We’ve discussed Anthony Burgess before (e.g., Burgess’s Slang), but I thought this bilious and detailed passage from the Roger Lewis biography was worth sharing:
Burgess’s idea of order, and his mental make-up, is signified by his fancy for the discipline and formality of grammar and linguistics. Language, in Burgess, creates the content. His information about his ancestors is divulged in terms of how they spoke and sounded, and by the Lancashire hotpot they ate: speaking and swallowing. And of course he can’t mention Manchester speech without having a go at the ‘centralizing linguistic culture’ of London and the south, which ironed out regional dialects – yet where did his own sonic boom come from? Elocution lessons? ‘We provincials have suffered in forcing ourselves to conform,’ he announced in 1987, writing from 44 rue Grimaldi, Monaco. One of Burgess’s biggest inadvertent jokes was to call a book Language Made Plain, because he makes it complicated, in my view. When he talks about substituting ‘an alveolar nasal for a velar one’ or of ‘palatizing his unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring. He can’t have friends or cronies at school – they have to be persons ‘true to the etymology khronios’; even as a hungry baby he was like the vociferously verbose Leonard Sachs, compère of The Good Old Days, the music-hall show broadcast from the City Varieties, Leeds. Instead of crying for more milk, it’s a question of ‘the lactal ducts never refilling fast enough’. With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites, one of her symptoms (a distension of the abdomen), is the Greek askos, a wineskin, and that one of her last acts had been to rebuke a Singapore nurse in fluent Mandarin Chinese, ‘astonishing me with a sleeping knowledge of the language I never knew she had’.
Clamour and confusion are concealed by language, and for Burgess living details become a literary process. He reminds me, therefore, less of any modern (or Modernist) artist, where the many-sidedness of existence is acknowledged and presented in a multitude of experimental ways, than of a late Victorian or Edwardian man of letters – his equivalent in painting being William Powell Frith, whose vast, thronging canvases of Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day or railway-station platforms and booking halls prompted Wilde to enquire innocently whether it was really all done by hand? Such, too, are Burgess’s modes of exaggeration – the bejewelled vocabulary, the polishings of his prose – the effect, though picturesque, is that the books are assembled by clockwork. His love of words is robotic.
Who the goddess of love is we well know (in Greek, aphrodiastikos means ‘lecherous’, aphrodiazein, ‘to copulate’). The god of language was Hermes (or ‘the rogue god Mercury’ as Burgess calls him), often represented in Classical statuary as a priapus. In many parts of Greece (Peloponnese, Argos, Megalopolis, Kyllene), he and Aphrodite were worshipped together. They certainly commingle in Burgess, who even talks of taking his dictionaries, like mistresses, to bed. Homage to Qwert Yuiop contains several dozen fervid pieces on dictionaries and sundry encyclopaedia: a veritable seraglio. Burgess always kept on his desk the OED, the American Heritage Dictionary, a 1926 Webster, plus works on slang, etymology, quotation, euphemism, anecdotes and Yiddish, the effect of which touched his every sentence. A Malayan Trilogy is full of South-East Asian tongues. The Doctor Is Sick is about a phonetics expert and the language of the criminal underworld. Abba Abba makes John Keats a pioneering philologist. Honey for the Bears plays games with Cyrillic script, as Paul Hussey becomes Pavel Ivanovitch Gussey. (The flyleaf of Burgess’s copy of Waldemar Schapiro’s Russian Gem Dictionary [1959] is inscribed ‘Ivan Vilson’ in perfect Cyrillic.) And the neologisms in A Clockwork Orange derive from the cockney dialect upon a Russian base. Baboochka is ‘old woman’, droog is ‘friend’, pretty polly is ‘money’. To write the novelisation and script for Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, Burgess went back to Greek and Hebrew editions of the Gospel, discovering a Bible rife with puns. The famous phrase about humped beasts and needles’ eyes is a confusion of kamilon (rope) with kamelon (camel). On the cross, Jesus did not call out Eli, eli, lama Sabacthani, but Elie, elie … ‘This is the vocative of helios in its demotic unaspirated form. He was calling on the sun.’ In Amos, Chapter 8, verse ii, Burgess glosses ‘a basket of summer fruit becomes a portent of Israel’s end’ by informing us that in the original ‘basket’ is qais and ‘the end’ is qes. A play on words, in other words. Harlot to Chaucer meant ‘maid-servant’, knave once meant ‘young man’ (the German knabe), apricot comes from Arabic al-precoq which comes from Latin’s praecox, or early fruit. Such snaps, crackles and pops of information were put to use in Quest for Fire, a film about Stone Age man, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, in 1981. It was based on the novel La Guerre du Feu, written by J. H. Rosny-Aîné in 1909 and first published in 1911. Burgess devised a prehistoric creole, or a new language patched out of existing ones (crioulo is Portuguese for ‘a slave born in the master’s household’), by ransacking his grammars. To make a word, he says, ‘begin with a lip sound, continue with a back vowel, end with another lip sound’. In the film, dondr-dondr (a Chinese duplication from the Greek for tree) means ‘a forest’; a stag is tirdondr (German for deer, Tir, with the antlered branches). Juggling, somehow, Japanese and Russian, muuv emerges as the word for ‘breast’.
