I just heard a radio announcer pronounce Martha Graham’s surname as /græm/ (like “gram”); the only pronunciation given in the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary, and the only one I remember hearing, is /ˈgrɛɪəm/ (“GRAY-um”). Is this a dialectal thing or his own idiosyncrasy? Also, looking it up I discovered that the surname is “derived from Grantham in Lincolnshire, England.” That’s some serious consonant reduction there.
Commented-On Language Hat Posts (courtesy of J.C.; contains useful Random Link feature)
E-mail:
languagehat AT gmail DOT com
My name is Steve Dodson; I’m a retired copyeditor currently living in western Massachusetts after many years in New York City.
If your preferred feed is Twitter, you can follow @languagehat to get
links to new posts here as they appear. (I don’t otherwise participate
in Twitter.)
If you’re feeling generous:
my Amazon wish list
And you can support my book habit without even spending money on me by following my Amazon links to do your shopping (if, of course, you like shopping on Amazon); As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases (I get a small percentage of every dollar spent while someone is following my referral links), and every month I get a gift certificate that allows me to buy a few books (or, if someone has bought a big-ticket item, even more). You will not only get your purchases, you will get my blessings and a karmic boost!
If your comment goes into moderation (which can happen if it has too many links or if the software just takes it into its head to be suspicious), I will usually set it free reasonably quickly… unless it happens during the night, say between 10 PM and 8 AM Eastern Time (US), in which case you’ll have to wait. And occasionally the software will decide a comment is spam and it won’t even go into moderation; if a comment disappears on you, send me an e-mail and I’ll try to rescue it. You have my apologies in advance. Also, my posts should be taken as conversation-starters; there is no expectation of “staying on topic,”and some of the best threads have gone in entirely unexpected directions. I have strong opinions and sometimes express myself more sharply than an ideal interlocutor might, but I try to avoid personal attacks, and I hope you will do the same.
Songdog
Kaleidoscope
The Daily Growler †
wood s lot †
MetaFilter
an eudæmonist
Avva (Russian)
No-sword
The Cassandra Pages
Transblawg
Epigrues
Far Outliers
paperpools
Lizok’s Bookshelf
A Bad Guide †
Poemas del río Wang
The Flaxen Wave
ТЕТРАДКИ: Что о нас думают в Европе?
Russian Dinosaur
XIX век
Wuthering Expectations
Boris Dralyuk
Laudator Temporis Acti
The Untranslated
The Fate of Books
The Millions
Linguablogs:
Language Log
Anggarrgoon
Jabal al-Lughat
Dick & Garlick
bulbulovo
Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (in English)
Word Routes
Sentence first
Balashon
Separated by a common language
Ozwords (a blog from the Australian National Dictionary Centre)
The *Bʰlog (“A blog devoted to all matters Indo-European”)
Strong Language (“a sweary blog about swearing”)
Language resources:
Arnold Zwicky’s list of blogs and resources
Multitran
American Heritage Dictionary
Green’s Dictionary of Slang
Wiktionary
bab.la
TypeIt (IPA keyboards, language character sets)
Clickable IPA chart (by Weston Ruter)
Wordorigins
Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language
The sci.lang FAQ
Omniglot
ScriptSource
BibleOnline
Jewish Lexicon Project
Cambridge International Dictionary of Idioms
TITUS: Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien
American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix
Andras Rajki’s Etymological Dictionary of Arabic
Germanic Lexicon Project
Dictionary of the Scots Language
Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm
Wortschatz Deutsch
Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen
DWDS (Der deutsche Wortschatz von 1600 bis heute)
etymologiebank.nl (Dutch etymology)
Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (Open Access PDF version of volumes A – M and O – P)
Trésor de la langue française informatisé
Dictionnaire de l’Académie francaise
Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales
Lexilogos (French)
Dictionnaires d’autrefois
Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
Real Academia dictionary (Spanish)
Diccionari català
Vocabolario Etimologico della Lingua Italiana
RAI Dizionario d’Ortografia e di Pronunzia (includes proper names)
Dizy: Il dizionario pratico con curiosità e informazioni utili
Dicționare ale limbii române
electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language
Cadhan Irish Dictionary (bridge to eDIL)
MacBain’s Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language (1911 edition)
Cornish dictionary online
Arak-29 (Armenian links)
Verb Conjugator
World Wide Words
Online Etymology Dictionary
Tower of Babel etymological database
Perseus Digital Library 4.0
Logeion (Greek-to-English and Latin-to-English dictionary search)
Greek language and linguistics
Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής [Modern Greek Dictionary] (comprehensive; includes etymologies)
LBG (Lexikon zur byzantinischen Gräzität = Lexicon of Byzantine Greek)
Orbis Latinus
Slovopedia (links to Russian dictionaries; sidebar has links to comparable pages for German, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Georgian, and Kazakh)
dic.academic.ru (Russian dictionary search)
ПоискСлов (Russian dictionary search)
Русский этимологический словарь (A.E. Anikin’s new Russian etymological dictionary, now on letter д)
etymolog.ruslang.ru (Russian etymology and word history links)
Philology.ru
Philolog.ru
Slavenitsa (converts from modern Russian to pre-reform orthography)
Minority Languages of Russia
Ru_slang (Russian)
Vasmer’s etymological dictionary(Russian)
Russian language links
Russian literature online
Национальный корпус русского языка (Corpus of the Russian Language)
Большой толково-фразеологический словарь Михельсона (1896-1912)
Словарь русских народных говоров [Russian dialect dictionary]
Старославянский словарь [Old Church Slavic dictionary]
Словарь русского языка XVIII в [Dictionary of 18th-c. Russian]
Russian Word of the Day
Ukrainian etymological dictionary
Речник на личните и фамилни имена у българите (Bulgarian names)
A Dictionary of Tocharian B (with etymologies)
Chinese Character Dictionary
Zhongwen.com
The Kanji Site
Mongolian/English dictionary
Digital Dictionaries of South Asia
Monier-Williams Sanskrit Dictionary
Nişanyan’s Turkish Etymological Dictionary
The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary
An ka taa (resources and lessons for Bambara, Dioula, Malinké, and Mandinka)
Movies listed by language at IMDB
Languages online
Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction
Speculative Grammarian
Word Oddities
Jan Freeman’s Boston Globe column
Character converter
Mailing list
Hattics mailing list
Visual pleasures
Nick Jainschigg’s blog
Citrus Moon
Ramage
Favorite rave review, by Teju Cole:
“Evidence that the internet is not as idiotic as it often looks. This site is called Language Hat and it deals with many issues of a linguistic flavor. It’s a beacon of attentiveness and crisp thinking, and an excellent substitute for the daily news.”
From “commonbeauty”
(Cole’s blog circa 2003)
All comments are copyright their original posters. Only messages signed “languagehat” are property of and attributable to languagehat.com. All other messages and opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily state or reflect those of languagehat.com. Languagehat.com does not endorse any potential defamatory opinions of readers, and readers should post opinions regarding third parties at their own risk. Languagehat.com reserves the right to alter or delete any questionable material posted on this site.
Copyright © 2024 · languagehat.com
I wouldn’t have known to pronounce any Graham any other way than /græm/, whether surname, given name, or cracker. Is this Martha-specific? Surname-specific? Or do you pronounce every instance of the word /ˈgrɛɪəm/?
Somewhere over here in Utah and Arizona, I have a cousin named Graham, and grew up eating graham crackers, and they both always rhymed with ham and clam. My environment also includes the standard pronunciation, but I think there must be a dialect about it.
