Jenny List had an amusing piece some years ago for the Oxford Dictionaries blog about diacritics, starting by saying you might think they’re not needed for English, and continuing:
But as any halfway observant child would tell you, what about the café down the road? Or the jalapeño peppers you and your fiancée enjoyed on your à la carte pizza, brought to you by a garçon? Washed down with a refreshing pint of Löwenbräu while reading a Brontë novel, no doubt. Or perhaps you’re not as naïve as all that, dreaming as you were of a ménage à trois. No, that’s probably a bit risqué, not to mention too much of a cliché. For somewhere so supposedly devoid of diacritic marks on our letters, we do seem to see an awful lot of them.
Of course, the English language has appropriated so many words from other languages that it would be extremely surprising were some of them to manage the transition unscathed. Most words gradually lose their accents on Anglicization; cafe is a perfect example of this as its occurrence without the accent is slowly overtaking that of café. Our lexicographers use the Oxford English Corpus to track the relative use of diacritic marks when deciding upon the preferred form of an imported word. Other words have left their diacritics behind completely, such as muesli (which has lost its umlaut on the u) or canyon (which is an Anglicization of the Spanish word cañon). Sometimes a word will retain its accent to preserve the pronunciation thus bestowed or to settle any ambiguity between the imported word and a similarly spelled existing English word. Thus we find maté and mate or the three outwardly similar but completely different words pâté, pâte, and pate. Occasionally we even encounter the same word entering English by two completely different routes, such as rosé and rose or the unexpected souffle and soufflé. Who knew that omitting that final e-acute could put you in hospital!
Some of our most familiar diacritics appear in brand names. Most of us will have eaten Nestlé chocolate (or perhaps even drunk Nescafé coffee) or imbibed copious quantities of umlaut-bespeckled German beers, but not I hope before driving away in a Škoda or a Citroën. As an aside, given the treatment his surname receives from most Brits, it should be stressed that the pronunciation of that last trema on the ‘e’ is important: cars from the company founded by André Citroën are not lemons.
She goes on to talk about Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, Gü puddings, and the metal umlaut; as for André Citroën, we discussed the history of his name back in 2008 — his cars may not have been lemons, but the Citroëns were originally Limoenmans.
Regrettably she misses a diacritic in “cañón”…
Of course, diacritics only seem to apply to European languages…
You can spell it müsli or muesli, but müesli would be abhominable.
For me, naive has taken on enough of an assimilated English character (like role, formerly rôle) that it looks better without the dieresis. And I definitely prefer naivety over naïveté, in both writing and speech. As for é, I think it can serve a useful purpose as a sort of xenographeme to clarify that an e isn’t silent (an original English use of this being saké), so I’d keep it in café – and I even lean toward a split-the-difference resumé.
One thing that really seems to flummox English speakers, though, is the gendered e found in fiancé(e): people mix those up so often – at a rate seemingly even worse than chance – that I find myself pleasantly surprised when they don’t. I guess we should just abandon the extra e, but for whatever reason I feel more reluctant to drop a whole letter. (And you see a similar issue with blonde applied to men. Myself, I’d even limit blonde to the nominal usage, so that, as it were, a blonde would be blond. It’s one thing to accept silently gendered nouns, but adjectives just seem like a step too far.)
I wonder if café would be losing its accent so fast if there was a *cafe (rhymes with “safe”) to compete with.
<rant>
Which, to anyone even slightly familiar with Spanish spelling conventions, is abominable, as it wrongly suggests the word has final stress.
If there’s a need to distinguish it from mate /meɪt/, the logical choice would be *matë (as in Zoë, Chloë, Brontë). Of course, expecting logic from English spelling would be… misguided.
</rant>
Swiss German is, in actual fact, abominable enough to have diphthongs that end up written as ie, ue, üe, and the last one is present in this word. The regular Standard cognate would be *Müslein, diminutive of Mus “edible mush”.
But yeah, it almost always ends up as Müsli outside of Switzerland.
BTW, Mus has also spawned the collective Gemüse, which nowadays means exclusively “vegetable(s)” and has become countable (though without acquiring a plural ending).
Pokémon.
> cars from the company founded by André Citroën are not lemons.
Though some Volkswagens, infamously, were.
Lazar: fiancé(e): people mix those up so often
when they don’t spell it finance ! (but that could be from Spellcheck).
There is also fianceé (and similar with other -ée words, as in Reneé).
For me, naive has taken on enough of an assimilated English character (like role, formerly rôle) that it looks better without the dieresis.
And most current dictionaries agree with you; I routinely excise the dieresis in that word in the course of my editing work.
“I wonder if café would be losing its accent so fast if there was a *cafe (rhymes with “safe”) to compete with.”
There is. A cafe, pronounced /keif/ and rhyming with safe, is a downmarket café in the UK, although the word is less commonly heard now than formerly.
Ah, the metal umlaut. Back in the eighties when I went to school in the Cincinnati area, the Hopple Street exit on I-75 always had an umlaut spray-painted over the o. This was near Vine Street, where a couple of musical venues were. For instance, I saw punk umlaut band Hüsker Dü over at Bogart’s in ’86 or ’87.
I have to admit I was disappointed that the umlaut was gone when I visited Cincinnati last year.
> A cafe, pronounced /keif/ and rhyming with safe, is a downmarket café in the UK
I have lived in the UK for decades and never heard that. Perhaps you are thinking of “caff”.
A cafe, pronounced /keif/ and rhyming with safe, is a downmarket café in the UK, although the word is less commonly heard now than formerly.
Caff ([kæf]) also exists: even more downmarket.
And surely in Switzerland you’d have to interpret Müsli as “small mouse”?
(I realise Müüsli would be a more obvious spelling of that word)
Michael Eochaidh: I envy your getting to see Hüsker Dü live at their peak! I had to content myself with running out and buying their new LPs. (I did get to see the Minutemen.)
