Emanuel Ax came up in conversation, and my wife asked me about his family name. Googling in English produced no results, but since he was born in (what’s now) Ukraine I thought of googling in Russian, and this page gave me the answer: it’s a variant of Yiddish oks ‘ox,’ and a translation of the Jewish rabbinical surname Shor (Schor, Schorr), the Hebrew word (שור) for bull or ox. If anyone with more patience wants to try to get this information onto Wikipedia, be my guest!
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Ax is an interesting word; it violates the constraint that only function words can be spelled with less than three letters.
The google books n-gram viewer suggests that “axe” remains the more common spelling, although its lead over “ax” is narrower than it once would. But “ox” would seem to violate the same alleged constraint, wouldn’t it? And without an “oxe” alternative.
It would, as does “ad.”
The spelling ax is better on every ground, of etymology, phonology, and analogy, than axe, which became prevalent during the 19th century; but it is now disused in Britain. [OED]
The spelling ax, though “better on every ground, of etymology, phonology, & analogy” (OED), is so strange to 20th-c. eyes that it suggests pedantry & is unlikely to be restored. [Fowler]
Interestingly, adz(e) shows the same alternation despite not having the three-letter constraint to contend with.
Oxford Living Dictionaries (not the same as the OED) has a list of two-letter words here. Many of them are foreign words that have limited currency in English, and a fair number of others are shorter variant spellings. However, there are plenty of clippings (like ad and bi) that do not have longer spellings. There are also words of foreign origin that are nonetheless fully incorporated into English usage, although often with physical referents that are themselves of foreign origin (for example, aa, which unusual in having two syllables without being an initialism like ok). The only two-letter words that have a venerable history in English and are neither clippings, nor shorter alternate spellings, nor function words are go (which is borderline on the function word question) and ox.
” The only two-letter words that have a venerable history in English and are neither clippings, nor shorter alternate spellings, nor function words are go (which is borderline on the function word question) and ox.”
“Venerable” is doing a fair amount of work there – “em”, I notice, goes back to the late 18th century and “jo” to the 16th.
Also allowed by the letter of the rule as stated here (though surely not the spirit): ah, eh, ew, oh, oy, uh, um…
“Venerable” is doing a fair amount of work there
And surely the European musical note names (do, re, mi, fa, la, and however you spell si – the list has three versions) are pretty old in English as well; they just don’t happen to be very commonly used lately.
Most of the note names have non-function-word homophones in “regular” English, which I guess illustrate something about English orthography by showing that monosyllables of CV structure usually take more than two letters to spell, i.e. doe/dough, ray, far (non-rhotic, but maybe a function word anyway), sew, and tea.
@ajay: While it is certainly old, I didn’t count jo because it is a clipping of joy (clipped right through the dipthong). It also has the three-letter spelling “joe,” but the two-letter form is probably older. The constraint against two-letter non-function words may be responsible for some pressure to respell it “joe.”
The situation with em (and en, which must be of a similar age) is also interesting. Aside from the fact that I would not consider them truly “venerable,” they are actually respellings of the one-letter words M and N. Some people who work in typography still prefer the one-letter versions when there is no possibility for confusion. These M and N are slightly unusual cases of the rule that any letter may be used to spell a single-letter word that means the shape of its standard majuscule glyph. Some of these (such as O, T, V) are much more common than others, and there are other lengthening respellings, like vee. What makes M and N atypical in this sense is that they refer just to the sizes of the characters, not their lineal shapes.
Aside from the fact that I would not consider them truly “venerable,” they are actually respellings of the one-letter words M and N.
But they aren’t, though. They have different meanings. “M” is the thirteenth letter in the English alphabet. “Em” is a blank space of a certain width.
I didn’t count jo because it is a clipping of joy (clipped right through the dipthong).
Is “jo” a clipping, or just an alternate spelling?
How is it pronounced? If it’s pronounced “Joe”, as hinted at above, it’s a graphic clipping that has produced an altogether separate word.
(What does it mean? Why would anybody clip joy “right through the diphthong”?)
It’s pronounced “Joe”.
U- (as in non-U) isn’t venerable but then the criterion Is it venerable? in the phrase “venerable history in English” has no place in a dictionary, living or dead. I suppose it’s a clipping of Upper- without an unclipped spelling.
What about ur.
Ur is a prefix – if you use it on its own, then you’re talking about the actual place, and proper nouns shouldn’t count.
David Marjanovic: it means “dear, darling” as in the Robert Burns poem “John Anderson, My Jo”.
Ajay, I assumed AJP was referring to the textspeak “ur”, but then that would be a variant spelling of “your”.
ur gettin ur biliterals in ma dictionary
Also ‘do’ as a noun — meaning either a hair-do or (in older British English, at least) a social event of some sort — “that was a very fancy do, that dinner”
Ah yes. Nice one.
And could we also have “go”? Meaning an attempt or a turn. “Give your brother a go at driving.” “I can’t open this, can you have a go?”
An “at” is this symbol: @. (And it’s venerable, dating back to the 16th century in Italian.) But would it count as a respelling?
I assume that “do,” “go,” and “at” would all in their core sense be “function words” (assuming arguendo that’s a coherent and meaningful category), so it doesn’t seem like extended senses of such function words (including the nouning of verbs etc.) would really be fair counterexamples to the original claim.
“M” is the thirteenth letter in the English alphabet. “Em” is a blank space of a certain width.
In the second use it is a clipping for “em space”, which can also be written “M-space”.
Another maybe-not-function-word is ay ‘ever’ (FACE word), often confused in writing with aye ‘yes’ (PRICE word).
@John Cowan: Apparently, it’s probably actually a clipping of “M quadrat,” the meaning of quadrat in (letterpress) typography being “a small block of metal, lower than the face of the type, inserted by a printer to fill up short lines, adjust spacing, etc.”
Id (the id, Freud’s coinage, not the Latin pronoun he got it off).
Freud didn’t coin that, his English translator rendered Es, Ich and Über-Ich in Latin – contrary to Freud’s stated aim to avoid creating more impenetrable jargon.
Yes, I complained about that back in 2005:
What, like a latter-day Descartes? Why did he use libido in German, btw? I can’t see how “Above-I” would be more accessible than Superego, Language. I learnt about Freud’s structural model of the psyche when I was about 13 (it was during the one week of the school year in which we were taught by our fellow pupils, the boys who were about to leave for university, and it wasn’t part of the curriculum) but since we were all well-acquainted with Superman it wasn’t such a stretch. I read in the Oxford DNB that Freud was greatly satisfied with The Standard Edition, James Strachey’s – he was the younger bro of Lytton (two of 13 siblings) and the cousin of Duncan Grant – & his wife Alix’s translation:
During the first weeks of their analysis Freud asked James and Alix to translate some of his recent works into English, a request which signalled the beginning of one of the most heroic undertakings in the history of psychoanalysis […] Despite the fact that the Standard Edition remains a prime source of reference for numerous Freud researchers all over the world, owing to the translation’s consistency and its invaluable critical apparatus, many criticisms have been levelled at its terminology and the purportedly dehumanizing tendencies of Strachey’s scholarship. One of the principal stumbling blocks for many authors has been Strachey’s decision to render the common German words of Ich, Es, and Über-Ich, which Freud used to designate the three instances of his so-called second topography, with the Latin terms ‘Ego’, ‘Id’, and ‘Superego’, instead of adopting the more common-sense option of ‘I’, ‘It’, and ‘Above-I’. It remains to be seen whether the new complete English translation of Freud’s works, which was started in 2002 under the general editorship of Adam Phillips, will be able to overcome these problems, while maintaining coherence and consistency, and thus replace the Standard Edition as the Freud translation of preference within the Anglo-American world and beyond.