I have always interpreted pronouncing Graham as “Gram” as a US thing? I’ve heard that for all uses of Graham – the Graham cracker, and also people’s names (a person in a workplace who all of us called “GRAY-um” was called “Gram” by the sole American)
I wouldn’t have known to pronounce any Graham any other way than /græm/
I’d probably have guessed a spelling pronunciation (not sure of the exact IPA equivalence), if I didn’t happen to remember that “Graham’s number” is translated as “число Грэма”, which corresponds to /græm/.
(On further consideration I remembered that Alexander Graham Bell is Александр Грейам Белл, where “Грейам” presumably corresponds to /ˈgrɛɪəm/ or something similar.)
/ˈgrɛɪəm/ is the only pronunciation I’ve ever come across.
I’ve always supposed it to be Scots; the clan name is (or might be) apparently from Gregham, wherever that may have been.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_Graham
I wondered about Gram Parsons, but I see that he was actually Ingram Cecil Connor III.
I wouldn’t have known to pronounce any Graham any other way than /græm/, whether surname, given name, or cracker. Is this Martha-specific? Surname-specific? Or do you pronounce every instance of the word /ˈgrɛɪəm/?
Every single one.
Somewhere over here in Utah and Arizona, I have a cousin named Graham, and grew up eating graham crackers, and they both always rhymed with ham and clam. My environment also includes the standard pronunciation, but I think there must be a dialect about it.
Apparently so! Once again I’ve learned something about my native language; now I’m wondering where the isoglosses are.
Born in Texas, lived in the South for 40+ years (now in the PNW) and it’s always been /græm/ and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it differently. My friend, a former professional dancer (ballet, modern, etc) specifically pronounced the “Graham” in “Martha Graham” as /græm/ so I would have felt like she would know.
Having said all that, it’s possible that I add a little extra after the /æ/ but I doubt most people would hear it.
The early 19th c Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham and Vaux, said his name Broom, and the light carriage named after him was a broom.
An American in my office always said Graeme in a way that sounded like ‘gram’ to me, but I would have guessed that it would have sounded like ‘Gray(u)m’ to you.
(There is a word for differences that don’t make a difference. Phonemic?)
A boy from NZ who worked for a while in my old office was always going to London to meet up with his cousin Bin.
Off the top of my head, the most famous public pronunciation of “Graham” that I can think of is Robin Williams in Birdcage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55Pnw-tEVek&t=1m05s
I only use gray-um for the name, never the cracker. In a hurry I might use Gram for the name
Wiktionary claims that /ˈɡɹeɪ.əm/ and /ɡɹæm/ both exist on both sides of the Atlantic, but other sources suggest that /ɡɹæm/ is Normal American (which accords with my idiolect) and the other one is Normal Foreign plus maybe a regional variant in the U.S. hat, do you pronounce “damn” in the regional-variant way suggested by the eye-dialect spelling “dayum”?
Separately, the “from Grantham” etymology would seem to be subject to the objection that No True Scotsman is from Lincolnshire?
hat, do you pronounce “damn” in the regional-variant way suggested by the eye-dialect spelling “dayum”?
Only when imitating a speaker of such a dialect. And the two-syllable Graham is certainly as Normal as the one-syllable one.
I learned the “gram” pronunciation growing up in California, but later somehow acquired the notion that “grayum” was the Only Correct Pronunciation, with the result that I’m now in a state of nervous cluelessness and do my best to avoid all people named Graham.
I say [gɹæːm] with a long vowel, perhaps as a token nod at the spelling.
@Jen: “Bin”? How’s that spelled?
@Bloix: So that’s what the car stickers mean, “My other car is a broom”!…
@Jen: “Bin”? How’s that spelled?
“Bin” is Ben with a Kiwi accent.
Thanks! I looked too far. I was imagining some long name, wildly reduced.
(When British English speakers hear “bin”, do they first think “rubbish bin”?)
Just to kill time, the weirdest dialect forms I remember from my childhood are “venchtables” = vegetables and “sanggwitches” = sandwiches. Not local, one kid only and I don’t know where from.
My fourth grade teacher had danced in Martha’s troupe when she was younger, and took us to see Martha Graham at the Kennedy Center in DC. She definitely pronounced the “Graham” in “Martha Graham” as /græm/. That is also how I pronounce the Graham in Graham Cracker.
The “/ˈgrɛɪəm/” pronunciation sounds Appalachian to me.
Kiwi joke: Q. What’s a Hindu? A. It lays iggs.
This would seem to be definitive for Graham:
https://www.youtube.com/marthagrahamdancecompany
Start at second 00:45.
But see this at 00:56.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH5fjgrXlzs
Didn’t Vanya just win the internet on this? The only thing more we could have more would be a notarized letter from Graham herself.
It never occurred to me that the h might be a lie before Stephen Colbert had to talk about Lindsey /ˈɡɹeɪ̯əm/.
The Grahamweckerl is named after an American, but gets a fully nativized spelling-pronunciation with /ˈɡraːham/. That makes it one of about four words with non-initial /h/.
Edit: And now I want one. *Homeric drool*
Never came across “venchtables” but “sangwich” would be pretty common in Ireland (where I grew up). Sometimes self mockingly in the phrase “hang sangwich” (for “ham sandwich”).
Sánguche is Spanish for ‘sandwich’ in southern South America, but that probably has to do with [gw] as the pronunciation of /w/ in loanwords.
@DM: And now I want one. A word with non-initial h?
Australian. Graeme and Graham are always the same, basically /ˈgrɛɪəm/ (or /ˈɡɹeɪ̯əm/). I wasn’t even aware that Americans or anyone else pronounced them as /græm/. The only ones I know who didn’t pronounce ‘Graham’ as /ˈgrɛɪəm/ were the Japanese, who said ‘gurahamu’.
Not ‘sangwich’ (/sæŋwɪtʃ/ for me. The pronunciation is ‘samwij’ /sæmwɪdʒ/.
Frank Gibbons: “sanggwitch” as I remember it from a mere 60 years ago had an “ng” sound followed by a hard “g” sound — sang+gwitch. is that the Irish?
Family name Craig, Catholic, could be not-too-distantly Irish.
John Emerson-
At 16:03 of this video, a former Graham dancer named Priscilla Birch, in an interview, clearly says Gray-em, two syllables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH5fjgrXlzs
and at 17:06, the actress Ann Jackson says it in two syllables as well.
You can also hear the New York Times dance critic say it with two syllables.
Jen, I’m an old person from Texas (always). “Graham” for me has always been closest to “ham” or “clam,” except that I remember learning Bell’s name as “Alexander Gra-am” (I don’t think it ever got as far as “gray-em.”) I also kind of hiccup on Lindsay’s last name, but the As are still the same as in “ham.”
But in Texas, “pin” and “pen” sound the same except when “pen” and “pan” sound the same. I’ve never gotten a handle on that. So Ben and Bin are the same unless there are 2 people under discussion and 1 of them is spelled Bin and folks want to differentiate. (The Ben gets more of the E sound. I can’t do fancy stuff with pronunciation.)
When British English speakers hear “bin”, do they first think “rubbish bin”?
The wheelie bin joke.
Kiwi joke: Q. What’s a Hindu? A. It lays iggs.
Substituting “eggs” for “iggs”, that works in the Southern U.S. too (minus New Orleans, plus Bakersfield, California, plus African American).
sangwich
A friend of mine, a native Floridian, says that, but I always say “samwich”.
@John Cowan
How did you manage to dig up a joke from 2008? !!!
(Actually, I’m wondering about this pronunciation. I think I always pronounced “been” as “bean”, never as “bin”, which sounds American to me. But I’m not AT ALL sure about this.)
OK, so some English dude from Grantham, Lincolnshire invaded Scotland and founded Clan Graham?