By the way, may I ask how Eochaidh is pronounced? I want to say /oχi/, but that’s probably too Irish for the Cincinnati area.
Myself, I’d even limit blonde to the nominal usage, so that, as it were, a blonde would be blond.
That’s my usage too — I always figured it was standard. There are some nouns that English has borrowed with their native inflections, but no adjectives that I can think of.
Conventions like these in the old days were for publishing houses (and maybe some newspapers) with fancy typesetting options available to them that required substantial investments in the requisite hardware. Normal Anglophones, working with the limited resources of typewriters or handwriting, have generally always managed to scrape by with zero diacritical marks even for fancy-shmancy foreign words. That modern software makes it *possible* for people of modest resources to deploy diacritical marks in a way that would not have been possible for them in the old days doesn’t mean they need to feel any obligation to give in to prescriptivist pressure to do so.
Of course.
I find myself desiring to refrain from diacritic usage just to spite List. As I’ve matured, I’ve grown more and more fond of a well-placed diacritic, sometimes several per letter, but I feel a bit put out by the implication that any English word requires them. e.g. in my experience the spelling “facade” is more common than “façade” (which my phone’s spell-check has marked as an error). Maybe there are a very small number of exceptions that would look weird without diacritics: “Emily Bronte” makes me vaguely uncomfortable.
Come now, she’s just being a journo, she doesn’t give a damn if you use them or not. And you can hardly write pate for pâté.
Family legend has it that Eochaidh (more likely Eochaidha) is the source of the now thoroughly anglicized surname Haughey, which is pronounced “Hoy” (maybe /hɔɪ/ in IPA but don’t hold me to that). I was going to use Eochaidh as a pseudonym but nobody can pronounce either version.
Ah, thanks very much!
And you can hardly write pate for pâté.
Googling for [pâté food -recipe] pulls up lots of instances of pate and paté without the always-useless circumflex. Indeed, the third one is a Whole Foods page giving the names of various pâtés, all of them spelled “pate”. Cat food comes in different types of which pate or paté is one.
OK, OK, I meant “you can hardly write pate for pâté without getting very stern looks from copyeditors.” Hell, you can do whatever you damn please.
A cafe, pronounced /keif/ and rhyming with safe, is a downmarket café in the UK, although the word is less commonly heard now than formerly.
Caff ([kæf]) also exists: even more downmarket.
I stand corrected! (Actually I’m sitting down.)
OED says this about café (they use the diacritic):
But am I to understand that there are speakers for whom /keɪf/ isn’t a humorous mispronunciation-on-purpose of French but a whole separate word with a meaning distinguished from “café”? Like, someone might say “That place is really more of a /keɪf/ than a café” and not mean it as a joke? That’s fantastic.
(Incidentally, I had heard “caf(f)” before, but only ever in contexts where it made sense to interpret it as short for “cafeteria.”)
I’m most familiar with /kæf/ from when I used to watch EastEnders. I always mentally spelled it caf. As I recall the woman who ran the caf was named Kathy and sometimes called Kath, but I don’t remember anyone remarking on the homophony in cockney pronunciation.
There are some nouns that English has borrowed with their native inflections, but no adjectives that I can think of.
How does English usually cope with Latino/Latina or Filipino/Filipina as an adjective? I can’t decide if it should be “She is Latina” or “She is Latino”, though the former gets almost three times as many ghits.
Do you prefer naïveté, naiveté, naivete, or naivety?
Alon: matë is drunk by Albanian gauchos.
It was a lot of fun when faux-Italian cafés became fashionable in the US, following the faux-French ones. Cafès and caffés all over the place, serving lattés.
My impression is that naïve and naivety are more British, naive and naïveté more American. “Go figure”, or as they say in Blighty, “Make of that what you will”.
In Ireland, “Haughey” is /ˈhɒhi/ or /ˈhɔhi/. Former Taoiseach Charlie Haughey was the subject of hee-haw jokes back in the day. Lots of anglicised spellings VhV and VghV of Irish words have /VhV/ in Ireland but /Vː/ in those parts of the anglosphere where phonotactic constraints are less amenable to aspirates. “Drogheda” is /ˈdrɒhɪdə/ in Ireland, but /drɒgˈidə/ in the “Thorn Birds” miniseries, and /ˈdrɔɪdə/ in a few limericks where it’s rhymed with “avoid her” and the like.
Here in the US, I’ve often heard (and, myself, tend to use) metathesized pronunciations of Flaherty and Doherty, like Flarrity, Dorrity.
Mate-drinkers of Albanian ancestry exist, though I suspect few of them ever qualified as gauchos. Most Albanian immigrants to Argentina settled in Berisso, where the industrial boom of the 1920s and 30s offered employment in the textile, chemical, steel and shipbuilding industries.
Ernesto Sábato, a brilliant writer who (I think) hasn’t been discussed chez Hat before, was partly of Albanian ancestry on his mother’s side.
I can’t decide if it should be “She is Latina” or “She is Latino”
To me, at least, the latter sounds very weird. I’ve tried to find other borrowed (as opposed to adapted) gendered adjectives of nationality, but without success. There is also Latinx (pronounced as if Latinex), which is about ten years old. If you use it, you will experience the weird sensation of being patted on the head by Latinxes who will be glad you acknowledge gender neutrality, while simultaneously being kicked in the belly by Latinos y Latinas who resent your appropriation and mockery of the Spanish or Castilian language.
The New Yorker is famous for a few things, one of them is a long-standing affair with diaereses:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-the-diaeresis
To me, at least, the latter sounds very weird.
Huh. Doesn’t sound weird to me, and I speak Spanish; to me, importing Spanish gendered adjectives into English is what sounds weird.
