Darren Freebury-Jones’ TLS review of Editing Archipelagic Shakespeare, by Rory Loughnane and Willy Maley, includes the following paragraph:
Shakespeare was an innovator among dramatists of the period in attempting to write Welsh accents, although frankly roles such as Fluellen in Henry V and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor often read as though they have lisps, with “beds” spelt “peds”, for instance. Bound up in Shakespeare’s approximation of archipelagic names and accents are stereotypes of the period. The jealous Frank Ford says that he would sooner trust “Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese”, or “an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle”, than his own wife. Welsh people really loved cheese, apparently.
To me, lisp means (in the words of the OED) “To speak with that defect of utterance which consists in substituting for /s/ and /z/ sounds approaching /θ/ and /ð/ ; either by reason of a defect in the organs of speech or as an affectation.” They add “Also, loosely, to speak with child-like utterance, falteringly or imperfectly,” but to me this is a general sort of thing, as in Pope’s “I lisp’d in Numbers, for the Numbers came”; I could never use lisp to mean specifically ‘substituting a voiceless consonant for a voiced one.’ But as I have painfully learned over the decades, my English is by no means normative, so I thought I’d check with the assembled Hatters: does this work for you?
Oh, and if you’re wondering about “Archipelagic Shakespeare”: “Loughnane and Maley focus on the Atlantic archipelago: they consider Irish, Scottish and Welsh characters and places in Shakespeare’s plays, and how he named and spelt them.” Seems like a dumb and confusing usage to me, but what do I know.
No one can really figure out what to call the so-called British Isles (which are absolutely the islands once settled by the Britons/Priteni/Cruithne – it’s the British Empire which stole their name, rather than imposing its own on them). But yes, I’m not keen on Archipelagic – and why would ‘the Atlantic archipelago’ not include the Faroes and Iceland?
Plus I’m skeptical whether you really have an “archipelago” if you’ve only got two islands that are really salient to what you’re talking about. I doubt this book explores at any length potential Manx or Hebridean voices in Shakespeare. Does he even have any characters from Anglesey or the Isle of Wight?
If you want a fancy academic quasi-neologism for some Atlantic archipelagos (archipelagi?*), I give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macaronesia.
*The Italian plural is apparently “arcipelaghi,” so this would be an Anglicization with total conservation of h’s.
and why would ‘the Atlantic archipelago’ not include the Faroes and Iceland?
Good question!
Macaronesia should obviously mean ‘islands where they grow macaroni.’
I contend that the Great British Baking Show is not a great show. It’s a very good show from Great Britain.
Their “archipelagic” apparently doesn’t include England, which makes it even more bizarre. Why not say “Celtic”?
And of course I agree about “‘lisp”.
Welsh people really loved cheese, apparently.
And leeks, according to lore. But what did it all actually mean ?
Dream of a Rarebit Fiend.
For that, we await DE’s wisdom.
This
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isles_of_Scilly
is an interesting place…
But what did it all actually mean ?
Unfortunately, the truth cannot be grasped by those who lack our mystic Celtic heritage.
It is significant that the People do not speak the True Name of Cheese in profane contexts, but substitute the Latin caws for the Ineffable.
But I have said too much.
Macaronesia should obviously mean ‘islands where they grow macaroni.’
Since if those boring egg-white cookies grew on trees, they wouldn’t be so expensive.
But yes, I’m not keen on Archipelagic – and why would ‘the Atlantic archipelago’ not include the Faroes and Iceland?
And the Bahamas, and the Falklands…
According to non-mystic-insider sources regarding Welsh phonology, “The stops /p t k/ are distinguished from /b d ɡ/ by means of aspiration more consistently than by voicing, as /b d ɡ/ are actually devoiced in most contexts.” If this was also true 400+ years ago, “peds” for “beds” would be plausible eye-dialect (with Anglophone hearers not necessarily perceiving the aspiration anyway).
To the extent “lisp” has a broader sense meaning something like “any pronunciation mix-up characteristic of a small child who has not yet fully mastered English phonology,” I’m not sure that /p/ for /b/ is a common one? Not one I have specifically noticed in my own kids, at least.
I vaguely recollect that previously on LH, I was noting Bill Bard’s habit of getting his Welsh characters to substitute initial voiceless stops for voiced in their English.
This struck me as odd, given that Welsh and English actually don’t differ in their rendering of initial /b d g/, but JC (I think it was) came up with a plausible explanation: Welsh /b d g/ differ from /p t k/ primarily not in voicing but in that the latter are aspirated, the former unaspirated (this turns up in the initial mutation rules); modern English has devoiced initial /b d g/ (so they are like Welsh now) but that hadn’t happened yet in Early Modern English.