The American Merriam-Webster Dictionary gives the pronunciation as \ˈgrā-əm, ˈgra(-ə)m\ (/ˈɡreɪ.əm, ˈɡræ(.ə)m/ in IPA).
The Oxford English Dictionary and the Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation both list /ˈɡræm/ as a possible US pronunciation in addition to /ˈɡreɪ.əm/ which is the only UK pronunciation and the primary US pronunciation. The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary and the Cambridge Pronouncing Dictionary, both British but covering both UK and US pronunciations, only have /ˈɡreɪ.əm/ even for the US.
So the /ˈɡræm/ variant looks specific to the US. I wonder if it has to do with the sequence /eɪ.ə/ sounding a lot like raised /æ/ in American pronunciations with /æ/ raising (cf. eye-dialect “dayum” for “damn”) with the result that it was reanalyzed as /æ/ in Graham.
Compare crayon in American English, as here in Bert Vaux’s survey from 20 years ago:
http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_9.html
I’m not sure whether Bert did one for Graham.
Not quite on topic, but some vaguely similar sounds are involved: Cambridgeshire was once called Grantabridgeshire – a fact that was recently brought to my attention by Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, a very high budget video game with a lot of things of linguistic interest going on, including background characters running around screaming snippets of Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Latin, sometimes all in the same monastery mid-pillage…
quick research informs me that “Granta” and “Cam” were names for two different parts of the same river… I wonder if there’s any chance they were actually two versions of the same word?
Oh, and I meant to say – raised in California, I only knew the pronunciation “gram” for everything. If I were trying to sound fancy maybe I would say it with a slight pause in the middle, more like “gra-um”. The way British people say “Graham” sounds perversely drawn out to my ears, not unlike the Australian “no” which to me seems to sometimes have four or five syllables.
Alexander Graham Bell is Александр Грейам Белл
Alongside Грэм Грин (Henry Graham Greene).
The artistic director of the Martha Graham Dance Company (starting at about 0:48) certainly seems to be saying /græm/: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6friKSsHqs&feature=emb_logo
If you ask me the word’s pronunciation you might hear my full /ˈɡræ.əm/ effort, but ordinarily it rhymes with “clam”. The British given name I have in a different bucket, and I hadn’t realized that the U.S. surname can go the same way.
@ag
https://epns.nottingham.ac.uk/browse/id/53287310b47fc40c4f000001-Cambridge
“Initial Gr – became Cr – and the r was lost through distant dissimilation in the combination r –n –r in Crantebrigge . Cf. IPN 114. The only serious criticism of Skeat’s etymology, as originally put forward, was the absence of such forms as Crantebr ‘ and the invariable initial Gr – in Grantchester. The former, though still illustrated only by a solitary example, is now supported by Cantrebrigg and Cantelbrigg and by certain forms for Grantchester showing a similar development, Crantesete , Crauncestre , Cantesete and Gantesete and by Graudene for Croydon, Cret (t )on and Crytton for Girton, Crethowe for Grethowe (infra 177) and Crendon for Grendon (infra 87) and also Camelinga , etc. for Gamlingay infra 160.”
The link also gives a lot of written variants with dates attested.
Thanks, Paddy – now that I think of it, “Cantabrigian” is a Latin-ish adjective I’ve seen on signs in Cambridge, Mass., so some of the interim steps were kind of out there in the open already.
“Sandwich”–
I’ve heard both “sammitch” and “sammidj”, among others.
Neither of which I use myself.
“Graham”–
I’m with Bathrobe here. My cousin Graeme spent some years working in Japan. I must ask him what they called him.
I grew up in Delaware, and I pronounce the cracker, the inventor, and the choreographer all as /græm/. A family down the street from me here in Connecticut have a son, Graham, whose name is pronounced the same.
I’m aware of the other pronunciation but I don’t use it.
quick research informs me that “Granta” and “Cam” were names for two different parts of the same river… I wonder if there’s any chance they were actually two versions of the same word?
A quick look at the map should tell you the river through Grantham can’t be the same river through Cambridge. All the rivers in the Fens drain eastwards towards The Wash. To get from Grantham to Cambridge (roughly North to South) would require traversing oodles of them. (Oodling/oozing is chiefly what they do.)
Yes it seems the river through Cambridge has two names. Seems the town Grantham is not named for any river: “To the south of the town [of Grantham, (alleged) origin of the name Grahame], between Little Ponton and Saltersford, the River Witham flows through marshes and water meadows” [wikipedia].
There’s another River Witham much further South in Essex, near Wivenhoe/University of Essex.
Can’t believe the thread has got this far without mentioning Grantham is birthplace of Margaret Thatcher.
“hang sanger” has taken over from “hang sangwitch”; for non-ham sandwiches the usual abbreviation is “sambo”. Racial sensitivities may be chipping away at that, but O’Briens still sells its Shambo (sham = ‘shamrock’, not ‘fake’).
Absolutely. As a verb, “bin” means “put in the rubbish bin” or figuratively “discard, cancel plans for”. When I thought a Brazilian friend in Ireland had compared shiny black puffer jackets to “bean bags”, it turned out she meant “bin bags”.
The only thing I know about Grantham is that Sir Isaac Newton went to the King’s School there.
I pronounce it with a lengthened [ɛ]– more [grɛ:m] than [‘grɛɪəm]. My first (Californian) wife pronounced it [græm]. My present (Chilean) wife pronounces it with a definite [h]: [‘grɑhɑm].
The only thing I know about Grantham is that Sir Isaac Newton went to the King’s School there.
In addition, Mrs Thatcher’s father had his grocery there.
Late to this: As a boy I always said “Grayum Bell” but “Gram crackers.” The latter may have been influenced by advertising.
@Bathrobe – I (UK) certainly pronounced ‘been’ as ‘bin’ when speaking quickly. I’m sure I’ve seen it spelled that way in some 17th century poetry, but can’t lay my hands on an example with the original spelling.
A seemingly-British 20th century example of the eye-dialect spelling “bin” for “been” is the title of Donovan’s first LP (released May 1965): “What’s Bin Did and What’s Bin Hid.”
I’m however somewhat doubtful that the assumed pronunciation of “been” or the non-standard participles are supposed to represent the singer’s own natural idiolect versus some imagined Authentick-Rustick-Folkie register of English, and I’m unsure whether the latter was supposed to be identifiably British versus identifiably American (“Dylanesque,” one might say) versus strategically vague. The “bin” pronunciation is unremarkable in the US, but sometimes eye-dialect skips over that, as e.g. when “was” gets spelled “wuz” to indicate something colloquial or non-posh about the speaker even though formal/posh AmEng speakers standardly use the “wuz” pronunciation.
I certainly say /bɪn/ for unstressed “been” myself, and I am inauthentic, urban and unfolkie.
My vowel system is not altogether RP (though most people don’t notice), but in this respect I’m pretty sure it matches RP.
In this 1960 Nabisco commercial for Graham crackers, “Graham” has two syllables.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CizId2a0JE
But in this 1991 Nabisco commercial, it has one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpQmsR1YmPc
My personal anecdote: until this thread, I was never even conscious of the two-syllable pronunciation — and on many occasions the topic of Graham crackers has indeed come up in my classes. Educational tip: if you want to talk about the cultural climate in which Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass, a fun way is to mention the health lecturer after whom the cracker is named, Sylvester Graham (1794-1851). Graham taught that thinking is bad for women because it draws blood away from the uterus, while sex is bad for men because it draws blood away from the brain.
And speaking of the American nineteenth century, I get the impression that I’m the last living American who pronounces “forehead” to rhyme with “horrid,” as in the Longfellow poem. All the rest of you whippersnappers pronounce the word as spelled.
