Mark Liberman at the Log has a post responding to the following plaintive comment by Rick Rubenstein:
Are there any proven therapies available for folks like me who, despite seeing the light decades ago, can’t keep from wincing at “violations” of prescriptivist rules ingrained (mostly self-ingrained) during childhood? I want to be totally unfazed by “The team with the bigger amount of people has an advantage,” but man, it’s hard. (Not actually serious, but it’s certainly true. Unlearning is tough.)
Mark says:
The short answer is “I don’t know”. But see below for some obvious ideas, which amount to “analyze the situation” and “get used to it”.
Follow the link for the “obvious ideas,” which are good ones; the basic problem is that to be cured you have to want to be cured. If you’re like Rick and know that your peeves are just a personal glitch that you’d be better off without, there’s hope for you, but a great many peevers (I strongly suspect they constitute a substantial majority) have no interest in the accuracy of their views and resent being told they’re wrong. It does no good to say “language is arbitrary” or “change is natural and inevitable” or “this form you’re complaining about has been in use for centuries”; they are deeply invested in knowing that they are right and those other guys are wrong, and therefore they are better than those other guys. I’m afraid there is no general cure, any more than there is for the (doubtless related) drive to be the boss of other people; all we can do is try to help the occasional victim who realizes they have a problem.
And of course no amount of therapy will entirely rid the victim of their peevery; years of study of linguistics and two decades of running this blog have not cured me of flinching when I see contrary-to-fact “may have.” But it’s good to be reminded of one’s failings — it keeps one ’umble.
The bigger of two amounts and the biggest of several, no?
I think he wants “the greater amount” or “the larger number,” but it’s not my peeve, so I’m only guessing.
“Bigger amount” clangs to me too, for a reason I can’t quite figure out.
I have a similar peeve about “hotter temperature.” Temperatures are high or low, not hot or cold.
I think it might be about number of count-noun and amount of mass-noun, but it took a bit of thinking to figure that out.
But I do find the sentence somehow inelegant, without necessarily considering it WRONG.
flinching when I see contrary-to-fact “may have.”
That’s contrary-to-fact flinching, given that some people say “may have” where you would prefer “might have” or “could have” (I guess that is what you’re getting at).
What’s wrong with flinching at facts ? How else are kings deposed and impudent puppies put in their place ?
As I noted over at the Log, I’m not even convinced that “bigger amount” is a normal sort of peeve, because I’m not convinced that it’s something some significant subgroup of L1 Anglophones say, as opposed to an ESLism. ESLisms should not be judged harshly (learning any language other than your L1 can be hard, especially past a certain age, and English has all sorts of pitfalls for the non-native speaker), but they strike me as conceptually different from usages deprecated because they are typical of a dialect or register associated with non-elite native speakers.
My own native-speaker-ear judgment is that “bigger amount” is wildly unidiomatic whereas “larger amount” and “greater amount” would both be fine. I have no idea why, I don’t recall ever being taught this. It’s just a weird fact about how, as is often the case, near-synonyms do not have competely coterminous semantic scopes and as far as I know it’s just a weird fact I picked up unconsciously from a lifetime of exposure to English As She Is Spoke.
As I also noted over at the Log, MWDEU’s lack of an entry on “big[ger]” suggests to me that deprecating Allegedly Wrong usage of it is not a traditional staple of the Peevological Usage-Advice-Industrial Complex.
I think peevery is a social sin, not curable with linguistic facts. I wince at the ‘misusages’ in healthy/healthful and less/fewer but I also refrain from trying to correct anyone using them.
I find myself ‘volunteered’ as pronunciation adviser to someone from the SubContinent who has a very wide vocabulary, but mostly acquired by reading. So some of their pronunciations are weird to my ears — except I’m desperately anxious to avoid (subconscious) peeving. (Do I ‘correct’ their pronunciations so they stand out less, or do I reinforce their idiolect?) Some of their pronunciations seem to be U.S. usage, but RP is what they should be using in NZ (?)
shallot, the oniony veg: stress on first or second syllable?
tuition: three syllables or two? stress on first or second (of the three)? wkt has (India) /ˈtjuːʃən/
My heretofore mentioned Classics master (who was not backward in ‘correcting’ English as well as Latin) alleged this was to make us better understood; then railed against split infinitives because Latin.
With the /ˈtjuːʃən/ pronunciation, we were several sentences in before I twigged what they were talking about.
