No, not the river (whose name is French, from Latin Mosa); this is an English dialect word I just ran across, with an unexpected etymology (French < Celtic) I thought I’d share. OED (updated December 2001):
Pronunciation: Brit. /mjuːs/ , /mjuːz/ , U.S. /mjuz/
Etymology: < Middle French muce, musse, mouce hiding place, secret place (1190 in Old French as muce; only from 1561 in spec. sense 1a; French regional (central and western) musse hiding place, hole in a hedge) < mucier, mucer to hide, conceal oneself (second half of the 12th cent.; compare Anglo-Norman muscier, muscer, mucier, etc.; also Italian (regional) mucciare, muccire to flee) < an unidentified reflex of the Celtic base of Early Irish múch smoke, Welsh mwg smoke, which in turn is related to the Germanic base of smoke v. Compare mitch v., muset n.1 Compare slightly earlier maze n.2 and discussion at that entry.
Recorded in Eng. Dial. Dict. s.v. in very widespread English regional use.Now Brit. regional.
1.
a. A gap in a fence or hedge through which hares, rabbits, etc., pass, esp. as a means of escape; (also) a man-made track or tunnel for leading hares, rabbits, etc., into a trap. Cf. run n.2 12a.
1523 J. Skelton Goodly Garlande of Laurell 1384 He wrate of a muse [1568 mows] throw a mud wall; How a do cam trippyng in at the rere warde.
1575 G. Gascoigne Noble Arte Venerie lix. 164 She..will all the daye long holde the same wayes..and passe through the same muses untill hir death or escape.
[…]
1623 T. Scott High-waies of God 55 A Hare started before Greyhounds will haue her accustomed way and muse, or die for it.
1754 W. Cowper Epist. to R. Lloyd 52 The virtuoso..The gilded butterfly pursues O’er hedge and ditch, through gaps and mews.
1756 Gentleman’s Mag. 26 180 The most effectual method of destroying hares is by laying snares..in the muishes of hedges, dykes, and other fences.
[…]
1812 W. B. Daniel Rural Sports (new ed.) I. 587 The Tipe or trap..consists of a large pit or Cistern, covered with a floor, with a small trap door, nicely balanced, near its centre, into which the rabbits are led by a narrow Meuse.
1821 Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag. 8 531 It is doubted whether the stoutest March hare will have sufficient vivacity to carry him to his muese.
1884 R. Lawson Upton-on-Severn Words & Phrases at Muse, Them Welshmen [sc. Welsh sheep]’d go through a rabbit run or a har’ muce.
[…]
1895 Athenæum 2 Mar. 285/3 In a stone-wall country you will not find a hare close to the lee side..because of the concentrated wind which whistles through every ‘meuse’.
1972 G. E. Evans & D. Thomson Leaping Hare vi. 75 An unusual method of catching hares..appears to have been extensively used by poachers in addition to the more common device of snaring or netting at the smiles or meuses.
2006 T. Williamson Archaeol. Rabbit Warrens vi. 54 (caption) A narrow wooden tunnel or muce runs through the wall and across the top of the pit; here there is a small trap-door in the tunnel floor.†b. In extended use: a means of escape; (a device affording) a way out of a difficulty. Obs.
1528 J. Skelton Honorificatissimo: Replycacion agaynst Yong Scolers sig. Avi, Howe..ye had..deuyllysshely deuysed The people to seduce And chase them thorowe the muse Of your noughty counsell.
1606 W. Warner Continuance Albions Eng. xvi. cii. 404 When desprate Ruffins fraught with faults finde readily a Meuse.
1647 N. Bacon Hist. Disc. Govt. 184 In this Tragedy the Pope observing how the English Bishops had forsaken their Archbishop, espied a muse through which all the game of the Popedome might soon escape.
[…]
1858 R. S. Surtees Ask Mamma xxix. 116 The Major, after trying every meuse, and every twist, and every turn..was at length obliged to whip off.†2. The form or lair of a hare; occas. with reference to other animals of the chase. Obs.
