Is Ümer a Tatar variant on Omar or a name with a Turkic origin?
It looks like Гомәр (Gomär) is the standard (Volga) Tatar version of the name Omar/Umar. So perhaps they are cognate?
There is also spelling Гумер. The author might have adopted it when he studied in Bashkiria where the 2nd Khalif’s name is spelled this way
https://dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/personal_names/6998/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9C%D0%95%D0%A0
If Ümer is from the Arabic name عمر /ʕumar/, I don’t understand why the vowels got fronted. I can see why Arabic /a/ might end up as e, but doesn’t vowel harmony usually work left to right in Turkic?
Not sure why, but Turkish fronts vowels in Arabic loans seemingly at random, e.g. “library” is kütüphaneand Umar is Ömer. I even knew an Abdülhamit. Perhaps Crimean Tatar caught it from them.
Volga Tatar гомер (ğomer) “life” comes from Arabic عمر (ʿumr), so the Arabic /ʕ/ seems to be mapped regularly to uvular /ʁ/. The same goes for җомга (comğa) “Friday” from جمعة (jumʿa), and we see such Volga Tatar names as Габдулла (Ğabdulla), Галимҗан (Ğälimcan), and Госман (Ğosman) corresponding to Abdullah, Alimjan, and Usman respectively.
For Turkish, the rule seems to be that Arabic long ā is back (a) and Arabic short a is front (e), matching the Persian pronunciation. I imagine the same probably applies in Tatar.
JFC, use a modified Arabic alphabet like your ancestors were happy to.
Why would anyone intersperse that in a text written in English for a lay public?
Volga Tatar гомер (ğomer) “life” comes from Arabic عمر (ʿumr), so the Arabic /ʕ/ seems to be mapped regularly to uvular /ʁ/.
Kazakh also maps /ʕ/ to /ɣ/. I assume that’s also Persian influence.
Now I am curious whether the stylistic tic exemplified by substituting “Qırım” for the English toponym is duplicated by writers in Cyrillic-scripted languages. Does anyone writing in Ukrainian or for that matter in Russian demonstrate respect and/or exoticizing-Orientalism by using “Къырым” instead of “Кр[и/ы]м”? Or would you stick Latin-scripted Qırım into your Cyrillic text instead, on the theory that certain members of the relevant group tend for understandable historical reasons not to currently be fans of the Cyrillic orthography?
We supposedly borrowed “Crimea” into English from Italian, where it is reportedly attested enough centuries back to make it quite unlikely to have been borrowed into Italian from Russian, rather than representing a loanword into Italian from the local language or possibly some other Turkic language. See also Modern Greek Κριμαία. It is thus interesting that the Italian version like the Slavic versions omits the initial vowel found (at least at present?) in the Cr. Tatar version. It may or may not be relevant that Crimean Tatar phonotactics are sufficiently hostile to consonant clusters that many people from that ethnolinguistic background “apply vowel epenthesis/prosthesis” to such clusters when speaking Russian, per an interesting 2002 article titled “Crimean Tatar-Russian as a Reflection of Crimean Tatar National Identity.”
@jwb
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staryi_Krym#
This gives several names, the corresponding article in Russian wikipedia gives Cyrillic alternatives (see below). Neither article seems to be based on the other, the Russian is longer but does not appear to me to be entirely consistent with the English version re history or naming.
From the Russian “names” (nazvanije) section;
—
Впервые название города встречается в период господства Золотой Орды. Ордынцы и составлявшие основную часть населения степного Крыма кыпчаки называли город Кырым, а генуэзцы, имевшие колонии на южном береге Крыма и ведшие в регионе активную торговлю, именовали его Солхат — Solcati. По поводу происхождения обоих названий ведётся много споров, однако наиболее обоснованными представляются следующие версии. Къырым — западно-кипчакское qırım — «окоп, ров» (Лазарь Будагов “Сравнительный словарь тюрко-татарских наречий. 1 том). Солхат — от итальянского solcata — «борозда, ров»
The English Crimea article does mention the Turkic trench derivation, which the English Staryi Krym wiki omits. It does not mention the potential match for the Greek name, if the Italian derivation is correct. The match makes the idea somewhat more convincing.
Perhaps Bob Marley was singing about Staryi Krym.
I am now thinking of that famous-if-historicity-challenged Cimmerian Conan, who habitually swore by the name of the supposed Cimmerian deity Crom. Surely as plausible an ultimate etymon as the others that have been proposed. The English article on the city seems to use Qrim and Qirim almost interchangeably or at a minimum in a way that is hopelessly unclear as to which supposedly developed from which. If the local Turkic tongue started with Qrim but then added an epenthetic vowel to break up the word-initial consonant cluster after other languages had used Qrim as the starting point for their versions, the mystery I mentioned above would be solved, although I don’t know that that means it has to have happened that way.
The Italian wikipedia article has a nice summary of the quite considerable ethnic/linguistic/political variability of the peninsula in question over the centuries. “Nel corso della sua storia, la Crimea ha visto passare sul suo territorio popoli e dominazioni diverse: cimmeri, greci, sciti, sarmati, romani e bizantini, goti, unni, genovesi, tartari, veneziani, turchi, russi e ucraini.” And that doesn’t even mention the Armenians, or the Karaites, or various others …
Sometimes pragmatic factors outweigh ideology. The Kurds in Syria use the Atatürk alphabet plus Q and W.
All the way to Mübarek (yes, that one).
Or it’s just the obvious choice once you’ve learned to hear [ʕ] in the first place.
Left to its own devices (which doesn’t happen often!), German maps [ħ] to /x/, not to /h/.
the quite considerable ethnic/linguistic/political variability
on every level of fractal detail!
one of moshe taube’s eastern knaanic scholars, rabbi moses ben jacob of kyiv (yclept “the exile”, “the russian”, and “the second”), had to synthesize an entirely new “nusakh kaffa” when he began leading a congregation there in the 1490s. taube describes it as “a compromise between the various components of the Jewish community there, the Romaniote, the Sephardi, the Ashkenazi, the autochthonous Krimchak, and the Iranian (Tat). Undoubtedly, the establishing of such a commonly agreed on canon of prayer is quite a remarkable achievement, as anyone who ever went to a synagogue could testify.” and with moshe ha-rusi’s own east slavic in the mix as well, that makes at least six vernacular languages floating around alongside hebrew and aramaic!
@J.W. Brewer: Cimmeria, Crimea, and Gomer all probably share a common origin. On the other hand, Howard took Conan and Crom from Irish, placing his fictional version of Cimmeria in the North Sea.
For those to whom it’s not obvious, the “kaffa” in “nusakh kaffa” presumably refers to Caffa/Kaffa (maybe from an earlier Καφᾶς?), which was supposedly the usual name for the medieval port in the Crimea on the site of ancient Theodosia when under Genoese-and-then-Ottoman control. The Romanovs eventually brought back the Theodosia name but of course in Slavic mouths it comes out as something variously transliterated Feodosia, Feodosiia, Feodosiya, etc. and maybe for some Ukrainians Teodosiia.
I am pleased to be informed by wikipedia that the maker-of-animated-movies Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, etc.) is that rara avis, a Krymchak-American. Table 3 in this piece says that Bakshi was the second-most-common Krymchak surname as of 1913. https://avotaynuonline.com/2015/06/jews-of-crimea/
@Brett: Just wait a few years and the “Great-Grandnephew of Yamnaya” thread will link to an exciting new paper in which the accuracy of Howard’s geography and chronology is surprisingly vindicated by new genome-based research.
alas for the freezing of profession-names, or we coulda had ralph karagioz!
(thanks so much for that link, JWB!)
That article uses one of the maps from Martin Gilbert’s Atlas of Jewish History, which is a wonderful resources. My personal copy is about thirty-five years old, and the newer editions have kept adding interesting maps, especially new maps of areas outside Europe.
Of course Cimmeria ~~ Crimea was the poetic calling card of Maximilian Voloshin… more specifically the dryer and less rugged Eastern side of the peninsula. Many great or notable talents, such as Marina Tsvetaeva or Cherubina de Gabriac, stayed with him and were profoundly shaped by Voloshin’s “Cimmerian experience”. But after 2014, these literary memories are on their way to cancelation and oblivion.
Voloshin’s wiki is amazing. It seems to have been written by a writer as romantic as Voloshin. Particularly vivid is the photo of an Orthodox priest in chasuble blessing his grave, as tourists look on, including a man in cool shades who could only be bothered to fasten the last two buttons of his shirt.
Could the world ever completely forget a man with Voloshin’s hair? Not likely, since the profile of the mountains behind his Crimean home will always call to mind his silhouette. .
@Ryan: a small point, but that’s not a chasuble, it’s a form of what would be called in Western churchy-outfit jargon a stole. Specifically, an https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epitrachelion. For some services or parts of services the priest will also put on the chasuble-analogue (phelonion*), but not here.
