Anglice.

My wife and I are back to watching the BBC adaptation of Trollope’s parliamentary novels, The Pallisers, which is (as I wrote here) absolutely splendid. But I have a bone to pick. In the last episode we watched, a lawyer deploys the fine old Latin adverb anglice, defined accurately by Merriam-Webster at that link as “in English; especially : in readily understood English (the city of Napoli, anglice Naples).” It is traditionally pronounced, as you can see at the M-W link, /ˈæŋgləˌsiː/ (ANG-gli-see), just as one would expect of an old Latin loan. It can also be pronounced (though not by me) as the ostentatiously classicizing /ˈanɡlikeː/ (AHN-gli-kay), as Wiktionary suggests. It cannot, however, be pronounced /aŋˈgliːs/ (ahng-GLEES), as if it were French, which is how the actor playing the lawyer said it. I would wince but not be surprised if I heard that in a current TV show, but from the BBC in 1974 I would have expected better things. (Oddly, anglice does not occur in the text of Phineas Redux, which that episode is based on.)

I am also disappointed with The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s decision to cancel their excellent language blog Lingua Franca. You can read laments at posts by Rose Jacobs (Dec. 10) and Anne Curzan (Dec. 11), and doubtless others as the deadline draws near. It seems there’s an endless demand for discussion of language… as long as it’s not by actual linguists. Bah.

Comments

  1. Oddly, anglice does not occur in the text of Phineas Redux

    Well, I wouldn’t use the word “oddly,” since some scenes in the series were invented out of whole cloth, while others followed the novels almost verbatim.

    As a Trollope fan, I watched it a few months ago after your initial recommendation. I thought some of the characterizations a bit broad, but on the whole was impressed by how closely Simon Raven followed the novels and how much he managed to cram into just 26 episodes, even while dispensing with numerous secondary characters and subplots. Susan Hampshire and Barbara Murray are particularly delightful in their roles.

  2. Well, I wouldn’t use the word “oddly,” since some scenes in the series were invented out of whole cloth, while others followed the novels almost verbatim.

    True, but it seems odd to me that the screenwriter would add such a musty (and, obviously, little-known, since nobody knew how to say it) word — I would have expected such a thing to be from Trollope’s pen. I entirely agree with your characterization of the series. It’s not perfect, but there are so many good things about it!

  3. I remembered seeing this word as a child in one of H. Rider Haggard’s novels, either King Solomon’s Mines or Allan Quatermain. It turned out to be the latter, as follows:

    Imagine to yourself a small, withered, yellow-faced man of sixty-three, with thin hands, large brown eyes, a head of grizzled hair cut short and standing up like a half-worn scrubbing-brush — total weight in my clothes, nine stone six [130 lb, 60 kg] — and you will get a very fair idea of Allan Quatermain, commonly called Hunter Quatermain, or by the natives ‘Macumazahn’—Anglicè, he who keeps a bright look-out at night, or, in vulgar English, a sharp fellow who is not to be taken in.

    There is a similar but shorter remark in King Solomon’s Mines (which was written later), that does not contain anglice. I am pretty sure that when I first saw it, I read it as French because of the accent; without, I probably would have read it as English (ANG-gliss).

  4. Yes, I can understand the impulse to read it as French or English — what I’m having a hard time with is the fact that nobody involved with the production knew any better.

  5. Yes, the Pallisers is a wonderful series.

    I felt one significant difference between the series and the books is that in the series Plantagenet Palliser is significantly older (both absolutely and relative to Glencora) than in the book. Glencora is twenty, I believe. In _Can You Forgive Her_, Plantagenet is described as

    “a tall thin man, apparently not more than thirty years of age, looking in all respects like a gentleman, but with nothing in his appearance that was remarkable. It was a face that you might see and forget, and see again and forget again; and yet when you looked at it and pulled it to pieces, you found that it was a fairly good face, showing intellect in the forehead, and much character in the mouth. The eyes too, though not to be called bright, had always something to say for themselves, looking as though they had a real meaning. But the outline of the face was almost insignificant, being too thin; and he wore no beard to give it character.”