In this 1960 Nabisco commercial for Graham crackers, “Graham” has two syllables.
Aha, that’s from my formative period. So this is not just a geographical thing, it’s a generational one as well.
*shakes cane*
Re early spellings of bin for been, Bin seems to be a minority spelling for been in Donne’s prose (but you would really have to check various editions). Here are two examples from sermons.
From Sermon “Preached upon the Penitentiall Psalmes”
Some have bin so beaten out of all confidences in this world…
From Sermon “Preached upon Christmas day, at S. Pauls. 1625”
In that soul that acknowledgeth it self to have bin a sink of uncleannesse, a Tabernacle, a Synagogue of Satan…
…1.46% pronounced it the same as crown? How?!?!?
*lightbulb moment* Total monophthongization to [aː] is my guess.
That far back the value of i isn’t reliable. Fresh out of the Great Vowel Shift, Elizabeth I spelled deeds as dides.
I rhyme “forehead” with “horrid.” However, I cannot claim to be an American whippersnapper (nor indeed any kind of whippersnapper, nowadays. Eheu fugaces …)
There was a little girl,
And she had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.
It’s Longfellow! Who knew? (Well, Jonathan Morse did, obviously.)
Better than Hiawatha …
My introduction to Kiwi vowels was at the airport in Fiji where passengers on my flight were instructed to “please board the earcraft” after spending time in the dutyfree shop, where I bought a shortwave radio cassette recorder for my fieldwork in Papua New Guinea. My linguistics department had furnished me an ancient reel-to-reel recorder, which I was happy to return unused a year later.
I get the impression that I’m the last living American who pronounces “forehead” to rhyme with “horrid,” as in the Longfellow poem.
Like David Eddyshaw, I rhyme “forehead” with “horrid”, but then, neither of us is American. I think the spelling pronunciation has become very common in British English.
I know about the girl with the curl from childhood; I also saw she saw Esau kissing Kate. Everyone in my maternal line aspirates their whiches. Re dialect variations, I like (the political writer) Charles Pierce’s apparently New Orleans inflected `Presnit’ for our recenly ex head of government.
Does anyone pronounce Aaron with the first vowel any longer than its stress would warrant? In other words, does it exactly rhyme with Sharon?
I wish I’d gone to college in Gruntbridge. I think the history of American anti-intellectualism would be completely different.
@Y. I may (obviously self-consciousness always gets in the way of reliable data collection here) pronounce the first vowel in Aaron a little longer than I do the first vowel in Sharon. But if I do, I also pronounce the vowel in “air” a little longer than I do the vowel in “share” So I’m not sure that “longer than its stress would warrant” is the right way to phrase it because maybe there’s another variable in play here.
Ah! That’s a good point.
(What about care?)
Aaron and Sharon don’t rhyme at all for me, probably because of residual Britishness. Aaron has the ‘air’ vowel but Sharon has ‘pat,’ so it rhymes with Karen.
On the other hand, there was a young couple living near me a few years ago whose names were Aaron and Erin. They used to joke about how their names sounded exactly the same.
(Luckily for them, there has never been a law against homophonic marriage).
@Y: vowel length in “care” exactly the same for me as “square.” Same for “pair” and “tear” etc., which suggests that maybe it’s the lack of an initial consonant that gives the stressed vowel a little more room to stretch out?
IME everyone pronounces every Graham or Graeme [‘greiəm], whether that be Greene, Norton, Chapman or Garden. I’d never come across [græm] before reading this thread.
Aaron is generally [‘ɛərən] (or with ɛ: — the SQUARE vowel, anyway), though I once knew an Aaron (born in the late 90s, I’d guess) who pronounced his name [‘ærən], so, yes, to rhyme with Sharon.
No collection of perversions of sandwich would be complete without sarnie. This is the version I prefer as it’s the easiest to type.
I (English) still remember how to pronounce “forehead”. It might get reduced as far as [‘fɒrɪd] if I’m taking less care than usual, but normally it’s [‘fɒrɛd]. So it has an example of that rarity, an unreduced short vowel in an unstressed syllable. Like [‘kreiɒn].
In Hebrew, אַהֲרֹן ‘Aharon’ is, in careful pronunciation, /ahaˈron/. In casual pronunciation it’s /ˈaron/, with no lengthening of the /a/. In contrast, אָרוֹן /aˈron/ is ‘cupboard’. My mother, returning to her German-speaking household from the first day of kindergarten, was excited to report that there was a boy there called Schrank.
…where the /h/, moreover, precedes an unstressed vowel.
Just a few seconds ago I happened to hear Kohorte, where the second syllable is stressed, with a /h/ that lacked the aspiration, leaving the “voiced glottal approximant” thing you can hear here.
Yup, homophones given the rabbit-abbot and probably the merry-Mary merger, so in any case for most Americans and Canadians.
I’m surprised to learn that Karen is on the marry side of those without the marry-Mary merger, BTW.
Erin has Mary, not merry, since it’s from Irish Éirinn.
The “traditional” prescriptive pronunciation of forehead rhymes it with horrid. However, I don’t think it is clear that the pronunciation that is more common in America today is actually a innovated spelling pronunciation, rather than a survival. Saying it forrid was an innovation itself at one point, and I don’t think there is any evidence that the fore head pronunciation has not coexisted (among the lower social strata, perhaps) with the reduced version all along.
The same may also be true for the unreduced pronunciations of waistcoat and forecastle, among other words that English-speakers have supposedly “forgotten” how to pronounce.
Rowlocks!
Surely nobody who actually uses the word “forecastle” says it any other way than “fo’csle”?
Same with “boatswain” and “gunwale.”
“Waistcoat” I’ll concede.
The evidently-common US pronunciation of “Graham” as [græm] goes some way towards explaining the peculiar orthography of the name of the lamentable racist Laura Ingraham.
On a happier note, I intend to work in as many casual conversational references to Martha [græm] as possible going forward, in the hope that people will attempt to correct me and I can demonstrate my linguistic superiority and all-round greater cultural sensitivity by confuting them.
@David Eddyshaw: You can actually find the spelling “fore-castle” only a couple hundred years ago, I think. That doesn’t necessarily mean the unreduced pronunciation is actually a survival, but it does raise the possibility. You are almost certainly right about gunwales and boatswain though; their reduced pronunciations are older and probably really were universal (except, obviously, among the continuously renewed crop of unacquainted readers).
Breeches. Victuals.
Victuals is like island, with an intrusive consonant (modeled after the Latin) inserted into the “preferred” spelling of a word that had, at the time, never been pronounced with that consonant in English. (Maybe the intrusion is ever-so-slightly less bad in the case of vittles, since that word does ultimately come to English from Romance; whereas iland is old-fashioned common Germanic.)
I’ve always imagined that catsup gained its popularity over ketchup by those who thought it somehow more refined.
i’m a cantabrigian by birth (the massachusetts kind), though my family ‘lect is newyorkish. nothing but [græm] in my world (okay, maybe with a touch of the FUN vowel before the closing consonant sometimes)…
for me, the aarons, sharons, karens, erins, et al (and the ariel(le)s, too) are a case of the “listen carefully for where the person puts themself in the merry/marry/mary triangle, and follow suit”. they all seem to come in all varieties, which is convenient for telling them apart (at least for unmerged types like me)…
and i do spend time on boats, so i can attest to gunls and foksls (in YIVO transliteration, of course), though i’ve never been on anything large enough to have a bosun).
How do the US Mary/merry/marry-non-mergerers among you pronounce Cary (Grant)? I always thought he belonged with the Marys, but I seem to hear Americans pronounce it like Carrie (Fisher).
