I’m finally reading Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms
And I’ve just discovered a new language name! When he discusses Franco-Provençal (which was to the medieval Kingdom of Burgundy more or less as Belarusian was to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth—the original Burgundians, who may have come from Bornholm, spoke an East Germanic language closely related to Gothic), Davies refers to it as “Arpitan,” which threw me for a loop. Google sent me to Wikipedia, which explains that “Arpitania and Arpitan Language are … neologisms from the 20th century… initially used for the Alpine regions where Arpitan was spoken. The name was popularised by Mouvement Harpitanya, a left-wing political grouping in Aosta Valley in 1970s.” In fact, he reproduces the “Map of Arpitania” shown on that Wikipedia page; it’s fun to see forms like “Lons” for Lyons and “Grenoblo” for Grenoble. Too bad the language, under whatever name, is dying out.
Last time I looked up the list of languages on Wikipedia (since I often try to read more than one article on a topic, and see more pictures), I encountered “Arpitan” which was totally new to me, but did not go to the page. A couple of years ago I heard a lecture on the Val d’Aoste and the linguistic situation there, but I don’t think that there was a name for the old language. It seems that there are serious efforts being made for keeping it alive though.
It’s astonishing how tiny these European linguistic subdivisions can be. I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a single one of these dialect names in my life before:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A4toromanische_Sprachen#Gliederung
I had seen “Arpitan”, but I remember assuming it was derived from a rhoticized “Alp”.
I think “Lons” is Lons-le-Saunier; Lyon is “Liyon”.
We once did a guided walk in Brussels; the guide said without a trace of self-consciousness “In our golden age under the Dukes of Burgundy …”
the extraordinarily complicated history of the various entities that have been known as Burgundy over the centuries
In the Ealing Studios’ 1950s film Passport To Pimlico the people of London name their newly independent state ‘Burgundy’.
I think Primo Levi wrote about those dialects, but I can’t find it.
I think “Lons” is Lons-le-Saunier; Lyon is “Liyon”.
Athel is right. Lyons is the English version, like Marseilles. These names do not have a final written s in French.
Northern French people pronounce Lyon like lion, in one syllable. Southern French people (whose speech is influenced by Occitan) say both as li-on or even liyon.
“Northern French people pronounce Lyon like lion, in one syllable.” Apparently that was how it was pronounced in English too until recently. (I once came across an article about how British pronunciation of French names had become frenchified in the last century or so. So King Lewis became King Looie, and so on.)
..wait what? How is lion one syllable?
AG, lion is one syllable in Standard French. The i coming between a consonant and a vowel is not the vowel but the semi-vowel otherwise written y.
But perhaps you mean English lion? perhaps dearieme means that it used to be pronounced like line? And, dearieme, French Louis is (at least currently) pronounced in one syllable, [lwi].
I think “Lons” is Lons-le-Saunier; Lyon is “Liyon”.
My bad; thanks for the correction.
@ marie-lucie –
thanks for the clarification, but… am I insane in thinking that “lion” and “Louis” (in either language) are clearly 2-syllable words? I don’t care how French you are, “lion” is obviously 2 syllables. Right?
Girl seems like one syllable, but…
“gir ul” might be two syllables.
Yon
Lyon
We
Twee
Lwe
I don’t care how French you are, “lion” is obviously 2 syllables. Right?
Nope, it’s one syllable. Think of it as “yon” (pronounced the French way, obviously) with an l- stuck on in front.
I’m sure I came across “Arpitan” when vacationing in Savoy (in Chamonix in Haute Savoie). But where exactly? I don’t remember. Perhaps I was reading Wikipedia on the road too much.
The golden age of Burgundy was – I guess – the 100 years before the death of Charles the Bold? I’ve just started Huizinga’s “Erasmus and the Age of Reformation,” which begins:
“When Erasmus was born Holland had for about twenty years formed part of the territory which the dukes of Burgundy had succeeded in uniting under their dominion – that compleхity of lands, half French in population, like Burgundy, Artois, Hainault, Namur; half Dutch like Flanders, Brabant, Zealand, Holland.”
(MT wouldn’t let me include the word “compleхity” in the post: I got “You don’t have permission to access /mt/mt-comments.cgi on this server.” I had to use the Russian х to get the comment accepted.)
AG: lion is obviously 2 syllables
If you are from Southern France, maybe. From Northern France, like from Paris (and many other places), or from Canada, no.
lion (suite)
However, it must have been two syllables in older versions of French, as shown by the syllable count in some older poetry (French poetry being syllable-based, not “foot” and stress-based as in English).
As a native speaker of French from Canada I can confirm that “lion” is monosyllabic to me.
There is an interesting minimal pair which highlights this in the speech of many francophones (myself included: I don’t know about Marie-Lucie): “lion(s)”, singular or plural, is monosyllabic. On the other hand “lions”, the imperative first person plural form of the verb “lier”, meaning “to tie/attach”, is bisyllabic: whereas the noun “lion(s)” has /j/ as its second segment, the verb form “lions” has an /i/ as its second segment.
“French Louis is (at least currently) pronounced in one syllable”: I said that English pronunciation has (apparently) been frenchified – I didn’t say that it had been frenchified accurately or completely. Consider Ypres – in the First World War the British troops pronounced it Wipers. Nowadays people would have a go at Eepr, even if they didn’t hit it spot on.