So Pill was noting a real phenomenon: sixteenth-century Welsh initial /b d g/ really would have sounded more like /p t k/ to the contemporary English than /b d g/. Presumably they would be surprised to hear the Welsh-accented English of their own descendants …
[Ninja’d by JWB, in a frankly uncanny way. Are you secretly a Mystic Welshman, JWB?]
Great British Foo is as a rule used with joculo-ironic ambiguity between [Great British] Foo and Great [British Foo]. Hence Foo is often capitalised à la Truth Social.
The least affected politically correct alias for “British Isles” is “these islands”, but that’s a bit too deictic. Blend with “those islands” suggests “thxse islands”
Done some reading. The reviewed book’s own introduction begins:
Kerrigan’s Archipelagic English : literature, history, and politics, 1603-1707 (OUP 2007) discusses the term in several places, including the following:–
p. vii:
p. 83:
Reviving “the three kingdoms” would work except for those pesky Welsh. And the Chinese.
i’m right with you, @hat, about lisping (though i await a comment from someone who knows from LISP).
and “them islands” is right there, for those of us outside the pleasant pastures “from the Channel Islands to the Shetlands, from the Wash to Galway Bay”.
it does so neutrally
ha!
ha! i say.
and also: pfft.
Three Kingdoms and a Principality? Although there was a King of Man(n) too, wasn’t there – possibly the same person as the Lord of the Isles…
If I were secretly a Mystic Welshman, I wouldn’t be able to tell you about it, would I? I have AFAIK so little identifiably Welsh ancestry that in the fullest exposition I might give of my ethnically-mixed (in a tyranny of small differences way) ancestry, Welsh would not make the six-item list. But I am supposedly a distant-but-direct descendant of this Welchman (as they used to say), who was one of the most colorful characters in early New England: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/7174476/thomas_morgan-carrier
Three Kingdoms and a Principality?
Wales, at any rate, wasn’t a Principality before the Norman conquest, so I performatively object to the name as a wicked colonialist imposition. Of course, it was the very lack of unity that made Wales vulnerable.*
I think the same was actually true of Ireland in de facto reality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruaidr%C3%AD_Ua_Conchobair
“A Nation Once Again” should really have gone “A Nation for the First Time”, but that is definitely less singable.
* The Britons had abundant form in self-undermining internal conflict in the face of invasion. Urien, patron of Taliesin, was doing quite well against the Northumbrians before a rival (ostensibly, allied) Brit king arranged for him to be assassinated …
I would have said “speech impediment” rather than “defect in the organs of speech”, since sometimes the impediment is psychological rather than with the vocal apparatus. Obviously, for speech as for sex and football, the most important organ is the brain, but it’s usually excluded from the list.
a linked and divided archipelago
That would be called CYA, in the days when I worked on the periphery of federal govt circles.
It strikes me that on account of its geographical location, or rather to any number of historical developments and shifts over time that that location made especially plausible, Galloway has as good a claim as any locale (and better than most) to have had historical ties to all of the competing brands of “nationality” floating around the archipelago in question. I therefore propose “Macro-Gallovidia” as an inherently uncontroversial compromise name for the archipelago as a whole.
“Great Galloway” has a ring to it …
It would need disambiguated from the less-great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Galloway
I’d be happy with anywhere in the right-hand big island, on the grounds that all of it is (of course) essentially Welsh. It is possible that the more Goidelic Hatters might bring a different viewpoint, however.
“Albernia”? “Hiberblion”?
I am pleased to report that I have a great-great-grandfather from Merthyr Tydfil (or, as DE would put it, Merthyr Tudful). According to family legend he was a friend of Sam Houston’s and his name is on the San Jacinto Monument (12 feet taller than the Washington Monument!), but I do not vouch for that.
Are we not all, in the final analysis, Welsh?
The memorial hat mentions supposedly honors Texan soldiers from a variety of the several states of the U.S.A. plus “Austria, Canada, England, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal and Scotland.” I don’t know whether it would have been worse to have overlooked Wales altogether or to have considered the issue and deemed it merely part of England. I am surprised to learn that it is slightly taller than the more recently-constructed Juche Tower in Pyongyang. I hope no one got executed for a miscalculation in the design of the latter.
The two central islands, one Brythonic and one Goidelic, are both Mona in Latin, so “[Omniae] Monae” could by extension include the more peripheral islands.
The Orkneys had a Queen of Air and Darkness. (Or do those not count as Isles?)