Several comments here could be stories told at a PA meeting (Peevers Anonymous). Abstention and humility triumph over the temptation to peeve, which as we know is with us for life.
My view is that only selective peeving has a chance of success. Bear down on the weak and ignorant if you will, but avoid the subject in the presence of peers.
This is a power struggle, not an essay at rightness.
With the /ˈtjuːʃən/ pronunciation, we were several sentences in before I twigged what they were talking about.
Yeah, I don’t think /ˈtjuːʃən/ works anywhere outside the SubContinent. You’re not peeving, you’re helping.
I think “amount of people” is at least as likely to be the peeve target as “bigger amount”, though the peever (autocorrect tried to make that “pervert”) may well dislike both, as I do.
@AntC: in my idiolect the vegetable “shallot” gets first-syllable stress (rhymes with “palate”) but Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott gets final-syllable stress. But it could be otherwise in Aotearoa.
And “tuition” is /tuˈɪʃən/ for me, just as wiktionary asserts about GenAm pronunciation.
@Keith Ivey: But “people” is a mass noun, innit? Does “amount of cattle” evoke the same negative reaction?
I suspect that as good a method as any is to hang out a lot with the non-peever crowd and harness the (hopefully gentle) peer pressure. Over the years, similar practices have sensibly attenuated some of the more rebarbative prejudices of my own youth. Obviously this won’t work unless you want it to, but Rick Rubenstein seems to have accomplished this vital step already. He is in Peevers’ Purgatory, not in Peevers’ Hell, and is accordingly saved already.
Can’t see anything wrong with “the team with the bigger amount of people has an advantage”, myself, apart from vague clunkiness. It doesn’t seem to violate any peever shibboleth that I’ve actually heard of, but Americans seem to have accumulated more of those than Brits, so that probably doesn’t signify much.
However, contrary-to-fact “may have” actually causes me to double-take, as it is quite foreign to my idiolect.
A luta continua.
[“Between you and I” and the like annoy me too, despite CGEL’s explicit sanctioning of it as informal-yet-grammatical. I’m pretty sure that this is because I long ago imbibed the (mostly incorrect) idea that it was a Horrible Hypercorrection, and all hypercorrections are naturally anathema to a good socialist.]
Can someone explain to me what contrary-to-fact ‘may have’ is, please? Google is unclear on the matter.
as an L2 writer of clumsy English I thought it is “amount of people” that fazes him…
“People” is not a mass noun. It’s “not many people”, not “not much people”. It can be a singular count noun (“a united people”), but most often nowadays it’s the suppletive plural of “person”.
MWDEU does have an entry on the peeve that “amount” only goes with mass nouns whereas “number” must be used instead with count nouns, but explains that that this over-simple proposed rule does not fully account for the actual data.
I was perhaps thinking of the famous quote attributed (many decades posthumously in terms of first published attestation, and possibly inaccurately and with bad motive) to Alexander Hamilton: “Your people, sir — your people is a great beast!” I will admit that the use of a singular verb here may sound odd or archaic to the 21st-century ear.
In any event, thinking of people as less mass-noun-like than “cattle” seems rather speciesist to me.
EDITED TO ADD (in response to Keith I.’s update): In any event, the inspired Word of God itself frequently says things like “On the next day much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth to meet him” etc. (Jn. 12:12-13) I have no truck with decadent moderns who think they speak better English than the translators hired by King James of famous memory.
Can someone explain to me what contrary-to-fact ‘may have’ is, please?
“If Abraham Lincoln hadn’t gone to that play in the first place, he may have survived.”
The post accumulated a big deal of commenters… (hardly better with “amount of readership” though:)
I would probably say “number of cattle”, and then some more cattle-oriented peever would correct it to “number of head of cattle”.
@DE, to be abundantly explicit about c-to-f ‘may’.
I’d usually say “…, he might have survived”. Using ‘may’ there to me sounds affected. ‘may’ is usually for giving permission: “If you’ve washed your hands, you may take a piece of cake.” (That’s simple conditional ‘if’; no c-to-f.)
I possibly remember my grandfather (born 1896) using c-to-f ‘may’. He was from very humble origins but advanced to seniority in the Postal Service, so (as I can now see) often hyper-corrected. He would very deliberately say “an (pause) _h_otel”.
@JWB ‘shallot’, thank you.
wkt allows either stress for (General American); but only second-syllable for RP. And yes NZ usually goes with RP — so my British intuitions /ˌɪntjʊˈɪʃənz/ usually work.
