I expect DE will have something to say about this:
Kye Kye Kule is a call-and-response song performed in several African countries. The actions of this song are reminiscent of the American song Head Shoulder Knees and Toes. […] I asked a friend of mine, Dr. Sunu Doe, about the origins of this song. Dr. Doe is an ethnomusicology professor at the University of Ghana specializing in preserving pre-colonial Ghanaian culture through music and music education. He says Kye Kye Kule is an authentic song that Ghanaian school children learn.
Depending on the source, both on the internet and in print, the song can be found by searching Che Che Koolay or Kye Kye Kule. According to Dr. Doe, the correct way to spell the title is with Ky instead of ch. Ch doesn’t exist in the languages of Twi or Ewe and was unsure about the Fanti language.
The song is made of meaningless sounds, just as many American songs are. The song has no language, and the use of the name Kofi is thrown in to make it relatable to children. He said other variations of the song use other day names. He surmises that using Kofi could be an alteration of k k sounds…
Thanks, Craig!
Unrelated, but I have to share this delightful bit of Edwardian slang I recently ran across: knut /kəˈnʌt/ (archaic, informal, Edwardian) An idle upper-class man about town.
Oh Hades! the Ladies who leave their wooden huts,
For Gilbert the Filbert, the colonel of the knuts…
All I know about the Knut song is that whistling it without irony might not suggest mature taste. (Google Books link to The English Assassin, by Michael Moorcock.)
It turns up recurrently in that remarkable work The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.
I had a vague memory that “knut” refers specifically to one of those dangerous degenerates who goes hatless in public. I feel that all of us here can unite in condemning such deviancy.
Ghanaian cultural practices
Akan (and Ewe) cultural practices, not “Ghanaian.” She’ll be thinking that “English” is the same thing as “British” next.
Don’t know the song. Sounds catchy …
Twi orthography indeed doesn’t use ch, but both ky and tw actually sound very like English “ch” (tw has lip rounding, but monoglot Anglophones hear “Twi” as “Chee.”)
Ewe truly doesn’t have anything much like English “ch”, but on the other hand it contrasts bilabial and labiodental fricatives, which is obviously way cooler.
(Kusaal doesn’t, either, although some people have a very palatalised allophone of /k/ before front vowels which can even turn into an alveopalatal affricate.)
An Edwardian use:
His appearance, even allowing for the high seriousness of an outfitter’s point of view, was eminently satisfactory. There was no fleck or speck of fluff or dust or mud about _his_ clothes. He was, Eloquent decided grimly, a “knut” of the nuttiest flavour; from the top of his exceedingly smooth head to his admirable grey spats and well-shaped boots, a thoroughly well-dressed young man.
L. (Lizzie) Allen Harker, The Ffolliots of Redmarley (1913)
Kusaal doesn’t either
Proto-Oti-Volta had /c ɟ ɲ/ contrasting with both velars and alveolars, and most Oti-Volta languages still do, but the Western Oti-Volta languages, apart from Nōotre, have merged /c ɟ/ with /s z/, usually, though not invariably, as [s z].
Some of the languages have subsequently recreated a contrastive palatal series out of palatal allophones of velars before front vowels when the vowels didn’t stay front, though, as with e.g. Dagbani chaŋ “walk, go” beside Kusaal keŋ.
There’s an instance of “knut” in Saki’s Filboid Studge IIRC.
Seeing the headline I thought it would be about a Scottish nursery rhyme, and I was trying to search my head for a Norwegian counterpart.
It appears to have been preserved in the other main branch of Scandi-Congo, though.
Re Jerry F.’s comment: boy, it’s been a long long time since I last reread _The English Assassin_ or any other Cornelius-themed book. I see that the short wiki piece on the EA characterizes Mrs. Cornelius as “blousy” (meaning what I might spell “blowsy”), which is an adjective perhaps underused these days.
I was right about Saki, but got the wrong story:
https://americanliterature.com/author/hh-munro-saki/short-story/cousin-teresa
It’s spelt “Nut” therein. (One notes with sorrow, but, alas, no suprise, the absolutely routine casual antisemitism characteristic of that era. And I have to say that Filboid Studge is a much better story.)
BTW, American literature? Cultural appropriation much? It’s hard to think offhand of a less American Brit.
We don’t hold that against him, and we’re happy to honor the cultural contributions of the outlying islands.
