The Uzhe.

An interesting Atlantic piece by Gretchen McCulloch:

You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!

Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.

Our confusion about how to spell uzh/yooje/ujhe reveals some of the breaking points between English spelling and pronunciation.

(To preempt an obvious gotcha: yes, “Yusz as if it’s Polish” doesn’t work. McCulloch is a linguist but not a Slavicist, and we all make mistakes.) I’ll skip over her long explanation of the problems with English spelling and pronunciation, which will be old hat to my readers, and get to the conclusion:

How can we English writers and readers resolve these spelling issues? In my Twitter bracket, I expected an option that was maximally clear about pronunciation to win, one that replaced that confusing initial u with a more obvious yoo, thus potentially dragging a less obvious zh or j along with it. But while yoozh made it all the way to the final (beating out uzh), it lost in the end to uzhe.

My Twitter poll is by no means a scientific study, but I still think the results can offer some valuable insight. Respondents explained that they found spellings with u to be less confusing because that spelling kept the initial letter in common with usual—as long as a silent e was there at the end to cue the pronunciation of the u away from the sound in untie. I find this resolution elegant in its clunkiness: Solving the problem of two unwritten sounds by writing a further, unpronounced letter is a truly Englishy solution.

The ad hoc, incomplete answer to the question of how to spell uzhe (or yoozh, or yooj …) reminds us that English—like any natural language—wasn’t designed from the top down by a single creator, the way a book is written in a unified authorial voice. Rather, language is organic and decentralized, a network where patterns emerge from the many ways that each of us choose whom we want to talk with and how to talk with them. At their best, dictionaries and other reference materials can be helpful maps to a territory we’re all co-creating every time we pick one word over another.

Of course, uzhe makes me do a double-take because it looks like a romanized version of Russian уже ‘already,’ but that’s my problem. It’s a good solution here, and I love that form of word-shortening.

Comments

  1. When I was Very Very Young, we had occasional quizzes in primary school in which the teacher would read out a simple passage and we had to write it down as best we could. I was a good speller, but one day a phrase came up that was entirely familiar to me but which I had never seen written down. I struggled with how to spell it and eventually decided on “youst to.” It was only afterwards that I discovered the connection between that phrase and the common verb “use.”

    Strange how odd memories like this stick in the memory.

  2. I heard the word “posish” before I ever read it: I deduced the meaning easily from the pronunciation, but I doubt I would have deduced either from the spelling. While the spelling is somewhat unsatisfactory, I think it is clearly the least bad option and the one most people would resort to. Ditto cazh, though wiktionary offers uncited alternatives. Unlike uzhe, which may well be the least bad option but not clearly so.

  3. David Marjanović says

    уже

    The Polish cognate is już

    “youst to.”

    Reminds me of that internet commenter who’s consistently been writing haft to for years.

  4. While I have assimilated reg and veg, the Australian rego still makes me wince. As a wise man once said, “but that’s my problem”.

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    This reminds me of the allegedly-spotted-in-the-wild schoolchild spelling pechasis for a common item of clothing.

  6. David Marjanović says

    I don’t get it – which item?

  7. David Eddyshaw says

    It may (or may not) help to know that the form represented is both dual and non-rhotic (in fact, distinctly Londonian.) The spelling is a not-unreasonable representation of the speaker’s /pɛ’tʃɑ:zɪz/.

  8. Plenty of people in Hawaii orally describe becoming habituated to something as “getting useta to it” but I’m not sure what the usual spelling might be.

  9. I’m curious how many people have actually heard the usage she wants to spell uzhe?

    For me, the syllables break YOU ZH’L so there’s no UZH- syllable to latch onto for a short form. It’s not shorter for me, and it doesn’t roll off the tongue, because zh is not a quick, simple phoneme, and it seems to demand a lengthened u-sound.

    I’m not fluent in phonetic spelling. I might transcribe my pronunciation as yi-zh’l or y’zh’l, with a sort of schwa/U/I sound that’s very clipped. Bottom line, it takes me at least as long, maybe longer, to say uzhe as to say y’zh’l. “The uzhe” is much longer than “th’y’zh’l”.

    Uzhe just sounds weird and forced to me.

  10. Is /pɛ’tʃɑ:zɪz/ “pyjamas” or “pair trousers”?

  11. David Eddyshaw says

    The latter. It would indeed be “pair of trousers” in Ecclesiastic High English.

  12. J.W. Brewer says

    I can’t say that I have noticed anyone uttering this clipping in the wild, but “YOOZH” seems to me the hardest to misunderstand as a non-IPA representation of what I take to be the pronunciation. It admitedly “looks weird” from the standpoint of ordinary English orthography, but in this particular context there’s a tradeoff between ordinary orthographic conventions and unambiguously indicating pronunciation. That just happens sometimes.

    Here’s a 2015 piece about how to spell the clipped first syllable of “casual,” with multiple contestants: https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/casual-abbreviation-do-you-spell-it-cajzh-caszh-caj-cas-or-with-the-voiced-palato-alveolar-sibilant.html

  13. It’s not shorter for me

    I don’t understand. The end is lopped off, how can it not be shorter?

  14. Trond Engen says

    When I saw the title I thought this was about one of the lesser known peoples of the Causasus.

    (I would have linked, but there’s nothing about them on the net. They don’t even have a Wikipedia article. No wonder I hadn’t heard of them.)

  15. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s evidently simply a by-form (among several others) of Udihe, the well-known Tungusic people:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Udege_people

  16. J.W. Brewer says

    One problem here, I think, is that /ʒ/ most typically occurs intervocalically in English. It’s never word-initial except in not-very-domesticated loanwords (people guessing at how to pronounce “Zhang” the way the Chinese Communists want them to), and is word-final only in a limited set of loanwords. And in that set, the orthography is not much help – it’s in rouge but not huge, garage (in AmEng pronunciation at least) but not courage.* So a final -ge certainly doesn’t reliably cue it.

    But my broader question is what typically happens to intervocalic /ʒ/ after clipping strands it in word-final position. If it became the fashion for some speakers to clip down “vision” to its first syllable, would it remain stable as /vɪʒ/ or would it naturally shift over to /vɪz/ once the prop of the following vowel was pulled away? The latter feels intuitively plausible to me, FWIW.

    To get more technical, wikipedia asserts that the intervocalic occurrence of /ʒ/ in English is “formed by yod-coalescence of [z] and [j].” Why wouldn’t clipping cause a de-coalescence, with the yod being part of what ended up getting clipped?

    *EDITED TO ADD: Maybe “courage” versus “corsage” would be a good minimal pair, suggesting stress as something to do with it. But would word-final occurrence in bisyllabic words depending on which syllable was stressed (even if that pair generalizes …) reliably predict outcomes in monosyllables?

  17. Why wouldn’t clipping cause a de-coalescence, with the yod being part of what ended up getting clipped?

    Dunno, but it doesn’t. I can’t imagine “yooz” as a shortening of “usual.”

  18. But “viz” is certainly used as a shortening of “visualization”.

  19. David Eddyshaw says

    There Is no yod in my /juʒl/ pronuciation (I only say /juʒuəl/ when trying to impress guests; there’s no yod in that, either.)

  20. J.W. Brewer says

    David E.’s report is interesting, because my pronunciation is completely missing yods where they’re reportedly common in BrEng (e.g. “tyune/chune” for “tune”) but apparently has one in “usual” that is missing for some other speakers. Is there a conservation law? Do we all have a limited total budget of yods to work with, but allocate them differently among words according to dialect?

