I saw on Facebook an announcement of the publication of Ha! Linguistic Studies in Honor of Mark R. Hale (publisher’s page); needless to say, I was curious about the title, and the first paragraph of the preface not only answers that question but is so entertaining I thought I’d post it here:
Mark Hale’s work is among the most original, thought-provoking and provocative in the field—or fields, rather, since his interests range from comparative Indo-European linguistics and reconstruction to phonological theory, syntactic change, Polynesian comparative reconstruction, Middle Iranian philology, and subgrouping methodology all the way to sociolinguistics (as anybody who has ever heard him lecture about change and diffusion will know). It is not easy to do justice to all these interests in a single volume, but we are proud to say that the contributions collected here pay homage to quite a respectable subset of them—hence the all-encompassing “linguistic studies”. This is all the more pleasing given that when we began the project of organizing what was then referred to by its preliminary working title as “Mark Hale’s so-called Festschrift” (have you heard him talk about “Wackernagel’s so-called Law”?) for his 65th birthday, we certainly did not anticipate having to navigate a global pandemic. “Ha!” aptly describes how we felt when we were finally able to complete this volume despite such adversities. It is, of course, also an interjection that you might utter while reading one of Mark’s articles and suddenly encountering a new solution to an old problem—or to something that you hadn’t even realized was a problem! And, finally, “ha” is also one of the infamous particles and clitics in Vedic that we now understand so much better thanks to Mark’s work. In fact, it is also in the title of his contribution to the Gedenkschrift for Jochem Schindler (Hale 1999, “ha: so-called ‘metrical lengthening’ in the Rigveda”), in which he elegantly explains the distribution of the particles h ̆ ̄a and gh ̆ ̄a and the variation in their vowel quantity as having arisen through the interaction of regular sound change (Brugmann’s Law) with metrical position. This article, which is such a good representative of Mark’s careful application of philology and linguistic theory, inspired us to recycle the eponymous particle for him.
I also liked their reference later on to “the perfect photo of our honorand”; I had forgotten the delightfully donnish word honorand (OED: “< classical Latin honōrandus worthy of honour, gerundive of honōrāre”), meaning “A person who is the recipient of an honour (esp. an honorary degree) or the subject of an honorary inscription, monument, etc.”; the OED’s first citation is from the Times of 27 June 1935: “The Hall of Worcester College where the honorands..and Doctors had met to partake of Lord Crewe’s benefaction.”
A graduand for us is someone who is eligible for a degree but hasn’t actually had it conferred yet – basically from the time the list of classifications is published to the time you get bopped on the head with John Knox’s pants and become a graduate (other graduation ceremonies are available).
I feel like ‘honorand’ should have been the same thing – someone whose honour has been announced, but not actually unveiled/published/whatever yet. Maybe it was once, in more pedantically classical days – one of the OED’s quotes could be read that way.
The Honorands, the eight or nine distinguished persons who are to be voted Honorary Doctors.
Honorand probably has to occur in a Festschrift if it’s in German…
I’ll take the opportunity to mention the Schriftfestschrift on writing systems.
I think I saw one of the papers from the FS Hale uploaded on Academia.edu just the other day. The list of contributors (honorants?) for this volume is really impressive.
“honoree” is an established word, so I would support Jen’s putative Useful Distinction.
@David M
That’s gold.
Would a Festschriftfestschrift have as its theme the study of Festschrifts?
Wiktionary has “honorand” but it is not included in this interesting-but-incomplete list https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_words_suffixed_with_-and. There does not seem to be much consistency as to whether LATINISH-VERB-and means “person/object about to be LATIN-VERBED” versus “…currently being LATIN-VERBED” versus “who/which has been LATIN-VERBED,” with some entries covering more than one option and in most cases the correct reading being dictated (it appears to me w/o very deep analysis) by pragmatic factors rather than etymological ones.
Most likely.