But “Latinx” sounds much weirder, and I can’t bring myself to use it. What a bizarre thing to invent.
There’s also “Latin@.” I have no idea how to pronounce it, if in fact it ever is.
Rodger: I think it is not; Latinx was invented to create a pronounceable form, I suppose.
Hat, what’s your intuition (if any) about “She is Zairoise”?
One occasionally finds “bonne vivante” used in English to refer to a woman, but using “bon vivant” to refer to females as well as males seems notably more common. But the gendered-in-language-of-origin feature of “bon vivant” is perhaps less obvious than in the Latino v. Latina pair? Although I have some sense that the gendered nature of “alumnus” as contrasted with “alumna” has been slipping away. There is a more general trend in English where discomfort with gendered terms sometimes leads to the formerly male term become equal-opportunity but other times leads to the invention of a new term, and which is handled which way seems somewhat unpredictable and ad hoc. Compare the expansion of “actor” to sometimes include “actress” with the rising popularity of “server” to replace the waiter/waitress pair entirely. If we are not consistent in our handling of our own longstanding lexicon it’s unlikely we’re going to be consistent with fairly recent and perhaps not entirely domesticated loanwords.
BTW “Latinx” may be possible to pronounce for Anglophones but is allegedly totally baffling to Hispanophones who have not acquired fluency in English, leading to its condemnation in certain circles as imperialistic and appropriative. http://swarthmorephoenix.com/2015/11/19/the-argument-against-the-use-of-the-term-latinx/
Now if it were “Latinix” and its masculine singular genitive were “Latinicis” I’d know exactly how to decline it …
Hat, what’s your intuition (if any) about “She is Zairoise”?
My intuition is that it would be said by a speaker of French or someone who has spent time in Francophone Africa. It’s certainly not a thing that would naturally be said by a speaker of English, who would very likely say “She is from Zaire.” At any rate, that’s what I’d say.
At least we aren’t assimilating these forms to Old English substantives, with masculine *Latina, neuter *Latine, and feminine *Latine…
“A cafe, pronounced /keif/ and rhyming with safe, is a downmarket café in the UK
I have lived in the UK for decades and never heard that. Perhaps you are thinking of “caff”.”
Well, there are no doubt a lot of words used in this country that you haven’t heard, and I haven’t heard, and any given subset of people haven’t heard. I’ve lived in England since 1957 and hear new words all the time. You’re right, caff also exists, and I have heard it too, though not recently.
That actually looks like Latin words of quite indeterminate gender. 🙂
Not so weird, I think, considering that x has been used to symbolise an unknown value since Descartes, and the whole point of the neologism is to underscore that the gender of the referent is unknown (rather than male). A similar substitution yields the gender-neutral honorific Mx.
Me, I’d favour Latine.
Not so weird, I think, considering that x has been used to symbolise an unknown value since Descartes
I really don’t see what mathematical usage has to do with language. I think the gender-neutral honorific Mx is weird too, but at least that’s only meant for written usage.
Mx can be pronounced /mks/ (or with an epenthetic vowel).
I ran into LatinX recently—I think the capital is meant to be a visual cue about the x not playing it’s usual role. This was in the context of something addressed to the faculty and student body of a US university that does not serve a primarily latino/a population, so presumably familiarity with English is a reasonable expectation, but I don’t know who decided on that terminology or what their thought process was. I have also encountered Latin@, which I typically pronounce as “latino-a,” just adding the “a” sound after I say “latino” in the usual way.
Of course, I pronounce “s/he” as “sh-he” with “sh” like in the beginning of “shush.” Perhaps this is not standard. And now I tend to just go with singular they anyway.
Some years ago the “Canadian Pacific” airline expanded its business range from regional to national and even international. It shortened its name to reflect its wider ambitions, shedding the word “Pacific” which had indicated Its regional location. But in order to show its national relevance it was not wise to use just the English word “Canadian”. The problem was solved by using the logo Canadi@n, which could be interpreted as either English or French (“Canadien”) without appearing to favour one or the other language. (It turned out the company had been overambitious, and it went out of business after a few years).
JC: “If you use it, you will experience the weird sensation of being patted on the head by Latinxes who will be glad you acknowledge gender neutrality, while simultaneously being kicked in the belly by Latinos y Latinas who resent your appropriation and mockery of the Spanish or Castilian language.”
There are women who hate being called Ms. and strongly prefer Miss or Mrs. Know your audience.
Mx can be pronounced /mks/ (or with an epenthetic vowel).
“Mx” just reminds me of that one mischievous imp whose name starts with those two letters (and is, in fact, just barely pronounceable without obvious epenthetic vowels, in the Czech way, but if you aren’t accustomed to Czech-style consonant clusters, the traditional canon pronunciation isn’t actually that far off).
I can’t recall ever seeing it used as a gender-neutral reference, but then I can’t recall ever seeing it used to refer to the imp either – references to him usually include at least the third letter (which happens to be a vowel).
Indeed, sometimes one choice of language is inappropriate, and yet the favored alternative is itself inappropriate in another context. What can one do.
It’s not as if this is the first time this usage has been extended outside algebra. Think Malcolm X, X factor, X-rays, etc.
Uh, no. Jack Monroe, probably one of the most visible enbys in the UK, was regularly referred to as ‘Mx Jack Monroe’ in the news when they announced their (subsequently withdrawn) candidacy for the Southend West parliamentary constituency. This (surprisingly non-bigoted) Telegraph article shows other contexts in which people expect it to be used in speech. I can’t sear what the honorific was meant for, but it’s definitely pronounceable and pronounced .
There used to be an establishment in my city calling itself the Cöntinentäl Food Bär (there were diaereses on the other o’s as well but the damn spellchecker corrected them). I never went in there, but having studied foreign languages I always mentally pronounced it with the vowels modified appropriately.