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    I have no yod in /tʃun/ either (I presume you say /tun/, more Americano?)
    The initial affricate is just the same as in “choose” /tʃuz/.

    I think this is partly a question of register, and partly age: I know a nice nonagenarian lady who actually says /kwɛstiən/, quite unaffectedly, even in rapid speech, but I lack the necessary degree of poshness to get away with it myself.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English_consonant_clusters#Yod-dropping

  22. J.W. Brewer says

    Just to be clear, the claim is not that I have a separate /j/ following the /ʒ/ in “usual,” but that the /ʒ/ historically developed from an etymologically-adjacent /z/ and /j/ getting so friendly with each other as to coalesce into a /ʒ/, with the first syllable contributing the /z/ and the second syllable the /j/. Keith Ivey’s report as to “viz” for “visualization” is consistent with the idea that if you remove the second syllable it takes the historical /j/ away with it and the /ʒ/ thus vanishes, leaving only a /z/ behind.

  23. David Eddyshaw says

    I think this only works if you are abbreviating based on the spelling rather than the sound. There are, admittedly, examples of that even in quite colloquial registers (I think we discussed “soccer” in our usual exhaustive manner some time back.)

    I don’t think even very posh speakers (not even lawyers) undo actual historical spoken sound changes as part of abbreviating. Though I suppose one might go all Sound Pattern of English at this point and start maintaining that English spelling (mostly) actually reflects our underlying spoken forms. Fortunately, as we here have not drunk the Chomsky-Aid, we need not do such violence to our brains.

    But “viz” may actually be a slightly different issue: yod-coalescence is currently working its way through the (Brit RP) vocabulary (as described further on in my link) and has not yet reached all words, especially not hifalutin words like “visualisation.”

  24. There are, admittedly, examples of that even in quite colloquial registers (I think we discussed “soccer” in our usual exhaustive manner some time back.)
    Another one is mic, which I mentally pronounced “mick” for decades until I finally learnt that it actually is how the “mike” I heard pronounced on radio and TV was written.

  25. I haven’t seen “fridge” written as “frig” much though. And “perk” seems to be used rather than “perc” for “percolate” (to the extent that exists anymore) or “perq” for “perquisite”.

  26. Yeah, I’ve always found “mic” a deeply weird spelling.

  27. J.W. Brewer says

    It’s a free country, man. You can still spell it “mike” if you want to. It’s not even like persisting with Peking (or Peiping) instead of Beijing, because no well-resourced group of Communist fellow-travelers is gonna hassle you for it.

  28. J.W. Brewer says

    Re “fridge,” part of it (according to my nascent theory) is that word-final /dʒ/ is common and unremarkable in English. My “decoalescence” theory, which I hope has not led me into the pitfalls of Chomskyanism could perhaps be rephrased as:

    1. Word-final /ʒ/ (apart from the /dʒ/ cluster) is absent in English outside a fairly well-defined and close-to-closed set of loanwords.
    2. Ad hoc coinages/clippings don’t smoothly fit into that well-defined-set-of-loanwords exception. Thus,
    3. There is implicit pressure for coinages/clippings that initially seem to presuppose a word-final /ʒ/ to shift/resolve into some other word-final consonant or consonant cluster that is by contrast unremarkable in that position, with /z/ being (it seems to be) the obvious fallback for clipping things like “visual(i[s/z]ation),” which I do NOT poshly pronounce with an uncoalesced /zj/ between the first two vowels.

  29. I thought Ryan’s description of why “the uzhe” is not shorter than “the usual” for him was clear. Quite simply, “the uzhe” is a clipping of someone else’s pronunciation of “the usual”, not his own. And the vowel in “uzhe” is longer than his vowel in the first syllable of “usual”, which isn’t available for him in the one-syllable “uzhe”.

  30. David Eddyshaw says

    which I do NOT poshly pronounce with an uncoalesced /zj/ between the first two vowels

    Huh.
    Hang on a moment while I come up with another epicycle …

  31. I don’t believe I’ve seen ‘perq’ for perquisite, only ‘perk.’

    I’ve more or less got used to ‘mic’ — it seems clear that it originated as a label on amplifiers and suchlike for the socket you plug the microphone into, but then it somehow took over from the pre-existing ‘mike’ as an abbreviation for the word itself.

    Mic’ed and mic’ing are truly reprehensible, though.

  32. I don’t believe I’ve seen ‘perq’ for perquisite, only ‘perk.’

    Neither have I. I was comparing it to the nonexistent spelling “frig” for “fridge”.

    JWB, my comment on “fridge” was only about spelling. The clipping would be the same even if it were spelled “frig” to parallel “veg”. I wasn’t suggesting /frɪg/, though I suppose that would go along with “soccer” in some way.

  33. It’s JUŽ or YUŽ if you will.

    UŽE of course, means ‘rope’

  34. David Marjanović says

    If it became the fashion for some speakers to clip down “vision” to its first syllable, would it remain stable as /vɪʒ/ or would it naturally shift over to /vɪz/ once the prop of the following vowel was pulled away? The latter feels intuitively plausible to me, FWIW.

    Issue has already been clipped to ish in some British circles.

    (Others, close by, take pains to pronounce issue with unassimilated [sj].)

  35. A different weird is bicycle>bike

  36. marie-lucie says

    While learning English I had no problem remembering how to pronounce words like “vision” or “invasion”, but I have never been comfortable with pronouncing “equation” as if written “equasion” rather than like “education” and many more such. Not a word that I often need to utter, but why the oddity in pronouncing the math term?

  37. David Eddyshaw says

    A different weird is bicycle>bike

    I’m still working on that new epicike I mentioned at 7:47.

  38. J.W. Brewer says

    1. It is really so delightful to see marie-lucie popping up, regardless of context. And I apologize to her on behalf of my fellow anglophones/Rosbifs for our somewhat bizarre orthographic conventions. We only did it to confuse you enough to beat you at Agincourt.

    2. “Ish” as a clipping for “issue” is not a problem or an interesting example of anything, because it rhymes with fish/wish/dish etc. Word-final /∫/ is perfectly common/unremarkable in English but word-final /ʒ/ isn’t. That distinction is what is driving most of my comments in this thread.

  39. I think I would actually use /ʃ/ in equation when it means “action of equating”, but in the much more common mathematical meaning it has /ʒ/.

    It’s one of those arbitrary deviations that developed somehow, like pronouncing flaccid to rhyme with placid (no /k/), or the /dʒ/ sound in margarine.

  40. “Viz” may also be supported by related words like visible that don’t have the yod, maintaining the sense of a yod-less root in visualization. While usual has an etymological relation to the verb use, I dont think many people have an intuitive sense of that relationship.

  41. David Eddyshaw says

    Good point. And “usual” has no active associations with “use” except for lawyers and etymologists, I’d say.

  42. I’m still stuck back at the beginning where people are actually walking into coffee shops and asking for “the us’…” – to my ears that sounds incredibly affected, and could only be used in a jocular way. Or is this a Canadian thing?

  43. I have a friend called “Roger”. I’ve seen his name abbreviated as “Rog”, but I prefer to spell this as “Rodge”. Same as “fridge”. Don’t know about “veg”.

  44. I’m still stuck back at the beginning where people are actually walking into coffee shops and asking for “the us’…” – to my ears that sounds incredibly affected, and could only be used in a jocular way.

    This. It’s been an interesting theoretical discussion, but I can imagine saying a “hip” one-syllable version of usual on exactly the 12th of Never. However one spells it, it sounds to me like a twit. Of course, it’s also true that I’ve never frequented a coffee shop (or other drinking establishment) often enough for anyone to be familiar with my “usual,” so I’m unlikely to ever have the opportunity to try it out even if I wanted to.