In 16th and 17th centuries freq. in proverbial sayings, as a hare without a meuse, every hare has its meuse, etc.
1585 S. Robson Choise of Change sig. Miii, Things very hard or not at all to be found. A hare without a muse…A whore without a skuse.
1598 G. Chapman tr. Homer Seauen Bks. Iliades vii. 123 As when a crew of gallantes watch, the wild muse of a bore.
[…]
1627 W. Hawkins Apollo Shroving v. iv. 86 Ludio The Nine Muses play at Nine-holes: euery Muse hath her hole. Thur. Yes, and euery Hare hath her Muse.
1788 W. Marshall Provincialisms E. Yorks. in Rural Econ. Yorks. II. 353 Smoot, a hare muce; or any small gap or hole in the bottom of a hedge.
1890 J. D. Robertson Gloss. Words County of Gloucester Mews, a hare’s form.
Note the odd form ‘lair of a hare,’ also new to me (it’s the OED’s sense 21); some citations:
a1300 Fragm. Pop. Sc. (Wright) 318 I-buyd as an hare Whan he in forme lyth.
c1386 Chaucer Shipman’s Tale 104 As in a fourme sitteth a wery hare.
[…]
1575 G. Gascoigne Noble Arte Venerie lviii. 161 When a Hare ryseth out of the forme.
[…]
1735 W. Somervile Chace ii. 38 In the dry crumbling Bank Their Forms they delve.
[…]
1845 C. Darwin Jrnl. (ed. 2) iii. 46 The Indians catch the Varying Hare by walking spirally round and round, it when on its form.
[…]
1952 R. Campbell tr. C. Baudelaire Poems 77 Whereon as in a fourm you would fill out And mould your hair.
I’m actually not sure the last one belongs here; it’s not at all clear to me what sense Campbell intended, since the line has little to do with Baudelaire’s French (“Qui, comme une guérite, enfermera tes charmes”). You can see the poem in the original with three translations here (William Aggeler and Lewis Piaget Shanks both render guérite accurately as “sentry-box”).
Addendum. It turns out I wrote about this word and its etymology less than three months ago. Sigh. At least it gets its own post here.
I don’t actually think the OED is saying “Celtic < Germanic”; it’s saying that the Celtic proto-form of múch, mwg is a cognate of Proto-Germanic *smuk- < PIE *smeug-, presumably thanks to s-mobile. Etymonline agrees, and also points to Armenian mux (without /s/) and Greek smykhein ‘burn with smoldering flame’ (with /s/).
You’re quite right, of course, and I’ve deleted the “< Germanic" part.
Shucks! My interest was really piqued by the prospect of a secure case of a loanword from Proto-Germanic into Celtic, since the borrowing usually went in the other direction. (For Hat readers, Ringe provides a good list of borrowings from early Celtic into early Germanic in his From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, and Hubert has fuller list of the words shared by the two branches on page 66 in his old but still serviceable work, The Rise of the Celts.)
Hat, was it that repitition of the from same Indo-European base as formula used by the OED that threw you off originally? How much easier it would be to read and digest the new OED3 etymologies without that clumsy and potentially misleading formula from same Indo-European base as that avoids stating an Indo-European protoform! I think the use of protoforms would make it easier for readers to wrap their heads around the rich information provided, rather than more difficult. in this instance, I can understand the reluctance of the OED to provide a Proto-Indo-European root like *(s)meukh-, *(s)meug-, *(s)meugh- for meuse and smoke, because the reflexes among the daughter languages don’t quite jibe and lead to a unitary reconstruction. But it seems perverse to me when, at the entry for the word one, the OED says
without even providing the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction *oi-no- thats ties them all together and serves as the input for the series of systematic sound changes that establish the relatedness of the cited forms. Are they scared of laryngeals? The weaselly formula from the same Indo-European base is everywhere in the OED3 revision, but the early OED (NED) had a commitment to PIE forms as they were known at the time. At the entry for five for example (I picked it at random), we can read:
All this needs is just a little tweaking, with Proto-Indo-European replacing the obsolete and now misleading and disturbing Old Aryan, some modernization of the notation of the labiovelar in *pénkʷe, and the addition of some Tocharian cognates. I hope at some point the OED will alter its policy on the point of protoforms as the revisions continue (especially since the future of the AHD is uncertain). Generous souls will probably soon make the etymologies in the Wiktionary a good complement to the OED etymologies, especially in their Indo-European dimension, but it would be nice to have everything in the same place.
