I found the section on Visigothic Spain in Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome
The reader will understand, of course, that to speak of the Visigoths, or any other society, as Christian here implies merely a formal and legal adhesion. It prescinds entirely from a judgment on the spiritual or intellectual character of any individual’s religious assent.
I immediately came to attention: it does what? I turned to the OED and found a perfectly good (if recondite) verb I had been unacquainted with:
prescind, v.
Etymology: < post-classical Latin praescindere to cut off, to shorten by cutting (4th or 5th cent.) < classical Latin prae- pre- prefix + scindere to cut (see scind v.).
1. trans. To cut off beforehand, prematurely, or abruptly; to remove, cut away.
1636 R. Basset tr. G. A. de Paoli Lives Rom. Emperors 20 The brevity of his reigne prescinded many and great hopes of his good government of the whole Empire.
[…]
1872 N. Amer. Rev. July 65 Mr. Buckle does not generally care to prescind matters. It is in his nature rather to affect the circumlocutory and vague.
1994 Buffalo (N.Y.) News (Nexis) 28 Nov. 3 If one were to prescind the whole of federal benefits that go to the poor, you’d come up with about $140 billion per year.
2004 National Rev. 56 1 The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court..granted conjugal rights to gays, and the bells tolled, as they did in San Francisco under the patronage of rump political leaders who sought to prescind the law on the question.2. a. trans. To cut off, detach, or separate from; to abstract from.
1640 J. Sadler Masquarade du Ciel 7 Whether Art or Nature, Sense or Reason, could best separate, abstract, at least prescind, a Sprightly Genius from its Body.
[…]
1856 J. F. Ferrier Inst. Metaphysic (ed. 2) . 475 Nor have universal things prescinded from the particular any absolute existence.
1947 M. Lowry Under Volcano iv. 104 The Malebolge was the barranca, the ravine which wound through the country, narrow here—but its momentousness successfully prescinded their minds from the goat.
1996 Wisconsin State Jrnl. (Nexis) 27 July 7 a, Oftentimes it is necessary to prescind the work from the surrounding environment.3. intr. a. To withdraw attention from; to leave out of consideration; to ignore, put to one side.
1654 T. White Apol. Rushworth’s Dialogues 249 Their very words directly tel him they on purpose resolv’d to prescind from her particular Case, and not determin any thing concerning It in that Decree.
[…]
1890 W. S. Lilly Right & Wrong 98 In what I am about to write I prescind entirely from all theological theories and religious symbols.
1977 Times 13 Aug. 14/3 The various denominations..are prescinding from their differences and attending only to those matters about which they are agreed.
2005 Cross Currents (Nexis) 22 Mar. 83 The methods of religious studies generally prescind from any commitment to a particular tradition or any personal self-involvement in a religious path.b. prescinding from: apart from.
1686 J. Goad Astro-meteorologica i. ii. 6 The Air..must be defin’d, prescinding from all Admistions that are extraneous to it.
[…]
1941 Far Eastern Q. 1 87 Prescinding from this misleading treatment of the mission history, the author’s presentation of the Tokugawa Shogunate is most elucidating.
1990 B. Bergon Exploding Eng. (BNC) 145 The last of the Victorian sages, who were men of letters and of affairs, not academics (prescinding from Arnold’s and Ruskin’s marginal tenure of chairs at Oxford).
Although, examining the citations, I see I had not been entirely unacquainted with it, since I read (and loved) Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano years ago; its momentousness must have prescinded my mind from the word as the ravine’s did the characters’ from the goat.
I love that word as well, and for whatever reason, when I could conceivably use it, I usually sit for a moment blocked, trying to think of the word, and then have to pick a less apt alternative because prescind doesn’t come to mind.
As the article says, Wamba was most likely a nickname, so to some extent not meant to be taken seriously.
It’s also the name of a slave and fool (“Wamba son of Witless”) in Ivanhoe. ObLanguageHat quote:
“Refractory grunters” is good.
In Spain, everybody who was born before 1961 and studied at Secondary school had to learn the list of 33 Visigothic Kings of Spain. It was a nightmare for most of them. Fortunately my generation could prescind of this memory test.
*facepalm* German Wampe “big belly”.
…Hey. We seem to have a native High German /p/ here. That’s really rare (except behind /s/)!
“How can you become a good citizen if you don’t know the names of the three sons of Chilperic?!?”
Womb has to be a cognate, too. I’ll stop here, or I’ll sit here all night…
>David Marjanovic
I still think about Felipe as a prince. From 718 to our days we have had 143 kings in Spain, most of them before the existence of our country.
As an anecdote, I had a children’s deck of card whose motif was the Visigothic Kings so I learnt some names but not in order. I don’t know anybody who has been baptized with those names.
To me Chilperic is the surname of a Dorothy L. Sayers character. Never knew he was a king.
The Italian author Luigi Bertelli used the pen-name Vamba, after the jester in Ivanhoe. His story Ciondolino, about a boy turned into an ant, has been a great favorite of mine since I was 9 or so.
“Prescindere” is very common in Italian, and it would make my life easier as a translator if I could just use “prescind” all the time. But alas.
As a youth, I was made to learn the “kongerekke” or “Kings’ row” of Norway. There were two cheats: first, early Norse Kings were followed by their sons, so Magnus would often be followed by Magnusson. More importantly, during the period of Danish rule, King Christian was followed by King Frederik, followed by King Christian again, for fully four hundred years. While the Roman numerals were a bit off (Christian II might be followed by Frederick I) you could be sure that Christian III and Frederik II were next at the plate. And the alternating sequence continued till 1814.
The Visigoths could have profited by this system, but did not. Thus, their kingdoms lie in ruins.
“Prescindere” is very common in Italian
That reminded me of a Spanish word still floating around in the recesses of my wordhoard from my time in Argentina: imprescindible ‘essential, indispensible’ (Nadie es imprescindible ‘Nobody is indispensible’). At last I know where it comes from!
My dictionary tells me there’s also a verb prescindir de ‘to do without,’ but that seems to have left no trace in my memory.
Wasn’t it de Gaulle who said something along the lines of “Les cimetières sont pleins de gens indispensables”?
The Malebolge was the barranca, the ravine which wound through the country, narrow here—but its momentousness successfully prescinded their minds from the goat.
What a sentence!
Lowry was a wonderful writer.
“As the article says, Wamba was most likely a nickname, so to some extent not meant to be taken seriously.”
I wonder if Wembley was named after a Saxon with some form of that nickname.
Apparently yes, per Wikipedia.
Jeffry, you left off the punch line: that after Christian, Frederick, Christian, Frederick, Christian, Frederick, Christian, Frederick, Christian, Frederick, Christian, Frederick, the new king who broke the sequence was named Christian Frederick.