  45. Back in Dickens’ time, we had “phiz” for “physiognomy”.

    And in the 1920s, it was

    It really doesn’t pay to be a gloomy pill
    It’s absolutely most ridic, positively sill
    The rain may pitter patter, it really doesn’t matter
    For life can be delish with a sunny disposish

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JO3MUJeDXzQ

    BTW, listen closely to the way they pronounce “absolutely” in that recording. Seems like there’s a yod in there. I think of that as an English thing, but the American stage in the early 20th century did follow English usage to some extent.

    I’m reminded of a practical joke I played once. At this job, there was a company cafeteria where we used to go for our coffee break. This one co-worker said that the cashier always said to him “the usual” whenever he paid for his coffee and bagel or whatever. One day there was a new cashier, so I told her “the second guy in line behind me, can you say the usual when he pays”. He comes over to the table, “I can’t believe it!”

  46. JWB, my comment on “fridge” was only about spelling. The clipping would be the same even if it were spelled “frig” to parallel “veg”.
    Wait, what? Are you saying that veg is pronounced “vedge” and this is another one that I have been mispronouncing for ages? I give up on English.

  47. Jen in Edinburgh says

    I’m with Ryan – ‘the usual’ in that context could come out as something like ‘hyizhl’, but ‘uzhe’ would have to have not only a long vowel but an actual ‘the’.

  48. Kate Bunting says

    ‘Veg’ is certainly pronounced ‘vedge’. I have seen ‘frig’, but very rarely.

    My father used to tell us how, when he was a small boy, they knew a family called Lewsley, and he thought the expression ‘I usually do’ was ‘I lewsley do’.

  49. I suggest that novel clippings are often affected and ostentatious to a degree that makes their utterance take longer than that of the unclipped original. Saving time isn’t the point.

  50. Jen in Edinburgh says

    I feel like I’ve seen ‘frig’ in books from when the name was pretty new. Although Angela Thirkell writes about a company called ‘Amalgamed Vedge’!

  51. David Eddyshaw says

    I dimly recall reading a novel many years ago in which a main character was called Rog.

  52. I’m still working on that new epicike I mentioned at 7:47.

    *epike

    But, actually, what is the history of different pronunciation of the -y- in /(ɛpɪ)saɪkəl/ vs. /baɪsɪkl/?

  53. J.W. Brewer says

    Here’s another example of the “fridge” pattern of clipping, i.e. where orthographic “g” in the unclipped form is replaced by orthographic word-final “dge” in the clipping in order to correctly cue the pronunciation as /dʒ/ not /g/. Rhymes with badge, not with bag. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/vadge

  54. J.W. Brewer says

    @prase: I think the answer is that the PRICE vowel does not like to manifest in an unstressed syllable, so when you take “cycle” (which has first syllable stress) and put it into a compound where the stress shifts off that syllable (which it does in bicycle but doesn’t in epicycle) the vowel shifts to one that is happy to be unstressed even though it need not be reduced all the way to a schwa.

  55. Wait, what? Are you saying that veg is pronounced “vedge” and this is another one that I have been mispronouncing for ages? I give up on English.

    I fear so. But you’re late to the party — everyone else gave up on English ages ago.

  56. Then there’s renege, which goes the opposite way, having /g/ even though the spelling clearly indicates /dʒ/.

  57. Yes, I’ve always been bothered by that spelling.

  58. Just checked the OED; the entry was updated in December 2009, and lists the following forms:

    α. 1500s–1600s reneage, 1500s–1600s reneague, 1500s– renege, 1600s reneag, 1600s reneg, 1600s reneigue, 1600s rinege, 1600s rinegue, 1600s– renegue (now nonstandard), 1700s– renig (U.S. regional and nonstandard); English regional (south-western) 1800s reneage, 1800s– reneeg, 1800s– reneg, 1800s– renegue; also Scottish 1900s– reneeg; Irish English 1800s reneague, 1800s– renegue.

    β. 1800s– renage (now nonstandard); English regional (south-western) 1800s– renage; also Scottish 1800s renaige, 1900s– renaig; Irish English 1800s ranague, 1800s– renague, 1900s– renage (northern), 1900s– renayge, 1900s– renaygue (northern).

    It’s odd to me that the entry makes no comment on the surviving spelling. Why would it win out over the clearer rinegue or renig?

  59. Robert Lane Green at The Economist in 2011 on “my plezh” and “the ushe” [sic].

  60. During the Civil War, the usual word in the North for supporters of the Confederate cause – soldiers, civilians, sympathizers, collaborators – was secesh, short for secessionist.

    “At Danville there are several secesh prisoners. Some of them are bridge burners who will most probably be shot.”

    “I seen dead secesh and Union men all lying together some tore to pieces by cannon balls and shells but most of the secesh was shot in the head by our rifles …”

    “[o]ur city [Columbus, Ohio] is turned over to ‘Secesh’ to such a degree as to make our streets and hotels more resemble Richmond than a loyal city of the Northwest.”

  61. J.W. Brewer says

    Lane Green’s thinking is interestingly contrary to my hypothesis; his hypothesis is that the very rarity of word-final /ʒ/ (when not part of /dʒ/) in normal English gives such clippings/coinages a novelty value or coolness factor that is attractive to the sort of Young People prone to innovate them, rather than (as I have been suggesting) motivating a change in the word-final consonant to something less weird.

  62. I dimly recall reading a novel many years ago in which a main character was called Rog.

    Kingsley Amis’s One Fat Englishman?

    (Not everyone called him that.)

  63. David Eddyshaw says

    I don’t think I’ve read it (so now I probably will …)

  64. It’s funny and very nasty (in various senses of the word).

  65. I just spent 2 minutes losing track of my zoom meeting while trying to figure out how you spell the present participle of to spec, derived from specification, and another word where the sibilant has been lost in the truncation.

  66. Thinking I had seen the name ‘Rodger’ [not the verb] in a long-forgotten context, I went to ‘wicky’ and found that it’s both a fore- and an aft-name!

  67. By the way, I thought that roger meant, not general sex, but buggery exclusively.

  68. David Eddyshaw says

    Not so.

  69. David Eddyshaw says

    to my ears that sounds incredibly affected

    That just shows that you’re not as hip as Gretch.

  70. Hans, Hat: You may find it interesting to learn that the English word “veg” has been borrowed by Quebec French…as a verb and an adjective, but not as a noun, unusually: /vɛd͡ʒe/ (a nice regular first conjugation verb: ʒvɛd͡ʒ t͡syvɛd͡ʒ ivɛd͡ʒ/avɛd͡ʒ…) has the meaning “to stand/sit around doing nothing” (with a negative connotation), and the adjective /vɛd͡ʒ/ has a comparable meaning: “inert, lazy”.

    Perhaps a thousand years hence historical linguists will use this verb of ours as a piece of evidence in support of the thesis that the Written English form VEG (which I suspect will be thought of much in the same way Sinologists today think of Chinese characters: I think John Cowan once made that comparison here at the Hattery) was originally realized as /vɛd͡ʒ/, not */vɛg/. Much in the same way that linguists today studying Latin loanwords in neighboring languages have been able to clarify, on the basis of the form of these loanwords, how (contemporary!) Latin must have been pronounced.

