Xhoris.

I forget how I came across the name of the Belgian village Xhoris, but of course I had to look it up to find out how it was pronounced. French Wikipedia informed me it was [(h)ɔʀis]; then, of course, I wanted to know why the devil it was spelled that way, but the Toponymie section didn’t really help:

Le nom de la localité est attesté sous les formes Scuricitas en 902 (acte où Louis l’enfant confirme un échange); Scuritias ou Scurritias en 932; Scorices en 1126 – 1130 (liste du retable de Wibald; Scoriches fin du XIIIe siècle et dans une charte de 1336; Horis en 1310; Xhorice (Xhoris) du XIVe au XVIIe siècle.

Xhoris s’écrit et se prononce Horis’ en wallon. En français, Oriss est la prononciation d’usage.

Scuricitas to Scorices makes sense, and I guess that could get eroded down to Horis, but where on earth did that silent X come from? Any ideas?

Comments

  1. Toutes les pages commençant par Xh includes places Xhendelesse Xhoffraix Xhierfomont Xhignesse Xhurdebise Xhout-si-Plout Xhoris Xhos Xhendremael and surname Xhonneux

  2. The region surrounding Liège is typical for its Germanic names using a very rare “xh”, and names ending in -ster. The -ster ending in all probability derive from the Frankish name “munster”, meaning “monastry” and is especially common around Verviers, in the former Duchy of Limbourg. The “xh” is the Liège dialect way of rendering the German “ch” or just “h” (which is otherwise silent in French) and was spellt “sc” or “sch” in the late Middle Ages.

    Source: https://www.eupedia.com/belgium/belgian_place_names.shtml#effe

  3. Oh, it’s a Walloon thing! And here I thought the only language with xh was Albanian. Thanks!

  4. Well, Xhosa.

  5. January First-of-May says

    A while back I did some database searching (by hand) to figure out the largest populated places starting with each pair of Latin letters; the search was incomplete (I’ve tried to restart it recently, but there are some inconvenient ambiguities with what qualifies), but so far as I could find, it turned out that the largest place listed in the database starting with XH was Xhimojay, Mexico.

    (Xhoris was not in the database; it is also apparently smaller. It appears that the Mexican example is not a digraph , like in Albanian, Xhosa, or apparently Walloon, but rather a consonant cluster written with the usual Nahua convention of for /ʃ/.)

  6. A list of 20,169 Belgian placenames includes 54 with xh; excluding duplicates gives these 49:–

    Anixhe
    Bois de Xhoris
    Bouxhmont
    Cerexhe-Heuseux
    Chanxhe
    Cour à Xhendelesse
    Ferme de Lexhy
    Ferme de Malaxhe
    Fexhe-Slins
    Fexhe-le-Haut-Clocher
    Foxhalle
    Gleixhe
    Grand Trixhe
    Grand-Axhe
    Kemexhe
    La Xhavée
    Labouxhe
    Les Floxhes
    Les Trixhes
    Lexhy
    Lixhe
    Marexhe
    Moxhe
    Moxheron
    Naxhelet
    Outrelouxhe
    Oxhe
    Petit Axhe
    Pixhos
    Rixhalle
    Ronxhy
    Souxhon
    Soxhluse
    Spixhe
    Sur les Trixhes
    Trixhes
    Wixhou
    Xhawirs
    Xhendelesse
    Xhendremael
    Xhierfomont
    Xhignesse
    Xhoffraix
    Xhoris
    Xhos
    Xhout-si-Plout
    Xhurdebise
    Xhéneumont
    Xhénorie

    Some (eg Rixhalle) may be non-digraphs

  7. Fwiw, on https://www.vlaanderen.be/team-taaladvies/eigennamen/xhoris no h is mentioned. It’s probably one of those h aspiré situations.

    Incidentally it’s already mentioned above, but Cerexhe is pronounced sèréche if I’m not mistaken.

  8. Judging from videos I’ve looked at, xh is pronounced [ks] in Fexhe-le-Haut-Clocher, which is also confirmed by Wikipedia. So here at least the French pronunciation diverges from the original Wallon. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more names from the list above given similar spelling pronunciations in French.

    The pronunciation guides and other language advice in the site that Frans linked to used to be run by the Flemish public broadcaster as VRT Taal and was my go-to for checking the pronunciation of Belgian names until it was discontinued last year. For several months the content was not available online, but now at least the pronunciation guides are back up as part of the Flemish government’s Taaladvies service. I don’t think new pronunciations are being added anymore, but it’s a relief that this invaluable resource is back online.

  9. David Eddyshaw says

    There are French speakers in France itself who still have [h] for h aspiré. I remember this in the speech of the mother of one of my children’s penfriends; she was from Brittany originally (though not Breton-speaking.) Her French otherwise seemed pretty standard, so I was quite surprised at the time. (I didn’t cross-examine her on the point.)

  10. “There are French speakers in France itself who still have [h] for h aspiré”

    =====

    French lects that still have a phoneme /h/ pronounced [h] are found at least in Belgium (namely Wallonia), Canada (namely Acadia, Manitoba, and Ontario), France (namely Dordogne, Normandy, and the Vendée), and the United States (namely Louisiana).

    Details here:

    Pierre Gauthier, « Le poitevin-saintongeais dans les parles québécois et acadiens : aspects phonétiques », dans Marie-Rose Simoni-Aurembou, Français du Canada – français de France : actes du cinquième Colloque de Bellême du 5 au 7 juin 1997, Tübingen, Niemeyer Max Verlag, coll. « Canadiana Romanica » (no 13), 2000, 118-133 (see page 126).

    Brigitte Horiot, Français du Canada – français de France : actes du deuxième Colloque international de Cognac du 27 au 30 septembre 1988, vol. 2, Tübingen, Niemeyer Max Verlag, coll. « Canadiana Romanica » (no 6), 1991 (see page 166).

  11. David Marjanović says

    The one person I’ve heard pronounce la haine with [h] was in Mauritania (I was watching it on TV). But I haven’t met people from the natively [h]-preserving places (the Dordogne surprises me).

    Judging from videos I’ve looked at, xh is pronounced [ks] in Fexhe-le-Haut-Clocher, which is also confirmed by Wikipedia. So here at least the French pronunciation diverges from the original Wallon. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more names from the list above given similar spelling pronunciations in French.

    I mean, there are people who pronounce Bruxelles with [ks] nowadays, transitque sic gloria mundi.

    Sur les Trixhes
    Trixhes

    C’est d’la triche !

  12. Mispronouncing Bruxelles and Anvers is like the Walloon version of schild en vriend.

  13. And thus I learn you’re supposed to pronounce the final -s in Anvers.

  14. January First-of-May says

    Xhoris was not in the database; it is also apparently smaller. It appears that the Mexican example is not a digraph , like in Albanian, Xhosa, or apparently Walloon, but rather a consonant cluster written with the usual Nahua convention of for /ʃ/.

    It turns out that some of the intended letters have disappeared; I put them in angle brackets and forgot that this would make them go away.

    Here’s the intended message, with italics instead of angle brackets:

    “Xhoris was not in the database; it is also apparently smaller. It appears that the Mexican example is not a digraph xh, like in Albanian, Xhosa, or apparently Walloon, but rather a consonant cluster written with the usual Nahua convention of x for /ʃ/.”

  15. J. F.-o.-M.: The foolish machine assumes angle brackets are part of a tag. If it doesn’t recognize the tag it deletes it. Use &lt; and &gt; instead of < and >, respectively (as I did here, along with &amp; for &).

  16. Frans says
    November 11, 2024 at 4:02 pm

    “the Walloon version of schild en vriend.

    ====

    The story told about the alleged shibboleth “schild en vriend” is now believed to be fiction.

    Details here: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000423.html

  17. I felt like [ks] for Bruxelles was nearly universal from French speakers in Paris when I lived there. I myself quietly insisted on [s], which is the only pronunciation traditionally recognized as correct by reputable reference works in France.

    This was before the success of the song “Bruxelles je t’aime” by Belgian artist Angèle a couple of years ago, but I doubt that it changed the pronunciation habits of the French too much.

  18. David Marjanović says

    And so I learn that apparently there are still Flemish dialects that retain [sk] instead of [sx]…

  19. Relic areas with [sk] are found in various parts of the Netherlands as well, and Afrikaans also has [sk].

    At the other end of the spectrum, there are even Dutch dialects with [ʃ].

  20. David Marjanović says

    I happened to know that about Afrikaans*, but took for granted this was just part of its near-creolization like the simplification of so many other consonant clusters…

    * This guy published a lot, mostly in Afrikaans, and mostly on skedels “skulls”, cf. German Schädel.

  21. @M

    The story told about the alleged shibboleth “schild en vriend” is now believed to be fiction.

    While if it was real it may just as well have simply been a password, the argument there seems to be against something of a misunderstanding. The argument in favor is that it’s difficult for the French to say /skɪlt/, turning it into something closer to /əskijt/, /ɛskijt/ or /eskijt/ instead (compare for example how the middle French don’t say squirrel but escureil). In short, both the /sk/ at the beginning and the /lt/ at the end are fairly plausibly considered problematic, and that’s not even mentioning the /ɪ/. I’d say a bigger problem with the pronunciation theory is that the French also had plenty of Flemish allies to go around. You can try to get around that by reducing it to a Bruges accent, but stacking assumptions evidently reduces the probability.

    According to this slightly outdated article from 1893 they even managed to turn it into the somewhat mysterious estric (granted, r-methathesis a thing), but the suggestion of scijt a few lines down makes more sense to me as already stated.

    Edit: also worth noting that I believe the remark in that Language Log post about /x/ is about Bruges/West-Flanders if accurate, not Middle Dutch, but I’d have to double check. Of course that doesn’t affect anything one way or the other as long as it’s accurate for Bruges. 😉

  22. @Frans. Of course you’re right.

    I should have avoided the agentless passive (“is now believed”), which implies general acceptance, and instead been specific by writing “According to Alex Baumans […]” and by stating that I have no opinion in this matter.

    My apologies.

  23. how the middle French don’t say squirrel but escureil

    I discovered quite late in life that Germans can’t say squirrel is a running joke among anglophones. It seems more common in America than Britain, but exists in both areas despite their very different pronunciations of squirrel.

  24. A native speaker of French once told me that “rural squirrels” was the English phrase she found hardest to pronounce.

  25. @M No problem.

    @David Marjanović

    And so I learn that apparently there are still Flemish dialects that retain [sk] instead of [sx]…

    Incidentally, I grew up in a (non-Flemish) /sk/ area, namely on Texel. Sheep are skéépen for example, foam (schuim) is skuum, etc. You probably can’t say it’s retained though; nearly everybody who spoke that way was over sixty when I was a teen, except in specific words.

    Over at the Meertens Instituut they have many interesting maps.
    https://kaartenbank.meertens.knaw.nl/kaart_details/20232

  26. David Marjanović says

    Fascinating how complicated this map is. I’ll try to remember there’s a [sk] island around Winterswijk…

    Also, is that preaspiration in West Frisian?

  27. If I’m at all representative, “rural squirrels” is tough for us native English speakers too. I just run at it quickly so it all blurs together.

    You could say “bucolic tree rats” instead.

  28. Also, is that preaspiration in West Frisian?

    Are you referring to the little x near Sneek in /skap/? I don’t know what that is.

    As an aside, North Holland north of Alkmaar/Hoorn is also called West Frisia.

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