Assuming that the British royal succession continues as expected, and that distinct regnal names have gone out of style, we’re at the start of a sequence of prime number monarchs: Elizabeth II, Charles III, William V and George VII.
“Prescind from”. OK the words exist, but it’s a very lazy translation. If I didn’t get sacked for that, it would at least be “called to my attention”,.
But who will be XI ? There’s never been a X of any of them. Lazar predicts the fall of the British monarchy. All hail Lazar, protector of the British republic – hang on, haven’t we been here before?
@Jeffry — you will have noticed, I hope, that we have taken steps to rectify the numbering mishap. Barring unforeseen events, Margrethe II will be followed by Frederik X and then Christian XI. (But of course they won’t be Kings of Norway).
I once read they haven’t, and Prince Charles is going to be George VII already. No idea if there’s any truth to that.
Yes, I never heard that distinct regnal names have gone out of style; when did that happen?
Oh – look at that, it says SVINθVS on one of his coins.
That’s fascinating.
Prince Charles Philip Arthur George is keeping his options open when it comes to regnal names, but George VII looks pretty likely; the last two Georges, his grandfather (born Albert) and his great-grandfather were popular. Charles III would associate him with some unfortunate events and people, and Philip is tied to some less than savory kings of France and Spain (if you’re English, that is). Arthur — well, can’t blame him for not being up for that.
Oh – look at that, it says SVINθVS on one of his coins.
And somebody isn’t very good at reading inscriptions; the legend says:
…but it’s clearly ISPALIS (=Hispalis, ‘Seville’), and of course SVINLVS should be SVINθVS; furthermore, I suspect CN should be CH (for CHinda).
>”a book I’d had sitting around for a couple of decades”
THIS. This nearly made me weep with recognition.
People don’t understand. They say “If you haven’t looked at a book in a year, get rid of it!” They have no concept that a book is waiting to serve a purpose, and it may have to wait decades to do so. I still regret certain books that I got rid of years ago under the impression that I would never read them or want to look at them again, only to discover I had been wrong.
Wamba/Vamba
I came across Gorvömb some 20 years ago when I tried to learn some Icelandic. That didn’t go well, as there were too few dictionaries and other stuff available online at the time.
Cleasby–Vigfusson defines it as follows:
gorvömb (f) the first stomach, Ísl. ii. 375.
vömb
Icelandic
Etymology
From Proto-Germanic *wambō.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /vœmp/
Rhymes: -œmp
Noun
vömb f (genitive singular vambar, nominative plural vambir)
1. belly, abdomen
2. stomach (especially that of ruminants)
Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/gurą
Proto-Germanic
Etymology
From Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰer- (“warm; hot”).
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈɣu.rɑ̃/
Noun
*gurą n
1. half-digested stomach contents
2. manure; dung; feces
3. filth; muck
I wonder what the Old English was for ‘first stomach’.
A Russian translation of Gorvömb is available here.
Icelandic isn’t among the languages DeepL can handle, and GT has produced this:
Once upon a time there was a king and a queen in their kingdom; they had one son and one daughter. Their daughter was a good-natured girl, but her son was in a bad mood and the most nasty.
Time passed and the king began to grow old, but his son is bored for how long he lives and finally he realizes that he is killing his parents and his sister. The king’s son now gets the kingdom from his father and wants to get married, but it does not go well for him because of the reputation of the one who left him. Eventually, however, he gets a wife when a long time has passed. Their intercourse is mentioned only in that they had the daughter of one child named Ingibjörg; she was superior to other women for the sake of beauty and beauty.
Gorvömb is another very silly name.
Well, it’s not exactly a human name:
Тут к ним подкатилось нечто чудное, требушина не требушина, не поймешь что, и закричало:
— Выбери меня! Выбери меня! Выбери меня!
— Зачем мне эта требушина? — удивилась королева.
— Возьми, не пожалеешь, — сказала хозяйка. — Ее зовут Горвёмб .
Источник: http://bestiary.us/fairytale/gorvemb-gorvoemb
I wonder what the Old English was for ‘first stomach’.
The kind of question the Historical Thesaurus of English was made for! Alas, the answer is, we don’t know: the thesaurus has nothing older than paunch (1400s, from French) for the specific sense of “first stomach of a ruminant; the rumen”. Womb could mean stomach in Old English, but the OED doesn’t indicate any specialized use of it for any particular stomach of a ruminant.
Other non-Latinate words found in the OED and HTE for specific stomachs of a ruminant:
maw, inherited from Germanic: “The stomach of an animal … Formerly also: spec. †the abomasum or fourth stomach of a ruminant (obsolete).”
feck, origin unknown, first recorded 1681: “Now English regional (south-eastern) and rare. One of the stomachs of a ruminant; esp. the rumen.”
reed, inherited from Germanic, “Now regional and technical. Originally: (perhaps) the stomach. In later use spec.: the abomasum or fourth stomach of a ruminant. The precise meaning of the word in Old English is unclear. …”
manyplies, formed within English by compounding, first recorded in this sense 1782: “Chiefly Scottish. … The omasum or third stomach of a ruminant. Now archaic.”
feleferþ, recorded only in Old English glossaries, glossing Latin centumpellis; fela is Old English for ‘many’, so probably equivalent to manyplies.
It wouldn’t be too surprising if Old English butchers did have a specific word, like foremaw or something, but it just didn’t get recorded.
The English Dialect Dictionary has more, though mostly more recent, plus many regional terms for a calf’s stomach, used for making rennet.
I would have guessed that the Old English terms were the pair craw and maw for the fore and hind parts of the upper digestive systems (with the dividing line depending on the type of creature, so that the craw would probably include the first stomach on a ruminant). However, while craw looks old, it is not documented until Wycliffite. Per the OED:
That “limitation in sense” is that when the word first shows up in Middle English, it only seems to be used for the crops of birds, before broadening in sense again by early Modern English.
(I’m not entirely convinced that cast one’s craw is obsolete. I know I’ve encountered it before, almost certainly in works more recent than the sixteenth century.)
@brett
The only craw word i am familiar with is a crawthumper, a very publically devout person (usually male).
@brett
The only craw word i am familiar with is a crawthumper, a very publically devout person (usually male).
@PlasticPaddy: The OED has a sub-entry for that compund, although it was unfamiliar to me. It says:
Was devotee a euphemism for “Papist”? And brisket-beater?
Oh, and I forgot to mention that craw is still somewhat associated in my mind with this Craw Wurm that was in my Magic: The Gathering starter deck.
The Google books corpus has a scan of the 1788 edition of Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, which has “BRISKET BEATER. A Roman catholic. See BREAST FLEET, and CRAW THUMPER.”*
More detail is given in the entry for one of the synonyms: “BREAST FLEET. He or she belongs to the breast fleet ; i.e. is a Roman catholic ; an appellation derived from their custom of beating their breasts in the confession of their sins.”
