This NY Times story by Andrew Higgins (archived) is a depressingly unsurprising tale of how right-wing jerks have glommed onto something popular — in this case, “an item of clothing traditionally worn by villagers” in Romania — and used it as a symbol of their regressive views, so that normal people who just liked wearing it are shying away from it. But the element of Hattic interest is the name of the garment:
Diana Sosoaca, a far-right firebrand, has made the blouse — known in Romanian as “ie,” pronounced “ee-yeh” — a central part of her political brand. She rarely appears in public dressed in anything else.
I was, of course, struck by the minimalist name; it isn’t in my (fairly minimalist) Romanian-English dictionary, but Wiktionary came to my rescue:
ie f (plural ii)
traditional Romanian embroidered blouse
The etymology is (like the appropriation) unsurprising, but it’s quite pleasing:
Inherited from Latin (vestis) līnea (“linen garment”). Compare Old Spanish linia (“a kind of garment”). Doublet of linie (“line”), a later borrowing.
Like French eau < aqua, it has managed to hang onto its inherited form despite severe consonantal erosion. And another interesting thing is its homonym:
ie f (plural ii)
(rare, archaic)1. the lower part of the abdomen or belly, especially in animals such as livestock
2. the skin that hangs down from the belly of an ox
3. the pastern on a horse
4. guts, bowels, or entrails
The etymology: “Inherited from Latin īlia, plural of īle.” I could swear that Latin word, meaning ‘groin; guts; belly or body of a vessel; private parts, genitals,’ had come up here recently, but I can’t find where.
“depressingly unsurprising tale of how right-wing jerks have glommed onto something popular”
Somewhat reminiscent of left-wing use of the keffiyeh.
Well, except that that barely exists. Can you name any major left-wing pols in America who go around wearing it? Is it a popular symbol of American left-wingery?
Latin īle ‘groin, etc.’ was in Stone the AI on April 5. (A search on just ile is drowned in false hits, but it’ll work if you add “groin” or “genitals”.)
What do American politicians have to do with anything? Do American politicians commonly wear an ie?
“ Compare Old Spanish linia (“a kind of garment”).”
Being curious, I went to the usual sources, and came up empty.
“La palabra «linia» no está en el Diccionario.”
It is not in any of the many dictionaries at th RAE site: https://www.rae.es/recursos
It is not in Covarrubias or the Autoridades.
Perhaps a kind Hatter might point me to a good source.
It seems highly unsurprising that self-conscious “nationalists” will embrace this that or the other thing viewed as distinctive and symbolic of the relevant “nation,” and if the self-consciously non-nationalist faction chooses to boycott the item in question as a knee-jerk reaction, they deserve whatever electoral consequences there may be. Things only become the exclusive symbolic property of the other faction when you let them.
But the story drifts away from the political-hot-take emphasis as it goes on and one might reflect on how many other things in or near the Balkans can be described with an analogy to the exemplary sentence “Asserting exclusive ownership of the blouse by Romania risks irking Bulgarians, Ukrainians and others in Eastern Europe who also wear embroidered tops that, at least to the nonexpert eye, look very similar.” That said, the suggestion that the late dictator Ceausescu didn’t wear an “ie” because the voters already appreciated his Authentic Peasant bona fides rather than because Communist ideologues tended to have a rather fraught and unpredictable relationship with pre-Communist peasant culture (and ditto with “nationalism”) is a helpful reminder that the NYT’s cluelessness about Balkan politics is not a new development.
What do American politicians have to do with anything? Do American politicians commonly wear an ie?
So you’re claiming Romanian left-wing politicians wear keffiyeh? Bah, this is a stupid derail, let’s drop it.
Given your original post, I thought that political use of formerly neutral objects and symbols, particularly clothes, by jerks was on-topic, but if you say it isn’t, so be it.
Latin īle ‘groin, etc.’ was in Stone the AI on April 5.
That was it — thanks very much!
Nikita Khrushchev wore occasionally an embroidered shirt. Rural voters tend to be in general more conservative and occasionally a politician wants to look like their voters. It would be extremely strange if US politicians from the West, for example, dressed as cowboys/cowgirls, but definitely more fun.
A benign use of traditional dress was the late President Rawlings’ habitual public wearing of what in Ghana is called a “fugu shirt”, as seen in both photographs here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/12/world/africa/jerry-rawlings-dead-version.html
This is actually an archetypally northern Ghanaian garment: half-Ewe/half-Scots Rawlings was using it to make a unifying point. (It’s also rather more practical than the characteristic Akan toga …)
The name “fugu” is in fact rather like the English use of “kimono” to mean a specific kind of Japanese garment: in the languages in question the word means only “clothing”, or even just “cloth” (e.g. Kusaal fuug.) The actual name for a “fugu shirt” in Kusaal is banaa.
It would be extremely strange if US politicians from the West, for example, dressed as cowboys/cowgirls, …
Roy Moore rode to the polls as a cowboy after spending an entire campaign in costume. IIRC there were some events where he also wielded a gun live on stage.
I rather got the impression it was common for US politicians of a certain stripe to be seen wearing at least a ten-gallon hat. I have given up trying to judge what would be “extremely strange” when it comes to US politics.
An image search for, e.g., “New Mexico politician cowboy -Griffin” will turn up plenty of cowboy hats, such as this article on the present District Attorney of Bernalillo County (which includes Albuquerque), a Democrat who’s running for governor. Without “-Griffin”, I got lots of pictures of Couy Griffin, a Republican former commissioner of Otero County (rural) who was removed from office for participating in the January 6 insurrection.
Yes, 10 gallon hat and a bolo tie now and then. Now, bring embroidered shirt, jeans, and a buckle belt. And let’s start that rodeo.
I just have to say that calling Diana Șoșoacă a “firebrand” is yet another example of the New York Times “sanewashing”. “Loon” or “crank” might be more accurate.
But in the NYT’s defense, JWB is being unfair. The NYT simply says that Nicolae Ceausescu felt no need to establish his peasant bonafides, which is absolutely right. (Nor is the NYT stupid enough to claim The Conducator cared about “voters”. ) The Ceausescus were well aware that the more sophisticated elements of the Communist Party and the intelligentsia (and foreign governments) already viewed them as uncouth peasants. Hence Nicolae had a personal tailor to make him his own dress shirts so he could look sophisticated.