(Must stop reading wkt for the stories.)
Australian English is not so predictable: it seems more-or-less random whether it takes American or RP. (In Sydney more likely Am; in Adelaide more likely RP.)
“The team with the bigger amount of people has an advantage,” doesn’t evoke peevishness/peevery or even peeviciouness for me. I do wonder, though, why the writer preferred a Palinesque salad to “The team with
the bigger amount ofmore people has an advantage.”“Your people, sir — your people is a great beast!”
(Yes the attribution to Hamilton seems highly dubious.)
It’s at least possible the dash means he/someone was about to say “Your people, sir, are ..”; then shifted semantics to ‘your people’ being a) a quote; b) treated/dehumanised as a mass noun.
(The sort of dramatic effect/wordplay a peever is oblivious of.)
@AntC: yeah, the whole point of the quote is to conceptualize “your people” as a/the mob, viz. an undifferentiated and rather alarming mass, rather than as a plurality of reasonable and responsible count-noun individuals. And it is in fact an important insight for political science (which is nothing more than an applied branch of primatology) that at some times and under some circumstances human beings who may seem reasonable and responsible when considered individually behave in quite bad ways collectively, under mob/riot/etc. social-group dynamics. But the frequent usage of “much people” in 400-years-ago English tends to suggest that it was at least in those days understood as a mass noun w/o that necessarily implying any negative judgment about the behavior of humans en masse.
Language usage is intimately tied to social status. We use accents, vocabulary, grammatical rules and shibboleths to distinguish ourselves from those below us on the status ladder and ingratiate ourselves with those above us. “Peevery” is very often a transparent attempt of people falling down the status ladder to stay where they are. Prescriptivism comes from people who have invested a lot of their energy and self-worth in acquiring an arcane set of rules to demonstrate they are people whose social status we are supposed to acknowledge, so it is not surprising that descriptivist attempts to devalue that skill generate anger and hostility.
@Keith Ivey. As a cattle-oriented peever I must point out your ‘number of cattle’ is/are vexing my sacred cow; ‘number of head of cattle’ is much more neat. And so and so forth.
There’s nothing much like that among the Kusaasi, though traditionally they didn’t have chiefs at all and are still not notably given to following leaders of any kind; unlike the Mossi, they don’t have any honorific pronoun usages either.
My informants did, however, occasionally criticise the grammar of the Young People of Today. This, I suspect of being a cultural universal.
Contra* Bryan Garner, I propose that the stages of a peeve are, s follows: 1 being annoyed by a usage; 2 being aware that others are annoyed, and not using it oneself, while not being annoyed by others using it; 3 being aware that others are annoyed, but using it oneself regardless; 4 being unaware that others are annoyed.
I must say I am surprised that so many commenters here are unclear about what Rick Rubenstein’s peeve is.
I took for granted that it was, as J.W. Brewer suggests, count-noun amount. On this peeve I am dawdling at stage 2 and am surprised yall have reached stage 4 already.
*edit: not really contra; Garner’s scale is at the community level, mine at the individual
I roil inside when TV newscasters say ‘anxious’ for ‘eager,’ or British panel-show types say ‘different to’ instead of ‘different from,’ but it’s futile to shout back at an indifferent screen. These folks of high status coast on in oblivion, happy in their world, and can they be sinners if I’m the only one who grimaces at their sin?
Language changes, I suppose, and great-grandchildren yet unborn will likely say ‘different to.’ Damn it.
In related news https://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2022/10/06/51872/war_of_words_over_bbcs_repugnant_grammar_nazi_sketch
Oh for god’s sake.
Glamor Queen’s English Society
The society has outed itself as a bunch of clamor queens, in addition to being grammar nazis.
Unfortunately clamor is not related to grammar, although glamor is (supposedly = so heißt es jedenfalls). Maybe that’s only when there’s a “u” in it.
Hasn’t it always been that?
That evil term… smears lovers of good grammar
I love a good grammar myself. (This may not be what that nice Dr Lamb has in mind, though.)
Carl Meinhof, now there was a proper Grammar Nazi! (I was going to say that they don’t make ’em like that any more, but – alas – they probably do.)
Hasn’t it always been that?
