SHIGUDO.

Trey of Speculative Grammarian, in a comment on this post, linked to this wonderful piece from Volume CLII, Number γ (December 2006) of SpecGram. In it, Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics,Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton, describes his youthful encounter with a very strange language spoken by a remote tribe deep in the Amazon Basin and his discovery of how the language worked and, eventually, of the unfortunate history behind it. I won’t spoil the reader’s enjoyment, but I will say how much I loved the footnotes; a selection:

3 By “very preliminary”, I mean, of course, stupidly, foolishly premature. But I wasn’t much of a linguist then, and I wasn’t yet taking the whole matter very seriously.
4 By “concision”, I mean, of course, the ability to say anything of interest in, say, a number of words, syllables, or morphemes less than or equal to the equivalent in English or Spanish.
5 By “I don’t really know”, I mean, of course, that I have never been bothered to look it up.
7 By “mastered Spanish”, I mean, of course, that his mastery of Spanish had overtaken my own, which had grown even rustier.
8 By “merit a study of its own”, I mean, of course, that now that I am retired I do not have the energy to pursue such a study, but would love to see someone else take up the cause.

Comments

  1. Pratchett-worthy footnotes.

  2. A.J.P. Crown says

    ‘Devonshire-upon-Glencullen’ sounds like an exotic and expensive kind of Irish coffee.

  3. The number “15” in the article looks like an error to me. Shouldn’t it be: klo’klo’a ?

  4. Much of the story sounds plausible.

  5. SnowLeopard says

    Reminds me of a chapter from one of the volumes of “Handbook of Australian Languages” in which one of the described languages had only ten verbs. IIRC, the author noted that their meanings were “necessarily rather abstract”, and in real sentences they were adorned with various affixes and inserted into compounds that ended up doing most of the work. No time to dig up the reference today.

  6. A.J.P. Crown says

    It would only sound plausible to somebody with a name like ‘Pete’.

  7. A.J.P. Crown says

    Or is that actually ‘pets’? I haven’t got my glasses.

  8. It did sound pretty plausible until the end…

  9. The stated ages of the informants was a dead giveaway. That and the ceremony where they stand in a circle and shoot arrows straight up into the sky.

  10. Under the archives section on the left side of the page referred to, follow the Lingua Pranca link to pieces like “Bilingualism in Rats”, or “On Defining the Blaspheme Revisited”:

    Theolinguists have long recognized the existence of the blaspheme (e.g. Aquinas 1270, Luther 1526, Calvin 1559). And it would be hard to improve on the classic formulation of Moses 1300 (b.c.e): “A blaspheme is the minimal unit of eternal damnation.”

  11. A.J.P. Crown says

    I think the age thing was meant to be a dead giveaway: look at the picture of the thirty-four-year-old indian. A lot of trouble has gone into this piece. Congratulations to whoever it is who wrote it: Trey?
    Are there really such things as theolinguists?

  12. michael farris says

    Also the people in the pictures don’t look anything like the indigenous peoples of the Amazon (and the material culture is all wrong too).

  13. [A] Few others can provide flawless translations from, say, Mohawk into Scottish Gaelic and back—a surprisingly common need in our ever more interconnected world.
    Just like some LH readers, indeed …

