Emu, Gulgong.

Two Australia-related items:

1) This is one of the stupidest language stories I’ve seen in a long time, and I can only assume it was a slow news day Down Under: Ee-moo?! NPR’s ‘absurd’ pronunciation starts new emu war in Australia.

The first shot was fired by National Public Radio in the US when it ruled on Friday that ee-moo was a correct and acceptable pronunciation of the name Australia’s national bird. […] This decision came as Stu Rushfield, a reporter and the technical director of the NPR weekend edition published his first story for the program about an escaped Maryland emu named Winston Featherbill.

The issue of pronunciation was brought to NRP’s Research, Archives & Data team who ruled (incorrectly) that ee-moo was acceptable to put to air. Rushfield said the team based their decision on previous on-air pronunciations, as well as how the bird’s (American) owner said the species’ name. But, one can only assume, failed to ask any one of the 24.9 million Australians who are an authority on the matter in the process.

Apparently Australians — at least those who chose to express performative outrage — say /ˈiːmjuː/, with a “yoo” after the /m/. I can’t for the life of me imagine why this should be an issue, considering the vast number of other pronunciation differences Aussies and Yanks encounter when dealing with each other, but as I say, it was probably a slow news day and someone decided to gin up some Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells activity. Anyway, to state the obvious, /ˈiːmjuː/ and /ˈiːmuː/ are both perfectly acceptable, and if you want to get really picky, the ancient OED entry says “The form emu is now [1891] more common in popular writing, and has latterly been adopted in the transactions of the Zoological Society. Prof. Newton, however, and some other eminent authorities prefer the older form emeu,” so if you’re sticking to your ancient guns you should write it emeu. And since it was borrowed from Portuguese ema (which may itself be borrowed from Arabic), both final vowels are “incorrect” in the first place. Stu Rushfield’s abashed account of the turmoil his pronunciation caused is here (audio should be available later today).

2) We Are What We Steal is a wonderful project:

Crimes are a reflection of the period and society in which they occur. What happened, the objects and people involved, the location, how it was recorded – or even if it was recorded – all tell us something about the values, attitudes, and power structures of the day.

This data visualisation looks at the almost 20 million words that were written in the New South Wales Police Gazette and Weekly Record of Crime from the beginning of 1860 up until the end of 1900* [*The gazette was printed up until 1930, but this project only looks at the period from 1860 up until federation.] to see what it shows about how the people, places, and things, changed in NSW over that period. But this is not a law-and-order piece, as it’s not so much interested in the crimes themselves, but rather the data in aggregate, and what else is documented in the process of recording them. Changing fashions, new technologies, new modes of transport, the establishment of new towns, increasing wealth, all this is recorded in the gazette – along with the racism of the day – as a by-product of reporting the crimes (and other police matters) that occurred. […]

For example, below you can see the popularity of the moustache throughout the 1880s and early 90s, how the town of Gulgong flourished during the gold rush years, and how the cabbagetree hat – one of the first distinctively Australian hats – became less popular over time […]

Just look at those wonderful graphs! And cabbagetree hat is not some kind of metaphor; it was actually made from the leaves of the cabbage-tree palm.

Comments

  1. PlasticPaddy says
  2. David Eddyshaw says

    Looks quite likely: Evonne G is

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiradjuri

    and so is the name of the town:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulgong

  3. Australians say jag-yoo-uh so it’s no surprise that they say ee-myoo. It’s just a spelling pronunciation.

  4. I grew up with ee-myoo and jag-yoo-ah. For some reason, the US pronunciation of jaguar now sounds not only reasonable but better, but ee-moo still sounds weird to me.

  5. It seemed likely that “Goolagong” would be just an alternative spelling of Gulgong, but this page (New South Wales Government Gazette from 1886) has separate entries for each.

  6. Jen in Edinburgh says

    There are people who say ‘noos’ for news*, and so presumably can say ’emoo’ for emu – but I don’t think it would have occurred to me that people would be *told* to say it that way, any more than you would tell people to say ‘fillim’ for film. (Vague memories of phonemic and phonetic transcriptions…)

    (*Do their kittens moo?)

  7. They’re not told to, it’s just how they say it, and thus it’s in the dictionary, same as any other word. Nobody tells us Yanks to say “truck” instead of “lorry,” we just do it!

  8. Yes, American kittens say moo when hungry, and British and Australian Jews say nyoo when impatient.

  9. I find myself using Jagwire more and more. I can’t help it.

  10. A slight refinement of my earlier comment: Jag-war sounds fine for the animal, but not quite appropriate for the motor-car. But then if I say Jag-you-ah for the car in the US, it sounds highly pretentious. What’s a person to do? (Buy a BMW, I guess)

  11. I use the British pronunciation, with the yod, for the Jaguar automobile, but that’s more mockery than anything else. The name sounds absurdly pretentious, for what is known to be a very poorly designed line of cars.

  12. David Marjanović says

    And since it was borrowed from Portuguese ema (which may itself be borrowed from Arabic), both final vowels are “incorrect” in the first place.

    The French form remains émeu, and [ø] is a reasonable approximation to an unstressed final Portuguese a, which is [ɜ] or thereabouts.

    Emeus, however (almost as Greek as Alligator is Latin), is not the emu. It’s a moa. The emu is Dromaius because it runs a lot more than any moa ever did.

    cabbage-tree palm

    Not to be confused with kale, the East Frisians’ palm.

  13. ə de vivre says

    Is Gulong related to Geelong? (I have fond memories of watching Australian rules football on ESPN’s late 2000s streaming service, which broadcast the best of whatever sports they could buy the broadcast rights to for pocket change)

  14. John Cowan says

    There are people who say ‘noos’ for news and so presumably can say ’emoo’ for emu

    The cases aren’t parallel, because of the stress. Americans change /tyu/, /dyu/, /nyu/ /lyu/ to /tu/, /du/, /nu/, /lu/ only in the stressed syllable, so that we say, for example, “Ben MacDooey” and not “Ben MacDyooee” or even “Ben MacJewy”. But when unstressed, the /y/ remains intact: annuity is “annooity”, but annual remains “annyual”. Also, /myu/ is normally not affected, so Tennyson’s couplet comes out “It is the little rift within the loot / That by and by will make the myusic myute” in AmE. Which probably would have given old Alfred a seizure. (I see looking at Wikt that “lyute” is optional even in RP nowadays.)