    But in the TV series Philip Latham (who plays Mr Palliser) is dignified and middle aged.

  6. Yes, but who could argue with the choice? Once you’ve seen him, it’s impossible to think of Planty any other way!

  7. Oh, I’m not criticizing, he’s very good in the role. But it was very surprising, especially since I saw the TV series before I read the books (and as you say, it’s hard to think of him in any other way).

  8. I can see how it might have been popular pronounced anglicay – sort of almost Anglican. Very Trollope, very “in plain English”. But written? It’s anglice to rhyme with police.

    endless demand for discussion of language… as long as it’s not by actual linguists
    This is perfectly reasonable and the price every closed shop pays for using incomprehensible symbols and professional jargon. Many of us are interested in different aspects of language – literature, swearing in foreign, grammar, style etc. – without taking much interest in linguistics, innit? Same with art & architecture, maths. I well remember [p.97]

  9. But that’s why the blog is (soon to be was) so great — they talked about this stuff very approachably! They’re fun linguists, great to hang out with at parties!

  10. And beautiful writers, mostly. Yeah, I’m sorry. I was just trying to stir up a little bit of dissent.

  11. Dissent? Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door.

  12. “Cannot” is a bit of a prescriptivist way of putting this, isn’t it? It’s evidently not physically impossible. I would agree with “shouldn’t”; although I would imagine that “usually isn’t” would also be correct, that’s an empirical question, and anglice is rare enough that I don’t know how easy it would be to get solid data on how people usually pronounce it aloud. It wouldn’t be the first word where Latin E came to be pronounced “silent”: we have vice versa, bona fide(s), rationale, possibly fomite (the dictionaries I’ve looked at call it a back-formation from the Latin plural fomites, although I’m not sure why it couldn’t instead be an anglicization built on the stem fomit-) and clostridium difficile.

  13. David Marjanović says

    Uppercase for Clostridium.

  14. Stephen Carlson says

    t is traditionally pronounced, as you can see at the M-W link, /ˈæŋgləˌsiː/ (ANG-gli-see), just as one would expect of an old Latin loan.
    Well, I’d say it uses the legal Latin pronunciation, common among lawyers (e.g. res as /ri:s/, etc.), one of three ways of pronouncing Latin in English (there’s also classical and ecclesiastical).

  15. Well, I’d say it uses the legal Latin pronunciation, common among lawyers

    It’s common among lawyers, but that doesn’t make it “the legal Latin pronunciation” — it’s the traditional anglicized pronunciation, preserved better by lawyers than the public at large because of their innate conservatism. (Which, in this case, I approve of.)

  16. I wouldn’t think a 19th C writer like Trollope would have used it because he wouldn’t have thought of Naples as being anglicized. The name of the city is Naples, he would have thought, and those silly Italians persist in getting it wrong.

  17. Oh, in the BBC series it had nothing to do with Naples — that was just an example sentence. It was some lawyerly expression he was translating into plain English for the benefit of the woman he was talking to.

  18. (I was hoping to be able to quote the sentence, which is how I discovered it wasn’t actually from Trollope.)

  19. @David Marjanović: Actually, Clostridium difficile should also be in upright type, because it is being emphasized twice: once because it is being used as an example, alongside anglice, vice versa, and the others; and again because it is a Linnaean name. So the first emphasis makes it italic, and the second one undoes the italics!

  20. David Marjanović says

    Heh. This may be part of the reason why some journals outright forbid italics except for names at the genus and species groups of ranks.

  21. Re the end of Lingua Franca, I can’t say I’m greatly distraught. It piqued my interest at first, but in recent times seems to have been more of the same, recycled. (If I see another piece on “OK” I shall scream.)

    The only contributor I continue to look out for is Geoff Pullum; I daresay he’ll just switch his output to LLog.

  22. Eli: I’ll grant you your silent e’s in vice versa and rationale — but what English speaker would think of them as Latin rather than as English? especially “rationale”. As for “bona fide(s)”, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce that with the e silent. And those who pronounce difficile with the e silent have presumably mistaken it for French, like those who pronounce anglice to rhyme with police.