“ Compare Old Spanish linia (“a kind of garment”).”
Being curious, I went to the usual sources, and came up empty.
See the text (‘popular Latin of Leon’) from the middle of the 11th century on page 33 along with the vocabulary notes on page 34 in Tatiana Zurunitch Fotitch (1969) An Anthology of Old Spanish, availabe here. Zurunitch Fotitch takes the text from the edition of Menéndez Pidal, Orígenes del español (1956), section ‘Documentos leoneses’, which however does not discuss the form linia any further.
I liked this quote from Max Leopold Wagner (1920) ‘Die Beziehungen zwischen Wort- und Sachforschung’,Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 8, p. 51, which mentions Romanian ie in passing (here):
For this Albanian l’ine, see Gustav Meyer (1891) Etymologisches Wörterbuch der albanesischen Sprache, p. 244, here.
Xerîb,
Thank you. That is just what I was seeking.
Romanian indeed abounds in highly phonologically eroded lexicon. The loss of *l in a palatalizing environment, however, was a fairly late sound change in Romanian, about half a millennium ago. Not only did it not happen in Aromanian, but some diaspora populations of Romanian itself split off before the change and so don’t reflect it.
@ D.O.
cowboy boots. yippie kai yai ay.
By protesting students on rather rare occasions (unlike 50 years ago); not by politicians, or even specifically left-wing as far as I’ve been able to tell (again unlike 50 years ago), anywhere.
You can find an ancient stock photo out there on the internet described as “Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern buttons up in a buckskin jacket after trying on a cowboy hat at a western wear store in Custer, S.D., July 27, 1972.”
It might have been advantageous for McGovern’s campaign to remind some skeptical voters that he was in fact a plain-spoken man from a small town out on the Great Plains rather than an effete coastal-elitist. But the broader point is that while there are regionally-marked wardrobe items, there is really no nationwide “traditional folkloric costume” in the U.S., because “traditional folkloric costume” in places like Romania contrasts with the generic “international” style of Western clothing broadly shared for the last few centuries by the U.S. with Britain/France and maybe Germany as well.
When you say, “Britain” …
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Kilt%26Sporran.jpg
Like French eau < aqua, it has managed to hang onto its inherited form despite severe consonantal erosion.
I am fond of Picard é for ‘bee’ from apis (see the departments of Pas-de-Calais and Somme in the map here).
And my favorite grammar point of any language of any era, Thurneysen here, p. 392:
Similarly, Hebrew jussives and wayyiqtol forms, like the most extreme example, 3rd sg. masc. jussive yēṭ from נָטָה nāṭāh ‘bend, turn’, root nṭy, with only the middle radical left from the entire root, after assimilation, apocope, and final degemination (-ṭ < *-ṭṭ < *-nṭ), as in Zephaniah 2:13:
Russian neuter and feminine nouns in the genitive plural are also beautiful in a similar way.
I wonder if other LH readers have their own favorites in this regard.
@David E.: Britain, like the U.S., has regional symbolic-wardrobe items. I saw some kilt-wearers this morning in our town Memorial Day parade, playing bagpipes. But this is the Northeastern U.S., where kilts and bagpipes are an Irish-American thing (however at odds with Ireland proper) not a Scottish thing.
And of course the kilt was until fairly recently regionally marked within Scotland as a barbarous Highland fringe thing, until the tourist trade made the lowlanders realize that they had nothing of equivalent tourist-attracting value and should thus treat Highland-specific stuff as if generically Scottish.
I wonder if other LH readers have their own favorites in this regard
Kusaal has the 3rd singular animate object pronoun “him/her”, which has been reduced by the loss its final vowel to – nothing. (Its presence is still detectable, though, from its sandhi effects on the preceding word.)
The plural of ie is ii. How did that come about? Latin ae reflects as e in Romanian.
From Martin Maiden et al. (2021) The Oxford History of Romanian Morphology, p. 50:
I would recommend obtaining the whole book and reading the entire treatment of plurals, from page 37 onwards.
Very interesting! Thanks for the quick reply.
It might have been advantageous for McGovern’s campaign to remind some skeptical voters that he was in fact a plain-spoken man from a small town out on the Great Plains rather than an effete coastal-elitist..
And then there was the unfortunate and unforgettable Mike Dukakis, Tank Commander! My children, then quite young, asked if he were doing an impersonation of Danger Mouse. Though he had served in the US. Army, he came across as a poseur.
On the other side of the aisle we have the Trumpus, costumed in suit and tie, imitating a Main Street Republican. And failing miserably.
I wonder if other LH readers have their own favorites in this regard.
Not exactly the same, but: Samarin’s Field Linguistics, p. 64:
I haven’t seen Westcott’s book, but the snippets on GBooks indicate that he has a whole chapter on this phenomenon.
Official party-line propagandistic spin on some folkloric-hat-wearing history, from the current website of the PRC’s ministry of foreign relations and in a somewhat stilted ESL register: “At a rodeo in Houston on February 2 [1979], Deng Xiaoping tried on with pleasure a white cowboy hat presented to him by two cowgirls. When he took it off and waved at the audience, he earned himself a hearty whoop from the spectators. He acted just like the locals, showing respect for American culture and goodwill to the American people. This image of openness and confidence has become an enduring symbol in China-US relations.”
Various photos of Deng with the hat were widely-publicized at the time and while in an objective sense he looked kind of comical (not least because this was early enough that he was still wearing a Mao suit rather than a Western-style one), I think it did generally make a positive impression on the US public, conveying that he was being a good sport in a way that suggested he was perhaps a different sort of Communist strongman than his predecessors.
…and I have heard and pronounced “I don’t know” as [m̩̏ḿ̩m̩̄] / [m̩˩m̩˦m̩˧].
Pictures of Kim Jong Un looking at things:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2018/aug/08/north-korea-leader-kim-jong-un-inspects-things-in-pictures
( & minny more @ Instagram, Tumbler, uzw…)
Blatantly trying to salvage his unsavoury reputation by a shameless appeal to the Hatter community. But we are not so easily bamboozled. Oh no!
(The tyre-factory hat has a certain something, I feel. It looks a bit small for him, though.)
