Nelson Goering’s Facebook post introduced me to a word whose pronunciation is disputed by the dictionaries:
I’m now curious how people I know pronounce quillon (the cross-guard of a sword). […] The OED gives as the only pronunciation /ˈkwɪlən/ (‘kwillen’). Wiktionary has only /kiːˈjɒn/ (‘kee-YAHN’). Neither evening hints at the existence of other pronunciation possibilities. I myself say /ˈkiːjɒn/ (‘KEE-yahn’).
Merriam-Webster has an even more Frenchified pronunciation; my instinct would be to favor the fully anglicized version, and since it’s sanctified by the OED I intend to use it in the unlikely event I ever have occasion to say the word. Rahul Gupta in the comments to Nelson’s post writes:
Pronunciation would be Anglicized like other such words established in English usage. Anglophone folk who have ado with swordplay these days say “kwillonz”, rhymes “villains”.
Which I like because it backs up my own preference, but I’m wondering if any Hatters have experience with the word and how they say it. (If you’re curious, the word is derived from French quille ‘skittle,’ borrowed from Middle High German kegel.)
I can’t say the word is in my lexicon so I don’t have a pronunciation for it. However, looking quickly at the google books ngram viewer to get a sense of what degree of actual use there was, I was struck by the fact that “quillons” is generally more common than “quillon.” Except for things that characteristically come in pairs (which I don’t think this would be), whether or not to the extent they are tantum plurale, I would have expected that RANDOMNOUN would be more common than RANDOMNOUNS. But maybe that expectation is wrong, or there’s something specific about the way this word comes up that explains this. FWIW, the less hoity-toity synonym “cross-guard” is rarer since the late 19th century, although perhaps it was more common earlier when more non-specialist normal-people Anglophones had occasion to talk about swords and their components?
I just checked some YouTube videos, and people seem to say either KWIL-ən or KWIL-yən.
Rahul’s response is, however, not unqualifiedly true — I learned the pronunciation /ˈkiːjɒn/, rhymes with eon(s), from (American) swordfighting groups. I learned the word by ear before knowingly seeing it written. You might imagine that I was a little surprised when I first encountered its spelling… This dynamic probably isn’t surprising, since it’s exactly in social settings where the word might actually have some regular spoken use that I’d expect the ‘traditional’ pronunciations to have a fair chance of escaping being changed under pressure from the spelling. Not that I’d expect uniformity here — a friend who commented on FB (and who’s very active in HEMA) says she pronounces it as “Kwill-ee–on or Kwill-yon”.
Any which way, I’m not sure I’m on board with the idea that the pronunciations with /kw/ are more ‘anglicized’. I’d have thought that ‘anglicization’ was a matter of phonology, in which case all the variants except MW’s (and does anyone actually say that in real life?) should count as equally ‘anglicized’. Otherwise it would be like saying that chef isn’t anglicized because its spelling-sound mapping is based on French norms. It’s just an issue of how established and widespread the spelling pronunciation is.
‘Except for things that characteristically come in pairs (which I don’t think this would be)’
My sense of the word is the same as MW gives: ‘an arm of the cross guard of a sword’. There are normally two of these on a sword, so it’s not surprising that the plural usage is more common — so I’d say your characteristic pair condition does apply after all. I’m sure I’ve said it in the plural much more often myself, but asking about the pronunciation I guess I defaulted to the singular as a more basic form.
@Nelson G: ah, that makes sense. I had perhaps read hat’s gloss of the meaning too superficially and not clicked through to more precise sources.
That was not my gloss of the meaning, I was quoting Nelson.
I’m afraid I wasn’t terribly precise — it was more of a pointer than an exact definition!
As an occasional collector of such things, I think I say quillion and maybe spell it that way. Is that considered a mistake or a legit variation now?
ETA: I find Bonhams, Christies and Sotheby’s spelling it that way, so I guess we’re good.
Here is Dirty Dick Burton calling out Littré for not explaining quillon < quille satisfactorily, characteristically choosing a footnote as his weapon.
My apologies for the misattribution of the superficial imprecision!
HEMA = historical European martial arts, apparently.
Neither evening hints at the existence of other pronunciation possibilities.
[quoted from the Facebook post — which I’m excluded from viewing]
“evening”? That should be “even”(?) Typo? Autocorrect? Mis-copy?
Yeah, should obviously be “even.” Presumably hasty typing.
If I have ever heard a pronunciation that did not start with /kw/, I don’t remember it (or didn’t even recognize the word).
Anglicization is not always *solely* the conforming of a pronunciation to the sounds of the English language. With some words, changing the pronunciation to one that better matches the spelling according to English orthography also counts. “Cherish” and “chicory” also come from French. Their pronunciations are more Anglicized than that of “chef” as regards the “ch”.
Admittedly, some people have a father/bother merger. Nonetheless, /jɒn/, in accents which have this vowel, is definitely “yon” and not “yahn”; “yahn” would be /jɑ:n/.
Cherish never had [ʃ] in English, being borrowing before the change of [tʃ] > [ʃ] in French. Chicory is a slightly more complicated case, but probably the modern pronunciation is influenced by Italian, and the spelling was updated to reflect this (the Middle English forms seem to be spelled with c, or at least once s). In any case, it really doesn’t look like a matter of ‘changing the pronunciation to one that better matches the spelling according to English orthography’ either (precisely the other way around, actually). There’s no higher degree of anglicization going on with either word, just different dates of borrowing (and *more* non-English influence on chicory!).