Grand Fenwick must be somewhere within the boundaries of that maximalist/irredentist Arpitania shown on wikipedia, but I can’t figure out what the Arpitan name on the map for it is.
The golden age of Burgundy was – I guess – the 100 years before the death of Charles the Bold?
Yes, with the proviso that that’s the least Burgundian of the various entities that have gone by that name; it didn’t include the historic heartland around Geneva, and its economic center was Flanders (in fact, what people meant when they talked about “Burgundy” and “Burgundian” in the fifteenth century was largely Flanders and Flemish). Also, Charles the Bold would be more justly known as Charles the Asshole; as Cope writes, “It was under these remarkable princes [the Valois count-dukes, from Philip the Bold to Charles] that the best opportunity arose that was ever offered to the Burgundian Phoenix. Philip created it, Charles cast it away.” He had no qualms about massacring the entire population of a rebellious city, and he thought he could make enemies of every surrounding monarch at the same time with impunity. Turns out he couldn’t.
Is Charles the Bold the man known in French as Charles le Téméraire?
Philip the Bold must be Philippe le Hardi. Hardi and téméraire both imply boldness, daring, but téméraire also implies stubborn, foolish boldness that takes unnecessary risks.
Indeed it is. He was also called Charles le Hardi or (in Dutch) Karel de Stoute, roughly ‘Charles the Tough’, and Wikipedia says he was also known as Charles le Terrible “to his enemies”.
Here’s an interesting passage from the Davies book about what happened after Charles the Asshole died:
I kind of like Charles the Unnecessary Risk Taker.
Charles the fool-hardi?
Actually, what is the “hardy” in “foolhardy”?
My new favorite real legendary placename, up there with Macaronesia.
Thanks for the responses… for some reason my brain was briefly unable to process one-syllable “lion”, but I think I get it now.
The Japanese name “Ryo” is a similar puzzle for me. It’s clearly one syllable, and easy for Japanese people to say, but for me it’s a near-impossible tongue twister
Hardy in this sense means ‘bold, courageous, daring’ (OED), so foolhardy means ‘hardy to the point of folly’, or as the OED says ‘daring without judgement, foolishly adventurous or bold, rashly venturesome’.
English lost /rj/ (as in rude) so long ago that no variety retains it, so it’s not surprising that anglophones find it hard to say. In the accents where there is a contrast between threw and through, the contrast is that threw continues to have /ɪu/ rather than simple /u/.
AG: The Japanese name “Ryo” … for me it’s a near-impossible tongue twister
Yet you can easily say “Are you?” Practice saying this: first the whole thing, then keeping the “A” silent. Of course you wont really sound Japanese, but you will get used to the “ry” sound sequence.
JC: French hardi must have preserved the Old English meaning (more likely the Germanic meaning). Foolhardy seems to be the right equivalent for téméraire, so it should be Charles the Foolhardy, not Charles the Bold which is a positive nickname.
What happens in Passport to Pimlico is that a a royal charter of Edward IV turns up as result of wartime bombing, conveying the title to the land now occupied by Pimlico to the Duke of Burgundy. The inhabitants have been having a dustup with the government of London, so they assert their independence. The city tries to starve them out, but they receive a great deal of support from the outside, and much publicity. Then the actual Duke of Burgundy (an otherwise ordinary Frenchman) shows up to lead his people. An excellent and very entertaining movie.
I have that Christopher Cope book, but mine has a different cover and is called The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy, with “Phoenix Frustrated” appearing only as a subtitle and only on the inside title page. 1986 edition.
Thanks, maid. I was hazy about the details. It must have been about 40 years since I watched it. Pimlico is a very good name, though. It seems a shame to change it.
Lyons is the English version, like Marseilles. These names do not have a final written s in French.
– Does anyone know why the Ss were added in English? It seems a bit of a waste if they’re not even going to be pronounced.
Of course you wont really sound Japanese, but you will get used to the “ry” sound sequence.
The main problem is that the Japanese ‘r’ sound is not really like the English sound at all. I think /rj/ in English might actually be easier to pronounce.
We once did a guided walk in Brussels; the guide said without a trace of self-consciousness “In our golden age under the Dukes of Burgundy …”
Brussels is reputed to have the best Burgundy wines because the old connection never died away.
Ryo: Bathrobe, of course Japanese ‘r’ is not any kind of English ‘r’, but the result might be easier for a Japanese person to process than whatever the speaker used to say. There is quite a diversity of sounds that are considered to be ‘r’ in different languages, without really impeding communication between people from different linguistic backgrounds. This can even be true in a single language: English spoken in different countries (eg England, Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, India, etc) has quite a variety of ‘r’s.
Pimlico is a very good name, though.
So it is, and I started wondering where it came from; according to Wikipedia, nobody knows for sure:
Pimlico
Some years ago I read an article in a linguistics journal (I don’t remember which one but it is well-known), where this question was addressed. The conclusion was that the name “Pimlico” had first appeared in a work dealing with America in the 17c or 18c, at a time when there was much curiosity about the continent. It is not uncommon for tourist or at least public attractions to be called by exotic names (like “Shangri-la”, for instance), and if the owner of the alehouse and the tea gardens had had a very commonplace name shared with many others, he could have become better known by the name of his ‘resort’. From “Pimlico Path” (leading to the “Pimlico” resort) to “Pimlico district” where the owner lived is not a huge step.
