OK, this is one of those ridiculously trivial questions that bother me enough to bother you all with. I came across a reference to L’Hoest’s monkey and of course wanted to know how to pronounce the name; my first-approximation guess was /lo:sts/ (“loasts”), and that is indeed how the zookeeper says it in this video (though she may not be pronouncing the final /s/), so that might have satisfied me… but I went to the Wikipedia article hoping for confirmation, only to discover that it was named “in honor of François L’Hoëst [nl], director of the Antwerp Zoo, in 1898.” At that Dutch page we learn that “François L’Hoëst (Tongeren, 1 maart 1839 – Antwerpen, 29 oktober 1904) was een Belgisch zoöloog.” So now I need to know how Belgians say the name L’Hoëst; the diaeresis is a confusing creature, as we learned in the Citroën thread. Anybody know?
Of course, Belgians may say it a bit differently depending on their L1 … I don’t know the answer but am intrigued to learn that the monkey in question is “officially” Allochrocebus lhoesti. I suppose there’s a style-book rule that you can’t use apostrophes in Linnaean names, but the “lh” sequence looks quite exotic in pseudo-Latin. Portuguese orthography has an “lh” digraph (representing a phoneme that its ancestral Latin lacked), but it’s apparently quite rare in word-initial position.
One of my Dad’s jokes was that the Danish painter Oluf Høst couldn’t be exhibited in Paris because French drops /h/ and final /-st/, and doesn’t have an /ø/. I’m sure they’d manage, but I don’t know how exactly. (There is no WP.fr article for the painter, I checked, but it would probably give the Danish pronunciation [if any]).
The Dutch WP article on Léon Lhoest
has a note:
—
De spelling van de familienaam als Lhoëst of L’Hoëst is onjuist, maar geeft wel de juiste uitspraak in Nederland aan.
—
I would take this to mean that a good approximation is the English word “lowest”, with the short e pronounced (i.e., [EPSILON]); the Lh is not a possible digraph, so I think the h is ignored.
Well, the final -st in Proust is pronounced, in Paris at least – I have read somewhere that in the province where the Proust family originated the name is pronounced without the final consonants.
Est, ouest.
…Home is best!
I would take this to mean that a good approximation is the English word “lowest”, with the short e pronounced (i.e., [EPSILON]); the Lh is not a possible digraph, so I think the h is ignored.
Thanks very much; that would seem to resolve the issue. Whoever gave the creature that name was just monkeying around, if you ask me.
I ast for it…
Also, zoöloog is a splendid woord.
Some zoöloog needs to be named Hiëst, and to name their own monkey.
So high, so low, so many monkeys to know.
https://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/l%27ho%C3%ABstmeerkat
If you listen to the clip, the speaker gives equal or even primary stress to the “est” syllable, i.e., I may have been wrong about stress, so loEST MEERkat or LO-EST MEERkat.
EDIT: I think my problem is that I think of 2s surnames as like WIGGers or KOOPman or de BEER, so something like 1st syllable stress except for de or van.
Whence WAry teaches me of English meerkat:
And on German Meerkatze,
And the etymology of Sanskrit markaṭa is uncertain.
It had never occurred to me to look it up. The mongoose-like animal seemed cat enough to me.
P.S. If there was evidence for medieval India-Europe contacts, I’d think the OHG word was a folk etymology.
It appears from wikipedia that scientific Dutch still uses “echte meerkatten” to mean a specific genus of monkeys called guenons in English, with unmodified “meerkatten” presumably having broader scope than that, as necessary to include e.g. the l’hoëstmeerkat. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echte_meerkatten
Dutch meerkat is English long-tailed monkey (Cercopithecinae, including guenons), whereas English meerkat is Dutch stokstaartje.
I see that Cercopithecus aethiops in Mooré is pugwãamba, literally “woman-monkey.” I wonder if that’s some kind of calque of the French guenon? Or reflects something about the actual monkeys that led to the naming coincidence? (A misunderstanding by the lexicographer is not out of the question, either, I imagine.)
I’ve always understood guenon to mean “female monkey”, but English WP (citing Robert) says it applies to both male and female Cercopithecus monkeys. Wiktionary gives that meaning as “obsolete.”
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guenon
According to Wiktionary, guenon itself is borrowed, via guenipe, from Old Norse kvinna “woman”, which strikes me as implausible, to say the least. The sole reference they give does not support this.
https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/guenipe/
Looks vaguely Frankish to me. Could the -ipe bit be the cognate of MHG wīp “woman” and English “wife”?
The OED firmly says guenon is from “French, of unknown origin.”
As a Dutch speaker from The Netherlands, I would pronounce it as loWEST. Not sure if Belgians would pronounce it differently. Without the diaeresis, hoest means cough, so that’s probably not a surname someone would like to have.