The Deng-in-a-cowboy-hat thing is apparently better remembered by the PRC authorities than the American public, because if you do some googling it turns out that virtually all recent-ish media references to the then-teenage girls who did the hat presentation back in ’79 involve them being reinterviewed by PRC-controlled English-language media about the old days. And in 2022 the PRC’s then-ambassador to the U.S. arranged to have a photo opportunity of him being presented with a similar hat by one of them (now pushing age 60 or thereabouts) while visiting Texas for some ambassadorial reason. (He was a fellow on the rise, who then served very briefly as foreign minister back in Beijing before abruptly disappearing from public view amidst speculation as to what might have happened.)
Very interesting! Thanks for the quick reply.
You’re welcome!
Should be dinți not dinţi, which is what came off the PDF in copying and pasting and automatic formatting conversion to HTML. Very hard to notice any errors like this in the swarm of HTML tags and entities in the editor window.
I wonder if other LH readers have their own favorites in this regard.
My favorite is Russian vynut’ “take out, remove”, where in the infinitive and past stem the root becomes zero (vy- is a prefix meaning “out” and -nu- is a suffix forming perfective / semelfactive verbs). The root -im- shows up in the imperfective counterpart vynimat’.
I think I have posted here before that my favourite is the seven-syllable Latin *ad ecce ista dies ‘today’ becoming, in colloquial Romanian, the monosyllable azi [azʲ] (via the rather defunct această zi and its still used but more formal shortening astăzi).
I also recently cycled the Greek island of Evvia, still often called Euboea in English, and admired how PIE *h₁su-gʷowyeh₂ ‘good-cattle [island]’ had become, in the space of four thousand years or so, just [evja].
French surely has to be the overall winner, what with [wi] for “hoc illud” and [u] for “Augustus” …
French can pack two words into a single short [o] … the Tardis of languages …
Not a case of disappearance, but I just discovered this and it pleases me: Bulgarian ние ‘we’ replaced an earlier мꙑе (c. 1869), presumably by analogy with the accusative нас/ни.
Bini… seven tempos of speech
this reminds me of the various registers of hebrew in yiddish jewish contexts, which dovid katz breaks down here into three tiers, distinguished by differences in word-level stress, and vowel reduction. his whole detailed treatment of what he calls “ashkenazic hebrew”* is fascinating and useful.
.
* i’m still trying to find any previous analysis of the semantic history, and to flesh out my sources, but the use of “ashkenazi” to refer to yiddish jews – as opposed to the communities of what could be called the greater rhineland – is basically the same maneuver as referring to all white folks in the u.s. as “anglo-saxon”. it doesn’t reflect emic understandings of jewish cultural (minhag/nusakh) boundaries (one old saying has it that “poyln [a cultural/geographic zone understood specifically as contrasting with ashkenaz] begins at the Dammtor [i.e. just east of hamburg]”), linguistic history (especially given manaster ramer’s analysis of the historical divide in yiddish lects as falling not along the “western yiddish”/”eastern yiddish” boundary, but (again) roughly east of hamburg), or emic understandings of jewish social groups (yekkes – ashkenazim – are contrasted with all yiddish jews, before the subdivision of the latter into litvaks/galitsianers, russian/polish, or more elaborate taxonomies). i’m betting on it as having begun in the later 19thC, when german jewish communities in western europe and the u.s. were desperately trying to maintain control over all jewish life in the face of much larger numbers of newly arrived yiddish jewish immigrants – defining the newcomers as an (inferior) part of a single group that the german jews were definitionally the center of was part of that effort.
The Norse also ground Proto-Indo European h₂ékʷeh₂ (“water”) down to an „á“, the Swedes tacked that stub onto “land” to create “öland”, and then ground that back down to “ö”, which I find impressive.
That’s what you call committing to the bit.
Xerîb:
The distinction between Turkish s-cedilla and Romanian s-comma was not made on computers until the characters were disunified in 1999. In some contexts they still aren’t, as on the cover of s Romanian passport, where PASAPORTA is still spelled with s-cedilla.
The false unification goes back to the first edition of ISO 8859-2 in 1987, and was in favor of s-cedilla, since at that time Turkish society was a lot more computerized than Romania. Unicode followed along until the Romanian authorities brought sufficient arguments to bear. 8859–2 remains unchanged, as does its Windows analogue CP1252, as there are no available empty slots.
By the same token, Romanian t-comma was unified into t-cedilla, without regard to the fact that t-cedilla wasn’t used for anything at the time. Since 1993 it has been used as an extension to the Turkish alphabet when writing Gagauz, where it represents the ts-affricate. It was also proposed as a spelling reform for French to mark t pronounced /s/ as in “nation”.
AFAIK if the components of English every are reconstructed to Proto-Germanic it comes out to a pretty long sentence…
(That final -y, in particular, already goes back to ǣġhwelċ at the Early Old English stage.)
The Norse also ground Proto-Indo European h₂ékʷeh₂ (“water”) down to an „á“
Caution, that’s not PIE according to Piotr Gąsiorowski. That’s OK, just make it “Proto-Germanic *axʷō” instead.
the Swedes tacked that stub onto “land” to create “öland”, and then ground that back down to “ö”
But wait, Wiktionary says Swedish ö isn’t descended from öland, it’s just directly from Old Norse ey, which already meant ‘island’ < PGmc *awjō “originally a substantive adjective related to *ahwō”. There’s also the Old Swedish compound øland and Old Norse eyland, but that’s a parallel development, not a step in between Norse á and Swedish ö. Is there any reason not to believe Wiktionary on this?
That’s the reason why the under-comma exists in the first place: it was feasible on imported typewriters, and when computers finally made it possible to get the cedilla right, the Romanian Academy declared the comma correct.
The Romanian /ts/ had been transcribed as tz into e.g. French since at least the mid-19th century. (I think I’ve mentioned Émile Racovitza before, and he’s just one example.) We’re looking at a quite literal zedilla.
And archaic-poetic German Eiland and… English island, whose spelling is famously remodeled after isle < insula ( > German Insel).
That last one is mostly [ut] nowadays. Let’s blame Late Capitalism or something.
Let’s blame Late Capitalism or something.
I blame everything on the supply chain. Or the cat.
We’ve heard of Kusaal morphemes that are just free-floating tones. It seems (pdf) that the ending of the PIE (and Sanskrit) endingless locative was similarly a preaccenting zero morpheme.
I see the zero ending of modern Slavic genitives plural and raise negative endings: Bavarian-Austrian 1sg indicative and (2)sg imperative verb forms are not just bare stems, they’re additionally marked by the shortening of any stem-final long consonants.