Could he conceivably have been taking the piss? Who did Burgess think he was being? James Murray? Murray, ‘a godfearing teetotal non-smoking philoprogenitive bizarrely polymath dominie’, was the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary – a great project which, by scientifically classifying the exfoliations of language, the evolution and pedigree of words, is related to Victorian biology and the work of Charles Darwin. Murray learned new lingos by translating the Bible (for instance, a Chinese Book of Genesis); and he was intrigued by dialects, those remnants of ancient tongues (Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh) which in his day were still spoken in remote regions, surviving like Romantic ruins. And the second wordsmith Burgess wrote articles on is George Borrow, a lackadaisical genius, in contrast to Murray, who was so formal he wore his doctoral cap even at family meals. Yet for all his sloppy manner (he was a supertramp happier living with gypsies than with gentry), Borrow knew hundreds of languages, attending the Great Exhibition of 1851 to be seen ‘yapping away in Armenian and Turkish and Manchu’. Burgess himself, having spoken Anglo-Saxon with Borges and read Don Quixote in Catalan, by 1989 was ready to learn Japanese (‘it takes me a week to learn one phrase. That can’t be right’). He wanted to be able to startle the Sons of Nippon, whom he kept running across in London or New York hotels, with the inscrutable information that ringo wa ume yori yasui desu: apples are cheaper than plums. He was also brushing up his Hebrew and encouraging Liana to learn Arabic. ‘Soon,’ he announced, ‘we’ll be able to read the Koran in the original to see if Salman Rushdie is mentioned by name. On the whole, though, I suspect the Koran’ll be a bore in any language.’
Poor Burgess! Yes, a lot of his theories were loony (or at least groundless), but he deserved better than to have a biographer who so smugly plumed himself on his ignorance (“I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring”). He was admirably besotted with language, and it’s fun to learn about the books on his desk; I myself have a prized copy of Waldemar Schapiro’s Collins Gem Dictionary, the first book of Russian instruction I ever bought (having been frustrated by the impenetrably Russian entries in a multilingual book).
Schapiro himself, incidentally, is a mystery; I was unable to find out anything about his life for his LibraryThing page, not even his birth or death years. (He should not be confused with this guy, who was murdered in 1933.)
a biographer who so smugly plumed himself on his ignorance
Exactly my own reaction.
With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites,
(Is the misspelling of “ascites” Lewis’s own error?) Not only is Lewis ignorant, he doesn’t get the humanity and pathos of this. One hopes he is not always so lacking in perception.
The Hebrew Bible, of course, really is full of puns. The technique does not have the facetious vibe that it does in English.
those remnants of ancient tongues (Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh) which in his day were still spoken in remote regions
Welsh, eh? Definitely a remnant of an ancient tongue (oldest language in Europe, no doubt.) Jen may have something to say about Gaelic …
crioulo is Portuguese for ‘a slave born in the master’s household’
Don’t think so.
What a maroon.
I just want to know where they spoke Anglo-Saxon in Murray’s day.