And you’re lucky you didn’t go there, the Bär might have eaten you. :-;
I’ve encountered the assertion that Mx is pronounced “mix”. That has interesting implications of its own…
the Bär might have eaten you
Or, if it is Swedish, you could have eaten them.
Latinå
I’ve heard mostly /məks/ (/mʌks/ when stressed contrastively), but apparently /mɪks/ is also attested. That would tally with a full form *Mixter, which I’ve however never found in the wild.
There are women who hate being called Ms. and strongly prefer Miss or Mrs. Know your audience.
It’s not so much the people being addressed, it’s those who see fit to be offended on their behalf. My mother was Mrs. Cowan, my wife is Ms. Cowan, and I have no trouble with that. “The great thing about standards is that there are so many choose from — and if you don’t like any of them, wait until next year.”
I’ve encountered the assertion that Mx is pronounced “mix”.
In AmE, where Ms. got started, it is pronounced with the same KIT vowel as Mr., Miss, Mrs., and indeed Mistress; but in the UK it is (I am told) pronounced with the minimal STRUT vowel. I would expect Mx to go much the same way.
As for the imp, his title is Mr.
I’ve read that Ms. has an antecedent in an informal Southern pronunciation of Mrs. My suggestion for a “full” written form of it, in the vanishingly rare cases where one is needed, would be Mis’ – on the pattern of Mis’ess, which shows up in some older texts.
(English actually seems anomalous among Euro languages in having its “Mrs.” term be more elaborate than its “Miss” term. Usually you can just equalize things by lopping off a suffix: Fräulein to Frau, Señorita to Señora, Mademoiselle to Madame.)
@John Cowan:. In Rumpole of the Bailey, the socialist feminist Luz Probert is sarcastically called Miz Liz, which seems to indicate more or less the same pronunciation as in American English. (Of course, the after-the-fact short stories, in which “Miz Liz” appears are generally quite inferior to the original teleplays.)
ODO and Collins show Miz as an additional pronunciation in BrE. Cambridge shows both pronunciations in both varieties, but I have never heard Muzz in AmE. Macmillan does not show the word at all in its BrE dictionary.
I think that southern predecessor of Ms. went national during the 1976 election when the press corps discovered Jimmy Carter’s rather colorful mother, who was commonly known as “Miz Lillian.”
Ah yes, I remember those days — there was also Ham Jordan, pronounced “Jerdan.”
From my university: “As Kentucky’s premiere metropolitan research university…”
Obviously, we don’t need the accent grave to distinguish it from the semi-vowel. The agreement is correct, even if I occasionally forget it; my undergraduate institution has a name which has adjectives that are, depending on the choice, like above or adding an “e” denasalizes the vowel instead of simply pronouncing a silent consonant. As an aside, I’m taking French phonetics, and it is excellent.
What is interesting is that the feminine form is also a noun in English, meaning the first showing. Generally, in this context, I expect the masculine form. But that’s not really how it would be used in French. Also, “premier” is a superlative of sorts; you could easily say ”best,” “most excellent,” etc. But it’s weird to say that when the other schools have other functions, even if they are research universities. UK is essentially a land-grant school, although it has a fantastic languages dept.
I would suspect that that premiere there meant ‘first’ rather than ‘best’.
I would suspect not. In fact, I would bet money on it.
I didn’t say I suspect it, but that I would suspect it, given a lack of context.
Matthew: What is interesting is that the feminine form is also a noun in English, meaning the first showing. Generally, in this context, I expect the masculine form. But that’s not really how it would be used in French.
In French, when referring to theatre or similar forms of entertainment, the first public show is called la première, short for la première représentation. The adjective is treated as a noun, preserving the gender of the original noun. Some theatregoers prefer to go to une première, others to attend une générale, meaning une répétition générale, the last official rehearsal for a play, opera, etc where last minute changes can still be made.
I think there are cases where premier/première means “tops” rather than ‘first’ but none of them come to mind at the moment.
I think there are cases where premier/première means “tops” rather than ‘first’ but none of them come to mind at the moment.
The obvious such case is press-release puffery, as in: “As Kentucky’s premiere metropolitan research university…”
In English I would have no problem finding examples, but I meant in French.
Apropos [à propos] the Oxford Dictionaries source, OED2 (1989) has Charlotte Bronte as both “C. Brontë” and “C. Bronte” (also “Charl. Bronte” and “Bronte”, but only for a couple of quots). This won’t affect anyone coming across a quot in an entry, but it significantly affected an academic article on female authors in OED (Baigent, Brewer, and Larminie, 2005), which only half counted CB, presumably because of this glitch in the data.
LH (7:36am):
Way back in the Carter administration, someone (I think it was William Safire) liked to refer to the Carter adviser in print as ‘Hamilton Jördan’.
Even earlier (early ’70s) a newly-enlightened secretary at St. John’s College (Annapolis) congratulated a middle-aged tutor (as they call professors there) for calling her ‘Ms.’. He was from Georgia, and replied (as best as I can represent it without IPA): “Why, ah bin sayin’ Mizz all ma lahf!” When I taught in Alabama twenty years later, I was glad that Mrs., Miss, and Ms. are all pronounced ‘Mizz’ in the South, because it meant I never had to worry about which one to use, except when I was putting something in writing.
It’s the extra adjective “metropolitan” that sends this boast into farce territory for me. It makes me think there’s a rural university in Kentucky whose research is even more premiere so they have to restrict the scope of their claims to primacy.
Also, does “premier(e)” ever have a simply ordinal meaning in English? It seems like such an affectation to me that I have a hard time imagining it used without a value-judgment meaning…
No, I think not; I was confused because I thought marie-lucie was talking about English when in fact she was talking about French.
It makes me think there’s a rural university in Kentucky whose research is even more premiere so they have to restrict the scope of their claims to primacy.