The same dialects, at least the ones I’ve heard, make in den indistinguishable from in; you’d expect the second /n/ to survive as length (the Central Bavarian contrast between /ɪs/ ist and /ɪsː/ ist sie/es isn’t going anywhere), but it doesn’t. It’s not even reintroduced in Viennese mesolect. No other articles ever just disappear; in die is even strengthened, somehow, to /ɪnt/ – there is no final fortition otherwise, mind you.
“I think I have posted here before” — yup, Really Short Forms (2024) started off with Kalispel then had comments on French [u] or [ut], the Romanian contraction of ad ecce ista dies to one syllable, the Kusaal 3sg. animate object pronoun, and the internal structure of every. Caveat, the OED’s etymologies related to every are less definite and more complicated than the Wiktionary summaries. It’s not a sentence but compounds piled on compounds, i.e. every = (the Old English ancestors of) ever + each, where both of those were already worn-down compounds in Old English.
This may be a folk explanation. I just now read in the Oxford Handbook of Romanian Morphology a claim that t-with-comma was invented by Petru Maior, who lived well before typewriters. I woukd suppose the comma was already a familiar diacritic from Greek where it marks aspiration.
῾ doesn’t look like a displaced , .
which dovid katz breaks down here into three tiers
Thanks for the link to that website, rozele!
katz is a treasure (and in his house there are many mansions)! enjoy, Xerîb!
It’s bigger on the inside?
This may be a folk explanation. I just now read in the Oxford Handbook of Romanian Morphology a claim that t-with-comma was invented by Petru Maior, who lived well before typewriters.
…a strange claim given that in Petru Maior’s time Romanian was still generally written in Cyrillic; the switch only occurred several decades after his death.
(Though apparently Wikipedia agrees, and gives a specific citation.)
[EDIT: I followed up on the citation; AFAICT it turns out that Petru Maior used T-with-cedilla (by analogy with French) and S-with-left-half-ring-below (sic – to represent a C). In his font it’s hard to see the difference between comma and cedilla below on the T, and I don’t understand Latin that well, but he does appear to mention the French analogy. He also uses a literal-Zedilla on his D, which looks like the lower half of a Z.]
That’s the reason why the under-comma exists in the first place: it was feasible on imported typewriters
…I suspect that the typewritten backspace-comma would have looked more like a cedilla than a comma, actually (i.e. crossing the bottom of the letter); in fact now I wonder whether the reason that the Turkish and Romanian characters were unified in the first place was that they were both typewritten with backspace-comma.
Romanian still had a /d͡z/ back then; it has now merged into /z/ (possibly with exceptions in some dialects, IIRC).
It’s bigger on the inside?
well, technically it’s his father’s house…
This way of representing the affricate /dz/ was chosen by the circle of Romanian academics around Matilda Caragiu Marioteanu who produced resources for Aromanian in the late twentieth century. I personally find it obnoxious, but only because I had already worked with Aromanian resources that used the diagraph dz. But all the multiple standards for setting Aromanian down are equally valid, since so few Aromanians are interested in writing their own language. (In Greece in my own experience – I’m actually writing this from the Aromanian village of Perivoli now – the very thought of writing in Aromanian instead of writing in Greek makes people uncomfortable and elicits responses like “We’re not Romanians [who are viewed as suspicious nationalist proselytizers], you know.”)
I wrote about the Vlachs and Aromanian way back in 2003.
David:
1-The French /t/ in “ut” was re-introduced in French as a spelling pronunciation, so that /u/ (Still the dominant pronunciation among us unfortunate backwards colonials in Canada) is the historically “lautgesetzlich” pronunciation.
2-Bavarian dialects have always struck me as varieties where the role of a Romance substratum needs to be carefully and systematically studied, because there are a great many Romance-y (Why yes, I just made up the word. Your point?) features in Bavarian that seem too numerous to be explicable as pure chance/coincidence. I might present on one or two such hitherto-unnoticed (in the scholarly literature) features at some scholarly gathering or other, in my copious free time, if I may quote a Harvard scholar…
Your point about Central Bavarian varieties where “in die” is strengthened to /ɪnt/, despite the fact that “there is no final fortition otherwise, mind you” is a case in point.
Why? Because in many Northern Italian Romance varieties you find similar such phenomena surrounding the preposition /in/ or /en/ plus the definite article, where it is quite phonologically regular (“en/in” + /l/ yielded /entl/ or /intl/, causing the /t/ in many instances to be re-analyzed as an allomorph or as the sole form of the preposition, often with loss of the /l/: hence Friulian “tal mieč di”, “in the middle of”, from Late Latin IN ILLO MEDIO DE).
If the extinct Romance variety(ies?) of Bavaria did likewise, it is fairly easy to imagine Romance-Germanic bilinguals extending this /t/ from their native Romance to their L2 Germanic, an innovation which would have been all the more likely to be broadly accepted by all speakers (of the Germanic varieties which were to become Bavarian, so: pre-proto-Bavarian?) when we consider that this /t/ was liable to be perceived by L1 Germanic speakers as related to the initial dental of the definite article…
Christopher Culver:
1-The Oxford handbook of Romanian morphology is an impressive work, but one which should have been edited much, much more tightly: as I recall there are several contradictions between different articles: I noticed a LOT of them involving the diachrony of the Romanian verb. Caveat lector, in short, as they say in REALLY geriatric Romanian.
2-On Aromanians (mostly) not being interested in writing their own language in Greece -how different/similar are attitudes towards writing Aromanian in neighboring countries, in your experience?
Yes, I have noticed a few issues here and there as I work my way through it. Still, this book is a very useful resource.
Within Albania, there have been efforts to introduce an Aromanian curriculum (so obviously written texts), and there are occasional visits by Romanian officials or experts. Big difference from Greece, where such things ended with World War II, and ever since then, Greek Aromanians are rather hostile to Romania, since they see the latter as a force disruptive to their quite happy identification with the Greek nation-state. But in spite of the official efforts that I have seen reported in Albanian news, I personally don’t know anyone there interested in writing it – they are just amused by my books that are undecipherable to them – and I have never spoken to any of the children in such curricula to hear what they think.
I have spent many months now interacting with Aromanians in Albania and Greece, but those of Macedonia are still completely unknown to me. I’ll plan a visit to those villages in the next year or two.