I agree that “Filboid Studge” is a better story. I recently read “The Bull”, which has the other half of “Cousin Teresa”: unlike and disliking brothers.
I don’t think that PG Wodehouse ever used the word knut in his books, but one of the biographies of him quoted him as saying that his books about the Drones Club and Bertie Wooster were about the world of the knuts.
I think he added that knuts had disappeared by the time he wrote about them.
“George Grossmith was the first to emphasize the distinction between the Nut and the Blood. The Blood was a young man who caused riots in restaurants: the Nut is too listless to do anything so energetic.”
https://madameulalie.org/vfus/The_Knuts_O_London.html
The article PlasticPaddy linked to was apparently published in the Sept. 1914 issue of _Vanity Fair_. It’s interesting to think of the American VF readers enjoying this depiction of preposterous young English toffs simultaneously with newspaper coverage of the perhaps-not-mostly-so-toffish young Britons of the B.E.F. suffering deaths in combat as they retreated from Belgium back toward Paris after the First Battle of Mons. (Maybe the publishing biz already worked such that the “September” cover-date issue was out on newsstands in mid- or even early August, and in any event its contents may have been finalized and sent to the printers well in advance, of course.)
Reminds me of the opening of a song of my old grandmother, born late 1880s, possibly the same one:
“I’m Gilbert the Filbert, the Knut with a K,
The pride of Piccadilly, the blasé roué”.
Note that filbert is an old name for a hazel nut.
All the poetic examples in this thread point to just /nʌt/.
Huh? Where are you getting that? The very first one clearly has /k/ as an alliterating consonant:
The kernel of the nuts.
Now that I think about it, I wonder if it’s actually a pun on “kernel of the nuts”…
[EDIT: ninja’d by Trond Engen]
FWIW if you ask the google books ngram viewer about “knuts” you get a sharp spike upwards starting around 1906 and peaking in 1916 before a sharp plummet down until things somewhat stabilize around 1933. That’s consistent with it starting off as an “Edwardian” usage, at least if you accept that the “Edwardian” age did not stop immediately upon the death of the relevant Edward in 1910. And even if (as I may have tried to suggest above) you might think it stopped rather abruptly at least in London just around sunset on August 3, 1914, its linguistic patterns may have still had enough inertia/momentum to take a while before they faded.
“Knut” is one syllable in the Gilbert song.
I had a student named Filbert, presumably after Spanish Feliberto or Filiberto. We didn’t discuss whether it was a good choice in English.
“Knut” is one syllable in the Gilbert song.
Oh, I’m not disputing it’s one syllable, it just seems to me the whole point of spelling it knut is to represent the humorous pronunciation starting with /kn/ (cf. saying /gnuw/ for gnu).
I knew at least one thoroughly Anglo (well, ethnically mostly Dutch-American, I think) guy named Filbert.
It didn’t even occur to me to look for alliteration. I’m talking about the meter:
Oh Hádes! the Ládies who léave their wóoden húts,
For Gílbert the Fílbert, the cólonel óf the knúts…
Oh. I didn’t think native speakers were capable of that (Evil K/ə/nievel, all the way back to Canute…).
Most native English speakers can’t pronounce initial [pt], right? I took me a while to realise that was a joke in Pterry’s “Pyramids” (as in Ptracy etc.) (or that “Pterry” was a joke about that).
Oh. I didn’t think native speakers were capable of that (Evil K/ə/nievel, all the way back to Canute…).
Yes, I mean parallel to K/ə/nievel — we smuggle a schwa in there to get the consonant sort-of-cluster, but I don’t think it’s perceived as a full extra syllable.
Gilbert the Filbert was married to Hazel Nutt, it goes without saying.
Certainly in doggerel poetry you could and should use a full three-syllable Knievel. I had to look up what it would be metrically, and it’s an amphibrach. I expect in other sorts of verse you could probably squeeze into two feet with a little poetic license, though.
I had managed to remain hitherto ignorant of this but a different sense of “knut” is apparently found in the Harry Potter books, and there are of course issues about how fans should pronounce it. https://metro.co.uk/2018/01/13/harry-potter-fans-have-been-pronouncing-a-key-word-wrong-this-entire-time-7226683/
Here’s a recording from 1915 by Basil Hallam (1888–1916), who seems to have introduced the song. I don’t hear any trace of a /k/.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppJCuAx1K40
Classic RP from both Hallam and the DJ, if I may so refer to him.