And that’s not even getting into the institute of technology that claims zériere status.
Also, does “premier(e)” ever have a simply ordinal meaning in English?
There are phrases like “premiere performance” that seem pretty clearly ordinal. Assuming that actors and stagehands get better with practice, it must actually be quite rare for a premiere performance to be the best in the entire run.
In Australia, Premier is the title of the head of state government, and it seems to me that this is more of an objective metaphorical extension of ordinality (“head, chief”) than a subjective value judgment (“tops, best”). A state’s Premier is not necessarily its premiere politician.
In Canada, too. The provincial and territorial heads of government are styled Premier, the federal one Prime Minister; the term for all of them jointly is first ministers. In Canadian French this distinction is not made, and they are both premier ministre; in the English of Quebec they are likewise both Prime Minister. These titles and distinctions are a matter of custom, not law.
Using “premiere” rather than “premier” in a context like “premier(e) research university” strikes me as closer to Just Plain Wrong than Pretentiously Affected, yet there are actual hits out there for “premiere research university,” so what do I know? Maybe it’s the same sort of thing as centre-for-center or theatre-for-theater in a US context, i.e. definititely Pretentiously Affected but too common to call an error? Of course, orthography may not be the only problem because by saying “premier research university” instead of “leading research university” you’ve probably already set off my Pretentious Affectation alert system.
Am I guessing right that in French the distinction between premier and premiere is simply masc v fem, and “premiere” as a noun for the debut performance of something is clipped from a fixed phrase where a now-missing feminine noun was being modified?
JWB: Am I guessing right that in French the distinction between premier and premiere is simply masc v fem,
Yes.
and “premiere” as a noun for the debut performance of something is clipped from a fixed phrase where a now-missing feminine noun was being modified?
Yes, as I wrote above it is short for première représentation ‘first show, first performance’.
I apologize to m-l for not having read her prior contributions more carefully!
No problem!
My guess would be that the copywriter reasoned that “weirder spelling = closer to the original”. I remember being confused by the blond/blonde alternation in English, and assuming that the e-less spelling was a simplification of the e-full. Or maybe they’re using the feminine form to agree with université. I kind of enjoy the idea of the copywriter knowing that the equivalent French noun is feminine, but not having the perspective to realize what a silly line of reasoning that would be. Or maybe it’s la recherche that’s première. [premiere [research university]] or [[premiere research] university]?
As a copyeditor, I can tell you the overwhelming likelihood is simply “doesn’t know how to spell or use words.”
Bah, you can pry my unlikely speculation and wilful misinterpretation from my cold, dead, metaphorical hands.
I remember seeming somewhere a recherchée idea, presumably reflecting une idée recherchée, but of course in English recherché is invariable. For that matter, the underlying noun in French could just as well be masculine for all we can tell.
Well, une idée is definitely feminine. Even if it is something only a man could think of.
ə de vivre’s “Bah, you can pry …” etc seems a strong contender for best internet comment of the day/week/month etc., at least if I apply a discount for personal bias to the truly awesome “Mr. Brewer, you are SO correct” (which an actual person actually said on facebook the other day …).
ə de vivre wins this thread, if not the entire Internet forever. 🙂
I should put up a plaque:
Ə DE VIVRE COMMENTED HERE
DO: une idée is definitely feminine. Even if it is something only a man could think of.
Tsk, tsk ,,,,,,
marie-lucie, why? It is definitely not a very good idea if it cannot come to a woman’s head.
In New South Wales, we not only have a premier as head of government, but back in the 80s the state number plate slogan was “the premier state”. No doubt this was meant to have all sorts of positive connotation as well as the obvious justification of being the original British colony in Australia. In any case, it was abandoned in favour of the less pretentious “the first state”.
New South Wales, Australia’s Delaware.
DO: une idée
I think your sentence could be interpreted in more than one way. Sorry if I misunderstood your intent.
In Australia, a winning football team can also be referred to as premiers, or as winning the premiership. A team is referred to as minor premiers if it comes out at the top of the ladder at the end of the season.
The major premiership, or merely “premiership”, would be winning the Grand Final. The Wikipedia article “Minor premiership” explains the origin of this terminology.
I’m not surprised that New South Wales still needs “all sorts of positive connotation”. I think it was Kingsley Amis who observed the oddity of explicitly naming a colony after only part of a province in the mother country. The namers seem to have been eager to repudiate any possible association with North Wales.
Well, to be fair, “South Wales” was an established concept in the motherland, if one with a rather wobbly definition. It was more like naming it “New West Virginia” than “New East Kentucky,” if you get my drift.
In any case, I’m not inclined to be too harsh on the namers of NSW since the names of the other states and territories are so incredibly boring. Western Australia. South Australia. Northern Territory and Australian Capital Territory (we couldn’t even give our artificially constructed city-sized neutral ground a decent name). Victoria. Queensland. It’s a sad state of affairs when “Tasmania” is the most linguistically inventive name of the lot. Even more so (and in a much less humorous way) when you recall that the entire country was, of course, populated by people speaking hundreds of fascinating languages entirely unrelated to English who had names for literally everything in the landscape.
“New South Wales” has a name in French: Nouvelles-Galles-du-Sud. “Wales” is le Pays de Galles and “the Prince of Wales” le prince de Galles.
What Gall!
So Gallic!
Well, doesn’t French have a synonym for idée that is masculine?
Not being able to think of one right away, except le concept, I looked for a synonym on the TLFI. Fat chance! there are several feminine choices, but the only masculine one is le rêve, which is not really a synonym. Perhaps you will find better ones in a bilingual dictionary.
I wonder at what point in the words’ histories Fr. Gaule (“Gaul”) diverged from Galles (“Wales”).