Oh yes, and there’s more in the literature than I know of. (…There are also Romance-like features I didn’t and probably still don’t know of, in some cases because they’re now extinct, in others because they occur in dialects I’m not familiar with. I actually just found one of those, complete with comparisons to Romance, in a Wikipedia article.)
That’s fascinating, but it’s really difficult to get this to work. (I’m reminded of the 2pl verb ending /ts/, which is identical to the Gothic one, but couldn’t possibly have survived the High German consonant shift as far as I can see, so would’ve had to be borrowed afterwards, so we’d need East Germanic north of the Alps in the 7th century, leaving no other traces in the Slavic-speaking population… the textbook explanation involving the 2pl clitic /s/ seems like the only option.)
– The mentioned HGCS would have turned this /t/ into /ts/. We’d need a /d/.
– Or maybe not. The cluster /tr/ famously survived the HGCS unscathed; perhaps /tl/ would have done the same?* There aren’t any native examples or counterexamples because /tl/ didn’t exist in early Germanic.
– Why actually isn’t it /d/ on the Romance side?
– You know those words like hand and wind that end in /nd/ in unshifted West Germanic, nt in OHG & MHG, and nd again in NHG? This lenition is real. They all have /nd/ in my dialect; the /d/ is voiceless as always, but it’s the same lenis as elsewhere, and /nt/ (which, off the top of my head, may be limited to loans in word-final position) is distinct. Maybe prepositions + articles don’t count as phonological words, but that seems like an assumption made just for this case.
– There is a grammatical fortition process, and it even involves syllabic /l/, but that /l/ survives.
– That said, it may all be part of a larger NHG fortition process that marks the ends of phonological words. (My mention of the /t/ in Hemd, however, is most likely wrong – the word simply has the /tː/ it’s etymologically expected to have, except that consonant length isn’t phonemic in clusters.)
At the other extreme, I’m happy to ascribe the HGCS itself to contact with Romance. It is, after all, a whole package of sound shifts that make things easier for hearers – and that’s particularly important when half your hearers didn’t grow up understanding what you’re saying.
* It makes phonetic sense. In English today, aspiration generally doesn’t phonetically manifest as such when /ɹ/ or /l/ follows, but as devoicing of the /ɹ/ or /l/. …That makes it stranger, though, that PIE */tr/ and */tl/ did not survive Grimm’s law unscathed.
Oh, uh…
You’re of course free to run them by me first – my e-mail address is in my papers; Google Scholar finds them. I’d naturally keep everything secret. As mentioned, there’s no guarantee I can say anything useful (unless you need help with sources in German). I’m certainly interested, though 🙂
The German Wikipedia article on Old Bavarian lists a whole bunch of studies on Romance substrate effects in Bavarian. The example sentence, though, is not grammatical in the dialects I’m familiar with, and lexically it doesn’t work either.* Judging from the title of the book of which the cited source is a chapter, it’s from Ebersberg in Bavaria, west of Salzburg and north of Innsbruck, far from anything I happen to know much about.
* …though it’s very funny in, specifically, Viennese, where the last word is actually very common and means “toilet”.
Who do you think you are, Kand?
He’d be a loan into my dialect, of course.
David: Thanks for the offer, but I think I can handle any written source on the topic AUF DEUTSCH: Atrocious though my active command of German is, my reading knowledge of German should prove adequate for research purposes when it comes to investigating issues relating to a Romance substrate in Bavarian.
One question I have for you and which other fellow hatters may find of interest is the following: Why is there so little such research? Considering the strong regionalism of Bavaria, rooted in both its dialect and in its Catholicism, I would have expected that research highlighting the “special” nature of Bavarian (demonstrating that some of its distinctiveness goes back to a Romance substratum, for instance…) would be widespread, if not indeed rampant (In the case of Austria within the Bavarian-speaking world, with its national identity strongly rooted in Catholicism and which after World War II strongly sought to establish a distance between itself and Germany, this is even truer).
In neighboring Croatia, for instance, there is a LOT of research on Vegliote and other extinct Romance coastal varieties, and even to an outsider such as myself it is clear that such research, highlighting Croatia’s connection to the Catholic/Mediterranean world (=connection to a world from which Serbia is excluded), is abundant because it fits into the self-image of Croatians.
Conversely, as a French scholar pointed out, the absence of any systematic scholarly study of North African Romance varieties is related to the fact that highlighting pre-colonial historical links between North Africa and Romance-speaking Europe (including France….) was anathema to the national self-image of the political/intellectual elites in charge of the various countries of North Africa which arose through decolonization (Lameen: if you are reading this your thoughts on the topic would be very much appreciated, and not just by me, I suspect).
So, if Croatia and North Africa are the rule, why is Bavaria/Austria an exception?
Austrian Catholicism (of which there isn’t as much left, BTW, as there was in the 50s) is not nationally contrastive; all neighbors are historically-nominally Catholic (including Bavaria and… 52% of St. Gallen). Bavarian Catholicism is, though (against the Prussians and the Franks – the ones who ended up in Bavaria for vaguely Napoleonic reasons, something neither the Franks nor the Bavarians are at all happy with), just like Croatian, Polish, Lithuanian or Québécois Catholicism.
Ideology-driven pet projects have existed in the humanities in Austria; the whole Mitteleuropa thing comes to mind.
Maybe the Nazis simply skunked the entire search for national origins. After all, they set in motion the change in the most common answer to “is Austria a nation?” from “no” over immediately changing the topic to “yes, as a trivial matter of international law, the only sense there is for this question”.
I happen to know of one paper or book by someone FPÖ-adjacent (I forgot who) that tried to reduce the area with Slavic placenames in Austria by giving very silly OHG etymologies to names that not only aren’t German, but in many cases were never claimed to be Slavic either.* The reason I know that work is that I happened to come across a review (on a school trip to the university library, I think, so in 1999 or 2000) that panned it.
Germany is federal enough, and the Bavarian government powerful enough in Bavaria and at the federal level, that desperate ideological projects seem not to be considered necessary. Austria did go through a phase in the 60s when the school subject wasn’t called Deutsch but Unterrichtssprache “language of instruction”, but that was short; everyone’s comfortable with having a generally similar relationship to Germany as Anglo-Canadians used to have with the US.
* Carantania is Karo’s fir forest, donchaknow.