Well, I am from Gododdin.
The two central islands, one Brythonic and one Goidelic, are both Mona in Latin
The Monarchy.
Then we can all be Monads.
I have it on fairly good authority that there’s still an aspiration-free zone somewhere in northern England. Unfortunately I don’t know where, or what it really sounds like, but it could be that the aspiration in the rest of English has spread from Norse and Welsh…
“Approaching [θ]” is what lispeln means even in German.
For want of a hyphen…
(We don’t actually have *großbritisch in German, but we totally could if we wanted to. We did have, uh, großdeutsch for a while.)
Charles III is Lord of Mann the same way, theoretically, that he’s King of Canada; that’s why the Isle of Man never was part of the EU.
Likewise for the Channel Islands; he’s the Duke of Normandy, still.
“After the death of Mac Lochlainn in 1166, Ruadhrí rode to Dublin where he was inaugurated as High King of Ireland, arguably the first without opposition.”
You folks don’t give the Scillies their props. Apparently Lovecraft never heard of them.
Then we can all be Monads.
The man tells us: Les Monades n’ont point de fenêtres par lesquelles quelque chose y puisse entrer ou sortir. Sounds like a life of abstinence, until you get the joke – they do have doors ! So you can still have your Nando’s delivered.
Nando’s Monads.
Having Charles III as your king prevents you being part of the EU? Was Brexit just a preemptive necessity?
Straddling the Arctic Circle in Northern Norway there are two small islands whose names end in -mona, Hestmona and Teksmona. Current opinion seems to be that the element is ON mön f. “mane”, which certainly makes sense after hest- “horse”. But Rygh (1905) found them hard to explain, and I’d love to concoct a derivation from Celtic.
David Marjanović: The Channel Islands were severed from the Duchy of Normandy in the Treaty of Le Goulet, 1200.
@Trond:
Both the Latin “Mona”‘s come from originals with a short “o”, as is also clear from the Welsh name of Anglesey, Ynys Môn, where the vowel has been secondarily lengthened after the collapse of original vowel length in later Brythonic, but must necessarily go back to an earlier /o/, not /o:/.
The best guess seems to be that the root is the same as in mynydd “mountain”, from *moniyos, which GPC tells me comes from the PIE root *men- “stretch out.” (As also does Latin mons, according to Wiktionary.)
The Germanic “mane” words are from a PIE *mon- “neck”, it seems (as is Welsh mwng “mane”, according to GPC.)
There are five EU member states that (ignoring various exiled potential pretenders and so on in other such states) presently have kings. It does seem like those kingdoms perhaps ought to be relabeled as duchies (archduchies or grand duchies if they wish) in light of their diminished sovereignty, consistent with the general practice of the later Holy Roman Empire in thinking that “kingdom” was a little too sovereign-sounding a label for constituent parts.* Although since the relevant Danish and Dutch monarchs also have territory outside the EU they could perhaps continue as Kings of the Faroes or Aruba or what have you, the way the Margrave of Brandenburg got to use the “King” title in theoretical connection only with his territory outside the Empire’s boundaries (viz. Prussia).
Admittedly in 1871 the successors of the relevant erstwhile dukes who had promoted themselves to king in the aftermath of Napoleon’s destruction of the First Reich got to keep those titles under the Second Reich because demoting them might have seemed too awkward.
*With Bohemia finessed by making sure it didn’t have a king who was a different fellow from the overall emperor.
May I, with reference to the original topic, recommend JO Bartley’s “Teague, Shenkin and Sawney” (Cork University Press, 1953) which has a detailed analysis of the stage Irishman, Welshman and Scotsman in the London theatres in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. P for B in the early Welsh specimens seems fairly standard: indeed, up to Charles Dibdin’s “Liberty-Hall”, 1785:
Ap-Hugh: “I have heard, and audited, and peen witness, look you, of your tisputes and tifferences, and as I am confinced and persuaded you are ferry good friends in the mane, I to desire and peseech you to shake hands.”
There is much more, but damned autcorrect makes it very tiresome to type it out.
Best regards from Stephen (English/Welsh/Irish ancestry)
The King of Bohemia was not always the same person as the Holy Roman Emperor. Most notoriously when Frederick the « Winter King » claimed that title while the Habsburgs Matthias and then Ferdinand held the Imperial position. Maria Theresia was King of Bohemia (sic, «Queen » was not a recognized title of authority), but as a woman was never allowed to rule the Holy Roman Empire. Her husband, and then her son Joseph held that title during her reign as King of Bohemia, King of Hungary, Archduchess of Austria, etc.