@Dmitry P.: You may be right, but the regimes that controlled the Crimea in Voloshin’s lifetime were hardly less brutal or illiberal than the regime that has done so since 2014, so you must have some other factor in mind.
*In the East Slavic languages the last syllables get clipped so you get a result typically romanized as “felon,” which illustrates what can happen when you don’t use word-initial “ph-” when transliterating even when the Slavic word was borrowed from Greek.
romanized as “felon”
Which is just as well. It is said that one tongue-twisted politician [insert you preferred name here] began his address to the inhabitants of the peninsula by: “Dear Criminals!”
Or it’s just the obvious choice once you’ve learned to hear [ʕ] in the first place.
I don’t know how much exposure to Arab spoken by native speakers the Kazakhs had when the Arabic loans entered their language. It’s anyway probable that much of the vocabulary was mediated by Persian, as there also are clearly Persian loans, like the weekdays.
ʕ becoming ɣ is certainly not a Persian thing. Persian doesn’t usually pronounce ʕ anyway, although apparently some learned registers used to allow it. The replacement of ʕ with ɣ in Arabic loans is a northern Turkic thing – though it also happens in Tuareg.
and with moshe ha-rusi’s own east slavic in the mix as well, that makes at least six vernacular languages floating around alongside hebrew and aramaic!
I think the Goths would still have been extant there in that time, as well, though I’m not sure if any of them were Jewish.
I really want there to have been a Judeo-Gothic language.
For instance, Gothic had the sound inventory to cope with the entire bgdkpt phenomenon… maybe not [v], but that’s actually somewhat controversial.
https://opensiddur.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Judeo-Gothic-transliteration-schema-Isaac-Gantwerk-Mayer-2023.pdf
I assume that’s a joke. A possibly different joke is referred to at https://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/2001-May/001619.html
But don’t bother with the dead link to Yahoo Groups.
yiddish gothic has made an appearance here before:
https://languagehat.com/gothic-yiddish/
alas, i fear it’s not considered particularly supportable, though it may be preferable to wexler’s eternal golden braid of relexifications.
but that doesn’t mean anything about the existence of judeo-gothic, or at least jews’ gothic, if there happened to be a community in the right place at the right time.
Or it’s just the obvious choice once you’ve learned to hear [ʕ] in the first place.
You’re right, I don’t even know what I misremembered here…
I’m getting targeted ads on meta for my “Saxon-Jewish” heritage now. There is apparently a website for “saxon-jewish” people for us to congregate. I am technically, Saxon as in descended from people who came from Saxony to the Balkans within oral history. _which_ Saxony — fuck if I know.
@V: Does that mean in context “from (currently or not too many centuries ago) Saxony” rather than the rather broader sense “Saxon” may have in various contexts in the so-called Anglo-Saxon world? Or various other narrow-ish but still different referents (e.g. the old “Saxon” population of Transylvania which was mostly ethnic German but mostly not from actual Saxony)?
I think it’s a Nazi thing. FB saw me mentioning that I am
“Saxon”, saw that I have “liberal” (in US terms) views — therefore, Jewish. Voilà — we will make a website for a Saxon Jewish person. (of course I didn’t click on the link).
Current Saxony, the one with all the historical mining, is not unlikely; it is one of the places from where miners with their families swarmed out all over the Balkans in the Middle Ages or soon thereafter.
I don’t know how much exposure to Arab spoken by native speakers the Kazakhs had when the Arabic loans entered their language. It’s anyway probable that much of the vocabulary was mediated by Persian
On the circumstances of the adapation of the Arabic sound of ع sound as /ʁ/ in Kazan Tatar, here is Ахметьянов, Рифкат Газизянович (2015) Татар теленең этимологик сүзлеге (‘Etymological Dictionary of the Tatar Language’), vol. 1, p. 228:
I do not know any examples in any variety of Persian or in Tadjik in which the sound of Arabic ع (ʿ) has been adapted with the Persian sound of ġ غ (ġ, later falling together in sound with ق q in western Iran). Usually the letter ع is pronounced as a glottal stop /ʔ/ in Persian, if it is pronounced at all. The glottal stop is written in Tadjik with ъ.
The replacement of ʕ with ɣ in Arabic loans is a northern Turkic thing – though it also happens in Tuareg.
Nice to have that Tuareg parallel!
A Modern French loanword from colloquial Arabic also offers a parallel to the case of the Arabic sounds ʿ ع (ʿayn) and ġ غ (ġayn) both appearing as /ʁ/ in Tatar and Bashkir.
For French /ʁ/ for Arabic ʿayn, there is French colloquial zarma /zaʁma/, also in the form zerma. Some explanations of this word here and here with some written citations, and some spoken examples on YouGlish here. Zarma comes from colloquial North African زعما zaʿmā. I am assuming no Tuareg influence is involved in the realization of the slang word with r /ʁ/ in France. (And no relation to Zarma, the name of the people of western Niger and adjacent areas, and of the Songhay language spoken by them.) I am trying to think of some other slang of Arabic origin in which ʿayn shows up as French r.
On the more understandable side of French r /ʁ/ for Arabic ġayn, there is French razzia /ʁazja/ ‘raid’, a rather older borrowing of an Algerian colloquial Arabic form cited as غزية ġaziya (cf. classical غزا ġazā ‘he raided, invaded’, غزو gazw ‘raiding, invasion’, غازية ġāziyya ‘expedition, raiding party’, etc.).
razzia
Hah! Never occurred to me, despite actually knowing the Arabic غازي.
I’d vaguely supposed that it was from Italian … or something …
Thanks!
[By pure chance, I’ve recently been speculating about ʔ/r alternations in Oti-Volta …]
Turkish fronts vowels in Arabic loans seemingly at random
Ömer
In general, short Arabic u appears in Turkish as ü, and short Arabic a appears in Turkish as e. But when preceded by the back and emphatic consonants ح ḥ, خ ḫ, ص ṣ, ض ḍ, ط ṭ, ظ ẓ, ع ʿ, غ ġ, ق q, as well the velar or emphatic l of الله (A)llah (in the those forms in which it occurs), then Arabic short u, a, and i appear in Turkish as u, a, and ı, respectively. Also, a following back or emphatic consonant will often back preceding short vowel too. (One can go through the dictionary and find some exceptions to this.) Compare Turkish Mübârek from Arabic مبارك mubārak (mentioned above as an example) without backing of mu- to Muhammet from محمد muḥammad with backing. (At the colloquial level, over history, all sorts of further developments can happen: Turkish Mehmet).
One would have expected a Turkish *Umer for Arabic عمر ʿUmar (cf. Turkish ulemâ ‘ulama’ < Arabic علماء ʿulamāʾ ‘learned men, ulama’, the first example that comes to me). Other examples of the treatment of u as in Ömer are ömür ‘lifetime’ (Arabic عمر ʿumr); örf ‘custom (established practice), usage’ (Arabic عرف ʿurf); özür ‘excuse’ (Arabic عذر ʿuḏr) and öşür ‘tithe, Ottoman tax of 10% levied on agricultural produce’ (Arabic ʿušrعشر ‘a tenth; tithe’). Note also the anomalous Osman, Arabic عثمان ʿUṯmān.
There is much more to say, but I must go to bed now. However the appearance of the vowels in Turkish is not simply random.
I just saw a typo: vocalized غازية ġāziya “raiding expedition”, not غازية ġāziyya “carbonated”. Good night.
I just took for granted it was Italian. 😮
I wonder if variation in the Arabic originals is to blame: actual pharyngeals drag vowels toward [ɑ], but epiglottals drag vowels toward [æ].
cf. classical غزا ġazā ‘he raided, invaded’, غزو gazw ‘raiding, invasion’, غازية ġāziyya ‘expedition, raiding party’, etc.)
And of course غازی ‘warrior, ghazi.’
ġazya for ġazwah is a particular case of a general principle: if a verb has w as its third and final radical, it always becomes y in Maghribi Arabic (and in most other dialects I think).
Mehmet seems likely to reflect an old variant pronunciation Arabic-internally. The early medieval Barghwata in Morocco borrowed the name as Māmat.
I wrote:
Or it’s just the obvious choice once you’ve learned to hear [ʕ] in the first place.
You’re right, I don’t even know what I misremembered here…
That was meant to be:
ʕ becoming ɣ is certainly not a Persian thing. Persian doesn’t usually pronounce ʕ anyway,
You’re right, I don’t even know what I misremembered here…
I should not post when I’m already half asleep.
David Marjanović : Yeah, Saxon miners. That’s “us”. I mean I know some of my ancestors came to the Balkans for mining from “Saxony”.