Is there a word doctoranD in any of the languages frequently generating academic jargon? I have recently discovered a noun doctoranT in French (I forget in which country), for which the context suggested the meaning “engaged in a doctoral program”. A hypothetical doctoranD would suggest a person having passed all the required obstacles but not yet the official confirmation in the shape of the piece of paper suitable for framing. Such words would not quite be similar to honorand, a derivative of the existing verb honorer. A hypothetical (?) verb doctorer would suggest something medical (literally or metaphorically) like to doctor in English. I agree with JWB that (like many additions to the vocabulary, such creations are conditioned “by pragmatic factors rather than etymological ones.”
Yes, German, where there’s also Dissertant. Doktorand means “grad student”, though; likewise Diplomand is someone (male) going for a Master degree.
In France, where I was one.
The Canadian equivalent is thésard.
Doctorandus in Dutch, but it seems to be something a bit different – anyone who has a degree which would allow them to start on a PhD, if I’m making sense of it properly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctorandus
A doctorant sounds like something maliciously added to somebody’s food.
Italian has dottorando, similarly to French, laureando for a candidate to a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree, and also maturando for a candidate to the high school final exam.
That last one is Maturant in Austria and Abiturient in Germany.
Abiturient – combining a future participle (abiturus “someone about to leave”) with the ending of a present participle. When is the earliest attestation of Abiturient? I can hardly believe that it was used (officially) at a time when students were still required to deliver essays written in Latin; I think this would have counted as a Barbarismus (perhaps originally a jocular usage?).
I just checked: in 16th century Latin student slang there was actually a verb abiturire (“to leave”) with the present participle abituriens which is apparently the origin of Abiturient (first attested in the 1780s).
Ha! I thought abitur was a present 3rd person passive-form-used-as-impersonal, as in Sic itur ad astra. How wrong I was … as I have remarked before, LH is educational..
The Canadian equivalent is thésard.
I hear doctorant(e) pretty frequently in French Canadian academia. Never encountered thésard before. I, probably inaccurately, associate slangy words that end in ‘ard’ as France French.
ə de vivre
I did not know thésard either, but I am not familiar with current French academic slang. The word is found in the TLFI, with the first attestation in 1970 and an example involving a prof et ses thésards – the doctoral students whose ttheses he is supervising. This relatively recent word has joined the apparently growing list of other somewhat deragoratory words in -ard, (with feminine -arde) (see the TLFI entry under -ard as well as the ones for the words themselves). Trying to remember more neutral words with this suffix, I thought of lézard “:lizard”. a very much older word which I did not think of as derogatory, but iit did belong to the list at one time, meaning basically “lazy”
I’ve seen thésard in non-slangy contexts, including on a CV where someone boasted to have won a prize as the best grad student of the year.
Also feminine thésarde.
How did the exam come to be called Abitur, BTW? (It’s Matura from Italy to Poland, which doesn’t make a lot of grammatical sense either.)
Did it? I thought it’s straight (with some probably irregular voicing) from Latin lacerta (or -us), and Wiktionary very briefly backs that up.
(That word is irregular in Romance anyway. Spanish lagarto must have had its non-front vowel in the middle for a long time…)
David M
I’ve seen thésard in non-slangy contexts, including on a CV where someone boasted to have won a prize as the best grad student of the year.
I guess the student in question did not realize that the word was part of an academic slang, rather than a formal noun appropriate to a prize winner.
lézard:
The TLFI does mention Latin lacerta but also several other Old or Middle French variants. This suggests that the original Latin word not being analyzable as such was reformed through reinterpreting the -ert- sequence as the Germanic -arT-, and the middle consonant as a sibilant of some kind occurring in a French verb (not always the same one) with an apparently suitable meaning. That the word is irregular in Spanish too would suggest a reinterpretation rather than a regular evolution. (I may be wrong here, but I don’t trust Wiktionary for anything complex — they just pick the simplest one of several proposed solutions).
“That last one is Maturant in Austria and Abiturient in Germany.”
Yeah, as with many other words, we borrowed the Austrian German version over here.
The fun part is we also borrowed ‘doktorand’, but that’s a less frequent word than ‘maturant’, and so via analogy, most people now say ‘doktorant’, and prescriptivists get angry at them. Of course the German pronunciation of ‘Doktorand’ also ends in [t], but that’s neither here nor there.
I never tire of stories about angry prescriptivists!