I entirely agree!
It’s hard to believe there is no connection with the word “mews”, which in Canada refers to row houses set along a narrow alleyway or path, sometimes above a garage or store.
The usual wiki sources don’t support a connection, but still I wonder.
Nope, totally unrelated. The Royal Mews began life as the place near Charing Cross where the king’s hawks were kept. They were converted to stables in 1534, and though the royal stables are now at Buckingham Palace and include carriage houses and garages, they retain the traditional name. By the early 17C, mews could be applied to any set of stables built around an open court or alley, and by the late 18C it was extended to similarly built human habitations, especially ones converted from stables.
But mew is older: it meant first a molting bird, then a cage for one, then a prison generally already in 12C Old French, from Latin mutare ‘change’ in the special sense of ‘molt’. It first appears in English around 1400. We still have mewed up ‘imprisoned’.
Looking up a word in OED is a good thing, but searching LH archives is even better.
I wonder what the evidence is that links mucier, mucer, etc. to a cognate of múch. On the face of it, it seems plausible but quite speculative.
‘Smeuse is an English dialect noun for “the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal”’ — from Rewilding the Language,, an LH post of a few months ago.
That sigh at the end of your post is so expressive to me, Hat. I too miss my young brain that automatically formed a meuse for every little fact my mind encountered. Rejuvenation of the brain is a consumation devoutly to be wished.
I’m beginning to think I use LH as a sort of auxiliary memory, so that when I post a fact here I can let my brain shed it. I often find when I go back through old posts that I have no recollection of the facts described there, so that I rediscover them with a combination of pleasure and rue.
Hat: to avoid reposting, you could first search your archives for X before posting about X, instead of after. This would prevent embarassing symptoms of losing your memory (I can’t remember if I already mentioned this to you once …).
All you need to remember is to search the archives first. In fact, you don’t even have to remember this if you have someone program an extra “search-and-confirm” step into the “post” function. This would require you to enter a few words which are then searched for in the archives – you would have to confirm the results before the post is actually published.
I see you wrote about this as I was working on my last comment. “Auxiliary memory” is all very well, but you have to remember to use it. I call this the Paradox of the Clever Excuse.
Of course this is all about the presentation of self in everyday life. You can do the loveable forgetful old codger one week, and the on-top-of-it Master of Auxiliary Memory the next, depending on mood.
“Keep’em guessing”, as P.T. Barnum is said to have said was the secret of his success.
Searching the archives only works if the word is mentioned in the post. As it happens, the prior post comes up if you search on “meuse” because it had “smeuse” in the post text, but that’s happenstance. Many times I have searched the archives in vain because it turned out I was remembering something that was in a comment, not a post. (John Cowan is going to tell me to search Google with site:languagehat.com, which is correct, but more work than I often feel like doing.)
Then the problem here is not amnesia, but ignavy.
I mean I find that reassuring, because I can relate to it.
I propose that someone compile an annotated concordance and index to Language Hat, to be issued in hardcover by a respectable publisher, with decennial supplements.
Think of the poor indexer! Mandelstam/Mandelshtam is just the tip of the iceberg; I have never been one for hobgoblins.
Think of the poor indexer!
Young brains to the fore!
“I know my quarries everyone, The meuse where she sits low”, The Old Squire Wilfred Scawen Blunt.
Meuse, Fire Escape.
1952 R. Campbell tr. C. Baudelaire Poems 77 Whereon as in a fourm you would fill out And mould your hair.
… the line has little to do with Baudelaire’s French (“Qui, comme une guérite, enfermera tes charmes”). You can see the poem in the original with three translations here (William Aggeler and Lewis Piaget Shanks both render guérite accurately as “sentry-box”).
