I was reading a story by Carolyn Brown in our local paper (how could I resist the title “History told through hats”?) that began:
In the 1870s, the largest palm leaf hat factory in the world, which produced hundreds of thousands of hats each year, was based in Amherst. A new history exhibit is celebrating Amherst’s connections to millinery (hatmaking) in venues around the town.
And I suddenly realized I didn’t know where milliner came from. So I headed for the OED, where I found (entry revised 2002):
1. † With capital initial. A native or inhabitant of Milan, a city in northern Italy. Obsolete.
1449 That every Venician, Italian..Milener..and all other Merchants straungiers..paye to you..vi s. viii d.
Rolls of Parliament vol. V. 144/2
[…]1604 You knowe we Millaners loue to strut vpon Spanish leather.
T. Dekker & T. Middleton, Honest Whore i. ii. 32
[…]1871 Mediolanum, the old Roman city of the ‘half-fleecy sow’, in process of time, became Milano, the city of milaners or milliners.
Ladies’ Repository September 163/22. Originally: a seller of fancy wares, accessories, and articles of (female) apparel, esp. such as were originally made in Milan. Subsequently: spec. a person who designs, makes, or sells women’s hats.
1530 Paied to the Mylloner for certeyne cappes trymmed..withe botons of golde.
in N. H. Nicolas, Privy Purse Expences Henry VIII (1827) 33
[…]a1616 No Milliner can so fit his customers with Gloues.
W. Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale (1623) iv. iv. 193
[…]1713 The Milliner must be thoroughly versed in Physiognomy; in the Choice of Ribbons she must have a particular regard to the Complexion.
J. Gay in Guardian 1 September 2/1
[…]1884 A black butterfly is unknown to entomologists, but at present is a favourite insect with milliners.
West. Daily Press 29 May 3/71911 There is your public, the readers of the Post—shop-clerks, stenographers,..drummers, milliners.
H. S. Harrison, Queed 1511986 Her life at home with Mother, who had, surprisingly, been a designer of hats and a court milliner.
A. Brookner, Misalliance x.153
So like jeans coming from Genoa, milliner comes from Milan. I had no idea! (If you’re wondering, as I was, about the odd-looking Queed, Wikipedia has you covered: “Queed is a 1911 novel by Henry Sydnor Harrison, which was the fourth-best selling book in the United States for 1911, and is considered one of Harrison’s best novels, along with 1913’s V.V.’s Eyes.” So many best-sellers lying, covered with dust, in oblivion…)
Half-fleecy sow is intriguing. Would a half-fleecy sow be one that was partially shaven, or one with patches of hair longer and softer than the typical pig bristle coat?
Today, you can get an AC Milan-logo fleece jacket in pullover style – that is, with a “half-zipper”. But even the vintage ones available on Etsy may not date to the classical period, let alone to Gaulish days.
At any rate, Wiktionary more soberly suggests proto-Celtic medyos (middle) and lanom (plain, field).
Googling a bit harder to avoid the soccer kits, I do see that half-fleece is at least a genuine folk etymology. But my guess is it was an attempt to explain the Gaulish name in Latin.
A merchant of mush! (Mencken’s pejorative label for the author of _Queed._)
But why not a milliner of mush?
partially shaven, or … hair longer and softer than the typical pig bristle
wikipedia scrofa semilanuta has info, though the sex and species of the animal are unclear
Ah, so halfway to the full-wool pig.
The Milan origin of millinery was a Jeopardy clue a week or two ago.
Milan has to be stressed on the first syllable in Shakespeare for the scansion to come out right.
Behold, sir king,
The wrongèd Duke of Milan, Prospero.
I don’t know when we shifted to the half-Frenchified pronunciation, following the rule that if it is foreign, it must be stressed on the final syllable, but it is only within my (long) lifetime that TUrin seems to have become tuRIN in US English.
Which is stupid; if you’re going to go there, why not go the whole Torino?