Or Cornish, come to that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Murray_(lexicographer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolly_Pentreath
Lewis evidently belongs to the school that believes you can assert anything that you like about language, because it’s all just opinion and nobody actually knows any facts.
I just want to know where they spoke Anglo-Saxon in Murray’s day.
In his office, I imagine.
They would greet each other with “Hwæt!”
It was years before the penny dropped for me as to why the teenspeak in A Clockword Orange is called “Nadsat.”
Yeah, that one’s not right-off-the-bat obvious.
I am not by profession a linguistician, leave alone a polylinguist, but I have had a great deal of pleasure from Burgess’ novels. I remember in particular the lorry driver in “The eve of Saint Venus” who gives a lift to the main character: “He had been a schoolteacher, but he was seeking to better himself”.
As for Roger Lewis’s “I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring” as a dismissal of linguistics, I would respectfully ask him to go bugger himself with a giant corkscrew.
And mine.
I am reminded of the time when Burgess reviewed a book by a then famous novelist (I think it was Amis senior, but I am not sure), and criticised him for using the term phoneme without having the slightest idea what it actually means.
In case anyone’s wondering: n for ng, sh for s.
Too early for confusion, but not for a pun.
Why would he? (And the Egyptians, at least, kept aspirating their Greek for a few centuries longer.)
To hell in a handbasket?
Tier is the cognate, but it means “animal”.
…except in hunters’ jargon, where it means “female red deer”. Still neuter in gender.
I still haven’t figured it out.
Count to twenty in Russian …
>>those remnants of ancient tongues (Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh) which in his day were still spoken in remote regions
>Welsh, eh? Definitely a remnant of an ancient tongue (oldest language in Europe, no doubt.) Jen may have something to say about Gaelic …
It’s silly all around. Cornish wasn’t still spoken in Murray’s time. Lewis is just babbling, enchanted by the rhythm of his own inventions.
Why do you think it’s a different Schapiro? The first edition of the dictionary came out in 1939, and could have been posthumous. Schapiro was born in Russia, too.
There is no indication the murdered guy was a lexicographer, and neither given name nor surname is unusual.
not… Eli, eli, lama Sabacthani, but Elie, elie / Why would he?
i assume because his frenemy eliyohu, who he’d been expecting to see show up among the spectators, preferred elye to eli, elik, or any of the other variations?
@DE, in regard to crioulo, I first shared your opinion, “ Don’t think so.”
I had a look at wiktionary, and was surprised to find this:
“ Noun
crioulo m (plural crioulos, feminine crioula, feminine plural crioulas)
1. (historical) criollo (a descendant of European settlers who is born in a colony)
2. (historical) a slave born at the house of his master
3. (historical) a black person born in the Americas
4. Creole (a person of mixed African and European ancestry born in a colony or former colony)
5. (Brazil, dated, usually ethnic slur) nigger; negro (a person of sub-Saharan African descent)
Synonyms: preto, (neutral) negro”
Number one and four were what I had assumed. Two was a surprise.
I checked a few English/Português dictionaries and didn’t see that #2 definition in any of them.
The biographer Roger Lewis was born and raised in Wales, FWIW (Caerphilly and then Bedwas, then secondary school in Bassaleg), but in 2011 “expressed a dislike of the Welsh language, calling it an ‘appalling and moribund monkey language.'” Whereupon some Plaid Cymru MP responded by reporting him to the police and the Press Complaints Commission, the way you do in appalling and moribund places. (This was the Hon. Member for Carmarthen East & Dinefwr, who subsequently got reported to the police himself for non-linguistic alleged offenses involving domestic violence.)
I think you’re bound by the constitution of Plaid Cymru to delate denigrators of the One True Speech to the authorities; domestic violence is probably not mandated, however. (They’ve moved on from Saunders Lewis’ day.)
(Roger) Lewis quote from his WP page: “Anthony Burgess was a great charlatan.” He seems to be about the most unsuitable person imaginable to write a biography of Burgess, so it’s unsurprising if he made a pig’s ear of it. As he seems to have done.
I once read Malcolm Muggeridge’s blessedly short biography of “Erewhon” Butler. I’m no great fan of the latter myself, but Muggeridge’s bio is so vindictive and petty-minded that you just end up despising Muggeridge for having written it.