*The immediately-following entry is BRISTOL MILK, a synonym for sherry, supposedly from the reputed tendency of residents of Bristol to drink it in quantity at breakfast-time. This of course evokes the still-extant Harvey’s Bristol Cream brand.
@J.W. Brewer: So, that’s where the name cream sherry comes from! I have always found it mystifying.
Incidentally, the OED does not a subsidiary entry for brisket beater; however, the relevant sense of brisket is there, although the entry could be a lot more complete.
@Brett: Well, that’s what Grose says, but I wouldn’t necessarily assume that it’s historically reliable rather than a jocular folk-etymology he passed on. There are certainly other dairy-metaphor names for types of alcoholic beverage (e.g. cream ale, Liebfraumilch) that don’t come packaged with a “because those sots over there drink it for breakfast” explanation.
Brett: I’ve never been into MtG, but some some friends of mine have been, and I’ve never been able to decipher the complicated rules, even after all those decades. (Not that ever actually tried). I think I remember that particular card, though.
And thanks to Kragen “collar”, it dawns on me that the German cognate of maw isn’t Maul “mouth of nonhuman vertebrates, or dysphemistically of humans”, but Magen “stomach” (just the organ, not “belly” in general).
Oh, so feckless parallels gutless…
No, that feck is short for effeck = effect.
Magen
mahalaukku
Finnish
Etymology
maha (“belly”) + laukku (“bag”)
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈmɑhɑˌlɑu̯kːu/, [ˈmɑɦɑˌlɑu̯kːu]
Rhymes: -ɑukːu
Syllabification: ma‧ha‧lauk‧ku
Noun
mahalaukku
1. (anatomy) stomach (digestive organ)
In Norwegian the first stomach of a ruminan is vom f., then nettmage m., bladmage m., and finally løype m.
Vom f. looks very much like an ancient term. It’s also a colloquial word for fat belly. I can’t say which came first, but jocular extension of terms for animal anatomy to humans is common enough.
Nettmage and bladmage looks like miodern tecnical coinages based on their anatomical properties.
Løype (or løpe) is used both for the final stomach and for the semi-digested milk that settles there — especially in calves — and which is used as a cheese starter. There’s also a verb løype (or løpe) “make milk settle into cheese”. Otherwise løype v. means “let something move down freely but in a controlled fashion”. I think the stomach term must be from a distinctly different meaning of the word, the metaphorical use for a transition from one condition to another that we know from Eng. leap.
Pansen, Netzmagen, Blättermagen, Labmagen, where Lab “rennet” has nothing to do with laufen “run”, including auslaufen “flow out slowly”.
…and the article on maha says that’s indeed a borrowing from a cognate of Magen.
Back in 2015…
..and then I actually did stop. Remarkable.
I remember continuing in some other thread at some point, but for the sake of having it all in one spot: 1) of course it’s cognate; 2) the expected German form is actually Wamme, which exists somewhere in Germany; 3) but actually, on first principles you’d expect every Proto-Germanic [b] – the actual plosive allophone – to become a High German [p], and it’s really strange that Wampe is one of only two or three words where that actually seems to have happened.
maha
There is also saha = ‘saw’ (chainsaw, hacksaw, etc)
Finnish
Etymology
Borrowed from Old Swedish sagh, see Proto-Germanic *sagō.
Pronunciation
IPA(key): /ˈsɑhɑ/, [ˈs̠ɑɦɑ]
Rhymes: -ɑhɑ
Syllabification: sa‧ha
Noun
saha
1. saw (tool)
2. sawmill (plant, production facility)
3. (music) musical saw (musical instrument)
Cows have a vom (rumen). Also people have them, it’s a deprecative term for a fat gut — but you’re saying it was originally a pregnant belly?
Me? I have no idea. Given the king on the East Germanic side, the dysphemism for a fat belly may well be the oldest meaning, though; that’s the one that remains in German.
@dm
In PG there is *stumpaz and *stubbaz. Would you say
(a) coincidence?
(b) one of these is wrong?
(c) there were some bb/mp doublets already in PG?
rennet
That’s the word. And looking at it, it strikes me that it’s related to ‘run’. Etymonline says:
Which is just about exactly what could be said about Norw. løype except that the base verb is the “leap” word.
For the sense “change state”, Norw. also has a word anløpe “tarnish (of metals)”*. The prefix makes it obvious that it’s a borrowing, presumably from LG through Danish. I want to add another meaning “start to turn sour (of dairy)”, but this is unknown to my Norwegian dictionary and even to Google. I’m pretty sure my mother used it though.
anløpe “tarnish (of metals)”*. The prefix makes it obvious that it’s a borrowing, presumably from LG through Danish.
The Standard German is X anlaufen “to turn X”, with X being a colour term; the implications are sudenness and spoiling, like blau anlaufen “turning blue” (when asphyxiating) or (schwarz) anlaufen “turning black” of silverware.
The prefix makes it obvious that it’s a borrowing
A sentence that has stuck in my mind from my attempts to tackle Icelandic is:
Það er enga atvinnu að fá. ‘There is no job/employment to be had.’ (For some reason I always want to say engin.)
And atvinna is clearly að + vinna:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vinna#Icelandic
@Hans: Yes. The basic meaning must be something like “arrive at”. Norw. has borrowed anløpe also in the meaning “call at a port (of ships)”. M/S Eirik Raude anløper Bergen hver tirsdag og fredag kl. 07.30. “M/S Eirik Raude calls at Bergen every Tuesday and Friday at 7:30 AM.”
Also *stuppa- and *stuffa- and *stuba- (or perhaps *stufa-) and *stūba- (or perhaps *stūfa-) and *stūpa- and even *stubna-. It’s a Kluge mess (p. 286f.). Add a nasal-infixed present verb form, and you’ve explained *stumpa- as well. (A verb *stubba- exists.)
David M: Labmagen, where Lab “rennet” has nothing to do with laufen “run”
OED cross-references rennet to cheeselip, “Now rare (English regional (Yorkshire and Lincolnshire) in later use)”, where they have this to say about its relationship to the German word:
Also, Wiktionary says that Danish for rennet is osteløbe, and ost is cheese; I hadn’t known that the Latin-derived cheese didn’t make it into North Germanic.
I hadn’t known that the Latin-derived cheese didn’t make it into North Germanic.
But ost is cognate with a Latin word.
I see Wamba, king of the Visigoths, and raise Bubba, duke of the Frisians.
Ubba, one of the commanders of the Great Heathen Army, probably belonged to a group of Vikings who had settled in Frisia. Some sources identify him as duke of the Frisians also.
And somebody isn’t very good at reading inscriptions; the legend says:
+CN•SVINLVS PX, facing bust
+ISPLLIS PIVS, facing bust.