The 1952 translator seems to have totally misunderstood the sentence in the poem. It describes a huge, heavy ceremonial cloak, enclosing and immobilizing the woman (compared to the statue of a queen) as in a sentry-box (which normally confines, as well as protects, a guard, whose role is to protect the queen). The translation ends in mould your lair not ‘hair’, but both “fourm” (form) and “lair”, with their connotations of animal trapping, are inappropriate here. And the woman inside the cloak will not herself fill out or mould the tight prison which will confine her.
meuse
When I was a child my sisters and I spent a couple of summers with our maternal grandparents in Southern France, in an area of not very high but still rugged mountains. Their house was built against the rock, and farther up in the property there was a flat wooded area in which there stood a small stone house with a door but without windows, referred to as la cabane aux lapins ‘the rabbit shack’, built by an ancestor. There were no rabbits in it in our time, but we were told that it had been built with tunnels underneath so as to attract and emprison wild rabbits (rabbits being a major source of meat in the diet). I did not realize until reading LH’s post that this was not an invention of our ancestor’s but probably a common practice (quite illegal in our time).
According to the poet C.D. Wright (“The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures…& All”, p 53), an obsolete meaning of “meuse” is “the form of an animal left by its lying.” Which is deeply gorgeous, if true.
That would be the OED’s sense 21a of form (also fourm), ‘The nest or lair in which a hare crouches. Also rarely, of a deer’.
From the very first comment…
But maybe it should say “Celtic < Germanic”.
Celtic:
as if from PIE *muk- or *mūk-
Germanic:
as if from PIE *smug- and *smūg- (German schmauchen)
Greek:
as if from PIE *smugʰ-
Suspicious, isn’t it?
What if *smugʰ- is correct? Then *smugʰ-n- would get us a Germanic “iterative/durative verb” **smukk-, which could be “deiterativized” to *smuk-, and lending that to the Celts (…for, presumably, some reason…) would explain the Celtic form. If the Irish vowel length is original (I’m blanking on what happened to *ū in Welsh), that could be from the Germanic *ū, which would just be the usual analogical reshaping of the *e-grade.
(Once *ej had become *ī in Germanic, *ew was widely replaced by *ū in Germanic verb roots, loading the language with doublets that often still exist today.)
But…
Armenian:
as if from PIE *muk-
That’ll need to be explained away somehow, I guess.
@dm
I am trying to find other examples where PIE *ewk, *ewg and *ewgh are reflected in Irish. So for comparison to German saugen we have sú and súg in old Irish. But sug is a borrowing from Latin sucus.
PIE *dhewgh > German taugen and Old Irish dú belongs here. I have the impression that Old Irish lost inherited final g and k in many of these short words. If my impression is correct and if much was borrowed after that loss, that would explain why the consonant is retained here. But you seem to be suggesting the borrowing is already a borrowing to Proto-Celtic, where these final consonants were retained.
I have found the word “meuse” for the first time in a Dutch newspaper article (Volkskrant May 31, 2023; https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/wat-indruk-maakt-een-platgetukte-tuin~bc236b60/). The article actually makes reference to HOLD STILL, the memoir of the American photographer Sally Hold, who uses the word with a slightly different meaning.
“Sally Mann opens her memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown), by invoking the meuse. An outdated word, the meuse is a mark left in the ground after a small animal leaves; the grass or dust bears an imprint of its departed body.” (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sally-mann-hold-still_b_8892766)
Interesting, thanks!
OED revised the etymology for five in December 2019. Let’s see how well they met Patrick’s desiderata, above:
Nope, no starred reconstructions:
For extra-Germanic cognates they give even more than Patrick asked for: besides Tocharian they also added Avestan, Oscan, Umbrian, Armenian, Old Church Slavonic, and Albanian.