@Xerîb: There are several examples of North African toponyms that have been romanized with Tamazight ɣ mapped to r /ʁ/ instead of the usual gh or g, as in Relizane, Oued Taria, Mezerana, and Chott Melrhir, all in Algeria. (I can’t find examples in Morocco or Tunisia, which might mean that the romanizations may have become slightly more systematic by the time the French got around to toponyms in those places.)
But it hadn’t occurred to me before that Arabic /ʕ/ could also map to French /ʁ/, even if it is limited to a couple of oral borrowings.
Somebody has actually tried to establish rh as the standard transcription for [ʁ] (“ɣ”); an example of it sticking is the Elrhaz Formation, a sequence of rock layers in northern Niger.
Standard Central Alaskan Yup’ik orthography uses g for /ɣ/ and r for /ʁ/.
Calling on DM: for some reason I just tried to think of a German word having /dʒ/ in it. There doesn’t seem to be one. Is that the case ? The closest Germans get is /tʃ/.
How weird is that ? Even stranger is that I have never missed it, nor even noticed. I suppose that’s why I can never follow phoneme discussions here. I can hear differences, but I don’t care about them. They actually get in the way of understanding. There, I’ve said it*.
*I’m bingeing on Heartstopper at the moment. It’s a bit cringey and gooey for old folks, but I like it anyway. Lots of accents in there. Kit Connor is very easy on the eyes, and I was 16 once.
Calling on DM: for some reason I just tried to think of a German word having /dʒ/ in it.
There are people who pronounce it in English loans with that phoneme. Duden has it in loans like Jeep.
Yeah, but loanwords are borrowed and must be returned someday. L’homme est né libre et partout il est dans les fers phonotactiques.
Schnorrwörter.
More later.
I thought ‘rh’ meant ‘hr’, in the same way that ‘wh’ means ‘hw’
These may not meet Stu’s criteria either, but how do German-speakers pronounce words such as Dschinn and Dschiu-Dschitsu?
I pronounce them with /dʒ/. By the way, Duden has the spelling Dschinn, but for the combat style it has only Ju-Jutsu (pronounced with /j/) and Jiu-Jitsu (with /dʒ/). For the latter, a spelling pronunciation with /j/ also exists, even if Duden doesn’t acknowledge it.
These are words that don’t come up often in everyday conversation, so I don’t know whether people’s pronunciations conform to Duden’s prescriptions in general, although I can say that I have heard both pronunciations (with /j/ and with /dʒ/) for Jiu-Jitsu.
In any case, they are loans. I don’t think we’ll be able to answer Stu’s question if we exclude loans, as /dʒ/ simply doesn’t exist in inherited German words.
/dʒ/ simply doesn’t exist in inherited German words.
That was all I asked about after all, except for the word “inherited”. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as German phonotactics. No need to learn the IPA symbols, just learn German.
Thanks, Hans. By the way, I got Dschiu-Dschitsu from WordReference.com. Now I see Google ngrams says it’s been obsolete for a hundred years.
Now that you know that German has no /dʒ/, you will not be fooled in future by “Dschiu-Dschitsu” or similar. “dsch-” is clearly an attempt to polyfill the /dʒ/ hole. I doubt anyone today would try to foist that on people. “dsch” is a tooth-twister in German, and it’s still missing an important component, namely ʒ.
The closest you can get to /dʒ/ is /tʃ/, as I indicated.
Do the German speakers who don’t use /dʒ/ still use /ʒ/ in Orange, or do they just say Apfelsine?
The closest you can get to /dʒ/ is /tʃ/, as I indicated.
Except that Hans says “I pronounce them with /dʒ/.” Does that not count?
Nope, doesn’t count. Hans has phonemic chops and phonetic skillz, I bet he can pronounce any old Schnorrwort better than passably. Das Volk kann das nicht.
Dschungel
The non-Austria audio clip has clear d͡ʒ.
Well, that’s certainly an example that no one had come up with.so far. Pity that, like jeep, jungle is a loanword from English.
im 19. Jh. aus engl. jungle entlehnt, einer Anglisierung von Hindi jaṅgal ‘Wald, wildes Land’, das über *jaṅgalaḥ m. ‘wasserarme, menschenleere, unfruchtbare Gegend’ auf aind. jāṅgalaḥ ‘trocken, spärlich bewachsen’ zurückzuführen ist. … [DWDS]
With practice, it gets better.
To expand a bit on that:
/ʒ/ is an established phoneme in German due to French loanwords. Most people can pronounce it; there are supposed to be people who substitute /ʃ/ for it, but I don’t think that I have ever encountered that in real life.
Lots of German speakers also substitute /ʒ/ for /dʒ/, not only in loanwords but also when speaking English. Similarly, you can find German speakers who substitute
/ʃ/ for initial /tʃ/ in English loans and when speaking English. I can’t remember coming across initial /tʃ/ for /dʒ/, even though I have Southern German and Austrian colleagues and acquaintances; but they tend to be people talking English regularly due to their work. OTOH, I have encountered that substitution word-internally, e.g. Maharadscha being pronounced with /tʃ/.
Dschungel actually is a case of an integrated loan, which is shown by the vowel being /u/, not/a/; still, it seems to me that whether a German speaker pronounces it with /dʒ/ or /ʒ/ is correlated with his knowledge of English pronunciation.
it seems to me that whether a German speaker pronounces it with /dʒ/ or /ʒ/ is correlated with his knowledge of English pronunciation.
Yes. Practice.
The Criterion Collection release of Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc has a commentary track by Danish film scholar Casper Tybjerg. He consistently pronounces her name with /ʃ/ (and it ends up sounding something like [ʃɛn]). It’s bloody annoying. IIRC, at the beginning he makes a comment about how this is the pronunciation he had grown used to using, but for a release by an American collection one could make a little more effort, or just say “Joan” with /dʒ/. This made me wonder whether /ʒ/ is viewed as rather challenging even by educated Danes of an older, pre-practically-native-English generation.
Lots of languages have phonemes that only appear in loanwords, with greatly varying degrees of naturalisation, from “only used by bilinguals” to “only used by posh people” to “only used in some dialects” to “used by everyone.”
Kusaal /h/ is confined to loanwords and words of the “blech” type, but the loanword hali “up to, as far as, even, very” is every bit as common as those glosses suggest, and nobody seems to have any trouble at all saying [halɪ].
English initial /v/ is a horrid foreign import (with the occasional item like “vixen” swiped from Yokel Speech.)
Welsh j is found exclusively in loanwords, but I doubt if there is anyone left who has any trouble with it. Come to that, /ʃ/ is confined to loanwords, but has been part of Welsh phonology since the Middle Ages.
English initial /sv/ is an even horrider foreign import, occurring in only one common loanword, but I’ve never heard anyone have any trouble with “svelte”.
While we’re doing German pronunciations of borrowed /dʒ/, I wonder about Giovanni, adagio, arpeggio, parmigiano. Just curious.
And why do so many Americans pronounce parmigiano/a and “parmesan” with a /ʒ/?
Pity that, like jeep, jungle is a loanword from English.
So what? Surely you’re not denying it’s a German word? DE is, of course, correct:
And why do so many Americans pronounce parmigiano/a and “parmesan” with a /ʒ/?
The first one, sure, but “parmesan” is usually /ˈpɑrməzən/ or /ˈpɑrməˌzɑːn/.
@hat
Natasha’s chicken parme/ʒ/an:
https://youtu.be/gwSOwAe_IVY
I grew up pronouncing “parmesan” as /pɑrməˈʒɑːn/. My grandmother’s family was Italian, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just an Italian thing.
Edit: I assume it reflects one of those Italian dialects where all the final vowels fall off – Neapolitan maybe?
Huh. I learn something every day!
My default pronunciation has a /ʒ/ also. I got that from my mother, and she grew up Catholic in Connecticut, which meant a heavily Italian-American peer group. (They have a statue of “COLUMBO” in one of the squares in downtown New London.)
But if you say /pɑrməˈʒɑːn/ wouldn’t you spell it “parmegian(o)”?
Rick C137 uses /ʒ/, in contrast to the usage in his latest adopted home universe.
@laniagehat: No, although when I was a kid I had trouble remembering the spelling, because of the phonetic disconnect.
To hat’s “But if you say …” the answer is obviously “No.” Unless you are the sort of person who already knows a lot and then overthinks things. The /ʒ/ pronunciation with the “s” spelling will seem odd if but perhaps only if you: a) know the Italian spelling and its Italianish pronunciation; b) plausibly (but falsely!*) assume that “parmesan” is a recentish “anglicized” respelling of the Italian; and c) plausibly assume that such ad hoc English respellings tend to follow-or-reflect the usual English orthography/pronunciation correspondences and thus straightforwardly signals the (only) Anglicized pronunciation of the word. If you can handle all three steps of that train of thought, you know too much and you’re overthinking it.
