I was reading Noah Shachtman’s NY Times piece on Bad Bunny (archived) when I hit the following passage and had to pause:
The United States is different, and more complicated. It’s really multiple markets in one, each developing and growing side by side. Spanish speakers might be watching música Mexicana videos while Caribbean immigrants and their kids are listening to dancehall, and members of the African diaspora are streaming amapiano. “When you’re that big and that culturally diverse,” Mr. Page says, “it can all happen within your borders.”
Amapiano? It looked Zulu, but there was something odd about it. So I googled, and Wikipedia explained:
Amapiano is a genre of music from South Africa that became popular in the early 2020s. It is a hybrid of kwaito, deep house, gqom, jazz, soul, and lounge music characterized by synths and wide, percussive basslines. The word “amapiano” derives from the IsiZulu word for “pianos”.
Pianos! That’s what I call a fun etymology. (I may actually investigate the music one of these days…)
For the “is like dancing about architecture” file: I could of course listen to some examples of amapiano and see if I could figure it out but I was struck by how I had literally no idea what was meant by “wide … basslines” and double-checked my intuition by establishing that I would likewise have no idea what would be meant by a “narrow” bassline. Having a comparatively wide range of pitches v a comparatively narrow range of pitches seems like an obvious possibility in the abstract, yet I somehow intuited that it’s referring to something else.
I did, however, do a tiny bit of googling and found one possible candidate on an advice-for-music-makers website:
“Go wide
“Use panning to open up the sound of your bassline. Although bass is typically panned in the dead centre for grounding, playing about with panning can lend spaciousness to the mix. Try duplicating your bass part into two tracks, panning each to the far left and right.
“Then think about using the EQ plugins in your DAW – use a low-pass filter to bring out the lowest frequencies and a high-pass filter for a wide sound.”
Not necessarily helpful evidence:
“If you think that mono-compatible wide bass is impossible to achieve. You are very wrong!”
To find out more about Low End Mastery, I’d have had to pay at least €159 for “Access to Video Curse & Community” (sic).
How about actually listening to the stuff? No idea what is meant by “wide”, but the “percussive bass” sounds like synthesized tuned bass drums. In fact most of the instruments sound like they have been artificially generated to my ears, while the vocals remind me of Afrobeat..
And here is an article about the history of the genre.
As far as African music is concerned, I still prefer Fela Kuti.
Recommending one album – I would not say I have heard a lot more, but some – please try:
“Scorpion Kings” (2019) by DJ Maphorisa X Kabza de Small
It will likely not replace Mahlathini in your South African pantheon but that is harldy the point. Although in that vein, did you hear last year’s “Buya Buya: Come Back” by the Mahotella Queens (still starring one of the original singers)? A wonderful record.
that Rolling Stone piece included this: “…put off by English in local music; it appears hoity.” i don’t know that i’ve ever seen that without its accompanying “toity” before!
amapiano
Heh. Bleek-Meinhof Class 6 ma- plural prefix (with the “augment” a- in front of it.)
Cognate with the Kusaal plural suffix -a, as in kɔn “a kind of traditional stringed instrument”, plural kɔna. (Probably connected in some way with Dyula gɔni “violin, lute, guitar.” A Wanderwort, probably. Like piano.)
” … hoity” … without its accompanying “toity” — some use for “hoitier-than-thou”
@ulr: well, I could in a pinch listen to what the writer is trying to describe, but the point of the writing is to give me an advance inkling of what it might sound like before I do that. If you’ve never heard Grand Funk Railroad before, Homer Simpson’s famous description of inter alia “the bong-rattling bass of Mel Schacher” might be useful.
For South-Africa-related music, I just relistened to Abdullah Ibrahim’s _Water from an Ancient Well_ album for the first time in many years, and it holds up well. It was released the same year as Paul Simon’s better selling South African excursion project, and by contrast the “exoticism” in AI’s stuff is very subtle if you had no prior exposure to the so-called “Cape* jazz” of the early Seventies and how it varied from US jazz of the same approximate epoch.
*As in “of Good Hope” or maybe as in -town.
without its accompanying “toity”
It’s all quite higgledy, not to say topsy. Those harum South Africans!
maybe as in -town.
I’m gonna say, definitely as in Town. And WP seems to concur.