    Whoever wrote “emoo” simply doesn’t know how to pronounce the word, and figured it was a foreignism like tofu or Zulu.

    They’re not told to, it’s just how they say it

    We are told to, in the case of learned words, either by other people or by dictionaries and such.

  15. ‘Cabbage tree’ is a fairly widespread term for a scruffy vaguely cabbagey/tree-ish shrub.

    The Māori used to make use of various parts of the NZ version: the heart can be eaten (after long cooking); the leaves/fronds woven to make baskets or ropes. I guess it could also be woven into a hat, but I’ve never seen that.

  16. We are told to, in the case of learned words, either by other people or by dictionaries and such.

    It’s not a learned word any more.

  17. No doubt a slow news day, but I think that I can’t for the life of me imagine why this should be an issue is skewed by Hat’s views on language (language is different wherever it is found, continually evolving, and shouldn’t be pinned down by prescriptive statements — a “free-for-all” and “the more the merrier”, as it were).

    In this case, nationalism and Yank-bashing (or, to put it a more nuanced way, defensiveness in the face of what are seen as American ignorance/encroachments on “our territory”) would seem to be present in equal measure. There are a couple of ingredients that make this more than just an issue of to state the obvious, /ˈiːmjuː/ and /ˈiːmuː/ are both perfectly acceptable.

    First, the emu is widely regarded as the national bird of Australia — it’s on the country’s coat of arms.

    Secondly, the word is universally pronounced as /ˈiːmjuː/ in Australia, (not, “Apparently Australians — at least those who chose to express performative outrage — say /ˈiːmjuː/, with a “yoo” after the /m/”).

    Thirdly, National Public Radio in the US “ruled” (as the article put it) that /ˈiːmuː/ was acceptable.

    The outrage is over the fact that (1) Americans, “in their ignorance”, decided to pronounce the name of the national bird differently from how it is universally pronounced in its home country, (2) Americans, “in their arrogance”, decided not to ask any Australians and “ruled” that /ˈiːmuː/ is indeed correct.

    Knowing that both nationalism and prescriptivism are anathema to Hat, I can see what has led him to dismiss the “nationalist prescriptivism” that has led to this storm in a teacup.

    (I am also aware that the indigenous Australians, with their many different languages, did not call this bird the “emu”. “Emu” apparently, from a quick Google, has a rather promiscuous history: it arose in the early 17th century (maybe before white people even discovered Australia); it is from Portuguese ema, which didn’t even refer to the emu — it denoted the cassowary (presumably known from New Guinea but also found in northern Queensland); later it was used for the greater rhea (in South America!); and current usage for Dromaius novaehollandiae only dates from the early 19th century. The modern Australian English pronunciation is a particular pronunciation that has taken hold among what was originally a white settler community. It is, indeed, hallowed only by local usage.)

    I do remember (as I might once have mentioned) a tour organised by our Beijing hotel for long-stay guests (if I remember it rightly). The notice distributed before the trip mentioned that we were going to visit a 鸵鸟 tuóniǎo farm, where 鸵鸟 (Chinese for ‘ostrich’) were raised for food. The General Manager waxed enthusiastic about the wonderful qualities of 鸵鸟 meat (healthy, nutritious). When we got there I was rather flabbergasted to find they weren’t ostriches at all: they were emus. The Chinese word for ’emu’ is 鸸鹋 érmiáo, but this word isn’t very well known, and none of the Chinese in the group had ever heard of it. It struck me that they didn’t have the faintest idea where the bird was from or what kind of bird it actually was; the main thing was that it was good to eat.

    I think 鸵鸟 is fairly clearly related to 骆驼 luòtuó ‘camel’ — I believe 鸵 (bird + tuo) is just a modified form of 驼 (horse + tuo) — which makes the ostrich into the ‘camel bird’. Which is interesting in view of the scientific name Struthio camelus, which is from Greek (ancient, of course), στρουθός (strouthós, “sparrow”) + κάμηλος (kámēlos, “camel”).

    In Mongolian the ostrich is known as Тэмээн хяруул ᠲᠡᠮᠡᠭᠡᠨ ᠬᠢᠷᠠᠭᠤᠯ temeen khyaruul or ‘camel + small bird’. And I don’t think most Mongolians know what an emu is, either. The only bilingual dictionaries I can find that give a translation into Mongolian give эму шувуу (ᠡᠮᠤ ᠰᠢᠪᠠᠭᠤ emu shuvuuemu bird’ (Mongolia) and ᠡᠮᠤ ᠲᠡᠮᠡᠭᠡᠨ ᠬᠢᠷᠭᠤᠤᠯ (эму тэмээн хяруул) ‘emu ostrich’ (China). That’s pronounced /emu/, by the way, which brings us full circle to the point of the post.

  18. Knowing that both nationalism and prescriptivism are anathema to Hat, I can see what has led him to dismiss the “nationalist prescriptivism” that has led to this storm in a teacup.

    Quite right, of course, but I can only be who I am. I appreciate your presentation of the Other Side of the Story.

  19. David Eddyshaw says

    Hat’s views on prescriptivism and nationalism are, of course, correct. No running-dog deviationism on this point is acceptable. I hope, however, that in time he will renounce bourgeois agnostic anarchism in favour of the One True Path of Calvinistic Socialism. Sciolism. Whatever.

  20. John Cowan says

    [Emu is] not a learned word any more.

    By learned I mean that Americans (or most of us) don’t hear the word and acquire it the way we do dog or house or stove. Evidently Australians do. (Of course, learnedness in this sense is variable: well was a learned word for me, but for country people it’s probably an acquired word.

    Oh. Did you think I meant learnèd? Sorry about that misunderstanding.

  21. …make the music moot

    (i’ve never had to wait till the by & by for that with sir alf, myself)

  22. ‘Well’ is a nice traditional English word, but since they’ve mostly lost such charming Old World institutions as ‘wells’, Australians tend refer to an underground water source as ‘a bore’ (because you have to bore into the ground to access the water). Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that there are two different kinds of access to underground water: a ‘well’ and a ‘bore’.