Here is some background on the name, from the Dutch surname repository: https://www.cbgfamilienamen.nl/nfb/detail_naam.php?gba_naam=l%27Hoest&nfd_naam=Hoest%2C+l%27+%28%C3%A9%29&info=documentatie&operator=eq&taal=
And the Petit Robert says about the French word “origine inconnue”, adding a vague speculation that it might be related to guenille.
As a Dutch speaker from The Netherlands, I would pronounce it as loWEST.
Thanks very much!
As for guenipe, I note the CNRTL suggestion of an original sense of “des hardes boueuses”, but I prefer the idea “pond*(-life) woman” …
Probably not this one, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_of_the_Lake
“You can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some watery tart threw a sword at you!”
* en tout cas l’aire du mot paraît en accord avec l’hyp. qui en fait un dér. (avec un suff. -ipe issu de l’a. fr. chipe, v. chiffe) de gasne “mare”…
I’d take it as l’west (i.e., like l’ouest), maybe with a schwa but not with an o.
Also see this random video:
“Armando en Engelbert L’hoëst AmersfoortGezien”
https://youtu.be/5MjDe4Wm-MA?si=5qvcJ9KOHqBlUax6&t=350
@Lars Mathiesen: French does have an /ø/ (phoneme). What it doesn’t have is an orthographic .
<ø> of course.
I keep forgetting how to do that (write non-magical angle-brackets in comments here.)
Less than and greater than, i.e. < and >.
@ulr, I know. But my Dad had very little French, if any, and I had none when he told me that, so the claim passed uncontested. (I can easily imagine a French pronunciation of Høst, but it’s possibly not the same one that a Parisian curator of paintings would use).
It’s true that lh does have a Portuguese look about it, but although I’m not aware of any ordinary French words with lh in them, it does occur at the beginning of some surnames. I once attended a meeting organized by Jean-Marc Lhoste. I asked him about his name and he told me that it was an archaic spelling of what would now be written as L’Hôte.
it does occur at the beginning of some surnames
One is the neurologist behind the splendidly named “Lhermitte’s Electric Sign.” The WP picture makes him look a bit supervillain-y:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Lhermitte
(It may be the hat.)
Bertil is right (Dutch speaker from Belgium here). For a long time, social climbers in Belgium needed to switch to French in order to be accepted in polite society. The dieresis over the – for French speakers – unsightly “oe” would help them in that goal. Best-known example in Belgium is probably the last name “Boel” (pronounced “booll”, with a short “oo”, which can mean “mess” or “brawl”), which in the case of one of the richest coal-and-steel dynasties in Belgium became “Boël” (and pronounced Bow-wèll – Hyacinth Bucket/Bouquet would approve). Thus the dieresis became a mark of social standing and a shibboleth (I remember being sneered at by a society matron in Brussels in 2015 because I didn’t get the pronunciation of a prince de Croÿ right).
Ah, right. I was trying and failing to think of Thierry Lhermitte when I posted earlier. Much more famous than Jean-Marc Lhoste.
filster: Thanks very much for that extremely interesting comment!
J.W. Brewer says: “I suppose there’s a style-book rule that you can’t use apostrophes in Linnaean names”. The style book in question is the The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature, and there is indeed such a rule. Chapter 7, Article 27 “Diacritic and other marks” is the relevant section:
The code is great bedtime reading: the sections on how grammatical gender is to be assigned to words that are not of Greek or Latin origin are particularly fascinating…
Here is some background on the name, from the Dutch surname repository
J. HERBILLON, Le nom de famille Lhoest. VW 1973, 225-6
Thanks for that link, bertil!
Here is the corresponding entry in Jean Germain and Jules Herbillon (2007) Dictionnaire des noms de famille en Wallonie et à Bruxelles:
The abbreviation w. nam. is for wallon namurois, and w. liég. is wallon liégeois. Here is Herbillon’s remark on the Walloon word from his article ‘Le nom de famille Lhoest’ in La Vie wallonne 47 (1973), pp. 225–226:
Walloon varieties show diphthongization of the reflexes of Latin ŏ and ĕ in stressed closed syllables before r and s to various extents (the details vary by dialect). For the phonology of the developments in wèsse, wasse ‘innkeeper, proprietor of a tavern’ < hospitem (accusative of hospes), compare Walloon cwèsse ‘côte (rib, coast)’ < costa, tiesse ‘tête’ < testa, and even priyesse ‘prêtre’ < presbyter.
Great stuff, thanks for sharing it!
Unlike the botanical and the prokaryotic Codes, the zoological one has given up the legal fiction that the names are actual words in actual Latin; you can leave the spellings unchanged* and just slap Latin o-/a-declension genitive endings on them**.
* But you don’t have to. Brouffia is named after Brough & Brough.
** Or not; that’s strenuously Recommended against, but the tiger shark remains Galeocerdo cuvier. The occasional 19th-century n-stem ending also remains valid as far as I understand: Lialis burtonis.
Belgian French speaking. I say Lo’est. no “w”, “h” is not pronounced.
Thanks! It seems to be a Rorschach-blot sort of name.