His tea-gardens, however, were near Hoxton, and the road to them was termed Pimlico Path, so that what is now called Pimlico was so named from the popularity of the Hoxton resort”.
Interesting. I don’t buy the “so that”, though. Hoxton is waay on totally the other side of London. It’s 6 or 7 miles from Pimlico. It’s a hell of a long way to go for a nut-brown ale, let alone a cup of tea.
Ebury Street, -Mews etc. is on the edge of Pimlico, and I didn’t know it used to be the name of the district. I had thought the streets were named for Lord Ebury, whereas he must have been named for them.
Is there independent documentary evidence for the historical existence of Ben Pimlico (including say, a parish register noting his baptism and indicating that Pimlico was in fact his parents’ surname – as marie-lucie noted, it could have been a “stage name”)? Browsing what seems to be a quite extensive database of surnames found in 19th century UK census records gives nothing in between Pimley and Pimlott, and it doesn’t match my gut intuition at least of the typical range of phonological/orthographic patterns found in British surnames. http://www.britishsurnames.co.uk/browse/PIM/
Obviously even many centuries ago London attacted immigrants from various sources and it’s entirely possible a foreign-origin surname could have been anglicized in an odd one-off version but then died out.
Whatever the exact source of hardi, Frankish or what not, it is certainly from a Germanic cognate of English hard. In the U.K., tough guys are called hard men, which is as irresistibly funny (to North American anglophones) as the North American Randall who goes Over There and introduces himself as Randy.
As for Pimlico, it is a Native American name. The work was done by Richard Coates, and memorably told by Larry Trask (pbuh) in Why Do Languages Change? (2010, posthumously published):
This tale fails to account for the transference of Pimlico from Hoxton to Westminster, but seems otherwise very convincing to me. Certainly it would be a stretch to assume two independent origins of a name so peculiar for two different places in London. The Pamticough mentioned would probably have been pronounced /pamticux/ and written down by early modern Englishmen as they heard it.
On the thing of the English word “lion”: RP was traditionally considered to have triphthongal phonemes /aɪǝ/ and /ɑʊǝ/, which in practice meant smoothing the relevant sequences into [aǝ] and [ɑǝ], so that’s how English can have a monosyllabic “lion”. As for the city, I’ve read that in older English, Lyon was spelled “Lyons” and pronounced /ˈlaɪǝnz/ (reminiscent of like how Milan used to be /ˈmaɪlǝn/).
Oh, and about “ryo” – I do agree that coronal rhotics are the hardest thing to follow up with a [j]-like sound. When I dabble in Russian, for example, soft “r” is the one thing that totally eludes me – I’m torn between pronouncing the sequence “ре” as [ɾe] or as [ɾie].
A thread over at Language Log has just induced me to praise “Brothel in Pimlico” by Roy Brooks, which . . . if you are only going to read one anthology of atypically well-written real estate ads in your lifetime is definitely the one to pick.
As for Pimlico, it is a Native American name. The work was done by Richard Coates, and memorably told by Larry Trask (pbuh) in Why Do Languages Change? (2010, posthumously published)
Thanks very much for reproducing that passage, which is both entertaining and convincing. The discovery that the sailors named the bird after the bar is almost too good to be true.
Yes, it is entertaining and convincing. A thousand thanks, John. How very interesting enlightening and I must say, surprising. M-l was right, and it must have been a piece by Trask that she read. That extract should at the very least be on the Wikipedia page for ‘Pimlico’.
JW, I haven’t read the Log piece but Roy Brooks’ property ads in the Observer & Sunday Times newspapers were a feature of my childhood. And it’s not often that children are entertained by property advertising.
I found a citation for the Coates article: Coates, Richard, “The First American Placename in England: Pimlico”, Names: A Journal of Onomastics, 43:3 (September 1995), pp. 213-227(15). Alas, I can’t fork over the $15 to download it.
“How very …surprising. M-l was right …”: how ungentlemanlike, Crown.
dearieme, shame on you, you are twisting Crown’s words through selective elimination. AJP, your comment was perfectly OK.
Thank you, m-l. That boy is such a troublemaker.
“m-l… is such a troublemaker”: He’s at it again!
marie-lucie: AG: lion is obviously 2 syllables
If you are from Southern France, maybe. From Northern France, like from Paris (and many other places), or from Canada, no.
I think it’s always one syllable in Marseilles, as is Lyon. I first became conscious of that when my daughter, at the age of 4, came back from school and recited a verse about a snail on its way from Dijon to Lyon. Before that I always did what Engllish speakers do, and put the stress on a syllable that isn’t there.
dearieme (quoting an earlier post that I can’t find): ”French Louis is (at least currently) pronounced in one syllable”
Yes. I’m not sure how my wife pronounces Louis, as it isn’t a name that comes up much in our conversation, but a related point arises with pluie, which she pronounces as if spelt ploue, something I’ve always found rather odd, as she (as a Chilean) doesn’t have the slightest difficulty with Spanish words with the same sound, like Luis.
AJP: Lyons is the English version, like Marseilles. These names do not have a final written s in French.
– Does anyone know why the Ss were added in English? It seems a bit of a waste if they’re not even going to be pronounced.
I think we’ve had that conversation before, or maybe I’m thinking of another group. If I’m right, then some knowledgeable person like marie-lucie pointed out that they originally had s in French and were adopted before they lost it. In English, Lyon has largely lost its s, but Marseilles still has it (some of the time, anyway). I don’t know why.