No disrespect intended towards the great Adam Phillips but that would be typical of certain levels of academia, now that the entire world is well aware of the Latin names, to start using Above-I (yuck) and the others. That Strachey was using their translation to show off his top-notch classical education (he went to the same school as me but doubtless put in more effort in Latin) seems a pretty unlikely assertion. He was one of the Bloomsbury Group, he didn’t have anything to prove.
I can see how it would be exactly as accessible as Über-Ich, which is just as clunky in the original; and I can see how misperformance would be a lot more accessible than parapraxis.
Yeah, what David M. said. You’re used to “superego” and the rest, so you feel comfortable with them, but imagine a world in which you were used to better translations!
I recall there was a study a few years ago finding that Finnish-speaking Finns got higher PISA scores than their Swedish-speaking compatriots despite their lower SES, and suggesting it might be because advanced concepts have more transparent and thus intuitive names in Finnish.
But this apparently isn’t an example of bad translation at all (“the translation’s consistency and its invaluable critical apparatus”). In fact it’s so good that it’s still in use as the principal text for Freud nearly 100 yrs after it was made. The fact that you & Dave don’t like a bit of Latin & Greek is pretty moot. We all have professional jargon to put up with: one man’s parapraxis is another’s peripteros and neither is as bad as Paliperidone palmitate or any of the other idiotic drug names still being invented, or so I was led to believe at Language Log, by linguists. Actually peripteros is just fine and entirely appropriate.
An installed user base covers all shortcomings.
Isn’t para- outright misleading for Fehl-, “mis-“? I thought it only meant “beside”?
‘Over-I’ is better than ‘Above-I’, which is borderline ungrammatical. If you want to use ‘above’, it’s ‘the I Above’, but that’s too literal for the job. Say I with all the authority of a non-native speaker.
But you’re ignoring the point that the original Über-Ich is just as bad.
Not as much ignoring as not accepting. Über is übercommon in German as a prefix or first element of compounds, used both in its literal and its metaphorical sense. With the risk of overstating my case, over does much the same in English, though not quite as often due to the overlay of Graeco–Latinate terms. The above-mentioned above can’t do that at all, or just barely and in a literal sense.
David: Isn’t para- outright misleading for Fehl-, “mis-“? I thought it only meant “beside”?
Beside or beyond, yeah, but:
para- in Medicine
para-
pref.
Beside; near; alongside: paranucleus.
Beyond: parapsychology.
Incorrect; abnormal: paradipsia.
[…]
– The American Heritage® Stedman’s Medical Dictionary
Misperformance is the kind of inept literal translation you’re likely to find in the instruction manual for a German lawnmower. Obviously the Stracheys couldn’t use Freudian slip. Slip of the tongue would have been available, but they weren’t writing pop psychology and I’m guessing that as psychoanalysts they preferred a medical-sounding coinage, which in England in those days was normally taken from Latin & Greek.
How is that “beyond”? That’s “somewhere off to the side”…
Now it makes sense!
Yeah, that’s very likely, but not very defensible.
Not defensible as names or as translations? (There’s a difference.)
“Superman” is probably the most common Englishing of “Übermensch,” and the Latinate prefix doesn’t make it sound too clinical or high-register, imho. “Overman” would sound a bit weird, I think, and be a good illustration of how the morpheme that is transparently the indigenous cognate of the source-language morpheme is not always the best translation.
Not defensible as names or as translations?
I was saying preferring a medical-sounding coinage to make it seem all scientific is not defensible (though of course human, all too human).
“Overman” would sound a bit weird, I think
Again, this is because you’re used to “Superman.” If the original translation had gone the other way, I guarantee you’d feel “Superman” would sound a bit weird.
I glossed over the difference between German über and ober, because my next-to-non-existing German doesn’t do nuances. It might be that they could be approximated in English by super and over, but on the other hand, it might be that they couldn’t. An over-achiever would be an über-whatever in German, while a super-achiever would (if we overlook the recent borrowing of ‘super’) be a hoch– or höchst-whatever.
On a related note, English usage has changed substantially since Freud and Nietzsche. ‘Super’ is much more of a household morpheme today, not least because of the English translation of their terminology.
We don’t have, e.g., overhighways or overmarkets. Super- has different semantics in AmEng than over- does. I will admit that I had forgotten the über v. ober distinction within German.
I was saying preferring a medical-sounding coinage to make it seem all scientific is not defensible (though of course human, all too human).
“Make it seem”? But the Stracheys were amusing psychoanalysts, gay scientists. Their translation is beyond good and evil.
Trondle: the difference between German über and ober
Über is a taxi company whereas Ober is a head waiter. Super is a building janitor.
Super is a building janitor.
Also in Cuban (I can’t stand English first thing in the morning).
The super is not just the janitor, but the custodian—for whom janitorial duties are only part of the job.
Like the Russian dvornik.
The scale of the job depends on the size of the building and how rich its owners are. Concierge is a better equivalent to the US apartment building super than custodian is. Like the word superintendent, custodian can mean many things. For dvornik I get janitor and that it comes from from двор (courtyard). Courtyards & windscreen wipers.
I wonder what Ultraman (Urutoraman) would have been if “Overman” had been chosen instead of “Superman”… “Way Over Man” (Uei ōbā man)?
@AJP Crown: This bit from The Producers is literally the only time I have ever heard “concierge” used to mean something like that. So I have known since childhood that the usage exists, but I have never met it “in the wild.”
@Bathrobe: When he was in eighth or ninth grade, one of my friends wrote a Dungeons & Dragons text adventure entirely in BASIC (old-fashioned BASIC with line numbers, not some kind of compiled version). It was impressively detailed, with four sizable dungeons, numerous monsters, and a surprisingly flexible adaptation of the combat system. The size of the program was ultimately limited by the amount of memory that could be allotted to the BASIC environment.
Among the objects in the game were four magical swords (with increasingly powerful bonuses of +1, +2, +3, and +4). However, he decided that he did not want to use any game terminology in item names and descriptions, so just calling one a “sword +1” was out. Instead, he named them “magic sword,” “super sword,” “hyper sword,” and “ultra sword,” respectively. There was no sword +5 (the strongest normally available in the game) in his game, but he and I independently decided that the right name for that would be “mega sword.” (My brother later objected to “ultra sword” not being the strongest weapon possible, because of the etymology of ultra.)
Modern dvornik is basically a street-sweeper (also windshield wiper), in ~19th century they’ve had more duties.
This bit from The Producers is literally the only time I have ever heard “concierge” used to mean something like that.