    Incidentally, I just recently learned that a scholar has show that Latin AE must have remained/been realized as a diphthong in Late Imperial/Early Republican Latin in North Africa: the crux of the demonstration? Some hitherto-unnoticed Latin loanwords in Berber. This genuinely surprised me, as no other neighboring language with Latin loanwords has preserved a distinct reflex of AE, and it failed to remain a separate phoneme in any Romance language (living or extinct) either.

  71. JWBrewer – now we’re talking.

    ‘U-jay-jay’?

  72. David Eddyshaw says

    How about the Germanic borrowing of Caesar? (It’s old enough that the Old English form is cāsere.)

  73. And on mollymooly’s point about ‘bike’ – I imagine that Ogden (“I’ve often thought that I would like To be the saddle on a bike”) Nash would have a thing or two to say about meddling with the abbreviations.

    “I’ve often thought it would be nice”?

  74. David Eddyshaw: Not the best (counter)-example, as the AE is a possible instance of written/learned influence.

  75. David Eddyshaw says

    The point of my citing the Old English was that the loan must predate the Old English sound change *ai -> a:.

    It seems unlikely to me that the (forbears of) the English were literate at that point. Did they learn the word from scholars (as opposed to soldiers)?

    Might not the Berbers also have learnt their words from similar scholars?

  76. Stu Clayton says

    It’s always Lizards or scholars.

  77. David Marjanović says

    I actually knew about veg (must have encountered it long after veggie), but it’s a good thing I’ve never had occasion to utter flaccid or renege.

    The word with the other vowel I’ve only seen spelled vaj, I think. (Or vajayjay, a term used more like hoo-hah.)

    I think the answer is that the PRICE vowel does not like to manifest in an unstressed syllable, so when you take “cycle” (which has first syllable stress) and put it into a compound where the stress shifts off that syllable (which it does in bicycle but doesn’t in epicycle) the vowel shifts to one that is happy to be unstressed even though it need not be reduced all the way to a schwa.

    This hypothesis is both strengthened and weakened by the currently usual pronunciations of finite and infinite.

    a diphthong in Late Imperial/Early Republican Latin

    If you mean “Late Republican/Early Imperial”, then sure. There’s even a piece of, IIRC archaizing, poetry from, IIRC, early in that period – unfortunately I forgot everything further, but it’s by someone famous – where materiae scans as māteriāī, with five syllables, the last two of them long.

    But if you mean Late Imperial, I would suspect a local innovation. Icelandic has turned its æ into [ai̯] (and its á, via a Mainland Scandinavian å, into [au̯]… also found in some environments in a dialect in Upper Austria that does the same with MHG a regardless of length, as opposed to the rounded monophthong preserved in the rest of Bavarian… oh, and Welsh has done it, too; *māros > Gaelic mór/mòr, Welsh mawr).

  78. David Eddyshaw: I understood the point of your quoting the Old English form, but however old the borrowing might be, its very semantic nature makes learned influence possible (do please note that it needn’t be direct learned influence: the word could have been acquired by Germanic speakers from illiterate Romance speakers who themselves in turn had acquired it from literate speakers).

    The two Romance words in Berber are reflexes of TAEDA (“pine (plank)”) and FAENUM (“hay”), both of which have plenty of non-learned reflexes in Romance and neither of which is semantically especially “learned” -indeed, both fit with the semantics of the Romance borrowed element of Berber, which contains a sizeable number of loans relating to farming (I sometimes suspect that it is a sign that Proto-Berber speakers were originally nomads located outside the Empire who, settling within, acquired farming/rural vocabulary from Romance-speaking farmers).

    David Marjanović: Yes, I meant “Late Republican/Early Imperial” (bangs head on desk repeatedly). Its existence in poetry needn’t mean that AE was ever part of colloquial speech, especially since Varro himself wrote that AE was variably realized as /e/ or /ai/ for at least some words, and thus it was possible that /ai/ was never more than an elite phonological feature which never found its way in the colloquial Latin spoken in the provinces, and I freely admit that I thought this was the likeliest scenario inasmuch as there is no trace of AE in Romance or (so I thought) borrowed Latin/Romance loanwords in neighboring languages. Well, the Berber evidence has changed my mind.

  79. David Marjanović says

    Etymologically, every* ae comes from *ai (of various lengths), and it’s actually spelled ai in the oldest few inscriptions, so /ai/ must have been part of colloquial speech at some point…

    * Well, with very few exceptions. The glaring one is glaesum ~ glēsum “amber”, borrowed from Proto-Germanic *glēzą, which must have had [ɛː] for Germanic-internal reasons.

  80. David Eddyshaw says

    @Etienne:

    So you are hypothesising that the monophthongisation of ae was resisted in some words in the Latin even of illiterate speakers? (This presumably means that the diphthong was confined to a certain rather small set of vocabulary items, effectively borrowed from Posh Latin, but I can think of parallels to that.)

    But then, if the Berber evidence suggests that the change was in any case not universal, with even unfancy words like “pine plank” and “hay” not showing it, I suppose the difficulty vanishes altogether in any case.

    It would be nice to have some confirmation that this cannot be some sort of intra-Berber diphthongisation phenomenon, though. Maybe Lameen will be able to say …

    I suppose it wouldn’t be particularly startling to suppose that the spoken Latin of the early empire cannot be simply identified with Proto-Romance, though. (After all, Welsh …)

  81. @J.W. Brewer: I think I have almost always seen the clipping of “vagina’ spelled “vag.” I wonder if their is a subcultural difference there.

    @Bloix: It’s interesting that secesh, although, as you say, it shows up all the time in Civil-War-Era letters and documents, has disappeared. As you undoubtedly know, the usual term now is another word that was also in contemporary usage, copperhead. Both were fairly slang-y nicknames in the 1860, and I briefly wondered whether there was a regional difference in usage that led to one surviving, but not the other. However, I think it’s actually more likely that secesh is so obviously a clipping, and thus automatically considered informal, that it was dropped from elite written discourse in later years.

    @Etienne: The noun veg and the identically spelled verb are etymologically distinct (although obviously cognate). The noun (uncommon in America; I don’t know about Anglophone Canada) is clipped from vegetable, but the verb is from vegetate. By a closely related metaphor, in I* “veg out” on the sofa watching television too much, I become a “couch potato.”

    * I couldn’t make this third example person, because I couldn’t get any suffixed version of “veg” to look right.

  82. David Marjanović says

    It would be nice to have some confirmation that this cannot be some sort of intra-Berber diphthongisation phenomenon, though.

    But if it is, that would still allow for the possibility that ae didn’t immediately merge with ē when it monophthongized. On first principles I’d expect it to become [æː] first, and to merge into [eː] later.

    Western Standard German has a very Classical-Latin-like vowel inventory, and it has an /æː/ that lacks a short counterpart.

  83. “couch potato” was coined in 1976 as a pun on the earlier “boob tuber”.

    IBM used to have a product called Visual Age for Java. It was shortened to an initialism rather than an acronym.

  84. David Eddyshaw says

    that would still allow for the possibility that ae didn’t immediately merge with ē when it monophthongized

    Berber languages do tend to distinguish more long vowels than short, often a lot more.

    So too, though to a lesser degree, with Proto-Western-Oti-Volta, probably largely because of monophthongisation of previous diphthongs, in fact. Kusaal has evened up the system a fair bit, largely via common processes which shorten former long vowels, but several of its short vowels are still restricted to just a few phonological contexts, and it’s not easy to find unequivocal contrasts even of short ɛ/ɪ or short ɔ/ʊ in identical contexts. There may originally have been a mere five vowels at the back of the current nine-vowel setup.

    Hausa has unproblematic long /a e i o u/, but short /e o/ are marginal and even the distinction of short /i/ from short /u/ is quite wobbly. But then Chadic languages in general feel that phonemic vowel contrasts are for the weak. Nobody really needs any of those fancy vowels other than /a/.

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    “couch potato” was coined in 1976 as a pun on the earlier “boob tuber”

    I Did Not Know That, but now see that it just has to be true, even if it isn’t.

  86. “flaccid” with no /k/? Do these people think the word is “flacid”, I wonder. After all, I’ve never heard the like in words such as “access”, “accident” or “accent”.

  87. @Etienne, was it
    Carles Múrcia, Contribution of Latinisms of Paleo-Amazigh to the knowledge of the history of both Latin and Amazigh languages here?

    I know tayda “pine”, but I didn’t know about hay.

  88. “Flaccid” sounds more flaccid without a /k/. Likewise “succinct” sounds more succinct.

  89. Consider: “For his most recent novel, the author got a lot of flacc from weakminded critics”. Pronounced “flass”, no one would understand it. Pronounced “flak”, everyone would understand it. Only on reading “flacc” might you get the joke, flaccid as it is.

    It’s an eye joke, not an ear one.

    Also, “the uzhe” sounds yuppie-pretentious to me as well. But it’s an ear joke at most. To fret about the spelling is to flood the carburetor. The word should never be written. Then discussions about it need never be push-started.

    To increase your footprint, speak so that it can easily be read.

  90. I have heard there are people who say “suggest” without a /g/.

  91. I’ve heard that; I may even have said it. It’s an easy simplification to make. The only reason I say “flaccid” with a /k/ is that I learned it from dictionaries before I ever heard it said.

  92. Stu Clayton says

    I say “flaccid” with a /k/

    !! I wonder why I don’t. Maybe I drew a youthful analogy with “acid”. I doubt that in soon-to-be-74 years I have ever heard the word uttered. If I had, I would have registered shock followed by peeve.

  93. /g/-less “suggest” is the standard UK and Irish pronunciation. It matches Latin/Italian exaggerate/arpeggio. Is there any other word with gg = /gdʒ/?

  94. David Eddyshaw says

    It is remarkable news to me that anyone at all says “suggest” with /gdʒ/. Presumably this is a US thing.

  95. Multiple dictionaries agree that suggest in AmE may be with or without /g/, both standard. From the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary: “AmE 1993 poll panel preference: with g 77%, without g 23%.” This is also on Wikipedia’s list of American and British English pronunciation differences.

    I wonder if the pronunciation with /g/ is an innovation, historically? The Century Dictionary (American, 1895) gives only the pronunciation without /g/.

    Both ways sound normal and unremarkable to me.

  96. I thought we had discussed suggest in relation to Khashoggi (with /gdʒ/) at some point, but I can’t find it now.

  97. David Eddyshaw says

    We discussed Khashoggi here:

    https://languagehat.com/khashoggi/

    As you say, there seems to be no mention of the pronunciation of “suggest.”

  98. @Brett: To me, “Copperhead” means specifically a Northern sympathizer with Southern secession.

  99. Clearly that was one of those Language Hat discussions that I only dreamed.

  100. Google to the rescue: the previous thread with extensive discussion of Br/Am suggest, with Keith Ivey involved, was SHIGUDO in 2018. But Khashoggi wasn’t mentioned there.

  101. @Rodger C: Yes, that’s right. Secesh is more general. Bloix’s examples showed that secesh was used both for copperheads and Confederates. I guess I fixated too much on thr former, probably influenced by Civil-War-era letters I’ve read that referred to copperheads as “secesh.” However, whatever its specific referent, my suspicion about why secesh did not survive remains.

  102. Drasvi: Yes, that is indeed the article I was talking about. For a more complete listing of Latinisms in Berber, see pages 6-10 of this introduction to the same author’s (with co-author Salem Zenia) Berber-Catalan-Berber dictionary:

    http://www.amazic.cat/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2.-Lestratificaci%C3%B3-del-l%C3%A8xic-amazic.pdf

    David Eddyshaw: your scenario involving monophthongization being resisted by some speakers is possible, but another possibility is that the diphthong was wholly lost and subsequently reintroduced as an element of some new (bookish) words into Late Latin/Early Romance (LLPR) -the name “Caesar” is found in the New Testament, after all (cf. Reddite Caesari quae sunt Caesaris).

    Please bear in mind that a diphthong /ai/ had in fact been created earlier (i.e. before the alleged introduction of words with learned /ai/ for Classical AE) in LLPR as a result of the loss of intervocalic /g/ followed by a front vowel: For example, Classical MAGIS turned into */mais/ everywhere.

    Now, because its reflexes in many Romance varieties are quite distinct from those of Classical Latin AE (Italian has MAI from MAGIS, versus CIELO from CAELUM, for instance: incidentally, this last word indicates that the reduction from AE to mid-high or mid-low E must have taken place before the palatalization of velars before front vowels, which, tellingly, is nearly pan-Romance), it is assumed that AE was monophthongized before intervocalic /g/ (+ front vowel) was lost (Otherwise MAGIS would have lost its /g/ and then been reduced to */mes/).

    (Irritatingly enough, many scholarly works on Romance historical linguistics do not make it clear, when they refer to -for instance- /ai/, whether they refer to the Classical Latin diphthong represented by AE or to the LLPR new diphthong due to the loss of intervocalic /g/ + front vowel).

    To speakers of LLPR, who thus had /ai/ in their phonological repertoire (but never as a reflex of Classical AE), a newly-introduced word such as /kaisar(e)/ (perhaps as an element from Biblical vocabulary, see above) would be unproblematic, phonologically, and thus they could have acquired this form of the word and transmitted it to Germanic speakers.

  103. David Eddyshaw says

    Please bear in mind that a diphthong /ai/ had in fact been created earlier

    Good point.

  104. David Marjanović says

    “couch potato” was coined in 1976 as a pun on the earlier “boob tuber”.

    When I saw that, I was enlightened.

    “flaccid” with no /k/? Do these people think the word is “flacid”, I wonder.

    BTW, there’s one German word like this: Saccharin, pronounced by ignoring the first c – though there the reason must be that the sequence /kx/ is otherwise completely absent from all but Considerably-Higher-Than-Standard German.

    I’ve heard suggest both ways from native speakers. And also with /gʒ/, but probably not from native speakers.

    To me, “Copperhead” means specifically a Northern sympathizer with Southern secession.

    I thought that was “doughface”?

  105. @Etienne, thank you! Nice to see Catalan.

    So afaynu
    – first appears in dictionaries in here,
    – the author asked around, and people in Central and Western High Atlas too say they know it in the meaning “hay”.
    I don’t have access to the paper, but that’s what google says….

  106. David Marjanović says

    Not that it says anything terribly specific about ae or about caesar, but there are Latin loans in Germanic that were borrowed right at first contact.

    Within Germanic, “cooking” and “kitchen” are derived from the noun “cook”, borrowed for the exotic concept of a man who cooks. In Classical form, the Latin original is coquus; but, like equus, it must have undergone a development coquos > cocus > coquus by a sound change followed by analogical leveling. Ecus is attested from the reign of Augustus, or so I’ve read; equos is attested from earlier times. (I think cocus is attested, too; I don’t know about coquos.) There doesn’t seem to be any trace of *kʷ on the Germanic side, only *k.

    This dating is supported by the inference that “kitchen” must have been borrowed before the time of Proto-Northwest-Germanic (in the narrow sense that excludes Gutnish). That is shown by its *u instead of *o. PGmc lacked a short *o; by PNWGmc times, not only had *u…a turned into *o…a, but *o had been phonemicized by massive (and messy) paradigmatic analogy. Kitchen is from cocīna (> coquīna), with its /o/ replaced by *u, evidently because *[o…i] was not yet available. (The cook himself may likewise have been borrowed as *kukaz and regularly developed into a PNWGmc *kokaz.)

    So, yes, Caesar could have been borrowed through a fancy spelling-pronunciation of the Bible; but nothing seems to preclude the hypothesis that the word was borrowed when the man himself crossed the Rhine and spoke of himself in the third person.

  107. I was comparing it to the nonexistent spelling “frig” for “fridge”.

    In point of fact, Gale wrote frig in informal contexts like notes until I pointed out to her the regrettable misreading it could give rise to.

  108. afaynu appears twice on the Internet: in a poem, whose author comes from this extremely geometrical place, and as a name of a user who cites another poem…

  109. Andrew Dunbar says

    I haven’t heard this used yet but I might suggest “usu.” which is as non-phonetic as English generally likes to be and is already an abbreviation for “usually” if not “usual” as used I think, in dictionaries.

  110. mollymooly: /g/-less “suggest” is the standard UK and Irish pronunciation. It matches Latin/Italian exaggerate/arpeggio.

    Wiktionary has a List of English words where G is pronounced exceptionally. Besides those two, the only other examples of -gg- pronounced /dʒ/ are the above-mentioned veggie; the very specialized agger ‘earthwork, mound, or embankment’ (from the same Latin source word seen in exaggerate, meaning ‘heap’); and other borrowings from Italian such as loggia.

    Is there any other word with gg = /gdʒ/?

    According to that Wiktionary list, no.

  111. So, yes, Caesar could have been borrowed through a fancy spelling-pronunciation of the Bible; but nothing seems to preclude the hypothesis that the word was borrowed when the man himself crossed the Rhine and spoke of himself in the third person.
    Maybe that’s a tad early, but already a few decades later we have evidence for Germanic people serving as Roman soldiers / mercenaries (Arminius is an example), where they surely became acquainted with the title.

  112. As an exercise, how would you abbreviate “leisure”, and “pleasure” (if you were the sort* to do so?) My immediate reaction would be leezh and plezh.

    * There’s probably an apt British slang term to be used here.

  113. David Eddyshaw says

    /lɛʒ/, /plɛʒ/. (Obvs.)

  114. Sorry. Of course. The corresponding BrE spellings would be 𝔩𝖊𝖟𝔥 and 𝔭𝔩𝖊𝖟𝔥.

  115. Concerning Latin /ai/: There’s the Germanic word for ‘spear’ (or actually I think ‘javelin’) that’s borrowed early on as gaesum but later appears in borrowed proper names as e.g. Radagaisus.

  116. David Marjanović says

    …and by looking up this fella, I just learned it’s also the gar- in garlic.

  117. What does Rada- mean?

    P.S. I haven’t seen the Hobbit, but WP tells that there is more Radagast in the film than in the book. Whihc is good. And on the picture he is portrayed in ushanka. Which is unexpected.

    I of course compared Slavic Radogost to Radagast.

  118. @drasvi: Less Radagast than in the proper text of The Hobbit would be none at all. Gandalf mentions him as a “cousin” known to Beorn, by way of introducing himself; and that’s it.

  119. Yes. But it is a good idea to add him, and it is good from exactly literalist perspective (perhaps literal with respect to the world rather than the text). I totally liked the idea that there are several more such excentric types as Gandalf.

  120. That’s a take.

  121. @drasvi: I didn’t get that far into the first film before I couldn’t take any more, but it was enough to convince me that, however it might sound in theory, in practice more Radagast was not a good idea at all.

  122. David Marjanović, Hans: Yes, it is POSSIBLE that Caesar’s name was borrowed back in Roman Imperial times…but I find it “mighty suspicious” (I learned the phrase in the American South, so do please realize the first syllable of “mighty” with a nice long /a:/, and the second with a weak schwa) that there are no known reflexes of the names of any other Roman generals of the same era who would have been more notorious (from Para- + Proto-Germanic speakers’ point of view) than Caesar: why no reflex of (say) Varus, for example? (I can see it already…Proto-Germanic *WARAZ, from Latin VARUS: “inept general, bloodthirsty fool, well-connected incompetent aristocrat”.)

    I stand by my borrowing scenario (the one I gave upthread) as the likeliest, given our current state of knowledge. Meaning that the discovery that two Latin loanwords in Berber preserve distinct reflexes of Latin AE definitely deserves historical linguists’ full attention.

    Incidentally, it occurred to me yesterday that this discovery means that the current “consensus” involving the history of *any* language family is probably MUCH more fragile than is realized by most specialists: Several handbooks of Romance linguistics confidently state that AE was lost at such an early date (i.e. before the expansion of Latin) that this is why no trace of it remains in any Romance variety (living or extinct) or in any language in contact with spoken Latin. It now turns out that said handbooks were wrong. If it remains possible for new data to cause significant revisions of the accepted history of Latin/Romance, then frankly, considering how over-studied Latin/Romance has been compared to most other families, well, the only conclusion can be that the scholarly consensus regarding the history of just about all of the world’s language families should be taken…CUM GRANO SALIS, to use Caesar and Varus’ language (Yes, I know neither of them would have understood the expression).

  123. that there are no known reflexes of the names of any other Roman generals of the same era who would have been more notorious (from Para- + Proto-Germanic speakers’ point of view) than Caesar: why no reflex of (say) Varus, for example?
    Most probably because Caesar wasn’t just some general’s name, but a cognomen and title used by the emperors and by commanders from the imperial family like Tiberius, Drusus or Germanicus, as well as all later emperors, so generally by people who would be the highest-in-command in the armies Germanic soldiers fought with.

  124. I don’t have a theory on when Germanic speakers seized on their Latinate term for king, but I don’t think the lack of surviving Germanic terms based on the names of other Roman generals who didn’t take power in the empire and give their names to a 400-year succession of autocrats is very telling.

    They took the word to mean ruler, not mean-spirited attacker. An early-adopted Germanic kaiser-word would have been reinforced for centuries.

    But Hans put this better – Germanic soldiers would have literally referred to their ruler as Caesar during those centuries. The situation almost required that they adopt the word into their languages.

    How long did proto-Romance continue to use a Caesar word? Is it extant anywhere today other than as a name?

  125. the current “consensus” involving the history of *any* language family is probably MUCH more fragile than is realized by most specialists

    Hear, hear!

    There’s always something that comes up that upends the reconstruction, not coincidentally from a geographically marginal and often poorly-attested language.

  126. Going upthread, lots of people are claiming that they’ve never seen “frig” for “fridge”, and I suppose they haven’t, but they’re wrong to claim that it’s nonexistent just because they, personally, haven’t seen it.

    *I* have seen it a lot, in particular on a homeschooling forum I frequent. It actually frustrates me no end because I read “frig” and think of something that I’m sure none of them are saying on that board.

  127. Hans, but isn’t your proposed explanation of why German borrowed Caesar with the meaning of “ruler” would lead to changes in phonology in parallel with late Vulgar Latin despite early contacts?

  128. David Marjanović says

    Yes, I don’t actually think Gaius Iulius Caesar was the original referent of the borrowing; more likely it was borrowed as the title of the Roman ruler, its attested meaning – although, given the amount of interaction around the time of Arminius, the original person who bore that title may well have been Gaius Iulius Caesar Octavianus Augustus.

    The Romans in the Gothic Bible are Rumoneis; vowel-wise that must be a much earlier borrowing than Christianity. (There’s reportedly some Norse saga, too, where Rome shows up as Rumaborg.) It pretty much has to predate the Empire in fact, if Caesar’s Bacenis silva is a Germanic beech forest and it’s *ō wasn’t rounded yet.

    Several handbooks of Romance linguistics confidently state that AE was lost at such an early date (i.e. before the expansion of Latin) that this is why no trace of it remains in any Romance variety (living or extinct) or in any language in contact with spoken Latin. It now turns out that said handbooks were wrong.

    Yeah, that happens. Several such works on Germanic state that vowel + nasal + /x/ (as in brought, thought) had already become long oral vowel + /x/ by Proto-Germanic. Not only did the First Grammatical Treatise explicitly say these long vowels were nasal in mid-12th-century Old Icelandic, but they’re still nasal in Älvdalen en Suède profonde.

    Or check out Johan Schalin’s very theory-heavy work on ResearchGate. It has long been thought, and is argued for e.g. in Ringe’s book on the origin of Proto-Germanic, that PIE *e and *i underwent complete merger in unstressed PGmc syllables. Schalin has shown in the last four years that this was only complete outside the stressed foot, and this explains all the profound mysteries of umlaut and its occasional absence in North Germanic (and, though he didn’t go there, West Germanic as well).

    But, hey, it’s only science. Metaphysical certainty is not available.

  129. David Marjanović says

    It pretty much has to predate the Empire in fact, if Caesar’s Bacenis silva is a Germanic beech forest and it’s *ō wasn’t rounded yet.

    That’s the wrong side of the explanation. I don’t know if there’s any *ō in Tacitus, but if it showed up there as a, that would be widely known, and the phoneme was common enough it should occur in names Tacitus mentioned…

  130. @Ryan:

    How long did proto-Romance continue to use a Caesar word? Is it extant anywhere today other than as a name?

    Well, it’s still extant in Spanish, at least in some frozen expressions. Matthew 22:21 is usually rendered “al César lo que es del César”, with the definite article indicating it’s a title rather than a proper name in this context.

    While I can’t recall ever hearing it being used in actual speech, there seems to be decent evidence of uninterrupted usage: it’s in Lope, Cervantes, Bolaños, de Falla and many others. They all seem rather learnèd sources, though.

  131. Hans, but isn’t your proposed explanation of why German borrowed Caesar with the meaning of “ruler” would lead to changes in phonology in parallel with late Vulgar Latin despite early contacts?
    I don’t know whether I understand your question correctly, but the view I support is that when Germanic loaned the word, around the turn from BC to AD or early in the 1st century AD, Latin ae was still a diphthong at least in the variety of Latin the Germanic people were in contact with; that diphthong then underwent the developments of /ai/ in Germanic (e.g. to /a:/ in Old English); the monophthongisation in Romance must have happened after that, or, if it started earlier, reached the varieties Germanic loaned from only after the loaning.

  132. @David Marjanović: I suspect that Augustus* is too early. The borrowing of caesar as a title probably had to happen after it was firmly established as a title, not just a name. That is not definite until the reign of Claudius, who was never adopted in the gens Julia, and I suspect the borrowing happened even significantly later than that, when caesar had become simply synonymous with emperor. I don’t think we really know when Roman soldiers on campaign began consistently referring to their imperator as “caesar” in their demotic Latin. So it’s possible it happened during the reign of Augustus; I just happen to doubt it.

    * And, incidentally, I believe there is no record of him ever using “Octavianus” as part of his name. It would, of course, be usual for an adoptee to take his original nomen as a cognomen that way, but it appears that Augustus never did.

  133. ” I totally liked the idea that there are several more such excentric types as Gandalf.”

    I mean, when I was reading LotR.

    @Ben, thank you.

    I haven’t seen it (I am just slooowwww, I haven’t even seen Star Wars…), but despite overwhelming popularity of Tolkien here, my freinds don’t seem to hate the films. I can say for myself that I think it is very good that someone attempted this adaptation. And it is very difficult to make it well. Maybe my friends are similarly forgiving.

  134. Another one is mic, which I mentally pronounced “mick” for decades until I finally learnt that it actually is how the “mike” I heard pronounced on radio and TV was written.

    This reminds me of something I’ve been wondering in the back of my mind for a while…

    There is a languagehat commenter with the visual name of “maidhc”, who in fact has commented in this very thread. For a long time, I thought of the name as “maid-h-c”, until if dawned on me that it might be the name “Mike” written using Irish orthography.

    Of course, I don’t actually know Irish orthography; I just have a sense of what it often looks like. And maybe it’s actually “Mick” rather than “Mike”?

    Anyway, I leave to actual Gaelicists to confirm or correct my notion.

  135. Hans, somewhat in line with what Brett says, if Caesar was borrowed early (BC/AD), there was no reason for it to acquire the meaning of a generic ruler. Germans were familiar with G.I. Caesar as a general and might have borrowed it early as a name. What you are essentially proposing is that either a) the borrowed word changed its meaning in German independently of what transpired with Latin or b) that the meaning of already borrowed German Caesar has changed under the influence of Roman usage, but phonetics remained unchanged. Is either of those likely?

  136. Simeon the Great of Bulgaria took (what is now transcribed as) the title tsar in the early tenth century, the first Slavic prince known to have done so. I don’t know what form his title actually took at the time, but it might shed some light on the post-Roman historical development, since the word is supposed to have reached Slavic through Germanic.

  137. Indeed, why is Proto-Slavic cěsařь deemed to be a borrowing from a Germanic language and not from Late Latin?

  138. For what it’s worth, I’m still seeing this post’s title in the Recent Comments list and pronouncing it in my head as “the oozh”. I don’t think I’m just being stubborn, though we’re not always the masters of our own minds. I think the spelling uzhe doesn’t suggest yoozh to most readers of English.

    Of course, I hate everything about the word – its spelling, its pronunciation, the fact that it exists. So it’s very possible my bias is affecting my pronunciation.

  139. Just thought of another name that ends with /dʒ/: “Reg”. As in Reg Smythe, cartoonist of Andy Capp, recently discussed elsewhere.

    Owlmirror: Yes, as in “Péigín Maidhc” in The Playboy of the Western World. An appellation that only my mother has ever used. Too bad I was never the sort of person who would be called “Spike”.

  140. Yes, as in “Péigín Maidhc”

    Thanks for confirming that — I’d been reading it “Mike” all along, but always with a niggling doubt.

  141. David Marjanović says

    Text message from Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) to Mark Meadows, � in the source I copied it from:

    Dick Morris is saying State Leg can intervene and declare Trump winner.�NC, PA, MI, WI all have GOP Leg. �

    Legislature.

  142. David Marjanović says

    Indeed, why is Proto-Slavic *cěsařь deemed to be a borrowing from a Germanic language and not from Late Latin?

    Probably because *kai > *kě > *cě is a native development (of which the last step never happened in Novgorod). In a direct borrowing from Early Romance I’d expect… well, in a borrowing from something Romanian-like I’d expect **čez-, and in a borrowing from something more like Vegliot **kez- might even have survived (though on the other hand I don’t know if *ě would be expected in that case).

  143. @Brett, D.O: I’m not fixated on a date. I think it’s probable that the cognomen became a form to address leading members of the imperial family relatively early (which would be one reason why later emperors not related to Caesar adopted it), and I think it played a role fir the loaning into Germanic that three successful leaders of campaigns in Germania (Drusus, Tiberius, Germanicus) bore that cognomen, but I can live as well with the Germanic people having loaned the title later, when it clearly had stopped being part of a family name, i.e. in the 2nd half of the 1st century. (That it had become a title can be seen in the NT use of Καίσαρ in Mark XII.17). That would just shift the date post quem for the monophthongisation of “ae”. What I find unlikely is Etienne’s proposal that the title was loaned only under influence of Christianity.

  144. State Leg (Legislature)

    That’s just a nonce clipping in a text message. “Texas Lege”, with that spelling and pronounced as “ledge”, is widely used in Texas and goes back decades. Molly Ivins popularized the phrase to a wider audience, but I don’t think she claimed to coin it. “State lege” is sometimes seen in other states as well.

  145. @ktschwarz: I’ve seen both “State Leg” and “State Lege” a fair amount, although I would only use the latter spelling myself (if I were transcribing someone else’s speech). Moreover, if the three-letter spelling “Leg” appears, then it has to be capitalized; without the capital, I unavoidably read it as the body part. (I wonder if anyone else has the same response.)

  146. Jan Bobrowicz says

    In the UK (and the cricketing nations), ‘legend’ is shortened to ‘ledge’, e.g. “Jimmy Anderson. What an absolute ledge.”

  147. Thanks for that; I don’t think I could have guessed what “ledge” meant in such a sentence. (I probably would have assumed it was an insult.)

  148. Pity we use ‘ and . to denote elision and truncation. A single bespoke symbol could do both. They_re leg_s _cause they eat their veg_s.

  149. Whether we use a comma, or an underline, or whatever, what about added sounds? /ˈvɛd͡ʒɪz/ added -s version of veg, short for vegetable or vegetate, doesn’t just have sounds (and thus letters) removed, but also the added /ɪ/ in the plural ending.

    Interesting to contemplate that one style for written abbreviations, if applied here, would have “veg.” (with a period, to show the ending removed) but “vegs” (no period, because the middle is removed, not the end). Of course, there’s a difference between a written abbreviation, and writing down a spoken abbreviation.

  150. I think I’d have to write “veges” for the plural — there’s no way “vegs” could be read as two syllables.

  151. Isn’t it veggies?

  152. Yes, “veges”. As with other words ending in sibilants, you have to add “es”, not just “s” (unless there’s already a silent “e”).

  153. PlasticPaddy says

    For me veg is its own plural (i.e , is not count noun) and veggies is a plural of a diminutive veg+ie, which does not occur in the singular.

  154. The OED says veggies is “colloquial (chiefly North American, Australian, and New Zealand)”—so likely all varieties of English except those of the British Isles—meaning “A vegetable; a plant grown for or used as food. Usually in plural.” The OED entry says it was updated in 2012, but it has no cites older than 1912 (British Punch) and no actual non-British cites until 1976. The two earlier, British attestations use the spelling “vegies,” which looks manifestly ill-formed to me, since the first vowel is short.

  155. In both spelling and pronunciation, no veggies is not a plural of veg. Veggies is a shorting of the plural vegetables, using the diminutive.

    As far as veg being it’s own plural, yes, okay (though it seems like some people have it with a plural form?) but it’s also a verb which would have the added /ɪz/ in the 3rd person singular.

  156. David M: Within Germanic, “cooking” and “kitchen” are derived from the noun “cook”, borrowed [from Latin] for the exotic concept of a man who cooks.

    The noun for ‘a cook’ in Hungarian, szakács, is also an old borrowing, according to Wiktionary:

    Probably a loanword, perhaps from Russian. Compare Russian (Church Slavonic) sokačь (chef) which, presumably, is also a loanword in Russian; based on the ending it could originate from a Turkic language. The Hungarian szakács may be an old borrowing, before the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin.

    However, that word is obsolete in Russian and its origin is not well studied; this Wordreference.com forum thread observes that “since it has no descendants in the modern East Slavic languages, it is absent in Vasmer’s dictionary as well.”

    Meanwhile, Hungarian has a native Uralic verb főz for ‘to cook’, plus konyha for ‘kitchen’ borrowed via some Slavic language from Germanic, with the second /k/ in Latin cocīna weakened and lost along the way. A trifecta of totally unrelated etymologies for semantically closely related words!

  157. The Hungarian etymological dictionary I consulted when annotating my Hun-Eng dictionary a few decades ago apparently called szakács a Wanderwort.

  158. David Eddyshaw says

    Meeussen’s Proto-Bantu reconstructions include *-dùg- “cook”, which looks astonishingly like Kusaal dʋg, Nawdm duug- “cook” (the tone correspondence is correct, too.) I think it may be too good to be true, though: the etymon doesn’t seem to occur in most of Oti-Volta, nor indeed have I found an actual example in a live Bantu language. MInd you, I’ve no doubt that the speakers of Proto-Volta-Congo could cook …

  159. David Marjanović says

    with the second /k/ in Latin cocīna weakened and lost along the way

    Isn’t it the h, metathesized?

  160. it is absent in Vasmer’s dictionary as well

    But сокал “поварня” is in Vasmer here. The reference to Miklosich EW p. 313 that Vasmer gives is here (s.v. sokŭ ‘juice, sap’).

  161. The attested Slavonic form is сокачии, so the suffix in question is https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Turkic/-či

  162. -čij (also -čej) ) was common enough, but not only with Turkic stems.

    A similar Turkic formation is desirable for Turkic etymology (also is the development “butcher > cook” common for Turkic? And what about -a-, Is -ači expected?)

  163. Isn’t it the h, metathesized? … oh, I didn’t think of that.

  164. One more kitchen thought to be metathesised is Irish cistin (but I don’t know if it counts if it was an affricate in OE).

  165. I have to reject uzhe as a spelling: English words (as opposed to borrowed proper names and phonetic respellings) don’t have zh for /ʒ/. Uge is ambiguous between judʒ/ (i.e. h-less huge a la NYC), usually written yuge and /juʒ/, but I think it’s still the best we can do.

  166. unfancy words like “pine plank”

    The object is unfancy, yes, but both words are borrowings in English. Indeed, the latter is part of the quadruplet plank, planchet, phalanx, phalange.

  167. Just seen in a current food magazine: nutritional yeast is “nooch” to the in-crowd.

    If it became the fashion for some speakers to clip down “vision” to its first syllable

    In Marvel comics, a character named the Vision was nicknamed “Vizh” since the 1960s-70s, although for some reason this didn’t cross over to the movies and TV.

  168. (as opposed to borrowed proper names and phonetic respellings)

    There is zhuzh.

  169. In other words English speakers don’t recongise usual-use as an alternation anymore, at least when coining short forms.
    One could expect “the use” etc.

  170. there’s not much consistency in spelling /ʒ/ in english, but it is fairly common at the end of clipped words. i like “zh” for it, myself, so (for instance) i tend to prefer “bouzhy” rather than the more usual “boujie / boojie” – which i think is probably influenced by “banji / banjee”.

  171. Every time “The Uzhe” pops up on commented-on posts, I think for a moment that it’s about some Caucasian tribe.

  172. January First-of-May says

    Every time “The Uzhe” pops up on commented-on posts, I think for a moment that it’s about some Caucasian tribe.

    I think for several moments that it’s about the Russian word for “already”. But that one at least is mentioned in the OP.

    Maybe someone should propose some kind of fancy philosophical concept that can sensibly borrow its name from that word…

  173. The names of phancy philosophical concepts are generally hard to pronounce, not hard to spell.

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