  14. @A.J.P.:
    “Are there really such things as theolinguists?”
    The minimal qualification for being sentenced to eternal damnation is being a non-thing. I would expect those doing the sentencing to be held to the same standards. Presumably a lump of clay need not apply.
    It has, however, been observed that in theolinguistics we don´t progress from the least complex units of speech to the more complex – i.e., the traditional linguistic ladder comprised of rungs we call phonemes, morphemes and so forth. Since the well-formedness of a theolinguist´s pontifications is never at issue, we only need to test them for authenticity. Anti-theolinguistics crusader Wittgenstein famously observed that the easiest such test would indeed be just looking on the ground for the remains of ladders thrown down to earth from on high. Later on, Wittgenstein came to revise his position as he realized that his original advice to shut up rather than talk about subjects nobody has any business babbling on about would lead to an incredibly shrinking universe of discourse – a de-babbling (or, as the postmodernist, trace-seeking reading has it, de-bubbling) of such cosmic proportions that all that would be left over for the members of the scientific community to do would be pushing on a tiny string – no matter whether those scientists´ original calling was physics or economics. (As a means of preserving their privilege of being enthroned at the top of the Great Hierarchical Food Chain Of Scientific Beings, physicists have proposed they be allowed to use special terminology – such as prefixing “super” to any dimensionally ungraspable materialization of the “string” thing.)
    The status of authors like Georges Perec with regard to their positioning in the theolinguistics/anti-theolinguistics debate remains as yet undetermined. Some practitioners of theo-linguistics classify the approach chosen by Perec as experimental anti-theo-linguistics
    because of its heavy reliance on avoiding the use of God´s most frequent tool of communication, i.e., the letter “e”. Others in the same camp have decried these pronouncements as the first step to getting involved with – and thus tainted by – the demonic concepts of secular linguistics which the idea of the “blaspheme” as “the minimal unit of eternal damnation” was meant to supersede.
    The most common repartee by anti-theo-linguists to the accusations leveled against them by the aforementioned subset of enraged, yet alphabet-conscious subset of theo-linguists was to assign a question to users of their textbooks á la “It´s left as an exercise to the reader to work out why this might not actually be so”. At least one student is known to have come up with the response that in a world where morphemes are scarce, meanings tend to multiply to the point where each morpheme carries at least one meaning derived from the domain of intuitions commonly lumped together under the heading of theology.
    Now excuse me, since I have to visit Lingua Pranca first to get a clue about what I may have been trying to obscure here.

  15. A.J.P. Crown says

    Thanks, Jörg. That may be the fullest answer I’ve ever received to a question I asked at Language Hat and all the more welcome for it.

  16. marie-lucie says

    A wonderful spoof!
    the people in the pictures don’t look anything like the indigenous peoples of the Amazon (and the material culture is all wrong too).
    The pictures are taken from Edward Curtis’s photographs of North American Indians. The one with the canoe and the bird effigy is from the Kwakiutl (Vancouver Island, Canada). Needless to say, its actual context is quite different from the one in the story.
    … Australian Languages in which one of the described languages had only ten verbs. IIRC, the author noted that their meanings were “necessarily rather abstract”, and in real sentences they were adorned with various affixes and inserted into compounds that ended up doing most of the work. …
    Sounds like English verbs like get and go with their dozens of possible additions, if these verbs went out of use by themselves.

  17. @languagehat: Thanks for the link! The SpecGram webservers are happiest when they are humming.
    @zhoen and others: Expect some of your great comments to eventually end up on the SpecGram Quotes page.
    @Bill Poser: (Do you mind if I attribute this to you as a letter to the editor in a future issue? otherwise I’ll rephrase the question. Here’s the reply:) I’ve asked Edmund about the number 15. klo’klo’a would be more compositional, wouldn’t it. Of course his notebooks are almost 50 years old, but he said the “useful numbers” only go up to about 15, and he recalls that, back in the 1960s, klo conveyed a meaning of “an awful lot”, so klo’klo’klo also conveyed “more than any normal person should care about”. Nowadays, Spanish numbers are used most often, and the Shigudo numbers are often reduced to being just grammatical affixes. That, or he just made a transcription error in his notebooks and our editors didn’t catch it. I’ll have a junior editor flogged just to be on the safe side.
    @pete & Ryan: “plausibility until the end” is the goal of any good satire.
    re: material culture.. langaugehat, I fear your linguistics blog has been overrun by wholly competent anthropologists. Watch out!
    @A.J.P.: A lot of trouble has gone into this piece. Congratulations to whoever it is who wrote it: Trey? — Thanks, and .. I plead the fifth.
    @Jörg: I’d love to use A.J.P.’s question and your reply in an upcoming issue of SpecGram! Is your email address really “nulldev”? Reply here please or email me at trey@ the obvious domain. Thanks!
    @marie-lucie: The pictures are taken from Edward Curtis’s photographs of North American Indians. — Those are some specialized photographic detective skills you have there! Wow!

  18. Trey, it was easy: I happen to own the paperback edition of Curtis’s photographs, although I can’t lay my hands on it at the moment to check the other pictures. Curtis not only photographed the Kwakiutl but actually made a (silent) movie with them, reenacting some old customs, and the canoe with the bird effigy is in it.

  19. I’ll have a junior editor flogged
    What a frightening place this journal must be. I had pictured some coffeehouse zombies with a printing press in the basement, but it appears they have an entire dysfunctional corporate bureaucracy.

  20. A.J.P. Crown says

    You’re welcome, Trey. You can certainly use my question.

  21. @Nijma: What a frightening place this journal must be.
    More than you can imagine. Flogging is getting off easy. in 1899, two junior editors sacrificed themselves to form a human bridgeThat’s dedication.

  22. A.J.P. Crown says

    See the archives page for more information and republication schedule
    You are Republicans?

  23. You are Republicans?
    No, put we turn people into Republicans. Clearly a missing hyphen. Merci.

  24. A.J.P. Crown says

    Trey, if you’re this Trey Jones, I don’t know how you find the time.

  25. A.J.P., I’m not that Trey Jones. I can remember when the web was still wet behind the ears and I was *the* Trey Jones (first and 6 or 8 of the top 10 on Google). Now these whipper snappers have pushed me aside. I’m still mostly this Trey Jones, except for the knitting guy. I’m not a knitter.

  26. It looks like Trey’s human bridge link has an answer to an earlier LH post about naming of centuries.
    memories of the recent droughts of the mid nineties and early noughties still sting in many quarters

  27. re noughties.. love the homophony.. I don’t know where I first head that one, but it’s been stuck in my head for a while.

  28. A.J.P. Crown says

    Well you’re still top of the list. But you’re right, don’t take up knitting or bicycle tricks.
    One thing I thought of to do with nought. In the U.S., ought and nought mean the same as one another; whereas in England (Yorkshire) they mean the opposite (‘You can’t get owt for nowt’, or you can’t get anything for nothing.)

  29. “naught” means “nothing”
    “aught”(1) is the opposite of “naught” and archaic
    “aught”(2) is an alteration of “naught” and nonstandard.
    “owt” and “nowt” are indeed Yorkshire variants.
    “nought” is a variant spelling of “naught” preferred for a count “zero” or digit “0” as opposed to “nothing”.
    “ought” is a variant spelling I’ve never seen.

  30. A.J.P. Crown says

    “ought” is a variant spelling I’ve never seen.
    I may have just made it up, then.
    Thanks for that, Molly.

  31. Say not the struggle nought availeth.

  32. David Marjanović says

    “owt” and “nowt” are indeed Yorkshire variants.

    <thinking hard about whether to turn into the Incredible Hulk, but noticing being too tired anyway, so…>
    How is that pronounced? With [aʊ̯] like in house? With [oʊ̯] like in no? With one or the other the way bow is? HELP!!!
    Actually, considering the fact that you didn’t spell them “ote” and “note”, the former alternative is more parsimonious, but it still isn’t guaranteed. <grumble>

  33. Grumbly Stu says

    With [aʊ̯] like in house

  34. David Marjanović says

    Thanks!

  35. ToussianMuso says

    Those are among the most deliciously pithy footnotes I’ve ever seen. But what kind of institution really has a Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics?
    I remember seeing “owt” and “nowt” in Yorkshire veterenarian James Herriott’s autobiographical series. I can even recall a sentence in context, where a farmer admits to having tested him by asking him to diagnose a perfectly healthy animal: “there’s nowt wrong wi’ t’ beast.”
    Thanks for the literary flashback.

  36. marie-lucie says

    Reginald Hill’s novels, whose main characters are members of the “Mid-Yorkshire Constabulary”, are full of “owt’s” and “nowt’s”. I always assumed that the words were pronounced as in note and was glad to learn the proper pronunciation.

  37. A.J.P. Crown says

    I know that younger people from Yorkshire don’t use ‘owt’ or ‘nowt’ any more when they go down south to London, thought older ones do (or did 25 years ago). I hope they are still in use at home in Yorkshire.

  38. Actually I think it is just one character, the older, curmudgeonly policeman, who pointedly (I think) uses those forms.

  39. “ought” is a variant spelling I’ve never seen

    Lewis Carroll’s book of puzzles A Tangled Tale, first serially published in 1980, uses “Oughts and Crosses” as a chapter title. One of his readers objects (markup linguistified):

    I. E. A. […] takes me to task for using the word ought instead of nought. No doubt, to one who thus rebels against the rules laid down for her guidance, the word must be distasteful. But does not I. E. A. remember the parallel case of adder? That creature was originally a nadder: then the two words took to bandying the poor n backwards and forwards like a shuttlecock, the final state of the game being an adder. May not a nought have similarly become an ought? Anyhow, oughts and crosses is a very old game. I don’t think I ever heard it called noughts and crosses.

    WP says that noughts and crosses first appears in print in an 1858 issue of N & Q, though the game goes back to Roman times or before. Nought ‘zero’ is clearly the origin of the first part of this name. (The name tic-tac-toe is old but was first applied to this game in the early 20C.) . So I think that Carroll’s history was wrong (he was born in 1832) and that I. E. A.’s suggestion was well founded.

    By the way, among the Hattics, who does and who doesn’t pronounce the /g/ in suggestion?

  40. I do.

  41. I don’t. I was taught English in school by non-native speakers (often not all that fluent), who taught us what they thought was British English. They always pronounced suggest with a /-d͡ʒ-/. My tenth-grade teacher was American-raised, and was the first native speaker I’d had as a teacher. He pronounced suggest with a /-gd͡ʒ-/, which we all found odd.

  42. So this is another US/UK thing?
    *checks Daniel Jones*
    Yup. Huh, I didn’t know that.

  43. David Marjanović says

    I wasn’t taught how to pronounce this word at all, but figured that the /gd͡ʒ/ so clearly suggested by the spelling was too absurd for English, a language with plenty of precedent for ignoring spellings in favor of easier pronunciation…

  44. Fool! Nothing is too absurd for English!

  45. I don’t.

  46. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed anyone not pronouncing the /g/. Now flaccid is a very different case.

  47. David Marjanović says

    English does lack a lot of faithfully spelled-out consonant clusters that most other languages in Europe have no trouble with – but admittedly almost all of that happens only in word-initial position.

  48. On the other hand, I never think of putting /g/ before /d͡ʒ/ in exaggerate, so I guess there’s not much logic to it.

  49. I do.

  50. Trond Engen says

    John C.: By the way, among the Hattics, who does and who doesn’t pronounce the /g/ in suggestion?

    This is just weird.

    Y: My tenth-grade teacher was American-raised, and was the first native speaker I’d had as a teacher. He pronounced suggest with a /-gd͡ʒ-/, which we all found odd.

    But this is even weirder.

    Well, it does make sense if suggest- is bimorphemic in English. But then we’d expect it to happen with the same frequency in all forms.

  51. I usually say suggest without the /g/, but I actually use both pronunciations, depending on circumstances.

  52. This is just weird.

    What is, pronouncing it or not pronouncing it?

  53. Trond Engen says

    Pronouncing it. Or, in fairness to the pronounciators, the fact that I”ve never noticed it. It boggled my mind.

  54. Is this the difference we are talking about?
    https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/suggest

    The Brit pronunciation is what I find familiar, and I can’t say, despite all my years in the US (in the States, I mean), that the US pronunciation is strikingly different, or that I’ve ever noticed a systematic difference.

    When someone asked about pronouncing the ‘g’ in ‘suggest’ I had in mind something like ‘sugg-jest’, which would be very strange. The US version at the link sounds to me more like ‘sud-jest’, with not much more than a hint of a ‘d’ sound (apologies for the lack of IPA).

    It’s a very different case from the two pronunciations of ‘flaccid’, which Keith Ivey mentioned earlier — flassid or flack-sid.

  55. I had in mind something like ‘sugg-jest’, which would be very strange.

    That is exactly how I pronounce it, and since it is the first pronunciation given in both M-W and AHD, I am clearly not alone. It may be unfamiliar to you, but it is not strange.

  56. Trond Engen says

    I asked my daughter, who has managed to acquire a frighteningly natural-sounding American English from Norwegian school and whatever she does in her room instead of homework. She tried it out silently a couple of times and said “Of course, that’s how it’s pronounced”. When she said it aloud I hardly heard the g. It’s more like a coarticulated gd or maybe a (pre-?)glottalized ‘d>i>.

  57. The thing with the “sud-jest” pronunciation is that English syllables aren’t supposed to end in a slack vowel, so the [d] of the [d͡ʒ] is replicated across the syllable boundary after the [g] is lost. Those who keep [g] of course don’t have this problem.

  58. …the fact that I”ve never noticed it. It boggled my mind.

    I’m boggled from the other side that I’ve never noticed speakers of British English not pronouncing the /g/.

  59. I share the bogglement.

  60. Trond Engen says

    Me: It’s more like a coarticulated gd or maybe a (pre-?)glottalized ‘d>i>.

    Another case of misbracketing. Or two cases at once. Since it’s about phonetics, not phonemics, I should have used angle brackets. And spent half an hour looking up the IPA symbols for glottalized d and coarticulated gd.

    Phonemically I don’t doubt that my daughter has a g there.

  61. David Marjanović says

    The thing with the “sud-jest” pronunciation is that English syllables aren’t supposed to end in a slack vowel, so the [d] of the [d͡ʒ] is replicated across the syllable boundary after the [g] is lost.

    In theory perhaps. In phonetic practice, this does not result in a long consonant.

    And spent half an hour looking up the IPA symbols for glottalized d and coarticulated gd.

    Coarticulated gd: [g͡d] 🙂

    Glottalized d: well, [dˀ] in general. If you want specifically an implosive, that’s [ ɗ ] (spaces inserted for legibility).

  62. No, it doesn’t: the only double consonant I know of in English is the /ll/ in wholly, which distinguishes it from holy: “Jesus Christ was wholly God.” But if you pronounce suggest (in the [g]-less pronunciation) as two clearly separated syllables, you do get “Sud. Jest.” (“Blubber. Tweak.”)

  63. I think I pronounce eighteen with /tt/ at least sometimes.

  64. I’m pretty sure I say it that way all the time; single /t/ sounds UK to me.

  65. the only double consonant I know of in English is the /ll/ in wholly

    What about midday? Drunkenness? Barrenness (contrast with baroness)?

  66. I have double consonants for all the examples listed, except wholly, which is homophonous with holy, unless I am enunciating specifically to distinguish them.

  67. David Marjanović says

    English is full of long consonants. Unlike in, say, Italian or Old English, they only ever occur across morpheme boundaries. You could say they exist at the phonemic but not the morphophonemic level (like the infamous phonemic aspiration-vs-glottalization contrast in nitrate vs. night rate).

    I don’t know if anyone pronounces wholly that way; John Wells has described a difference in the stressed vowel instead that lots of people seem to use.

  68. David L said (2018):

    Is this the difference we are talking about?
    https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/pronunciation/english/suggest

    The Brit pronunciation is what I find familiar, and I can’t say, despite all my years in the US (in the States, I mean), that the US pronunciation is strikingly different, or that I’ve ever noticed a systematic difference.

    When someone asked about pronouncing the ‘g’ in ‘suggest’ I had in mind something like ‘sugg-jest’, which would be very strange. The US version at the link sounds to me more like ‘sud-jest’, with not much more than a hint of a ‘d’ sound (apologies for the lack of IPA).

    I can hear the /g/ in the audio clip there (assuming it hasn’t changed between 2018 and now), but it is not released, so the difference is really hard to notice if you’re not listening for it—I’d never noticed it until just now. (The Cambridge dictionary apparently didn’t notice it, since they didn’t put a g in the transcription.) You can hear more examples of /g/ pronunciations at Forvo (some but not all Americans), Youglish (ditto), or from Accent Coach Nicole, who is insistent about the /g/; she apparently doesn’t realize that the other pronunciation is *also* standard in AmE.

    You are far from alone in never noticing the difference. This has come up on other language discussion groups, always with multiple native speakers astounded and incredulous that there is another pronunciation—and this includes people with *both* pronunciations, with no apparent regional pattern within the US, so many people must have heard it both ways and just not noticed. This thread at wordreference.com is a good one.

    The “suggest with or without /g/” question reappeared here four years later.

  69. It just occurred to me that maybe in David L’s “something like ‘sugg-jest’, which would be very strange”, he was imagining the [g] being released, as if reading “sugg, jest, …” as items on a list.* That *would* be strange; that is, nobody does it. The [g] is not released, even in slow and careful enunciation. (Or more accurately, John Wells says, there’s no audible release.) People with this pronunciation just close the [g] and then release the [d͡ʒ]. I think it’s the same thing as between the first two syllables of actual (if you pronounce the t, i.e. [kt͡ʃ] rather than [kʃ]), but there it’s unvoiced.

    *I’m not sure if that would work either. In reading items on a list, each one is an utterance, and at the end of an utterance, plosives might not be released?

  70. John Cowan (August 21, 2018):

    English syllables aren’t supposed to end in a slack vowel, so the [d] of the [d͡ʒ] is replicated across the syllable boundary after the [g] is lost. Those who keep [g] of course don’t have this problem.

    That only applies to *stressed* syllables; English is fine with words like comma ending in an unstressed schwa. For syllables within words, you do have to have some theory of syllable division (which is why some sources define checked/free vowels by reference to one-syllable words only), but consider supply, support, suppose, suppress: everybody puts the /p/ in the stressed syllable, there’s no need to replicate it across the syllable boundary. There’s also no replication of [d] across the syllable boundary in other words with [d͡ʒ] between syllables: pa-jamas, not pad-jamas; a-genda, not ad-jenda; e-ject, not ed-ject.

    I couldn’t find any clear evidence on whether “sug-jest” is the older pronunciation, from which the g has been lost in BrE. According to Walker’s 1791 Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, “Though the first g in Exaggerate is, by a carelessness of pronunciation, assimilated to the last, this is not always the case in the present word. For though we sometimes hear it sounded as if written sudjest, the most correct speakers generally preserve the first and last g in their distinct and separate sounds.” Don’t know how reliable that is.

    Also, the stress in suggest may have changed, if we can trust Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster: they both mark stress on the *first* syllable. In that case, I’d expect SUG-jest.

  71. Also, the stress in suggest may have changed, if we can trust Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster: they both mark stress on the *first* syllable.

    Strange! I wonder why the OED doesn’t mention that?

  72. David Marjanović says

    they both mark stress on the *first* syllable.

    Oh, that’s enlightening.

  73. I’ve been trawling Google Books (pre-1800) trying to find evidence one way or the other; from William Dechair Tattersall’s Improved Psalmody Vol. I The Psalms of David (1794), “At midnight’s silent hour suggest” (p. 51) shows that the end stress was used then, though perhaps not exclusively.

  74. And Shakespeare has end stress in “All other devils that suggest by treasons” (H5 II.ii.115).

  75. Aha, OED doesn’t mention that because it’s not true. Samuel Johnson:

    Webster:

  76. Your Johnson link goes to an edition of 1799, revised by somebody else. I was using Johnson’s Dictionary Online, which has a page image from the 1755 edition showing stress marked on the first syllable—I should’ve put in the link.

    And your Webster link is a revised edition of 1842; in Webster’s 1828 it’s SUG'ĠEST, with stress mark after the stressed syllable.

  77. Sorry about that! I should have known you’d have checked properly. Well, as I said, it’s strange!

  78. But then why does Webster have penultimate stress on suggested and suggester??

  79. Yeah, that doesn’t make sense.

    How was Latin suggestus stressed? On ges?

    Intriguingly, just down the page, Webster 1828 also has SUG'ĠIL ‘to defame’ and SUG'ĠILATE ‘to beat black and blue’, from Latin suggillo, both marked “[Not in use.]” — but if they’re not in use, how did he know how to pronounce them? Just guessing? The Century Dictionary and OED also have these words, marked rare or obsolete; they agree with stress on the first syllable, but give the pronunciation of the -gg- as just [d͡ʒ], no [g]. Maybe these were always so rare that there was no general consensus on how to pronounce them.

    There’s also suggillation, a medical term for ‘bruise, discolored spot’, but sources differ on whether it’s obsolete and whether it’s pronounced with a [g]; it’s obscure enough that Wiktionary’s list of soft -gg- words missed it.

  80. David Marjanović says

    How was Latin suggestus stressed? On ges?

    Yes. If the penultimate syllable is long, stress it; if not, stress the antepenult.

    But English doesn’t seem to have allowed final stress in loans until long after German did. Maybe this word was borrowed with initial stress and then updated later (a pretty common phenomenon worldwide).

  81. Maybe this word was borrowed with initial stress and then updated later (a pretty common phenomenon worldwide).

    I guess that’s the most likely explanation, though I would have thought it would no longer be operative by this time.

  82. When didn’t English allow final stress in loans?

    Borrowed in the 1300s-1400s: supply, support, suppose from French; suppress from Latin (from past participle suppressus). Suggest was slightly later, early 1500s (per the OED entry; the other four are revised and this isn’t, so maybe it could move back a little). Shakespeare uses all of them, and suggest, with stress on the second syllable. Johnson gives second-syllable stress for the first three, but first-syllable stress for suppress — even while including quotations from Shakespeare and Milton where it’s stressed on the second!

    Well didst thou, Richard, to suppress thy voice;
    For, had the passions of thy heart burst out,
    I fear we should have seen decipher’d there
    More rancorous spite, more furious raging broils,
    Than yet can be imagined or supposed.
    —Henry VI, Part I

    Go figure. Maybe there was variation? Or Johnson made a mistake? I guess Jack Lynch would be the one to ask.

  83. David Marjanović says

    Ah, looks like the timing doesn’t work out.

Speak Your Mind

*