Could well be, but they present themselves in a different light:
# The Queen’s English Society describes itself as ‘a global, progressive and multi-cultural charitable body that seeks to promote the maintenance, knowledge, understanding, development and appreciation of the English language’. Last month, members voted to keep its current name despite the death of the Queen. #
Anyway, isn’t English already adequately maintained, known, understood, developed and appreciated without that bunch of queens englishers getting in a huff about it ?
Meinhof
Those eyes ! Umstrittener Begründer der Afrikanistik ! But I have no time to read all about it.
On the propriety of making mass murderers into mere figures of fun, I invoke the ever-sane Auden:
Last month, members voted to keep its current name despite the death of the Queen.
Good of them to make absolutely clear their refusal to adapt to any change whatsoever.
Charles is a bit too left-wing for them, I expect.
But his mother (in her day) seems to have missed out on Labov’s finding that young women are in the vanguard of language change.
I see that Dr Bernard Lamb, the Archbishop of the Grammar Nazi Society, is in fact a geneticist. Figures …
“For 40 years he taught and conducted research in genetics at Imperial College London where he studied and tried to improve his students’ use of English.”
[Extraneous material deleted — LH]
Idly browsing the QES website, in a vulturelike-descending mode, I find in their “Policy Document”
It is of course characteristic of such people that they missed the entire rhetorical point of KInnock’s perfectly deliberate choice of phrasing, but for the life of me I can’t see what they object to in “It looks like rain.” These people are too far gone for meaningful communication with them to be possible any longer.
I have, above, inadvertently included some extraneous matter from “logo 1” to just before “Idly browsing.” Ignore it all (and more, if desired.)
“It looks like rain.”
Reminds me of that old joke about two guests in a diner. One says “Looks like rain.” The other responds “But the waiter claims it’s coffee.”
By Morphic Resonance, 18 Down in the Grauniad’s Prize Crossword today goes:
Relation, though not well-spoken, accepted linguistic rules. (7)
two guests in a diner
That works in German too: sieht nach Regen aus.
I have, above, inadvertently included some extraneous matter from “logo 1” to just before “Idly browsing.” Ignore it all (and more, if desired.)
I deleted it with extreme prejudice (and great pleasure).
I too am occasionally annoyed, even flummoxed, by the disappearance of “might.” But just today I saw “might” in a headline where “may” was called for. I suppose the writer just thought of it as an elegant synonym, like my freshmen whom were always writing sentences like this one.
Even accepting arguendo that in Rubenstein’s example his peeve was the use of “amount” rather than “number” with a count noun, it’s still a twofer, because if you substitute in “number” for “amount” in the Bad Example, it remains the case that “bigger number of” is vanishingly rare in the google n-gram viewer as compared to “greater number of” and “larger number of.” So rare that I think it’s fair to say that “bigger number of” is, from a descriptivist POV, an error (for complicated reasons of idiomaticity that are probably hard for ESL learners to grok) — but perhaps such an infrequent error for native speakers as not to have attracted notice in the peevological literature?
Good of them to make absolutely clear their refusal to adapt to any change whatsoever.
Perhaps they merely don’t want to be mistaken for Americans. After all, we have been using the King’s English for the last seventy years. Or possibly since 1776.
@David Eddyshaw: I figured that Auden’s “T” would be Timur (“Temujin” being too obscure, compared with his better known title “Genghis Khan”), but I was then flummoxed by the anagram at the end. I eventually figured out the “Tamburlaine” spelling—but that just raised the question (which I have wondered about before) of where that intrusive “b” came from. Marlowe’s play uses that spelling obviously, but Marlowe does not seem to have known much about the actual historical Timur the Lame; moreover, neither of the two supposed historical sources for the play has that intrusive “b.”
(Any I don’t know who “N” and “S” are either.)
AntC – “He may not have died” (it’s possible he has survived).
“If [this] had happened, he may not have died” (we know he didn’t survive – the uncertainty is in the past, so ‘might’ is called for).
This is a pet peeve of mine too.
I don’t know who “N” and “S” are either
Napoléon and Stalin ?
I thought of them too, but then I got to this:
Which implies N came along in the fifteenth or very early sixteenth century. Also, “Out of the North” is hard to square with Boney.
‘number of head of cattle’ is much more neat
I see what you did there.
Ha, I missed that!
It’s much more meat?
Meater.
That’s one neat herd!
Neat (for those unfamiliar with this archaic term).
Oh, you mean da kyne.
Neat was another uncommon term that William Morris overused in The Well at the World’s End, along with carline and ness.