I think I heard both pronunciations from a fairly early age but as best as I can recall never assumed that there was a 1:1 mapping between variant pronunciations and variant spellings.
*My assumption until I checked and was advised by the internet that “parmesan” is just the Middle French spelling which we borrowed without further modification.
you know too much and you’re overthinking it
I’ll have that engraved on my tombstone.
J.W. Brewer : “you know too much and you’re overthinking it” sounds vaguely menacing, without a context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuKuw71YBbI
https://www.facebook.com/maria.k.jackson/videos/10220951982841700
As in we out our innies. 😀
I’ll have that engraved on my tombstone
More original than “I told you I was ill.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/southern_counties/3742443.stm
May I respectfully suggest to hat’s future bereaved survivors that they have that carved on the stone but as translated into koine Greek or Hebrew and in the appropriate non-romanized script. Just to blow the minds of future translators. Gaelic might work just as well I suppose.
One of the most difficult sounds for Korean speakers learning other languages to produce is [ʒ], and I have heard those with otherwise excellent pronunciation in English or French pronounce this as an affricate of the type [dʒ]. In loanwords the sound is mapped to Korean ㅈ j /dʑ~dzʲ/ as in 잔 jan for French Jeanne. Korean doesn’t have a voiced fricative phoneme so [z] is enough of a struggle for some learners.
Danish and other Scandinavian languages also lack voiced sibilant fricative phonemes, so no native /z/ or /ʒ/. One thing in which they are different from Korean is that they lack affricate phonemes as well; stop-fricative sequences are possible but more phonotactically restricted, so they don’t natively occur in initial position, for example. This means that voiced sibilant fricatives are always mapped to their voiceless equivalents, not any affricates.
So in loanwords /z/ usually gets mapped to /s/ and /ʒ/ is phonetically realized as [ɕ], [ʃ], [ʂ], or even the infamous sj sound in Swedish conventionally transcribed as [ɧ]. If /ʒ/ becoming something like [ʃ] bothers you, don’t look up how Swedes usually pronounce Geneve (Geneva).
I wouldn’t find it surprising if Danish or other Scandinavian speakers with otherwise excellent English pronunciation also struggled with [ʒ]. It’s not really something that they could simply overcome with “a little more effort”, any more than you can tell an average English speaker about producing an Italian trilled r or a Welsh ll.
Yes, foreign phonemes are not all the same when it comes to incorporating them. It seems to be easier to fit a new sound into an existing grid of feature contrasts than to add a new row or column: relatively easy to add /x/ if you already have /s/ and /f/, for example, or /ʒ/ if you already have /ʃ s z/.
Also easier if you already can produce the actual sounds in some context: Kusaal has no /h/ in inherited vocabulary, for example, but [h] is common as an allophone of non-initial /s/. English had [f] and [v] as allophones already before it separated /f/ and /v/ as phonemes to accommodate French loans. But adding something like /ʕ/ or /k͡p/ would be another matter.
(On the other hand, at least with /k͡p/, that actually has happened in English-lexifier Atlantic creoles. But that is probably a whole nother story. English reimagined throughout in Gbe phonology, rather than English adopting individual exotic phonemes.)
While we’re doing German pronunciations of borrowed /dʒ/, I wonder about Giovanni, adagio, arpeggio, parmigiano. Just curious.
Same as with English /dʒ/; those who have the phoneme and know that that’s what is required for the Italian pronunciation, use /dʒ/, the others substitute /ʒ/. People who say Parmigiano tend to be people who like to show off their knowledge of Italian culture and cooking and will probably use /dʒ/, because the usual word in German is Parmesan, with /z/.
Thanks, Hans. I was thinking there might be a spelling pronunciation with /g/, like the spelling pronunciations of the Japanese words you mentioned, but I guess German-speakers have had enough exposure to Italian for enough time to avoid that.
Even if they don’t know Italian per se, those who use terms like that regularly most probably have heard them pronounced during musical education or in discussions of Italian culture or cooking. We also have so many Italian eateries caled “Da Giovanni” that people normally know it’s not pronounced with /g/. I can’t exclude that someone coming a term like Arpeggio in a text without any prior musical education will pronounce it with /g/, same like an English speaker who doesn’t know better might think it rhymes with Peggy-O, but they normally will be corrected by people who know better.
Ryan says, “Voloshin’s wiki is amazing. It seems to have been written by a writer as romantic as Voloshin. Particularly vivid is the photo of an Orthodox priest in chasuble blessing his grave, as tourists look on, including a man in cool shades who could only be bothered to fasten the last two buttons of his shirt.
=====
M. The photograph, captioned “Voloshin’s grave, on a hill high above Koktebel in the Crimea,” shows about forty or fifty stones that presumably non-Jewish visitors have left on the gravestone after visiting the site (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian_Voloshin#/media/File:%D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B8%D0%BB%D0%B0_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%B5%D1%82%D0%B0_%D1%96_%D1%85%D1%83%D0%B4%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0_%D0%9C._%D0%9E._%D0%92%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BE%D1%88%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B0.JPG).
That custom seems to be universal among Jews. How widespread is it among non-Jews (in this or that country, among this or that people, among followers of this or that religion, etc.)?
Alright, I’ll take a longish break from the old bones and talk about [ʒ] and [dʒ]…
I have a colleague from Sweden who lived in England, mostly at Cambridge, from ages 14 to 40. His English is perfect, with a perfect Oxbridge accent as far as I can tell, except for the complete absence of [ʒ] or any approximation to it. He uses [ʃː] instead in words like measure.
Similarly, I was stunned when I discovered [ɣ] in a dictionary of Greek. Like [x], but voiced?!? It had not occurred to me that this place in the grid existed – and that was long after I had learned to use [z] and [ʒ] in French and English.
Maggi. However, very few people outside of Switzerland know this is a (Swiss-)Italian name (and apparently the Swiss actually get it right, says the German article).
The German pronunciation of Latin (the “ecclesiastical pronunciation” hasn’t made it here) is also worth mention in this context: c followed by front vowels is /ts/, because that’s available natively, but g is /g/ in all environments because there is no voiced or lenis affricate or fricative that could be mapped to it.
The thing about dsch is that this is the extent of explanation most of us get. Logically, then, it must mean a sequence [dʃ] as opposed to [tʃ].
If your /d/ is actually voiced, as it is where Hans and Stu live, this is of course right next to absurd: the /d/ will be devoiced by the following voiceless /ʃ/, and you’ll either end up at [tʃ] – an important component of a Tschörmen accent in English – or you’ll notice that something is off and learn [dʒ] properly.
If – at the other end of the dialect chain – your /d/ (and /b/ and /g/) is universally voiceless, /dʃ/ isn’t absurd at all, and neither is a contrast between /dʃ/ and /tʃ/. Indeed, though it’s rare, it’s native: all the more or less native -atsch- words, plus ätsch “neener”, have /dʃ/ (complete with a preceding long vowel!), while loans like Ketchup and sound effects like patsch, platsch have /tʃ/; word-initial /tʃ/ is familiar from Tschech- and the Czech last names that (mostly) Vienna is stuffed with. (…But the Topfengolatschen, a pastry of Czech origin, do get /dʃ/.) It’s not that hard to extend this contrast to initial position. So that’s what most of us do: we believe we’re making the distinction, and perhaps we actually do, just not in a way that native speakers of English are likely to notice, because the English contrast really does rely mostly on voice.
(Occasional claims that the English /tʃ/ is aspirated seem to me like a theoretical expectation more than reality. Loud & clear aspiration there will give you a Chinese accent.)
Lagniappe: /dʃ/ vs. /tʃ/ in Wuhan.
South of the White-Sausage Equator, this dsch is a /dʃ/ like any other. North, however, this runs into syllable-final fortition: it’s Ma.ha.rad.scha, and the syllable-final d becomes /t/.
This also introduces a /t/ into Sydney and a /p/ into Simbabwe, the latter getting an amazing affricate [pv] with perfect voice onset timing. Pretty astounding to hear.
The worst attempt at a /dʒ/ I ever heard was by a tour guide at Schönbrunn trying to pronounce the name Shah Jahan (who had apparently sent some artworks to the Hapsburgs).
Thank you, David M., and thank you again, Hans. All very interesting.
FWIW, i hear Danes producing pretty convincing versions of English /ʒ/ in Azure which is a term of art where I work. But also devoiced ones. (The bone of contention is more the stress placement). Danes don’t really hear voicing in sibilants, and Geneva is unapologetically /ʃe’nɛv̥/; I wouldn’t be surprised to hear the final approximant vocalized like in native words, but it doesn’t happen in “cultured” speech. Personally I have made a point of learning to pronounce foreign sounds; French /ʒ/ and /v/ are not hard to do, it’s much harder to unlearn the Danish lenis/fortis distinction between /b̥/ and /pʰ/ /(and the other stops) in favour of proper voiced/unvoiced and I don’t think I master it yet in connected speech.