What I find interesting is how many placenames have no s in their original language but acquire one when translated — not just those two, but Brussels (Brussel in Dutch, but Bruxelles in French), Algiers, Naples, Athens, Tangiers, once upon a time Portingals, not to mention (in French) Gênes, Londres, Douvres and Cornouailles Those last three account for 75% of all the English placenames that I know of that are different in French (the exception being Cantorbéry.) Of course, Athens and Naples are plural in their original languages (but s-less).
Defanged spam, with the slogan removed:
I’ve always hated the bailey button in the software.
Athel: two comments:
pluie, which she pronounces as if spelt ploue, something I’ve always found rather odd, as she (as a Chilean) doesn’t have the slightest difficulty with Spanish words with the same sound, like Luis.
I have no idea why a Chilean would pronounce pluie as “ploue” ([plu]), because in French it is pronounced like lui, which is not the same as in Luis or Louis. The semi-vowel at the beginning of ui is related to (French) u (= German ü), that of oui is related to (French) ou (= German u) and equivalent to English w.
French city names with final -s: All your citations are correct, except for “Cornouailles” which is not a city or town. La Cornouaille is the name of two regions, one in Southwest England (also called by the plural les Cornouailles) and the other in Brittany.
Under the heading of far-flung Arpitania: An emigration, presumably from the Val d’Aosta or the Piedmont, led to Arpitan being spoken in two adjacent villages in the Italian province of Foggia (the heel-spur of the Italian boot) named Faeto and Celle di San Vito; there are now about 1400 speakers of the language there. A further emigration from that area settled in Brantford, Ontario, with about 400 speakers today.
They moved from Piedmont to Apulia?? I wonder if it was like Rick moving to Casablanca for the waters.
I’ve just been reading a 1670 amusement called “The pleasant and delightful history of King Henry 8th. and a cobler relating how he came acquainted with the cobler, and the pleasant humours that happened thereupon, &c. To which is added, The cobler’s song in the Kings celler.” I post about it here because of the last sentence of Chapter III: “Having done this, she made her Husband to rise and pull off his Shirt, then she washt him with warm Water, from Head to foot, putting him on a clean Shirt, afterwards she dressed him in his Holiday Cloaths, pinning on his Lace-Band in Pimlico.” This must mean “in Pimlico fashion”, whatever that might have been.
Rick may indeed have moved to Casablanca for the waters, if those in the atmosphere are meant. Fogs in the desert night sky are not the commonest thing. (It also helped to hide the fact that the airplane was made half-scale and entirely out of plywood and balsa, with no metal parts.)
reminiscent of like how Milan used to be /ˈmaɪlǝn/ — and Mailand in German. Coincidence or a detour via English?
Parallel sound laws, I’d say – both English and German have diphthongised historically long “i”.
And both borrowed /mi’l:ano/ as /’mi:lan/? Perhaps both languages had stricter stress placement rules when the name was borrowed, and transferred length to the stressed syllable.
(It was mediō’lānum in Latin, I’d be surprised if it ever had initial stress in Italian).
Well, I think it’s likely that English and German both borrowed it from either French or Lombard Milan, rather than from central Italian Milano. Moving the stress forward wouldn’t seem quite so unusual in that case.
Irrelevant to that historical development, but it’s amusing/interesting that the Italian name of the famous soccer/football team is AC Milan, with the stress on the Mi-.
Pffft: “Lombard, Milanese variant: Milan [miˈlã]”
I suppose it’s possible that the [i] was borrowed as /iː/ as opposed to /ɪ/ in both cases.
Anyway, the German -d is a delightful folk etymology: “May country”, because northern Italy is the land where they have spring instead of winter, spring being equated with May in the Little Ice Age.
Kennst du das Mailand?
Exactly.
it’s amusing/interesting that the Italian name of the famous soccer/football team is AC Milan, with the stress on the Mi-.
There’s also Genoa CFC (not Genova). The early Italian clubs were founded and dominated by British expats – hence the still current Italian term for [football] coach, Mister. I think Mussolini forced those two clubs to use Milano and Genova respectively, but they reverted after the war.
Yup, that’s my understanding as well.
And in North America’s struggling MLS, we have similar affectations like the use of “FC” by various clubs, or even the nonsensical “Real Salt Lake”.
Not to mention fans’ pathetic imitations of drunken racist European supporters.
See also Vienna’s Austria, pronounced à l’allemande; the fans are Austrianer.
Wikipedia:Pimlico currently cites H. G. Wells’ “The Dream”, and he connects the name to a former local wharf rather the relatively distant Hoxton, but includes the Algonquin connexion.
I wonder where Wells got his etymology from?
John Cowan:
The price is currently $44 just for that one paper. Yikes.
Fortunately, there are other ways to generically liberate it.
Coates 1995 says:
The wharf that Wells references does seem to have been real, regardless of where the name came from. Lockie’s Topography of London (1810) gives:
Note the absence of a Pimlico Road at this time. Also note that 1810 is prior to the development of the area; per WikiP, that development began in 1825.
I may have tracked down Wells’ source. Review of Reviews, Vol 31, pg 59 (1905), references The Antiquary for January 1905, and an article on “Some London Steet Names”, by Rev. W. J. Loftie, B.A., F.S.A.