How is it translated in Maigret novels? … Just checked The Hotel Majestic on Google books, concierge it is.
DO: “How is it translated in Maigret novels? … Just checked The Hotel Majestic on Google books, concierge it is.”
Funny, I too had a Maigret* in my mind’s eye. It’s probably a British translator. They don’t use super in Britain.
Brett: “This bit from The Producers is literally the only time I have ever heard ‘concierge’”
Not surprising, because Americans usually say “super” and keep concierdge for the person at a hotel who deals with Jeeves’ jobs like suit-pressing and shoe-polishing (“valet” having been taken for parking and “Jeeves” for a search engine), but it’s the right word. I love that clip.
*By the way the four (I think) Maigrets in which he’s portrayed by Mr Bean, Rowan Atkinson, are really worth watching. In some places they’re available on Netfux.
Funny, I too had a Maigret* in my mind’s eye. It’s probably a British translator. They don’t use super in Britain.
We don’t really have them in Britain, whatever you call them. Hotels have concierges, but it’s not common for blocks of flats to have them outside 1% territory.
One obvious advantage to using “ego” rather than “I”; it doesn’t have any homophones.
On the other hand, that would have deprived us of a stunningly ingenious pun.
Good point. “My eye!”
Hotels have concierges, but it’s not common for blocks of flats to have them outside 1% territory.
At the Moscow block of flats (um, is that the right term? the Russian is подъезд) that I’m currently living in, we do have someone called консьержка, but honestly I have no idea what her duties are, if any (aside from “sit in that room over by the front entrance sometimes”).
More prestige attached, I presume, than to the fearsome/annoying дежурная of Soviet times.
How about “self”, though?
(“And then I said to myself: ‘Self, …'”)
“magic sword,” “super sword,” “hyper sword,” and “ultra sword”
My firm stance is that the rightful third rank after super and hyper should be über.
Americans usually say “super”
Americans or just New Yorkers? Here in the DC area high-end condos are advertised as having 24-hour concierge service, and I’ve never heard anyone refer to a “super.” (I only know the word from doing the NYT crossword, where it sometimes comes up as “supe.”)
How about “self”, though?
Well, “my self” is a homophone for “myself”…
I think it’s quite a good idea to use “id” and “ego”. When you are introducing a new and specific scientific concept (inasmuch as Freud’s writing counts as science which is not much, but let that pass), it’s not a good idea to give it the same name as an existing very common everyday concept. It’s “proton” not “first one”. “Species” not “kind”.
When you are introducing a new and specific scientific concept (inasmuch as Freud’s writing counts as science which is not much, but let that pass), it’s not a good idea to give it the same name as an existing very common everyday concept. It’s “proton” not “first one”. “Species” not “kind”.
But that’s what Freud did! If you’re translating Freud, you’re not translating some hypothetical person who would have made what you consider more sensible decisions about nomenclature, you’re translating Freud, and it behooves you to render what he wrote as accurately as possible, not invent a better Freud for yourself.
David L:
Americans or just New Yorkers?
Yes, of course New Yorkers. In San Francisco – where there aren’t quite as many apartment buildings, but there are some – they’re sometimes called “building supervisors” which may be a hypercorrection of super(intendent). SF also calls its city council the Board of Supervisors; supervision is popular.
I only know the word from doing the NYT crossword, where it sometimes comes up as “supe.”
As an answer, for which the clue is “Where apt bdg empl. finds a fly”?
I suppose that’s all orthogonal to the concept of BFS?
It is of course “kind/sort” (Art) in German.
My firm stance is that the rightful third rank after super and hyper should be über
“Uber” has already been taken by a errm, ride-sharing company. I wonder whether Camp and Kalanick read Nietsche?
AJ When you are introducing a new and specific scientific concept…
Language: …it behooves you to render what he wrote as accurately as possible, not invent a better Freud for yourself.
I agree with ajay. Dr & Dr Strachey were introducing scientific ideas from a German text into English. Freud the baggage-laden personality didn’t exist in England in 1920. He was no big deal. Ernest Jones’s biography (the first) wasn’t published until 1953 (the year of my birth). And, as I said before, this wasn’t a pop-psych paperback it was a text for docs.
I should have added:
from a German text into English, therefore they used the contemporary conventions of English medical textbooks.
it was a text for docs.
I think you mean “a text for quacks.” (I have little patience for Freudianism.)
I just ran across the Old Russian word окъшьвь ‘ax,’ in Vasmer s.v. окшевь, a borrowing from Germanic:
And I thought that was interesting enough to mention here.
The loan must be quite old to reflect the Common Germanic form of the word.
old-fashioned BASIC with line numbers, not some kind of compiled version
ObCompHist: The original original (1965) Dartmouth Basic, line numbers and all, was in fact compiled. ObHat: Dartmouth is locally “Dirtmuth”.
concierge for the person at a hotel who deals with Jeeves’ jobs like suit-pressing and shoe-polishing
I would say a hotel concierge may concern himself with these activities as an administrator, but doesn’t perform them personally. When I speak to a concierge, it is usually because I want to know the name of a good local restaurant: other forms of entertainment doubtless also come within his purview.
the rightful third rank after super and hyper
The ranks below these are control and meta, or more recently alt. There is no rank above them.
And sadly keyboards don’t have coke bottle keys these days.
I was so amused by this that I very nearly put my cup of pills into the toaster oven rather than my toast.
And you call yourself low context.
Well, not about everything.
David Marjanović (2018): “Freud didn’t coin that, his English translator rendered Es, Ich and Über-Ich in Latin – contrary to Freud’s stated aim to avoid creating more impenetrable jargon.”
AJP: “Why did he use libido in German, btw?”
Good question. That must have been following the precedent set by Krafft-Ebing and other German neurologists of the 1880s, who were already using Libido as a naturalized German word in medical texts.
The OED revised libido in March 2023 and separated the definitions into non-Freudian (simply “Sexual desire; sex drive”, with no baggage of psychoanalytic theory) and Freudian senses. The non-Freudian usage actually predates Freud in English; they have a citation from 1891 in an American medical journal, which turns out to be a translation from Krafft-Ebing.
The pronunciation department did its job this time (yay!), making a note that a former pronunciation is now obsolete: “O.E.D. Suppl. (1976) gives the pronunciation as (libī·do, -əi·do) /lɪˈbiːdəʊ/, /-ˈaɪdəʊ/.” That second (“li-BYE-doe”) pronunciation must have been old-fashioned Anglicized Latin, as in verTIEgo; some old dictionaries, e.g. Funk & Wagnalls 1929 and Merriam-Webster Collegiate 1945, gave that as the only pronunciation. It’s been dropped by most dictionaries, though MW and AHD still carry it as an alternate pronunciation, probably out of inertia.
The pronunciation department did its job this time
I’ve always pronounced ‘libido’ with stress on the first syllable and all vowels short. I’m aware some say /lɪˈbiː.dəʊ/ [wiktionary], but I’ve always taken that to be a U.S. aberration.
Any other offers?
