I was looking at Martin Seymour-Smith’s discussion of Nietzsche in his (superb and superbly opinionated) Guide to Modern World Literature — I have the 1973 first edition — when I came across this: “Nietzsche could be strident, even horrisonous; but he is a key figure.” Horrisonous! This is why it’s good to have poets writing about literature. OED:
horrisonous, adj.
Etymology: < Latin horrisonus (< stem of horrēre + -sonus sounding) + -ous suffix.
Previous versions of the OED give the stress as: hoˈrrisonous.= horrisonant adj.
1631 J. Mabbe tr. F. de Rojas Spanish Bawd vii. 84 Words of most horrisonous roaring.
1901 Daily Chron. 31 Dec. 5/1 Sophie oft wakes on my snorting horrisonous.
1962 L. Deighton Ipcress File xv. 91 I listened to the ululating wail and horrisonous mewl.
They should add the Seymour-Smith quote to the citations. And if you’re wondering about horrisonant, it’s “< stem of Latin horrēre (see horripilation n.) + sonānt-em sounding” and means “Sounding horribly; of terrible sound.” The citations:
1656 T. Blount Glossographia Horrisonant, roaring, having a terrible sound.
1709 Brit. Apollo 2–4 Nov. A Multiplicity of Horisonant Phrases.
1772 T. Nugent tr. J. F. de Isla Hist. Friar Gerund II. 97 The horrisonant bam, bim, bom, of the bombs resounded throughout all the fields.
1835 R. Southey Doctor III. 106 To exact implicit and profound belief, by mysterious and horrisonant terms.
You gotta love “The horrisonant bam, bim, bom, of the bombs.”
I like it just as much as horripilation.
Exactly! Those grandiloquent Latinisms can easily be overdone, but in moderation they are splendiferous.
No etymological connection to “orison,” it would appear.
No, it’s like eneolithic and neolithic.
The whole passage, full of latinajos, from the Historia del famoso predicador fray Gerundio de Campazas of José Francisco de Isla is amusing:
The translation by Thomas Nugent equals (stridulous volatiles) the original in Latinizing humor:
Wonderful — thanks for digging those up!
The horrisonant bam, bim, bom, of the bombs
I dunno, bombs that go bam, bim, bom sound as if they belong in the chorus of a Carmen Miranda song.
Yes, and I can see Carmen Miranda leaping through the flamigerous bonfire of the Babylonian furnace without a hair of her head, or a fruit of her hat, being singed.
Nietzsche strident ? Well, here and there a bit. But horrisonous never. It must be some English translation that SS is talking about.
Not even Also Sprach Zarathustra has horrisony among its many faults, the main one being that only mystic drama queens can get anything out of it.
Bim Bam Bum by the unforgettable Xavier Nougat.
“This entry has not yet been fully updated (first published 1899…)”, yet there are two citations from the 20th century (while horrisonant is unchanged). What’s up with that? Turns out, horrisonous was prematurely marked †Obs. in the original entry! It was Burchfield’s supplement (1976) that rescued it, withdrew the deadly dagger, and added the 1901 and 1962 citations.
Possibly Burchfield noticed that other dictionaries treated these twin words equally: in the Century Dictionary they’re both listed and marked [Rare]; in Webster’s New International (1909), both Obs. or R.; and Webster’s Third doesn’t include either of them.
Both horrisonous and horrisonant are pretty far down in the weeds in the Google ngrams, but they’re not dead. Of course it helps that their formation is transparent, and meaning easily guessable. Wordnik offers some excellent examples mined from Project Gutenberg, such as this from The Siege of Kimberley:
(This is during the Anglo-Boer War, when civilians were sheltering in the diamond mine.)
Splendiferous indeed.
This bim is a good lesson on the importance of keeping [i] and [ɪ] apart.
What lesson ? Important for what ? Cui bono ? Cur quis non prandeat hoc est ?
Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo
Previous versions of the OED give the stress as: hoˈrrisonous.
NED generally didn’t bother with pronunciations for (a) obsolete words (even some in Shakespeare, which is annoying for thespians) or (b) derivatives with pronunciations obvious from the base word[s].
Did Burchfield as policy not add pronunciations for de-obsoleted words, or was horrisonant overlooked or excluded as still falling under (b)? I see NED has pronunciation hǫri·sǒnănt for horrisonant, which suggests hǫri·sǒnəs for horrisonous. Collins hɒˈrɪsənənt concurs.
Yes, and the stress is clear from a line of verse like “Sophie oft wakes on my snorting horrisonous.”
Horrisonous: Nietzsche / roaring / mewl / whiz
“Nietzsche” is hourrisonously onomatopoe[t]ic.
From far, far out in left field…
“1631 J. Mabbe tr. F. de Rojas Spanish Bawd vii. 84 Words of most horrisonous roaring.”