On a tangentially related topic, does anyone know how the English word Breton acquired its mid vowel “e” in the first syllable? I’ve often noticed how Brittany has an “i” while Breton has a “e”. I take it that’s because Breton is a loan from French (or directly from Breton?) while Brittany is not. Looks like Cornish and Breton have “e” in all Britain-related words, so perhaps the French word Breton reflects developments internal to SW Brittonic? But, on the other hand, French also has the “e” in Grande-Bretagne.
The Cornish and Breton words in question, I suppose, must be loans back from Latin Britannia, since the cognate of “Britain” in Proto-Brythonic had a p- initial.
Greg: Gaule is from Latin Gallia, an adaptation of a Celtic name, from a root gall- but the history must be a little more complicated because with the “normal” Northern French evolution the name should probably have ended up as “Jauille” (or “Geauille”)..
Breton, Bretagne : In the history of French, most if not all unstressed vowels lost their distinctive features and ended up as schwa.
whoa, I thought the view was unanimous that Gaule is from the *walha- root, not from Gallia.
Wiktionary has a fairly detailed discussion.
Merci LH. I vaguely remember that the topic was discussed here quite some time ago.
Even if the Latin stem gall- ultimately came from a Germanic walh-, the homophony of Gallus “Gaulois” and gallus ‘rooster’ must have been established quite early. The ‘rooster’ word survived in some Occitan varieties, e.g. Gascon ‘gal’, sometimes ‘gat’.
You’re probably thinking of this thread; see your comment here. [Edit: You may have to scroll down from there; in those long threads the comment anchors get detached.]
So, if the orthographic “e” in Breton is purely due to French vowel reduction, that means it’s a coincidence that it also appears in related Southwestern Brittonic words, e.g. Bret. “Breizh”, Corn. “Breten Vian”? It also means that the English pronunciation with /ɛ/ is a spelling pronunciation. Neither of these premises is implausible. Story checks out.
So, if the orthographic “e” in Breton is purely due to French vowel reduction
In stanza CCXXI of the Song of Roland, the first line is La siste eschele unt faite de Bretuns ‘Le sixième corps de bataille, ils l’ont fait de Bretons’. This cannot reflect vowel reduction, because OF still had a strong stress. The Western Romance shift changed VL Brittania [sic] to /e/, but the French shift should have made that /e/ into /ɛ/ in a closed syllable (which this is), leading to *brèton. I don’t know why that didn’t happen.
Something is missing here.
Strong initial stress, I should have written. You can’t have vowel reduction in stressed syllables, at least not in the history of French (or English or Russian).
@LH, for me that link went directly to M-L’s comment. Comment anchors are embedded in the HTML code, it’s not like there is a central ToC with offsets that can get out of synch, for instance — so either WordPress is putting the wrong “fragment” into the link on the date (which would need some very “creative” coding), or the problem (which I’ve also seen) is on the browser side. If I see the phenomenon again, I’ll check what happened.
You can’t have vowel reduction in stressed syllables, at least not in the history of … ( … English …).
Explain to me, then, East Yorkshire dialect — for example the pronunciation of its largest city /ʔəl/, or possibly /ʔʌl/ (‘Hull’).
I can’t do East Yorkshire myself, but according to a native of Willerby (suburb of Hull) — who was training in phonetics, and heard this ‘no vowel reduction in stressed syllables’ allegation — this is /’bʌləks/ (bollocks).
wp has a whole section mentioning varieties of English with stressed and unstressed reduced vowels.
I think I have heard a (native Belfast) pronunciation /’bʔəlfæst/ or /’bʔʌlfæst/ contrasting with a (non-native) version with [EPSILON] in the first syllable and stress on the second syllable. The Irish Béal Feirste is trisyllabic with [ē-SLENDER] in first syllable and [ě-SLENDER] and stress on the second syllable (maybe some Ulster Irish accents would stress the first syllable, but this is not general for Ulster Irish–anyway, I am not sure if the Irish name was in common use before the “anglicised” version).
That looks like East Yorkshire has done the same thing as America: interpreted the always stressed [ʌ] and the always unstressed [ə] as allophones of a single phoneme, and consequently replaced [ʌɫ] by [əɫ] or [ʊɫ] or just [ɫ̩].
(I find the Vulcans and the hulls in Star Trek quite noticeable for this reason. They’re difficult to imagine if all you’re used to is RP.)
“Maybe it’s the same sort of thing as centre-for-center or theatre-for-theater in a US context, i.e. definitely Pretentiously Affected but too common to call an error?”
Comment: Two or three American students of the theater have told me that they spell the word “theatre” when it means ‘dramatic representation as an art or profession’ (as in “students of the theatre” and “A History of the Theatre in Such-and-Such a Country”) and “theater” otherwise, a distinction not possible, of course, in speech.
Two or three American students of the theater
I’m not a student of the theatre (more than of anything else), but I make the same distinctions in writing. I know most Americans consider this Middle High Pretension, but “indeed I cannot help it”. I’m not clear if your students would write “movie theatre”; I wouldn’t.
I see plays at the theater and movies at the theatre.
As an American I’ve mostly encountered the “theatre” spelling in the names of buildings, rooms, and groups.
Same here, and I’ve always shaken my head sadly (as I do at American reverence for royalty). We fought a revolution to escape from the Stamp Act and -re spellings, people!
Yes, I don’t understand why the English are so attached to their frenchified “-re”/”-our”/”-ise” spellings, but there’s certainly no reason for Americans to copy them.
Original of course. Indeed, -our is specifically Norman as opposed to the -eur of francilien.
“Everybody agrees that English spelling is horrible.
There have been almost as many proposals for spelling reform as there are rewrites of Esperanto. (Tellingly, there has been precisely one success in each category– Noah Webster and Ido– and neither caught on universally.)”
On this page, written by two Americans of whom one lives in the Netherlands, is an occurrence of:
…in a school in California. (I can’t link to it more directly, search the page for theatre.)