Another thing: I have heard that the loyal toast in Jersey was till recently “Our Duke, the Queen”. Can anyone confirm this?
The Bohemian estates certain thought as of 1619 they had a right to select a non-Emperor as their king, but the Emperor of the time disagreed and rightly or wrongly prevailed in the relevant aspect of the war via which he expressed that disagreement. Although perhaps the disagreement would have been equally strong even if the title associated with control of Bohemia had been less grand but the practical stakes the same. Legalistic anomalies created in the following century by MT’s sex were another issue to be finessed as best they could be, and if the titles were nominally divvied up for a while between the two spouses there may be some disagreement among historians as to which was actually the real ruler of all relevant territory and which the nominal one.
confinced and persuaded you are ferry good friends
“F” for Welsh /v/ is hard to account for in the same way as “p t k” for /b d g/. The Welsh sound seems always to have been unequivocally voiced.
Are there Shakespearean examples? I wonder if this had just become a convention by 1785, rather than a reflection of anything real.
“Shenkin” is due to something quite different: Welsh genuinely lacked the sounds of English “ch” and “j” until modern times, and substituted /ʃ/ for both of them in loans (written si.) Welsh also lacked [z] then, and s was substituted for it in loans (such as proper names in the Bible.)
Croatia was a Hapsburg kingdom as well. However, it had already been under the rule of the Hungarian kings for centuries before the disastrous Battle of Mohacs and the death of Lajos II. After the battle, the Croatian nobles did gather to elect their Hapsburg king, just like the Bohemian and remaining Hungarian nobles. However, while there were subsequent upheavals and resistance to Austro-Hungarian rule, there were no elections of serious anti-kings or military conflicts on the scale of what happened in Bohemia in the early Thirty Years War. This difference can probably be attributed to Croatia being (compared to the lands of the Bohemian crown) much smaller, poorer, and closer to the Turks, along with Croatia having less recent cultural memories of being independent of Royal Hungary.
“F” for Welsh /v/
I suppose there’s “Cardiff”, from Caer Dyf, now altered to Caerdydd out of Ignorance (and the fact that word-final /v/ and /ð/ are both very lenis and often not pronounced at all.)
Come to that, the river Taff Taf that the city name comes from. And the famous kleptomaniac Taffy, whose name is supposed to reflect my own True Name, Dafydd.
Evidently More Research is Needed.
For purposes of my modest point, Croatia is irrelevant, because like Prussia-as-originally-understood, and like Hungary for that matter, it was outside the nominal borders of the nominal Empire even if ruled by someone who also ruled territory within the Empire, so the relevant anti-kingdom taboo was not in place.
Me: I’d love to concoct a derivation from Celtic.
I should put on record that I actually believe in the “mane” etymology. Both names probably first denoted prominent ridges on the islands. Across the country, there are dozens of ridges named with some variation of the “mane” word, including e.g. Blåmanen and Rundemanen in Bergen.
Another example of people talking about an ocean with direction terms while clearly thinking of a land mass instead…
I most often notice this when people use “west coast of the Pacific” to talk about ares in the Americas, but that’s probably just because I’m a resident of the actual west coast of the Pacific (with an above average interest in water).
No; I mean that the UK was an EU member, but the Isle of Man isn’t part of the UK – it would have had to join the EU as a separate country to become part of the EU, and didn’t.
If one is going to name the collected islands after a single one, I propose “All Rockall’s Rocks”.
Maximum Flugga.
Oh, and Yes, the review’s use of “lisp” is a bizarre malapropism. That ain’t no lisp.
Sure ain’t. Lisps are guttural.
Damn straight!
Welsh tafod tew (“thick tongue”), which GPC rather oddly renders “lisp”, actually means pronouncing /r/ as [ʁ], which is indeed regarded in the same sort of way as a lisp.
Inupiaq has a verb (which unfortunately I’ve forgotten) for pronouncing all your uvulars as velars, which apparently has a cutesy baby-talk vibe.
Some Kusaal speakers pronounce /s z/ as interdentals, but there doesn’t seem to be any particular word for it, and I doubt whether speakers even notice, as the language has no /θ ð/ phonemes.
You folks don’t give the Scillies their props. Apparently Lovecraft never heard of them.
i suspect he avoided the subject for fear they’d turn out to be part of sicily.
There are no /θ ð/ phonemes in Norwegian, but we do notice, and we have the verb lespe.
part of sicily
Or just silly.
The Queen was definitely the Duke of Lancaster.