…but it’s clearly ISPALIS (=Hispalis, ‘Seville’), and of course SVINLVS should be SVINθVS; furthermore, I suspect CN should be CH (for CHinda).
In fact the original listing says +CN•SVINΛVS PX and +ISPΛLIS PIVS, with two lambdas; but that particular site apparently makes the lambdas via Symbol font or something, so they get copied as L.
The second lambda is presumably trying to represent a crossbar-less A; a better Unicode symbol for that would be Ʌ – that is, U+0245 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER TURNED V – but I suppose they used what they could easily access. I can’t figure out what’s up with the first lambda, though… the letter on the coin is clearly a theta.
As for CH versus CN, I agree about CH making more sense in context, and looking at the strokes that’s what it looks like as well, but at first glance that H looks enough like a N that I can see where the misreading came from.
@Hat (from the o.p.) I turned to the OED and found a perfectly good (if recondite) verb I had been unacquainted with:
I note in the definitions Hat cites, there are multiple equivalent and more familiar words,
Abstract Noun
prescission from would then be sense 1.
prescission simpliciter would then be ?? ambiguous: dismissing from consideration; or paying attention to ??
These contrary senses for the same word puts it in the same category as sanction — skunked [not that I would usually cite Garner].
Homophone: precision
From the style guides of several of AntC’s employers [summarised **]:
* If your audience would have to turn to a dictionary, avoid that word. (Typically they won’t, and will try to ‘wing it’.)
* If it’s a sound-alike or a spelling-alike for another abstruse word, especially avoid it.
* OTOH if the word is a term of art with a domain-specific meaning that would be understood by your audience and with no adequate equivalent, be careful to specify you are using it in that sense; avoid using it in any other sense (its ‘general/non-specialist meaning’) within the same document.
Because: you are trying to get a message/analysis/complex idea across. Anything that sidetracks your audience will detract from your writing’s impact.
[**] I would have especially liked to quote the exact form of the advice from my favourite writing guide, that I’d used ever since I worked as a technical writer/systems designer. (Now out of print.) Lost in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake: we were not allowed to return and retrieve anything from the office.
Homophone: precision
Surely prescission has /ʃ/, whereas precision has /ʒ/.
2. (transitive) To pay exclusive attention to.
There is no such sense. I see you’re quoting it from Wiktionary, but that’s bullshit — some officious Wiktionutcase has misunderstood a quotation from William Hamilton (and note that said nutcase does not seem to understand that Henry Longueville Mansel and John Veitch are two different editors, not to mention that there would seem to be no reason to mention the editors in the first place). If you read the woolly and almost incomprehensible passage from which that nugget of prose is extracted, you will see that Hamilton is making some sort of point analogous to not being able to not think of a pink elephant, so that not to pay attention is really to pay attention. It does not in any way say or imply that the meaning of the verb prescind is “To pay exclusive attention to,” and if I were a Wiktionary editor I would delete the alleged sense 2. Nobody has ever used prescind that way or ever will, so your supposed “contrary senses for the same word” are nonexistent. Not to mention that, as Keith Ivey says, prescission and precision are not homophones.
This paper may be relevant:
THE DEVOICING OF FRICATIVES IN
SOUTHERN BRITISH ENGLISH
Source:
Jo Verhoeven, Allen Hirson & Kavya Basavar
https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2011/OnlineProceedings/RegularSession/Verhoeven/Verhoeven.pdf
I do not know of a similar study for Ireland, but I believe I have heard medial z devoiced to s (this is unremarkable for final s in many other dialects of English).
That’s as may be, but the words are not homophones in standard English. If we’re going to let every dialect influence our definition, there are going to be a whole lot of homophones.
@Keith, @Hat thank you for the corrections.
err, yes that was wikipedia. (I’d first tried etymonline, but too obscure for it.)
prescission and precision are not homophones.
Aren’t they? I’ve never heard the former pronounced. I think neither would have my hypothetical audience. My dead trees dictionary [Chambers 1972] says of ‘precision’: “partly connected with prescission“, citing Berkeley.
Hat’s o.p. doesn’t give much of a definition for prescind from, which is why I was casting around. (And that was the usage of interest in another place.) The quotes for that sense don’t help.
Too hard. I give up.
I don’t know. No-one else puts it in exactly those words, but the OED has ‘To cut off, detach, or separate from; to abstract from’, M-W has ‘to detach for purposes of thought’, and Collins has ‘to isolate, remove, or separate, as for special consideration’.
The impression I’m left with is that while ‘prescind’ always means separating one thing from its background, you can do so either in order to consider the background without being distracted by the thing, or to consider the Thing without being distracted by the background. And Hamilton certainly makes more sense if you read him as meaning the latter!
Thanks @Jen.
I continue to think there are plenty equivalent and more familiar words, such that using ‘prescind’ in an informal blog (even a language-focussed blog, excepting where it is the explicit subject of discussion) is some sort of willfulness/contrarianism. I shall file ‘prescind’ in the dustbin of memory.
either in order to consider the background without being distracted by the thing, or to consider the Thing without being distracted by the background.
Kinda like that optical illusion with two faces in profile staring into each others’ eyes; or is it one vase in the middle? Gestalt.
I feel the later Wittgenstein would have handled it better than Hamilton.
That’s as may be, but the words are not homophones in standard English.
That’s far from clear for American English. There is authority for the British pronunciation of prescission with /ʃ/, namely the OED3 and Collins; Cambridge doesn’t have it, Macmillan has shut down as of June 30, and ODO has retreated behind a glacis. On the American side, though, neither m-w.com nor AHD5 lists the word (neither is officially an unabridged dictionary) and W3, which is unabridged, is also paywalled — and my favorite hack for bypassing the paywall has stopped working. Collins has American pronunciations for many words, but not this one. That leaves just the OED3, and it is unequivocal that /ʃ/ is BrE and /ʒ/ is AmE, thus making it a homophone of precision in Yankland. (This also agrees with my own Sprachgefühl, for what that’s worth.)
All the dictionaries agree, for what that is worth, that rescission is /ʒ/, which is the obvious analogy. There is also abscission, less common than rescission but more common than prescission, which is a concrete ‘falling away’, specifically leaves and fruits from trees; this is mostly /ʒ/, but I did find one dictionary that gave /ʃ/ as a BrE pronunciation.
The minimal number of minimal /ʃ ~ʒ/ pairs is as few as one, depending on your accent.
I will never pronounce any of those words with /ʒ/; it offends my own Sprachgefühl.
Mine too, Hat. I use /ʃ/ in equation even, when I can get away with it. I feel uncomfortable if I have to say scissors or dissolve. And thanks for prompting me, through your link to this thread, to pick up a copy of Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. “Like new”, delivered to Australia from the US, for US$17.41. A steal.