BTW, I’m surprised cinema isn’t used more often in the US – it is, after all, well enough known for puns on Senator Sinema.
Edit: now that I think about it, perhaps the strict separation of Kino and Theater in German is actually just another manifestation of the usual snobbery. There are no film critics writing in German the way there are theater critics, and while “actor” does make people think of cinema & TV first nowadays and of theater second, Romy Schneider’s mother still lamented that her exceedingly famous daughter “never became a real actress, only a film actress” (Leider ist sie keine richtige Schauspielerin geworden – nur Filmschauspielerin).
There are no film critics writing in German the way there are theater critics
Amazing! No wonder Fassbinder was so pissed off. Why is that? Germany has a great film tradition, after all.
Snobbery: film is (still) newfangled and not quite serious. It’s not High Culture. You dress up to go to the theater, not to the cinema.
About the same applies to comics, for example. They’re automatically For Children, so adults aren’t allowed to read them (and children used to be discouraged from reading them), no matter if you call them “graphic novels” and no matter if Erika Fuchs changed Carl Barks’s colloquial style to a downright literary one and added plenty of quotes from Goethe and Schiller.
Today’s xkcd Instead of Serf or Sans Serif, my new font is only Serifs.
I don’t think any fonts are called Serf, unless perhaps they are for Serbian Cyrillic.
Does anyone in English these days pronounce “cinema” with a “hard C” (i.e. /k/). A la German Kino, or
‘The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the “sculpture” of rhyme.’
I had a friend who, for a while, was always careful to pronounce it “kinema”
(more later on in that thread)
Danish for cinema is biograf (I blame the French), but before the end times the local one was more likely to be called Kino than not. (Capital K because proper noun; but I blame the Germans for the word itself).
OED, s.v. biograph (entry updated November 2010; original sense “A biography or biographical article; esp. a short profile of a public figure,” first cite 1825):
This Dylan box-set title was presumably referring more to the pre-motion-picture sense, with perhaps some wordplay on “phonograph” as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biograph_(album)
@jwb
https://www.popsike.com/BOB-DYLAN-BIOGRAPH-ORIG-PROMO-5LP-BOX-SET-AUTOGRAPHED/160638183951.html
Whilst this link does not explain the title “Biograph”, it identifies the two individuals (three, if you count Dylan) who I suppose would know…
@PP: I would not necessarily assume that the title was chosen by either/both of the two guys who spent all the time and effort putting the project together, or for that matter by the artist. That’s not how things inevitably work in the record biz. (Dylan did probably have enough clout he could have vetoed a title he affirmatively disliked.)
According to the TLFI, biographe was indeed the recording apparatus, and the projector was a bioscope. Why Danish movie theatres got named after the former, I shall not venture to guess. (One of the quotations [not the dictionary itself] offers a claim by movie pioneer Ole Olsen that he invented the word from scratch, but he was active 10-20 years after the first attestation in French).
Exclusively cinéma in French nowadays.
Re XKCD’s mouseover: Wouldn’t Comic Sans with serifs be Comic Avec?
Regarding Latino, Latin@ and Latinx, in Spanish there’s also latine, which uses -e to create a non-gendered form. And this can be used (in Spanish) as a pronunciation of latin@ or latinx.
That makes a lot of sense. Which raises the question of why so many people (a small minority, of course, but loud) insist so doggedly on the idiotic “latinx.”
Efforts, perhaps somewhat heavy-handed, are underway to crack down on that sort of people. E.g., https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/connecticut-latino-lawmakers-propose-banning-latinx-calling-offensive-rcna68712
Ha, I love it!
When I moved to DC, one of the movie theaters I would go to was the Biograph, but sadly it’s been gone for more than a quarter of a century.
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/800
I have realized that “Latinx” is simply insufficient and so not fit for purpose. When praising the beauty of the persons in question, for example, we must henceforth write “Lxs Latinxs son bonitxs.”
The nice thing about the “e” solution is that it can almost mechanically be slotted in where there’s an “o” now, because Spanish happens to have -o/-os almost everywhere that’s masculine-for-inclusive gender. Some fiddling is obviously needed in cases like padres or este where there’s already an -e in the masculine/inclusive. (Aquelle/primere/buene for aquel/primer/buen look fine to me, but it’s not my language to decide about. Une/le/le/elle for un/el/lo/él [if that’s what people choose] would perhaps take a bit longer to become a habit, but not a showstopper).
Yes, but the unsatisfactory thing about it (from the point of view of the x’ers) is that it doesn’t leap out and proudly announce one’s superiority. When you see that x, you know you’re in the presence of a Higher Being!
And of course x is different from e, so you can be conspicuously different all the time. (Are there even x’ers who do their thing in running Spanish text, or is it only a thing for single words quoted in English text? Latino in an English text is arguably an English word and can be mangled to fit the temperament of English speakers. Right now I can’t think of a Spanish word with a masculine in -e that is likely to be used in an English text).
“Hombre” is reasonably current as a loanword in AmEng, but I guess it doesn’t have a feminine equivalent that you can get by just switching a vowel.
Presidente might be more like what Lars is thinking of, though presidente or presidenta can be used for a female president. It’s not really a loanword though.
My wife doesn’t regard herself as Latinx; in fact I’ve never heard her utter the horrible word and I’m not sure she is aware that it exists. She wouldn’t call herself Latina either (not in English, anyway). She calls herself Latin American in English or latinoamericana in Spanish.
A Mexican-American friend of mine in her 50s identifies as a Chicana. When she told a white zoomer college student organizing some sort of campus diversity event to use that identity to describe her, they were confused. “I thought we weren’t supposed to say that”, whispered the student to her, apparently afraid someone else might have heard the offensive uttering.