Not anywhere south of the White-Sausage Equator, except by Finnish standards.
Okay, I know what the WSE is, but what do you mean by Finnish standards? 😀
The voiceless lenis.
The High German Consonant Shift (in the wider sense) eliminated not only aspiration, but also voicing from the obstruent system, phonemically and phonetically. Between the WSE and Carinthia, neither of these features has come back. But /t/ and /d/ remain distinct after consonants and, in part of the area, word-initially. They’re both voiceless and both unaspirated, and neither is glottalized or anything; and at least word-initially length doesn’t play a role either. /t/ sounds like the /t/ of languages with a voice contrast (e.g. Japanese, Slavic, Hungarian, Standard/southern Italian, French), /d/ sounds like the /t/ of languages without any contrast or nearly so (Finnish, Spanish) and those with a strong aspiration contrast (Mandarin) and those that combine voice and aspiration contrasts (Thai, Hindi).
Nothing special happens at the ends of words. The Central Bavarian lenition process that turns /t/ and /tː/ into /d/ (not the other way around) doesn’t apply after consonants. The /d/ in -and sounds exactly like the /d/ in the plural -anden.
…and the most difficult sounds in the French language, for me, are [b d g], followed by [z ʒ].
Ah, yes, I should have guessed.
I remember you mentioning Schwarzenegger and Chinese in the same post. 😀
Yes.
@ David M.: that’s interesting, do you mean that Spanish /t/ is phonetically [d̥]? I’ve never seen it described as such, even in accurate phonetic studies.
Also, I’m curious as to why you specified “Standard/southern Italian”. Northern Italian accents tend, if anything, to respect the voicing contrast between /p t k/ and /b d g/ more clearly, since in the local dialects lenition has gone all the way, meaning that intervocalically fully voiced segments (outcomes of lenition) contrast with fully unvoiced ones (outcomes of degemination).
But Central-Southern accents and dialects mostly have some kind of synchronic lenition of voiceless stops, so that e.g. Roman /t/ is [d̥] intervocalically, while remaining distinct from /d/.
Yes.
A pure fortis-lenis contrast is so rare worldwide that the IPA doesn’t offer a way of writing it. Using the “voiceless” diacritic with the letters for voiced obstruents is a makeshift workaround sometimes, inconsistently, used in German dialectology, but that’s also been used for completely different things like slack voice…
Because I was trying to handwave over my insufficient knowledge of Italian dialect geography. 🙂
That’s actually a neat explanation for why my impression of Roman (15 years ago I got to hear it occasionally) was that all obstruents are voiced all the time, except z, which I heard as always voiceless! Probably I simply didn’t notice the pure voice contrast for plosives. 🙂
(Once friction is involved, it somehow becomes much easier. I find [z] or for that matter [ʒ] very noticeable, much more so than [b d g].)
In fact, another noticeable thing about Roman accents is that the abovesaid lenition also applies in sandhi. Now, it is true that, like all non-Tuscan* accents the Roman one does not have an opposition between /s/ and /z/: all intervocalic s‘s are phonologically unvoiced in the Center-South and voiced in the North. But in the present-day Roman accent, the allophonic lenition of obstruents increasingly applies to /s/, which comes out as [z̥] — not fully voiced, but perceptibly so. To speakers of a Northern variety, where intervocalic /s/ is always [z] word-internally but [s] word-initially (no sandhi at all)**, it sounds like speakers from Rome (especially younger ones) are in fact voicing all sibilants like crazy, since they say not only ro[z̥]a (not quite Northern ro[z]a but closer than Southern ro[s]a), but also things like la [z̥]oluzione that are very striking to a Northern ear.
* Tuscan (and thus, at least in theory, Standard Italian) contrasts /s/ and /z/ for the same reason it has stop voicing in words like ago, strada, riva ( < acus, strata, ripa) but not in fuoco, amico, dito ( < focus, amicus, digitus), i.e. either lexical diffusion from more prestigious Northern dialects in the Middle Ages, or incomplete phonologization of a native voicing rule. This crazy distribution creates no problem with regard to stops, that use different letters, but for non-Tuscan speakers it is unreasonably difficult to remember which ⟨s⟩'s are supposed to be /s/ and which /z/, especially considering that both outcomes often appear in what is literally the same suffix — personally, I refuse to even look up which one between inglese and francese should have /z/.