Conversely, there are various Scottish titles which can be inherited by women in their own right, so that the 9th Earl might be followed by the 10th Countess who is followed by the 11th Earl, despite the fact that there has never been a 10th Earl, and may have been any number of countesses.
there may be some disagreement among historians as to which was actually the real ruler of all relevant territory and which the nominal one.
There was also real disagreement between MT and her son Joseph about who was the real ruler of the Empire. Granted, by the mid-18th century “Holy Roman Emperor” had long since ceased being an important locus of power or wealth, although still useful for arranging advantageous matrimonies.
There was also a two year period from 1743-45 where Charles VII of Bavaria remained Emperor despite having handed the Kingdom of Bohemia back to Maria Theresia.
I just don’t know that “taboo” describes the situation. Simply put, other than Bohemia by historic accident, none of the constituent states of the Holy Roman Empire had ever been “kingdoms”, including the non-Bohemian Habsburg holdings inside the Empire. For most of the lifetime of the Empire, “King” was a title that required Papal recognition. Leading to odd European outcomes like the Dukes of Savoy becoming “Kings” in the 18th century by virtue of taking over Sardinia, a fairly no-account place at the time that was a “Kingdom” simply because a 13th century Pope had curried favor with the Aragonians.
Savoy, by the way, was also a state in the Holy Roman Empire, yet the Duke of Savoy was able to immediately become “King of Sardinia”, unlike his Brandenburg peer who had had to become “King in Prussia” 20 years earlier. Possibly because the Hohenzollerns had set a precedent and the Empire was already fraying at that point. Possibly also because “King of Sardinia” was actually a legitmate title, not an obvious attempt at status climbing.
Just to add, the HRE Emperors started out as Kings of the Eastern Franks before becoming Emperors with Otto the Great, and at various times also sported the titles King of the Romans*), King in Germany, and King of the Germans.
*)The title they took in the Middle Ages on accession to the throne before the formal coronation as Emperor in Rome by the Pope.
But without ‘archipelagic’ I don’t think it would ever have occurred to me that ‘archipelago’ and ‘pelagic’ were related, and then I wouldn’t have looked up ‘archipelago’ and discovered that it was originally a name for the Aegean Sea. So I’ve got something out of it!
@Hans: There was the title of King of Italy as well, often granted on a ruler’s first arrival in Lombardy, prior to his coronation as [Holy] Roman Emperor. The Salian emperors also used the title King of Arles after they gained Burgundy in the eleventh century.
When did “Llewellyn” (< Llywelyn), with the extra <l>, become near-standard? A quick check in WP shows it used by some bonafide Welsh folks, including a couple of politicians. Have any purists tried to raise a stink about it?
(I couldn’t bring myself to phrase the question using the word “spelling” without being a smartass, so I just avoided it.)
Wikipedia:
I say avoid the whole mess by using Lugubelinos.
A lot of echt Welsh personal and (especially) family names are spelt Englishly by their bearers. Even Welsh speakers don’t very often change Preece into ap Rhys or Bowen into ab Owain, and still fewer use ferch, the female equivalent of ap. Only teh hardcorez do that: it’s not like Ireland. None of my own relatives does anything like that.
But initial “Ll” has got naturalised into the English spelling, so you get e.g. “Lloyd” for yer actual Welsh Llwyd “Grey.”
It’s different though. Bowen and Preece are phonetically correct, just orthographically inauthentic. “Lewelyn” I could understand, as tin-eared phonetic spelling. “Llewellyn” is gilding the llilly.
Nobody pronounces “Llewellyn” with two ɬ’s. (The English don’t even manage one, and Welsh speakers say Llewelyn*.) It’s just a quirky spelling, not a representation of an actual alternative pronunciation.
* However, in these Latter Days of the Law, as the sleep of reason produces monsters, who knows what perversions are perpetrated by the young? A colleague who went to a Welsh-speaking school tells me that they were taught there that Lleu Llaw Gyffes was actually called Llew Llaw Gyffes! Can you credit it? [Mumbles into beard darkly for several minutes before the medication kicks in …]
It’s misleading, though, to English speakers who know in principle what a Welsh ll sounds like, even if they don’t use it.
*lightbulb moment*
The OG sea.
Hence oggin.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=oggin
(I can vouch for the actual existence of this word, having heard it from my father, who was in the Royal Navy back in the Middle Ages or thereabouts.)
Good lord, it’s in the OED (entry revised 2004):
Etymology:
* However, in these Latter Days of the Law, as the sleep of reason produces monsters, who knows what perversions are perpetrated by the young?
Proof that Goya was Welsh
Who ever doubted it?
The name “Goya” derives from the Welsh goiäen “sad.”