Prescission (n., ‘act of prescinding’*) is so rare and specialized that I’m doubtful that “standard pronunciation” means much; there just aren’t enough people who ever say it out loud. According to the OED’s citations, it was either re-invented or resurrected after a 300-year gap by C.S. Peirce, and entered in the Century Dictionary with the /ʃ/ pronunciation — probably by Peirce himself, since he wrote many of their entries for terms in philosophy and logic. The definition there is just “The act of prescinding. [Rare.]”; the verb prescind gets more attention, though it only has the philosophical senses and not the OED’s first sense:
… with two supporting quotations for each definition, one of which is the Hamilton quotation at Wiktionary. Peirce defined prescission as a mode of thought in his own writing, and later users of the word seem to be mainly discussing him.
*As opposed to prescission, also spelled pre-scission, adj., in chemistry and nuclear physics; there are many references in the literature to “pre(-)scission neutrons” and “post(-)scission neutrons”. That would inherit its pronunciation from scission, n., which can be pronounced with either /ʒ/ or /ʃ/ in either the US or UK, according to OED3, Longman 2000, and most other dictionaries; both ways can be heard from nuclear physicists on Youtube.
I would certainly say “prescission” with /ʃ/ if I ever said the word out loud at all, which I never have. It’s probably too late for me to start saying it now, at my time of life. It might cause unfortunate speculations.
“Old man yells ‘precission’ at clouds” could be a new meme. You could get rich.
I will never pronounce any of those words with /ʒ/; it offends my own Sprachgefühl.
You astonish me. Rescission with /ʃ/? What about scission, or for that matter Noetica’s scissors? But of course given the scarcity of minimal pairs people can say what they like.,
“pre(-)scission neutrons” and “post(-)scission neutrons”
I can beat those with prescission neutron multiplicities (Collins) and range property prescission (OED),
John Cowan: Macmillan has shut down as of June 30
Sad news. At least they haven’t taken their blog down yet, even though they stopped adding new posts three years ago; Stan Carey wrote lots of fun posts there.
ODO has retreated behind a glacis
By which you mean it can only be accessed through middlemen such as Google and Bing?
neither m-w.com nor AHD5 lists the word (neither is officially an unabridged dictionary)
Does m-w.com really have any words that it doesn’t show for free? How do you know? I frequently look up words and find a definition and an etymology, followed by a silly notice that “there are over 200,000 words in our free online dictionary, but you are looking for one that’s only in the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary” — when they just *did* show it to me for free! (For example: prerolandic, prerupt, Prescott scale, to name a few that aren’t in Wiktionary.) And I just went down a column on a random page of W3 and checked the words against the online browsing list, and they’re all there. Whatever the extra content for subscribers is, it apparently isn’t more headwords, at least not currently.
W3, which is unabridged, is also paywalled
There’s a 1966 printing on the Internet Archive. Prescission isn’t in it. But it *was* in the New International Unabridged of 1909 (which gave pronunciation with /ʒ/), and in the Second Unabridged of 1934 (still in copyright; Hathitrust will search the text and confirm that the word is there, but won’t show it). Gove must have decided it was too obscure and cut it out.
By which you mean it can only be accessed through middlemen such as Google and Bing?
I had money in mind, actually.
find a definition and an etymology, followed by a silly notice
That’s new to me; historically I simply used my hack to access the unabridged version for free if the main site had nothing. Still, the main dictionary is still growing from its original source in the Collegiate, and it may well grow at the trailing as well as the leading edge of the language. FWIW, I believe the unabridged version is editorially equivalent to a late printing of W3 and is stabilized.
n the Second Unabridged of 1934 (still in copyright
… until 2029, according to the Cornell public domain page, assuming all formalities were complied with and the copyright was timely renewed.
You astonish me. Rescission with /ʃ/? What about scission, or for that matter Noetica’s scissors?
I cannot imagine -ssion involving /ʒ/; if it has that sound, it’s spelled -sion. Scissors is neither here nor there.
There are people who say fission with /ʒ/, but I assume that’s the influence of fusion.
@Keith Ivey: That’s how I say it, although I learned the two words at the same time, so it wasn’t just fusion influencing fission. Probably, I simply picked up my father’s pronunciation. I would have never considered that pronunciation to be a marked one; it has certainly never provoked any kind of comment.
Perhaps our ophthalmic surgeon can report on the pronunciation of discission ‘opening of the capsule of the lens in order to treat a cataract’? Or maybe not, since the OED (revised 2013) labels it as “Now chiefly historical”; if I understand correctly, it’s been made obsolete by newer methods. Various dictionaries (including medical dictionaries) disagree on whether it’s supposed to rhyme with “vision” or “mission” or can go either way.
Does anybody understand how the [z] in scissors and Missouri developed in the first place? (…Surely Missouri didn’t become a place of misery until later…?)
Missouri at least goes with dessert, dissolve, possess, and brassiere in having the anomalous voicing occurring at the start of a non-initial stressed syllable.
The spelling of scissors is an eggcorn that became standard. The etymological spelling would be cisors, from Anglo-Norman cisours, from the same Latin root as incise, excise, etc. (Chisel is also via French from the same source, with change in suffix.) It got the sc‑ and ‑ss‑ apparently by confusion with Latin scissor < scindere, used in medieval Latin to mean tailor.
We Aussies invariably want /z/ in Aussie, not /s/.
… voicing occurring at the start of a non-initial stressed syllable
With ex, I find myself saying and accepting /egz/ only if the vowel following is more stressed than the vowel preceding. While /egzist/, /egzamin/, and /egzaktitud/ pass muster, /egzail/, /egzit/, and /inegzorabl/ are rebarbative.
*facepalm* French ciseaux. Of course.
Likewise German Schneider “tailor”, literally “cutter” (and actually “cutter” in a few compounds).
Oh, Verner’s Second Law again.
Indeed.
@Keith Ivey: Oh yes, the good old school of education by terror 😉
range property prescission (OED)
That’s actually not a phrase in the source, although the OED’s quotation makes it look like it is; they seem to have misread the source, and/or reformatted it misleadingly. The actual source is from the index of a book on the meaning of “equality” in political philosophy:
That is, there are two subentries, one directing the reader to the index entry for “range property” (a term coined by John Rawls), and another to page 32 for a comment on Rawls’s prescission from exigence of “double equality” (a term coined in this book). The OED deleted the linebreak and ran them together. That’s necessary when quoting poetry, but it’s a mistake in quoting an index.
Well caught, kt.
Some people unaccountably pronounce crescent with /z/, rhyming with present (I just heard it in an audiobook). Wiktionary suggests it may be more common in the UK.
pronounce crescent with /z/,
I think I do that at least some of the time. wiktionary seems to think that’s perfectly cromulent in UK/less common in U.S. but not unknown.