  23. Allan from Iowa says

    I once thought that anglice was pronounced in the Italian style.

  24. Rosie: I’ll grant you your silent e’s in vice versa

    Wot, like Miami Vice? This is common in America? The English pronunciation is vice-er verser or vice-a versa (same thing really).

    “bona fide(s)”, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce that with the e silent.
    Nor have I, but I even pronounce the final E in Trollope (Trolløper or troll-runner in Norwegian).

  25. Wot, like Miami Vice? This is common in America?

    Yup, well-nigh universal.

  26. David Eddyshaw says

    I’ve always said ‘vice’ in ‘vice versa’ like the Miami kind, though I’ve had a bad conscience about it ever since I learnt what an ablative absolute was in about 1966. Eheu fugaces …

    But then, if called upon actually to say “Anglice” (I never have been), I would have pronounced it Italianly, like they do in Iowa. IANAL.

  27. I would find ANG-gli-cheh more acceptable than ang-GLEECE, because Italian is an acceptable pronunciation of Latin.

  28. I’m reasonably sure that people say “rash-un-AL” because they think it’s French (as opposed to knowing it’s a Latin neuter, in which case it would come out “ray-shun-AY-lee”).

  29. David Eddyshaw says

    As for “bona fide(s)”, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce that with the e silent.

    IIRC George Clooney’s character does (repeatedly) in O Brother, Where Art Thou?; but that’s presumably just to show how ignernt he is.

  30. The Internationale is another one that poses trouble. It’s conspicuously rhymed with rally in the English lyrics, but I’ve often heard it with /…ɑːlə/.

    And on the topic of song rhymes, one thing that puzzles me no end is why modern songwriters keep rhyming again with /eɪn/ while their singers say it with /ɛn/ (notably in Singin’ in the Rain, but in many more recent songs too). Make up your minds, people!

  31. People pronounce intelligentsia as if it’s Italian, when it’s Russian.

  32. David Eddyshaw says

    Debout, les damnés de la terre …

    I only know it in French, and therefore feel justified in saying/singing it à la française.
    It’s the best language for revolutionary songs. Sorry, Hat.

    All together now!
    C’est la lutte finale …

  33. January First-of-May says

    And on the topic of song rhymes, one thing that puzzles me no end is why modern songwriters keep rhyming again with /eɪn/ while their singers say it with /ɛn/

    IIRC, in my childhood, I ended up encountering poems (in different contexts) rhyming again both with rain and with ten, leaving me quite confused about how the word was actually supposed to be pronounced.
    (I think I’ve mostly switched to the “rhymes with ten” variety.)

    Internationale and dilettante are of course интернационал and дилетант in Russian, both with final stress, and both presumably from French. I don’t think rationale has a Russian equivalent (рационал, also with final stress, apparently exists, but with a different meaning).
    As far as my idiolect is concerned, in English, Internationale is pronounced as if it was a fancy spelling of international (which it kind of is, diachronically), and dilettante has three syllables and final stress (which comes out as something pretty close to Italian minus the last syllable) – though I probably wouldn’t spell out that double T in the middle either.
    (I’m less sure about rationale, but my best guess is “basically how it’s spelled”, i.e. something along the lines of /ˈreɪʃəˌneɪl/ – give or take some minor phonetic details, anyway.)

  34. IIRC George Clooney’s character does (repeatedly) in O Brother, Where Art Thou?; but that’s presumably just to show how ignernt he is.

    No, it’s Basic American. Using a classicizing pronunciation shows you’ve been to a fancy school or been brought up by patricians.

  35. I don’t think the one-syllable pronunciation of vice in vice versa is universal in the United States. I’m with AJP in saying “vice-a versa”, and I must have learned that from some other American, but it can be hard to notice whether the schwa is there.

  36. I thought I’d pop in again to respond to some comments!

    To be clear, the words in my list were only meant to serve as examples of words where a non-etymological “silent e” pronunciation is definitely common (not necessarily more common than other pronunciations) and cannot not be dismissed as an “mistake” unless you are using that word in a prescriptive, rather than a descriptive sense. There are sources that will back up the existence of “silent e” pronunciations (used by a non-negligible amount of speakers) for all of these words, whether or not you’ve personally heard them pronounced that way. I find it interesting to hear about which pronunciations seemed familiar or unfamiliar to the other people posting comments here, but I don’t think it affects my point. Whether or not these pronunciations are associated (or were originally associated) with ignorance of the words’ etymologies is also beside my point.