Germaine Greer has been heard pronouncing libido “incorrectly” like that too. Nothing in the Latin justifies it: libīdō. Another of interest is plethora, which is quite unjustifiably stressed on the antepenultimate by “careful” speakers: plēthōra in Latin, from πληθώρη. Other modern European languages do the same as most English does: plétora in Spanish, etc.
‘domino’, ‘placebo’ also I pronounce with stress on first syllable. Disclaimer: I’m speaking English, not Latin. Yes /ˈplɛθəɹə/ per wiktionary — although it allows equally the antepenult stress.
-ebo is merely the inflection, so shouldn’t the stress go on the plac-?
Of course I’m not expecting you can infer any pronunciation from the spelling. But neither can you infer from the Latin pronunciation.
ebo is merely the inflection, so shouldn’t the stress go on the plac-?
No, it’s a long e in Latin so it gets stressed. I’ve never heard anyone stress the first syllable, and the OED records only the standard penultimate pronunciation (Brit. /pləˈsiːbəʊ/, U.S. /pləˈsiboʊ/). The same is true of libido (Brit. /lᵻˈbiːdəʊ/, U.S. /ləˈbidoʊ/). You can of course pronounce anything any way you like, but your versions are not even in the ballpark of standard.
Incidentally, the first sense of placebo, dating from the 13th century, is “Vespers in the Office for the Dead.” I had no idea!
Vertigo similarly has initial stress in English despite being stressed on the penult in Latin. That didn’t happen with lumbago.
‘domino’
That one is justifiably stressed on the antepenultimate; it’s ultimately derived, obscurely through French, from Latin dominus (all short vowels).
kt:
AJP: “Why did he use libido in German, btw?”
Of course you were not to know, but AJP Crown (Jeremy Hawker) passed away in October 2020, and is much missed at the Hattery.
it’s a long e in Latin so …
I learnt Latin (language only, not Poetics) in the dying days of the Grammar School system. (My school was the last Grammar in the Borough, indeed by a couple of years after I left, the last in London.)
The Latin exams had no oral component, so how I/we pronounced the Latin in my head/we parroted in class was a matter of supreme indifference. In reciting tables, we stressed the ending to be contrastive vs the other endings. I got no idea that the endings being long vs short moved the stress away from the stem. [**]
When reciting verb forms, we put (contrastive) stress on the stem to show vowel changes. Again no inkling some forms stressed the ending rather than the stem.
You can of course pronounce anything any way you like,
Well yeah. (‘Fish’ like ghoti.) Specifically, (to repeat) I’m speaking English not Latin. Are there any Anglo-saxon-y 3 syllable words ending in /-əʊ/ from which we can take a model? ‘portmanteau’ I say with equal stress on each syllable (I think) — but that’s because I know it’s not English; also I know it’s a compound. I see wiktionary allows stress on the final syllable, U.S. only. That’s probably the sort of perceived affectation I’m keeping away from. Also I say /ˈkɪləˌmiːtə/ out of respect for French/Greek/Europe in general; and because it’s a compound.
[**] Exception: the plural accusative of 1st declension was long -ās, so that for ‘causa’ (a cause) it sounded like cow’s arse. But that would be equal stress on each syllable.
German Libido has initial stress: /ˈliːbi.do/. The etymology given in en.Wikt is “Borrowed from Latin libīdō. The usual stress on the first syllable probably from a generalisation of the tendency that penultimate Latin -i- is short; perhaps also reinforced by association with Liebe ‘love’, though this is speculative.”
Incidentally, the first sense of placebo, dating from the 13th century, is “Vespers in the Office for the Dead.” I had no idea!
Pla ce bo / Who is there, who?
Di le xi / Dame Margery;
Fa, re, my, my / Wherfore and why, why?
For the sowle of Philip Sparowe,
That was late slayn at Carowe,
Among the Nones Blake [nuns black], / For that swete soules sake,
And for all sparowes soules, / Set in our bederolles,
Pater noster qui, / With an Ave Mari,
And with the corner of a Crede, / The more shalbe your mede.
(John Skelton, 1463-1529)
Noetica: Germaine Greer has been heard pronouncing libido “incorrectly” like that too.
Heh, out of the first 100 clips of libido on Youglish, only two are stressed on the first syllable — and they’re both Germaine Greer!
Merriam-Webster is the only dictionary ever to enter that pronunciation, as far as I’ve found. Actually, in the Third Unabridged (1961), they added it with their danger symbol ÷, indicating “variants which occur in educated speech but to the acceptability of which many take strong exception”. Their first pronunciation has remained “li-BEE-doh” ever since, but they changed around the alternate pronunciations in almost every Collegiate edition: “LIB-i-doh” was absent in 1963, but added *without* the danger symbol in 1973, and it remains there today. Maybe they’re fans of Greer?
And yes, I realized that AJP is no longer with us, but I figured that others would be interested in the answer to his question.
they’re both Germaine Greer
Curious. I’m of course aware of Ms Greer’s oevre; but I haven’t followed closely enough to mimic her pronunciation AFAICT. Neither have I made a great study of Krafft-Ebing. But in Freud-(or Jung-)aware circles how would ‘libido’ get stressed? Is that where Greer first came across it?
3 syllable words
liberty, liberal, library, Librium, libeling, Libyan, Lebanon, labeling, lubricate, lobbying, labia,
libation doesn’t count because -ation gets penult stress; libretto is foreign.
Before there was an internet to hear it on, if I came across a 3 syllable word l?b-, it’s a fair bet the stress would be on the first. (I doubt the word appeared in our *family* dictionary.)
I don’t think I’ve heard it pronounced in any language, but in German I imagined Libido to follow the pattern with two short first syllables, of which the first is stressed, as in Kanada, Panama, Ananas and a few other loans. Didn’t know the Latin lengths; long penultimate i is certainly unusual in Latin.
Just checked with DWDS. The recorded pronunciation sounds like “li-bi-do” with equal stress on all syllables. If the first syllable is slightly stressed, it’s not audible. It sounds a bit weird, possibly machine-generated.
The recorded pronunciation of “ka-na-da” is of almost the same type, except a slight initial stress is just barely not inaudible.
Vox populi it ain’t. A Latin vowel length lizard has crept into the recording equipment, crapped, and crept out again.
Specifically, (to repeat) I’m speaking English not Latin.
Latin is neither here nor there except in a historical/etymological sense; I told you about the Latin vowel because you asked, but the only relevant stress pattern is English, which is penultimate. Your pronunciation is yours and you have a right to it, but you don’t have much company (Germaine Greer excepted).
Re German Libido, Duden has first syllable stress as the default and penultimate stress as variant pronunciation.
That’s more like it.
I learnt Latin (language only, not Poetics) in the dying days of the Grammar School system.
It sounds to me like you barely learned Latin at all. I dare say I knew more than you describe after a semester of a typical public high school in West Virginia. (Typical for 1960.)
@RodgerC I dare say I knew more [Latin] than you describe after a semester of a typical public high school in West Virginia.
Very probable. My prolegomena was not to boast but rather to lower expectations. (And in case the nuance got lost in translation, ‘Grammar School’ meant the academic-oriented stream within the public/state funded system. It _doesn’t_ mean what Brits call ‘Public School’ — which is private-funded.)