The last couple of generations of Irish Aarons (and there have really only been a couple of generations of them at most) seem to be pronounced like Aran (Islands) (TRAP). My secondary-school-age daughter has never heard anyone but me say it with the SQUARE vowel.
“fo’csle”
When I first noticed apostrophes in names of extraterrestrials, my first idea was that authors imitate words (transcriptions) from human foreign langauages, where those mean glottal stops…
If their inspiration is eye dialect, do they too feel an instinctive urge to say /foʔksl/, /foʔkʔsl/ and /foʔkʔsʔl/?
Burchfield’s Fowler has an entry spelt fo’c’sle, but under apostrophe spells the same word fo’c’s’le. How does one mark the place in a word where one has omitted an apostrophe?
That’s too few apostrophes; why not fo’c’s’l’?
Looks especially good in single quotes: “I said ‘fo’c’s’l’.’”
Thanks for taking some notice of me! The name’s Graham, pronounced /ˈgrɛɪəm/. Or at least that’s how it’s always pronounced here in the UK, with the usual regional variations, as for example /ˈgre:əm/ in Scotland. Abroad I have been called /ˈgrɛxam/, /ˈgrɛɪham/, /ˈgra:ham/, and many other things, but that’s another matter.
The pronunciation of the spelling variant Graeme is exactly the same.
How does one mark the place in a word where one has omitted an apostrophe?
By including the omitted apostrophe in square brackets, and adding an attribution, like so: [‘, ed.]
In Russian such words are simply Dutch or Low German.
-sl, just with palatalized s and l and front reduced vowel in between means “sail”.
fok-machta is foremast, and fok is foresail.
*foksl could mean the foresail in Russian, from Dutch fokkenzeil (whcih does not mean fucking sail).
The genitive plural of ‘fo’c’s’l'’ would be ‘fo’c’s’l’s’’.
P.S. it is written -sel, of course, as in стаксель. I just meant, it is a reduced vowel there, like in focsl.
The genitive plural of ‘fo’c’s’l” would be ‘fo’c’s’l’s”.
As a copyeditor, I’m afraid I must correct you: the genitive plural of ‘fo’c’s’l’ would be ‘fo’c’s’ls’.’
Then maybe fo’c’s’l’s is a name for a bar.
“Raise foksel-moksel!” shouted Captain Wrongel.
“Aye, aye, Captain” responded first mate Lom.
Then maybe fo’c’s’l’s is a name for a bar.
And a great one it would be — I’d happily drink there.
Stu: as in “Hawai‘ [i.e. ’] i”, or more concisely, “Hawai‘[“‘”]i”.
I meant: “Hawai’ [i.e. ‘] i”, or more concisely, “Hawai‘[“’”]i”
Y said “I meant: ‘Hawai’ [i.e. ‘] i’, or more concisely, ‘Hawai‘[‘’’]i’.”
Y said ‘[“’”]’, not “[‘’’]”
P.S. sigh
P.P.S. «[“’”]»
Space shuttles have blown up on smaller mistakes, guys.
Don’t forget the New Yorker cartoon of a sailor with a diary asking another sailor, “How many apostrophes in ‘fo’c’sle’?”
Things could be worse, and around 1900 they became so when some major American publishers decided that contractions like “don’t” should be spaced out as “do n’t.” That was approximately when George Bernard Shaw pointed out that “shan’t” ought logically to be “sha ‘ ‘ n ‘ t.”
Christ, what an asshole.
“don’t” should be spaced out as “do n’t”
Not merely pedantry, but incorrect pedantry …
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/244421136_Cliticization_vs_Inflection_English_N'T
Refudiating even.
All parents of Graemes, and all parents of Jaimes who are actually Jamies, ought to be tarred & feathered.
Discuss.
Who’d’a’ thunk it.
No, you missed my correction — that’s the genitive singular. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Graeme and Graham have two syllables. The former is correct, according to our side of the family. This was the sort of thing that would regularly be argued over with an uncle-by-marriage, until one of the last times it came up, when he’d had to dig out his birth certificate and found out that he’d been a Graeme all along.
My siblings and I also liked to laugh at my father’s weird pronunciation of Aaron (air-), but he’s had to shift since one of us didn’t think of that issue when naming one of his grandsons…
Speaking of pedantry (as you were, David Eddyshaw), I see that the rules for spacing out contractions in e.g. Scribners’ house style were more complicated than I thought. At
https://archive.org/details/houseofmirth1908whar/page/11/mode/1up
you’ll find a page from a 1908 printing of The House of Mirth which spaces “it ‘s” and “that ‘s” and “have n’t” but actually not “don’t.”
But Brett, you weren’t overlooking a George Bernard Shaw irony, were you? Look at all the missing apostrophes in e.g. Pygmalion and read what Shaw had to say about that unfortunate punctuation mark. He was on your side! Executive summary of his position: except (at a charitable maximum) for some trivial pronoun ambiguities like I’ll/ill and we’ll/well, the apostrophe is almost always unnecessary. Pedantry continued: online, Shaw’s preface (where some of this is spelled out) is to the first, 1916, edition of the play. But for the 1941 Penguin edition he revised and improved.
Two more anecdotes about apostrophes: Emily Dickinson generally omitted them except as a phonetic marker in polysyllables like “is’nt.” And Lewis Carroll, who of course was a professional logician, used to apostrophize “ca’n’t” to its logical extreme.
my father’s weird pronunciation of Aaron (air-)
Same as mine, and therefore correct. In fact, by the same token, the only correct pronunciation …
I suspect that the dividing line here is in reality between the dwindling band of those familiar with the names of Moses’ siblings, and everyone else, for whom the name has no particular extraneous associations and is basically Modern, Hip and Happening.
Ca’n’t and sha’n’t are certainly logical. I’ve a feeling I’ve seen them elsewhere than in Carroll.
The true monstrosity is the l in could. I can see no excuse for it at all.
“that’s the genitive singular” — no, it’s not.
n.s. fo’c’s’l’ — g.s. fo’c’s’l’’s — n.pl. fo’c’s’l’s — g. pl. fo’c’s’l’s’
using single-quotes instead of double-quotes or italics for mention was My Little Joke, like the double apostrophe in the g.s. just now.
To answer drasvi’s question: No, I doubt that anyone who learns to read with sentences like “Mary’s isn’t” is tempted to pronounce “fo’c’s’le” with glottal stops.
using single-quotes instead of double-quotes or italics for mention was My Little Joke, like the double apostrophe in the g.s. just now.
Argh, out-pedanted! I shall pierce myself with an apostrophe.
I always thought he belonged with the Marys, but I seem to hear Americans pronounce it like Carrie (Fisher).
Speaking as a non-merger American, yes Cary is pronounced like Carrie (the “marry” vowel). My sister-in-law is Keri and I pronounce that with the “merry” vowel.
Not sure she herself does though, she is a merger.
Forehead is a word I learned early on when I first started learning English in the US around age 8. It appeared in a story I was reading for school, and as I was not familiar with it my father taught me the word, using the pronunciation from the dictionary.
I distinctly remember being confused by his pronunciation because the story had a character mishearing forehead as four heads, which didn’t seem likely the way my father said it. I had an inkling that some people might say forehead more like it’s spelled.
To this day, I pronounce it [ˈfɔːrɪd], even though I’ve come to be familiar with the spelling pronunciation since then. I say fore- the same way as when it stands on its own and only reduce the -head. As a result, it doesn’t rhyme with horrid for me in my natural pronunciation, as I use the LOT vowel for the latter.