    In the time since I made my last comment, I found one more example that I’d like to add to the list: statice, for which the OED and AHD list pronunciations with final /s/. It’s apparently from the Latinized form of Greek στατική.

    @Stephen Carlson:

    Well, I’d say it uses the legal Latin pronunciation, common among lawyers (e.g. res as /ri:s/, etc.), one of three ways of pronouncing Latin in English (there’s also classical and ecclesiastical).

    I think that in the pronunciation tradition that you call “legal Latin” (as languagehat says, it has a long history of usage outside of legal contexts), res would more typically be /riːz/. Actually, this kind of supports another point that I wanted to make: there isn’t really any neat division into three ways (or any other small number of ways) of pronouncing Latin. Even traditions that were originally relatively distinct have mixed in certain common pronunciations: “alumni” is in my experience never pronounced entirely in accordance with the principles of restored pronunciation (which would require it to end in /ʊmni/) but is fairly frequently pronounced as /əˈlʌmni/. And there is variation in certain points within each of the “traditions”.

    @rosie:

    I’ll grant you your silent e’s in vice versa and rationale — but what English speaker would think of them as Latin rather than as English?

    It’s hard to tell for sure, but I feel like I think of “vice versa” as a Latin phrase. I have never used “anglice” or really encountered it before reading this post, but it’s not obvious to me that “vice versa” and “anglice” lie on the opposite sides of some division between unassimilated “Latin” words and phrases and “English” words and phrases. I feel fairly sure that the converse of the rule that you are implying does not hold: I would confidently argue that there words that end in non-silent e that qualify as “English”, such as simile, which I learned long before I knew of its origin as a Latin word. A one-way rule might hold (“If an English speaker recognizes a word as Latin, it is not pronounced with final ‘silent e'”), but I’m not convinced that a rule like this is relevant for describing mainstream English pronunciation.

    @January First-of-May:
    Separately from all of the above, I’m curious about your comment that Internationale is “интернационал” in Russian. I forget if it’s come up on this blog before, but could you explain why it doesn’t end in ль instead? I had the impression that French /l/ in word-final position was usually taken into Russian as a palatalized consonant, as in отель.

  37. why it doesn’t end in ль instead?

    By analogy with capital?

  38. J.W. Brewer says

    I don’t know how common the “Basic American” monosyllabic pronunciation of the “fide” in “bona fide” is among BrEng speakers, but you can find it in e.g. Nick Lowe’s song “Cruel to be Kind,” where “bona fide” rhymes with “don’t coincide.” Whether that sounds weird (or like a comically-forced rhyme) to BrEng ears I can’t say.

  39. I don’t think the one-syllable pronunciation of vice in vice versa is universal in the United States.

    I didn’t say it was, I said it was “basic,” meaning it’s a standard part of the American linguistic toolkit and doesn’t need special explanation. Of course I’ve heard the two-syllable pronunciation, but it seems to me less common.

  40. BTW, how usual is it to stress u in ‘desultory? I believe I’ve heard in an issue of the Economist in audio.

  41. Then there’s “congeries.” On the rare occasions I’ve heard someone attempt to say it, it’s been conjeREEZ. If I ever used it, I’d say cunJERRY’S and probably get blank stares.

  42. I may be the only living English speaker who uses the four-syllable pronunciation /kənˈdʒɪəɹɪˌiːz/, which I believe I picked up from some antiquated dictionary in my young youth and which was reinforced by learning Latin (congeriēs being indisputably tetrasyllabic).

  43. M-W online (which tends to be conservative about pronunciation) gives only the second pronunciation; AHD gives both, or rather CONjeREEZ with equally distributed stress. The OED2, whose pronunciations are just an IPA-ification of the OED1’s 19C RP, gives JEER rather than JERR as the stressed syllable.