How about actually listening to the stuff? No idea what is meant by “wide”
If listening to it didn’t tell you what was meant by “wide”, I’m sure it wouldn’t have told me. And even without that, I didn’t think there was any significant chance.
TIL about gqom. I’m not aware of any other at-least-plausibly-English word with consecutive “gq” in it*, and certainly not any that starts with that. I wonder if it’s in Scrabble…
Apparently it’s Zulu onomatopoeia for a drum sound; the initial consonant pileup represents a click.
*) The Free Dictionary’s list is mostly acronyms (in the shorter words) and Chinese place names (in the longer words), but xiangqi seems legit.
They don’t seem to know about gqom; I suppose their Wikipedia copy must have been too old for that.
dragqueen?
Gets some Ghits. But @mollymooly wins the thread.
TIL the “voiced” nonnasal clicks are breathy-voiced. That makes them a lot easier (…for me to distinguish from the nasal ones, at least)!
Never seen that one written solid before.
I’ve never heard of this Canadian actress, but she’s notable enough to have a wikibio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Lough_Haggquist. More generally, the rarity of “gq” orthographically representing a single consonant or consonant cluster doesn’t mean there’s any phonotactic obstacle at all to a word with a syllable ending in /g/ being followed by a syllable beginning in /kw/ which would then unproblematically result in the sequence “gq.” (Maybe my example would have been /kv/ if not fully Anglicized in pronunciation?)
More generally, the rarity of “gq” orthographically representing a single consonant or consonant cluster doesn’t mean there’s any phonotactic obstacle at all to a word with a syllable ending in /g/ being followed by a syllable beginning in /kw/ which would then unproblematically result in the sequence “gq.”
Indeed, and “dragqueen” is a good example I hadn’t thought of.
(It doesn’t happen to be particularly commonly written as one word, but that’s a question of orthographic history, not phonotactics. Wiktionary does give the one-word spelling as an alternate form.)
EDIT: on the subject of foreign names, the list did pick up, among the multitudinous Chinese places, also Langquaid, a town in Bavaria; and that’s /-ŋkv-/, which does indirectly suggest that [in an English context] a syllable ending in /ŋ/ followed by a syllable beginning in /kw/ might be even more unproblematic (as there’s no voicing mismatch).
EDIT 2: …but that might end up spelled -nqu- instead.
There’s Engquist, as one of a set of variations on that surname, although I don’t know if it counts as arguably English.
Noah Shachtman needs to get out a bit. If he visits Germany, or Belgium, or France, or the UK, he will find that the world extends beyond the borders of the USA, and many countries, to name but four, have plenty of cultural diversity.
Talking to myself, I have long tended to think of LanguageHat as Langquat.
There is also ingquest and engquiry, which we don’t usually spell like that, though we perfectly well could, as the n is pronounced as if it were ng.
Huh. On this side of the pond, I pronounce both with [n], as I think is not unclear even in my unguarded moments. There might be a brief [ŋ] right before the [k].
Engquist — “Bergquist” is probably the most common -gquist surname, and the most common -gq- surname in the anglosphere.
As of the 1990 census, Bergquist was indeed the most common surname in the U.S. containing the “gq” sequence, followed by Youngquist (an Anglicized spelling?), Engquist, & Ringquist. Ringquist of course sounds a little bit like the name of a sub-Tolkien fantasy RPG, and one can easily imagine e.g. an RPG where the players all have swine-related adventures such that Hogquest would be the obvious name.
@JWB, -quist is just a fancier way of spelling -kvist in Swedish surnames. And /kv/ is closer to the truth than /kw/, in its land of origin at least.
(Cf. Rosenkrans and Gyllenstjärna for the type of noble names that Jönsson and Pärson try to emulate when they want something fancier. Many could be heraldic charges, though I wouldn’t know how to distinguish a sprig of hagg [or probably hägg as recently discussed] from other sprigs. Engquist = ‘meadow sprig’ is just carrying it too far, but they do do that. Bergquist is no better).
-qvist, surely?
@DM: You can do either, and people do. Wipe.se is full of redirects from -qvist to -quist, and cross links to different people with the other spelling, but according to the tax people there are about 9 times as many Engqvist as Engquist. This may be different for other names, I didn’t check. (Because of an old charter or something, Sweden has decided that the maintenance of citizen registrations [“folkbokföringen”] is done by Skatteverket. Denmark has a separate organization to do that, Folkeregisteret, but the name statistics are run by Statistics Denmark).