“unaccountably” ?
Rhymes with/influenced by present. But I think I make a pronunciation difference with the gift sense /z/ to follow the verb form /pɹɪˈzɛnt/ = give vs the here/now sense.
Separated by a Common Language covered crescent last year, but couldn’t find any pattern for /s/ vs. /z/ within UK speakers on Youglish:
From my comment there: John Wells’s Longman Pronunciation Dictionary has a graph of BrE crescent pronunciation vs. age from a poll conducted in 1988, rising from ~45% /z/ for older speakers to ~85% /z/ for younger speakers. It’s also in Geoff Lindsey’s Mini Dictionary of words with recent changes in British pronunciation (excerpted from his English After RP).
Some people unaccountably pronounce crescent with /z/
I’m one of them, and I’m American and in my 70s. I didn’t even know there was a version with /s/ until I was an adult (not that it’s a word you hear that often). Like AntC, I find “unaccountably” odd — as though all other English words had perfectly transparent spelling/pronunciation matches!
“Unaccountable” was perhaps not the best word, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously, but my feelings are somewhat parallel to Hat’s “I cannot imagine -ssion involving /ʒ/; if it has that sound, it’s spelled -sion” above, which is why I put it in this thread.
The /z/ pronunciation seems to be much more common that I expected, considering none of Merriam-Webster, Cambridge, Collins, and the OED list it.
Like AntC, I find “unaccountably” odd — as though all other English words had perfectly transparent spelling/pronunciation matches
To be honest, discoveries like “crescent” being pronounced with [-z-] are destroying my last illusions that there is anything in English spelling I can rely on to deduce pronunciation. I slowly start to suspect that I have been misunderstanding Shaw all that time and fish is actually pronounced goatee.
To be honest, discoveries like “crescent” being pronounced with [-z-] are destroying my last illusions that there is anything in English spelling I can rely on to deduce pronunciation.
I have not blogged in vain!
Keith: Merriam-Webster doesn’t list the z pronunciation because it’s still very far from the norm in the US, as Youglish will confirm (even though some anonymous enthusiast added it to Wiktionary). Collins does have it as a second option, as Lynne Murphy notes with a screencap; if you didn’t see it, you must have been looking at an American section. The OED doesn’t have it because that entry hasn’t been updated since 1893, but the Oxford Learner’s does. That leaves Cambridge as the only current British dictionary that still doesn’t have it.
Good point.
It’s not like I can find an explanation for crescent-with-/z/ either. It’s against Verner’s Second Law, and influence from present – why???
It’s against Verner’s Second Law, and influence from present – why???
Maybe because Verner’s Second Law is not a law of physics, and other kinds of laws are made to be broken ? And because influencers are beholden to no man (or woman) ?
Phonetic “laws” display indeterminacy even at the macro level.
It’s OK to run out of explanations now and then. Of course there are many explanations for why people often find that so hard to accept.
If after many tries you don’t succeed, give it a rest already, or change the subject. Surely that is the least one can reasonably expect from clever people.
I knew from my early years that Americans rhyme scone with bone, but I only learned in late adulthood that they do the same with shone. Has it always been so, and everywhere in the US? In Ozland we rhyme both with one. Same across all of the UK? Not for scone, I think.
Oops, no! I meant: “In Ozland we rhyme both with on.”
Is it not fashionable in the US to pronounce scone as “scon” ? That was the last I heard. But no matter how it is pronounced, ein Gentleman genießt ein Scone und schweigt.
Edit in re Oops, no!:
You did have me wondering about scone/one in Oz. My mind is now at rest.
Crescent is the easily the commonest word spelt with -escent or pronounced /ˈɛ.sənt/ and the only disyllable. That suffices to tempt the parvovocabularous to lump it in with present, pleasant, pheasant, and bezant.
OK, maybe not bezant.
Bezant ? Is that the roundel or, or the coin of Byzantine mint ?
A perennial mystery: Why do most in the US use the vowel of shoe to realise “u” in words bearing even the faintest tinge of foreignness (Buddha and the like), rather than the equally available vowel of good or full, which is a far better approximation for most source languages?
Same in spades for the vowel in bone (/ˈkɑzmoʊs/, /ˈkuːdoʊs/, /oʊɹɪˈnoʊkoʊ/), replacing that available to most Americans in gnaw (/nɔ/). Yes yes, I know about the cot/caught conflation; I said “available”, not “preferred” or “normally used”. (In cosmos and kudos at least, each o would of course be best realised as a short version of the relevant vowel.)
As a pervasive tendency this must be a post-WW2 thing. John Kenyon’s A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English (Merriam-Webster, 1944) shows far less evidence of it.
I search in vain for discussion of this salient shift, whose inexorable progress I have observed in US media over the decades.
Why do most in the US use the vowel of shoe to realise “u” in words bearing even the faintest tinge of foreignness (Buddha and the like), rather than the equally available vowel of good or full
I grew up saying Buddha, Buddhist with FOOT, probably because the dd spelling triggered a lax vowel, but I was corrected to GOOSE by a Buddhist, so I acquiesced.
Yes yes, I know about the cot/caught conflation; I said “available”, not “preferred” or “normally used”.
People with the LOT=THOUGHT=CLOTH=PALM merger generally realize it as an unrounded back vowel, unless they are Canadians. I don’t know what you mean by “a short variety”; in the merged dialect there is nothing corresponding to a short (in the sense ‘lax’) version of GOAT. In the sense of quantity, of course, there are no short vs. long distinctions in any kind of AmE at all.
I was corrected to GOOSE by a Buddhist
I presume you were corrected back.
Crescent is the easily the commonest word spelt with -escent or pronounced /ˈɛ.sənt/
Only the commonest short word. Adolescent is the #1 word rhyming with /ˈɛ.sənt/ in almost every current general* corpus: Google hit counts, ngrams, Youglish, COCA, GloWbE, iWeb. The only corpora where it doesn’t beat crescent are NOW (News on the Web) and Wikipedia; there crescent apparently gets a boost from its frequent use in proper names (“Red Crescent” is the top collocation), placenames, and brand names.
Fluorescent is the next strongest rival, close to crescent and even ahead of it in a couple of corpora. The rest — incandescent, antidepressant, etc. — are some ways behind in every corpus.
*i.e., excluding the Coronavirus Corpus, where convalescent is the winner.
Anyway, any explanation based on sound alone is inadequate, since it doesn’t explain the US-UK difference.
JC:
there are no short vs. long distinctions in any kind of AmE at all
Really? The vowels of man and hat are the same length for you, even? In Oz and most UK English the first is sensibly longer than the second (not that you’d know it, from dictionaries). You’d get a strange look if you pronounced can the same in each occurrence here: “Can you open the can for me please?”