    When I first read about the congeries of iridescent globes, I probably said (in my head) CONjereez, but it’s been c’nJERry’s for a long time now. Wikipedia wimps out and uses conglomeration except in direct quotations, though a congeries is not necessarily conglomerated: the items may be quite separate physically: in 1849 we hear of a “congeries of stars”.

  44. The OED2, whose pronunciations are just an IPA-ification of the OED1’s 19C RP, gives JEER rather than JERR as the stressed syllable.

    Maybe that’s where I got it from.

  45. “Congeries” is one of those words that I’ve known for a long time yet I’m pretty sure I’ve neither tried to say out loud myself nor heard anyone else make the attempt. It’s in some special only-used-in-writing register of English.

  46. I once wrote a terrible poem beginning “The world’s insane congeries/ creeps, foully brooding, into sense” and ending “which keeps him from a life of ease/ and forces him to deal with it — / the world’s insane congeries.” That certainly makes my pronunciation clear, if nothing else.

  47. Wot, like Miami Vice? This is common in America? The English pronunciation is vice-er verser or vice-a versa (same thing really).

    This BrE speaker says vice versa, with vice as in vice meaning sin (or clamp), and has never in his life heard anyone say vice-a versa.

  48. Aha, the plot thickens!

  49. “Vice-a versa” has existed in American, though I don’t think I’ve heard it for a long time. When I was a boy there was a line of reversible clothing called “Visa Versa,” of which my grandmother said, “Shouldn’t that be pronounced Veeza Versa?”

  50. “Visy Versy”, too.

  51. J.W. Brewer says

    Thinking of e.g. “acey-deucey,” which co-exists just fine in AmEng with monosyllabic “ace,” I’m wondering if the extra syllable in “vicey-versuh” is more of a prosody-driven thing like that than a learned affectation?

    FWIW, the primary context in which “vice” is not monosyllabic in my AmEng idiolect is in the fixed lawyer-jargon phrase “pro hac vice,” in which I pronounce it in lawyer-jargon-assimilated-Latin as “vee-chay” rather than in the pseudo-classical pronunciation I was taught in 11th grade.

  52. So when did lawyers switch from anglicized to Italianate?

  53. J.W. Brewer says

    I dunno, man. Don’t look at me. It was already broken before I got here.

    I don’t think there’s any one set of pronunciation rules that account for all US-legal-jargon pronunciations of Latin-origin fixed phrases, and there are probably some such phrases where multiple pronunciation variants are extant. Part of that may be a sliding scale of more-v-less “domesticated” (like “vice versa” is in such broad use that a distinctively lawyers’ pronunciation would have been swamped long ago by standard AmEng pronunciation, but no one outside the legal subculture is going to either say or hear someone else say “pro hac vice” and there are no doubt other examples falling somewhere in between), but it may be more complicated.

  54. David Marjanović says

    BTW, how usual is it to stress u in ‘desultory?

    …How else would you pronounce it? “Dessel tory”?

    (I’ve never heard it, only seen it written.)

  55. “Dessel tory”?

    Exactly so; that’s the standard US pronunciation.

  56. Stu Clayton says

    @David M: how comes it that German words apparently without exception (I can’t think of any) have only one pronunciation in terms of stress pattern ? Other aspects (vowels, consonants) are assignable to region and dialect, or (rarely) to idiosyncratic ignorance, and thus in any case exempted from discussion There are no discussions here about correct stress, but rather ones about spelling and case use with prepositions.

    There are only a few non-dialectal signs of impending cultural decline and fall, for instance the tendency of tv talkers to say “Fusch” instead of “Fisch”.

  57. David Marjanović says

    Good question. Different stress patterns do occur for the least assimilated foreign words – just like in English, you’ll find Diplodocus and Deinonychus stressed on the 3rd-to-last or the 2nd-to-last syllable. Then there’s the fact that the Swiss are much more willing to stress almost anything on the first syllable, including initialisms like USA. And then, again as in English, there’s contrastive stress with complications.

    However, it’s usually possible to deduce the placement of the stress from the spelling: the stress generally goes on the last unreduced-looking syllable, i.e. the last not spelled with e. When that’s the last syllable, the word is basically presumed to be French and stressed accordingly.