NB: You’d think that Loftie would have written “Pamlico” in that penultimate sentence, but he did not. “Algonguin” is also spelled with a “gu” rather than “qu” in The Antiquary”. I don’t know if that’s a typo, or a spelling variant. “Review of Reviews” changed it to “Algonquin” when they reprinted Loftie’s words, and broke that section up into several paragraphs.
Presumably Wells either read “Review of Reviews”, or “The Antiquary” (or something that referenced one of those works), and absorbed that tid-bit of information.
Coates 1995 does not mention either Loftie 1905, or anything at all about Pimlico Wharf. Hm.
Were it not for the big publishers, we’d have been living in deflation for years now.
Ben Pamlico moved his inn from Hoxton to Chelsea, a fact that Loftie (and Wells) do not seem to have come across. (I didn’t note the date of the “later edition” of Brewer’s dictionary, but it must have been the “New Edition” of 1900. I got it from the Internet Archive, and the next edition from 1953 is probably not there yet).
It’s a death spiral: fewer entities can afford journals, so the journals take in less money and then raise prices. Fewer people pay for articles thanks to that blessed website
Mesopotamia, so the price of articles goes up too. Journals have a monopoly on their names (and associated impact factors) and nowadays provide nothing else, and repeated mergers have created an oligopoly typical of what is optimistically called “late” capitalism. Already there have been some revolts, and whole journals have turned into zombies; one may expect the pressure to rise until a phase transition is reached and we have a new system. “The future is already here; it is just unevenly distributed.”(As I pointed out to David M last time, biology is on the bottom of the transition; it is now possible to have a whole career in the humanities while publishing only in open-access journals. That is, provided you can get a job at all.)
John Cowan:
In searching Google Books for the term, I see that “Set out in Pimlico” made it into contemporary dictionaries for bemused continental tourists:
The Royal Dictionary. In Two Parts. First, French and English. Secondly, English and French. […] Volume 2. Abel BOYER. 1699.
— Set out in Pimlico — Tiré à quatre épingles.
Dizionario italiano ed inglese: A dictionary Italian and English […] Volume 2. Ferdinando Altieri. 1727.
— Set out in Pimlico — attillato
An English and Swedish Dictionary, […] Jakob Serenius. 1757.
— Set out in Pimlico — med fyra nålar upsatt [I think]
A compleat dictionary English and Dutch […] 1766.
— Set out in Pimlico — Zeer netjes opgeschikt, aangekleed.
Vollständige Englische Sprachlehre […] Johann Gottfried Flügel. 1826.
— Set out in Pimlico — zu gespußt , geschniegelt , geziert , gezwungen [I think – Fraktur breaks my eyes]
[Adding]
Also, I see that German “Geschniegelt” is translated back into English:
— spruce; finely dressed , trimmed ; sprey ; smug ; jemmy ; trig ; gim ; set out in pimlico ; snod
[A new and complete critical dictionary of the English and German […], Part 2
By Fr. Wilhelm Thieme, Emil Preusser. 1859.]
I confess to not being familiar with a bunch of those, even as archaic terms.
gespußt
Not a word I have ever seen, but googling gives several examples that clearly are OCR errors for gewusst “known”. In this context it seems to be used as “too sophisticated” or something like that. That must be an obsolete usage, at least I have never encountered it before.
@hans
The vollständige englische sprachlehre is in Fraktur; the word in question is zugeputzt, not zu gespußt.
Hopefully you can see it here (top of page).
Sorry, I mistook the unfamiliar-to-me tz ligature for the sz. And I don’t know where the “s” following the “ge” came from. Mea maxima culpa.
However, it still looks to me like there’s a space between the “zu” and the “geputzt”. Are my eyes deceiving me?
No, there’s definitely a space; I’m guessing it’s an idiosyncratic (or obsolete?) way of handling verbal prefixes, but others will know more.
@owlmirror
The English and French expressions seem to mean “turned out nicely” without any hint of “too nicely”/”poncy”. The German zu would seem out of place in its meaning of “too”, so I thought maybe it was a verbal prefix. But i do not know how zu was used by the author of this old book…
There is a full-width space; perhaps Flügel wrote separable verb prefixes as separate words – there’s a gray area there, even though I’ve never seen zu- spelled separately.
Edit: oh yes, zu meaning “too” would of course be spelled separately (and keep the stress on the verb); the meaning would have to be “overdecorated” (rather than “completely covered by decorations”).
The glosses are also a reminder how much Standard German has changed in 200 years. Putzen means “clean” today; the meaning “decorate” survives only in aufputzen “decorate, often rather too much” and Kopfputz “decorative headgear”. I hadn’t encountered zuputzen ever before; I guess it means “cover with decorations”. Geziert is now limited to “stuffy” language; Zier(de) “decoration” survives, but the verb is now verzieren (and sich zieren means “hesitate in a ladylike way”). Gezwungen means “forced”… I think to find this amount of lexical divergence in Standard English, you have to go back to Shakespeare or the King James Bible.
Not the big publishers, including the one in question. They have profit margins around 40% of their revenue (not 4; 40), and that’s been increasing rather than decreasing.
All of this now holds for biology, too, or at least parts thereof.
@Lars Mathiesen: The text that you link to looks to me like Ben Pimlico was experimenting with branching out (opening up a second establishment having the same food, drink, and entertainment style) rather than moving.
Hm. Actually, “The Book of London Place Names”, by Caroline Taggart, states that there is not enough evidence to tell if the second pub actually had anything to do with the first pub.