@Noetica: There are different typical lengths, in American English, but they are not (so far as I know) phonemic. My natural pronunciation definitely has a longer vowel in the second “can” of, “Can you open the can for me, please?” However, I can use either length in either instance, and all the permutations sound fine to my ear.
“Can you open the can” — the first can is a function word, many of which have weak forms in English.
Yes, I find it hard to imagine pronouncing the first “can” with /æ/.
So how about the vowels in man and hat? Same, or at least slightly different in length?
Hat:
Surely with /æ/ in “I know you want to, but can you?” No? But it would, at least in Oz and most UK English, be shorter than the vowel in the noun can though not a schwa.
Yes, of course; I was talking about unstressed “can.”
So how about the vowels in man and hat? Same, or at least slightly different in length?
Slightly different in length, but nobody but phoneticians notices or cares. Not phonemic, which is what’s implied by “short vs. long distinctions.”
Yes, of course; I was talking about unstressed “can.”
And I, equally of course, was not.
“My brother and I are amateur brewers. But I can, and he bottles. He can can, and I can bottle. It’s just a matter of preference.”
Only the commonest short word. Adolescent is the #1 word rhyming with /ˈɛ.sənt/ in almost every current general* corpus
Adolescent surely gets a huge boost from its use as a legal term. I don’t recall having ever encountered it in a non-legal-adjacent context.
…on second thought I guess it would also include the more official-style publications (in particular, newspaper reporting) that might use the word adolescent because it’s in the right register, or at most only a smidge more official than they’re aiming for, and they don’t want to have to deal with more fine-grained/more colloquial terminology. I’m not sure of the exact composition of the corpora in question, but I imagine that newspaper reports probably make up a fairly large fraction.
In other words: you’re a good deal more likely to want to talk about an adolescent than a crescent (especially in a newspaper reporting context), but in the former case you have a choice of much more common synonyms (notably “teenager”) and need to make a deliberate choice to use that one, and in the latter case that is the most common term for the concept.
FWIW, out of the /ˈɛ.sənt/ words listed in the post, the only ones that don’t feel very fancy to me are crescent and antidepressant (though the latter seems more common in the plural). Fluorescent and (especially) incandescent are very common in the context of light bulbs/light fixtures but very rare in any other context. As for convalescent, I don’t recognize it at all – is it a coronavirus-related term?
EDIT:
at least in Oz and most UK English
AFAIK, most Australian English dialects, and IIRC also some UK dialects, do have a phonemic length distinction in /æ/ – the so-called “bad-lad split”. AFAIK most US dialects don’t.
I’m unconvinced that the vowel in unstressed can is an /æ/ at all, of either length.
And I, equally of course, was not.
Your comment was:
Which seemed like a non-sequitur response to my comment, which was a response to mollymooly’s
In other words, you changed the subject from unstressed can to the stressed version, without acknowledging that you were changing the subject.
I’m unconvinced that the vowel in unstressed can is an /æ/ at all, of either length.
Same here. Plain schwas in canonic unstressed modals, of course.
Hat:
But as a function word can need not always be said with a schwa. There might be all sorts of reasons for giving it the full /æ/ – but that would not, outside the US, be the /æ/ of the noun can.
Brett and Hat:
This is quite interesting. Consider my sentence above, please: “He can can, and I can bottle.” Are you both saying that you could, normally and naturally, give exactly equal length to the vowels in the second and third words?
We in Oz certainly could not. And for us, cam (think camshafts) and Cam (short for Cameron) are normally pronounced differently.
I don’t know about “exactly” — how would I measure? — but they seem the same to me.
“Can, can, can you do the can-can…”
“Seem the same” is interesting too (with all due respect of course – and I believe you!). I have encountered an American who denied and could simply not hear that he was geminating the t in fourteen, which is pretty standard in US but not other English.
Similarly, asked by a speaker of Chinese about best practice with aspiration or non-aspiration of plosives in various contexts I was forced into some quite unaccustomed and difficult analysis of my own speech. They are acutely aware of that distinction, and we are not. (Phonemic or not. Hmm.)
That same Chinese interlocutor was astonished at my observation that it was not possible, by any ordinary means, to apply the tones of her language (Putonghua Chinese) when whispering. She tried, for a few minutes.
January First-of-May: I don’t recall having ever encountered it in a non-legal-adjacent context.
In fact you have, for example … there are several more, limiting the search just to threads where you posted.
It’s true that within COCA, adolescent is by far the most frequent in the academic division, but it isn’t unusual in any genre, including fiction and web comment sections; COCA includes a lot of goodreads and amazon customer reviews. Adolescent even beats crescent in the movie dialogue corpus — and that’s counting Crescent in street addresses and other place names, which make up about a third of its appearances in dialogue. Adolescent also beats crescent in the languagehat.com corpus (where “Fertile Crescent” is probably the leading collocation).
Fluorescent is most common with reference to lights, but it’s also not at all unusual with reference to paints, clothing, etc. Incandescent is not at all unusual in figurative use: incandescent rage, genius, talent, etc.
I imagine that newspaper reports probably make up a fairly large fraction
No need to guess, follow the link in my comment and see for yourself. COCA contains roughly equal numbers of words from blogs, general web content, TV/movies, spoken, fiction, magazines, news, and academic sources.
Didn’t Sprite used to be effervescent in its advertisements. You still find a fair number of hits, but I doubt that word would pass the comms committee these days.
Even if they’re Canadians, at least my cahleague from Nova Scotia.
Rather, quantity is exceptionlessly tied to quality; LOT=THOUGHT=CLOTH=PALM is always long, and Sarah Palin talked about [ˈhaˤːkiˌmaˤːmz] hockey moms.
It means “recovering from an illness” and was never common, but definitely more common than prescind.
Not that my nonnative English is necessarily relevant, but it’s RP-oid, so it’s supposed to lack the bad/lad split, and indeed it does, so, yes, cam = Cam, and yes, the first two can are identical as far as I can tell. (The third gets reduced.)
What do you mean by “ordinary means”? I can apply Putonghua tones to whispering, and I can also apply my ordinary intonation.
I probably can’t apply purely level tones, though – no game of Cantonese whispers for me.
And I also can’t whisper my own /h/ unchanged, because it’s the preaspirated version of this “voiced glottal approximant” and therefore contains an inbuilt voice onset. When whispering, I resort to actual [h], pure disembodied aspiration.
Whisper generates white noise, with a high frequency cutoff. As your larynx is lowered, the cutoff frequency is lowered, and vice versa. That is adequate for conveying pitch, whether of intonation in e.g. English, or of tone in e.g. Putonghua.
Yes, Y. And that is not an ordinary way of rapidly realising the tones. It takes some practice, as my native Chinese speaker (a teacher of English) found. She did not normally make them at all in whispering as it turned out, and they were not missed.