Way back when I was active in the Esperanto movement, I was astounded by musician Kim Henriksen’s Danish accent in Esperanto. It was so incredibly strong, in spite of Henriksen having been raised in Esperanto, precisely because of that stop distinction. It warped the language in a direction that L. L. Zamenhof could have never imagined.
With regard to Danes and /ʒ/, I get what Jongseong Park wrote, but it is still interesting how speakers of a language can’t master a voiced consonant /ʒ/ when they already have the unvoiced counterpart /ʃ/ in the language. When I learned languages that had /ɣ/, I found this easy to learn by simply voicing /x/ (a phoneme that, fortunately, I was exposed to early enough in life to learn). Why can’t Danes just voice /ʃ/?
@CC: I was wondering the same thing, when someone told me about a Pakistani friend of his (presumably an Urdu speaker), who couldn’t manage a [v] at all, only a [ʋ], despite having an [f].
Similar for me: the most difficult individual sounds in French for me are [b d g], followed by [z ʒ]. By now I can do them all fluently, but I do have to pay some attention, and the entirely straightforward voice assimilation rules still aren’t quite intuitive.
(The nasal vowels are straightforward. The rounded an sound in particular is very common in my dialect.)
As I just explained about my completely unexpected discovery of [ɣ]: “just voicing” an obstruent is unthinkable.
That’s arguably a different phenomenon. Most alleged [v] worldwide are actually [ʋ] (some more open, i.e. closer to [w], some less, i.e. closer to [v]); languages that contrast a /v/ with a /ʋ/ are extremely rare (…which is why the symbol ʋ was introduced in the IPA so late, and in turn why so many [ʋ] have been described as “[v]”). English is one of the rather few languages worldwide that have both /w/ and /v/; therefore, [ʋ] always sounds wrong in English* – when it’s used for /v/, it sounds too much like /w/, and when it’s used for /w/, it sounds too much like /v/. This is the basis for the Chekov accent that gets both [w] and [v] right but consistently uses them in each other’s place.
I have escaped this because my native /ʋ/ isn’t [ʋ], it’s articulated as a fricative – though there’s no actual friction, because it’s nasalized (and always short). I also do this to /j/… and to [z] and [ð] in English if I don’t pay attention, which is dangerous, because [ð], acoustically, more or less disappears in the process. [ʋ] is quite common in Austria, though.
*…except that particular southern British accent that turns /r/ into [ʋ] and therefore has /w/, /ʋ/ and /v/. That’s extremely rare worldwide.
I don’t think most Danes hear the voicing difference. There are speakers who idiosyncratically voice their /s/ phonemes, some of them old-school female burlesque performers. I think it’s supposed to sound sexy, but it counts as an allophone of /s/. Point is, you can’t imitate what you can’t hear.
Also no affricates, and /ʃ/ is arguable the same as /sj/, there are no minimal pairs to distinguish them. Well, there’s jungle which is spelled as the English loan word it is, but it’s phonetically nativized to /djʉŋlə/ which I don’t think would ever merit a tie bar. Same for James as a modern first name.
To clarify, this was in the U.S., and my friend was trying to help the guy with his AmE pronunciation.
English is one of the rather few languages worldwide that have both /w/ and /v/
All the Western Oti-Volta languages except Nõotre have both /w/ and /v/, as do Buli, Konni, Yom and Nawdm. (The Gurma languages and Eastern Oti-Volta have all shifted proto-Oti-Volta *v to /f/, however, while Nõotre has shifted *v > /b/ instead. The avoidance of all voiced fricatives seems to be an areal phenomenon in northern Benin, affecting Miyobe and Baatonum too.)
A contrast of /v/ and /w/ is common in “Central Gur” generally, in fact: Kassem has it too, as does Koromfe. It’s not just Central Gur, either: the Senufo language Supyire has both /v/ and /w/, as does Kulango. The contrast is also common in Adamawa languages, e.g. Gbeya. The Chadic language Miya also has both /v/ and /w/.
And of course this is also common in Bantu languages; Swahili, for example.
And in Hebrew after it spirantized bgdkpt, in those varieties that didn’t merge /w/ and /v/ (e.g. Tiberian and Yemeni), or in those that did merge them but then adopted /w/ in loanwords (e.g. idiolects of Modern Hebrew, more common nowadays.)
Also in Chadic: Goemai and Mupun (though not Hausa.)
Not so Chadic: Welsh.
Ewe is the poster child for a language with a /v/ ~ /ʋ/ contrast, but you knew that.
Any number of languages contrast /β/ and /w/, of course; I think the rarity is not so of much /v/ versus /w/ contrasts, but (unsurprisingly) of /v/ versus /β/ and /ʋ/ contrasts; in Indo-European, the situation has been muddled by the fact that nearly all the languages have shifted PIE *w to *v or *β, or done even weirder things with it. In languages which have a /v/ which did not originate from earlier *w, the contrast seems to be common enough.
The Tangoa language of Vanuatu (which came up here recently) has apicolabial consonants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguolabial_consonant
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-03166543/file/AlexFrancois_Araki-grammar_2002_PL522.pdf
> English is one of the rather few languages worldwide that have both /w/ and /v/; therefore, [ʋ] always sounds wrong in English* – when it’s used for /v/, it sounds too much like /w/, and when it’s used for /w/, it sounds too much like /v/.
!!!! I think you just solved my confusion about South Asian English dialects. I’ve wondered about this for *years*. Thanks, David M.!
> Point is, you can’t imitate what you can’t hear.
As my brief and extremely frustrating attempt to learn Mandarin Chinese tones in college can attest.
> Giovanni, adagio, arpeggio, parmigiano.
I believe you guys that these are all supposed to have /dʒ/ but it just sounds so wrong to me for the middle two (that is, adagio and arpeggio)! I say them with /ʒ/. Apparently my classical music teachers didn’t let me in on the correct pronunciation. Or I’m not as good at distinguishing /dʒ/ and /ʒ/ as i think…. I did have a lot of trouble with the word “azure” as a kid, but i practiced it and got better long ago.
(Giovanni is definitely /dʒ/ for me, and parmigiano could go either way. And just to be clear, I’m an English speaker in the USA — my experience is irrelevant to the German convo above, I just took a tangent b/c I am surprised :P)
> “Saxon-Jewish”
My great-grandparents were Jews from a town that’s now in Saxony. It was in the Province of (Lower) Silesia when they lived there though, so I’m guessing they did not identify as Saxon….
apicolabial consonants
The WP article notes, following Maddieson and Ladefoged, that not all linguolabials are apical, pace François. I don’t know about Tangoa specifically.
The Araki grammar I linked to says
I never heard of them, but they’re easy and fun to pronounce — I say we include them in our One World Language!
“A linguolabial trill [r̼] is not known to be used phonemically but occurs when blowing a raspberry.” Something to make the One World Language really stand out?
Another example is Good’s consonant (search for “consonant” at that link). He suggested that it was involved in the original pronunciation of “Ptah” and “Ptolemy”. I assume there are good reasons to rule out the possibility that ancient Greek had apicolabial consonants, but I recommend them for the One World Language’s reflexes of “pterodactyl”, “helicopter”, “mnemonic”, “bdellium”, [edit: “ophthalmologist”,] etc.
I’m pretty sure that if I dug through the history of I. J. Good’s Wikiparticle, I’d find a mention of it.
Good* does indeed seem to be describing an apicolabial stop. Such sounds are (as all Hatters will immediately appreciate) entirely distinct from the Yélî Dnye coarticulated alveolar-labial tp and post-alveolar-labial dp.
The One World language should distinguish all these as separate phonemes. However, /p/ should not be included, as the sound is absent from several major world languages.
* “In a 1988 paper, he introduced its subject by saying ‘Many people have contributed to this topic but I shall mainly review the writings of I. J. Good, because I have read them all carefully.'”
Labiodental plosives have been described:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shubi_language
It seems like these sounds are only possible if you have the right dentition to make them, though …
easy and fun to pronounce
And have a cute IPA sign, too: n̼, t̼, etc. Like a cartoon seagull.
I knew a bunch of languages had them, all in Vanuatu, but TIL, as the kids say (ATKS?), via WP, that Kajoko Bijago, a Bak language in the islands off of Guinea-Bissau, has them too.
A /h̪͆/appears in the Shapsung dialect of Adyghe: “The lips are fully open, the teeth clenched and the tongue flat, the air passing between the teeth; the sound is intermediate between [ʃ] and [f]”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bidental_consonant
Unfortunately no actual language seems to use the even-cuter /ʭ/ (the sound made by gnashing the teeth), or /ʬ/ (the sound of smacking the lips.)