In searching for “Pimlico wharf” in Google books, I found only two entries dating from 1793 – Kent’s Directory lists a Baynes, Wood & Co., Coal Merchants, who had an office or something at Pimlico Wharf (as well as other places), and also Wakefield’s Merchant and Tradesman’s General Directory, dating to 1794, which lists a Lambert and Scott as Timber Merchants at Pimlico Wharf. No-one else mentions the location earlier. Using Google Scholar rather than Google Books, I found something titled “Water-Raising Technologies of the Chelsea Water Works Company Prior to the Introduction of their First Boulton and Watt Steam Engine”, which has an interesting paragraph:
Right now, given what you point out and the corroboration that I found, it looks like Loftie’s thesis is invalid, and rather instead the area of Pimlico was named for the second tavern, and the wharf was later named for the area.
Putzen means “clean” today
It has made its way into Finnish with that meaning, via Swedish, as usual:
putsata
Etymology
From Swedish putsa.
(transitive, informal) To clean, cleanse.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/putsata
the area of Pimlico was named for the second tavern — nice finds, case closed. I have to admit that I only started the search four years ago because it bothered me that people would name a path leaving London on one side for a destination on the other (and so far away). But I only had the Internet Archive.
geputzt
That makes much more sense. Looking at the link Hat provided, I read that as zu geputzt “overly dolled up”, not as a prefixed *zugeputzt.
it bothered me that people would name a path leaving London on one side for a destination on the other
This is commonplace in the East Coast of the U.S., and almost has to be inherited from England. The streets Bowery and Broadway were once called the Boston road (215 miles away) and the Albany road (150 miles).
Austerlitz Street in Chatham, N.Y. leads east toward Austerlitz, N.Y. (which is where my house is). After leaving Chatham it becomes Columbia County Road 15, which then merges with New York State Road 203, which terminates at Austerlitz, a total of 8 miles away. But before the fad for numbering roads came in a century ago, I feel confident that at the Austerlitz end the road was called something like the Chatham Road. (Chatham is more built up than Austerlitz.)
This is commonplace in the East Coast of the U.S.
Similarly, the roadways leading out of Moscow are approximately all named X-skoye shosse, where X is a place in the general direction of the roadway in question (ranging from Altufyevo, now within the ring road, to Warsaw, several countries away).
Overall in Russia the practice was common enough to inspire a WW2 song.
This is commonplace everywhere ,I think. How else would you talk about a road out of town?
What bothered Lars last year was something else: That a road leaving town was named for a place it clearly couldn’t be leading to.
What bothered Lars last year was something else: That a road leaving town was named for a place it clearly couldn’t be leading to.
These days, that’s not unusual – here in Bonn, we have a whole quarter with street names commemorating places in Eastern Germany that became Polish after WWII, we have an Oxfordstraße because Bonn is twinned with Oxford, and we have a Saarbrückener Straße that has no obvious connection with Saarbrücken. Modern cities have so many streets, people just use any option to name them. But I also would expect old street names to reflect some realia.
“This is commonplace everywhere ,I think. How else would you talk about a road out of town?”
A few examples from other languages:
Arabic شارع يافا ‘the Jaffa Road’ (one in Haifa and one in Jerusalem) leads to Jaffa.
Hebrew דרך יפו ‘the Jaffa Road’ (one in Haifa and one in Jerusalem)) leads to Jaffa.
Spanish la calle de Alcalá ‘Alcalá Street’ (in Madrid) leads to Alcalá de Henares.
Yidish די קעלצער גאַס (di keltser gas) ‘Kielce Street’ (in Łagów kielecki, formerly Łagów opatowski) becomes דער קעלצער װעג (der keltser veg) ‘the Kielce Road’, which leads to Kielce.
Just to remind everyone, this is what Lars Mathiesen wrote:
it bothered me that people would name a path leaving London on one side for a destination on the other (and so far away).
He knows perfectly well, as do we all, that roads are named for destinations; what bothered him was that a road was apparently named for a destination in the opposite direction. The Boston Road is heading toward Boston, not away from it.
How else would you talk about a road out of town?
Oh, I don’t know. In Baltimore, Charles Street is a major north-south road. A century or so ago, following it northward would get you to the city limits, where it became Charles Street Avenue, and further out it was the Charles Street Avenue Road. The alignment is no longer continuous, and indeed Charles Street now continues due north across the line and Charles Street Avenue is a northeasterly branch off it. It terminates now at the (Baltimore) Beltway; where it went when it was a named road, I have no idea.
lolwut
I’ve wondered about the (obsolete? British only?) usage of “The” before road names, as in “The Brompton Road”, “The Kensington Road”. Is that specifically for roads named after where they lead to?
what bothered him was that a road was apparently named for a destination in the opposite direction
Quite. Open mouth, insert foot, close mouth, chew.
Is that specifically for roads named after where they lead to:
I suspect not, but I can’t quite come up with a counterexample.
Well, apart from “the 5” etc. in Southern California and Toronto.
“The Vico road goes round and round to meet where terms begin.”
The Grand Trunk Road doesn’t lead to Grand Trunk.
@de
Your opening the field to names with qualifiers makes the issue complicated. Another example is the Long Mile Road. Although, as anyone who has ever asked directions in Ireland will know, Long Mile could refer to a place anywhere “about a mile up the road (going towards Dublin) or down the road (going away from Dublin)”, there is no specific place of that name. I have a feeling that “on/in Long Mile Road” would be used more informally or by locals than “on/in the Long Mile Road”.