Why? It seems that in the case of Turin General American simply took over what (according to Daniel Jones) seems to have been the British accentual pattern at least since the 1950s (the earliest edition of Jones I own); at that time Kenyon/Knott gave only initial stress for Turin. In modern pronunciation dictionaries, CEPD has only stress on the second syllable both in British and American English (with the exception of the expected stress shift in the phrase Turin shroud), whereas LPD has both accentual patterns (both for British and American English), but recommends stress on the final syllable for ESL learners. If you look into Kökeritz’ book on Shakespeare’s Pronunciation or Crystal’s dictionary of original pronunciation of Shakespeare, you’ll find many other words where the stress position has changed – not just the names of foreign places.
As far as foreign place names go, there was a time when Rome was homophonous with room; I have read somewhere that this was still Queen Victoria’s pronunciation.
Turin is the actual traditional Piedmontese spelling; pronounced [tyˈriŋ], says the Pffft!. Torino is the Tuscan cognate.
Still Mailand in German.
(Reinterpreted as “May country”, which makes sense because 1) May is poetic for “spring”*, 2) northern Italy is where they have spring instead of winter.)
* Little Ice Age.
Turin is the actual traditional Piedmontese spelling; pronounced [tyˈriŋ]
OK, I’ll adopt that pronunciation — I’ll be one up on everyone else.
Don’t know about Victoria, but there’s some record of people pronouncing Rome as “room” even later; from the OED’s historical pronunciation note (quoted in full in previous languagehat comments), “This pronunciation survived in regional speech into the 20th cent. … Sc. National Dict. (at Room) records the pronunciation /rum/ as still in use in Banffshire in 1968).
Aha, ulr, you had it backwards: Queen Victoria was modern, it was her mentor Lord Melbourne who was old-fashioned. From Victoria’s diary, Oct. 10, 1838:
And a comment by her lady-in-waiting Lady Lyttelton, in a letter from 1839:
I didn’t know that about the pronunciation of “gold”. The OED’s etymology (revised 2018) has a long and complicated note, indicating that the old pronunciation is not entirely dead even now: “The pronunciation /ɡuːld/ , which now survives only regionally … was still in common use in standard English in the first half of the 19th cent.” Actually, considering that the change was that recent, I’m surprised that the first edition (in 1900) made no comment at all on the pronunciation of “gold”; it was still being discussed in Notes & Queries and newspapers in the 1890s.
And what was the way of saying Prussia that didn’t have it “rhyming to Russia”?
B. H. Smart says in Walker Remodelled (1836), “The old name for Prussia was Pruce, which see: hence, the present word, with its relations, was for a long time subject to a similar sound of the u, which in the metropolis is now deemed a vulgarism.”
But he who himself has said it remains an Englishman.
at least for gilbert-via-d’oyly-carte, prooshin still rhymed with rooshin, but perhaps the dean of chester did something else for the keepers of the third rome?
Since they’re spelled “Proosian” and “Roosian” in the libretto (edit: or here in 1879), I think those pronunciations are comically non-standard as befits the boatswain.
The snippets about Vicky remind me that she seems in reality to have been quite different from the industry-standard “we-are-not-amused” caricature.
Doing her best in objectively quite grim circumstances
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_System
until she married her beloved Albert; enjoyed her wedding night greatly; utterly devastated by his death; subsequently surrounded by people who felt she should just pull herself together.
@JF: i’ve never gone to look at the original libretti, actually! so i always assumed the spellings in the LP liners just followed the sung words, clarified for a contemporary/u.s. audience. and, i suppose, i’d heard versions close to “rooshian” often enough in cold war / cold war satire context for that side of it not to bother me. ah, well…
@DE: she really does seem to be a genuine victim of the residual feudal system – stuck in a role that she couldn’t [bring herself to?] escape, that didn’t let her be the self she was to herself…
There are very few “non-native” spellings for cities used in Danish, but Rom for Rome is one of them. (Also Venedig). Country names in Europe are kept traditional, even for new ones like Tjekkiet. (Den tjekkiske Republik might be correcter, but you’d have to be writing for the Ministry of the Exterior or translating for some EU organ to use it).