    I was going to spice my discussion of ’emu’ above with the hypothetical example of someone who had never acquired the ‘correct’ pronunciation from ordinary speech pronouncing wildebeest as ‘wild-beast’. But then, I don’t think my example would work because the pronunciation /waɪld biːst/ isn’t actually recognised by any dictionary. But would that make it wrong?

  23. Tub: it denoted the cassowary
    OED:

    cassowary, n.
    Pronunciation: Brit. /ˈkasəwəri/, /ˈkasəwɛːri/, U.S. /ˈkæsəˌwɛri/
    Forms: α. 16 cassoware, cassaware, 18 cassowar; β. 16 cassawarway, cassawaraway, cassa-, cassiowary, 17 cassuary, ( casuari), 16– cassowary.

    First, I agree with Bathrobe’s take on this as much as with Language’s position on nationalism etc. And there’s a paradox in the attractive cuteness of foreign pronunciations of English words (le weekend etc.) or unthreatening local dialects (Cockney vs Edinburgh, say) and preposterous American misunderstanding of ancient words like emu. One is benign and the other threatening, but I’ve no idea how to treat the latter.

    On the cassowary, I’m pretty sure as a child I picked up ‘cassuary’ as a pronunciation from my mother & grandmother who had both spent time in Queensland. I’d be interested to know if Bathrobe, who’s both a Queenslander & a bird enthusiast would recognise it.

    On Jags: rightbackatcha, Brett. I’m by now accustomed to the faux-foreign-language US pronunciation. However, not only are the cars well made (my daughter’s ex-bf’s father just bought an electric one, so I got a look), and with the notable exception of Tesla famously better looking and marginally less twinkly-vulgar then US branded car makes (I believe Jaguar is owned by Ford), but techwise, electric Jags are going to be the only taxi in Oslo from 2023. We (Oslo) are installing charging boxes every few metres under the taxi lanes so the cars never have to stop to recharge.

  24. Having pondered this in my own bathroom while I took a shower I think the Welsh, French, whatever, pronunciation is taken as merely an accent rather than as a threatening reinterpretation, like Communism or Disco. I remember as a child hearing the Australian MerSEEDeez for the car and being quite cross because it was clearly wrong.

  25. The idea that a word can have proprietors, who are the sole arbiters of its pronunciation, is accepted by most for the specific case of personal names of living people. It is, moreover, accepted tacitly by some in other cases, e.g. names of historical figures, corporate brands, placenames, regionalisms, and other words for region-specific things.

    I’m unconvinced by Kate Burridge’s theory that /ˈimu/ is just another point in the secular trend of yod-dropping, unless it can be shown that American English has changed /ˈmju/ to /ˈmu/ in many non-exotic words. An alternative hypothesis is that (1) /’mu/ is the pronunciation of exotic/recent-loanword “mu” whereas /ˈmju/ is restricted to Anglicised “mu”; and (2) “emu” is exotic in American English but not in Australian English. I wonder whether “emu” will become exotic in the UK as memories of Rod Hull fade?

    But yeah, slow news day.

  26. Oh, and Geelong Grammar School in Victoria that Prince Charles attended sometime in the late 1960s, is pronounced jiLONG and not GEE-long as BBC newsreaders had it at the time. Bastards. It took me 50 years, but.

  27. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    I grew up with the Australian pronunciation of “emu”, but I’m not going to clutch my pearls if I here the US pronunciation.

    However, as a reminder that Australians may be different:

    https://tinyurl.com/y4pzluyd

    A man who allegedly sparked a Christmas Day siege on the Gold Coast has appeared in court on charges of attempted murder and keeping a rabbit.

    One almost has the impression that attempted murder is a trivial offence compared with keeping a rabbit.

    As for Jaguars, if you have a faux-Spanish -uar, why not a faux-Spanish Jag- (which I ‘ve heard from Spanish speakers, but not from anglophones)? Anyway, the Jag (as we call it in Britain) owners that I’ve known haven’t indicated that it’s a rubbish car.

  28. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    The server didn’t allow me to correct “here” to “hear”!

  29. January First-of-May says

    Apparently Australians — at least those who chose to express performative outrage — say /ˈiːmjuː/, with a “yoo” after the /m/.

    …TIL. I somehow expected it to be “eh-moo”, as spelled (or even outright /emu/ “eh-muh”), probably treating it as a blatantly-foreign word (it does kind of look like one – few English words end in U at all, and most* of them are recent-ish loans like tofu or zebu), but even if I realized that it started with an “ee” sound, I would probably have expected “ee-moo”.

    And since it was borrowed from Portuguese ema (which may itself be borrowed from Arabic), both final vowels are “incorrect” in the first place.

    Also TIL. I always assumed that the word came from some Aboriginal language (not realizing that if it did it would’ve probably been spelled *emoo [or perhaps even *imoo], cf. kangaroo).

     
    Meanwhile, in Russia, Boris Zakhoder’s Fuzzy Alphabet features another possible confusion about the pronunciation of the word…

    Я про страуса
    Про Эму
    Написал бы вам
    Поэму,
    Но никак я
    Не пойму:
    Эму он
    Или эмУ?

    [“About the ostrich
    Emu
    I would have written you
    A poem,
    But I just couldn’t
    Understand:
    Is it Emu
    Or emU?”]

    Note that the emu is (just as, apparently, in Mongolian) considered to be a kind of ostrich; in fact ostrich farms in Russia raise both African ostriches and emus, though mostly the former.

     

    *) Certainly if we don’t count the Frenchy words in -Vu (such as plateau, milieu, froufrou), which have their own pronunciation rules.
    A check of the Scrabble Word Finder for words in -Cu, excluding anything I can’t recall having ever heard of before (and emu itself), resulted in mu, nu, xu, cru, ecu, flu, gnu, ecru, fugu, guru, kudu, latu, leku, menu, thru, tofu, zebu, zulu, bantu, centu**, haiku, kombu, kudzu, nandu, otaku, quipu, snafu, vertu, wagyu, gomoku, haleru, kikuyu, sudoku, ubuntu, antiflu, bunraku, jujitsu, santimu, seppuku, submenu, ninjutsu, nunchaku, tiramisu, zaibatsu. (I might have missed a few, and some of the ones I did include I probably only recognize in the wrong meaning.)
    Excluding the blatant French, the blatant Japanese, and exotic monetary units that I happen to recognize as a numismatist, we’re left with mu, nu, flu, gnu, guru, kudu, menu (a common enough word that the Frenchiness isn’t blatant), thru, zebu, zulu, bantu, nandu, quipu, snafu, kikuyu, ubuntu, antiflu, submenu, and tiramisu, of which only flu (and antiflu), menu (and submenu), thru, snafu, possibly ubuntu, and perhaps the Greek letters mu and nu aren’t blatant loans of some other variety.