@JWB, thanks, that is indeed the sort of word I couldn’t think of. But unlike the padre/madre pair where padres is used to mean ‘parents,’ I haven’t seen los hombres used to mean ‘people’ (or ‘adults’). Los personas or la gente is what I see. (I would not be surprised to see padre in English text either, especially about Latin American [Catholic] clergymen, it must be one of the Spanish words that most Anglophones recognize, but I don’t think the x’ers will ask for padrx).
(I may have seen chicos = ‘dudes’ used inclusively, but I’m not sure. It doesn’t have -e, though).
chique (though that has it referring to a nonbinary person rather than being a gender-neutral word).
Gale and I once got an invitation to a gallery opening at a place in New York allegedly called The Taller Latin Americano. This seemed bizarre (taller than who or what?), and checking with the friend who had us sent the invitation it was in fact called El Taller Latinoamericano (English capitalization because of the anglophone context, I assume). Only then did we learn the word taller ‘artist’s studio < workshop’, etymologically nativized < Fr atelier ‘id.’ < attelle ‘wood splinter’ < L assula ‘id.’, dim. of axis + Fr. -ier, a locational suffix.
I knew the word taller, but never connected it with atelier, let alone axis
How did assula > attelle happen?
@trond
assula > *ass+et+ella = *astella > atelle?
The only comparandum for a development like that I can find is jarretelle. Is Étienne there?
I overlooked this from Feb. 9th:
Initial stress? In Old French?
I’ve been taking for granted that the same syllables were stressed that were already stressed in Classical Latin and that are still stressed today. By OF times, vowels other than *a had been lost after the stressed syllable (Brittōnes > Bretuns; penultimate > final stress by loss of the stressed syllable), and the others had changed to e which fell largely silent later.
I’ve been taking for granted that the same syllables were stressed that were already stressed in Classical Latin and that are still stressed today.
“Stressed today”? What would that even mean in Modern French? It has no word-stress at all, best beloved. But of course you are right to say that I was wrong about initial stress in French. Perhaps I was thinking of initial stress in Old Latin. Er sumpn.
French has prepausal stress, roughly speaking. For words in isolation that means word-final stress, and indeed the syllables following the one that was stressed in Latin have consistently disappeared in every word I can think of right now (through loss of their vowels).
What French does not have is phonemic stress. But that’s an abstraction. Phonetic stress is still there. Are you sure you can’t hear it?
The French, of course, can’t hear their non-phonemic stress, hence their repeated assertion that their language is spoken in a monotone, a statement that puzzles all foreigners. Nevertheless, I’ve even seen it in English-language texts. But I can hardly believe that JC can’t hear French phonetic stress.
What French does not have is phonemic stress. But that’s an abstraction. Phonetic stress is still there. Are you sure you can’t hear it?
I can confirm that French is a stressful language.
It’s not about phonetic vs. phonemic: Polish stress isn’t phonemic (because it falls in a fixed position in each word), but it’s not merely prosodic.
it falls in a fixed position in each word
Not entirely true. Also, as others have said, French does indeed have clearly perceptible stress.
Polish stress is on the penultimate syllable of every content word, except for a small and shrinking number of antepenultimate exceptions (some people have apparently lost them all). French stress is on the ultimate syllable of various groupings that are often larger than a content word – prosodic doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Egrfsn2CU8E
I think there are some typical stress rhythms:
0.23 (Lorraine)
c’est le facTEUR qui en SOMME fait la liaiSON: aVEC le BOURG, aVEC les nouVELLES…
2.05 (Paris)
et le SOIR je sors sur la PORTE, j’ai éteint TOUTES les lumIÈRES
3.33 (Nice)
AH, tu peut pleurER après ce que tu as FAIT
It is definirely word stress for the multi-syllable words here, I really think none of these words could be naturally stressed on another syllable, but I agree that my transcriptions sometimes do not capture the elided syllables or some phonetics that don’t relate to stress, e.g., j’ai éteint is pronounced by the speaker more like “chétein”.
@Athel Cornish-Bowden says. “My wife […]calls herself Latin American in English or latinoamericana in Spanish.”
“The term Latin America was first used in an 1856 conference called “Initiative of America: Idea for a Federal Congress of the Republics” (Iniciativa de la América. Idea de un Congreso Federal de las Repúblicas),[8] by the Chilean politician Francisco Bilbao. The term was further popularized by French emperor Napoleon III’s government in the 1860s as Amérique latine to justify France’s military involvement in the Second Mexican Empire and to include French-speaking territories in the Americas such as French Canada, French Louisiana, French Guiana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti and the French Antillean Creole Caribbean islands Saint Lucia and Dominica, in the larger group of countries where Spanish and Portuguese languages prevailed.[9]” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_America).
It would be interesting to know how your wife would define herself in the absence of the demonym “Latin American.”
Polish stress is on the penultimate syllable of every content word, …
We are told that Czech (another West Slavic language) has fixed stress on the first syllable.
Hungarian has it on the first syllable, but when my wife says “Mit akarsz?” or “Mit csinálsz?” (“What do you want?” or “What are you doing?”) I often hear it shifted to the second syllable. Probably because the stressed “mit” is adjacent.
Yes, it’s on the first syllable in Czech and (most of?) Slovak. Like in Hungarian, it’s completely independent of vowel length, which is amazing to listen to if you’re not used to that. (In Polish, all vowels are always short, unless a catastrophe has happened and you decide to say o kurwaaaa instead of o Jezu.)
“Hombre” is reasonably current as a loanword in AmEng, but I guess it doesn’t have a feminine equivalent that you can get by just switching a vowel.
Well, there is hembra ‘female’ (adj.), which is the apparent result of switching two vowels, although the parallelism is mostly accidental: < hominem, feminam. In English, hembra means ‘female llama’, and for all I know it is used as a noun in llama country as well.