Otherwise, I still don’t see how /ˈkwɪlən(z)/ (edit: this is displaying as garbled after posting for me, but is fine in the editor, so I’m not sure how to fix it; I mean the ‘KWILLenz’-type pronunciation) isn’t just a routine example of spelling pronunciation. Much the same as with victuals, forehead, waistcoat, or conduit. Source-language spellings, alteration under perceived origins, and obscuration within English can all be sources of this kind of mismatch, but the responses are identical: pronounce the word using the more standard graph-phone mapping of English. A normal enough process, especially in a language like English, with plenty of important regularities in the orthography, but also with a fairly high tolerance for irregular (unsystematic) spellings.
Zichorie.
It’s just a glitch in the display; refresh the page after posting, and it looks as fine for you as it does for the rest of the world.
More precisely it’s a character-set issue when the editing widget (to use the term of art) roundtrips the edited text through the server and expects the server to do something it doesn’t. There are myriads of people in the world who could fix it, but it’s not important enough for whoever controls the code to pay one of them to do it. If they even know about the glitch. QA isn’t what it never was.
Ah, good to know. And it is indeed displaying fine for me now.
it’s a character-set issue when the editing widget (to use the term of art) roundtrips the edited text through the server and expects the server to do something it doesn’t
Isn’t it the opposite? When you post something, you immediately get the post processed locally by the dumb editing widget. When you refresh, you get it processed correctly through the server.
It’s just a glitch in the display
Something or somebody is screwing up: either mobile Chrome, and/or the page compositors at Spiegel.
For weeks now in Chrome, the Spiegel website layout glitches badly every time I scroll down – and sometimes without even that (crazed in sich flickering of certain animated ads). Not in desktop Chrome. Refreshing clears things up only briefly.
Maybe Spiegel isn’t vetting its third-party widgets. I’m considering sending them a copy of HTML5 for Dummies.
I experience this primarily at Spiegel, so it doesn’t bother me that much.
A good reason for using Firefox instead of Chrome is that there are adblockers for Firefox that let you turn “acceptable ads” off.
Yeah, I haven’t seen an ad in years.
For some reason, my mobile Chrome blocks a lot of ads anyway – I see only blank “frames” or whatever they’re called. It’s the animated stuff that gets through. The Larousse website is really bad about serving up that crap on a mobile. They offer ad-free for 0,99 a month, which I would be glad to pay but they demand a credit card, which I refuse to have, or some proprietary French payment thing whose name I have already forgotten. They don’t accept PayPal.
Hmm. I just remembered that I installed UBlock Origin in my desktop Chrome years ago. That must be what is giving me some peace. I don’t see it on Google Playstore for my mobile Chrome.
I switched away from Firefox a few years ago because it had too many rendering “issues”.
I think AdAway works on unrooted Android phones (not sure, because I always root mine, on ideological grounds.)
https://github.com/AdAway/AdAway/releases
some proprietary French payment thing whose name I have already forgotten
Can’t be Plastic Bertrand, that’s Belgian.
“Unrooted” ? Sounds like some kind of *nix thing. What is it and how ?
ETA:
Well, well. Sez here: Android is based on a modified version of the Linux kernel.
I don’t know that I want to get into all that. I’ze got more important things to do.
“Unrooted” is just how it comes out of the box.
Most things you can do to block ads involve having free access to all the files on the phone, which Google dislikes and tries to prevent (though somewhat half-heartedly – not to the extent that Apple of the Walled Garden does.)
But you don’t need that.
All you need to do to install the AdAway app is to download it to the phone and click on it in the files app (though you have to give permission for it to be installed when the phone moans about it.)
I think the mobile DuckDuckGo browser can block ads on the phone generally, too.
As far as mobile phones go, out of the box is fine for mine. It’s just a telephone with a tv, for God’s sake.
To convey top-secret data I use other means. It would be foolish of me to reveal these.
Pigeons are good. You have to swear them to secrecy, though.
I wouldn’t entrust a pigeon with the time of day. They can’t keep anything to themselves. Especially not their waste products.
I do have sympathy with some pigeons, however. There are two that take refuge in the outside recess of my bathroom window when it snows or rains hard. So I don’t open the window suddenly or slam it shut. It’s a bit warmer there too, I expect, because my rapacious landlord can’t be bothered to replace the window seals intended to keep the heat in.
And iOS is based on a microkernel version of one of the BSDs (Open?) called Darwin. It’s all Gnu’s not Unix on the command line, just like Linux, though. (CLI is only visible on Macs out of the box, of course, but you can probably compile a userland for an iPhone too. I don’t touch the things, so I have never needed to find out).
Chrome has an inbuilt adblocker that allows “acceptable ads” because Google lives off ads.
And iOS is based on a microkernel version of one of the BSDs (Open?) called Darwin.
FreeBSD with heavy modifications.
It’s all Gnu’s not Unix on the command line, just like Linux, though.
Not just like. What GNU and BSD (including MacOS) have in commmon is a set of shared primitive characters.
I don’t remember having to unlearn anything moving from one to the other, so almost but not quite is spot on. GNU userland is meant to be a better BSD, after all; /usr/bin (AT&T) vs /usr/ucb/ (Berkeley) was a bigger issue back in the day. (I don’t try to learn the more obscure options by heart, so as long as ps -ef and tar zcf work, I can read the manual page for the rest).