Guillaume Segerer brought out a grammar of Bijogo; I think you can download it from his website. He mentions the Kajoko dialect, and says that it’s mutually comprehensible with the Kagbaaga dialect he describes, but unfortunately doesn’t give any more details.
I thought cartoon seagulls sounded like Zero Mostel.
@David Eddyshaw: Ewe is the poster child for a language with a /v/ ~ /ʋ/ contrast, but you knew that.
Dutch is the one that immediately came to mind for me. At least conventionally, written v and w are transcribed as /v/ and /ʋ/ respectively.
But in northern pronunciations written v is increasingly indistinguishable from /f/ in more and more contexts. An English speaker I know who learned Dutch in Groningen and is now a fluent speaker was adamant that v was simply pronounced the same as f, at least at the beginning of words. Meanwhile in Belgium, written w sounds closer to [w], maybe [ʋ] with more velarization, or even [ɥ] before front vowels.
Speaking of Dutch, I don’t really hear voiced [ɣ] for g even in non-devoicing contexts, despite this being the way it is conventionally transcribed. Even in Belgian pronunciations of Gent or Brugge the supposedly voiced soft g [ʝ] sounds voiceless to me.
Well, I naturally think of a familiar language like Ewe before exotica like Dutch …
For what very little it’s worth, Dutch g always sounds voiceless to me, too.
I have heard [ɣ] – and [ʁ], from different people – in Belgium. [w] is supposed to be retained in West Flemish.
I’m not sure where the line between north & south is, but northern Dutch has abolished /v/ and /ɣ/ wholesale, in all positions; carrying the /v/-/f/ merger over into English is an important part of a Dutch accent. The /v/ I’ve heard from, uh, at least one Fleming seems to confirm what I once read – that this /v/ is actually a voiced fortis, [f̬], to increase its distance from /ʋ/.
I use both the bidental and the bilabial percussive as alternatives to humming or whistling… the pitch changes depending on how widely spread your lips are. Available both with and without the lung for extra resonance (and a lower pitch range).
I thought gnashing referred to bruxism?
David Marjanović: “I use both the bidental and the bilabial percussive as alternatives to humming or whistling… the pitch changes depending on how widely spread your lips are.”
I don’t think I use the bidental percussive without either a coarticulated bilabial fricative or nasalising it (it seems difficult, actually, producing it without either), but, otherwise, the same.
I don’t think I’ve ever really heard Belgian Dutch. The only Belgians I’ve ever had much to do with were native French speakers, despite in some cases having unmistakably Flemish names.
I thought gnashing referred to bruxism?
Yes, “gnashing” didn’t seem quite right to me, either (I nicked the description from WP.) I’m not sure what else to call it, though …
I’ve heard a lot of Belgian Dutch and it does not sound particularly different different from the perspective of a native Bulgarian speaker. I might have heard more of it, actually, but from a smaller sample size. Maybe the sample sizes are about equal, but I’ve been more “involved” when Belgian Dutch speakers were talking, as in them doing an effort to be comprehensible to me. The Dutch Dutch in Bulgaria mostly keep to themselves when speaking Dutch, and otherwise speak English when they want to be understood, and don’t bother explaining their Dutch.
David Marjanović: “I use both the bidental and the bilabial percussive as alternatives to humming or whistling… the pitch changes depending on how widely spread your lips are.”
I don’t think I use the bidental percussive without either a coarticulated bilabial fricative or nasalising it (it seems difficult, actually, producing it without either), but, otherwise, the same.
I use the tongue-against-the-floor-of-the-mouth percussive for that. I control the pitch by raising and lowering my jaw.
Any chance of starting a Hattery beatbox team? I can do a click roll. (What do you mean, can I do it consistently?)
The Notorious H.A.T!
Any chance of starting a Hattery beatbox team?
Read the manual, here or here, and here.
I can do a sort of a velar click. I never could figure out the articulation exactly, because it doesn’t feel like much.
Voiceless laterals? No? OK.
They’d give a nice snare drum effect, I think.
Before considering a career switch to beatboxing, remember the tragically short lifespan of the original Human Beatbox (1967-1995), although I suppose most actuarial-tables types would say that beatboxing was probably not the key risk factor pointing toward his premature death. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darren_Robinson_(rapper)
There is of course the separate risk (to reputation rather than health) that a typical Hattic might be about as good at beatboxing as that now-notorious lady from the Australian Olympics team is at breakdancing.
remember the tragically short lifespan of the original
It’s the choice of Achilles:
μήτηρ γάρ τέ μέ φησι θεὰ Θέτις ἀργυρόπεζα
διχθαδίας κῆρας φερέμεν θανάτοιο τέλοσδε.
εἰ μέν κʼ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν ἀμφιμάχωμαι,
ὤλετο μέν μοι νόστος, ἀτὰρ κλέος ἄφθιτον ἔσται·
εἰ δέ κεν οἴκαδʼ ἵκωμι φίλην ἐς πατρίδα γαῖαν,
ὤλετό μοι κλέος ἐσθλόν, ἐπὶ δηρὸν δέ μοι αἰὼν
ἔσσεται, οὐδέ κέ μʼ ὦκα τέλος θανάτοιο κιχείη.
Let’s do it for the κλέος!
I suppose that it’s only fair to note that one early rival of the aforementioned Human Beatbox (Doug E. Fresh, in the world Douglas Davis) is still alive and working at age 58. As early as 1984 he was billing himself as “the Original Human Beatbox,” but I strongly suspect that you only explicitly self-designate as the “Original” if the other guy actually beat you to market and got his record out first.
Is this also the case with Coca Cola?
Coca Cola the Human Beatbox?
That’s the one.
(As opposed to the drink, which has none of the virtues of either coca or kola, let alone both. Wake up, sheeple! No wonder America is so unpopular! The Non-Fungible Token of drinks. The drink for Bored Apes.)
I reached out to Loeb for a translation:
#
my mother the goddess, silver-footed Thetis, tells me that twofold fates are bearing me toward the doom of death: if I remain here and fight about the city of the Trojans, then lost is my return home, but my renown will be imperishable; but if I return home to my dear native land, lost then is my glorious renown, yet will my life long endure, and the doom of death will not come soon on me
#
What stilted prose ! I thought Homer could write better than that.
@J.W. Brewer: In the 1990s, when I was in high school and college (with very different peer groups), if someone I knew mentioned “The Human Beatbox” they would almost certainly have meant Darren Robinson. I don’t remember anyone I knew being especially fans of The Fat Boys, but there was a lot of respect for their skill and their sound. I remember Robinson’s death getting a lot of attention at the time; the sentiment was that it was a tragedy for such a young and creative artist, although unfortunately not that surprising. (Wikipedia puts it dryly: “Although perfect for the group’s image, Robinson’s weight contributed to his death.”) The health crisis among African-American men affects even rich and influential black men.* Fellow Fat Boy Mark “Prince Markie Dee” Morales and another even more famous beatboxer (whose stage name was an homage to The Fat Boys) Marcel “Biz Markie” Hall both passed away in 2021, only in their fifties.
* The most striking example to me of this was the death of Jerome Kersey, the starting small forward on the grear Portland Trailblazers teams of the early 1990s. (The year they were absolutely dominant in the regular season, the Blazers did not even reach the NBA finals, and they lost each time they did make the finals.) He had been my favorite player on the team, and it was shocking to have a world-class athlete die of a cardiovascular problem in just his early fifties.
@Stu:
The original English goes:
My fates long since by Thetis were disclosed,
And each alternate, life or fame, proposed:
Here if I stay, before the Trojan town,
Short is my date, but deathless my renown;
If I return, I quit immortal praise
For years on years, and long-extended days.
(It will be apparent that the Greek translator has over-ornamented, and also incorporated some material which really should have been placed in footnotes*: his version does not really convey the noble simplicity of the original.)
* Surely any educated reader will already know that Thetis is Achilles’ mother, for example? To incorporate this information into the actual text is simply dumbing-down.
@Brett: the long-established stereotypical/canonical age for white* rock stars to die of various sorts of misadventure is 27, and Darren Robinson did manage to make it to 28. But those dead 27-year-old rock stars are generally thought to have fallen prey to profession-specific risks rather than simply reflecting actuarial risks of a broader demographic group they might also fall into.
A good example of a white rock star dying at a much-older-but-still-youngish age of causes not obviously stardom-related would be George Harrison (1943-2001, a bit younger than I am now) although I did not find that personally as affecting as the death of the admittedly-more-obscure Ron Asheton (1948-2009, still just a little bit older than I am now). That’s probably in part because Ron and the surviving colleagues of his youth had had a late-life career comeback, playing a number of rapturously-received (by still-smallish audiences) reunion gigs between 2003 and 2008 that allowed him to experience the sense of recognition and appreciation he had largely been denied in his earlier career. Mr. Harrison by contrast did not have that “30+ years later people are finally noticing how important his early work is” angle.
