The Economist’s excellent Johnson column recently covered an important subject [back in 2018]: Women’s voices are judged more harshly than men’s (archived). It begins:
“In a World…”, a film from 2013, is about, of all things, the voice-over industry—specifically, the warm, masculine voices that lend a ponderous authority to film trailers and advertisements. Lake Bell, an actor, plays the daughter of a legendary voice-over man; she wants to break into the industry herself, but faces sexism at every turn. Ms Bell has a rich and deep voice of her own, but she is also a gifted mimic. A bubbly young woman with a squeaky high voice stops to ask her: “Do you know where I can get a smoothie around here?” Ms Bell expertly mimics her tone in reply.
The scene highlights two vocal features associated with young women: vocal fry and uptalk. Uptalk, as the name suggests, is the rising intonation that makes statements sound like questions? And vocal fry—often said to be typical of Kim Kardashian, an American celebrity—happens at the ends of words and phrases when a speaker’s vocal chords relax, giving the voice a kind of creaky quality (a bit like something frying in a pan).
From these descriptions, an alien observer would be bemused to learn that these harmless phenomena drive some people to scorn, or even anger. But they do. When Christine Blasey Ford testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, had sexually assaulted her, some viewers were so infuriated by her speaking style that they denounced it on Twitter: “Christine Blasey Ford’s little girl voice…vocal fry, and uptalk worse than clubbed toenails down a chalkboard.”
After providing more background and explanation, it concludes:
There is no escaping the fact that some voices sound more pleasing than others. And there is no quick way around society’s belief that deep voices convey authority; men have been more powerful than women for all of known history. It may be good practical advice to tell women who want to get into the voice-over industry—or indeed others that have been historically dominated by men—to use firm and deep voices if they want to impress. They might also take care to avoid the distraction of vocal fry, while simultaneously ensuring that they don’t sound too mannish. Women, in other words, are required to walk a thin line when they speak in public, a no-room-for-error performance never expected of men.
There’s nothing new here for anyone who’s been paying attention, but the prejudice is so deeply rooted that occasional reminders are a good idea; even I, who have been aware of it for years, still have to battle an instinctive recoil from particularly “girly” voices on the radio or TV. ¡La lucha continúa!
The comments about Christine Blasey Ford would have been motivated by pure misogyny: I doubt if the people responsible could even reliably identify vocal fry and/or uptalk. They would have settled for any modish topical hook for denigrating a woman, regardless of any actual facts. People of that kind are not interested in facts at all, particularly the kind of fact that you can learn only from taking an actual interest in other people as human beings. (I predict that they would also have criticised her physical appearance.)
There is, I think, a very definite limit to the extent to which women could avoid sexist bigotry by changing the way they talk. It is not in reality the way that they talk that the bastards are objecting to: that is a mere pretext to cover for the fact that they hate women for being real women at all (as opposed to fantasy creations of “ideal women” of the kind that appeal to such pond life.)
Well, yes: this isn’t, or shouldn’t be, about women having to change the way they talk but about getting men to confront the issue and do what they can to mitigate the problem. (Compare the issue of women dressing in too “sexy” a manner and being told they were “asking for it.”) Needless to say, the occasional newspaper column or blog post is a drop in the ocean, but every-little-bit-helps and one-does-what-one-can.
A friend of mine consciously lowers the pitch of his voice a notch because it’s more attractive to females. It seems to work.
there is no quick way around society’s belief that deep voices convey authority;
What is it about the vocal quality of Trump’s or Boris’s ‘style’ (if that’s the word) that conveys every word is a lie? And that they’re not to be trusted with anything? And yet people kept voting for them.
IOW I’m finding “convey authority” to be utter bollox.
Paul Robeson sounded pretty authoritative, but that may have just been him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Kxq9uFDes
(My daughter loves to sing along with this, but she does have some difficulty doing the basso profondo.)
Association. You’ve learnt to associate Trump’s near-singing (apparently that’s what sermons sound like in some denominations) and Johnson’s “oh, don’t mind me, I’m just the class clown” with “not intended as a factual statement”.
During my youth, I had a corporate mentor who recorded me giving presentations, subject to post-analysis, partly to help me develop a speaking voice. Most people would benefit from such training. Having a voice like Richard Burton’s is certainly an advantage but with practice, even my calming baritone voice works out somehow. Hell, probably Richard Burton had training as well.
And a bit of anecdata, but the last time I was in a mostly female work group, with a female boss, I was mildly surprised that, by far, most of the judgments about female colleagues (what they wore, their speaking styles) were by the women.
Association.
I believe these days ” a rich and deep voice” has been over-used so much that it’s now ipso facto associated with fakery. Advertisers prefer regional accents or authentic ‘local’ voices (certainly in NZ/Aus) over plummy Brit accents.
My own bias is: if your offering is so good, why do you bring an actor to promote it rather than use your honest-to-goodness own belief? An actor who might just as well be promoting dog food or vitamin pills for the pay.
Who’d trust Mitch McConnell over AOC with her uptalk?
I was mildly surprised that, by far, most of the judgments about female colleagues (what they wore, their speaking styles) were by the women.
I’m not surprised. Sadly, women are frequently zealous enforcers of sexist standards (cf. Chinese women and foot-binding in the bad old days). Of course, this leads to men comfortably saying “See? Can’t be sexist, it’s the women who want it that way!”
Recentness is in the eye of the beholder perhaps, but I’m trying to reconcile your “recently covered” statement with the fact that the linked column appears from internal evidence to correspond with the 10/4/18 hard-cover issue.
For other recent coverage why not try this 2015 piece which contrary to the headline only devotes a minority of column-inches to Hillary Clinton’s speech and reactions thereto but more space to comparing and contrasting the speaking voices of various male politicians who were at the time thought to be contenders for the 2016 GOP nomination and how they might be perceived and what they might mean. (August authorities like Mark Liberman and Geoff Nunberg are quoted.) Bernie Sanders’ accent goes unmentioned; perhaps the assumption as of that point in 2015 was that Clinton already had a lock on the Democratic nomination. And Donald Trump’s speech likewise goes unmentioned, as this was a few months before he launched his candidacy. https://newrepublic.com/article/121643/why-do-so-many-people-hate-sound-hillary-clintons-voice
…some viewers were so infuriated…
This is lazy. About 10% of people agree with any claim, no matter how stupid (US government is controlled by lizard people). If the number of “infuriated people” is less than 10%, it should be rounded to 0.
You would really need to judge the authoritative-soundingness of Paul Robeson’s voice by comparing it scientifically to a representative cross-sample of the voices of other winners of the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples.
On the other hand, it is perhaps generally instructive to consider what sorts of male voices are viewed as sounding more or less “authoritative” and how that does or doesn’t match up with our sense of rank or hierarchy or wealth or power among American males. Three datapoints for consideration:
1. Consider the lavish description “a stirring basso profondo that [lends] gravel and gravitas” to whatever it says. That’s an online description of the voice of James Earl Jones, who in addition to his acting career earned quite a lot of money on the side doing commercial/voiceover work on the basis of that voice. On the one hand, it is to some extent a racially-coded voice – if you have an ear for American accent variation you wouldn’t in most contexts take it for that of a white speaker. But on the other hand it’s not the accent of the modal male black speaker born 1931 in Tate County, Mississippi either.
2. One stock “authoritative” male voice in modern American culture is that of the male commercial airplane on the intercom, assuring the passengers that the fellow at the controls is competent, calm, and unflappable. The usual story one hears is that airplane-pilot subculture converged in the 1950’s et seq. into everyone trying to sound the way Chuck Yaeger spoke. Yaeger grew up in Hamlin, West Virginia, the county seat of Lincoln County, along the banks of the Mud River. Not the sort of place that power-elite folks tend to come from. But maybe in a useful Midland transitional sort of zone where people don’t sound either stereotypically Southern or stereotypically Midwestern so if you don’t sound stereotypically hillbilly, you’ve got a nicely neutral backdrop to project your calm and unflappable authority over.
3. Another stock “authoritative” voice was the old-time (by which I mean prior to circa 1990 and cable tv fragmenting everything) tv newscaster. In that role, you didn’t want to sound like a rich dude or Ivy League graduate (the Thurston Howell III character on Gilligan’s Island); you wanted something that wasn’t coded as regional or rustic but was neutral, straightforward and unpretentious. You also didn’t want that pseudo-British “Mid-Atlantic” accent that used to be in vogue for Hollywood types. The conventional wisdom, I’ve been told, is that you would need the least work with a dialect coach to get the “newscaster register” of AmEng down pat if your native accent was that of the Great Basin. This was not because American media was run by a secret Mormon cabal, but because by chance the Great Basin accent was the most neutral-sounding, in terms of not exhibiting features that struck material numbers of people from other parts of the country as aggravating regionalisms. In non-newscaster TV personalities, Johnny Carson’s Iowa/Nebraska upbringing, far away from the strongholds of wealth, power, and cultural capital, may have given him something reasonably comparable to that neutral-base starting point. Things were otherwise in the UK, where the traditional BBC newsreader accent had a social-class connotation that was not present in US practitioners of the same trade.
So to attempt to harmonize the preceding remarks with the thesis of the Economist piece and hat’s commentary: my observation is that in an AmEng context the best way to sound authoritative is to start with speech that sounds neutral – perhaps because then people are obligated to focus on the substance of what you have to say (or other intangibles like charisma or what have you) and aren’t able to use random features of your speech that are marked for region or class or ethnicity or whatever as pretexts to complain about how you sound rather than engage with the substance. The (quite plausible) claim will then be that in a historically male-dominated society, a male voice is systematically more likely to sound neutral – if there are various features of speech that are disproportionately deployed by female speakers, they will tend to sound marked, as deviations from neutrality, in much the same way as a male voice with features that signal class or region etc. is marked and sounds non-neutral. Female speakers will thus disproportionately face the same sort of problem as male speakers with stigmatized-as-non-neutral voices, viz. preemptive dismissal of the substance of what they have to say on account of their speech has some supposedly grating quirk. My broader claim, however, is that it’s too reductionist to assume that neutral-v.-non-neutral or unmarked-v.-marked will inevitably tend to correspond to more-powerful v. less-powerful. E.g., to the extent there are features of a male voice that will be taken to signal wealth or power, you may well cast the guy with those features in his accent to play the villain in your movie whereas the hero who will eventually give the rich-and-powerful villain his well-deserved comeuppance will have a more neutral accent.
I’m not surprised; they are the ones who (feel they) have to be constantly aware of such things. Men can get away with not knowing the difference between a skirt and a dress and with being unable to tell whether someone is wearing makeup, let alone commenting on whether that particular makeup is currently fashionable or whatever.
Your first sentence is about voice; the second is about accents.
That was already the assumption well before Sanders declared his candidacy – Clinton already had a large number of semi-prominent endorsements at that point.
The title of the “excellent Johnson” column mirrors a common euphemism, and a particularly strange one for a piece on women’s voices. Why do they call it that?
Wouldn’t Effie’s “woman’s intuition” have seen through Brigid O’Shaughnessy and “that throb you get in you voice?” (In the novel more than in the movie, Sam mocks Effie a couple times about this, including in the final scene.)
Recentness is in the eye of the beholder perhaps, but I’m trying to reconcile your “recently covered” statement with the fact that the linked column appears from internal evidence to correspond with the 10/4/18 hard-cover issue.
Oops! I simply forgot to check the actual date and assumed it was recent. Fixed!
The title of the “excellent Johnson” column mirrors a common euphemism, and a particularly strange one for a piece on women’s voices. Why do they call it that?
I have no idea what you mean: what euphemism is involved in “Women’s voices are judged more harshly than men’s”?
Oh, wait, are you talking about Johnson, the nom de gazette used for the column (which is a regular feature)? It’s an allusion to Sam’l J; get your mind out of the gutter, young man.
The [one and only] Big Johnson zts”l
Definite article-surname isn’t a common pattern in English, so it naturally leads in that direction. But the implications seemed ridiculous, so I assumed there was a different explanation. It’s just as well you described the column as excellent, which suggested that my snap interpretation was wrong. If this particular column had been unusually long or short…
The brand name Johnsonville Brats trips similar wires for me — is that a sausage company or the site of a sausage fest? Maybe my mind is just too gutter-al.
MMcM: O’Shaughnessy’s “throb” is her pitiful faux-sobbing when the going gets tough. That is what worked on Effie. It’s not about her voice quality in general.
mirrors a common euphemism
Only in America (which doesn’t count.)
Myself, I am only familiar with the term because the Dude Abides.
Johnsonville Brats! There’s a brand I haven’t thought about all that much since I moved back East from Chicago over 30 years ago. A quick google suggests that you can purchase them at certain places in the NYC metro area but they don’t have much high-profile brand-awareness marketing going on here compared to how it used to be in Chicago, and NYC is in general a much less bratwurst-centric part of the U.S. although there are niches. (Never drew gutter-al inferences from the name, FWIW.)
Man, I still slaver thinking of the amazing sausages I had when I visited Chicago on a baseball-centric trip in the ’80s. Like barbecue and Ethiopian food, it’s one of those things New Yorkers are missing out on.
People I know usually don’t discuss other people’s voices.
Women’s dress is discussed almost exclusively by women. In a freindly way. As in “wow”.
re authoritative speech; AM radio, perhaps especially in the US South, is full of exhortation in a characteristic preaching/style/rhythm, \cf for ex Robert Duvall in `The Apostle’
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118632/
that I don’t recall having ever seen analyzed. I don’t even know how to call it : I do not think it is particularly African-American. YMMV, but to me there is something unmistakably White about it. [I don’t mean to be controversial, please advise?]
>like barbecue and Ethiopian food
The delightful surprise present at my family birthday dinner out last year was that my then 9- and 11-year olds loved Ethiopian food, a huge advance after a decade of being constrained to places offering butter noodles or grilled cheese.
Er, um, they’d actually changed affiliation and become an Eritrean restaurant. Not sure whether there were new owners or a new sense that there were enough people in the area who would recognize Eritrea. But civil wars aside, it was about the best present a dad could ask for.
Most “Ethiopian” restaurants were actually Eritrean restaurants back in the day, but nobody had heard of Eritrea. Now that that’s no longer the case, I presume they’re letting their true affiliations fly.
“Of course, this leads to men comfortably saying “See? Can’t be sexist, it’s the women who want it that way!””
@LH, I’m not sure you are not confusing arguments against a theory with arguments in support of all those things your theory is meant to explain. You say “men suppress women, let’s stop it”. This might be a crude description of your model, but you focus on male agency. When in objection I point at women’s agency, it is just because you focus on men.
People who support pressure normaly say different things, that traditional gender roles are Right.
characteristic preaching/style/rhythm
i think of this as a specific register, based in specific kinds of professionalized performance contexts, geographically centered in the southeastern u.s. but extending beyond it. to my ear, there are a number of variations, with the most often-named (if not invariably the most audible) divergence between black and white variants. but i think the aesthetic that defines them, overall, is african-rooted (though developed in the north american diaspora). it’s a similar situation, i think, to the blues/country/gospel continuum of african-rooted musicking centered in the same geography, which is similarly partitioned along racial lines despite being audibly one terrain.
@ rozele :
Exactly! I recall that Texas Monthly magazine, in its early innovative days, had a (quite good) Church critic who reviewed notable venues and performances. Who wonders about such things?
People I know usually don’t discuss other people’s voices.
Women’s dress is discussed almost exclusively by women. In a freindly way. As in “wow”.
You must live a sheltered life, surrounded by nice people.
(But it isn’t a cultural difference, I’ve witnessed Russians, both men and women, discussing, criticizing, and mocking other people’s appearance, clothes, manners, physical attributes, etc., like people from any other cultures, and often in a ruder, more abrasive way.)
Yeah, I was going to say the same thing.
@Hans, LH, I did not even mention Russia and did not generalise over the humanity.
But clearly my female freinds take more interest in other women’s dress and this interest is not limited to “mocking”.
We can’t discuss attention to this variable (dress) only in terms of limitations imposed on it. (cf. my ex-wife who is apparently curious about Moscow Muslim fashion without being a Muslim).
I mean, if both freindly and hostile attention comes from women, then we don’t need a mechanism which would explain why hostile attention comes from women.
People generally don’t like extremes, though I suspect more people react negatively to a high-pitched male or female voice than to a low-tone voice. There are some beautifully modulated female voices who are very easy on the ear. But why anyone, male or female, chooses to flaunt their sexuality by dressing in too-tight, too-low-cut or very revealing anything, particularly in cold weather, when they know that choice will get a lot of (sometimes unwelcome) attention, is a mystery to me.
The title heroine of “Mrs. Brown’s Boys” combines modesty in dress with a pleasingly low vocal pitch. I would like to recommend the viewing of this programme to Eliza’s daughters, especially if they are young and impressionable.
AM radio, perhaps especially in the US South, is full of exhortation in a characteristic preaching/style/rhythm
Whenever I’m in Texas on the road, I listen to those stations for that virtual reality experience the undead past provides. I know it will disappear when I remove the headset to board the plane back to Germany.
PlasticPaddy, well said. Unfortunately, her choice of language is a tad limited but that minor detail aside, she is the epitome of modest dressing and a great role model for us girlies. My daughters do indeed watch the programme for style tips. (Mrs Brown’s Boys, if anyone’s interested).
1) Scarily many people are fashion victims – they dress according to current fashion with no other considerations, including the weather. If they suffer from the weather, it doesn’t occur to them to complain or to dress differently because it doesn’t occur to them that it could be otherwise. The motivation here is to avoid the attention they fear they’d get for being unfashionable.
2) Some people want to be noticed, so they dress conspicuosly. For historical reasons, conspicuous clothing in this culture is usually revealing, especially if it’s intended for women.
3) Tastes differ. They really do. There is no way to predict the sorts of attention or lack thereof any particular attire will generate. As far as my own taste is concerned (which doesn’t matter, because I’m introverted), plenty of people dress more sexily than they can possibly have intended, while many outfits that were intended as sexy – by their wearers and/or their designers – fail resoundingly by that criterion.
4) Attention is culturally specific, too. No matter how crazily you’re dressed, nobody will say anything to you if you walk through Berlin, first because talking to strangers is just not done, and second because (in pretty large parts of Berlin) people have seen crazier.
Exhibit A: wool suits and neckties, however warm the weather.
talking to strangers is just not done
On my last visit to Berlin, I was asked directions (in German) by strangers several times a day.
Mind you, that probably proves your point: if they were Berliners, they wouldn’t be asking directions, would they?
It is probably true to say that my habitual garb is not sexually provocative, however. I rely more on my natural charisma.
Absolutely.
…That is actually culturally permissible.
It’s those illuminated… emanations. I suspect living in a former imperial capital may make people more sensitive.
@DM, but some people just want to look attractive – which does not answer Eliza’s question.
Attractive attracts.
(This can be countered: “everyone wants to look attractive, but not everyone dresses provocatively” – which in turn can be countered with “but people used to wearing ‘too short’ and ‘too tight’ dress don’t see it this way, they just think ’30cm above knees is more attractive than 10′”).
Many people don’t care much about what they’re wearing and how they look, just trying not to fall foul of minimum society standards.
Then there’s the fact that standards evolve; people complaining how the youth of today dresses or how standards are slipping is as old as the hills. (My age shows in that I find piercings deeply unattractive – except earrings, which reveals that my taste was conditioned before piercings in other places became usual.) And then there’s social differences, and it’s revealing that people, besides complaining about young people, mostly bash the lack of taste of the underclass (items decried in Germany at various times comprise the Arschgeweih and the Assi-Palme; you can google these if you want to spoil your day or have some fun, depending on your taste).
Russian ladies expose less skin today than in 90s.
Two decades more of this slide into so-called conservatism and everyone will wear burkas!
I cry tears for the youth of today;-(
Young men don’t know anymore what it feels when in March, with first rays of the spring sun (have just begun to melt our snows and already can warm you), all girls undress and walk with naked bellies! (I don’t object as girls must be warmer in their modern (surely influenced by Western fashions) dress… But what about the summer? )
I feel like I’m belaboring the obvious, but the whole issue of “women dress provocatively” is preposterous: it doesn’t matter how women dress or act, a certain proportion of males will harass them or worse, and it is not about sex, it is about power. Consider this: plenty of men look at other men and think “I’d like to punch that guy in the snoot,” but the thought stays unexpressed. Why? Because they fear retaliation. The goal is to get to a society where men’s thoughts about the women they encounter similarly go unexpressed. How to get there? By any means necessary, as Malcolm said.
@LH, I understand ‘provocatively’ in a more optimistic way (like this girl wants to seduce me and dresses accordingly – surely people do that).
But I don’t see anything “sexual” or “provocative” about any body part. I find a human being as a whole “sexual” of course. There are (arbitrary, cultural) signs… In my case, I’m afraid, only a prostitute’s professional outfit works for me as a “sign” (of that she is a professional prostitute or is imitating their style for some reason) – and not because it is “more revealing”, it is just a specific style.
Also there is a question of what kind of looks provokes a sexual response (that’s makes someone aroused or whatever). I think people want people who want them (assuming that these people are already “potential partners”), so there is something like exchange of signals and thus “signs” here. But this exchange and these signs is subconscious. Combining the concept of “signs” (usually in this case called signals) with subconscious and especially physiological/biological processes leads to complications.
Presumably there can be for a given culture some sort of outfit that will likely provoke an involuntary sexual resonse in some people.
Only if they’re extroverted.
Oh, I’ve seen that – in Edinburgh, at 12 °C. Yes, twelve. I froze again just looking at these people. :-S
However, that was in August. They didn’t have summer yet in Scotland. (Now, ten years later, they probably do.)
That must be hard to do if you don’t know that person’s taste already.
like this girl wants to seduce me and dresses accordingly – surely people do that
No. Dressing to look attractive does not equate to “wants to seduce me”; this is a solipsistic idea that leads to all kinds of bad things.
Arschgeweih
In The U.S., known as a tramp stamp.
Oh, I’ve seen that – in Edinburgh, at 12 °C. Yes, twelve. I froze again just looking at these people.
Similar in Ulaanbaatar, where the girls start to bare their arms and run around in T-Shirts when the temperature rises above 10°C.
But the prize in my view goes to the girls in the former Soviet Union who in deep winter walk around in fur hats, fur coats, long winter boots, but with miniskirts showing legs that are either bare or protected only by transparent nylon, and that at temperatures of -20 / -30° C. My legs turn to ice just when I look at them.
I’m talking about sports bras. But, yeah, not at -20 °C.
“ Dressing to look attractive does not equate to “wants to seduce me”;”
@LH, and? This is my point, more or less. “Sexually provocative” are DE’s words.
I think the word “provocative” appears here because of the contexts like what I described, where someone tries to seduce someone and modifies her dress – intending to provoke a response.
I use “provocative” in a hypothetical interpretation of short skirts by someone who normally wears (attractive) longer skirts. And I note that for someone who normally wears short skirts those can be just “attractive” rather than “provocative”.
“Oh, I’ve seen that – in Edinburgh, at 12 °C. Yes, twelve.”
Well, early March in Moscow is when the sun does warm you, but the air can be anywhere around 0°C, below or (slighly) above. Not 12°C.
Having retired from Kentucky to Indiana, I find myself, every spring and fall, wearing a jacket while my neighbors appear in t-shirts.
Which reminds me: On the season premiere of Brokenwood, a character claims to have graduated from Indiana U, and another one finds out that in fact she graduated from “a university in Kentucky.” This seems, in context, to imply that the character is lying about the quality of her education. What do they know, or think they know, about these things in NZ? (The scriptwriter was also under the misapprehension that there were mammals in NZ before people brought them.)
Ah, I was not paying attention when I wrote my comment. 🙁
mammals in NZ before people brought them.
Bats, sea mammals, and this weird thing.
Or two things – note the complete lack of evidence that the jaw and the thighbone belong together.
TIL about the Saint Bathans Mammal, a wonderful name, even better than Sir David’s Long-Beaked Echidna. But the one in the story was a 10,000-year-old fossilized hedgehog. No cigar.
I just realized that a link hiding as “this weird thing” is classic clickbait. Not sorry.
I think it really has to be “this one weird trick” to qualify.
(I wonder if the phrase has potential for discouraging a click-though: a sort of hyperfnord?)
This thread has gone from women’s voices to extinct antipodean mammals – I love it!
If anyone wants to learn how to dress and act appropriately, please follow this link to cuts from “Mrs Brown’s Boys”, referred to above, British/Irish humour which may not translate across the Pond.
youtube.com/watch?v=4rC2rfCj3sk
DM, I exaggerated of course.
Early March is when first girls began to undress, and what is air temperature when sun begins to seriously affect it is a difficult question.
Also, of course “revealing” clothing is not just about sexuality. Exposing skin to air and sun is something immensely pleasant to us – and much less so for people from Arab countries (who protect their skin from it).
Monotremes are the Anatolian of mammals!
It does translate across the Channel…! I must confess I’m not used to Irish accents, though, so I miss out on some of the humour.
Yes!
“Echidna” sounds like the name of a Hittite city…
(Excuse me: Eḫidna.)
Platypus was a Greek historian. Anteater is Latin.
Anteater is Latin
Not at all. He is a Greek tragic hero; in epic poetry, his name sometimes appears as “Anteator.”
There is also the famous Anteater of Kos, the Stoic philosopher.
He should not be confused with Anteator of Antioch, the grammarian. Anteator was a Syrian, and his name in Aramaic is thought to have been ʻArd-Barka. He is known to have spent the latter part of his life in Alexandria, where he is thought to have suggested the principle of alphabetical ordering to Callimachus.
I have no doubt previously mentioned the Australian linguistics grad student I was in a class or two with when I was an undergrad. He apparently refused to acquiesce in the notion that the seasons worked backwards in the Northern Hemisphere and insisted on walking around the oft-slushy streets of New Haven in January in his habitual January-weather outfit of shorts and sandals.
Don’t forget Aesthetes of Aegina, who was of course supportive of the alphabetical-ordering proposal.
Though Adeimantus of Abydos was even keener on it.
“and his name in Aramaic is thought to have been ʻArd-Barka.”
Only now I realised that aard is unrelated to earth:((((
@drasvi I don’t know if you are continuing the joke,* but my Khmer mercenaries will (forcibly, if necessary) assure you that that name is literally “earth pork.”
* Feel free just to respond with “Whoosh.”
I presume by “unrelated to earth” drasvi meant Arabic ʔarḍ and cognates.
Sadly, the first element of the name ʻArd-Barka cannot be connected with Arabic /ʔarḍ/; that would, of course, be /ʔarʕ(ā)/ in Aramaic. Various conjectures have been made as to the etymology, but there is no consensus; perhaps the most plausible relates it to the ערד mentioned in Judges 1:16 (modern Tell Arad), but there are many difficulties with this hypothesis.
It should be pointed out that the textual evidence for the name is itself not uncontroversial; it is based on the Geʻez version of the Lives of the Grammarians (the Greek original, and the intermediary Arabic version which almost certainly was the source for the Ethiopic, have both been lost.)
Any relation to Ben Barka? (I realize these are deep waters, and you might well prefer not to comment.)
Now you’re being silly. Ben Barka was a mathematician, not a grammarian.
> Lives of the Grammarians
That’s a title you market as a loss leader that proves the intellectual heft of your manuscript copying team. You make it up in sales of works of geographical fiction and ecstatic column-sitter memoirs.
It’s not well recognized in the literature, but Ard-Barka, the Syrian Grammarian, is believed to have done the copy editing on the Athenian drama Platypus Rex.
It has been suggested that he might be the author of the Lycaeniad, a mock-didactic poem purporting to give more detail on Lycaenion’s advice to Daphnis. However, this is based on little more than the alphabetical ordering of the notorious Catalogue of the Charms of Chloe, and of course there are grave chronological difficulties with this attribution.
The Lycaeniad seems to have been extremely popular in ancient times, but is hardly to modern taste. It appears to have been singled out for particular opprobrium by Origen, but this detail appears only in the Armenian version of Eusebius’ Church History.
ecstatic column-sitter memoirs.
“Style Through The Ages: Stylites And Fashionistas”
I don’t think that’s right, DE. It was the Lycaeneid, the story of his literal flight from Troy, in the form of a blue-winged butterfly.
This may well have been the origin of the false attribution, which, as I say, is chronologically impossible.
It had not previously occurred to me, but of course the – perhaps wisely – anonymous author* of the Lycaeniad must have chosen the title as a parody of the Lycaeneid (a very different work …)
* It has been suggested in the basis of internal evidence that the author may in fact have been a woman. (In our own day, of course, fanfic is generally female-dominated. Daphnis and Chloe will no doubt have inspired many such, erm, retellings.)
If so, I’ve successfully repressed that disturbing memory.
David E.: Not at all. He is a Greek tragic hero; in epic poetry, his name sometimes appears as “Anteator.”
This is far from certain. The old heretic view that the name Anteater (which as you imply is known only from missing lines of poetry reconstructed from marginal inscriptions in late, translated sources) is a back-formation from the term Anteaterian in late Medieval discussions of lost classics may have fallen in disgrace for good reasons, but a new hypothesis of a Classic Era Latin origin has appeared after one of the readings of the Herculaneum scrolls produced the phrase inimicus posteatri. (The minority view holds instead that this is the AI software signing its work with what it considers a clever pun.)
posteatri
However, the most natural reading would surely be posttheatri, genitive of posttheatrus “backstage hand.” The term is found in Cicero’s letters to Atticus; it seems to have been applied somewhat loosely (and pejoratively) to theatrical hangers-on in general. Backbiting and inimicitia were notorious among such persons, who were of course legally infames.
inimicus posteatri
That would be a physician who tells you to avoid sweets.
I think the current scholarly consensus is that the transliteration “LySaeniaD” should be preferred. And based on the mind-opening experience of reading this thread, I cannot disagree.
David E: However, the most natural reading would surely be posttheatri, genitive of posttheatrus “backstage hand.”
Well. In light of the new evidence, this is now seen as a mocking pun on Cicero’s part, contrasting the boorishness of the consumers of modern mass market culture with the sophistication of the Anteaterian past.
But I’ll concede that the folk-etymology could go back to classical Latin. It would have to be very early, though,
According to this, anteaters are the antique equivalent of the not-so-modern stage-door-Johnnies…
And speaking of johnnies, the BC form is of course “eatanter.”