    **) plural of centas, pre-euro subdivision of the Lithuanian litas; the list contains a few other monetary units, mostly in plural forms, that I recognize from the respective coins

  30. plural of centas

    Looks more like the genitive plural. If memory serves, -as words have -ai nominative plurals.

  31. David Eddyshaw says

    A man who allegedly sparked a Christmas Day siege on the Gold Coast has appeared in court on charges of attempted murder and keeping a rabbit.

    Caused me to double-take. Ghanaians are cool with rabbits.

  32. January First-of-May says

    Looks more like the genitive plural.

    Could be dual and/or a Russian-style paucal; I don’t recall much about this form aside from “appears on coins”.

    (Lithuanian, like Russian and probably for similar reasons, has three different forms for nouns after 1, 2, and 5, which in this context are centas, centai, and centu – the last one with some kind of diactritic on U, I believe – not necessarily in that order, though this was the order I remembered them in.)

  33. Australians may be different ….

    keeping a declared pest (a rabbit)

    I think the keeping of rabbits was just something extra that could charge him with.

    But lacking here is the background: rabbits have been the cause of huge economic disasters in Australia.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_plagues_in_Australia

    As a place sheltered from the rest of the world until recent times, and having unique ancient wildlife (just as New Zealand does), the Australian continent is highly susceptible to the introduction of pests from overseas (cats, foxes, cane toads, mynahs, etc., I won’t mention cattle and sheep), which can have devastating effects on native flora and fauna. Many Australians do take rabbits seriously.

  34. David Marjanović says

    the ‘camel bird’

    Literally so in Turkish as well: devekusu. The reason is that it’s only got two toes per foot.

    some kind of diactritic on U

    is a gen. pl. ending much discussed by IEists.

  35. In Lithuanian, unlike in Romance / Germanic languages, and like Slavic languages but in a different way, the form of a count noun depends on final digits of the number.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_grammar#Noun_modification_by_numeral

  36. iterally so in Turkish as well: devekusu.

    devekuŞu

    Kazakh has an -s, though: түйеқұс

    Finnish (in older language): kamelikurki ‘camel crane’

  37. And Tajik (and Farsi, I guess) has ‘camelbird’ as well:

    шутурмурғ

  38. Camel bird
    I’d guess that the names meaning this in Chinese, Mongolian, and Turkish are all calques of the scientific name Struthio camelus, which Bathrobe already mentioned.

  39. @AJP Crown: Ford spent several billion to buy Jaguar in the 1990s. But it lost money every year, until they sold most of the company for peanuts about a decade later, just to get it off their hands. During the period when Ford owned Jaguar, the company naturally increased their marketing presence in North America, trying to sell more Jags to Americans. (The commercials used the British pronunciation.) There was an increase in their sales here, but the cars rapidly got a reputation for mechanical problems and unreliability. The problems from that period really shaped my view of Jaguars, and probably the views of many other Americans. It was over a decade ago, though, so it is entirely possible that the cars are much better made now.

  40. Kazakh has an -s, though: түйеқұс
    [s] is the regular Kazakh reflex of Turkic [ʃ], see also tas, bes (“stone, five”) vs. Turkish taş, beş.

  41. J.W. Brewer says

    I considered buying a (low-end-of-the-range-pricewise) Jaguar when I was last in the market for a new car three years ago, but instead went with an Alfa Romeo (newly returned to the US market after decades of absence), in part on the theory that Italian unreliability would be more fun than British unreliability.

  42. Alfa Romeo always makes me think of Godard’s Contempt.

  43. JW, do you like your Alfa Romeo? We nearly bought one once based on the way they look but chickened out on the grounds that when it’s -10C and your car won’t start, who cares what it looks like.

  44. Trond Engen says

    I’ve noticed that within the last year or so those of my colleagues who use more money and time on their cars than I do have turned from Teslas, Audis and BMW’s to electric Jaguars.

  45. What, no Bugattis or Bentleys?

  46. Trond Engen says

    Nah. It has to look sensible. They are engineers.

  47. Yes, the guy with the electric Jag that I know is an engineering PhD at Telenor. He sold a Porsche for the Jag and he loves it. He didn’t want a Tesla, the car you see most here and the car I’d quite like if I had the money (mostly because it’s interior is featureless except for a big screen). Jaguars are still too twinkley inside for my taste.

  48. No mention of Brits’ inability to pronounce “Houston”? They always say “Hooston”, whereas the inhabitants of that place call it “Hyooston”. Seems to be the inverse of the usual stereotype.

    I own a lute, and I frequently attend early music events, and I have never ever heard anyone call it a “lyoot”.

  49. David Marjanović says

    I’d guess that the names meaning this in Chinese, Mongolian, and Turkish are all calques of the scientific name Struthio camelus

    More likely the other way around. Ostriches used to be all over the Middle East; a source from the Tang Dynasty located the “camel bird” in Arabia.

  50. PlasticPaddy says

    @maidhc
    Re lute/loot they are not identical here, I think the tongue position for lute is ee but the lip position is oo, if that makes sense.

  51. January First-of-May says

    I think the tongue position for lute is ee but the lip position is oo, if that makes sense

    As far as I can tell, you’re describing a close front rounded vowel, IPA /y(:)/. Not sure if that’s exactly correct, though.

  52. David Eddyshaw says

    Lute/loot are homophones for me, although I might take to calling lutes lyoots if I actually possessed one. However, I am not worthy.

    Why is Houston pronounced “Hyooston”?

  53. No mention of Brits’ inability to pronounce “Houston”?

    Huh? Brits used to say ‘Hyooston’. Then we heard Americans say “Hooston, we have a problem”. So now some Brits pronounce it the American (or at least the astronaut’s) way. (The pronunciation on wikipedia seems to be somewhere in between. Perhaps to Brit ears expecting a more definite /ju:/, they think they must have had it wrong.)