This brings back over half century old memories of a debate among grad students regarding James Mabbe, who translated La Celestina and other important Spanish literary works. Someone called him ‘Mabb’, and another said it was pronounced ‘Mabbuh”. The pointless argument continued for a couple of months until yet another student found a contemporary mention of Mr. Mabbe by a 17th c. Spanish author who called him “don Diego Puede Ser”. Puede ser=may be.
That’s great! (And shows the value of multilingual puns.)
This morning I was roughly awakened by the horrisonous cacophony of garbage trucks across my street.
Horrisonous: Nietzsche / roaring / mewl / whiz
Yes, Nietzsche sounds like Mieze = pussy(cat). Friedrich Miezekatze. The Mewler of Sils Maria.
# Sils Maria: Maria ist eine abgeschliffene Form des rätoromanischen Maioria, was Meierei oder «Gutshof» bedeutet. #
Apparently the name Nietzsche was intended to be pronounced, essentially, “Ni-che” (“Ni” as in the knights who say Ni, “che” as in Che Guevara – not like the word “niche”).
AFAIK this particular variant of consonantal pile-up was already on its way out by then, so most modern readers don’t actually read it like that. Offhand I’m not actually sure how they do read it. Russian goes with a German-spelling-based pronunciation: Ницше.
Yes, that’s how it’s done in German. Graphically extending tsch to tzsch, perhaps in order to mark the affricate as such by putting an affricate letter in, seems to have been an Upper Saxon fashion a few hundred years ago and survives in a bunch of proper names.
In Russian it is an affricate t͡s and retroflex ʂ (which in my case is not retroflex). I would blame German, but such surnames in German are usually Slavic.
Actuially, -tzsch- does look like an attempt to write down /ʈʂ/ ot /tɕ/ (I wonder which one).
But then no one forced Russian to imitate it. Of course no one reads it as -ч-, because if it is meant to sound as -ч- why write it as if it were some German horror, -цш-? It is like reborrowing zashtsheeshtshayoushtsheekhsya as заштшиштшайуштшикхсья.
I was curious to see if Mabbe used horrisonous in English simply because he found horrísono among the latinajos in La Celestina. However, Mabbe seems to have embellished quite a bit… As far as I can tell, Mabbe’s words of most horrisonous roaring corresponds in general to crudas bozes (i.e. modern crudas voces) in the version of 1499 and turbadas bozes in the version of 1531.
Here is the whole passage from a modern edition by Julio Cejador y Frauca, online at the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, in which Celestina describes the powers of her dead friend, the witch and prostitute Claudina (the mother of Parmeno, whom Celestina has raised since a boy):
Here is Mabbe’s version from a 19th century edition:
Good that the name did not went to say, Japan before being borrowed.
AFAIK this particular variant of consonantal pile-up was already on its way out by then
I now wonder what was the trajectory of the sound in German.
Wiktionary: A variant of Nietsch, Nietsche, ultimately from Nikolaus (“Nicholas”), influenced by Slavic languages.
So, Коля.
Another Коля is “nickel”, the name of a metal.
You’re talking about Коля Никель, I presume. Anyway, we’ve now tied it in with the knights who say Ni.
WP:
In medieval Germany, a red mineral was found in the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains) that resembled copper ore. However, when miners were unable to extract any copper from it, they blamed a mischievous sprite of German mythology, Nickel (similar to Old Nick), for besetting the copper. They called this ore Kupfernickel from the German Kupfer for copper.[48][49][50][51] This ore is now known to be nickeline, a nickel arsenide. In 1751, Baron Axel Fredrik Cronstedt tried to extract copper from kupfernickel at a cobalt mine in the Swedish village of Los, and instead produced a white metal that he named after the spirit that had given its name to the mineral, nickel.[52] In modern German, Kupfernickel or Kupfer-Nickel designates the alloy cupronickel.[14]
Wiktionary:
Borrowed from German Nickel, first used in a text by the Swedish mineralogist Axel F. Cronstedt as an abbreviation of Kupfernickel (“a mineral containing copper and nickel”), from Kupfer (“copper”) + Nickel (“insignificant person, goblin”), originally nickname of Nikolaus (“Nicholas”), due to the deceptive silver colour of the relatively valueless ore. Compare cobalt as related to kobolds.
Maybe everyone knew this, but I only learned it when reading about copper alloys and specifically cuivre blanc. Коля is (obviously) “Nick[y]”. It is very casual, when I am trying to imagine a Коля, I picture a 24 years old craftsman, open and with a large nose, relatively sober today. The Kolya that I know is like that (he studied topology and is a millionaire but he does work as a craftsman).
It is comforting to know that everything (Nietzsche) is just “Kolya”.
*Nik, vocative *Niče. Awesome.
Hermann Nitsch and his art are here.
Now that I think about it, it could actually be an attempt to write something between (t)z [ts] and tsch [tʃ], i.e. [tɕ]. On the other hand, Wikipedia in several languages says č & ć have merged (as [tʃ]) in Upper but not Lower Sorbian, and it’s the former that’s spoken in Saxony.