Pärson
…”Persson”, surely? Or is that Danish?
(There is apparently one famous person surnamed Pärson known to English Wikipedia, and this spelling of the surname redirects to her article.)
Amateur Reader (Tom): “Scorpion Kings” (2019) by DJ Maphorisa X Kabza de Small
I have been wondering what Des is doing these days-
–
On the Swedish names on the Bergquist form, I’ve seen them described as “ornamental”. If I understand it corrrectly, they were (chiefly? originally?) adopted when people without heriditary surnames were inscribed in military rolls. The first element tend to reflect the background of the person taking it — an element of the homestead or parish name, some feature of the landscape back home, etc., while the second element is usually purely poetic. Some such names actually make sense as compounds, but that may well be coincidental.
Youngquist
No doubt < Ljungquist “heather twig”, which does make some sense. Even more sense: Häggquist “hagberry twig”, Lindquist “linden twig”. Somewhat less sense: Lundquist “grove twig”, Engquist “meadow twig”. Definitely less sense, e.g.: Bergquist “mountain twig”, Källquist “source twig”, Rehnquist “reindeer twig”, etc.
With other botanical suffixes: Lönnroth “maple root”, Ekblad “oak leaf”, Lindblad “linden leaf”, Lindblom “linden flower”, Lindgren “linden branch”, but also e.g. Forsblad “waterfall leaf”, Forsgren “waterfall branch”,Dahlgren “valley branch”, Sjöblom “sea flower”, Sjögren “sea branch” and Ögren “island branch”.
Some suffixes recall landscape elements and make the compound seem deceptively meaningful: Strandberg “beach mountain”, Ljungberg “heather mountain”, Sjöberg “sea mountain”, Lindwall “linden green (n.)”, Sjöwall “sea green (n.)”, etc.
The suffix -man apparently never escaped its etymology: Sjöman “sea man”, Öhman “island man”, Dahlman “valley man”, Fjällman “highland man”, Bergman “mountain man”, Wallman “green (n.) man”.
We did have a discussion here, years ago, where the Danish heraldic charge søblad was adduced as a possible model for this type. The nine “hearts” in the Danish escutcheon are actually this = ‘Nymphoides peltata/floating heart leaf’. Or, three lions azure, crowned and armed of the first, langued gules, nine hearts of the third. (Yes, metal on metal, I don’t know who came up with that. Would never fly in England innit. Unless it was grandfathered in since the 12th). TIL that maybe they were always hearts, or linden leaves.
Point is, Sjöblad would be a plausible name for a Swedish noble house that carried only that charge on their achievement.
Yeah, I think several models came togerher and formed a pattern. One is the noble blazon name, another is the indefinite compound toponym (possibly attractive because correlating with homestead size and/or self ownership), and a third is occupations and geographic origin indicators ending in -man.
I would have guessed that Langquaid was in Scotland.
It’s not always easy to guess where places are on the basis of their names. If I didn’t know it was in Provence I would guess that Ganagobie was in Scotland.
Cf also the numerous families here with surnames that are explicitly farm names: Østergaard, Søndergaard, Vestergaard, Nør(re)gaard, some of them modernized with å. (Not very inventive innit). And probably a lot of farm names that you’d have to look up to distinguish from village names (though -rup, -drup, -strup are strong hints for the latter). Add patronymics, nicknames, occupational names, and most family names are very easy to explain before you even get to noble blazons like Bille and Sparre.
What’s special about Sweden is that toponymic name elements like -berg, -sten, -ström, and -wall have been incorporated into the ornamental system, so what looks like a farm or village name is often not.
In Norway there’s two distinct origins for toponymic surnames. The largest is individual farm names, usually adopted as hereditary surnames around the year 1900. Mine is an example of that. The other is (usually) parish names adopted by priestly families in the 17th and 18th C. Of the latter type, most are probably Danish (e.g. Schjelderup, Tønder), but a few are Norwegian (e.g. Bang < Bagn, Klæboe < Klæbu, Leganger < Leikanger.
Oh, I thought Bang which also occurs in Denmark, was most likely a nickname in origin (bange = ‘scaredy,’ and who knows how many syllables that had in the 15th).
I know the toponymic origin of Bang because the originator and a number of his male descendants are in my wife’s family tree. Other instances of the name may well have other origins.