Pronouncing “the /knʌts/” shouldn’t be any harder than saying “thick nuts”, but if I try “thick nuts”, the /k/ is unreleased and clearly belongs to the previous syllable.
@J.W.B.: Wikipedia says the most recent Jerry Cornelius story was published in 2024 in the sixtieth-anniversary issue of New Worlds, and (with a Citation Needed) more are coming. I didn’t like The Cornelius Chronicles, Volume 2 anywhere near as well as the first four novels, collected in Volume 1, especially The English Assassin and The Condition of Muzak—but I think you have to have read The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer first.
Btw, “Metrical Feet”, by Coleridge, for anyone seeking a mnemonic.
@Jerry F.: I have read each of those first four novels multiple times, but just not in the last 25-30 years …
I don’t hear any trace of a /k/.
I bow to the weight of facts and withdraw my remarks.
Thanks, for the Hallam link, JF.
“Oh, I can do that one. But I do mine in the bathroom in the early morning.”
Thanks, JF. Later performances are pure n as well. I was sure it would have the k, but it’s akin to Wodehouse’s Psmith.
(cf. saying /gnuw/ for gnu)
G STANDS FOR GNU,
whose weapons of Defence
Are long, sharp, curling Horns, and Common-sense.
To these he adds a Name so short and strong,
That even Hardy Boers pronounce it wrong.
How often on a bright Autumnal day
The Pious people of Pretoria say,
“Come, let us hunt the—” Then no more is heard
But Sounds of Strong Men struggling with a word.
Meanwhile, the distant Gnu with grateful eyes
Observes his opportunity, and flies.
MORAL:
Child, if you have a rummy kind of name,
Remember to be thankful for the same.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Moral_Alphabet/G_for_Gnu
Also (of course):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqgPyqyh4X4
The Gnu Song was (of course) what I had principally in mind.
@JF:
Thanks: a new one to me.
Remarkably even-handed, in its way: Saki loves his young aesthetes, but is under no illusions about them.
The Unbearable Bassington perfectly illustrates this. He really is unbearable, and then some, but you still end up feeling sorry for this butterfly broken on the wheel.
(Clovis, however, is, of course, invulnerable. But he would clearly be invulnerable even if aesthetes had never been thought of. He just is.)
[“Aesthete” is not quite the word I’m looking for. “(K)nut” is not quite right either: but you know what I mean if you appreciate Saki, as all right-thinking people do.]
@J.W.B.: I wasn’t giving you Moorcock recommendations (though I thought my comment might have worked that way for other people), just mentioning my experience in case you wanted to compare yours.
I’ve never read any of the Jerry Cornelius books. I find Moorcock disappointing more often than not, since a lot of his plots are basically that fate dictates the hero will travel to these places, fight these enemies, and recover these treasures.
I’ve been reading P. G. Wodehouse since I can remember (my aunt was a huge fan) and I’m learning new things now. This is why I love this blog.
Brett : a friend of mine likes (well not “likes” more like finds him interesting) Moorcock for entirely different reasons that you dislike him for, as in they don’t intersect. But I’m not him. I’m just observing.
@Brett: I’ve been disappointed by Moorcock too. Of the first four Jerry Cornelius books, only the first is anything like what you describe. I’m not saying you’ll like the first four books (which have been published in one volume and in my opinion should be read that way), but they’re very different.
By the way, Wikipedia quotes Moorcock as saying, “My books frequently deal with aristocratic heroes, gods and so forth. All of them end on a note which often states quite directly that one should serve neither gods nor masters but become one’s own master.” I hadn’t noticed that.
The JC books are pretty far from the pulp-fantasy sword-and-sorcery settings of a lot of MM’s stuff and are more along the lines of groovy/drug-addled post-Sixties metafiction in which “plots? we don’t need no stinking plots” might be a good genre-specific defense of unconvincing plotting. Doesn’t mean any given reader will like it, of course. In the pulpier stuff MM is sometimes obviously deviating from or “subverting” some of the pulpier genre conventions, but when trying to explain himself he may try too hard and be a little unconvincing in his claims to be better than the dopey norm because of his self-awareness about the dopiness.
I liked “Mother London” by Michael Moorcock better than any SF of his that I read.
Sounds like he was trying to do what Conan the Destroyer actually did.
(Yes, I mean the Schwarzenegger movie.)