(See also: Procopius’ Secret History.)
Separate Lewis tidbit: “”What I was trying to do with all my biographies was find a form that would suit the subject matter…Anthony Burgess was a great charlatan, so the book is full of all these mock-scholarly footnotes. I thought I’d pulled it off, and then the reviews came out and they were homicidal.”
ETA: forgot to hit post and then David quoted part of the same bit but I think the whole sentence (i.e. what Lewis did in reaction to thinking Burgess a charlatan) interesting …
The biography has its own WP page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess:_A_Life
More or less in its entirety, it reads:
Blake Morrison, in his review in The Guardian, describes the book as “an idle, fatuous, self-regarding book”.
(The linked Guardian review has Lewis’ number.)
It is clear that for Lewis, charlatan means “show off”. On the other hand, maybe one of our musically educated contributors has an opinion on B’s original compositions.
Crioulo
>Antonio Moraes Silva, em seu Diccionario da língua portugueza, publicado em 1813, registrou o termo crioulo empregado ao escravo que nascia em casa do senhor
Also of interest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_Crioula
The common thread seems to be “foreign origin, but local-born.” Which is not a bad way of characterising creole languages, really.
(Pretty clear that slavery as such can’t be a core feature of the concept, from the other well-attested meanings of the word. I don’t think it’s likely that a word with the primary sense “homegrown slave” would have been adopted as a self-designation by people particularly keen on asserting their own pure Iberian heritage.)
‘brigado, Ryan.
DeepL translation:
crioulo
Termo que designava os escravos nascidos no Brasil e, em alguns casos, os cativos originados de outras colônias portuguesas. De origem portuguesa, crioulo é derivado da palavra “crea”, como era escrita a palavra “cria”, ou seja, pessoas criadas na terra. Antonio Moraes Silva, em seu Diccionario da língua portugueza, publicado em 1813, registrou o termo crioulo empregado ao escravo que nascia em casa do senhor; significando também o animal, cria, que nascia “em nosso poder”. O sentido dado a “crioulo” era menos uma exclusividade do negro “nacional” do que um designativo social “de cor” aplicado aos descendentes de escravos, mas que também podia ser atribuído àqueles escravos vindos de uma parte da África. Nesse sentido, era usual o nome do escravo estar seguido do adjetivo “crioulo”, da nação a que pertencia ou do porto do qual fora embarcado para as terras americanas, a exemplo de João crioulo Angola.
https://historialuso.an.gov.br/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6115:crioulo&catid=2071&Itemid=121
A term used to refer to slaves born in Brazil and, in some cases, captives from other Portuguese colonies. Of Portuguese origin, crioulo is derived from the word “crea,” as the word “cria” was written, meaning people raised on the land. Antonio Moraes Silva, in his Diccionario da língua portugueza (Dictionary of the Portuguese Language), published in 1813, recorded the term crioulo as being used to refer to slaves born in their master’s house; it also meant animals, offspring, born “in our possession.” The meaning given to “crioulo” was less an exclusivity of the “national” black than a social designation “of color” applied to the descendants of slaves, but which could also be attributed to those slaves who came from a part of Africa. In this sense, it was common for the slave’s name to be followed by the adjective “creole,” the nation to which he belonged, or the port from which he had been shipped to the Americas, such as João crioulo Angola.
https://historialuso.an.gov.br/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6115:crioulo&catid=2071&Itemid=121
Amis senior, …, and criticised him for using the term phoneme
If it’s this bit in his “confessions,” it’s more like a mild rebuke for this, in what is otherwise positive. Others make out much worse around there.
FFS
Reminded that there was a Star Trek (TOS) episode (“Bread and Circuses“, S02 E14) that had a planet with a literal freaking Roman Empire having a persecuted religious minority calling themselves “Children of the Son”, although at first everyone thought it was “Children of the Sun”. LOL (English) homophones.
Somebody goofed. It’s not ‘basket’; it’s ‘summer’ or ‘harvest’ ¹. I would transliterate the words as qayits (קיץ)(Strong’s 7019) and qets (קץ)(Strong’s 7093).