Here’s one subtlety about the Mary/marry/merry split-or-merger and how it may not map onto words like Aaron/Sharon – it seems to assume, at least for the minority of AmEng speakers who do not have a full merger, an analysis of Mary/marry/merry in which the /r/ is the initial consonant of the second syllable rather than the final consonant of the first syllable. That’s a fine and perhaps sometimes blurry-in-practice distinction, but still a coherent one. By contrast, for me at least the /r/ is definitely part of the first syllable not the second one in names like Aaron and Sharon. The standard Wells lexical sets give the SQUARE vowel in GenAm as the GenAm DRESS vowel + /r/, and don’t have either the TRAP vowel or the FACE vowel as combinable (in GenAm) with /r/ for the vowel in an /r/-final syllable.
for me at least the /r/ is definitely part of the first syllable not the second one in names like Aaron and Sharon
Interesting, what are you basing that on? (I don’t mean that as a rhetorical question, in case internet communication makes that ambiguous)
My sense is that non-rhotic accents and their kindred pronounce these words that way. They’re dropping the end-of-syllable r and pronouncing it at the beginning of the next.
Here in Washington, DC, there’s an Ingraham Street in an alphabetical run of streets with three-syllable names, so there’s some question about how to pronounce it.
Bret in “Flight of the Conchords” had a similar problem.
I can’t agree with that – the conversations where we laughed about Dad’s pronunciation were definitely about Moses’ brother, and I specifically remember being surprised that it didn’t match what I remembered from other people on the same topic. You suspicion sounds very plausible in terms of how the newer version came about, but I think it must have crossed that line pretty quickly in my circles.
@ə de vivre: I’m basing that on introspection about my own idiolect (always a hazardous endeavor!) combined with reference sources such as this one, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aaron, which assigns the /r/ to the first syllable in both pronunciations listed under GenAm, but rather interestingly offers one RP option where the /r/ finishes the first syllable and another where it begins the second syllable.
Merriam-Webster syllabifies it, ˈer-ən. OED has British /ˈɛːrən/ or /ˈɛːrn̩/, U.S. /ˈɛrən/, and doesn’t show syllabification. It does have another meaning, ‘The wild arum or cuckoo pint, Arum maculatum‘ (by folk etymology, historical and rare).
(The plant has a great variety of English names, some suggesting reproductive organs, q.v. the thread next door.)
I prefer to say that “forehead” rhymes with “torrid”.
I thought “forrid” was still pretty standard in Australia until I watched a video on a Qantas flight where the narrator said “fore head” (don’t remember the context).
Forehead rhymes with torrid but not with horrid for me. The base layer of my English was laid in northern New Jersey, where horrible has the LOT vowel, so I also apply that to horrid. But torrid is a word I picked up later in life; I’m not sure how it is pronounced in North Jersey. I probably would rhyme torrid and horrid if I was drifting into a more British accent though and merging the CLOTH set with LOT.
As for Aaron, the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary says that it is traditionally ˈeər ən in BrE and still usually so for the biblical character, but the personal name may nowadays be either ˈeər ən or ˈær ən.
Since the syllabification of Aaron is being discusses, the first of the “Mr. Garvey” sketches by Key and Peele (or really just Key, in this case) seems relevant.
I’m too late to this post for comments about the pronunciation of “Graham” to still be relevant, but I always pronounced it /græm/ until, quite a few years ago, when I moved to a part of Brooklyn near the intersection of Graham & Grand and I lived on a street with Graham as one of its cross streets. I quickly learned, when ordering food, to call it /ˈgrɛɪəm/ (or even /ˈgrɛɪhæm/), or else who knows where my food would have ended up. It didn’t help that I lived on Meserole St, & that there’s a nearby Meserole Ave which almost intersects with Graham. But I don’t live there anymore, so I’m back to /græm/ now.
I wonder if the use of Arran as a name pushes Aaron towards the air- pronunciation.
—
(random musings)
You can be called Lewis, Harris, Skye, Iona, Coll or Arran, but probably not Uist, Benbecula, Mull, Tiree, Rhum, Muck, Eigg or Gigha.
Barra seems plausible, although I don’t think I’ve come across it, but Canna is probably ruled out on semantic grounds. I’ve come across Jura for dogs, but not for people. I’m not sure if Isla is for the island or the glen or something else, although the island is often pronounced that way.
I know someone called Ross whose brother is called Kyle, but he assured me their mother wasn’t a geographer…
Merriam-Webster syllabifies it, ˈer-ən.
Really? That seems an extremely odd syllabification for English, or indeed any familiar language – apart from Arrernte.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrernte_language#Phonotactics
Evidently the matter is umstritten:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology#Syllable_structure
@Jen
Some of the names you dismiss are well established among the lesser nobility, e.g. Lord Muck, Mull of Kintyre.
More seriously, Barra is used as a given name in Ireland, but would have a different origin. There is also de Barra = (de/du) Barry.
From DE’s Arrernte link: “Peter Sculthorpe’s music theatre work Rites of Passage (1972–73) is written partly in Arrernte and partly in Latin.” How has that never come up here before??
Huh, so even in Arrernte there’s a need for Ominous Latin Chanting.
It has more recently been argued that it’s much simpler to analyze Arrernte in terms of boring old CV syllables. The “rabbit talk” language game simply shouldn’t be interpreted as moving syllables around, but as moving rhymes around.
Syllabification in English is much more complex and multilayered in any case, but I recommend starting here.
…are you telling us he didn’t know his legal name?
@dm
Re not knowing one’s own name, you know of course that the UK does not have a personal ID or residency registration system. I am not sure if a person would be obliged to provide a birth certificate in order to obtain a legal document like a passport, driving or marriage license in a particular name. Of course in circumstances where these documents do not match one another, name on tax form or birth cert, etc., a person may be suspected of fraud. So some care is required.
In Ireland (and perhaps in England Wales and Northern Ireland) under common law your legal name is the name you are generally known by, not necessarily the name on your birth cert, drivers licence or passport. However, such official documents are prima facie evidence of your legal name. If you want a new passport to have a different name from the one on your old passport the authorities may ask you for proof of change of name. A deed poll is one such proof, but I imagine a statement sworn by your parish priest stamped by a Peace Commissioner would work just as well. Alternative you can add your new name as an aka in the passport’s “remarks” section.
It is still the custom for State Ceremonials, Irish Republicans and the Gaelic Athletic Association to Gaelicise/de-Anglicise personal names in Irish-language texts. There have been some questions about allowing people to have both English and Irish versions of their name on official documents, e.g.
https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2009-02-10.1502.0
https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2010-01-19.2679.0
https://www.kildarestreet.com/wrans/?id=2014-02-18a.1922
Some people have English on some documents and Irish on others, which is may strictly speaking be illegal if common law assumes you are “generally known by” only one name. The practice may in some cases be used fraudulently e.g. to claim two welfare payments, but OTOH clamping down on it would be politically unfeasible.
@Jen: ben becula is definitely a minor figure who shows up somewhere in the palestinian talmud.
Ow!
I was thinking of someone like Ben Gazzara, but this is better. In fact he, too, could be an obscure Talmudic figure, too.
Ah.
I’d probably have thought of Benbecula as something you’d expect to see in the Monster Manual. “Oh no, it’s a Venomous Benbecula!”
The Talmudic option is neat, though.
but Canna is probably ruled out on semantic grounds
I don’t see why not. It’s listed on several baby name websites, and there’s even a saint.
I agree about Muck, Eigg, and Gigha, though. Mull, Tiree and Rhum have a good fantasy-hero feel, but I’m not sure if they would work in a 20th or 21st century setting. I can’t think of a way to pronounce “Uist” without utterly breaking English phonotactics.