Not much. /tʃ/ exists only as 1) a random cluster of /t/ and /ʃ/ (e.g. deutsch < deut- + -isch, i.e. diutisc and such), 2) in loans (most of them Slavic and now English, also Romance in Switzerland). Its place of articulation is, consequently, the same as that of /ʃ/, which is practically the same as in English (there’s more lip-rounding, though, so it sounds more retroflex sometimes).
Previous discussion of nickel and cobalt as gremlin ores.
Tin tan din dan bim bam bom bo
The bells of Fenchurch St. Paul.
All this talk of Nietzsche reminds me that I still don’t understand how Germans are supposed to pronounce the word “Borschtsch”.
If you don’t like Borschtsch, try Schtschaw or Schtschi.
With [ʃtʃ]. 😐
It’s no harder than, say, lists in English. Or firsts if you’re rhotic.
As with “fresh cheese” (stop after sh?) I am not sure whether in English “lists” there is a stop after the first s (or the first s is prolonged, I think my own production is more like “lissts”). DM seems to have better hearing for things like this than I do.
In Russian it’s just [ʃʃ].
I’m not sure what you mean. As long as you have a [t] in lists, unlike the people for whom the plural of “breakfas” is “breakfasses”, we’re not disagreeing.
It has been changing, over the last few generations, from [ɕtɕ] to [ɕː] – at least I’ve read about that claim a few times, and I’ve heard both of these pronunciations (and probably more) from native speakers.
Yeah, that’s more accurate — I was just lazily copying.
наступающего, 2:34.
[ʃ:] is actually a good approximation.
But I guess for a learner the problem is finding two Englsih sounds to approximate щ and ш…
I do not know, what is “Russian”. But the change can possibly be explained by
(1) diffusion from regions where [ɕː] was current. (see Dahl, Щ)
That is what I mean by “what is Russian” – I do not know how to appropriately define the sociolinguistic entity that we mean when speaking about pre-revolutionary pronunciation.
(2) removal of pressure to have Щ.
Our Щs came from church Slavonic.
Щ is a long and tense sound. It takes an extra effort to articulate it, you actually apply slightly more pressure to the mouth roof and increace airflow. So complaints about borschtsch make certain sense:-)
Not in щас schas (schtschas:)), a lazy (sometimes intentionally!) pronunciation of seychas, “now”. This sound is relaxed. And I can’t even put this sound in щ-words without preparation.
Possibly Slavonic did not merely inject -schiy participles (instead of identical -chiy participles that retain adjectival meanings and are means of derivation rathar than conjugation), but also sustained the presence of the phoneme/cluster?
Very plausible.
@drasvi: щ is not just an import from Church Slavic, it is also the product of palatalised sk and of stj in native Russian phonology.
Sure, but the point is that the constant presence of Church Slavic in people’s lives may have helped preserve it. Once the church-smashers took over, it was free to disintegrate.
Yes, that is what I meant.
Well, it’s still a distinct phoneme (/ɕː/).
FWIW, [ɕː] is what I learnt as normative pronunciation already over 30 years ago, and our corrective phonology teacher (native speaker) actually admonished people who inserted a “t” not to do that.
The link above is to a song from 20s. The singer’s pronunciation is quite peculiar in many ways though, and he is the undisputed king of mannerism.
Alongside with Severyanin (egofuturism) in poetry whose poems he sung with perceptible pleasuse.
2:34 is where he says щ in наступающего.
And here Schtscherba, 1940:
“… о букве щ сразу скажем, что она теоретически (если не всегда в произношении, ср. выше, стра. 119), отвечает комбинации звуков ш + ч, а потому не требует особого латинского эквивалента.”
“…theoretically (if not in pronunciation, cf. above, p. 119) corresponds to the combination of sounds ш + ч and thus does not require a distinct Latin equivalents”
feb-web.ru/feb/izvest/1940/03/122.pdf
Above he notes that both шчука and шьшюка coexist and that [when writing Russian words in Latin] we should thus follow orthography rather than pronunciation. Verba volant, scripta manent, adds he.
Interestingly, he wrote шчука , that is [ʂt͡ʂ] (because ⟨у⟩) or [ʂt͡ɕ], but шьшюка, that is [ɕ:].
Likely he meant it, that the former is less palatilized. Of course it also could be /šč/ vs. [ɕ:].
2:34 is where he says щ in наступающего
I’m not good at identifying sounds, but that sounds like [ɕ:] to me.
It sounds to me very clearly like …[juʃt͡ʃɐvɐ]…
See, that’s why I never got much into phonetics. I just can’t hear the nuances, and I hear what I expect to hear 🙂
Interesting. The [t] is there, but sort of reduced – [d̥] actually. The sibilants on either side, to my great surprise, aren’t [ɕ] at all, but something around a rounded [ʃ] or a not very retroflex [ʂ].