    And while English has long and growing lists of noun/verb or noun/adjective pairs that are spelled the same and differ only in stress placement (and the resulting vowel reductions), there’s no such thing in German. There are minimal pairs for stress, but very few, and most of them are verbs with separable vs. unseparable prefixes (umgehen).

    the tendency of tv talkers to say “Fusch” instead of “Fisch”

    That’s regional: /ɪ/ has values like [ɨ] and [ʉ] somewhere down north, often merging with /ʏ/ at least in my impression (but not with /ʊ/). You’re not going to find it on Austrian TV, where the value of /ɪ/ is much closer to [i].

  58. In Alan Dean Foster’s 1972 novel The Tar-Aiym Krang, a future nursery rhyme is quoted: “Where humans go / There thranx [sic] also / And vicey-versey // Didn’t you know?”

    Hat: The change in lawyerese came some time in the 20C, for my father (1904-1993) certainly said “pro hack vice-y”.,

  59. David Eddyshaw says

    I acquired some knowledge of UK legal Latin in the 1970’s through kibbitzing the work of my then girlfriend; enough at least to be able to say that it was pronounced in the One True Way, like JC’s “pro hack vice-y.” Whether that is still the case in these Latter Days of the Law, I do not know.

  60. Since “per say” (as opposed to “per see”) seems to be the predominant American pronunciation of per se, which has somehow entered into colloquial use, I’d guess that American lawyers nowadays say “pro say” rather than “pro see” for pro se. Maybe it’s the influence of Spanish?

  61. @juha: I feel like the second syllable of desultory is a unusual stressed schwa, because regardless of what specific qualities I give the vowel (so long as it doesn’t move too far from the middle), the word sounds fine.

    @David Marjanović: I have never heard deinonychus stressed on the second syllable in English. On the other hand, with diplodocus, I have heard both stress patterns. I remember when we had a science unit on dinosaurs in second grade, part of our final examination was correctly pronouncing all the names of the dinosaurs we had studied (apatosaurus, parasaurolophus, etc.). The teacher pronounced it with second syllable stress, but I had learned it with third syllable stress. She was surprised by the way I said, but she told me explicitly that both pronunciations were acceptable.

    @Keith Ivey: I have heard the restaurant Per Se (pronounced PER-say) mentioned a few times on the Food Network, and (for branding reasons), I assume that they know how the owner wants the name to be pronounced.

    @J.W. Brewer: I have sometimes wondered about acey-deucey. I imagine that it is older than the similarly pronounced AC/DC; certainly it is older than the band, but I also grew up with AC/DC being the slang my mother used to describe bisexuality. However, I suspect there has been some supporting influence back and forth between the two phrases.

  62. @Brett: Are you saying the word “desultory” specifically is special in this way? I can’t comment on my pronunciation of that exact word because I use the initial-stressed variant, but for me, the nucleus of any syllable ending in /ʌl/ followed by a voiceless consonant seems to have a somewhat murky or indistinct quality (I think it’s the combination of the coloring from coda “dark l” and shortening from “pre-fortis clipping”). For example, although I do think of “adult” as having the distinct phoneme /ʌ/ in my pronunciation, it doesn’t sound too bad or very different to me to replace the nucleus with /ɑl/ or /ʊl/ (or syllabic /l̩/, which pretty much sounds like /ʊl/ to me). The same seems to be true for “pulse” and “ultimate”.

    I have read that some North American speakers simply have a phonemic merger of /ʌl/ with /ʊl/ or with /ɔl/, but this isn’t the case for me. (Since I am cot-caught merged, my phonemic inventory doesn’t contain /ɔ/, so a merger of /ʌl/ with /ɑl/ would presumably be the equivalent).

  63. I have never heard deinonychus stressed on the second syllable in English.

    Really? I’m only familiar with deinónychus, which is also the only form I can find in dictionaries. Likewise diplódocus.