There used to be an older layer with more Germanified names like Florens and Mayland, especially in Italy — my 1899 encyclopaedia has Torino, province and city, s.v Turīn — but also Ny York. Mayland is now only the trade name of a calendar publisher, and YPN-A-D possibly think it’s English and pronounce it thus.
Also Stokholm and Malmø and so on, nothing that changed the spoken form. And in general, anything foreign like consonant length or sibilant voicing are ignored when speaking, even if the written form is the same as in the country’s main language. We do have vowel length, but it’s usually guesstimated. Sometimes it ends up right, like Torino because all foreign words have penultimate stress and that causes length; I don’t know how that worked in 1899 since the compilers of the encyclopaedia felt they had to mark length (albeit in a two-syllable form which would otherwise get initial stress and long-short, even now. Or possibly vacillating with short-short like Florens).
The former Danish lands of South Schleswig and Holstein are a special case, everything there had a Danish spelling before 1864, and everything in North Schleswig had a German spelling before 1920. Slesvig, Flensborg, Hamborg, Aabenraa, Sønderborg vs Schleswig, Flensburg, Hamburg, Appenrade, Sonderburg, for instance. These will give very different pronunciations in the Standard languages, but I’m not sure how different they are in Sønderjysk vs. Platt. You come off as pretty twee if you use the German forms in a Danish text.
(The WP.en article on Sønderjysk calls it “South Jutlandic,” but Jutlandic has always seemed a very cumbersome form to me. Does English allow of anything without -land- in it, like maybe Jutish?)
(In Older Danish, it [sc. the modern word jysk] was iuzk /i̯utsk/, ON józkr, and there’s an obsolete side form jotisk in later Danish, I think mainly literary. So it’s only general laziness that’s eliminated the /t/ in the modern form, and the obvious parallel in English would indeed be Jutish.
Danish tysk for English Dutch is closely parallel. Jutch, anyone? Or Utch? I don’t know where English got the affricate in Jute from).
Jutish exists in English (it’s in the OED), but it refers to the late antique/early medieval Germanic tribe of the Jutes.
@ulr, lars
For some reason Jutlander (but not Jutlandish) seems OK to me, maybe JutLANDic for the adjective, paralleling terms for inhabitants of Iceland.
Oh, so it’s “southern castle”, not “special/set-apart castle”…!
The spelling.
southern: Well, yes, in this case. Some king thought the Hun was too close to the southern border. But we also have slightly archaic slå sønder where it would be a cognate to G sonder. Who knows if whoever decided on the (Standard) German name was aware of that; they may also have started from whatever it was called in Platt in 1864.
@pp, what would even the descendant of OE Ēotas be if it hadn’t been mogrified through Latin? (Ioti in Bede, later Juti whence the English spelling and thus affricate). WP.de adduces Yte as an alternative in OE.
Having -land- in the English name of the modern population and the language only bothers me because we don’t do it in North Germanic. German has südjütisch, for instance (but also südjütländisch), and sønderjyllandsk would be wrong in Danish. (WRONG, I tell you, WRONG. Not on my lawn! [Daciter: UD af min kiosk!])
@lars
Re Eotas, I think the e is misleading, there is also iotas, and most of the eo- words in Bosworth-Toller have variants with initial i. Juding from ewe < eowes, I suppose S.E. *yewt < Eotas. You could then have *yewtish or *yewtch (compare Frankish/French). But Nelson Goering would know. Note however that some people in Ireland say yō for ewe 😊.
I agree that x-lander seems to be a marked form apart from Iceland, Greenland and New Zealand, but Jutlandic sounds a hair better to me than *yewtish/*yewtch.
I agree that x-lander seems to be a marked form apart from Iceland, Greenland and New Zealand,
And the Highlands? Without an initial capital, there are the flatlands, outlands, etc. I pronounce “islander” differently, with no secondary stress on the second syllable.
ETA: The crashlands don’t count except in Known Space.
@jf
island(wo)man, Highland (wo)man are less marked for me than the -er versions.
That’s interesting. “Highlander” seems normal to me, and is much more common at Google ngram search, and I don’t remember seeing “island(wo)man”.
My instincts are the same as Jerry’s.
Mine too.
There can be only one?
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated.