I just heard an announcer say he was going to play Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony, which he pronounced /ˈrɛnɪʃ/ (REN-ish). I was irritated, because I myself say /ˈriːnɪʃ/ (REE-nish), so I looked it up to see what reference works said. Imagine my horror on learning that the OED, AHD, and M-W only give the former version, with the short vowel. I was relieved to see that Collins gives both, with mine first (/ˈriː-, ˈrɛnɪʃ/), and downright triumphant to discover that Daniel Jones gives mine as the main entry, with the other in square brackets (“rare”). But I am perturbed, so herewith one of my pop-quiz survey questions: how do you say this word? And does anyone know anything about the history of its pronunciation?
By the way, in the course of my researches I learned of the existence of the Rhenish Republic (1923 – 1925); I have mentioned my affection for long-forgotten, short-lived territorial entities before, e.g. here.
I’ve only heard the word in connection with the symphony, but I’m in the short e camp, rhyming with (um, thinks desperately) ‘replenish.’ No idea about the history, or any other uses of the word.
The Latin name of the river is Rhenus with (I think) short e.
REE-nish for me, and I believe that’s the only way I’ve heard it said — perhaps in the context of English poetry? It’s in Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”.
I always thought it rhymed with “replenish” (thanks, David L).
There’s this guy named Robert Greenberg who recorded a series of lectures on classical composers for the Great Courses; he pronounced the first syllable like “rain”, as if it contained an anglicized German long “e”. (He also pronounced “erstwhile”, a word he was unnecessarily fond of, as if it started with “air”.)
And I know where I got the pronunciation, speaking of poetry:
The Latin name of the river is Rhenus with (I think) short e.
Nope, long, which is one reason I like my version (not that etymology is destiny).
I say Rheenish. All other pronunciations are therefore Wrong.
That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe …
Sadly “Rhenish” is not a rhyme-word in the Eve of St Agnes. I think the verse scans better with “Rheenish”, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
Terrific poem, incidentally.
I’ve only heard the word in connection with the symphony, but I’m in the short e camp, rhyming with (um, thinks desperately) ‘replenish.’ No idea about the history, or any other uses of the word.
I can’t quite recall where I remember encountering the word before; it definitely wasn’t the symphony, and it might have been the 1920s republic. Looking at Wikipedia, the most plausible of the listed options is the Rhenish Circle(s) of the HRE; I want to say “Rhenish Confederation” and apparently that’s an existing-but-rare alternate name for what’s more commonly known as the Confederation of the Rhine.
[EDIT: some further googling after a few more awkward graspings at memories suggests the Rhenish monetary union.]
I think I’d default to a rhyme with “replenish”, but “rain-ish” does sound like a plausible option.
I say Rheenish.
If Daniel Jones and David Eddyshaw be with me, who can be against me?
German der Rhein and Dutch de Rijn presuppose i:. I’m sure there are Low German varieties that maintain den Rin or some such.*
Up here, it’s [¹ri:n.n]. And ri:nsk. Not that we ever say it, except maybe in rinskvin “Rhenish wine”, where vowel length is pretty much neutralized.
What I wonder about is Latin Rh-. Did Gallic have an aspirated r?
* Duh, Wikipedia: Plattdüütsch de Rhien, Nedersaksies den Rien.
Longman’s Pronouncing Dictionary has both, with Rennish given primacy.
The Rhine (< ri:n) ought to have been a word in the English language since Hengist and Horsa, which means that both the forms are spelling pronunciations, based on an interpretation as either Rennish or .Reenish. The real question is where the English spelling comes from.
For council dinners made rare havock
With Claret, Moselle, Vin-de-Grave, Hock
We discussed that low and shameless kind of rhyme before.
I’ve only heard the word in connection with the symphony, but I’m in the short e camp, rhyming with (um, thinks desperately) ‘replenish.’
Thank you, yes exactly my situation. Is this a Brit vs US pronunciation thing? wiktionary has (UK) /ˈɹɛnɪʃ/, with no US. Also spelling ‘Rennish’ (which I think I’ve seen) marked obsolete, but the double-n would reinforce short ‘e’.
My musical dictionaries offer no pronunciations.
The real question is where the English spelling comes from.
…Latin?
I agree, though; I’d have expected Rhinish if inherited (…plausibly rhyming with “diminish”, come to think of it), Rheinish if borrowed, or Rhineish if recently formed.
I can’t remember hearing “Rhenish” spoken aloud and have mentally rhymed it with “Danish”. Will this new information change that? Ask me in a year.
The element rhenium always has the Latin /ˈriː-/
Not really. Bold type just means that that pronunciation is recommended as a model for learners of English. There is no implication that the main pronunciation is “better” than alternative pronunciations. I vaguely remember John Wells complaining that most users of his dictionary don’t seem to read the introductory chapters…
LEPD has only the variant with [e].
And anything by Daniel Jones is more than half a century out of date (and applies to British English only).
The only pronunciation that came to mind for me is /ˈrɛnɪʃ/. I’m pretty sure that the last time I saw the word was in some book talking about enjoying “great quantities of rhenish hock” (an expression which would seem to be redundant) but, alas, Google Books is no help in tracking down the passage.
And anything by Daniel Jones is more than half a century out of date
Well, so am I.
Disappointingly, for the river name Welsh just has Rhein, presumably borrowed from English, though I suppose conceivably from German (the Danube is Donaw in Welsh, after all.*)
I think it would be *Rhwyn if it were actually descended from the original Celtic name.
* Though also Donwy, which actually does look like a reflex of the original Celtic name:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Danubius#Latin
I’m not sure how solid this proto-Celtic form really is, though. It looks suspiciously as if it’s been backported from the Welsh name, and I wonder if the (g)wy element in the Welsh name might not have been based on analogy with Welsh hydronyms in -wy:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gwy#Welsh
After all, if Welsh hasn’t preserved the original Celtic name of the Rhine, why would it preserve the original name of the even-remoterer Danube?
I’ve always pronounced it RAYnish. I don’t have strong views on the matter, but RENish does sound a bit little-bird-like to me, and REENish sounds too kidney-ish.
Longman’s Pronouncing Dictionary has both, with Rennish given primacy.
Yes, LPD gives both; but I wish it would also give my preferred pronunciation. Like Viseguy above, I’ve always said ˈrɛːnɪʃ for the symphony and in other “high-cultural” contexts: my way of respecting Latin Rhēnus. I reserve ˈrɛnɪʃ for the wine.
That’s among my favourite 19C symphonies, vying with Brahms 4 (which I adore, beyond proper bounds, for its transcendentally Elysian slow movement). The second movement of the Rhenish (marked, oddly I say, as a scherzo) is usually realised in a way that keeps the metre ambiguous. Be honest: can you tell, in the first five seconds, what the metre is and where the downbeats fall? Hmm?
Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, not as written. Don’t be sloppy, Y.
i rhyme it with wren-ish (/ɛ/), and i feel like i’ve thought of it as umlauted from the /aj/ i have in the name of the river.
I use either of the common pronunciations, probably the one with the short vowel more frequently though.
I mentally pronounce it RAY-nish, rhyming as somebody said above with Danish. I don’t think I’ve ever had occasion to actually say it out loud.
Early Modern English spellings like rennish seem to be fairly common. Note also the rhyme in Alexander Brome‘s ‘Song on Canary’, stanza 4, in Songs and Other Poems (1664), p. 82, here :
(Bagrag is apparently Bacharach.)
Gielgud’s Broadway production of Hamlet with Richard Burton from 1964 here (or in Hamlet’s mouth, I.iv.10 here) has /ˈrɛnɪʃ/. Similarly, from the 1948 film with Olivier here.
From 1964 again, Hamlet at Elsinore here, and Branagh’s film in 1996 here, and the video version of the Royal Shakespeare 2009 here.
But come to think of it, in speaking of West Germanic languages, I think I would sooner say /ˈriːnɪʃ/ rather than /ˈrɛnɪʃ/.
Branagh’s film in 1996
Yikes! That’s Ken Dodd as Yorick! Alas, I knew him well. His worst crimes were merely tax evasion — I say “merely” as compared to others who worked in Children’s TV in the 70’s/80’s.
/ˈriːnɪʃ/ for me, but I’m not at all sure I’ve ever heard it said out loud. If it was it was probably in the name of the symphony – I’ve encountered it in historical and dialectological contexts, but only in writing.
I gather that Ken Dodd was very much funnier in live performance than you would suppose from what one saw in the highly constrained medium of television.
‘Rennish’ comes naturally to me, but I don’t know where I learned it from.
I (in UK) learnt /ˈrɛnɪʃ/ early in the context of Doyly Carte recordings of The Gondoliers (“When he had Rhenish wine to drink It made him very sad to think That some, at junket or at jink, Must be content with toddy”) and can’t remember encountering a different pronunciation at university in relation to the isoglosses known as the Rhenish Fan (Rheinischer Fächer)
Partly on the proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua principle, it increasingly seems to me that my “Rheenish” may in fact be a Horrid Spelling Pronunciation. I am ashame.
No, no! It is an Ancient and Honourable Pronunciation! Do not abandon it, and me!
Rhēnus = REE-nus, hence Rhenish = REE-nish. It follows as the night the day.
I don’t understand how “drawer” is supposed to rhyme with “heir”.
I’ve passed by the Rhenish Church in Hong Kong, but don’t know how it is locally pronounced. I remember getting into a discussion about the pronunciation, and though I’m not positive I think I guessed /ˈrɛnɪʃ/ while my (also non-local, but more familiar with German) companion argued for /ˈriːnɪʃ/.
“Rhenish” just seems like one of those words that is needlessly obscure in the modern world. Why not just call Schumann’s work “The Rhein Symphony”, a title most casual music listeners would immediately understand?
I found a recipe website that translates “Rheinischer Sauerbraten” as “Rhenish Sauerbraten”, which is oddly selective, why not go all the way and say “Rhenish sour roast”?
I don’t understand how “drawer” is supposed to rhyme with “heir”.
Which, though Brome rhymes it correctly with “replenish”, makes one doubt his evidence. But Xerîb and anwheol show what the British theatrical tradition is.
I found a recipe website that translates “Rheinischer Sauerbraten” as “Rhenish Sauerbraten”, which is oddly selective, why not go all the way and say “Rhenish sour roast”?
Because the English word for “having to do with the Rhine” is “Rhenish”, and the English word for that kind of marinated roast is “sauerbraten”.
While I’m at it, I’d say a Rhine Symphony would be about the river, but the Rhenish Symphony is about or from a region (with one movement about the river, it seems).
I don’t understand how “drawer” is supposed to rhyme with “heir”.
Both rhyme with passenjare.
Because the English word for “having to do with the Rhine” is “Rhenish”,
Only in the same sense that “Brunswick” is the English word for Braunschweig or “Leghorn” is the English word for “Livorno”. It’s not common usage and not recognized by most English speakers.
The Rhenish Symphony is about or from a region
Good point. It should be the “Rhineland Symphony” in modern English.
I wrote the English word for “having to do with the Rhine” is “Rhenish”
Actually “Of or relating to the Rhine River or the lands bordering on it” (AHD). And I feel that it’s more the lands than the river.
But @Vanya, I’ll have to reply to you later.
Much more the lands, particularly the specific Rhineland in western Germany, than the river, I would say.
Vanya may be pleased to learn that in Esperanto the composition in question is reportedly “la Rejnlanda simfonio.”
And FWIW the google ngram viewer indicates that “Rhenish” underwent a very dramatic drop in frequency of usage in English throughout the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th before stabilizing at a much lower level pretty steadily from circa the outbreak of WW1 through the present. (“Leghorn” by contrast peaked later although I don’t immediately know why it would have been discussed so much in the mid-1920’s. Too early for Foghorn Leghorn to have supplemented the toponym.)
ETA: Which is to say that if “Rhenish Symphony” became a fixed phrase early enough among the niche subculture of Anglophones who refer to symphonies by established names, the adjective may not then have sounded quite as weird/archaic as it subsequently came to, and then got “protected” by its status as part of a “proper name” which was thus allowed to be idiosyncratic and obscure.
The erudition and passion with which some Hatters state their preference is noteworthy.
It reminds me of the change in the pronunciation of Berlin. That’s the small town in northern New Hampshire. Prior to WW I it was BerLIN, that same as the American English pronunciation of the German capital.
And then came the war. New Hampshire folks, for that matter all northern New England people, are a practical lot. The citizens of Bur LINN didn’t want to pay for new signage, stationery, etc. They were also patriotic, and wanted to differentiate themselves from residents of a wartime enemy.
They came up with a simple and useful solution—change the way they pronounced their town name. It became—and remains—BUR linn.
When I wrote that both may be spelling pronunciations, I meant that we can’t decide which one without knowing what the spelling was supposed to convey. And to guess at that, we need to know how the spelling came about. If it’s a learned reetymologisation (but only of the adjective!) we have competing interpretations of that, but the one that was intended would not be a spelling pronunciation in the strict sense. If, instead, it was a reborrowing from Low German, the situation would be much the same, but we’d know which pronunciation was intended.
It became—and remains—BUR linn.
Yes, but non-rhotic of course.
For the backstory of the would-be Rhenish Republic, see also the 1919 “false dawn” described here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Adam_Dorten#Proclamation_of_the_Rhenish_Republic_in_Wiesbaden Note also (scrolling down) that Dr. Dorten (a key player in both 1919 and 1923) ultimately became a naturalized French citizen and published his memoirs in French (“La Tragédie Rhénane”) some decades before they appeared in German.
Note also that the goal of the separatists is referred to in English as the or a “Rhineland Republic” (rather than “Rhenish”) in the 1934 memoir (_Retreat from Glory_) of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._H._Bruce_Lockhart, who spent some time in the Allied-occupied Rhineland after the adventures in Revolutionary Russia that the Bolsheviks characterized as the “Lockhart Plot.”
It should be simply “3rd Symphony”. Schumann never called the symphony “Rheinische” (or published an official program). As with so many works of classical music, the title is non-authorial. Works with an allegedly descriptive title sell better.
It became—and remains—BUR linn.
Yes, but non-rhotic of course.
Most tourists and other visitors to the northern New England states assume that we are all non-rhotic, sort of Bostonians with cowshit on our boots and a gentler disposition. They hear what they expect. The truth is less simple and certainly less simple-minded. Many natives are non-rhotic; many are rhotic. The separation into R and not-R brigades is just the beginning. It’s a spectrum rather than a clear divide.
Most tourists and other visitors to the northern New England states assume that we are all non-rhotic, sort of Bostonians with cowshit on our boots and a gentler disposition.
I grew up in New Hampshire, and am descended from 12 generations of New Hampshirites. It’s non-rhotic in my town, and the rhotic speakers are never native – they are best case Vermonters (like my grandmother), or worst case New York transplants or moronic Free Staters from places like Michigan. Yes, young people these days… but leveling is an issue everywhere.
@Vanya: I agree that “Rhineland” would be a much better nickname for Schumann’s Third Symphony than “Rhine”. However, “Rhenish” is slightly more common than “Rhineland” before nouns, so I don’t see a reason for departing from tradition here.
@J.W.B.: While we’re doing ngrams, it seems that one reason for the decline of “Rhenish” might be replacement by “hock”. (I tried to check that with “Rhenish + hock”, but the sum was less than either addend, so there’s a bug.) Of course “hock” and “Rhenish” hves other meanings, which confuse things.
To me, “hock” is both antiquated and British; I have never heard that or “Rhenish” applied to wine. In the US we talk about Rhine wines.
I was trying to explain the 19th-century decline of “Rhenish” in the ngram J.W. posted. But here’s that ngram plot with “Rhine wine”, “Rhine wines”, “Rhenish wine”, and “Rhenish wines”. You can see that they’ve always been much lower than “hock” and “Rhenish” a secas (probably the wrong term for sweet wines).
Taking out “Rhenish” and “hock” and just looking at fairly recent American books, I see that “Rhine wine” is more than twice as common as “Rhenish wine”, and the same for the plural forms, as you say. At the moment I’m not going to look at GB to see whether the instances of “Rhenish wine” tend to be historical.
By the way, to give one datum in answer to your question about the history of the pronunciation, Robert Nares in <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=k_9YAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA228#v=onepage&q&f=false"Elements of Orthoepy (1784) includes “Rhenish” in a list of words with “E ſhort, terminating an accented Penultima”. Almost all the words on the list are still pronounced with short E, with a few exceptions, such as “scenic”.
Thanks!
Wow!
Are there, at least for some sounds (say, ê), two traditions of reading Latin among English speakers? Like
a) e, ê > /e/ [ɛ]
b) e > /e/ [ɛ], ê > /ee/ [i:]
(I’ll use ̂ instead of macron, it’s more keyboard-freindly and does have a tradition behind it as well)
Basically, yes. Wikipedia.
o > /o/, ô > /oo/ would be great!
It would sound like Sicilian.
Lat. ê > Sic. i, Lat. ô > Sic. u.
LH, thx! And reading it!
“It would sound like Sicilian.” – sorry. At first I linked a different song.
The most widely known song in Sicilian, at least known among those I’m aware of) I asked my friend to guess the place in the photo at 0:27, he failed, so I thought the sound of language will help and played it. He said he understands that it is some Romance language, but he’s a poet and based on God’s knows what the range of his guesses only widened:)
Though well, many u’s and i’s in Sicilian are not Latin long vowels at all. E.g. russu, russa, russi “red, Russian”
I’ve always assumed it’s ‘reenish’, and of course that preserves the Latin and English quantities, although I know we’re not supposed to take any notice of that. But I have to admit that I can’t swear to have ever said the word or heard it spoken.
Like Mr Hat, I am more than half a century out of date, and unlike him I am British. My favourite variety of English, if one may be permitted to have one, is the common currency of educated written English on both sides of the Atlantic that prevailed roughly over the period 1850-1980.
Rhine wine previously on LH.
(The only result for “Rhenish wine” is this thread.)
“To me, “hock” is both antiquated and British”.
I tried to check that on Google Ngrams, but of course it’s difficult because of other meanings of ‘hock’. However, I used the query ‘drink=>hock’ to give some context and found that American usage peaks at the start of the sample period, 1800, at 0.00000051%, with curious later and lower peaks during 1813-15, 1836, 1846 and 1870, and then dies away almost to nothing.
British usage peaks a little higher at 0.00000067% in 1804, then declines with subsequent peaks in 1823, 1843, 1866 and 1885, with an unexplained minor bump in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Some of the peaks may be due to clustering of guessed dates in Google’s sample documents.
I have certainly never heard an American refer to “hock,” and (though this is much more dubious) I don’t recall seeing it in American novels. Unfortunately, the OED entry is from 1898 and is no help; M-W and AHD both qualify it as “Chiefly Brit.”
Jerry’s iamb reminded me the Onegin verse that systematically makes school teachers and pupils likewise envious (Beef-steaks)
I think “claret” is old fashioned, “hock” is obsolete. “Claret or hock?” Is just trying to be funny.
LH, thx! And reading it!
It’s impressive and has things I didn’t (consciously) know, but it leaves out some topics, such as vowels at the ends of words.
When you said “Jerry’s iamb”. did you mean my quotation from Browning? Anyway, I’m glad to learn that pâté de foie gras is a kind of pierogi.
I found this fact amusing too.
But well, pâte is paste (both dough and Italian noodles) AND pastry…
“He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer / As he gazed at the London skies …” I’m pretty sure I first encountered the lexeme “hock” back in high school when I first read Betjeman’s “The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel,” of which those are the opening lines, with several more references to both hock and seltzer then occurring before the authorities burst in. I had no idea what it was although I inferred from context that it was presumably alcoholic. The context may have suggested that it was a more louche sort of beverage than was in fact the case in UK drinking culture of the 1890’s and/or 1930’s. Although maybe one was supposed to think of it as a sort of ladies’ drink and thus emblematic of Wilde’s lack of stereotypical masculinity?
I think of both “hock” and “claret” as equally Foreign, and thus have no sense of either being now archaic even among Foreigners. But I will defer to mollymooly’s better-informed judgment.
Wait, Americans don’t have claret? That explains so much …
You should have said “That makes everything so clear.”
We have the referent, of course; we just call it Bordeaux.
The sort of low-end and not-very-dry German white wine that was (formerly?) called “hock” in England was quite popular in the US in the 1970’s – often drunk by my own parents at dinner, for example. It just wasn’t called “hock” in the American market.
ETA: I would actually have known what Betjeman meant by “hock and seltzer” if it had been translated into AmEng as “white wine spritzer.”
I am now belatedly reminded of a Simpsons episode in which the generally teetotal Ned Flanders (while in Vegas with Homer …) throws caution to the winds and says “Oh, what the heck, you only live once. Give me a white wine spritzer!” The joke presumably being that this was about the least manly thing one could order that actually contained alcohol.
But Flanders is portrayed as stereotypically “unmanly” in a way (wimpy, non-confrontationally “nice,” goody-two-shoes, etc.) that does not involve being either effeminate or non-heterosexual. I remain uncertain what sort of masculinity-related stereotypes one would have defied or embraced by drinking hock and seltzer at the Cadogan Hotel in 1895.
The sort of low-end and not-very-dry German white wine that was (formerly?) called “hock” in England
Didn’t or doesn’t “hock” include high-end, probably not-dry-at-all German white wine? It’s mentioned in a Peter Wimsey story that’s far from my favorite, as you can see by searching here for “noblest hock”. (Just searching for “hock” gets you a shocking number of hits on “shock”.)
Pinchas Sapir, who was the Israeli Minister of Finance in the 1960s, once went to France on a state visit and was invited to a formal dinner at the Rothschilds. An appropriately noble wine from their cellars was brought up, whereupon Sapir, a man of simple origins, asked for soda water to make himself a spritzer with. He got it, too. I presume the sommelier silently wished to die on the spot.
I suspect this was also a red, suitable as accompaniment for spiced beef or roast lamb. Apart from Schwaben (and maybe northern Italy as far as Bologna?), spritzer/Schorle is with a youngish white.
@Y: I expect any “unmanly” associations of diluting wine with soda (or still) water do not carry over to “Mediterranean” cultures where the history is different. I put “Mediterranean” in quotes because I have myself seen a fairly rough and tumble and certainly not unmasculine fellow in a Portuguese-American bar mixing red wine and cold (still) water in his glass to whatever ratio suited his own taste, having been brought little pitchers of both by the barmaid. (I expect it may be the sort of thing they do for regulars if they ask for it in Portuguese but they might be suspicious if you asked for it in English.)
At church we mix wine with hot water to make the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zapivka, but I doubt too many parishioners would seek that out in a non-liturgical context or promote it in an ecclesial context if it were not for Holy Tradition.
@jwb
Oh, of course. Red wine with coca-cola in Spain.
@JWB: Manliness was not a consideration. Sapir came from a middle-class Polish Jewish family, and always led a simple life. I imagine that to him adding soda to wine was like adding soda to grape juice, and it didn’t occur to him that the bottle of wine he was shown was anything different than a bottle you buy at the grocery store at a hundredth or a thousandth of the price.
I feel free to imagine that the wine was a Mouton Rothschild or Lafite Rothschild.
I can hardly think that any reasonably intelligent European served wine at the Rothschilds’ formal dinner wouldn’t think there might be something special about it. Maybe Sapir wasn’t overawed and just wanted it the way he liked it, or wanted to show he wasn’t overawed, or didn’t want to pretend he could appreciate it.
Yeah, I refuse to believe that was just peasant simplicity. He was sticking it to the snooty Euros.
@Jerry F.: are Israelis Europeans? (The fellow in question was born in then-Russian territory near what is now the Polish-Lithuanian border, but relocated to Asia as a young man probably close to 40 years before the anecdote in question.)
I think he did have an image of artless coarseness about him, which fit with the ethos of the Israeli Labor Party. He lived all his life in a simple apartment away from Jerusalem, and supposedly, when he had to stay overnight in the capital, he had a room rented for the purpose, shared with another politician of like tastes, and divided by a sheet (that per Hebrew WP).
Moreover, when he went to Europe, it would have been as Minister of Finance or Minister of Trade. He was good at bringing rich people to invest in Israel’s nascent economy. That would not have been the occasion to stick a finger in their eye.
The story had been circulating and could have been an urban legend, but my mother had it confirmed to her by Miriam Rothschild, whom she knew.
Another tale of wine faux-pas: when Richard Feynman was at the dinner in honor of the Nobel recipients, of which he was one that year, a waiter/sommelier went around pouring wine in everyone’s glass. Feynman objected, saying he didn’t drink, but was told quietly yet decisively not to fuss. It turned out that the secret agents of the Nobel Foundation had done their work well, and what he was served was grape juice or such simulacrum.
Pinot Grigio x Gill Sans Easy to sip, even easier to read
(“Leghorn” by contrast peaked later although I don’t immediately know why it would have been discussed so much in the mid-1920’s. Too early for Foghorn Leghorn to have supplemented the toponym
Foghorn Leghorn is named that way because “Leghorn” is a breed of chicken; maybe references to that contaminated your search?
Concerning Rhenus vs. Rhine: both must go back to a Western IE *rei-no-. The Germanic forms show the Germanic development /*ei/ > /i:/, while the Latin form shows the Celtic development /*ei/ > /e:/, so it’s a loan probably from Gaulish, perhaps mediated by Greek geographers, which would explain the “rh”.
@DE: I guess Welsh either preserved the native Celtic name of the river or loaned it from Latin, as the Rhine was an important shipping route for bringing goods to Britain, while the Danube was just some faraway geographical feature.