Kyne is, as is well known, the most irregular plural in English. (It was the answer to a Car Talk puzzler once—to identify a plural noun that had no letters in common with the singular.) Like another famously irregular plural, children, kyne is a double plural. It originated from a plural with an umlauted vowel (obsolete ky, from obsolete singular ku), with an extra –en appended. (Children originated by appending both the –er and –en plural suffixes. Note that in both cases, we have the –en suffix—which is no longer productive but not completely moribund—appended to an already plural noun that was originally pluralized according to a pattern that really is moribund in modern English.)
The old plural is normatively spelled kine (e.g., J. Milton, Paradise Lost xi. 647: “A herd of Beeves, faire Oxen and faire Kine”).
Not sure if “productive” is the right word for the English plural -en: I presume you’re thinking of “boxen”, “Unixen” and the like. Such forms seem much like Kusaal malif “gun”, plural mali, an Arabic loanword with flexion clearly modelled on mɔlif “antelope”, plural mɔli, despite the fact that the relevant fɔ/ii noun class has only a handful of members remaining.
It’s productive, but not as we know it, Jim.
But he didn’t say it was productive, he said “no longer productive but not completely moribund.” I think that covers “boxen” quite nicely.
The town I grew up in had two public parks, on opposite sides of the main road. The larger one was the Bull Croft, the smaller one the Kine Croft.
I think I may have been in my teens before I discovered what Kine meant. My understanding may have been hindered because no one ever called by its proper name but referred to it as ‘The Krinny.’
Yes, if boxen means the -en plural is not completely moribund, then fen (plural of fan) would mean the umlaut plural isn’t either. Admittedly I have been known to say shoon as a jocular plural of shoe.
In Lark Rise to Candleford, a series of books about life in an Oxfordshire village in the late 19th century, the author has elderly folks using ‘housen’ as the plural of house.
(I remember this because we were obliged to read the books in school, mostly likely because we lived in Oxfordshire.)
((Well, to be precise, we lived at first in Berkshire but involuntarily became Oxfordshire people when they moved the boundary.))
John Fuller says N and S are indeed Boney and Joe. Fuller is a poet rather than a historian.
But he didn’t say it was productive
True. I have erred.
I suppose syllabi, octopi etc show that the -i plural of singulars in -us is productive (a bit) in English, now I think of it.
Though nowadays it’s become an -ii plural, with people writing things like virii. I even know someone who uses Travii as a plural of the name Travis (obviously the correct version would be Traves).
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees.
Neat (for those unfamiliar with this archaic term).
Chiefly known these days in Neatsfoot oil for conditioning leather. It’s the treatment for new bicycle saddles, which are famously uncomfortable. (It was never clear to me whether you apply it to the saddle or to your bum; and the same ambiguity in the advice ‘you’ll wear it in’.)
In Coptic, though only a minority of nouns preserved distinct singular and plural forms at all (number being generally shown by the form of the preceding article instead), the Egyptian feminine plural ending -owe became regular for Greek feminine nouns in -ē: epistolē “letter”, plural epistolowe.
Annoyingly, wiktionary Category:English irregular plurals ending in “-i” mixes regular-Latin and jocular/hypercorrect forms. The categorization on wiktionary is orders of magnitude more chaotic than on wikipedia, which is saying something.
And obviously status, apparatus and their ilk should have invariant plurals (in English, I know there was a length difference in Latin). But if that ever was a habit, it was so long ago that I’ve never seen it. (Some fifth declension nouns, like series and species, do hold the fort. TIL that distinguishing singular and plural by vowel length is a modern affectation, they were both long in Latin).
@hat 10/09:11.28
The poem is from a cycle “Homage to Clio”, so I think the poet may be talking specifically from a Greek (or specifically Ionian) perspective. So T means in a wider sense also “the Turks”, whereas Napoleon came to the region from the North, less than 100 years after the last Turkish victory against the Venetians; maybe Auden is even blaming the Communist Greek guerillas (or their failure in the Civil War?) on Stalin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman%E2%80%93Venetian_War_(1714%E2%80%931718)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_rule_in_the_Ionian_Islands_(1797%E2%80%931799)
The poem is from a cycle “Homage to Clio”, so I think the poet may be talking specifically from a Greek (or specifically Ionian) perspective. So T means in a wider sense also “the Turks”, whereas Napoleon came to the region from the North, less than 100 years after the last Turkish victory against the Venetians; maybe Auden is even blaming the Communist Greek guerillas (or their failure in the Civil War?) on Stalin.