Elilevelin, […] Swellin
one could people an entire tolkien novel from this list alone! elves, dwarves, hobbits, and even several varieties of what james (james morrison morrison) ronald reuel was pleased to call “men”.
@mollymooly, quoting one Kerrigan on the term “Atlantic archipelago”: “it does so neutrally (avoiding the assumptions loaded into ‘the British Isles’);”.
Neutrally! The assumptions loaded on to “Atlantic archipelago” are quite a heavy burden. I choose to set myself against those assumptions by using “British Isles” – which has always been neutral in my usage. It is no more imperialist or anti-Irish than the use of “Indian subcontinent” to include Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Bhutan.
I found a particularly ludicrous use of the term under discussion in an article about the Cornish language, which described Cornwall as (from memory) “a peninsula at the south-west corner of the largest island of the Atlantic archipelago”. The aim is evidently to avoid the use of terms connected with Britain or (heaven forfend) England.
Having said that, I preferred this blog when it was less political.
which has always been neutral in my usage
Fine, so long as you’re not using language to communicate with other people, for whom the usage may not be neutral at all. Should they just grow up and accept that your idiolect is normative, and their own feelings about the matter are simply mistaken?
Tempest in a teacup…
People who take elaborate offense to standard/majority usages because their minds have been afflicted with nationalism should, indeed, be encouraged to grow up. To the extent of taking it in stride when other people use those usages; they can do their own thing when it is their turn to speak. You needn’t believe that Norma Loquendi is “neutral” to think it is in some sense “normative.”
Somewhat oddly, the google ngram viewer shows a big upswing in usage of “british isles” starting in the 1960’s and then peaking in the mid-Eighties, with a subsequent upswing for “britain and ireland” staring in the Nineties. (“atlantic archipelago” is too rare to turn up on the graph.) One could dig in deeper in recent usage where both “british isles” and “britain and ireland” are fairly common to see if they’re really being used interchangeably but by different users or if they are each more dominant in particular contexts, depending on whether one is talking about a “political” lumping together versus a “geographical” (or ornithological or what have you) lumping together versus some third possibility.
John John
Ronald Ronald
Reuel Tolkien, he
Took great
Care his estate
Would defend his property.
John said,
“For gold, I’ve allowed
A film I shan’t live to see,
But no one may write
With words I’ve a right
To unless it’s all right with me.
There are no /θ ð/ phonemes in Norwegian, but we do notice, and we have the verb lespe.
Point.
Is lisping a thing in French? I can’t think of an everyday word for it …
WP actually has a article on lisping, I see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp
I like Icelandic smámæli, which seems to mean exactly the same as “lisp.”
People who take elaborate offense to standard/majority usages because their minds have been afflicted with nationalism should, indeed, be encouraged to grow up.
Gulf of America!
While all Hatters (well, some Hatters) agree that Nationalism is Bad, I had a rather broader question in mind.
An illustration might be “Eskimo.” As all Hatters know, this word is not derived from an Algonquian form meaning “eater of raw flesh” and there is nothing derogatory about it etymologically. Moreover, Alaskan Eskimo prefer to be called “Eskimo”, on the eminently logical grounds that most of them are not, in fact, Inuit.
So Canadian Eskimo who object to being called “Eskimo” are (in some sense) wrong that the word is derogatory. Certainly, when I use the word, I mean nothing derogatory by it. Evidently they should recognise my purity of heart by telepathy, grow up and accept my usage.
Is lisping a thing in French?
The en wiki Lisp links to fr wiki via the technical term Sigmatisme, which redirects to the umbrella term Dyslalie, which has a section on the related Susseyement
The French WP article on dyslalie has the following:
“vice de prononciations” — do the French still say that? Or is the WP article simply copied from an old, out-of-copyright encyclopedia?
TLFI has
ZOZOTER, verbe intrans.
Fam. Zézayer; en partic., prononcer de manière défectueuse les s et les z en portant la langue trop en avant. La cousine Cendrine, qui avait un appareil pour lui rapprocher les dents, déclara en zozotant que cela n’avait rien de drôle de faire la mendigote (DRUON, Gdes fam., 1948, p. 94).
I apologize for repeatedly bringing this up but for some reason I find myself fascinated by the Scilly archipelago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bronze_Age_Scilly_Coastline_in_3,000_BC.png
which seems to be hidden behind a field of perceptional fdistortion protecting it from attention, This is very different from the case of Bielefeld.
[see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland ]
Ce vice de prononciation consiste à dire [s] à la place de [ ʃ ] et [z] à la place de [ ʒ] (par exemple « pizon » pour pigeon, « sien » pour chien, etc.)