Not only was there no oral component; we weren’t even required to put diacritics over our written answers. Indeed I think macrons for Latin hadn’t been invented yet.
I don’t think the school or the Latin master would see it as an objective to be ‘fluent’ in Latin. I got an ‘O’ level in a subject that wasn’t my mainstream sciences; so that showed I had a ‘good brain’ enough to get into university. Mission Accomplished as far as the school was concerned. Very possibly as at the exam I knew plenty of Latin. In later life I’ve gained from knowing the vocab; I’ve gained from learning the principles of word-classes, conjugation/declension, agreement, free word order (alleged); but the specifics have just leaked away since 1971 through lack of use.
@Hat I told you about the Latin vowel because you asked,
Yes thank you. And now I see why I’d want to put macrons in Latin. Equally I’ve learnt (per vertigo) that the stress pattern in Latin isn’t a reliable indicator. The Hattery has not laboured in vain.
Sounds like you got out of the Latin course everything that a Latin course is really good for, unless one wants to go on reading the stuff later and then recite some impressively in the middle of an English-language lesson in Virgil or Horace, as I used to do.
My textbook, which I still own, has macrons. The task for us was to learn that they shouldn’t really be used in “real Latin.”
And I was also, to be fair, in the “college-prep” stream of my high school.
Indeed I think macrons for Latin hadn’t been invented yet.
Unless you’ve been around since the 5C (and in Egypt at that), we can rule this explanation out. For more than a century now, macrons have been used throughout the world in Latin textbooks and dictionaries, but not in editions of Latin authors. They do not have the status of French or Irish diacritics on the one hand (used without fail except in the most informal styles) or Serbian and Croatian vowel diacritics on the other (used to show pitch and length in dictionaries and specialized transcription only).
Equally I’ve learnt (per vertigo) that the stress pattern in Latin isn’t a reliable indicator.
Here’s what Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) says. I have replaced his dictionary respellings with IPA:
So as we see, Walker’s pronunciation has prevailed. But if we dig past the English pronunciations into the Latin itself, we see that vertīgō with penultimate stress is folk etymology, as if from vertō ‘turn’ + -īgō ‘disease (suffix), as in impetīgō ‘contagious bacterial skin disease’, prurīgō ‘an itching’, or robīgō ‘rust (of metal or plants)’, whereas the true etymology is antepenultimately stressed *verticō < vertex ‘whirlwind’ + -ō ‘suffix for slangy Latin nouns’ (e.g. centuriō, mōriō ‘idiot’, combibō ‘drinking buddy’, mūliō ‘muleteer’), so that the English pronunciation has restored the original stress.
The OED says that libeedo was a variant spelling in the 15C.
I’m impressed with Walker — that’s an excellent analysis!
The OED says that libeedo was a variant spelling in the 15C.
You meant to type “verteego”.
Walker (1791) cites Johnson and Swift as authorities for stressing vertigo on the first syllable, but it’s more complicated than that. Johnson put the stress on the second syllable in his first edition (1755), but moved it to the first in his revision of 1773. And Walker is actually *misquoting* both Johnson and Swift! In both editions, Johnson gives the quote as:
This is the correct quote from “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”, as given in every edition from 1739 onward, including Jack Lynch’s annotated text (except for slight variations in punctuation and capitalization). So Swift certainly stressed vertigo on the second syllable — and Walker, apparently working from the revised edition of Johnson, has distorted Swift to put it on the first!
Apparently Messrs Elphinston, Sheridan, Nares, Scott, and Perry were gentlemen, whereas Bailey, Entick, Buchanan, Barclay, and Fenning were mere tradesmen.
Walker, apparently working from the revised edition of Johnson, has distorted Swift to put it on the first!
Very interesting!
Here’s what Walker’s Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) says.
Bibliographical note: You’re actually not quoting from the first (1791) edition, but from the third or later edition. The first edition did not have the long discursive note under vertigo, it just listed the three pronunciations with a cross-reference to section 112. The note under vertigo was added in the second edition (1797); the third edition made a change in section 112, from the original
to (as quoted above)
(The third edition does not seem to be online; the earliest edition with this wording that I could find is actually the first American edition, from 1803, so I’m assuming it’s taken from the third London edition of 1802.)
There’s an exhaustive bibliography of the many editions of Walker’s dictionary, which was still being printed into the early 1900s. The site also has notes on how long it took before the letters I/J and U/V were separated in alphabetical ordering in this dictionary: not until 1814 for initial letters of words, and decades later for full spellings.
Walker would have been pleased to see that Noah Webster, in 1828, gave only first-syllable stress for vertigo.
With four syllables come diphthongs: vitiligo.
You’re actually not quoting from the first (1791) edition, but from the third or later edition.
The title page of the copy I used says:
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR THOMAS TEGG, 73, CHEAPSIDE ;
R. GRIFFIN & CO., GLASGOW;
TEGG & CO., DUBLIN ;
ALSO, J. & S. A. TEGG, SYDNEY AND HOBART TOWN.
MDCCCXXXIX [1839]
On the verso it says:
GLASGOW:
FRINTED BY GEORGE BROOKMAN,
You meant to type “verteego”.
Indeed I did.
Vitiligo, impetigo, lentigo, and serpigo are all still stressed on the i, pronounced like “eye” (well, serpigo is now archaic, replaced by ringworm). These are all survivals of the Anglo-Latin pronunciation of long i. Being a skin disease seems to be a better predictor than number of syllables of whether a word still keeps its Latin stress placement!
Other survivals of the Anglo-Latin long i include icon, isosceles, alibi (last syllable), and saliva. All of these, and the skin diseases, have centuries of history in English; libido doesn’t, and apparently it didn’t have enough time to establish a traditional pronunciation. By the mid-20th century, the reconstructed classical Latin pronunciation had taken over in education, and psychiatrists started pronouncing it as the new Latin textbooks and dictionaries said, with the long i as /i:/ instead of /ai/.
Surely icon would have had the same vowel in English whether the i was long or not in Latin, and I suspect the same is true of isosceles.
I-dyll, i-dyllic /:: I-con, I-conic
So the Brits should say icken and the Yanks eye-con?
whether the i was long or not in Latin: Possibly; item didn’t have a long i in Latin. But what I meant was that none of those words changed their pronunciation when they stopped teaching Latin that way, whereas libido did.
@hat
For me these are edge-cases, I have not heard one pronunciation or other reinforced, so I don’t have an opinion as to what people “should” say, based on what I hear. I probably would have to check a dictionary for UK standard, there is interference for me with some Dublin or other regional accent (i.e. one that says eyedeological or genueyene). For other Latin accented vowels, I don’t know if any speakers say eelocution or eeducation, maybe there are some.
Edit: I have a good friend who says Veyetamin “because it is an American word”.
I don’t have an opinion as to what people “should” say, based on what I hear.
I was just joking, sorry. (I find the UK “idd-l” pronunciation hilarious, for some reason.)
Benedikt notably.
Surely icon would have had the same vowel in English whether the i was long or not in Latin, and I suspect the same is true of isosceles.