In the first place, T-for-Turks is quite a stretch. In the second place, Napoleon never came to the region all — his plans to attack the Ottoman Empire were cancelled in 1811 and he invaded Russia instead. And in the third place, I have never seen any indication that Auden cared particularly about Greek Communists one way or the other; he had other concerns. “Clio” is a bog-standard term for history and the goddess thereof to anyone with a classical education — it certainly doesn’t imply any interest in modern Greece (likely the reverse).
Oopsie. I was just trying to make sense of North and century….
Lars: I’ve seen very old texts in which 4th-declension plurals were written -ûs. I think it may have been pronounced -ooz. As for species etc., I’ve never heard a length distinction made: one speeseez, two speeseez. Maybe it’s a Young People Today thing
John Wells on pronouncing diocese, dioceses
Whoever distinguishes sg./pl. 5th declension nominatives by length?
@Y: Wiktionary.en thinks that some people do. (I am one of them because I was instructed to do so in my impressionable youth. Possibly by a peever).
“Some speakers pronounce the singular with -ɪz, the plural with -iːz.” Wow — I thought I’d heard it all, but that’s a new one on me.
I wonder if I could start a rumor that the plural of “peever” is “peevater.” It’s an r/n stem, see.
I bewail the loss of the feminine form “peevrix.”
Nonsense! The correct form is “madame peevewoman.” “Peevrix” is a Horrid Americanism.
Pîveuse.
Ou bien… Pivotte.
“Some speakers pronounce the singular with -ɪz, the plural with -iːz.”
Interesting, that unsourced assertion in Wiktionary about species. It makes some intuitive illatinate sense. Is that pronunciation mostly US? Wouldn’t surprise me, given a certain very widespread US way with the ending of processes: /ˈpɹɑsɛˌsiːz/. I’ve never heard that syllable from anywhere else. Wiktionary introduces this variant as a generic “nonstandard, for the noun plural”, and gives only /ˈpɹɑsɛsɪz/ as “General American”. Both should be explicitly marked as confined to the US.
Peeverts everywhere, be horrified: Reports of Putin’s recent mock referenda have thrown Australian media into confusion. Commenters speak now of “this latest referenda”, “these referendum”, and so dismally on.
I’ve never heard that syllable from anywhere else.
I regret to report that I have heard it from Brits. We live in a world without borders.
And processus is of course a 4th decl. deverbal just like status and apparatus. In Latin. Even hiatus, I learned recently. E process/processes came through French so where do people get off treating the plural as were it classical? (Proceed is what the verb became).
Danish has proces/processer which is normal for French imports. A judge is able to procedere, the rest of us can’t. (It would be fun to talk about procederet mad which would have been the only option to render processed food into Danish if you wanted something derived from the Latin verb. Though I’m afraid YPN-A-D would not blanch at a a bastard processet. Eheu).
(This used to be a little academic game to exhibit your latinity. I’ve heard august head surgeons talk about at transfundere blod. But always with -‘ere as if only the 2nd conjugation ever existed.– I suspect that’s built on a core of back-formed French loans, e.g., parere as a fencing (and later boxing) term. Anyway: transfound, anyone? Or even transfuse?)
But always with -‘ere as if only the 2nd conjugation ever existed
I guess that Danish -ere goes back to Low German -eren (Standard German -ieren) from French -er, which historically is 1st conjugation.
German has prozessieren “to litigate”; it normally doesn’t mean “to process” (that would be verarbeiten). The noun is Prozess, pl. Prozesse.
What about [lɔs ‘æŋd͡ʒəlɪjz] (loss ‘ængelees)? Very common with Brits, though I learned to say [lɔs ‘ænd͡ʒləs] (loss ‘ænjluss) when I was at Berkeley. Mel Wax, the chair of Newsroom during the San Francisco newspaper strike, used the British pronunciation, which I thought sounded odd.
Very modest publication record, however. He probably spent more time on improving his students’ English than on his genetics research.
@AC-B, Los Angeles with -eez is not strange to the US, but it’s obsolescent, I think. See Arlo Guthrie’s song, Coming Into Los Angeles.
where do people get off treating the plural as were it classical?