I met advanced US students of Chinese in China who had chosen scarcely to bother with tones, but got by very happily with clear, confident, strident delivery. They were readily understood, as I observed.
clear, confident, strident delivery.
Yes, the natives will understand you if you just shout louder.
They were readily understood, as I observed.
Hmm? You can get yourself understood well enough just by nodding and smiling and pointing. The sounds you make with your mouth need only signify that you’re trying to signify. Were they ordering noodles from a hawker stall? Or discussing the finer points of Lao Tzu?
They were asking detailed questions about a locality. Note, by the way, that stereotypical shouting tourists are shouting in their own language: not in the language of the country visited.
There are, of course, means to disambiguate apart from use of the tones. Such is the normal redundancy we encounter in language that disambiguation may not often be needed, given rich context; but if it is, there’s greater care with choice of measure word (shunning the versatile and normally sufficient ge), or an added rewording, etc.
I report what I studiously observed.
Are you both saying that you could, normally and naturally, give exactly equal length to the vowels in the second and third words?
I don’t, but that’s because I have phonemic /æ/-tensing (or /æ/-raising, as you will). WhenIwerealad, they had the same length for me, but now can ‘put up in tins’ is /kɛən~keən/, inherently longer than can ‘be able’ /kæn/ because it’s a diphthong. I don’t have tensing in bag, unlike native New Yorkers, though.
my cahleague from Nova Scotia.
The Maritimes are not “Canadian”, phonologically speaking. Indeed, Sydney, N.S. (the original capital of Cape Breton Island and one of only two British towns in N.S. older than Halifax) has FACE-type /æ/-tensing, making haggle like the surname Hagel. Sydney is the historical capital of Cape Breton Island, which is east of the main island and separated by the Strait of Canso < Fr Canseau < Mi’kmaq Kamsok ‘place beyond the cliffs’. How Canso is pronounced locally I don’t know; the town is now best known for the Stan Rogers Festival.
but that would not, outside the US, be the /æ/ of the noun can
Southern England and Australia have a quantitative split, but not Scotland, Ireland, Northern England, N.Z., S.A., Canada, etc. This is not the U.S. versus the World.
“Can, can, can you do the can-can…”
,
For me those are all /kæn/, because can-can is a foreignism, though not so foreign as to be /kɑnkɑn/.
Yes, the natives will understand you if you just shout louder.
“Who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder?”
Nobody answered, so he shouted all the louder.
“It’s an Irish trick that’s true / I can lick the mick that threw
“The overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s chowder.”
(She was an American.)
Mandarin singing ignores tones in favor of tunes, but Cantopop requires them to be aligned.
I suspect Noetica was using “strident” in the non-dictionary sense, which I sometimes meet with, no doubt influenced by “stride”: something like a forthright, clear articulation.
I take Noe to mean what he wrote. “Clear, confident, strident delivery” is a sequence of subtle intensification. It does not culminate in let’s-be-neutral-and-nice-to-each-other. Strident is strident, for pete’s sake.
Consider the stridulous cricket. Even though one of God’s creatures, it can sure be annoying.
I know what he is describing, just not with regard to any kind of Chinese.
In a strict 1 : 1 relationship AFAIK: you compose your lyrics, then you exaggerate your pitch range so the 3 level and 3 contour tones fit into it as 6 level tones, then you say the lyrics in this exaggerated pitch range – and you are singing them. The tune is the tones.
That’s not unlike Vedic chanting, BTW, which goes like this:
1. All stressed syllables get middle pitch.
2. Of the unstressed syllables, all that immediately precede a stressed syllable get low pitch.
3. Of the remainder, all that immediately follow a stressed syllable get high pitch if they’re short. If they’re long, they’re broken in two, of which the first gets middle and the second high pitch. You can even insert a glottal stop between the two.
4. All remaining syllables get middle pitch.
got by very happily with clear, confident, strident delivery.
Loud language manglers (LLMs).
@RodgerC “strident” in the non-dictionary sense
wikt
You/Noetica mean in sense 3? Or some other non-standard sense? How many “non-dictionary” senses are there?
Dictionary.com has “Linguistics. (in distinctive feature analysis) characterized acoustically by noise of relatively high intensity, as sibilants, labiodental and uvular fricatives, and most affricates.”; but also has “having a shrill, irritating quality or character”. That Linguistics sense is more about acoustic qualities than describing a speaker’s mode of articulation?
I think if that was the sense, you’d say ‘strident, clear, confident delivery’; but I’d more likely avoid ‘strident’ all together: ‘carefully-articulated’?
I took more of the “shrill, irritating” sense. Well they might have gotten understood — to be overbearing US Imperialist running-dogs. Which would be my take on the (few) US students I’ve observed speaking Mandarin in Taiwan. All their vowels had that shrill, irritating twang you could hear half a block away.
I did come across a Canadian who was specifically learning Hokkien. Props! Nothing strident about her: she was accompanying a Catholic nun walking up a mountain to a shrine. (Seemed to involve a lot of genuflecting, so not even ‘strident’ in the making strides sense.)
Strident vowels, too. Hear here.
I suspect Noetica was using “strident” in the non-dictionary sense, which I sometimes meet with, no doubt influenced by “stride”: something like a forthright, clear articulation.
I was not at all back-thinking of stride, but meant it in an OED sense: “1. a. Making a harsh, grating or creaking noise; loud and harsh, shrill.” More the second part than the first.
I know what he is describing, just not with regard to any kind of Chinese.
I’ve heard a great deal of stridently delivered Chinese in my time. Most memorably, yelled (close to my alarmed ear) from one floor of a hotel to another far removed; but admittedly, that was in Penang and it was not Putonghua. One man was fixing a tap in my room, and the other was receiving distant instructions on manipulating the water supply. I remember thinking at the time that their language (unlike French or Portuguese, say) was well suited for this.
Strident vowels, too.
OED knows only strident consonants, not vowels: “1. b. Phonetics. Of the articulation of a consonantal sound: characterized by friction that is comparatively turbulent. Also as n., a consonant articulated in this way.”
Wikipedia has an article for “Strident vowel” (linked by Y, above), but “Strident consonant” redirects to “Sibilant”. A relevant excerpt:
I’ve heard a great deal of stridently delivered Chinese in my time.
Same here.
I stand corrected on Noetica’s use of “strident.” But I once found C. S. Lewis referred to as a “strident man,” which he certainly wasn’t; I suspect the writer meant “booming-voiced.”
The OED has removed the mistranscribed quote with “range property prescission”. I forgot to save a copy of the previous version, so I’m not sure if this is a new quote that they found to replace the deleted one, or if it was already there:
Yup, it’s a chapter about Peirce.