I don’t think it’s surprising or novel to note that the author of Amos was having God make a ‘harvest/end’ wordplay in Hebrew. It’s just obvious if you read the original.
__________________________________
1: The word ‘fruit’ isn’t in the original phrase. In some cases qayits implies ‘(summer) harvest’, so ‘a basket of the harvest’ might be a better translation in context.
Gemini summarises:
The Lexicographer’s Identity: The Core Mystery
The lack of a dedicated entry for a “Waldemar Schapiro, Lexicographer” suggests that:
He may have been an editor or academic who only published reference works under his name but did not have a public profile significant enough for major, dedicated biographical records (like the Resistance Fighter or Bridge Player did).
He might have been an émigré scholar who worked for a publisher like Collins, whose primary career was something else (like teaching or translation) and who simply compiled the dictionary to make a living.
The biographical lead I found earlier (Waldemar Schapiro, 1906–1982) is the correct person, but the records are private or only accessible through specialised archives (like university or immigration records).
I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring
Good to know I wasn’t the only one triggered by that. A middle schooler going “Boooring!” at least has his age as an excuse for being immature. A middle-aged biographer should be old enough to know better. It’s the kind of smug anti-intellectualism that gives you Cabinet ministers who think “people in this country have had enough of experts”.
If it’s this bit in his “confessions,” it’s more like a mild rebuke for this, in what is otherwise positive.
Good find, and yeah, that’s both mild and captious — there was nothing wrong with what Amis wrote.
I’ve read “Language Made Plain” and in my view, it’s one of the better introductions to the English language and linguistics. Clearly written by a man who loves language and values getting things right over cheap anecdotes. And I’ve liked most of Burgess’s fiction I read – out of “Clockwork”, “One-hand Clapping” and “M/F”, I didn’t like only the latter. 2 out of 3 isn’t bad. And Burgess has a way of writing that keeps me hooked, even in the book I didn’t like, while I stopped reading after getting halfway through the Lewis excerpt posted by LH… so for me, Burgess wins this duel even from the grave.
there was nothing wrong with what Amis wrote
Yes, Amis was actually quite interested in such things himself, and quite perceptive about them, though not in a way sufficiently well-informed to pass uncriticised at the Hattery.
For example, there’s a very minor character in The Green Man whose sandhi assimilations of the “Londom Bridge kind, Amis represents in writing. The problem is that Amis means this as a characteristic of the speech of a Trendy Vicar: he hasn’t realised that it’s a universal feature of normal spoken English. (It is quite funny in context, though.)
There is also a quite elaborate phonetic explanation in Lucky Jim of how the odious Bertrand Welch has the verbal tic of saying “You see” in a way that sounds like “You Sam.”
Incidentally, the Spectator article that got Lewis into trouble, a review of a biography of Dusty Springfield, strikes me as merely crass stereotyping and startling insensitivity, rather than actual homophobia: he seems to me to be expressing genuine sympathy for her pain in living in an intolerant age. He just needed a good editor to kick him and say “you do realise that’s not actually at all funny in this context, Roger?”
I have long thought that having a drink and chat in the pub with Anthony Burgess and Mervyn Peake would be a fascinating time.
Independent crossword today:
Author recommends boring case of books (7).
I found Burgess great for new words. Years ago I read his Earthly Powers, in it I discovered the word ‘infangthief’ (I think outfangthief was in there too), when I learned it was a legal term meaning ‘thief seized within’ I realized it made sense in my childhood dialect (Stoke, midlands of England) where ‘to fang hold of’ meant ‘to seize’.
I think I already despised Malcolm Muggeridge without needing to read this. I used to see him from time to time on television telling us what a wonderful person he was (second only to Mother Teresa) and I found him instantly dislikeable.
I’ll freely admit to being smug and immature, because I do find that kind of ‘I know these long words and you don’t’ pedantry rather boring.