…so:
That was the case between the wars. Austrofascism consisted of telling Germany “no, you’re doing fascism wrong, and you’re doing German nationalism wrong; here’s how to do them right”, and doing fascism right involved being ostentatiously Catholic. But… that’s over.
(…even though parts of Austria’s conservative party still aren’t quite over venerating Engelbert Dollfuß as their martyr. But the guy who was discovered to have a Dollfuß-Museum in the house where Dollfuß was born is considered a laughable eccentric, embarrassing at best, and the museum is going to be dissolved.)
Well, no. Apart from the short-lived Unterrichtssprache thing mentioned above and the not very consequential Österreichisches Wörterbuch (the Duden never lost prestige), nothing was actually done. Instead, Germany was ignored really hard. Even the slur expresses the wish that it would just go far, far away: Piefkonesien.
(…Piefke is very similar to Yankee in that it’s fractal. Hereabouts it refers to a personality type, or at least did 70 years ago; in Bavaria refers to all people from north of the White-Sausage Equator; in Austria it refers to the Germans, with the poor Bavarians getting overlooked.)
Edit: one thing that was done was that Austria became a founding member of EFTA in 1960. But I don’t think Austria would have been economically able to join the EEC/EC/EU before it actually did in 1995 (and left EFTA in the process). EFTA has not been terribly consequential.
I think it would also have been politically impossible for Austria to join the EU during the cold war; taking into account the accession process, Austria basically joined as soon as the cold war was over.
By that time, EFTA had already turned into a kind of antechamber for the EU; any serious chance for it to be an alternative to the EU had died in 1973 when Britain, Ireland, and Denmark joined the EU (or rather its predecessor, the EEC).
something neither the Franks nor the Bavarians are at all happy with
If I had a Deutschmark for every time I heard “Franken ist nicht Bayern” the summer I lived in Nuremberg I would have several Euros today. There was also a gregarious blonde oversized lad from Upper Bavaria in our class who really did seem to come from another culture entirely.
even though parts of Austria’s conservative party still aren’t quite over venerating Engelbert Dollfuß as their martyr
Captain Von Trapp of Sound of Music fame was apparently a Dolllfuß guy in real life. Not surprisingly, Maria erased that element of his Austrian patriotism from the story but the character is shown wearing the distinctive Austrofascist cross (“Kruckenkreuz”) at one or maybe a few points in the film. Possibly the Hollywood costume people were just looking at old pictures of Von Trapp from the 1930s and didn’t realize what that cross signified.
My favourite is the English monosyllable “alms”, which derives from hexasyllables: Late Latin eleēmosyna, and Ancient Greek ἐλεημοσύνη. An English word derived more straightforwardly from Latin and Greek is the adjective “eleemosynary”, which thus manages to have six more syllables than the corresponding noun.
Dolllfuß
A counter-Nazi Fascist. My head’s spinning.
A Parliament can self-immolate? Shh don’t give you-know-who ideas!
Would the development have been something like *alĒmosin to *ALēmosin to *ALemosin to *ALemsen to *ALems (interpreting sen as a double plural) to alms?
There was some discussion of smaller facist states, starting with Austria, here in 2019. Personally, I tend to think that many of those nominally “facist” inter-war governments don’t really fit the term, but there is also no clear demarcation between facist and merely authoritarian conservative regimes.
I see also that I added a comment to that thread just a few months ago, mentioning The Green Shirts and the Others, which is the best book I know of about facist movements in minor Axis states (primarily the Arrow Cross in Hungary but also the Iron Guard in Romania). The author, Nicholas Nagy-Talavera, seems to have been a fascinating guy. He wrote about Hungary and Romania because he grew up in those countries and saw the facist movements firsthand. The book is full of personal recollections, although it is definitely not a memoir; he only mentions that he survived Auschwitz or that he spent seven years in the gulag when it is relevant to the history he is writing.
Conversely, Man muss Gott für alles danken. Auch für die Ober-, Mittel- und Unterfranken.
Why is Giorgia Meloni so vehemently against Putin?
Because Putin made the mistake of supporting another totally-not-quite-fascist party in Italy. Splitters!!!!!
[Edit: two others, I think. Just overlooked hers somehow.]
At the time, the three presidents of the Austrian parliament couldn’t vote. Once, a tiebreaker was needed, so the president stepped down; then the second president, from the other party, also stepped down to restore the tie; then the third president stepped down as well, and there was nobody left to conduct the session. Oops. The delegates went home, and when they came back the next day police prevented them from entering.
This was fixed in the 1970s: the presidents can vote now.
America never had that particular problem.
I bet.
German Almosen, plurale tantum; stress on the second syllable, but unreduced non-first syllables attract stress.
Da almisse, bog standard common gender count noun, first syllable stress. Sw allmosa, pronounced as if a compound with all- (tone 2 and 1, long /o/). Old Saxon, MLG, who knows?
That’s weird. In almost seven decades, I have never heard the word stressed anywhere else than on the first syllable. This is confirmed by all the dictionaries I have consulted.
Apparently all the modern Romance and Germanic forms of the word go back to a posited early Romance form *al(i)mos(i)na, where the *a- is apparentlich due to the influence of L. alimonia.
That’s weird. In almost seven decades, I have never heard the word stressed anywhere else than on the first syllable
Same here.
…I don’t think I’ve actually ever heard it pronounced. The spelling, with its unreduced o and lack of ll, makes initial stress really hard to imagine, so I always took second-syllable stress for granted.
Illiberal authoritarian regimes, whether or not usefully labeled “fascist,” are quite often nationalist, sometimes extremely/extravagantly so. It should thus be highly unsurprising when neighboring such regimes do not get along because their respective nationalistic commitments lead to conflicting territorial claims etc. The Metaxas regime in Greece, which was at least within the range where “fascist” was arguably a useful rather than merely polemical label, got into a shooting war with the Mussolini regime, for example. Although my sense is that the f-word is comparatively rarely deployed w/r/t the Metaxas regime, perhaps because it was aligned with the Allies in the early stages of WW2 so the desire to use the label for purely factionalized and cynical reasons had already swamped attempts to use it as a neutral descriptor. (Also, Communist propaganda subsequently wanted to label the anti-Communist side of the Greek Civil War as fascist, and that was a broad-tent coalition including some bourgeois centrists/liberals who had gone into exile in the Metaxas years, meaning that focusing on how the Metaxas regime had indeed been distinct and different from the other non-Communist elements of Greek politics was not a politically useful angle to be pursued.)