** The other big difference being of course that Northern /s/ is almost everywhere retracted [s̺]/[z̺].
It’s unsettling. Even the exceptions from the exceptions in German stage pronunciation aren’t random like that.
Roberto Batisti: Thanks for an extremely informative comment.
Roberto Batisti: I second our cyberhost’s thanks for a very interesting and data-rich comment. I would like to add that, of the two possibilities you mention regarding the origin of the irregularly voiced intervocalic stops and /s/ in Tuscan (“either lexical diffusion from more prestigious Northern dialects in the Middle Ages, or incomplete phonologization of a native voicing rule”), one scholar has made a very good case that the first is in fact the correct one: see Izzo, Herbert. 1980. “On the voicing of latin intervocalic /p, t, k/ in italian”, in Izzo, Herbert (Ed.) “Italic and Romance: Linguistic studies in honor of Ernst Pulgram”, Amsterdam & Philadelphia, John Benjamins, pages 131-156.
I am also glad to hear that non-Tuscan Italian speakers find the /s/ versus /z/ distinction frustrating -back when I was studying Italian this was the phonological aspect of the language that irritated me the most (stress being unmarked in the orthography is an extra problem, but at least we speakers of another Romance language can make good guesses on stress placement based on cognates in our L1 of numerous Italian words. But /s/ versus /z/? Learners of Italian, be they native Romance speakers or not, might as well flip a coin).
@ Etienne: for what it’s worth, I too subscribe to the first view. The fact that lenition never appears in inflectional morphology (the past participle is always of the shape -Vto, the 2nd person plural -Vte…) strongly speaks in favour of a non-native origin of lenited forms.
I just ran across this passage on the dialect of Verona in Pavel Muratov’s wonderful «Образы Италии» [Images of Italy] (1911-24):
I’m not happy with how I’ve rendered говор ‘sound of talking/voices/speech; dialect, patois; pronunciation, accent,’ but I wanted to distinguish it from the scientific term диалект ‘dialect,’ and it’s the best I could come up with at the moment. I also think “Italian /d͡ʒ/’s and /t͡ʃ/’s” looks ugly, but what can you do?
Finnish dialectology claims to distinguish fortis allophones p t k (universal utterance-initially and in voiceless clusters) from lenis allophones ʙ ᴅ ɢ (usually in positions like word-medial, word-final or in post-voiced sandhi). I’ve never gotten much of a hang on hearing this though. Maybe I have however just not had enough experience with dialects, supposedly mostly Southwesternish, where it would be as clear as in Estonian.
Standard Finnish nominally has a voicing distinction of course, though it’s really still fairly unstable esp. for /b g/ (attempts at exaggerrating the distinction can IME also veer towards [ɓ ɠ]); and for many speakers the t d distinction is really more cued by dental vs. alveolar.
That would make a lot of sense. I haven’t heard enough of any kind of Finnish to rule that out. (Not of Estonian either, but I’d be surprised if the triple length contrast is really all just length alone.)
Huh. Intriguing. Makes sense in that a few western dialects have an American-style flap for d (according to a map you recently posted).
I think I’ve heard some s turning into z, eg sitten -> zitten, probably, after a preceding -n. Perhaps something similar in Icelandic, too (postposed sinn, eg).
Estonian
Listen for the p in Eilne Päev (multiple times)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7TfHYPXmlw
The Russian original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri7gCEGLtw4
The lyrics from the Veski page:
1. EILSEST ME KÕIK OLEME HOMSESSE TEEL
MINNA ON MEIL KAUA JA KAUGELE VEEL
AEG SEDA TEEB KUI VÄSID, VAIBUB KA HOOG
PIKK, PIKK ON TEE IKKAGI KERGEM ON KOOS
Ref: EILNE PÄEV PETLIKULT HEA
EILNE PÄEV EHK PARANDAS VEAD
EILNE PÄEV MAHA MEIST JÄÄB
EILNE PÄEV
2. MAAILM NII SUUR, LÕPUTUD TEED IGAL POOL
SEISMA EI JÄÄ IIALGI AEGADE VOOL
PÄEVADES KÄID, ETTE ON MÄÄRATUD KÕIK
KORRAKS EHK VAID VÄSINULT UINUDA VÕID
Ref: EILNE PÄEV…
EILNE PÄEV, MINUTID REAS
EILNE PÄEV EI KORDU JU EAL
EILNE PÄEV MAHA MEIST JÄÄB
EILNE PÄEV
3. SELGE ON SEE ÜKSINDA OLLA EI SAA
SIIN ON ME TEE, MEIEGA KOOS ELAB MAA
MIKS OLED KURB? HOIA MU KÄTT OMA KÄES
EES ELU MEIL PÄIKEST JA RÕÕMU SA NÄED!
Makes sense in that a few western dialects have an American-style flap for d
No, that’s from older †ð and is also a proper flap / single-contact trill, not the tap. This alveolar [d] is strictly from Standard Finnish (incl. where taken up colloquially in learned vocabulary) and seems to be derived from the Swedish pronunciation.
Estonian short b d g are definitely generally lenis and can have voicing in free/idiolectal variation. The Wiktionary recordings of Es. sild ‘bridge’ and Fi. keltainen ‘yellow’ might be good points of comparison.
[z] can be definitely heard occasionally in both but not systematically anywhere west of Ingria / Karelia.
David Marjanović
Could you please describe (in words, not in the IPA, which, as you say, does not give you the symbol you need) the realization of Spanish /d/ that you have in mind?
If the source of your information is the research literature, could you give at least one bibliographical reference?
If it is personal observation, could you state the variety or varieties (topolects, sociolects, etc.) in which you have heard that realization?
In what environments is /d/ so realized? All environments or just word-initially, word-finally, intervocalically, and/or before or after certain consonants?
…OK, I’ve suffered through the whole thing. (Postsowjetischer Musikantenstadl. *facepalm*) First, I didn’t notice a single fortis. Second, every p in päev is a fully voiced [b]. Wikipedia: “The stops are voiceless unaspirated, but the short versions may be partially [p̬, t̬, t̬ʲ, k̬] or fully [b, d, dʲ, ɡ] voiced when they appear before or between vowels.[5]” A few lines later it says “Word-initially, obstruents are always voiceless, while the remaining consonants are always short.”, but I guess professional singing might prefer intervocalic voicing even across word boundaries; in the lyrics posted above, every occurrence of päev is preceded by a vowel, except for a päevades preceded by l at the end of the preceding line.
Unrelatedly, ä has bottomed out and become [a] in the strict meaning of the IPA symbol: the bottom front corner of vowel space, as found in French. I’ve heard people do this in Finnish.
Ah, so it’s a single-contact trill and not a flap…
Oh. Of course. I should have thought of that.
(I’ve heard very little of any North Germanic language… but I would have expected that basically all of Germanic except High German has apical alveolars if I’d thought about it.)
Yes, both lenes (and the k more or less too) – indeed the Estonian d in this recording has a loud release that brings it closer to the fortis end of the scale than the Finnish t.
I’m not sure what you mean. In my experience, the Spanish t sounds like my native (Upper German) d, not like my native t which has a louder release (and sounds like the t of, say, French, Standard Italian, Russian or Japanese). The Spanish d is an approximant (the tongue doesn’t actually touch anything; it’s difficult to hear its very presence if you aren’t used to it), except after n or after a pause, when it comes out as an actual [d], which is a voiced plosive as found in French or Standard Italian or Russian or Japanese. In English, voicing of b d g is most reliably present in professional singing; it’s also more common toward the ends of words, and if r or l follow.
My sister once took a course in Spanish and marveled at how one of the other participants, from far northern Germany, simply could not manage to pronounce te: it’s [d̥ɛ], but the closest they have available by the North Sea is [tʰeː]…
every p in päev is a fully voiced [b]
I beg to differ—they are not as full-on voiced as in Russian or Japanese.
You can listen to more Estonian at https://www.jw.org/en/library/bible/?contentLanguageFilter=et
namely, Piibel. Uue maailma tõlge (2014). It has both audio and text. A few chapters of the Genesis would be enough, I guess:
1 Alguses lõi Jumal taeva ja maa.
2 Maa oli tühi ja lage, pimedus oli vetesügavuse peal ning Jumala vaim* liikus vete kohal.
3 Jumal ütles: „Saagu valgus.” Ja valgus sai. 4 Jumal nägi, et valgus on hea, ja ta hakkas valgust pimedusest lahutama. 5 Jumal nimetas valguse päevaks ja pimeduse ta nimetas ööks. Oli õhtu ja oli hommik — esimene päev.
6 Seejärel Jumal ütles: „Saagu laotus vete vahele ja see lahutagu veed vetest.” 7 Nii ka sündis. Jumal tegi laotuse ja lahutas veed, mis olid laotuse all, vetest, mis olid laotuse peal. 8 Jumal nimetas laotuse taevaks. Oli õhtu ja oli hommik — teine päev.
9 Seejärel Jumal ütles: „Veed taeva all koondugu ühte paika ja nähtavale tulgu kuiv pind.” Nii ka sündis. 10 Jumal nimetas kuiva pinna maaks ning koondunud veed nimetas ta mereks. Ja Jumal nägi, et see on hea. 11 Siis Jumal ütles: „Maast tärgaku rohi, seemet kandvad eri liiki taimed ning eri liiki* viljapuud, mille viljas on seeme.” Nii ka sündis. 12 Maast kasvasid rohi, seemet kandvad eri liiki taimed ning eri liiki puud, mille viljas on seeme. Ja Jumal nägi, et see on hea. 13 Oli õhtu ja oli hommik — kolmas päev.
graduate : escapee :: graduand : …?
a. escaper
b. escapand
c. escapado
d. espadrille
I’m bad at hearing pure voice contrasts in plosives that are short enough.
Here, all obstruents are voiceless, and the frequent long ones make the whole thing sound rather Swiss. 🙂 Apparently the voicing is a feature of professional singing.
Interesting also that h is [x ~ ç], unlike in Finnish where it sticks much closer to [h].
And I’ve found that the Finnic languages have the same split as Eng. worm ‘worm’ and Scand. orm ‘snake’:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Finnic/mato
madu : mao : madu ‘pika rulja jalutu kehaga soomuseline roomaja’
? ← alggermaani *maþōn-, *maþan-
vanaülemsaksa mado ‘tõuk, uss’
gooti maþa ‘uss’
alamsaksa made ‘uss, tõuk’
● vadja mato ‘madu; röövik, tõuk; vihmauss, limukas’
soome mato ‘uss’
isuri mado ‘madu; tigu, limune (ilma koja, karbita)’
Aunuse karjala mado ‘madu’
lüüdi mado ‘madu’
vepsa mado ‘madu; uss, tõuk’
Teisalt on arvatud, et sama tüvi mis sõnas made. Kolmanda võimalusena on arvatud, et tüve vaste on ka saami muohcu ‘(raamatu)koi’ ning tüvi võib olla vana indoiraani laen, ← varane algindoiraani *matsa-, mille vasted tütarkeeltes on nt vanaindia maśa-ka-, maśa- ‘sääsk, pistkärbes, moskiito’, leedu maša-la- ‘kihulane’. Sääsk, moskiito ja kihulane on ühes eluetapis vastsed, tõugud. Hiljem võib olla laenatud germaani laenuallika saksa vaste, maat-.
http://eki.ee/dict/ety/index.cgi?Q=madu&F=M&C06=et
DeepLed:
serpent : snake : snake ‘armoured reptilian with a long legless body’
? ← Old Germanic *maþōn-, *maþan-.
Old German mado ‘worm, wolf’.
Gothic maþa ‘worm’.
Low German made ‘worm, wolf’.
● Vadja mato ‘snake; reptile, brood; earthworm, slime’.
Finnish mato ‘worm
isuri mado ‘snake; snail, slime (without shell, shell)’
Aunus Karelian mado ‘snake’.
lydian mado ‘snake’
Vepsa mado ‘snake; worm, brood’.
On the other hand, it is thought to be the same root as the word made. A third possibility is that the stem is also the Sami counterpart of muohcu ‘book moth’, and the stem may be an Old Indo-Aryan loan, ← early Old Indo-Aryan *matsa-, whose counterparts in the daughter languages are e.g. Old Indian maśa-ka-, maśa- ‘mosquito, mosquito’, Lithuanian maša-la- ‘goshawk’. Mosquito, mosquito and gerbil are larvae, breeds, in the same life stage. Later, the German equivalent of the Germanic loan source, maat-, may have been borrowed.
More likely, the Germanic version (which includes moth) is a loan from Finnic.
Maggot, BTW, is place-of-articulation metathesis from maddock, which is the above plus the diminutive suffix also found in hillock and paddock.
This at least establishes that we’re talking about two different things, since I was making the point that this recording of keltainen has what I think of as being a very clear fortis vs. sild a rather clear lenis.
That confused me, so I listened to them again, but yes, we’re clearly talking about different things (and I have no clue what the one you’re talking about is).
Ah, so Da maddike and E maggot are cognate. Who knew?
@Lars Mathiesen: The OED says “probably”:
Incidentally, the other sense of maggot mentioned, which the OED says is definitely from the “obsolete pet form of the female forenames Margery… and Margaret” is:
Not surprisingly for a bit of British rural terminology, this was completely unfamiliar to me.
(As I was slogging through doing the markup for this post, I realized that I could insert italic and bold tabs much more easily by using the online graphical version of the blog editor I use, then copying the resulting code version.)
“Probably” is good enough for me. I didn’t know about E maddock either, and I learned that there is a whole complex around maddike and mading = ‘fish bait’.
The whole mess of moth & maggot; pick p. 218.
(Well, most of it. OHG mado m. has become Made f. “maggot”. But that phenomenon is probably part of another mess.)
On p. 219 Kroonen uses the word anciennity, which I have never seen before, and nor has the OED. I see it in a few linguistics books, also authored by Dutch speakers, and in economic texts, meaning ‘seniority’. Wiktionary lists it as a synonym for that meaning, but without its own entry.
I was taken aback by “The anciennity of the a-vocalism is at any rate confirmed by a number of Slavic cognates…,” but “anciennity,” though not in the OED, occurs a fair number of times in Google Books: “The ECJ deliberated whether the length of service (anciennity) should be admissible in determining pay,” “A similar difference between norms and facts may be noted in connection with anciennity,” “above all strategies designed to make his status as Electoral Prince emphatically clear by invoking its seniority and anciennity,” etc.
Pipped by Y!
I see the Dutch word is anciënniteit (Wikipedia).
Yeah, I was wondering if that’s a case of “every French word is a potential English word”.
could it be fossil norman legal terminology on both sides of the shirtsleeve? “seniority and anciennity” has that legalistic double-barrelled structure (deem and consider; lewd and lascivious; etc), though it’s not on wikipedia’s Legal Doublets list.
Anciennity appears in a lot of Czech texts. I’m not even sure what case it’s in. The only pre-1900 English occurrences I can find are in Diezmann’s 1832 Vollständiges Taschenwörterbuch der vier Hauptsprachen Europas, “Amstalter / anciennity, seniority in office / ancienneté / anzianità”; and in Spence’s 1878 The Land of Bolivar; Or, War, Peace, and Adventure in the Republic of Venezuela, in an example of “South American English in the early stage of development”.
The OED has ancienty, but no ‘real’ quotes later than 16-something.
1775 J. Ash New & Compl. Dict. Eng. Lang. Ancienty (a law term), Seniority, priority of birth.
Ancientry, with similar meanings, seems to just about make it into the 20th century.
@Y
Amstalter should read Amtsalter.
Yup. Here’s an image:
The Czech word is now spelt ancienita according to Czech Wikipedia but it refers to an article with the spelling “anciennita“ in the 19th century Ottův slovník naučný. “anciennity” would be the genitive.
From the Anglo-Norman dictionary:
la dite ville, li quiel purroit morir consideree sa grande ancientee, si pur nous lui n’ estoient purveuz de notre grace.
This is from 14c, TLFI has cites already late 12c. for French