*To be fair, the standard lists of those exemplifying the dead-at-27 pattern always include Jimi Hendrix and will also include Robert Johnson if sufficiently historically-minded.
Janis Joplin too.
Here if I stay, before the Trojan town,
Short is my date, but deathless my renown;
If I return, I quit immortal praise
For years on years, and long-extended days.
He does snappy riffs best. I found the double album Essay to be too long. I never could get through the whole thing.
The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot is highly enjoyable.
Let Sporus tremble …
We could do with some merciless satire in our time too. It’s so good that you almost feel his victims should have been flattered, though apparently they responded with death threats instead. I suppose that’s a compliment in its way …
I quite like The Rape of the Lock, too.
On his Homer, I have agree with Bentley’s “It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” On the other hand, it has the major virtue of being actual poetry by a major poet, and Pope quite rightly realised that if you’re going to translate great poetry well, you need the chutzpah to adapt the original mercilessly. (It’s analogous to the process of making a good movie out of a great novel. Fidelity kills.) Pope was not lacking in chutzpah.
(Some large part of?) Low German has merged them. That’s why, in Standard German, Möwe “gull” is sometimes spelled Möve.
(…The English root cognate appears to be… meow.)
Zähneklappern – shivering with your jaw muscles. As opposed to zähneknirschen “gnashing”.
Just whisper “what do you need the cabbage for” in Polish: po co ci kapusta.
‘mew’ cognate with ‘Möwe’ must be one of the few English words largely displaced by a Brythonic loan (‘gull’, cf Welsh gwylan).
Apparently Zurich is цьueхь in Zurich.
(Some large part of?) Low German has merged them
Confusion between /v/ and /w/ has been quite common in Welsh historically, and there are even doublets like cawod/cafod “shower.” However, what’s really remarkable is that there aren’t more examples, given that /v/ seems to have actually been [β] as late as the Middle Welsh period.
Oh yes! That reminds me:
fr.wikipedia “Goéland”; note the inconsistency between é and ë, which corresponds to real usage. Footnote 1 has a neat folk etymology:
“Soar” and “sail” are both segeln in German, too.
fr.wikipedia “Mouette”.
Catching up on older stuff:
I’ve never encountered /j/ in J(i)u-Jitsu, but it seems universal in Judo – and in Java.
Some people have a loanword phoneme /ʒ/ or make inconsistent attempts toward it; the usual substitute is /ʃ/, plainly enough.
In dialects and accents like mine, where sch is /ʃː/ by default and a rare /ʃ/ has developed, the latter is used to replace /ʒ/. This means the distinction is lost word-initially.
I’ve never encountered that. I can imagine it, as a remnant of the times when French was the default foreign language, but… ~:-|
This I have encountered e.g. in Berlin. I was quite surprised to hear Chips as [ʃʉps]. I’m not sure if I’ve heard it in any other word, though.
Carinthian German is South Bavarian reimagined throughout in Slovene phonology. That means the length contrast is gone, including the one between /s/ and /sː/; [z] remains completely absent, and so, less surprisingly, does [ʒ] – even though Slovene of course has both.
Interesting; what’s the evidence for this?
Well, it certainly was [β] in the Old Welsh period (and written b, with the corresponding nasal written m; they fell together in Middle Welsh.) The evidence usually adduced for Middle Welsh is actually the very alternation with /w/ that I was talking about, which admittedly is somewhat circular. However, it’s always been a distinct phoneme from /w/, despite these sporadic confusions.
There’s a great deal that’s unclear about Middle Welsh phonology, though. The orthography is not as bad as Irish, but still far from “phonemic”, and the written language must certainly have reflected forms obsolete in actual contemporary speech, making dating of sound changes very difficult.
There are also definite differences between “Early” and “Late” Middle Welsh in both morphology and syntax (and to confuse matters yet further, a good deal of material only preserved in Middle Welsh form in the manuscripts was certainly actually composed in the Old Welsh period.)
Do the German speakers who don’t use /dʒ/ still use /ʒ/ in Orange, or do they just say Apfelsine?
In the Duden Standard, the word is pronounced with /ʒ/ both for the fruit and the colour. They are both French loans, so /dʒ/ wouldn’t be expected.
The use of Apfelsine vs. Orange is a regional issue and not related to the ability to pronounce /dʒ/ or its absence.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that anyone would use /dʒ/ in Orange, just that if someone was able to pronounce /ʒ/ they might also be able to manage /dʒ/.
As I said above, there are many Germans who aren’t. When I was at school, training to pronounce and use /dʒ/ instead of /ʒ/ was a part of English language instruction.
> Giovanni, adagio, arpeggio, parmigiano.
I believe you guys that these are all supposed to have /dʒ/ but it just sounds so wrong to me for the middle two (that is, adagio and arpeggio)! I say them with /ʒ/.
…I vaguely recall a recent-ish LH discussion about how Modern Standard Italian /dʒ/ for gi is actually a hypercorrection and /ʒ/ is the original pronunciation.
(…Oh, here it is. Apparently it’s more complicated than that.)
EDIT: In the Duden Standard, the word is pronounced with /ʒ/ both for the fruit and the colour. They are both French loans, so /dʒ/ wouldn’t be expected.
Wilhelmus van Nassouwe is, of course, een Prinse van Oranje, with a /j/ (rhymes with “Hispanje”). I’m not sure if the same pronunciation (or even the same word at all) is used for the fruit and/or the color.
TIL that the original 16th century spelling was Oraengien (and correspondingly Hispaengien). I wonder what pronunciation it was intended to imply – especially for the latter.
We were instead told to make sure to keep /dʒ/ distinct from /tʃ/…
Speaking of which: there are Swiss last names with initial /tʃ/, like Tschudi, Tschopp and Tschirner. They pretty much have to have some kind of Romance origin, but that’s beyond me. -irner even looks entirely unremarkable in German.
@dm
Re Tschirner, try
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schirner
I don’t know if there are names like Schopf, but I think Schauder is a German name…
Up on the north coast there’s a tasty soup called klamm schauder.
Oh, this looks like Schirner is the nativized version of Tschirner. But the spelling with the most dread tzsch suggests a Slavic name from Saxony rather than a Romance one from Switzerland…
Schopf is a real word (“tuft”), but you can’t get from pf to pp in Switzerland.
Among the new books on Gutenberg, I saw one that reminded me of this post: Travels to Tana and Persia. Funny to read about Goths living next to Turks and Alans.
“The Gothes speake dowche, which I knowe by a dowcheman, my serūnt, that was wᵗʰ me there: for they vnderstode one an other well enough, as we vnderstande a furlane[20] or a florentine.”
Note 20 says “Furlane; i.e., of Forli.”
Well enough seems … optimistic.
Yeah, but Crimean Gothic does look surprisingly modern and Continental Germanic. It’s been commented.that the compilers of the wordlist were (some flavor of) “Dutch”.
I’d taken the name author of that passage, Josafa Barbaro, to be a form of Joseph, but it’s from Josaphat instead. Here’s a fun anecdote that ends better than I expected:
>In November 1437, Barbaro heard of the burial mound of the last King of the Alans, about 20 miles up the Don River from Tana.[7] [8] Barbaro and six other men, a mix of Venetian and Jewish merchants, hired 120 men to excavate the kurgan, which they hoped would contain treasure.[7][8] When the weather proved too severe, they returned in March 1438, but found no treasure.[7][8] Barbaro analytically and precisely recorded information about the layers of earth, coal, ashes, millet, and fish scales that composed the mound.[7][9] Modern scholarship concludes that it was not a burial mound, but a kitchen midden that had accumulated over centuries of use.
Barbaro’s servant chatted with the Goths nearly 600 years ago. Still a long time after Goths settled in Crimea. I wonder whether they maintained any mercantile ties to other dowche communities.
I’m suspicious of claims like this, especially when they emanate from people who don’t actually know either of the languages in question themselves. I’ve seen it confidentally asserted that Welsh speakers understand Breton, and that Dagbani speakers understand Mooré. Nope. Odd word here and there, given enough context, maybe.
Gothic and Dutch are in different branches of Germanic. This is on a level with claiming that German speakers six hundred years ago could understand Swedish “well enough.” Or English. (Though I suppose one might ask, “Well enough for what?”)
It’s actually amazing how well people can understand each other, given enough motivation, without actually understanding each other’s languages. This too I have often seen … language-orientated persons like ourselves tend to have a somewhat limited idea of the full range of human communication.
The compiler of the wordlist was a known Fleming, and it looks like whenever he recognized a word he simply wrote down the Flemish cognate. When he didn’t, he wrote down what he actually heard, as with ada “egg”, which is diagnostically East Germanic.