It occurs to me that while the U.S. does not have a national folkloric costume, it does have a national folkloric symbol in another genre which once belonged to all the people but which is increasingly monopolized by the right, videlicet, thr national flag. Nowadays a Democratic patriot who flies the flag in his front yard (alas, i have no citation for this) finds it necessary to take to the press to reassure his neighbors that he is not a convert to the cause of King Donny and the whole House of Orange.
Brett; Your post on facism reminded me of the chief snti-facists, Donald Duck and Spike Jones.
@John Cowan: Wow, I hadn’t seen that in decades! The comments on YouTube also pointed out something I don’t remember noticing when I saw the cartoon before, way back when it was only about forty years old: The appearance of Donald’s house is itself a caricature of Hitler!
thanks for the recommendation, Brett! i’m excited to give nagy-talavera a look!
Possibly the Hollywood costume people were just looking at old pictures of Von Trapp from the 1930s and didn’t realize what that cross signified.
i’d give it 50-50 between that and someone knowing exactly what they were doing because they already knew who von trapp was and were not happy about him being cleaned up – but more likely there were both kinds on the crew.
Sound of Music is, from an Austrian point of view at least, a very reactionary film. It implicitly celebrates the Ständestaat as a Golden age, and in terms of imagery and characters (probably intentionally) conflates the Ständestaat with the pre-war Empire, which of course many Americans descended from Central European immigrants tend to view through a warm nostalgic lens. The more I think about it, celebrating Von Trapp’s old time Catholic nationalism may well have been intentional in an era when Franco and Salazar were America’s good buddies.
Sounds right to me. I never liked that movie.
It is broadly true that mainstream Hollywood pablum of the post-WW2 era and thereafter very much shied away from depicting Catholics-qua-Catholics, and Catholic institutions-qua-institutions, in an even mildly negative light. Consider e.g. the Father Mulcahy character on M*A*S*H and how a show that is so overtly satirical about the military qua institution treats the church qua institution with kid gloves and makes Mulcahy himself virtually the only character in the cast who is never really made to look ridiculous.
I think this had everything to do with domestic politics and sensitivities (including the fact that until at least sometime in the Sixties any boycott of a supposedly anti-Catholic film could be quite economically significant) and virtually nothing to do with Cold War alignment with the Estado Novo etc. Vanya’s other point re widespread American goodwill toward a hazy vision of the pre-1914 Hapsburg lands coupled with a general lack of interest in the messy details of the 1918-1939 subsequent history, is probably relevant, however.
For the Sound of Music, there’s the additional complexity of three layers of authorship – you’ve got the explicit or implicit political/historical attitudes of: a) Maria von Trapp as memoirist (and perhaps unreliable narrator of her own life); b) the group that then adapted the memoir into a stage musical (with considerable changes and fictitious embellishments); and c) the group that then adapted the musical ( with further changes and probably without going back to consult the memoir?) into a movie. No reason to think that all three were on the same page politically, but it’s of course also possible that the later groups didn’t care enough to critique or revise whatever was implicit in their source material.
I never liked that movie
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ELSx0Kq8xZs
(I think I actually encountered this on LH, so it’s not new to the Hattery, but still worth linking to again.)
I think this had everything to do with domestic politics and sensitivities (including the fact that until at least sometime in the Sixties any boycott of a supposedly anti-Catholic film could be quite economically significant) and virtually nothing to do with Cold War alignment with the Estado Novo etc.
You’re ignoring/eliding the fact that Vanya wasn’t talking about Catholicism tout court but specifically about “old time Catholic nationalism,” which has nothing to do with domestic politics and sensitivities. This is about the Kruckenkreuz, not attending mass.
The so-called Kruckenkreuz in a U.S. context is of course the symbol of the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico, whose gunmen shot up Congress and tried to assassinate President Truman.
In an Austrian context, I read on the internet that “Upon the passage of the 1924 Schilling Act the cross potent was used as a national symbol of the Austrian First Republic, minted on the back of the Groschen coins. In 1934 it became the emblem of the Federal State of Austria, adopted from the ruling Fatherland’s Front …”* Note that this might be another instance of the phenomenon with which we started this thread whereby a generically “national” symbol comes to take on a specifically factional identity.
As noted above, we apparently don’t know who handled the relevant “wardrobe” bit of the movie and what their understanding of Austrian history and/or subjective intent was or wasn’t. One certainly can’t assume the scriptwriter and director and producer all sat around discussing it. To the extent someone was working off a historical photo of the historical Georg von Trapp, one might want to know the year it was taken – one thing the movie does is compress the timeline fairly dramatically. The historical Georg married the historical Maria in November 1927, more than a decade before the Anschluss and over six years before the demise of the First Republic, whereas in the movie the fictionalized post-Anschluss escape over the mountains occurs more or less immediately after the honeymoon.
*I know little about Austrian numismatics, but of course in U.S. numismatics the fasces appeared on the back of the silver dime before during and after Mussolini’s time in power in Italy, disappearing only in 1946 when they redesigned the front to replace the pagan deity Mercury with the recently-apotheosisized Franklin Roosevelt and decided to “update” the back while they were at it.
And indeed a little more poking around shows that the First Republic was handing out medals/awards in the shape of the Kruckenkreuz from 1922 forward. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenzeichen_f%C3%BCr_Verdienste_um_die_Republik_%C3%96sterreich_(1922)
The one depicted in that wiki article is red whereas the one the “Captain” character in the movie wears* is white, but the German wiki article on the very-similar-looking awards (with a change of name) handed out by the Ständestaat is illustrated with a photo of one which is also red. When the Second Republic revived the concept in 1952, they switched to a more Maltese-cross sort of shape, presumably because the prior shape had as noted above taken on undesirable associations after the end of the First Republic.
*The wikibio of the historical Georg says he won a bunch of Hapsburg-era awards but (inferring from silence) none from any post-1918 regime. So presumably another liberty taken by the movie’s wardrobe folks, who cannot be confidently presumed to have known even a little bit about the differences between the First Republic and the Ständestaat.
Very true.
I didn’t even know that. (And I knew about the creation of the Schilling in 1924.)
Absolutely.