“People” are not, by and large, etymologists or classical scholars. The word looks Latinate to them (which it is), so they give it what they understand to be a classical plural. They don’t give a good goddam about Latin declensions, nor should they.
used the British pronunciation
As Y says, it’s not British, it’s just not what the locals use, and most Americans have learned (probably via the LA-based movie/TV industry) not to say it. Compare “New Or-LEENZ” (though it’s complicated there, because some inhabitants of New OR-lunz do say it that way, at least in some contexts, when they feel like it — making sweeping generalizations about that motley city is a mug’s game).
Far be it from me to try and get a rise out of our esteemed publican.
But seriously, I’ll assign an a posteriori likehood of 90% of such a pronunciation sticking if first promulgated by a peever who should know better, and 10% of sticking if someone just came up with it. Which by my understanding of Bayesian analysis means there’s a 90% chance that it was a peever wskb who invented it. But I think I’ve been explicit about my opinion of BA before.
On the other hand, exhibit B is penii.
I guess the salient question is whether the romantic fashion of [-‘i:z] for anything in -es (cf Συμπληγάδες / rolling seas) counts as peevery, because I’d buy that as the source of processease.
@Hans, I think Danish got some from French directly, some from Standard G and some from Low. With some levelling because it’s pretty transparent how they correspond in the source languages. (I never looked into what French did to the other conjugations. There’s avoir II, vaincre III, venir IV, but I don’t know if any of those are “typical”. Danish does have kapere; but that doesn’t seem to be in recent editions of French so that one we probably got from some sort of German).
Another word people bizarrely use /iz/ with is biases.
@Hans, I think Danish got some from French directly, some from Standard G and some from Low.
I was talking about the suffix itself. I don’t know about Danish, but in Standard German verbs can be formed from it without a French source, e.g. hausieren “to hawk, peddle” (because pedlars go from house to house). And it forms verbs directly based on Latin verbs, without French intermediary, and without regard to the conjugation class (e.g. rezipieren “adopt, receive” – there is no French *reciper AFAIK).
(I never looked into what French did to the other conjugations. There’s avoir II, vaincre III, venir IV, but I don’t know if any of those are “typical”.
I think they are typical. There are some verbs that moved from III to II (e.g. -cipere, -cipio -> -cevoir).
Danish does have kapere; but that doesn’t seem to be in recent editions of French so that one we probably got from some sort of German).
German kapieren, I guess from Italian capire.
@hans
Here are two early citations of rezipieren from the DTA Corpus.
—
1658
weil er auch einer von Adel/ auff drey Wochen das Carcer dictiret werden könte, kan man ihn doch den Amandum wieder recipiren, nur daß es relegiren heist/
1674
welcher nicht allein sich darzu gebührend legitimiret/ oder habilitiret/ daß er pro loco gethan und praestirt, was davor zu thun und zu praestiren gesetzt ist/ sondern auch daß er würcklich recipirt und angenommen/ und hierauff nicht suspendirt worden.
—
These texts seem to have more ieren verbs and other Latinisms than modern texts (when did the initial vowel in Kerker change?). Besides rezipieren, there is prästieren, which could also be problematic for a French derivation (unless french e before s was transcribed as ä or the writer just knew the form praestare and “corrected” the French form he was adapting).
Provençal does that systematically, and without, I think, exceptions: the Provençal noun is invariant for number. That’s in the Mistralian norm; the so-called “classical norm”, which sees to be designed to make Provençal look as much like Catalan as possible, does inflect nouns for number, adding a silent -s.
@Hans, Danish also has husere, but from German (earlier as hausere); I don’t think there are any verbs formed on uniquely Danish roots to make it productive in Danish. And yes, kapere has more or less the senses of the Italian verb, not the Latin one, so I think you’re right. (Unlike kapieren, it also means ‘be able to handle’ or ‘stand,’ but often with kan made explicit; but not in a physical sense like capire or Spanish caber).
when did the initial vowel in Kerker change?
According to Grimm, /e/ took over already in Middle High German. What we have in your quotes seems rather to be the later (re-)loan Karzer “detention room, prison room at school or university”.
The topics discussed and ease with which Latin verbs are loaned using -ieren in those texts seems also to point to them being student / university language.
Annoyingly, wiktionary Category:English irregular plurals ending in “-i” mixes regular-Latin and jocular/hypercorrect forms.
Plus a few that are correct-in-the-original but not actually Latin, such as cappuccini and zakuski. And for that matter I could tell it’s missing some words that do appear in Wiktionary but apparently aren’t properly categorized.
Unfortunately (?) there’s apparently no category for plurals ending in “-ii”, though to be fair if there was it would probably be similarly mixed.
(There are 10 of those in the big category – seven are correct Latin plurals of words in -ius, such as radii, genii, and (glutei) medii, then the two infamous mistakes penii [correct Latin penes] and virii [no known correct classical Latin form, correct modern Latin vira], and finally scenarii, which is apparently a malformed attempt at Italian.)
Fun fact: one of the words is ægagri, apparently a rare plural of ægagrus, which is in turn apparently an obsolete form of aegagrus, but that’s a red link, so I’m left with very little idea what the word actually means. (Though judging by the one quotation, it’s probably some kind of mountain goat.)
Unrelated fun fact: in the Harry Potter setting, the plural of Inferius is Inferi (correct Latin would be either plural **Inferii, or singular **Inferus). Meanwhile, the plural of Horcrux is the regular English Horcruxes, and not anything more fancy, but apparently Rowling almost made it Horcri [sic] but decided against it due to unwanted similarity with Inferi.
One more reason for me to rowl my eyes at Rowling.
It underwent completely regular umlaut (in the 8th century or so). The second /k/ shows the word was borrowed in Roman times – when Germanic no longer had unstressed short /ɛ/, so the second vowel was borrowed as /ɪ/ and eventually triggered umlaut before it was itself reduced.
All such words are relatinized. This holds even for öko-, where not just the spelling is different. The only pre- word is prekär, which doesn’t etymologically contain any prae-.
Fun fact: one of the words is ægagri, apparently a rare plural of ægagrus, which is in turn apparently an obsolete form of aegagrus, but that’s a red link, so I’m left with very little idea what the word actually means. (Though judging by the one quotation, it’s probably some kind of mountain goat.
Quite right: αἴγαγρος is Ancient Greek (and Modern Greek) for ‘wild goat’. Its etymology, says Wikt, is αἴξ ‘goat’ and ᾰ̓γρός ‘land’; cf. ἄγριος ‘wild’. I was put onto this because I remembered the word aegagropilous (I am not quite sure of the -ous ending, but it looks right to me) from Larry Niven’s article “Bigger Than Worlds”, which I probably read in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
So what’s aegagropilous? ‘In the nature of a hairball or furball’ (πῖλος ‘hair’), apparently. It’s not current in English, but Wikt lists French égagropile ‘hairball, furball’, the conceit evidently is based on a ball of goat hair. A marimo is a filamentous green alga that under certain conditions grows as a ball up to 12 cm in diameter within a lake; its Linnaean name is Aegagropila linnaei. (Why linnaei? I don’t know.)
So to what would this adjective be applied? We start with Niven’s own Ringworld, a short cylinder around a star, made by disassembling the star’s planets and rapidly rotated for artificial gravity. It is, of course, not in orbit around the star, and therefore “The Ringworld is unstable!” A topopolis is what you get by deforming the ring into a tube and rotating the tube around its long axis; you don’t need to spin the tube around the star any more, though you still need attitude jets. Unlike the Ringworld, you can’t see the rest of the universe, since you live on the inside of the tube where the ecosystem is.
Now think bigger, and wrap the topopolis around its star multiple times in slightly varying directions each time. The result is something like a ball of pasta with the star at the center, and is an aegagropilous topopolis. Eventually you are absorbing the whole energy of the star, as with a Dyson sphere. Of course, you are still just a Kardashev Type II civilization, since you are only using the energy of one star. If you scale your civilization up to Type III, then you can start with a spiral galaxy and disassemble both arms to build your tube, which you then wrap repeatedly around the now-naked galactic core. This is, of course, an aegagropilous galactopolis, which is the phrase I remembered. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.” —Daniel Hudson Burnham
Probably Kützing just thought L. deserved the honor, or he had run out of other people to honor. It was in 1843, so he may not have stated a reason.
It seems it was Linné who originally bestowed the choice epithet ægagropila on this species (as Conferva ægagropila) in 1753 (Species plantarum 1753: 1167, bottom of the page here). Kützing put the species in his new genus Aegagropila in Phycologia generalis: oder, Anatomie, Physiologie und Systemkunde der Tange (see p. 272 here). So ‘Linné’s aegagropile’ must have seemed appropriate.
Ah.
Botany, unlike zoology, does not allow “tautonyms” (identical genus & species names like
Buffalo buffaloBison bison), so if a species gets its own genus and if the species name is promoted to genus name, a new species name has to be created.