    I see Swigert, who said that phrase (in popular misconception) was from Denver, Colorado. Perhaps he didn’t pronounce it the Texan way?

  54. In Australia Mercedes is pronounced with a SAY in the middle syllable. Never heard the SEE pronunciation.

  55. John Cowan says

    there are two different kinds of access to underground water: a ‘well’ and a ‘bore’.

    I make that distinction using the terms dug well and drilled well; there is one of each at my house in upstate NY. The dug well is highly seasonal sweet surface water, but there isn’t much pressure, whereas the drilled well is full of iron and sulfur which make it stink (not enough to be toxic), stain things, and taste awful. Activated-charcoal filters help, but not enough. But it does supply plenty of water for things like the washing machine and the hot-water boiler.

    So the dug well is currently shut off and we drink bottled water (bought in 4-liter containers). However, the house water is fine for making coffee or cooking: boiling it removes the bad taste.

    Many years ago, the U.S. census long form asked people if they had dug or drilled wells, and ol’ Bill Safire called up the Census Bureau and asked if ordinary people were supposed to be able to make this distinction. The censor (no, that doesn’t work) replied succinctly: “People who have wells, know what kind of wells they have.” He was right.

    it can be shown that American English has changed /ˈmju/ to /ˈmu/ in many non-exotic words.

    It cannot: yod-dropping follows coronals and coronals only. (Granted, /r/ is not a coronal any more, but that yod-dropping is so old as to be universal. Some people may say “riwd” still, but no one says “ryude”.)

    attempted murder and keeping a rabbit.

    In Alberta, Canada, it would be “keeping a rat”. There are no rats in Alberta thanks to natural borders, and Albertans are determined to keep it that way. Sometimes a dozen or so rats come in from Saskatchewan, and it’s TRAPS! POISON! GAS! FIRE!
    As a result, they are only rat-free place of any size in the world that is not covered with ice. Pet rats expose you to a fine of CA$500 per rat.

    Actually, Queensland is the only state that absolutely bans rabbit-keeping: the rest simply regulate it very strictly. But the fine in Qld. is a ferocious AU$2200, ranging up to a maximum of AU$44,000.

    a faux-Spanish -uar

    I have never understood this charge of faux-Spanishness. First of all, though the jaguar has a very large range, much of it is in Brazil, and the word is a Tupi-Guarani one (meaning ‘large carnivore’, actually). The original pronunciation is varyingly /jawara/ and /yawara/. There being no way to write /w/ in Portuguese, the spelling “gu” was adopted and spread to many other languages. So the only thing actually Spanish, or rather Portuguese, about it is the /g/, which is a mere spelling convention (though now pronounced in both languages) and in any case shared between British and American pronunciations.

    Words in -uar are thin on the ground in English, but there is guar (from Hindi), a South Asian plant from which is made guar gum, heavily used in processed food as a thickener and stabilizer. And how is this pronounced? /Gwahr/, naturally. If you saw that word in writing, would it occur to you to pronounce it /GYUE-ar/? Give me leave to doubt it.

    Now it’s true that languages with rational spelling systems do tend to pronounced jaguar with three syllables according to their local conventions. French does not, however: it has two syllables there and sounds very American, modulo the lack of stress and the difference between French and English /j/. Dutch got the word from French and originally pronounced it Frenchwise, but they have now snivelingly changed over to an English-style pronunciation.

    flu (and antiflu), menu (and submenu), thru, snafu, possibly ubuntu [I don’t think so], and perhaps the Greek letters mu and nu

    Okay. Flu is a shortening of influenza, blatantly foreign, and /lj/ is pretty well gone anyway. Menu keeps its yod in both accents because it is unstressed. Thru is a respelling and anyway /rj/ is fully gone, see above. That leaves mu, nu, of which the first is yodic because it is non-coronal, and then we have nu which actually does alternate between the two accents.

    the inhabitants of that place call it “Hyooston”

    The inhabitants of that place do. But the inhabitants of this place (NYC) speak of How-ston street, following Gen. and Gov. John Houstoun’s own pronunciation. His parents came from Scotland (though indeed they could not help it). Sam Houston was also of Scottish ancestry (by way of Ireland), and somewhere the pronunciation changed before the new city was named for him.

  56. The place has always been Hyooston for me, although I’m not typical, having lived overseas for most of my life. And I don’t think I’ve ever heard Hooston. Ever.

    Thanks, David Marjanović, for pointing out that about ‘ostrich’ in Chinese. I started a response but never sent it, it seems. (The Mongolian is most likely from Chinese, not from the binomial name).

  57. the inhabitants of that place call it “Hyooston”

    How do inhabitants of other parts of America pronounce it?

    And how do the pronunciations compare for Whitney Houston or John Huston (director)?

    Houston Renfrewshire is /ˈhuːstən/ [wikipedia].

    To repeat myself, I think Brits used to pronounce the Texas place as ‘Hyooston’; but that changed as it became better-known as mission control. And that could only have been to follow American pronunciation on TV.

  58. I believe I’ve heard μ, ν pronounced moo and noo by Richard Feynman, talking about tensor indices.

  59. The great drawback of English phonology is a lack of hard/soft distinction. Russian deals with this difficulties very simply. Just say m’u with soft m, no need to insert j (that’s also why the emulation of нет as njet is so comical. Njet, njet and njet)

  60. In Australia Mercedes is pronounced with a SAY in the middle syllable. Never heard the SEE pronunciation.

    When I was young I think I recall that ‘Mer SEE dees’ was the one I was familiar with. Then ‘Mer SAY dees’ seems to have taken over at some point (and I changed over with it) because it sounds trendier or more authentic, I guess. If you buy one I think the cachet of ‘Mer SAY dees’ beats ‘Mer SEE dees’ hands down.

  61. January First-of-May says

    no need to insert j

    Though you can, if the phonetics call for that – Russian phonology (and even, with some fiddling, Russian spelling) allows this. It just doesn’t happen, in this particular case, to result in a real word. If you did it with nu instead, it would’ve resulted in нью as in Нью-Йорк.

    (And if “njet” was a Russian word it would’ve been spelled *ньет.)

  62. John Cowan says

    I think Brits used to pronounce the Texas place as ‘Hyooston’; but that changed as it became better-known as mission control.

    The city in Texas is “Hyooston” everywhere in the U.S. and hopefully throughout the Anglophone world. It’s other places that are “Howston”, including Houston County, Georgia (John Houstoun’s home state) and the street three blocks from me. One of the marks of a tourist or newcomer in NYC is asking about “Hyooston Street”: that was my point about inhabitants, which turned out to be quite misleading to the Hattics. Sorry about that.

  63. John Huston (note the spelling) pronounced his his name the way as the city in Texas. You can here him talking here. (He says his last name at 1:49.) His daughter Anjelica says it the same way, as I recall, but I am not certain about his father Walter (or any of the other less well known members of their showbiz family).

    Having not listened to Huston talking in a long time, I was amazed by how his speaking voice took me back to thinking of Gandalf. It seems like Rankin and Bass simply had him use the natural cadence of his voice, and yet it just sounds absolutely wizardly.

  64. IIRC “Guar [gum]” was pronounced goo-ar by Esther Rantzen on BBC in an exposé on bogus slimming products c.1989

  65. jaanalind

    Estonian
    Etymology
    From Hebrew יָעֵן‎ (“ostrich”) + lind (“bird”).

    Noun
    jaanalind (genitive jaanalinnu, partitive jaanalindu)

    ostrich, Struthio camelus

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/jaanalind#Estonian

  66. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    How about Houston Stewart Chamberlain: how did he pronounce it? I’ve always assumed [‘hu̟:stən], but I really don’t know. However, as he was very nasty man it probably doesn’t matter that much.

  67. zyxt, I’m talking about the 1960s – 70s when Australians said MerSEEDease, so that may be before your time. I’ve heard it myself, in Australia, with my own ears. I also heard it in a recently made Australian crime drama on the telly but I acknowledge it’s not normally current. What annoyed me as a ten-year-old was some git across the road (the son of Australians) telling me I was saying it wrong with MerSAYdees.

    -the inhabitants of that place call it “Hyooston”
    -The inhabitants of that place do. But the inhabitants of this place (NYC) speak of How-ston street, following Gen. and Gov. John Houstoun’s own pronunciation.

    Molly said it best:

    The idea that a word can have proprietors, who are the sole arbiters of its pronunciation, is accepted by most for the specific case of personal names of living people. It is, moreover, accepted tacitly by some in other cases, e.g. names of historical figures, corporate brands, placenames, regionalisms, and other words for region-specific things.

    We wouldn’t have this problem of one spelling to fit all pronunciations if spellings were flexible, as they were in the English-speaking past.

  68. David Marjanović says

    /r/ is not a coronal any more

    Retroflexes are coronals.

    The city in Texas is “Hyooston” everywhere in the U.S. and hopefully throughout the Anglophone world.

    And beyond.

    MerSEEDease […] MerSAYdees

    …and nobody goes for -ess or -əs? Does everyone have -ης in mind?

    Anjelica

    I always want to pronounce that in FYLOSC, with [nʲ] and [ts].

  69. John Cowan says

    Retroflexes are coronals.

    So they are, but my /r/ is something like /ʑ̙/ (that’s the “retracted tongue root” diacritic) except before a genuine coronal, so I don’t think of /r/ as coronal.

  70. January First-of-May says

    I always want to pronounce that in FYLOSC, with [nʲ] and [ts].

    Haha, Анелица! Didn’t think of that. Sadly, to me it’s too blatantly a weird spelling of the familiar-ish name Анжелика.

    …and nobody goes for -ess or -əs? Does everyone have -ης in mind?

    Russian actually has final stress on Мерседес the car brand, which I suspect has to do with some peculiarity of Russian phonotactics.

  71. That’s how I want to pronounce Мерседес when I look at it, so I must have absorbed quant. suff. of Russian phonotactics.

  72. I also always pronounced the gum “goo-ar.” To me, Gwar will always be the name of a parody metal band. (Sudden thought: Was it named after the gum?…)

  73. Wikipedia sez:

    Dave Brockie was the vocalist and bassist for a punk band named Death Piggy that staged mini-plays and used crude props to punctuate its music. […] Brockie had an idea to use the costumes made for Scumdogs of the Universe and have Death Piggy open for itself as a barbaric band from Antarctica, playing nonsense songs while sacrificing fake animals. The name of the joke group was “Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh”. The members of Death Piggy began noticing that more people were coming to see Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh and leaving immediately after the set. After several refinements, including shortening the band’s name, Death Piggy was phased out in favor of the band now named Gwar.

    There is, however, no citation for the Gwaaarrrgghhlllgh part.

  74. Guar gum, yeah
    What is it good for?
    Absolutely nothing.

  75. And, sez the article, Gwar sprays its audiences with … carrageenan.

  76. J.W. Brewer says

    AJP, I’ve never had difficulty with the Alfa starting in cold weather and where I live it gets down below -10 C at least occasionally most winters (including the three since I got the Alfa), although getting below -15 or -20 C is significantly rarer. One minor aggravation in cold weather is that the rear-window defroster is not very useful or efficient, which is illustrative of a broader theme that one very good review of the model (the Giulia) focused on, viz. that 100% of the design-and-manufacturing quality effort was put into the specific aspects that make a car fun to drive (engine, transmission, steering, handling, adjustability of driver’s seat) and 0% into everything else.

    So if you’re used to cars made by Japanese firms that are fanatical about the thoughtfulness of cup-holder placement and the quality of rear-window defrosting and getting all the little ancillary details like that right, the consistent shortfalls in that area will be noticeable, but if you can live with that tradeoff, it’s fine.

  77. Lars Mathiesen says

    Sort of the opposite of the Lada — its reputation in Denmark was that it would start at -40 and defrost the windows quickly too, but otherwise it was like driving a tractor.

    Alfas reportedly rust away in the Danish climate where winter can be 5 months of -1 to +1 C and slush mixed with liberal amounts of salt. Up around Oslo where they have proper winters and no salt (which has no effect under -10C, I think) they should hold up much better.

  78. Algirdas Pocius says

    Thanks, David Marjanović, for pointing out that about ‘ostrich’ in Chinese. I started a response but never sent it, it seems. (The Mongolian is most likely from Chinese, not from the binomial name).

    [I have left this spam comment (while deleting the spam URL) because it’s discussed below — LH.]

  79. Oh, that’s all good to hear for next time except for the rust bit, of course. They say here that Italians don’t make cars for cold weather but it’s probably just propaganda put about by Germans. Our BMW is ok in many ways (no rust, I think it’s maybe aluminum) but it has twice died and left me stranded in the middle of Norwegian proverbial nowhere. There may be some salt; years ago my father-in-law’s Mercedes rusted something terrible, Daimler having bought a bad lot of cheap Russian steel, or so he said.

  80. David Marjanović says

    Interesting spambot sighting.

    Russian actually has final stress on Мерседес the car brand, which I suspect has to do with some peculiarity of Russian phonotactics.

    French phonotactics, rather. Mercédès.

  81. “jag-war” is a “faux-foreign-language US pronunciation”? Being as jaguar is the name of a animal from the Americas, pronouncing the animal name in an American way rather than a British way is hardly any sort of foreignism. And pronouncing the car name like the animal name is rather natural. And for many of us it wouldn’t occur to us there might be a different pronunciation. Pronouncing it the British way would be the foreign way. Correct perhaps in the case of the car, but none-the-less foreign.

  82. Thirty years ago, I knew a guy (twenty-ish at the time) who was a huge fan of GWAR. However, he seemed completely unattuned to the idea that the band’s over-the-top character was meant as parody. That was entirely in keeping with his character, though; he also talked about Hamburger Hill like a gung-ho action film.

  83. J.W. Brewer says

    GWAR unfortunately did not attain to quite the same heights of commercial success but it’s a reasonably commonplace claim that the reason that the Village People were briefly in the late Seventies one of the biggest-selling recording artists in the U.S. was that they were getting half of their record sales from people who were “in on the joke” and the other half from people who very much weren’t, and would have been somewhat shocked and appalled had they gotten the joke. Put those two groups together successfully, and you have a larger potential market share.

  84. I still remember my younger brother playing “YMCA” for us just after it came out (but well before he did) and smiling beatifically at the sight of his oblivious straight family members enthusiastically bopping along and singing the chorus. Hey, it’s a catchy song about a nice, respectable organization!

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    I’ve never quite got over the discovery that some of the Village People were straight. Can nothing be trusted in this sad sublunar sphere?

  86. Some of the Village People were straight? That’s like blackface; they’d never get away with it nowadays, they’d be outed in 5 mins.

  87. Trond Engen says

    Lars: Up around Oslo where they have proper winters and no salt

    That was a long time ago, on both accounts.

  88. Trond Engen says

    The Norwegian comedian Espen Eckbo did a boy band parody that became so successful that the songs made the charts and the “band” had gigs and shopping center events for a year, attracting both those who were in on the parody and a real boy band audience. The rise and fall of the band is documented in Get ready to be Boyzvoiced. For a taste, here’s their huge Christmas hit Let me be your Father Christmas.

  89. Oh great, now I can’t get “Hooray hooray, it’s the birth…day of Jee…zuss!” out of my head.

  90. Trond Engen says

    Sorry about that. You could try to replace it by one or more of their other hits. There’s no escape from awkward lyrics in Bad English, though.

  91. January First-of-May says

    Hey, it’s a catchy song about a nice, respectable organization!

    …Darn, now I’m actually worried for my brother; he quite likes the song, and last I checked he was probably straight (he’s 14, so it might be too early to be sure one way or another).

  92. “unless it can be shown that American English has changed /ˈmju/ to /ˈmu/ in many non-exotic words”

    I’ve just listened to an audiobook where Laurence Bouvard says “remunerate” /rɪˈmuː.nə.reɪt/

  93. Yes, it doesn’t seem to me to require much explanation: /ˈmju/ to /ˈmu/ is a change in the direction of easier articulation and thus a priori likely.

  94. I first saw the Village People in late 1978, just after moving to California, singing “YMCA” on a sports special hosted by Howard Cosell. I sat there stunned (and I think stoned), being like, “Howard, do you have any idea what’s going on here?” It was certainly a striking introduction to the West Coast in the late Seventies.

  95. Laurence Bouvard

    She’s near-L1 in Italian; perhaps that was leakage from remunerare. In any case, it’s a tough enough word that many people write it renumerate, as if for re-enumerate. (I don’t know if they say it that way too.)

    And pronouncing the car name like the animal name is rather natural.

    Well, yes. Is there anyone outside the U.S. who does not do that, who says jaguar with two syllables and Jaguar with three? In The House at Pooh Corner the word is given as Jagular:

    “Look, Pooh!” said Piglet suddenly. “There’s something in one of the Pine Trees.”

    “So there is!” said Pooh, looking up wonderingly. “There’s an Animal.”

    Piglet took Pooh’s arm, in case Pooh was frightened.

    “Is it One of the Fiercer Animals?” he said, looking the other way.

    Pooh nodded.

    “It’s a Jagular,” he said.

    “What do Jagulars do?” asked Piglet, hoping that they wouldn’t.

    “They hide in the branches of trees, and drop on you as you go underneath,” said Pooh. “Christopher Robin told me.”

    “Perhaps we better hadn’t go underneath, Pooh. In case he dropped and hurt himself.”

    “They don’t hurt themselves,” said Pooh. “They’re such very good droppers.”

    Piglet still felt that to be underneath a Very Good Dropper would be a Mistake, and he was just going to hurry back for something which he had forgotten when the Jagular called out to them.

    “Help! Help!” it called.

    “That’s what Jagulars always do,” said Pooh, much interested. “They call ‘Help! Help!’ and then when you look up, they drop on you.”

    “I’m looking down,” cried Piglet loudly, so as the Jagular shouldn’t do the wrong thing by accident.

    I suppose this is a mixture of jaguar and jugular (as in what the Jagulars attack after they drop on you). The OED2 (1900) lists the two-syllable pronunciation /dʒaɡwɑː/ first; the recorded enunciator from a century or so later makes it /dʒakwɑː/, as if he were hardly used to saying it.