That’s doing a lot of work here.
Gothic and Dutch are in different branches of Germanic. This is on a level with claiming that German speakers six hundred years ago could understand Swedish “well enough.” Or English. (Though I suppose one might ask, “Well enough for what?”)
OTOH, Florentine (Tuscan) is Italo-Dalmatian [just south of the La Spezia-Rimini line], while Forlivese (Romagnol) is Gallo-Italian [well north of the line], and Venetian… seems to be its own branch AFAICT. So they’re not that closely related either.
(Realistically at this scale, and accounting for minus six centuries of development, it’s going to be similar to Polish/Croatian: “Nie rozumiemy się!” – “Razumjemo se!”)
We’re still talking different branches of Germanic, but is there a reason to read Dutch for dowche? Almost any other Deutsch seems more likely to me.
A paper on recently recognized 9th century Gothic religious graffiti argues it’s in an ecclesiastical lect little changed from Wulfilas, and that educated Goths must have been trilingual in that tongue, vulgar Gothic and Greek. Which doesn’t help Barbaro’s servant much, but it seemed interesting.
Another interesting question is how someone who traveled deutschlands in the fifteenth century might have approached the question of how to understand a novel brand of dowche. There are a few savants today like David M who know the variances of the dialects of German or Italian/Romance, but do most travelers even hear other dialects nowadays or do people just use the standard.
In those days with no standard, or maybe with different court standards as one crossed from duchy to bishopric to stadt, was it more habitual to retune your ear, so that arriving in Crimea, it might take a few weeks, but because you expected correspondences and had trained your brain to replicate the patterns, that you instinctively worked it out more quickly — you had to learn atta for fadar but just recognized unsar= ûsa, and you made allowances for words you knew in your native tongue but never used, which popped up a lot in the new place — and you could get by?
Having said that, it’s certainly easier for this West Germanic speaker to pick out cognates in the old Saxon lord’s prayer than in the Gothic.
I had clean forgotten that “tschüß” is supposed to be ultimately of Romance origin, although the standard account at first glance looks like a fishy folk etymology.
“tschüß” is supposed to be ultimately of Romance origin
In Köln there’s the mildly jocular “tschö” as an alternative. The derivation from “adieu” is the only one I’ve read/heard of. What’s supposed to be fishy about that ? Parts of the Rheinland were occupied for longish periods by the French.
Well, by “first glance” I meant to suggest that it may well be valid even if superficially wacky-sounding. But getting from “adieu” to “tschüß” has quite a lot of intermediate steps. You need to lose the initial vowel, change the following cluster into something that doesn’t exist in French (and is apparently not found in German other than in loanwords) and then add a word-final /s/. Seems like a lot of work, and when e.g. you look at how “adieu” came into the Scandinavian languages as a loanword (e.g. Danish adjø) none of those things happened.
There’s a tantalizing surface similarity to another loanword-in-German with quite similar semantics, i.e. “tschau” as the respelling of Italian “ciao.”
@jwb
Not sure if final s is added, if the form was *adieux, the x may have been pronounced “s” by the Romance speaker loaning the word.
A good example of a white rock star dying at a much-older-but-still-youngish age of causes not obviously stardom-related would be George Harrison
I would say Joe Strummer. Who died of a heart attack in 2002 caused by a congenital birth defect at the relatively young age of 50. At the time he was making headway with the Mescaleros and was well on his way to becoming a senior statesman of the alternative rock world. He is still a big enough star almost a quarter of a century after his death that in my local guitar store I just came across olive drab Fender “Joe Strummer” signature guitar cables, for which I would have assumed the market, at least in Austria, consists of basically just me.
To PlasticPaddy’s point, wiktionary indicates on a deeper dig that some of the Scandinavian forms have or had an alternative with final -s. E.g. “adjes (obsolete)” pairs in Danish with adjø, and “ajöss” (supposedly with “dismissive” implications) pairs in Swedish with adjö (“usually either solemn or ironic”).
My intuitions here may be corrupted because as a teenager I may have kept the meaning of “tschüß” straight when I first encountered it by thinking of it as “German for ‘ciao.'” Which might be true in a semantic sense even if not in an etymological sense, of course.
@Vanya: obviously there’s lots of subjectivity, which may involve ones own situation. So e.g. Strummer dying at age 50 when I was 37 of a sudden cardiac event with congenital causes seemed to me like “premature death,” while George Harrison dying at 58 when I was 36 of lung cancer felt more like “the ordinary course of things.” Not quite dead of “old age” but not at an age that would have necessarily seemed notably premature for a working-class Liverpool bloke his age who’d been a long-term heavy smoker, i.e. his own alternate non-stardom life arc. Whereas for some reason Ron Asheton dying at 60 when I was 44 struck me at the time as very much an “old age” / “natural causes” situation, especially for a functionally-working-class guy who may have not had or taken advantage of the best healthcare. Now that I am 59, of course, death at 60 may seem a lot more premature.
There’s a separate subgenre of very-delayed stardom-related causes, as when someone who is 50 or 60 or even 70 dies from some sort of serious liver condition in which youthful use of drug-use-via-imperfectly-sterile needles is almost certainly causally implicated even if the person had gotten clean and sober decades previously.
But for the classic Young Dead Rockstar scenario, we are now getting within sight of the 40th anniversaries of two strong Day the Music Died candidates for a certain subsliver of my generational cohort, viz. 12/22/85 (D. Boon, at 27) and perhaps more obscurely 10/26/86 (Paul O’Halloran, at 26).
ETA: consider this perhaps oddly-phrased wikipedia description of the end of an admittedly-obscure one-time cult favorite: “Her years in Arizona were troubled and chaotic, the details and particulars largely lost, and [Lydia] Tomkiw and her work faded from view. In September 2007, at age forty-eight, she died of natural causes in her apartment in Phoenix.” If “natural causes” simply means “not by external violence or suicide,” I guess it might be accurate, but it’s usually the sort of non-specific “cause” you mention for someone much older than 48.
What I immediately notice now on re-listening to Tomkiw all these years later is how strong her Chicago accent is.
@Vanya: It was only upon my moving to Chicago to resume my formal education in ’89 that it suddenly clicked for me why her voice sounded the way it did. I must not have been previously exposed to enough pop-culture representations/parodies of that particular sort of Chicago accent. (The affluent suburban kids in the John Hughes movies didn’t have them and shouldn’t have had them because those settings weren’t in the part of the metro area associated with the stronger versions of the accent.)
I confess I’ve never heard of Lydia Tomkiw or her group Algebra Suicide, but then Christgau doesn’t include them in his ’80s Record Guide, even in the unannotated list of 200 New Wave bands in the final appendix. (Happily, they don’t make his Meltdown list either.)
@hat: I would say the “big hits” that exemplify the classic early Algebra Suicide style and give you a sense of Lydia’s distinctive voice (both her literal voice and “voice” as a lyricist) plus the guy’s musical-background stylings are “Little Dead Bodies” and “In Bed with Boys.” Both available on youtube in adequate fidelity, esp considering the lo-budget nature of the original recordings. By the time this was happening Xgau was aging and had gotten too infatuated with the latest sounds from e.g. Zaire (and or the relevant diaspora in Paris/Brussels) to pay enough attention to what was coming out of Chicago.
@J.W. – same with me. It wasn’t until the 1990s when I did some work in Chicago that I realized what a Chicago accent is. In fact I think Lydia speaks with what my Midwestern cousins would consider an almost stereotypical Chicago „Ukie/Polack“ accent.
I see Hedeker is now a venerable and respected professor of biostatistics at UChicago and plays in a rock/polka band in his spare time. His life apparently went on a completely different trajectory.
I am going to an aging-college-classmates get-together this weekend, where one of the rsvp’d classmates is the widow of a sadly departed fellow (1959-2023) who was the frontman of a more prominent (and straightforwardly punk-rock) mainstay of the Eighties Chicago scene than Algebra Suicide. Except I’m pretty sure she didn’t at the time follow that sort of music and likely initially fell for him in some later context where he was trying to hold down a straight grown-up job and his colorful backstory was not immediately evident.
Wasn’t distinguished back when Wilhelmus van Nassouwe was van duitsen bloed.
That would be a bit late for polytheists on the Rhine! The story is instead that somebody half-latinized it and restored the S in deus. A semicultismo by loan…
In non-rock-star premature-death-anniversary news (how’s that for a segue?) … I by chance recalled (then confirmed via the miracle of the internet) that this year will be the 40th anniversary of the premature death (age 55, cancer) of hat’s old teacher the Indo-Europeanist Warren Cowgill, who would almost certainly have been one of my own teachers had the onset/progress of the condition that killed him been deferred for another year or two. Death at 55 seemed pretty old back when I was 19 going on 20 (and my own parents were still in their forties)!