I don’t know how happy anyone is with Bay(e)risch-Schwaben, BTW. The whole wide western rim of Bavaria speaks not Bavarian, but Swabian.
I should perhaps also have mentioned that neither in Austria nor in Bavaria is there much if any identification with the other, and not even a lot of awareness. There hasn’t been political unity in over a thousand years, and the border hasn’t moved that entire time except for the Innviertel being pawned back and forth centuries ago… it’s very easy to just ignore each other completely.
As I have no doubt mentioned previously, long long ago when I was a teenager (1982, to be precise) I spent the summer as an exchange student technically residing in Bayerisch-Schwaben (in Neu-Ulm: the city of Ulm proper right across the Danube was* and is in Baden-Württemberg). I was told that the extent to which local folks on the “Bavarian” side of the river had any sort of “Bavarian” self-identification, especially as contrasted with a Swabian identity, tended to depend on what soccer teams they were enthuasiasts of, and to a lesser degree their political views (on a spectrum ranging from “the [distinctively-Bavarian] CSU is awesome” to “the CSU is the opposite of awesome.”).
*Formerly a Freie Reichstadt, but it lost its autonomy back when Napoleon was destroying the last vestiges of the First Reich with the connivance of the more powerful regional potentates who stood to benefit by absorbing smaller fragments.
Ah, that makes perfect sense.
There hasn’t been political unity in over a thousand years, and the border hasn’t moved that entire time except for the Innviertel being pawned back and forth centuries ago…
Don’t forget Tyrole becoming Bavarian for a couple of years under Napoleon; the Tyroleans didn’t like it and there was guerilla resistance. Its leader Andreas Hofer, who was executed by the French, used to be a German national hero (not for fighting the Bavarians, but for standing up against the French), although I guess most Germans nowadays wouldn’t even know who he was. Is that episode taught or widely known in Austria today?
@Hans: I see that Hofer’s Tyrolean home village is in the region currently under Italian rule due to the fortunes of war, so don’t-rock-the-boat establishment politicians in Vienna may need to be cautious in how they invoke his resistance-to-occupation legacy. I assume Hofer’s prior status as “German national hero” occurred during an era when the active and self-interested collaboration of quite a lot of mid-market German rulers (such as the Wittelsbachs) with Napoleon was somehow passed over in discreet silence.
Here in Vienna I live a few blocks from the Andreas Hofer memorial, which stands in the middle of Südtirolerplatz. I would not be surprised if the average person who walks by just assumes Hofer was fighting for South Tyrolian independence from Italy. In my son’s Gymnasium they apparently do not teach anything about Hofer, or if they did it was fleeting and apparently didn’t sink in, but I would guess he is more widely celebrated in Tyrol.
Tellingly, I didn’t know that.
(…more likely I did once and then forgot, but it’s not brought up as part of the story.)
He’s the national hero there, and the versions of the story I’ve read all mention somewhere on the side that he was well disposed toward the Austrian emperor.
Edit: he’s also in the anthem, which I think I knew mentioned the emperor and I didn’t know mentioned Germany.
Hofer does get quite a detailed article about him on Italian wikipedia, which naturally names his birthplace as San Leonardo in Passiria rather than Sankt Leonhard in Passeier. Note also the rather small-minded “La revisione storica del mito” section. Also, the “Controversie” section, which quotes Friedrich Engels’ negative evaluation of Hofer (“un contadino stupido, ignorante, bigotto, fanatico”). Although they balance that with a positive evaluation by Albino Luciani (a/k/a “futuro papa Giovanni Paolo I”).
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Hofer
EDITED TO ADD: I may have neglected to mention that I recently got through a bottle of this irredentism-evoking Austrian-distilled pear brandy, distilled in Linz nowhere near the border but advertising on its label that the pears that are fermented to go into the still come from across the [current] border in the Alto Adigo / Südtirol, with both names given on the label. https://alpenz.com/product-pear_williams.html
Das heilige Land Tirol does have a reputation as conservative. (Not unlike Bavaria, actually.)
Adige, as it says on the bottle. In German, the river is Etsch, and Strabo called it both Ἀτησῖνος and Ἀταγῖς, says de.wikipedia.
tended to depend on what soccer teams they were enthuasiasts of
I think you could draw a pretty accurate linguistic map (Arabic vs. Kabyle) of the area between Algiers and Tizi-Ouzou just by counting the relative proportions in each village of graffiti for their respective football clubs (MCA and JSK).
I’m trying to introduce “isothoryb” for that kind of line.
pear brandy, distilled in Linz nowhere near the border
Austria is not a big country. It’s only a 4 hour drive from Steyr to Brenner, 5 hours to Bozen (Bolzano).
On the other hand, Concord New Hampshire is less than a 2 and a half hour drive from the Quebec border, and I would also think of Concord as “nowhere near the border”. People from Tennessee might disagree.
he’s also in the anthem, which I think I knew mentioned the emperor and I didn’t know mentioned Germany.
I know that song from my readings about German history, but I am surprised that it is the current anthem of Tyrole. It’s monarchist and German nationalist sentiments seem somewhat un-PC for a state of the Austrian Republic.
Ugh, autocorrupt changes any “its” at a start of a sentence to “it’s”, and I overlooked that when posting…
It’s monarchist and German nationalist sentiments seem somewhat un-PC for a state of the Austrian Republic
you forgot to finish the sentence: “…that is not Carinthia or Upper Austria”.
The way anthems typically work in practice, I am very skeptical that locally-patriotic Tyrolese actually routinely sing all six stanzas of the Andreas-Hofer-Lied that the internet provides. One or two seems more likely, but we would need local informants re which one or two it generally gets abbreviated to. It does seem likely that the “ganz Deutschland” bit reflects the retrojection of a subsequent nationalist ideology onto the more particularistic loyalties of Hofer and his comrades in arms.
Although these things vary. Last month I took my ten-year-old to visit the North Bridge at Concord, Mass., where 250 years ago this spring “the embattled farmer(s) stood”* and opened fire on the British regulars on the other side of the stream. Presumably some of the militiamen who fought thought they were fighting for their particular towns, others for the Massachusetts-Bay “colony” as a whole, others for New England as a whole, and perhaps even a few for an inchoate notion of “America” as a whole.
*As phrased in the famous poem written by our disreputable and distant kinsman R.W. Emerson, who improbably rhymed “stood” with “flood.”