  96. /rɪˈmuː.nə.reɪt/ for “remunerate” strikes me as a spelling pronunciation. That’s how I sounded it out in my head when reading it in the comment above. It’s not actually a word I know.

    To me, even though there are words where the letter u represents yoo (/ju/), I wouldn’t pronounce it that way in an unfamiliar word. I suspect that’s typical of Americans. Which probably comes to play in pronunciations of emu.

    On the other hand, when I look remunerate up in dictionary and see /ɹɪˈmjuːnəɹeɪt/, my brain quickly adapts.

    Emu, though, is actually a more common word than remunerate in American English (Google Ngrams supports this assertion), and the /ˈimu/ pronunciation of Emu is common enough in American English to make it into dictionaries (along with /ˈimju/). (I checked Wiktionary and Merriam-Webster.)

  97. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    My post seems to have disappeared into the aether in an unfinished state. Here I try to reconstruct it.

    Nabokov, referred to to in the polyglot thread, described somewhere (maybe in Pale Fire, a much better book, in my opinion, than Lolita) to a fictional correction in a newspaper referring to confusion between корова, корона and ворона that would work perfectly well in English as a confusion between cow, crown and crow: “there was an unfortunate error in the edition of yesterday in which the word ‘cow’ was used in reference to Her Majesty; it should of course have been ‘crow'”.

    (Incidentally, I also like Laughter in the Dark, which I’ve only read in English, though I think it first appeared in Russian, a lot more than its later manifestation as Lolita.)

  98. J.W. Brewer says

    Rodger, I must have missed that 1978 thing with Cosell but I do have a vivid memory from the following year of seeing the VP perform “In the Navy” with Bob Hope (born 15 years before Cosell, although maybe no relevant difference between their generational cohorts on comfort/discomfort with the relevant sort of double entendre?) hamming it up with them, on a tv special which googling suggests was “All-Star Birthday Party for Bob Hope … At Sea.”

  99. J.W. Brewer says

    I always subconsciously assume that “remunerate” is a metathesis-typo for “renumerate,” which somehow seems the more plausible word. But I don’t know whether BrEng speakers would go with a “nyoo” rather than my AmEng “noo” for the stressed syllable of “renumerate.”

  100. It should, of course,
    Have been “horse”.

  101. David Marjanović says

    BrEng speakers indeed go for “nyoo”, because “noo” would have to be spelled noo.

    munus non numerus

  102. I’m not sure that “BrEng” really describes anything here. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are Scottish and possibly other accents where people say reNOOmeration. We don’t all speak the same and that American accent must have originated somewhere in the British Isles.

  103. корова, корона and ворона

    Mentioned by our host in 2008 (though surely I must have seen it somewhere more recently than that if I remembered it).

  104. Andrej Bjelaković says

    @AJPCrown

    Well, traditionally, Norfold has yod-dropping, even after bilabials (unlike North American English), so “beautiful” is famously “bootiful” in eye-dialect. Not sure how recessive this is, though.

  105. Being as jaguar is the name of a animal from the Americas, pronouncing the animal name in an American way rather than a British way is hardly any sort of foreignism.

    Is this some kind of reincarnation of the Monroe doctrine?

  106. Andrej Bjelaković, I hadn’t thought of Norfolk!

    Is this some kind of reincarnation of the Monroe doctrine?
    Haha. Really.

  107. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    Mentioned by our host in 2008 (though surely I must have seen it somewhere more recently than that if I remembered it).

    Right; it was. Not only that, but in response to a query of mine. I should have remembered. Creeping Alzheimer.

    A few years ago I asked my doctor to check my memory. He did, and found nothing wrong. He asked a series of questions like what is the capital of France? What is todays’s date? (No idea: why does it matter?) What was Alzheimer’s first name? I said I didn’t know; don’t worry, he said, nobody does, it’s not a serious question. I do now, however: it’s Alois.

  108. “I’m talking about the 1960s – 70s when Australians said MerSEEDease”

    I believe you, I just haven’t heard anyone say it. I know someone who went to Mercedes College (founded 1846) . I’ll ask to see if the older nuns called it anything other than mǝseɪdiz

    Maybe it’s a pronunciation specific to the Eastern States. Bathrobe: Do you reckon you heard it pronounced as mǝsidiz anywhere outside Qld?

  109. Stu Rushfield says

    I’m glad my story yielded so much discussion. Happy to have given everyone a reason to take their minds off the real problems the world is facing. Best to all!

    Stu (aka @stu_rush)

  110. And we thank you for your delightful reportage — talk about making lemonade out of lemons!

  111. Mercedes College was apparently always pronounced as mǝseɪdiz

    Mercedes Ladies (mǝseɪdiz leɪdiz) by Skyhooks came out in 1975. Skyhooks is a Melbourne band.

    Maybe mǝsidiz is a strange Queensland pronunciation.

  112. What was Alzheimer’s first name?
    De’ath, but changed it to Alzheimer to give his research more credibility.

  113. In Ireland in the 80s there was free variation between /mǝrseɪdiz/ and /mǝrsideɪz/

  114. Maybe mǝsidiz is a strange Queensland pronunciation.

    Well, I was partly brought up in New South Wales so I really can’t be sure. All I know is that /mǝsiːdiz/ doesn’t sound particularly strange to me.

  115. /mǝsiːdiz/
    The mother of the kids across the street, when I was a child – and they all said it – is from Perth.

  116. The comment on 31 August from Algirdas Pocius, which just repeats what I said on 30 August, appears to be spam.

  117. Stu Clayton says

    I bet that’s in Rumanian because many of the words have “ul” in them.

  118. David Eddyshaw says

    from Algirdas Pocius, which just repeats what I said

    He’s a politician. He appropriates your original research without attribution.

  119. The comment on 31 August from Algirdas Pocius, which just repeats what I said on 30 August, appears to be spam.

    You’re quite right; I’ve left the comment but deleted the spam URL.

  120. On the contrary it’s Lithuanian because he has blondish backlit eyebrows.

    He’s a politician. He appropriates your original research without attribution.
    If only; bugger the attribution.

  121. AJP, on behalf of the good burghers of Perth, apologies for teasing you about mercedes all those years ago. we’ve learnt our lesson.

  122. heh.
    🙂

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