I can’t recall having ever heard of anyone named Coll; for me it’s another candidate for the fantasy-hero category. (To a lesser extent so is Barra. Jura is either a German forest or a weird respelling of Yura. Arran, at least, sounds realistically modern.)
@January First-of-May: Coll is a major character in Lloyd Alexander’s children’s fantasy series The Chronicles of Prydain. The teenaged protagonist, Taran, initially has a hard time comprehending that bald, middle-aged farmer Coll is actually one of the greatest heroes of the realm.
Rhun is also a lesser, albeit important, character. He shows first how a callow, vainglorious youth can grow to be a man when it matters, and shortly thereafter that even heroes can die.
mollymooly: There have been some questions about allowing people to have both English and Irish versions of their name on official documents
During WWII my mother worked in intelligence. I never found out most of what she did, but she did tell me about The Case of the Missing Internee. This was in an internment camp for people of questionable citizenship. A number of the internees were of Chinese background. (I suppose they may have been from places that were under Japanese control, such as Taiwan or Manchuria.)
The problem was that every time they called the roll, everyone was there, but when they did a headcount, there was always one person missing.
My mother asked “Do you think that one of them has both a Cantonese and a Mandarin name?” Consternation ensued, and the problem was eventually cleared up. Maybe not that particular combination of languages, but that was the concept.
Kenneth Grahame is /ˈɡreɪ.əm/.
…are you telling us he didn’t know his legal name?
I am a bit confused about how he had managed to get things like a passport with a spelling different to his birth certificate, but I guess once the change has happened on one form of identification, it can fairly easily be propogated.
@maidhc: there is an apocryphal story that when Pádraic Ó Conaire worked for the English Board of Education he entered a promotion competition and requested Irish as his language exam; the examiners asked Douglas Hyde to set the paper but he declined and recommended one Patrick Conroy instead. So Patrick Conroy set the exam and Pádraic Ó Conaire passed with flying colours.
I had a friend working in a somewhat esoteric field who had to pass a professional examination in circumstances in which it was fairly clear to all parties that he knew more about the subject than any of the examiners did.
I can only be thankful that I have never been placed in such an awkward position myself.
Graham commercial: if your nerve forces need to be vitalized or you’re a man perilously engaged to a woman or a horse, visit Glasgow and
https://jonathanmorse.blog/2021/01/27/you-republicans-and-your-underwear/
Non-US readers, Dr. Alcott would be Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May and head-in-the-clouds Transcendentalist. About the goings-on at his Fruitlands commune, the LH news is
http://www.alcott.net/cgi-bin/home/champions/Larned.html
Has Graham Central Station been mentioned?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ck4AlFfu5pM
@J1M: “uist”, like the card game, no?
once the change has happened on one form of identification, it can fairly easily be propogated
My friend Ronald Joseph H― aka Joseph Ronald H―..
I was thinking that Paul Nurse was an example of someone who didn’t know his legal name, but on checking I see it wasn’t quite that. He didn’t know that his “sister” was actually his mother.
If he had graduated from Birmingham University a year later than he did, or if I had become a lecturer at Birmingham University a year earlier than I did, I could claim to have taught a Nobel Prizewinner. Alas, no.
I returned to this thread specifically to read about this point. Curiously, there is another example not a million miles from Cambridge. The principal river that flows through Oxford is called the Thames everywhere except where it flows through Oxford, where it is called the Isis.
A cousin of my father’s was in charge of the supply of water to Bristol during the war. After it was bombed one night he was able to get the water flowing again within a few hours. It was bombed again the next night and again he was able to get the water flowing again within a few hours. He said afterwards that if they had been bombed a third time the problem would have been insoluble, but fortunately the Germans had never heard the expression Third Time Lucky.
Anyway, he had to take an exam once after the war that he found absurdly easy. He had three hours to do it, but finished in about 20 minutes. When he went to hand in his paper the invigilator said surely he could have found some questions he could answer. “I’ve finished the damn thing,” he said.
The principal river that flows through Oxford is called the Thames everywhere except where it flows through Oxford, where it is called the Isis.
Huh. If I ever knew that, I’d forgotten; I just assumed the Isis was a little local river.
At one time, New York City-ites called the Hudson River, which is to the west of Manhattan and flows south[*], the North River, because it would lead north if you followed it. The tidal strait to the east of Manhattan is called the East River until it reaches Harlem, at which point it becomes the Harlem River until it joins with the Hudson/North River.
[*] In principle and net-net, that is. The river is tidal for 153 miles (246 km) north of the outflow, and that only because the tide is stopped there by the Federal Dam in Troy, NY. Although the river is fairly flat and slow-moving, by some definitions the Hudson is the most southerly fjord in the world: indeed, the Hudson Canyon is a submarine canyon about 400 miles (640 km) southeastward from the river’s mouth to the edge of the continental shelf (the Ice Age shoreline) where it drops off into the abyss. For comparison, the canyon is about the size of the Grand Canyon (of the Colorado), and it has several distributaries.
I met some people in Oxford who claimed that Isis was the correct name for the river flowing through town down to the confluence with the Thame a few miles further downstream. It seems that some Oxford scholar was beguiled by the equation Thames = Thame+Isis and persuaded his peers and the Ordnance Survey, but people in other places didn’t take the bait.
In any case, people who think it’s the Isis mostly live in Oxford, but they think the name applies to all of the upper reach, not just the bit there.
Next British tabloid headline:
ISIS ADHERENTS RULE OXFORD!
I can only be thankful that I have never been placed in such an awkward position myself.
Which side is more awkward?
I didn’t know the Isis was the Thames flowing through Oxford either. It seems all the stranger now that television ‘s Inspector Morse, based in Oxford, was with the “Thames Valley” police.
Which side is more awkward?
The examinee’s.
Personally, I’m fine with examinees knowing more than me … (perhaps a minimal requirement to pass?)
Though it puts me in mind of a friend talking about when he was examining in medical vivas for the Royal College for the first time.
“I was so anxious that I could hardly sleep the night before. I thought, these candidates are not stupid, and they will have been spending all their free time studying and revising for months. I’ll ask a question and they’ll run with it and it’ll soon be clear that I know much less than they do about it and I’ll look like a complete idiot in front of the other examiner.
“But in the event, I discovered, to my great relief, that most of the candidates were so paralysed with nerves that they had great difficulty in answering even the simplest questions …”
Has the following been noted above?
The New Zealand English merger of Ben (= short form of Benjamin) and bin (recipient, etc.) is an example of the Pin-Pen Merger, which is frequent in parts of the American South too:
Kinntuckuh, Tinnesee, the Sinnate of the United States, Sinnator Jones, and so on (that is, before /n/).
More here: https://ils.unc.edu/afporch/audio/dialect/41.html
I came here to comment on another nautical term with a traditionally reduced pronunciation: bowline. I had also noticed, long ago, the similarity between the names of the bowline and the sheet bend knots. In fact, they are pretty much the same knot. A sheet bend is used to tie two lines of unequal sizes together (whereas a square knot is slightly better with lines of the same weight) and gets its name from its use in tying lines to the corners of sails. For old-fashioned canvas sails, without grommets, a sailor would coil up the corner of the cloth into a rope-like roll and attach a line to that with a sheet bend. The bowline is nothing more than a sheet bend of a line to itself. This seems to explain the parallelism of the names—bowing a line or bending a sheet; presumably the difference in morpheme orders is just contingent happenstance.