The Pamticough mentioned would probably have been pronounced /pamticux/ and written down by early modern Englishmen as they heard it.
While looking up some more detail on the famous Pimlico/Pamlico etymology – particularly on whether there’s actually any plausible intra-Algonquian explanation for the river/tribe name – I stumbled on the Gesta Septentrionalis entry for the Carolina Algonquians, which goes into some detail on what’s known about the early attestations of the name.
Here’s the Wikipedia description first: “The Pamlico (also Pampticough, Pomouik, Pomeiok) were Native Americans of North Carolina.”
In turn…
– The earliest attestations of the L-rather-than-T variant are apparently from the 1680s. (And even then the oldest is Phampleco, with a surviving medial cluster.)
– …preceded, at least, by Pamxtico 1657, Panticoe 1666, Pemptico 1672 [Pampticough ca. 1700, apparently; the spelling was used for a precinct in 1705]. Judging by these spellings, it probably was something like /pamptiko/, likely without a final consonant.
– “Pomouik” is from an account by Arthur Barlowe (ca. 1584?), and appears to be the same place as “Pannauuaioc” (de Bry 1590); sources from the Virginia colony give names such as “Pannawaick” and “Panawiock”, all of which probably reflects something like /panawai(a)k/. Apparently on ~geographic grounds this is likely the same tribe as the later Pamlico, but that does not necessarily imply an identity of the names.
– “Pomeiok” (also “Pomeioke”) is apparently also from Barlowe, who uses it to refer to a different place/tribe, not particularly attested otherwise. Some later historians have gotten those confused.
It seems that the river name is attested before the tribal name, and it’s possible that the tribe was named after the river rather than vice versa; a note suggests a possible connection with pamptuckquah’, which is the attested Nanticoke [another vaguely-southeastern Algonquian language] word for “river”.
[In fact the note gives several attested spellings of the Nanticoke word, which I will not reproduce here.]
I wonder if it was in fact the Pannawaick (or even the scantily attested Pomeiok?) who were actually the people of the greasy river (*pemiy + -ak/ok). I don’t know remotely enough about Algonquian to tell if that’s plausible.
In any case, the possibility of “Pimlico” in 1586 seems to, sadly, fall apart on the American side.
The name remains a mystery…
(Overall mood: “Карл Маркс и Фридрих Энгельс – это не одно и то же, а четыре разных человека.”)
(Still better than the case of the Golden Horde khan Bolaq, a.k.a. Tulak, a.k.a. Ghiyas ad-Din Muhammad Sultan, who is apparently anywhere from one to five different khans depending on which source you’re following.)
I keep wondering when exactly spellings with gh stopped straightforwardly meaning [x] and came to be ornamental flourishes on vowels.
hough nough broughn cough?
David: Fifteenth century I think. Anyhow it was thoroughly over by the time of Spenser, who rhymes “might” with “spright.” Someone with a closer knowledge of English texts 1400-1550 could be more precise.
Barbara M. H. Strang, A History of English (ch. 3, 1570-1370, p. 167):
Kökeritz in Shakespeare’s Pronunciation points out that, judging by Shakespeare’s rhymes, puns and the spelling of early editions, “Shakespeare’s usage was quite modern”, including those cases where <gh> is pronounced [f]. This is in contrast to contemporary orthoepists who “were stubbornly holding on to and trying to keep alive what the average Londoner, and southern speakers in general, had discarded long ago”.
So, foreign [x] could have been transcribed as gh until well after Shakespeare, but there’s no guarantee of anything…
I think these all have -ugh, so the lip rounding could have done it; this includes daughter, which Shakespeare sometimes (IIRC in the speech of at least one character whose language was already marked in some way) rhymed with after or something like that.
Also, um, much of southeastern England today…
Th-fronting of the MLE kind may be a different kettle of fish, though: it extends to the voiced counterparts as well, giving eg bruv
Yes, and there’s a YouTuber who does that a lot while the rest of his accent is northern (lack of FOOT-STRUT split), so it seems to have spread far & wide, if apparently recently.
Winter’s Tale, IV.1
—
I mentioned a son o’ the king’s, which Florizel
I now name to you; and with speed so pace
To speak of Perdita, now grown in grace
Equal with wondering: what of her ensues
I list not prophecy; but let Time’s news
Be known when ’tis brought forth.
A shepherd’s daughter,
And what to her adheres, which follows after,
Is the argument of Time. Of this allow,
If ever you have spent time worse ere now;
If never, yet that Time himself doth say
He wishes earnestly you never may.
—
This example is not particularly marked, I would judge the register to be uniformly high although it does have the conceit of time vs. Time (the speaker).
He doesn’t. It always rhymes with slaughter. Perhaps you mean the rhyme oft:naught in The Passionate Pilgrim; the poem in question (18) may not be by Shakespeare. The rhyme “may well be traditional or reflect a variant of naught with -ft” (Kökeritz, who adduces evidence that such a pronunciation of naught “may have been current in London at the time”).
See the quote just above.
Not included in Kökeritz’ (very useful) Indes of Shakespeare’s Rhymes. I guess he’s no longer alive, so there’s noone to complain to…
f v. θ aside, daughter/after isn’t a very good rhyme unless someone has a THOUGHT/BATH merger. Was that a thing back then?