Supposed to be a stereotypical characteristic of Litvak Yiddish, IIRC (which may not be the case.)
It’s happened repeatedly in Oti-Volta historically.
Non-Nõotre Western Oti-Volta, for example, has /s z/ for proto-Oti-Volta *c *ɉ, and the Ninkare dialect of Farefare has /s z/ for original initial *k *g before front vowels.
None of the modern Oti-Volta languages actually has /ʃ ʒ/ as separate phonemes from /s z/, even though most of them have /c ɉ/.
which seems to be hidden behind a field of perceptional distortion protecting it from attention
My aunt loved the Scilly Isles, and I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of her accounts of the place. She did have something of a mystical streak, however …
On the other hand, one famous connoisseur of those islands was Harold Wilson, who is not chiefly remembered for his mysticism. Perhaps further research is needed on this underappreciated aspect of the man.
(I actually have postcard from my aunt which purportedly was sent from the Scilly Isles. I think … it may have vanished back into the void between the worlds since I last saw it. Or did I see it?)
@ DE
Thanks for the comforting thoughts. It seems there is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archipelago_(2010_film)
Apparently birds are aware of its existence…
So Eskimo is the correct noun for autochthonous Alaskans? I wonder if those who’d used the wrong term feel the remorse of Inuit.
@rosie, the broadest term is “Alaska Native(s),” since “Eskimo,” while covering both Inuit/Inupiat and Yupik (definitely non-Inuit) does not cover Aleuts or the various other groups that traditionally spoke Tlingit or Athabaskan languages etc.
the remorse of Inuit
Thread won, as DM says (and possibly others.)
a stereotypical characteristic of Litvak Yiddish
yes indeed: so-called “sabesdike losn” (“shabes” and “loshn” being the more widely distributed forms). it’s one of the litvish characteristics that wasn’t adopted by YIVOish (possibly because it wasn’t universal among litvaks, possibly because it was deprecated as “vulgar” or “rural”).
the other yiddish lect that’s named from a pronunciation rather than a location is “tote-mome lushn”, from the southeast, where what’s elsewhere realized as /a/ and /o/ appear as /o/ and /u/. the conventional explanations for this one are external, mainly involving influence from ukrainian; here is an article arguing for internal processes instead (others here will be more able to assess it than i am).
Around Stockholm, the rebound of the Earth’s crust after the latest ice age still means that the land rises by about a centimeter a year, with very noticeable consequences. The thriving trade at Birka in Mälaren was abandoned in the late first millennium AD because the waterway past modern Södertälje became too shallow for the boats.
(I lived for a while in Sigtuna, the next trading hub, founded in 986. The main street (Stora gatan) which used to have be fronted on one side by traders’ plots, which were essentially on the beach so they could easily pull their ships up, is now 10 meters over lake level).
Geographic overlap with mazuzenie.
Thread quite possibly won, but I don’t get the pun…?
Ayenbite of Inwyt.
…oh dear.
Or rather “by þe tellynge of algorisme”.
Some of our non-L1-Anglophones like David M. have such good English that we occasionally forget their outsiderness and are thus surprised when they miss Every Schoolboy Knows cultural allusions like agenbite-of-inwit. Although I suppose there may also be generational-cohort factors. I suspect, for example, that in the US the percentage of Painfully-Intellectually-Earnest teenage boys who have read Joyce* has dropped significantly in the four decades since that was me.
*There may be vectors other than reading Joyce via which one could have come across agenbite-of-inwit, but that’s not the smart way to bet.
Compare the fateful turkey.
I don’t actually remember when I first read Ulysses, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t as a teenager. I was actually a very unliterary teen (unliterary, at least, for someone who did Latin* and Greek at school), and I only got into reading Posh Lit at university (actually, this is the longstanding legacy of my time with my then girlfriend, the lawyer.)
* It was only after leaving school that I got into reading much Latin literature; fortunately the language had been beaten into me so thoroughly that I can read Latin for actual pleasure, rather than for a mere sense of achievement that I can do it at all.
At school, I had subscribed to the utterly adolescent idea that Latin literature was all just a sort of lame copy of Greek literature. The great Latin authors didn’t write for teenage boys. Except, possibly, for bloody Seneca. And Livy, of course …
Well done, DE. If I’d had a quid for every time I’ve seen the subject raised, spotted an opportunity to make the pun, and made it, and someone has got it, I’d have two quid … but it’s odd that it’s happened twice.