Indeed. Latin vowel length has nothing to do with traditional English pronunciation except insofar as length specifies stress. English vowel quality accords for the most part with English spelling rules, not Latin lexical quantity. From the linked article (with a bit of editing):
From the linked article
I think you probably mis-edited the link, because it just goes back to this thread.
Then there’s ichor: from Greek ἰχώρ, so it’s perverse that it’s normally pronounced with /aɪ/. The iota is long, so perhaps petrichor (coined in the sixties by an Australian scientist) should be stressed on the penultimate; but it never is (and there’s no trace of /aɪ/).
I learned embarrassingly late that the noun incipit is stressed on the antepenultimate; but at least I’ve got impious “right” for the last few decades.
Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_English_pronunciation_of_Latin
I always have to remind myself that “icker” is not an accepted pronunciation. It’s how I always pronounced it In my head. I don’t know when I first heard the word spoken.
from Greek ἰχώρ, so it’s perverse that it’s normally pronounced with /aɪ/.
Not perverse at all; as JC says, ancient vowel length has nothing to do with English pronunciation (except in the imagination of those who want classical roots as justification for everything).
@Keith Ivey: The OED lists that pronunciation, and has since at least the second edition. (Their Web site seems to have been totally revamped today, so I haven’t been able to track down the original 1899 entry yet.)
Their Web site seems to have been totally revamped today
Oh god, not again…
Not perverse at all
I know, I know. Of course. It’s just that I long for a language that generally uses simple more regular ways to generate vocabulary from Greek and Latin, without the shocking legacy of English grammar-school mangling. A language with something approaching one-to-one sign-to-sign mapping – and systematic marking of stress, unambiguous like Spanish.
Not “again”, this is the same redesign they’ve been previewing for months (as described in Dave Wilton’s post a couple of months back). I’m not thrilled with the enormous banner taking up half the screen, but I’ll get used to it.
The Entry History is now at the top left corner: “First published 1899; not yet revised (details)”. Click “details” for the Entry History box, which is the same as before, just styled differently; click “View ichor, n. in Second Edition” for the 1989 version, now in a different typeface but otherwise same as it was.
It’s always been the 1989 edition that they showed as “Previous version”; if you want the 1899, it’s on Hathitrust. And yes, they did include “ick‑” for the first syllable of ichor already in 1899 as a secondary pronunciation, though it’s not clear to me whether the second syllable was meant to be reduced as far as schwa; the 1989 edition lists (ˈaɪkə(r), ˈɪkə(r), ‑ɔː), and the pronunciation has not been revised since, except for adding audio clips. Other current dictionaries don’t accept “ick‑” pronunciations.
Of course. It’s just that I long for a language that generally uses simple more regular ways to generate vocabulary from Greek and Latin, without the shocking legacy of English grammar-school mangling. A language with something approaching one-to-one sign-to-sign mapping – and systematic marking of stress, unambiguous like Spanish.
I think you could hardly do better than Interlingua de IALA (not to be confused with Interlingua de Peano). Phonetic irregularities are few:
* c before a front vowel is /(t)s/
* ch is /k/ in Greek and Italian words, /ʃ/ in French words, and /(t)ʃ/ otherwise
* g is always a stop except for words in -age and in French words
* qu is /k/ rather than /kw/ in que and qui and their compounds
* s between vowels (but not ss) is optionally /z/
* tiV, unless stressed, is pronounced like cV
* w may be /v/ or /w/
* h may be silent or /h/.
Stress falls on the vowel before the last consonant, or on the first vowel if there is none. Exceptions (which could be marked with a diacritic, since Interlingua has none) are:
* Words in -Vle, -Vne, -Vre, -ica/-ico, -ide/-ido, -ula/-ulo are stressed on the antepenult.
* Words in -ic are stressed on the penult.
Here’s a sample:
As you can see, there’s a fair amount of adaptation to the modern Romance languages and English. German and Russian are also used to supply vocabulary as needed and to limit the complexity of the grammar.
At first I recoiled from the new OED presentation; then I turned away from the wretched “tabbed view” and felt better. The “factsheet” tab view is horrid. For one thing, it gives a couple of pronunciations without any hint that there are more visible at the “pronunciation” view, and at the full untabbed view. Euw.
How do I now get a full-text search at OED? It seems one has to select one of these exclusive options: Headword, Definition, Etymology, Forms, Quotation text, Quotation author, Quotation work. Please assure me that I’m missing something. We shouldn’t have to search with a concatenation of search lines joined by OR: “ichor in Headword OR ichor in Definition OR …”.
I must correct myself. Unlike SOED 6 (2002), which lacks “petrichor” and has only an /ai/ pronunciation at “ichor”, OED also records /i/ pronunciations at “ichor”.
I meant that OED also records /ai/ pronunciations at “petrichor”.
Huh! It turns out that the “factsheet” tab only sometimes shows an unacknowledgedly shortened list of pronunciations. At “ichor” it gives two, omitting the /i/ pronunciation; elsewhere it gives up to four of them, when British and US differ. That inconsistency is even worse.
When it’s more complicated again, the “factsheet” view gives up to two for British, and up to two for US. At the full view for “chalcedony” there are three for British and four for US! Seriously misleading, for the casual interrogator.
Their Web site seems to have been totally revamped today
Haiyaa… Clicking on “Show more quotations” is very tedious. I already find this “feature” very troublesome in the MED online. I like to take everything in at a glance. This is going to slow me down a lot. Is there a global setting on the website that I can turn on and off? (I only have my phone at the moment.)
I was disappointed by etymological treatment of today’s OED word of the day, anticucho:
Quechua anti ‘east’ is most probably also the source of the name of the Andes! Worth a mention, I should think, especially since space on the page is no longer a consideration — or worth a cross reference to Andean and a note there. The policy is not to etymologize place and personal names, I suppose. Hobgoblins!
Now I’ve confirmed my suspicion that only one view is available to non-subscribers: at the “factsheet” tab. There is no option to switch to any of the other tabs that are marked on the screen (nor any hint that anything other than a tabbed view is ever available). Clicking on another tab brings up an invitation to subscribe.
That’s far worse! People will cite the OED as not recognising certain pronunciations.
Why the hell can’t they let you keep the original view if you prefer it, the way Wikipedia does?
Even Adobe (Acrobat) Reader lets you keep the previous view (the new one is horrible).
Noetica: the wretched “tabbed view” … The “factsheet” tab view is horrid
Xerîb : Clicking on “Show more quotations” is very tedious. … Is there a global setting on the website that I can turn on and off?
Yes, if you have a personal account. Click on the personal account icon (at the top of the page, just to the right of “Oxford English Dictionary”, looks like a stylized head floating above shoulders; they neglected to put a mouseover label on it). That should bring up a pop-up with a further link to “Manage account”; click that, scroll down to “Display preferences”, uncheck “Tabbed view for dictionary entries”, check “Show all quotations on dictionary entries”. Worked for me.
Instructions via Jesse Sheidlower on ADS-L, who concurs about the factsheet and the tabbed view.
Thanks kt. Those extra features should be immediately visible, of course. I’ll experiment.