Instead of giving the reconstructions, they describe the assimilation of consonants in more detail:
(Actually instead of *kʷ they have k + superscript u, but the comment field won’t allow that.) I think this illustrates Patrick’s point that it would be easier to follow if they would just come out and say *pénkʷe. They also avoid saying whether the second consonant in Proto-Germanic was m or n (m seems to be the consensus; how did n reappear in German fünf?)
That’s all new since 1896. Again, it might be easier to see what “the nasal” is if they had allowed themselves to say *fimf.
On the whole, I think this is better than just a little tweaking, but it could have been even better if they hadn’t tied themselves up in a rule that requires awkward workarounds. Further arguments (January 2024) on that.
I would assume that the spelling vünf aso. in MHG is conventional for the result of the neutralization of nasals before /f/ (and one less pen stroke) and the pronunciation given as the modern (careful) standard is a spelling one. OHG wrote /m/. Neither Wikt nor DWDS touch on the matter. Cf how Spanish spells inmigrante and inmediato despite pronouncing /mm/ and every other Latin language spelling it like that.
the pronunciation given as the modern (careful) standard is a spelling one
I have no special knowledge of the matter, but I wonder then how Yiddish got פֿינעף finef, as after around 02:22 here and around 01:30 here (finef zenen di klezmorim, “five are the klezmer musicians”).
The lyrics visible on Google Books here, I hope.
If the Google Books link to the lyrics is not visible, I just found another printed version here.
@Xerib: fünnef is also showing up as a variant in German regiolects and idiolects.
FWIW, Wikipedia has [fyɱf] as the Standard pronunciation for fünf (scroll down to “M”). The insertion of the schwa may be due to a desire to avoid an unusual allophone (VnfC/# without a morpheme border exists only in a handful of German words.)
@Xerîb, the phrase you quote was in a sentence headed by I would assume–I don’t have any special knowledge myself, but with no evidence to the contrary that seems a natural assumption. The Yiddish and dialectal forms are indeed evidence to the contrary, unless /ɱ/ > /n/ is known from other contexts. Or indeed from other contexts in the Standard, but it has to be newer than OHG.
Cf how Spanish spells inmigrante and inmediato despite pronouncing /mm/
Spanish — at least the varieties I am familiar with — does not have double consonants in speech; the pronunciation is /imigrante/.
Gemination in Spanish (for /m/, /β/, and /n/) was discussed a few months ago. It appears that /immigrante/ is a thing. Wiktionary doesn’t have a pronunciation for inmigrante but does have /immiɡɾaˈθjon/ and /immiɡɾaˈsjon/ for inmigración. It also has both /ˈobbjo/ [ˈoβ̞.β̞jo] and /ˈobjo/ [ˈo.β̞jo] for obvio.
Huh. I stand corrected!
Sorry, I seem to have messed up the link. I haven’t figured out what tragannos is though.
Lars must have meant trágannos and analogous forms.
Lars must have meant ¡tráigannos! = the plural imperative form ¡traigan! ‘bring!’ + the objective pronoun nos ‘us’, as in ¡tráigannos agua! ‘bring us water!’.
trágannos ‘they swallow us’, ‘you swallow us’, if used today, would be highly archaizing Spanish, found, say, in a lofty poem — and then only in sentence-initial position.
Wiktionary is not the place to look for reliable information on Spanish geminate consonants (whether in spelling or in pronunciation) when the fully descriptive and exquisitely detailed 2380-word treatment of the subject by the Royal Spanish Academy is easily evailable: https://www.rae.es/ortograf%C3%ADa/secuencias-de-dos-consonantes-iguales.
Yes, ¡tráigannos!. And I had just read the RAE link when I wrote that other piece, I just flubbed the spelling.
I have tried talking to some Mexicans about the matter, and once they accept that tráigannos exists in writing, they sit silent in wonderment for a minute and then they tell me that it’s pronounced exactly like tráiganos (singular imperative). I have tried to find a verb for which it would make sense to have a plural imperative and the enclitic pronoun -os, just to confuse matters further, but no success so far.
@Lars. “I have tried talking to some Mexicans about the matter […] and then they tell me […].
What they have told you is a secondary response (https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Dictionary_of_Linguistics_and_Phonetic/3ZPQVuSgDAkC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=SECONDARY+responses+(LINGUISTICS)&pg=PT477&printsec=frontcover), which may or may not be right and in any case was presumably based on their attempt to analyze just their own speech.
To be truly sure about whether tráiganos (singular imperative) and tráigannos (plural imperative), for example, are homophonous, you would have to record spontaneous speech secretly and analyze it in a phonetics laboratory.
Do you really mean “the enclitic pronoun -os,” that is, the object pronoun -os, corresponding to the subject pronoun vosotras ~ vosotros? If you do, you would have to limit your recordings to Peninsular Spanish minus Canarian and Andalusian Spanish. I think you mean -nos.
That RAE treatment doesn’t address nm at all. Is that because it’s really talking about spelling rather than pronunciation (but then it does include obvio), or because RAE prescribes /nm/ for the pronunciation? Since -nm- is not included among the consonant groups to be simplified, it doesn’t seem that just dropping the /n/ is being recommended.
It doesn’t speak about /nm/, as in comúnmente, presumably because that sequence of phonemes is not reduced or changed in any other way. For example, /nm/ in ¡tráiganme agua con gas! ‘bring me carbonated water!’ is presumably realized always as [nm].
Well, the vowel is simply wrong, it should be [ʏ]. And [ɱ] is not used by any of the standard pronunciation dictionaries for German (not because it is wrong, but because it is a rare allophone of /n/). They all have [fʏnf], which is btw also my own pronunciation. Not a particularly “careful” one, but my everyday pronunciation.
I last heard this several decades ago, and all speakers came from a (lower class) background and had parents speaking heavy dialect. They also pronounced 11 als [‘ˀɶlɶf] and 12 as [‘tsvɶlɶf] (instead of the second [ɶ] you sometimes heard [ɛ] or [ə]). In school, these were the pronunciations that got you ridiculed by the other kids. My impression is that nowadays these pronunciations are limited to certain forms of “Rheinischer Karneval”.
The 25th edition of Hermann Paul’s Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik, 2007, has finf as the normal MHG form, with fünf first appearing in the 13th century. This is also listed as one of the typical differences between MHG und Modern German.
It didn’t everywhere. I have [mf], with bilabial [m] released into labiodental [f], for all intramorphemic -nf- words that are native or close enough (fünf, sanft “softly”, Senf “mustard”, Genf “Geneva”; that could be the complete list). Contrast [nf], with laminal-alveolar [n] released into labiodental [f], in Konferenz and the like, as well as across transparent morpheme boundaries as in anfangen.
Remarkable. I’ve noticed [ɱ] in German literally twice in my life – while in English it’s as automatic as [ŋ] is in German. I do hear unassimilated [nf] regularly in Berlin.
Absolutely. [y] here would be a French accent (…and not a Canadian one at that).
With initial f? I thought initial [f] > [v] happened in late OHG, became universal and stayed so till MHG was over? … Trying to look up an example I remembered that I thought was important, I found this text from 1190, so not just MHG, but “Classical MHG” (1170–1250). It has total chaos between f- and v-, notably finfzehen “15”, and also randomly distributed Upper and northern Central German forms (t ~ d, -ch for Upper -g/-c). I’m left to wonder what the geographic reach of “West Germanic fricative voicing” ever was, and am more confused than ever over whether, say, my dialect ever had a [z].
Also, /sk/ > /sx/, let alone > [ʃ], still hadn’t happened if the numerous sc and common sk vs. complete absence of sch can be trusted. That’s supposed to be a difference between OHG and MHG, I thought.
Yes. But in the index of MHG words the forms are alphabetized under V. According to the preface, the 25th edition is in its phonological chapters supposed to be closer to the language of the actual documents (rather than the idealized “standard” MHG of the 19th century grammars and dictionaries (not to mention the standard editions of MHG literature)).
Hanf?
The 25th edition of Hermann Paul’s Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik, 2007
The first edition came out in 1881, 126 years earlier. That’s pretty unusual, but I suppose not a record (nothing ever is.)
@M, no, I mean -os. I live much closer to Spain than to Latin America, in fact I was in Madrid for two weeks in December.
In theory, tráiganos could be either tráiga-nos (“bring us x” adressed to a single person) or tráigan-os (&dagg;”bring x to you” addressed to multiple persons and with a second person plural clitic). But there are several problems with that, not least that it mixes levels of formality. For instance, it’s either idos or váyanse for “go away”. (Another problem is that you only get the clitics with finite verb forms in the imperative “mood”. I think it’s correct in peninsular Spanish to say espero que os traigan la comida pronto, but it’s been a few hundred years since you could use tráiganos in such a phrase).
Yes, but there have been a number of thorough revisions since then (the same goes for the other grammars included in the “Sammlung kurzer Grammatiken germanischer Dialekte”); for some time the latest editors were listed as co-authors, but the publisher gave up that practice; the 2007 edition has five different editors/authors, and I doubt there is much left of Paul’s original text (and it isn’t “kurz” anymore either, at > 600 pages). The same goes for current editions of Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch, indispensable for anyone with a deeper interest in the German language.
fünnef is also showing up as a variant in German regiolects and idiolects.
[…]also pronounced 11 als [‘ˀɶlɶf] and 12 as [‘tsvɶlɶf] (instead of the second [ɶ] you sometimes heard [ɛ] or [ə]).
this does seem like one of the topolects/sociolects closer to yiddish (syn- or diachronically) – /ɛlf/ and /tsvɛlf/ being the standard yiddish versions of “11” and “12”; פֿינף and פֿיניף are both pretty common in my experience (and i think, though i’d need to watch some cradle-tongue speakers to be sure, at least sometimes a labiodental/bilabial realization of the /n/).
@Lars. You have answered your own question why * tráigan-os does not occur — not for any phonological or grammatical reason but for logical ones:
You are right that espero que os traigan la comida pronto is impeccable.
fünnef is also showing up as a variant in German regiolects and idiolects.
It’s standard in Kölsch variants, along with elluf.
My impression is that nowadays these pronunciations are limited to certain forms of “Rheinischer Karneval”.
Thanks for those quote marks, ulr ! Unfortunately it’s coming ’round the bend again soon. Distance makes the heart grow gladder.
Yes, thanks.
Pschyrembel Klinisches Wörterbuch
257. Auflage
1994
First edition 1894. Willibald Pschyrembel edited the 19th through 254th editions, so his name got attached to the whole series. The 123rd through 153rd editions date from 1959.
…well, I suspect they’re not all separate editions, just printings; the 257th explicitly states it’s updated (neu bearbeitet).
Oh, wait, it’s got an English Wikipedia article. Pschyrembel alone even redirects to it. “The current edition is the 262nd edition, published in July 2010.”
From the article:
I still remember the original TV show with Loriot (Vicco von Bülow) describing the Steinlaus (parodying the manner of Bernhard Grzimek) from the 1960s. I wonder if it is on Youtube.
Pschyrembel
Really?!
Indeed it does. His accent is very interesting.
The copyright fairy strikes again:
Dieses Video enthält Inhalte von Studio Hamburg. Dieser Partner hat das Video in deinem Land aus urheberrechtlichen Gründen gesperrt.
That despite the fact that there’s lots of other Loriot clips out there, even from official ARD channels.
Usually, YouTube videos that are blocked for copyright reasons in Germany are not blocked in Austria, but this one is.
84500 ghits for Przyrembel, apparently a reasonably common last name.
The original Polish form is of course Przyrębel.
Amazingly, that gives only 84 ghits. Maybe the name is mostly pre-orthographic.
Cf. proper Polish przerębel ‘hole in the ice for fishing’, with e in the first syllable.
Spanish also has written -mn- in indemnizar. Listening to a Peninsular radio channel just now, I happened to catch an occurrence and I’m pretty sure it was realized as -nn-. I’ll try and catch inmigrante, must be something they talk about on the news.