This was before au contracted to a monophthong that (promptly?) merged with THOUGHT.
Kökeritz actually devotes a whole long paragraph to the rhyme group caught her : daughter : slaughter : halter : after (not just Shakespeare, but other authors, including Jonson, too). It seems rather complicated. The l in halter seems to have been silent (as in talk), the same goes apparently for the f in after. The vowel was either [ɔː] (K’s preference, especially where au is concerned) or [ɑː]. The result is “clearly a patchwork of colloquial pronunciations current in regional or class dialects within the London area […] Ben Jonson did not hesitate to rhyme water : daughter : slaughter : after i his epigram “On the Birth of the Lady Mary; the clever rhyming itself was undoubtedly a source of amusement and appreciative comment”. The latter is important, I think: Shakespeare’s or Jonson’s audience had a sense of humour (unlike many philologists) and loved occasional out-of-the-way rhymes. The evidence Kökeritz assembled shows that English pronunciation in Shakespeare’s time was much richer in variants than the standard treatments allow, and the poets exploited that.
if replacing /f/ with /χ/ in english starts as a northern innovation, i wonder whether it was specifically about distancing from scots, which still – for values of “still” based on ewan mccoll, anyway – has (for example) /tɔχtr/* [“daughter”].
.
* or some other “r” – i’m not a great transcriptionist, especially with that pesky animal
To repeat something that appears, a bit buried, in ulr’s comment: after didn’t contain /f/ in Shakespeare’s speech. Also, atter appears in (mostly older) transcriptions of dialect speech, including American.
foreign [x] could have been transcribed as gh until well after Shakespeare
It was certainly done in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when representing Irish and Native American toponyms.
To repeat something that appears, a bit buried, in ulr’s comment: after didn’t contain /f/ in Shakespeare’s speech.
Jack and Jill went up the hill,
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
(Apparently the first appearances of this poem are from the mid-18th century, but it’s suspected to be older precisely because of that rhyme.)
Ah…
That’s what I was wondering about – in particular when that became unreliable, because there are Native American toponyms with gh that never had a [x] or anything like that, AFAIK.
The Arden Shakespeare edition of The Winter’s Tale has a long footnote on the after/daughter rhyme, saying what Rodger C just said and citing some of the same examples and references as ulr, and adding, “The spelling dafter is common in the 16th to 17th centuries (notably in West Country parish registers), and in modern western dialect the f is silent in after, common pronunciations being datter, atter, the au and a both being short a.” It also cross-references The Taming of the Shrew, which has
(I looked up Kökeritz and both this and The Winter’s Tale *are* included in his index, under after; after is also mentioned under daughter, but without the references — I think they’re not repeated at the alphabetically later word, to save space.)
The reader of nineteenth-century American literature (which I used to teach a course in) will find non-elite characters stereotypically pronouncing “after” as “atter” or “arter” (non-rhotic of course).
Does “being short a” mean /æ/? What’s the pathway from that to /ɔː/ in “daughter”?
FWIW, it’s datter in Danish, but efter. (Sw has dotter/efter). All vowels short.
Norw. Bm. datter/etter, Nyn. dotter/etter. The loss of x (or whatever) in datter is much more recent than the loss of f (or p) in etter. The former is shared with Icelandic and predates ON. The latter is … not.
But it was still eptir in ON? ODS doesn’t explain -pf- > -ft- and for once we can’t blame the Hanse. AFAICT, there’s no cognate in MLG.
FWIW; there also the Danish adverb atter = ‘again’ which is obviously cognate if you think about it (ON eptr/aptr).. Swedish has åter here which I don’t know what they did to make the vowel long and the stop short. (Well, the one would cause the other, but it was a perfectly fine initial syllable to start with. Compensatory lengthening?)
@Lars
I thought achter = behind was the cognate. Is ther an *ahtar in ON?
@PP, wikt.en only has the adverb for Dutch, and ft- > -cht- is a very Dutch thing. (Cf. Koniklijke Luchtvaartrmaatschappij). Danish has agter borrowed from MLG, but ON only had aptr. (It’s a nice doublet: PPGmc -p(o)t- becoming -ft- in Germanic, -cht- in Dutch, -gt- when borrowed in Danish, but becoming -pt- in ON then -tt- in Danish. atter and agter do not feel related at all).
Thanks. I seee that the achter- words in German are all sailor’s jargon, so presumably also ex LG.
https://www.dwds.de/wb/achter-
It’s a pure spelling quirk: /pt/ didn’t exist, /ft/ did, so apparently some people decided to spell it pt. This may have been connected to the decision to use x for what was [xs], not [ks], at the time and is still [xs] in Icelandic. Or it’s just an effort to avoid confusion between ft and ſt.
It actually only spread across Dutch quite recently; ft survived in Holland into the 19th or 20th century, IIRC.
Norse /xt/ > tt comes from reinterpretation of [ht] as preaspirated /tː/; it’s regular.
Thanks, David, it all makes better sense now. So Danish atter can actually be cognate with agter through an ON form with -xt-, but whether borrowed from MLG even earlier or a “natural” side form I can’t tell. Sw åter still surprises me. (If it even is the same word, but Hellqvist says
Not that I’d have known what uddljud was, but TIL I learned that it means “in the first syllable”. So I guess it’s not udd as “uneven,” but as “spear point”).
Oops, that should just be “TIL” — or “T I learned”?
LOL out loud!