  64. David Marjanović says

    “per say” (as opposed to “per see”) seems to be the predominant American pronunciation of per se

    Also the predominant spelling on teh intarwebz outside of specialist circles.

    part of our final examination was correctly pronouncing all the names of the dinosaurs we had studied

    *facepalm*

    *headdesk*
    *headdesk*
    *headdesk*

  65. David Marjanović says

    I’ve heard Deinonychus both ways and “data” all three ways from Americans alone.

  66. I willl respect and use the pronunciation used by Deinonychus itself.

  67. David Eddyshaw says

    That would be “Rrraaaagh!” (the ‘d’ is silent.)

    I agree that it would be disrespectful to correct Deinonychus in such matters.

  68. Do any English speakers stress Dionysus on the antepenult?

  69. @Y: I have heard second syllable stress on Dionysius at least once from an English speaker (although I can’t remember if they were a native). It sounded really weird. Moreover, I now think that it is possible that I may have heard deinonychus with second syllable stress and just not recognized the name at all. With that stress pattern (including a reduced vowel in the third syllable), it sounds like a completely different name to me.

  70. Brett, are you talking about Dionysus or Dionysius? (Don’t feel bad. Northrop Frye once wrote the latter for the former in a whole book.)

  71. I actually did mean Dionysius, although I misread Y. And as it turns out, I have now and then heard Dionysus with second, syllable stress.

  72. On stress differences in German – there is a regional difference for the stress of compounds consisting of two-syllable words, like Bürgermeister “mayor”, which are stressed on the first element in the German standard, but on the second element in some regional varieties, especially in the South.

  73. The Internationale is another one that poses trouble. It’s conspicuously rhymed with rally in the English lyrics

    The version I learned (by ear) begins the refrain with “‘Tis the final rebellion”, so there is no question of rhyming. The third line seems to be intensely polymorphic: different manuscript versions make it “The International Union” (Wobbly), “The International Party” (Communist), and other things. The Bragg recension preserves the original rally/Internationale rhyme, but in a different place: I like this version very much for the distich “Freedom is but privilege extended / Till it’s enjoyed by one and all” at the end of the first verse, but it can’t replace the song as I first knew it in my heart.

    However, Gregg Baker’s immortal Linux-nationale expressly uses the pentasyllabic pronunciation, as noted by the lyricist himself: “The Linux-nationale shall Microsoft outpace”. Though nowadays Microsoft has embraced Linux with a vengeance. It would not astony me to see a Microsoft Linux distro on the desktop one of these days.

  74. David Marjanović says

    Just five lines on, it rhymes -nationale with stall.

    Meanwhile, the “infoscreens” in the Berlin subway run on Windows Neanderthal Technology. Occasionally they turn into Blue Screens of Death and say ntoskrnl.exe has a problem; more often they just turn black…

  75. diplodocus

    Dzharatitanis
    First rebbachisaurid sauropod dinosaur from Asia

    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0246620

  76. John Cowan says

    [The Bragg recension] can’t replace the song as I first knew it in my heart.

    It has now, though, only three years down the line. Lyrics.

    It would not astony me to see a Microsoft Linux distro on the desktop

    This too has come to pass: not a singular Microsoft Linux, but any Linux you want running on Windows (or rather on the NT Executive, the sub-basement of Windows) in a way that Microsoft supports. Perhaps they grew tired of Apple eating their lunch in the developer market.

  77. Lyrics.

    It’s funny, I learned it first in English and then in Russian; I guess I knew it was originally in French, but I don’t think I ever read the whole thing in that language until just now from your link. I sang it aloud and had to stop a couple of times and figure out the scansion of some lines.

  78. Also, the ahng-GLEES thing still annoys me. If I ever get around to watching the series again, I’ll copy down the sentence and share it here.

  79. Lars Mathiesen says

    There aren’t any Microsoft-branded Linux distributions yet, AFAIK. But the grapevine is replete with sayings of doom because apparently Amazon Linux now exists.

  80. John Cowan says

    Yes, but (as is well known) Amazon Linux is just the default Linux installed on Amazon cloud devices. You can’t download it (except as a container), or buy it in stores either, not even Amazon stores. In truth it is just a variant of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The next version will be based on the closely related Fedora Linux, also from Red Hat.

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