Moreover, I also noticed that I had failed to clarify something else above. In the exchange with Jonathan Morse involving Shaw, I was alluding to the meme that any New Yorker cartoon can be improved by changing the caption to, “Christ, what an asshole.”
gets its name from its use in tying lines to the corners of sails
There’s a thing about sails/their control lines: you need to release those lines temporarily when tacking/gybing, whereupon they ‘flog’ until you can sheet in on the new tack. Reef knots (aka ‘square knots’) will work loose; sheet bends stay locked. So even if you’re tying two ropes of same weight, don’t use a reef knot if the line is going to be alternately under tension then loose.
Bowlines also need to stay locked: their most vital use is around your body/under your arms when being pulled from the sea: a knot that slips would slice you in half.
Topologically, yes a bowline is a sheet bend on its own ‘standing end’, used as the loop. I’m not convinced that coincidence is enough to constitute any sort of etymological explanation. You tie a bowline by grabbing the free end and looping it back on itself. (Another key feature in the ‘vital use’ is you can do this with a single hand without needing to let go whatever piece of flotsam is currently stopping you getting washed away. Trying to form a loop and threading the free end through it needs — em — an unavailable number of hands.)
A bend is a type of knot used to join two lengths of rope. A bowline is not a ‘bend’; it is tied on a single line as a ‘bow’ of the standing end.
the similarity between the names of the bowline and the sheet bend knots.
Hmm? What similarity/parallelism — specifically of names? There are a bazillion knots/a bazillion names. I’m not seeing those two are especially close.
bowing a line
as a ‘bow’ of the standing end
Correcting myself: the ‘bow’ bou, boue, from a source such as Old Norse bogr, Middle Low German boog, Middle Dutch boech in bowline refers to the front of the ship [**]; _not_ Middle English bowe, from Old English boga, Proto-West Germanic *bogō , as in archery or a bend in a linear formation. Although both ultimately from PIE root *bheug- “to bend.”, “to bind, tie”.
[**] That is, on a Square-rigger when sailing close to the wind, you need to hold the front-facing edge of the sail tight. Wiktionary on bowline is questionable: that edge is called the ‘luff’ when front-facing; not ‘leech’ — which is when it’s stern-facing. (And then you go about, and all is reversed.) ‘leech’ from PIE *leyǵ- ‘to bind’.
Much-binding …
Compare crayon in American English, as here in Bert Vaux’s survey from 20 years ago:
http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_9.html
I’m not sure whether Bert did one for Graham.
Since this thread has been revived, I’ll mention that the other word like that (that I know of) is “mayonnaise”, often pronounced [‘mæənɛɪz] or [‘mæ:nɛɪz] or [‘mænɛɪz] or things like that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_American_English
See under diphthongs
Are the diphthongs you hear really different in the first and “third” syllables? You may be hearing the same diphthong and interpreting it two ways, because it is intermediate.
I don’t see why you’re suggesting Southern AmE, since the maps of “crayon” linked above show the one-syllable monophthongal pronunciation concentrated in the North (as self-reported), and analogous pronunciations of “mayonnaise” might have a similar distribution. But I don’t have linguistic training and I may be misinterpreting what I’ve heard. This isn’t a good time for me to search for examples on line, but I might get back to you in a couple days, or you could search.
”I just heard a radio announcer pronounce Martha Graham’s surname as /græm/ (like “gram”); the only pronunciation given in the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary, and the only one I remember hearing, is /ˈgrɛɪəm/ (“GRAY-um”). Is this a dialectal thing or his own idiosyncrasy”
Many, many moons ago I used to study dance somewhat seriously, including modern dance. I always heard Martha Graham’s last name pronounced as /græm/ like “gram.”
This was in my my hometown of beautiful Santa Barbara, California. It just so happens that Ms. Graham also grew up in Santa Barbara as a teenager, long enough for me to consider her a “hometown girl” so I suspect the pronunciation that I heard there is the one her family used but at the very least I can tell you firsthand that it’s the one her town uses.
Thanks! My family lived in beautiful Santa Barbara for many years (and in fact my younger brother is still there), so I am glad to know that.
@jf
https://youtu.be/gBgr1WlStys
–Alabama same phoneme
–Louisiana different phoneme (but first syllable pronounced as in French)
https://youtu.be/tqYILk5_dH0
Buffalo (about 1.00) I am unable to distinguish the two phonemes reliably, is your hearing better?
https://youtu.be/bXo5XWTNdOY
Houston (with S US admixture, as she explains) same phoneme
https://youtu.be/xEyU1mvEQtE
Mass (about 0.48) strongly feel both phonemes are the same, but again your hearing might be better
The reason I gave S US link was that some features are shared wih S Midlands and/or S West (since you are from or based there, I thought you might have heard this there).
The New Zealander I’ve heard up close simply has [e] for DRESS – not [ɪ].
…which reminds me of this startling occurrence of [e] for i in Ukrainian.
…but more recently he mocked him with something called a GRAHAM SLAHAM.
@PlasticPaddy:
You were right to look at the South. Contrary to my guess based on “crayon”, self-reported “mannaise” is mostly in the South.
I don’t think we need to worry about the possibility that my ear is better than yours.
Edit: Your Buffalo guy sounds to me as if there’s some difference between the first and third syllables.
I listened to YouTube demonstrations of making chicken salad, which were mostly Southern. (Is there a reason for that? Chicken salad was quite familiar to me in my childhood in northeastern Ohio, which is distinctly Northern.) In almost all, the vowels in the first and third syllables sound the same to me.
In this one, I listened to three examples. The one around 0:36 sounds monophthongal to me, like what I’m talking about. The one about 4:30 a bit less so. (Just after that he says “paprika” with a schwa before the /r/, which I don’t remember hearing before.) The one around 5:28 sounds iike what I’m talking about again.
In this one, around 4:30, I also think I hear something different in the first syllable from the third (or two-and-a-halfth). What do you think?
@jf
Sorry for not replying earlier. I am not sure I can distinguish the two “a” phonemes. But I have no training in phonetics. I may be hearing what I want to hear. I do not think there is an environment in English where you could predict that the two phonemes would be different. Playmate, haymaker, payrate, daycare-same (except maybe the sound of the a in front of the r in daycare may be affected by the r). For the Louisiana speaker I really feel the environment is interference from Creole or French, and the first a is anomalously pronounced as in one of those other languages.
I hear a difference in the first and “second” syllables for the Massachusetts guy as well. I may be hearing what I want to hear as well. What I hear is an AT vowel.
I knew a guy, Chicago born with an Irish parent, who said a two-syllable MAY-NAYZ.
@PP: Since neither of us has any training, and @Ryan isn’t sure, we may have to wait for someone with training (or spectrogram software) to weigh in.
The only environment where this monophthonging happens, to the extent that it does, seems to be when followed by a schwa (followed in turn by a nasal?), as in “graham”, “crayon”, and “mayonnaise”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in “rayon”, but people don’t talk about rayon much any more.
Actually I think I’ve heard “sail” and “sale” pronounced in a way that sounded like “sell” to me. That might be a reaction to pronunciations like mine, in which “sail” and “sale” are each two syllables.
It’s interesting that the distribution of one-syllable “crayon” is so different from that of two-syllable “mayonnaise”. I think. It would be quite helpful if I could tell the red from the green on the those maps. Deuteranomaly is not a book of the Bible.
Anyway, I completely agree that the Louisiana pronunciation in that video is influenced by Louisiana French. Compare Lafayette Square in New Orleans, with the second syllable like “fie”, not “fay”.
@Ryan: Thanks for listening to the examples. I think I may have heard “MAY-NAYZ” from someone or other.
Actually I think I’ve heard “sail” and “sale” pronounced in a way that sounded like “sell” to me.
Also, notably, Yale.