In another thread I recently thanked Hat for alerting me to (reminding me of?) the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. I ordered the current edition (3rd edition, 2008): as new, and crazy-cheap. It arrived promptly a couple of days ago.
An instant delight, starkly contrasting with the new OED design. The included CD-ROM, for installation onto a hard-drive any number of times, offers all of the book’s core content: beautifully presented, copyable for reporting finds to the Hattery, and searchable. Audible pronunciations in British and US. There’s even a “sound search”, by which I found exactly 28 entries that fit the pattern l*dʒ: language, large, lavage, …, luge (in one of its pronunciations), luggage, lunge. And judiciously chosen charts for selected words, to show percentages of US or British speakers using variant pronunciations. Some even plot speaker’s age against variants.
So far I find little to quibble with. A selection of minor gripes:
All in all, a brilliant design and execution. It complements my ancient
English Pronouncing Dictionary (Daniel Jones; I’ve just ordered two much later editions, bargain-priced and invaluable for diachronic researches), and my very revealing old Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (John Samuel Kenyon, Merriam-Webster, 1944).
I watched the four Maigret mysteries starring Rowan Atkinson this month. They were very good, and it’s a pity they didn’t make any more. Since I finished those, I’ve been watching the Michael Gambon versions from a decade and a half earlier. I don’t think they are as strong, but not because there is anything to complain about in Gambon’s acting; over the course of his career, he demonstrated much more range than Atkinson, who only rarely ventures beyond comedy (although he has done many different kinds of comedy).* No, the weakness of the Gambon versions was that they were often too short to fit in an entire novel’s worth of events. A couple of the stories were dramatized in both series,** and the Gambon version of Maigret Sets a Trap in particular seemed quite rushed; the Atkinson version, twice as long, did a better job establishing the sense of setting and exploring the psychology of the murderer and his enablers.
* Indeed, Gambon and Atkinson played the character rather similarly, although Atkinson’s Maigret was somewhat more sober. Another surprising similarity I noticed was that both shows were filmed Hungary. Apparently that’s where one goes to get something resembling the look of 1950s Paris.
** I was actually surprised that there was so much overlap in the novels they chose to adapt. After watching the first Rowan Atkinson mystery, I looked up a list of Maigret stories online, wondering whether any of the handful I had read were among those adapted for television. I was surprised to learn that there were over seventy Maigret novels, plus twenty-some short stories. Granted, Georges Simenon’s novels tended to be fairly short, but he was nonetheless an incredibly prolific writer, penning about 400 books.
CD-ROM — technology moves too fast. I don’t think I have any way of reading a CD-ROM in the house. When I decommissioned laptop N-2 I made sure to transfer my late dad’s photos from his CD collection to duplicate USB sticks. I should do a read test on them soon.
(I do have a dormant tower cabinet with a reader in it, so I could probably get a CD online with an hour of work. Most of which would be finding a VGA cable.. 3.25 inch “floppies,” now…. Not to speak of 8 inchers).
I don’t think I have ever been called upon to actually say the word “libido”*, but if I did, I would certainly say lib-EYE-dough.
Mind you, the very fact that I haven’t been used to using the word in conversation may account for my choice of what (I gather) is an obsolete pronunciation.
* Show, don’t tell.
Let me note here the recent passing of Frederick Crews, one of my intellectual heroes — he proved to the satisfaction of anyone who chose to pay attention that Freud was a fraud. Alas, the old charlatan has attained such an exalted position in Western culture that the demolition job has not had much effect yet. But the arc of history bends toward the unmasking of fake wizards!
I hold no brief whatever for Freud or his theories (though, liberated from any feeling that I needed to take any of it seriously) I did rather enjoy The Interpretation of Dreams.
But while Freudianism is surely empty, I think characterising the man himself as a “fraud” is a bit simplistic. Devoid of any grasp of real scientific method, undoubtedly: but that is not quite the same thing. And while he may well have been a personally horrible man for all I know, the evidence for that seems a good bit more equivocal than the evidence for the fatuity of his theories.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/why-freud-survives
To take the obvious if far-from-complete parallel (hereabouts), Chomsky is surely our greatest living pseudoscientist, but “fraud” is not the right label for him at all. I don’t think “fraud” captures the level of self -deception involved, for one thing.
The Freud cult never seems to have caught on in the UK to the degree that it did in the US. I never came across it at all in my (very limited) exposure to UK psychiatry. (Though the works of that other charlatan R D Laing still had a certain cachet in my youth.) But that was probably well after its high-water mark in academia anyway.
Menand’s
perhaps has a certain irony coming from the land which has birthed Seventh-Day Adventism, Mormonism, the Nation of Islam, Trumpolatry …
I think characterising the man himself as a “fraud” is a bit simplistic.
He lied and bullshitted constantly for profit and self-advancement; what’s your definition of a fraud? I agree that Chomsky is an entirely different kettle of folly.
If you think my characterization is exaggerated or unfair, you need to read Crews. He doesn’t fulminate, he documents.
I’m happy to take your word for it.
(In my idiolect, at any rate, “fraud” implies a major level of deliberate and conscious deception and self-awareness thereof. I accept your assertion that Crews has actually proven this in Freud’s case. Also, my usage may not be normative …)
I did rather enjoy The Interpretation of Dreams.
Oh, so did I. He was a wonderful writer, which is (of course) why he pulled the wool over so many eyes. (Same goes for Nietzsche and many others.)
Can one who is self-deceived and thus subjectively sincere be a charlatan?* Or do the ordinary semantics of “charlatan” in English require some degree of conscious bad faith? If so, what’s le bon mot for the fellow who does just as much harm to his credulous audience w/o having done so in bad faith?
*I’m not advancing any affirmative claim that any of the names recently mentioned into the thread would fall into this category …
“Charlatan” does not necessarily imply conscious deception for me. But I may have been a bit influenced by reading too many Francophone dictionaries of Gur languages which use charlatan for what we politically correct types would render as “traditional healer.”
I think that in Actual (as opposed to Foreign-Language Dictionary) French the word means much the same as “quack.” The Francophones amongst us will know.
I am not a Francophone and am primarily interested in the semantic scope of “charlatan” in Actual English, which could have drifted wider or narrower than whatever it may be in Actual French …
To me, “charlatan” implies some degree of conscious bad faith but perhaps not so clearly as “fraud.”
The interested reader will want to consult Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade for details.
Separately, I had not heard of the recent death of Crews. I imagine he would not want to be remembered primarily for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pooh_Perplex as opposed to his more “serious” scholarly work (including but not limited to Freud-debunking), but it’s his own damn fault for producing such a masterfully amusing work so early in his career.
primarily interested in the semantic scope of “charlatan” in Actual English
Indeed. I was merely pointing out a possible confounding factor in my own usage.
Though I actually would be interested in what French speakers say about charlatan. I was surprised to see it pretty consistently used to gloss words for “traditional healer”, in works that otherwise hardly suggest a colonialist mindset, and concluded that the semantic range of the French word must be rather different from English “charlatan.”