I would refer fellow Hatters to my work on the eigenbyte of inwit in quantum metaphysics but I can’t get the box open…
The teenager in question being the future emperor Nero… (and in that context let us not forget that at the same time that Nero eulogised his dead adoptive father, Seneca composed the rather nasty and unfunny Apocolocyntosis — some of Nero’s nastiness may have been encouraged by his teacher)
As an anarchist, I am obliged to point out that power encourages nastiness, and absolute power encourages absolute nastiness.
I’ve never read Ulysses. It might be from Tolkien that I heard of the Ayenbite of Inwit.
I’m shocked (shocked!) that nobody has brought up the relevant xkcd on LISP. Or the retronym ‘Lost in Stupid Parentheses’.
(My first programming course was in LISP – but I’m happy to say that I have never used it since then.)
Lots of Irritating Single Parentheses.
But real programmers can code LISP In any language*.
__________________
(*) Programming language. IAF and IMF, anyone?
I was interested to come across these people, described on Google Maps as ‘Builders and Untertakers’.
Not that I’m claiming Google Maps as an infallible source of linguistic information, but that’s the kind of mistake I’m more likely to make because I have the wrong sound in my head than because I have my fingers in the wrong place.
What mistake? From here:
“Untertakers”
But real programmers can code LISP In any language
And lesser programmers can cheat.
I once spent many happy hours transposing some natural-language-processing programs (the kind of thing that “Artificial Intelligence” meant in those days) from a Lisp dialect into C so that I could actually run them on an Atari ST. Any program can be coded in C. Reality is probably written in C.
#include “universe.h”
Oops! Good thing I retired from copyediting…
I’ve never read Ulysses. It might be from Tolkien that I heard of the Ayenbite of Inwit.
I’m sure I first saw it as “agenbite”, it wasn’t from Ulysses (which I read at least ten years later) but probably from someone who had read Ulysses, and I wondered whether the first two syllables were pronounced as in “agent”.
Homophones for T-flapping Americans; -nter and -nder are both [ɾ̃ɹ̩]. That’s how the tubes of the Internet were able to become the innertubes.
So I suppose this was a typo of anticipation.
@David Marjanović: Of course, it helped that inner tubes was a preexisting compound.
For most T-flapping Americans, doesn’t it happen only between vowels (including r-colored vowels)? For me the preceding /n/ prevents flapping of /d/. I’m not positive what sound I have for /t/ between /n/ and an vowel, but “under” and “unter” are not homophonous.
“This ought to be innaresting. That’s Paul’s brother. He just spotted Paul and Mrs. Nelson.”
John O’Hara, “Trouble in 1949”
(That’s the first hit I found at Google Books.)
I’m with Keith Ivey. “Cantor” and “candor” are not homophones for me, though “cantor” and “canter” are.
I think what may be going on is not d or t before a vowel but d or t before r or l that has an “epenthetic” schwa.
So unner, hannel, cenner, innerest, sannals, but candor and Gandolf.This is not my accent, but one I seem to have been heavily exposed to.
“candor”
You mean “candour”? No pair of those three are homophones for me. Though “candour””and “cantor” I probably give spelling pronunciations, because I’ve seldom heard them out loud. (I see “cantour” is an obsolete spelling.)
@PP: I’m not familiar with that accent. I’m pretty sure I have a [d], maybe a weak one, in the words with a “d”, and “sender” and “center” are not homophones. What I think I have after the [n] in “center” is an evanescent glottal stop.
ETA: I say “interest” with two syllables, “intrest”, and “interesting” with three.
John Wells on winter and winner:
That’s “can be, and often are”, not “always are” — this is more a shortcut that can happen in rapid natural speech than the pronunciation you’d use for reading words off a list.
“Candor” has a schwa in the second syllable just like “center” (in dictionaries and usually in speech), but it’s a high-register word, so I have a hard time imagining it being said casually enough to get the cluster reduced.
“Cantor” (if you use a schwa in the second syllable — some dictionaries also give the option of ɔ) is also a high-register word, but it’s fairly common as a surname, and then it can get reduced; the first several clips on Youglish for “cantor” were all names, including one where Steve Bannon said it unreduced in the first use and reduced in the second: “We took down Can[t]or. Remember, we took down Can[]or …” And I heard at least one “Canner Fitzgerald”.
None of them are homophones for me in careful speech, but cantor (I would think a much more common word among practicing Jews, of which I am not one these days but have been in the past, than generally) and canter can both have the [t] reduced to a flap if I’m speaking quickly.
Canter’s, the deli in LA, is pronounced with [-nt-], never a flap that I’ve heard.