`If you can look into the seeds of time,
And say which grain will grow and which will not,
Speak then to me…’
There a whole morphological universe of bubbles, intellectual Ponzi schemes, Faustian bargains \dots from Skinner to Chomsky, PageRank to Google, matters of economy of scale. An aggressive ecosystem eventually develops parasites and symbionts, Astounding SciFi to Scientology, Oppenheimer to Teller, Freud to Jung to Melanie Klein whom I revere; it’s a crapshoot.
[Tesla is an interesting case – a showman but the one who made the electric power grid possible…]
I’m not enough of one, but Wiktionary is…
Though I suspect very much that the “traditional healer” meaning, which isn’t mentioned there, is local French unknown to the immortels, like the meanings of witch and fairy and so on in Ghanaian English.
Ooh, burn. 🙂
@de
Charlatan seems to have been an attractive word to apply to the African healers, because it also possessed in French a sense of “miracle-curer”, i.e., the remedies dispensed by the charlatan had (or were claimed to have) some mystical or magical healing power.
https://www.afrik.com/pourquoi-tant-de-charlatanisme-en-afrique
Though I suspect very much that the “traditional healer” meaning, which isn’t mentioned there, is local French unknown to the immortels,
That could very well be the case. Good thought. There are a fair number of such cases that I actually know of in the dictionaries.
And as a very broad (over)generalisation, Francophone Africans tend to be more dismissive of indigenous cultures than Anglophone Africans (a consequence of the mission civilisatrice, perhaps), which might well predispose to the adoption of an essentially pejorative term in the first place.
There is a lot of nonsense out there about traditional medicine in Africa. Apart from sheer ignorance of actual specifics, the main problem is the perennial tendency to suppose that “African Culture” is some sort of monolithic single entity. Quite sympathetic authors are prone to do this too.
Big place, Africa.
the “traditional healer” meaning, which isn’t mentioned there
But it does have a note “Il s’agit généralement d’un terme de mépris. Il est utilisé sans connotation en Afrique noire[1].” The footnote is to Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire, with a dead link, but here’s the definition from the book at archive.org:
Perfect. I managed to overlook the note.
Hatters have, once again, answered all my questions …
I wonder which language boka comes from?
It reminds me of Waama boko plural bokiba “le devin, le charlatan.” Waama is a pretty unlikely source itself, but the actual root goes back to proto-Volta-Congo, as I mentioned not long ago. It means specifically “divine(r)”; in Western Oti-Volta, at any rate, a diviner (e.g. Mooré bága), is a different role from a traditional healer, though you can imagine colonial officials getting them mixed up easily enough.
I’ve a feeling boka is from Mande, though, which would probably make the Volta-Congo resemblance a coincidence. (Away from my books at present.)
Boka is another entry in the same dictionary:
And zima:
Ah. Should have thought of Hausa (in fact, that may have been what was nagging at my memory.) And that one really is “healer”, too.
I suppose that if it’s from Fulfulde, it could conceivably be cognate to the Volta-Congo forms after all, but even if there is a genetic connexion between the northern bits of Atlantic and Volta-Congo, it’s a very remote one, and the meanings don’t really match either (though that’s probably not a showstopper. The Oti-Volta and Bantu “witch” words look like they should be cognate, too, though the actual concepts of witchcraft differ quite a bit.)
Talking of semantic drift, and linking up with the Romani thread, the Romani word for (Christian) “cross” apparently goes back to (Shiva’s) “trident.” Generic Important Religious Symbol …
So “diviner”/”healer” is pretty small potatoes in comparison. (As is “vampire”/”sorcerer”, though Oti-Volta “witches” are much more like vampires than malevolent magic users.)
…with a vertical and a horizontal bar!
In China, crusaders fight in the sign of the 10.
“Zimma” is Songhay, or at least that’s where I know it from. Wonder if it’s based on Arabic jinn; jinn would regularly yield zin, at least if not borrowed with the definite article, but it would be odd to suffix -ma to a noun.
Whoever pronounces Freud a Fraud has mispronounced.
A Fraudian slip. (Or “umlaut”, to use the psychoanalytic technical term.)
One of those situations when I learn a new English word here. I did of course come across “slip of the tongue”, but I mechanically interpreted it as something long and figurative, an idiom and though I could see that it is used as Russian оговорка, did not remember it so. And I always wondered how you say оговорка по Фрейду.
Ruckümläut.
2. TCH. Petit marchand ambulant.
ENCYCL. Il vend de petits articles (lunettes de soleil, bracelets de montre,…).
SYN. : bana-bana*
I was curious about the origin of bana-bana. The Wiktionnaire offers the following etymology: “Du wolof (« pour moi, pour moi »).” Wolof bana is “pour moi” ? That would be just like Turkish bana… However, I couldn’t find any morphological analysis, or indeed any trace at all, of this alleged Wolof bana as “pour moi” in any grammars of Wolof I consulted. Does it exist?
Jean Léopold Diouf (2003) Dictionnaire wolof-français et français-wolof has the following entries, with a different etymology:
In baax na, the word baax is “être bien, être bon”, while na is the 3rd sg. perfective/aorist indicative affirmative marker, I think. There is also this from Giovanna Cavatorta (2014) Discorsi e pratiche sul ritorno dall’Italia al Senegal: Per un’antropologia del fallimento all’epoca del transnazionalismo, footnote 237, on baana-baana :
“Zimma” is Songhay, or at least that’s where I know it from. Wonder if it’s based on Arabic jinn; jinn would regularly yield zin, at least if not borrowed with the definite article, but it would be odd to suffix -ma to a noun.
How interesting!
Could it ultimately be Kanuri formation in -ma making nouns of profession or frequent involvement in an activity? A virtual *jindimá from jíndi ‘jinnī’ ? (Like láravuma ‘diviner’ from láravu ‘divining’, fátkéma ‘trader’ from fátké ‘trade’, jiremá ‘honest and truthful person, truth-teller’ from jíre ‘truth’, karwamá ‘one who runs amok’ from kǎrwa ‘wind’ (examples from Lukas); yerima ‘king’s eldest son, prince’ from yeri ‘north’ (originally ‘lord of the North’ or the like, I suppose).)
I wonder if Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan is offering an implicit etymology from ذمة ḏimma “protection, care; responsibility; guarantee, security” when he translates zimma by “responsable des génies” in his study “Possession, affliction et folie : les ruses de la thérapisation” (L’Homme 131, 1994, pp. 7–27, available here). From page 11 :
Cf. Hausa zimma ‘responsibility’, azzimma ‘responsibility, accepting responsibility for someone or something’ in Bargery’s Hausa dictionary and Roy Clive Abraham’s.
That’s a tempting etymology. There’s no plausible path for Kanuri loans to reach Songhay in recent times, but some evidence that they used to make their way in…
Kanuri tone sandhi looks scary. Also, is that a Finnic-style metathesis in kǎrwa?
That must be an OCR and cutting and pasting error that I did not fix correctly. It should be just kǎrwa ‘wind, storm’ and karwamá ‘one who runs amok’. (Adjusting the low tone notation there to the notation in Cyffer and Hutchinson’s dictionary as best I could.) I hope this is visible.
[Fixed the error in Xerîb’s earlier comment.]