I haven’t tracked down the ‘unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, but the other quote comes from A Mouthful of Air, not from Language Made Plain:
I’m not denying for a second that Burgess is more correct, but I don’t think he’s more descriptive – everyone who read the novel would be able to picture what was meant from Snow’s version, and very few would from Burgess’s*. (And it’s not even like Snow has come up with a new inaccurate description – ‘dropping your gs’ or similar is the usual everyday description of that phenomenon, and people know what it means.)
*And that’s fine. I get wanting people to know more about language in general, but there are forms of writing where it’s usual to use scientific terminology, and forms where it isn’t.
Lewis is obviously full of nonsense (although the bit about ‘we provincials’ writing from Monaco made me laugh), but everything quoted from Burgess makes me quite happy to stay well away from him.
I had to mouth Londom Bridge to myself to convince me that David was correct, and yes, he is. Spanish effortlessly avoids merging consonants into one another (is there a technical term for this?) in words like inmediato, but English on the whole doesn’t, though I think we separate the n and m in words like inmate.
The onlooker sees more of the game:
https://www.englishpronunciationmadrid.com/connected-speech/linking/assimilation/
the Spectator article that got Lewis into trouble,
Is this. Opening para
sets off my homophobia detector. The later sentence sounds misogynistic, racist against the Welsh, and snobbish — that is, for 2014.
At least half of those were later stars; their style was imitating Dusty (and black US singers such as Dionne Warwick, of course). Lewis gets an arseholerie award in my book.
I think a good editor should have told him to take the whole thing away and start again.
So never believe a native speaker if they say there’s no assimilations in their native language… I will readily admit that something like godt nytår = ‘happy new year’ has a geminate /n/ (and nothing else) in connected speech. Whereas godt on its own, or utterance-final (as in det er godt), has a full, if not always released, unvoiced stop.
Spanish inmediato (and inmigrante, for instance) seem odd to me, since the spelling in Latin reflects a very old assimilation that Spanish has somehow reversed (even though the words are cultismos — never mind if the source was Latin, French, Italian or English, they all have /mm/). Spanish nasals do every other assimilation there is. and if I’m not mistaken any inherited (non-learnèd) forms would have a single /m/ for Latin /mm/.
Lewis gets an arseholerie award in my book
Oh my, yes. No debate about that at all. My comment was in the spirit of the proverb:
Kikirig ya’a mɔr bʋʋdɛ, fʋn tis o ka o lɛbig o mɔɔgin.
“When a malevolent goblin is actually not guilty of something, concede the point so it’ll go back home to the bush.”
(I paraphrase – a little.)
Anti-Welsh “racism”* is such an old-established trope among right-wing fuckwits that it doesn’t really register with me any more. No point in rising to juvenile abuse.
Incidentally, draig “dragon” is feminine in Welsh.** And quite right too.
* Scare quotes because we’re not a “race.” But people of that kind automatically think in such terms. They assimilate their fear and hatred of all difference to their default paradigm.
** For the benefit of Daily Mail readers: this is an appalling and moribund monkey language, a remnant of an ancient tongue which in James Murray’s day was still spoken in remote regions.
Going back quite a bit in all this, Cornish would have been still just about around in the mid-19th century, in the sense of people who could count and recite rhymes, or prayers, or even had learnt enough as children to hold conversations on limited subjects – Dolly Pentreath might have been the last known fluent speaker, but the language didn’t just vanish completely with her. I don’t know if Murray was fascinated by those remnants or not, but other people were.
I have no idea what ‘Anglo-Saxon’ could reasonably mean, though.
While that’s certainly perfectly possible in principle, I’m always rather leery of such claims. Some of the revivers of Modern Cornish are suspiciously keen on making out that the language never really died. It would be nice to imagine so, but …
It’s a very old problem. We’ve really no idea when the last L1 speakers of Sumerian died …
There’s a whole literature about language death, of course, and what a fuzzy concept it can be at times. Between radical simplifications or remodelling of language structure, serious loss of vocabulary, progressive restrictions on the domains of use … semispeakers self-identifying as fluent for understandable reasons of cultural pride … it’s all a much more problematic question than deciding when a person or animal is dead.
[I’d also introduce “Zombie Language” as a term of art, were it not that my candidates for the title were likely to cause some (quite natural) offense. Perhaps even more so than “appalling and moribund monkey language.”]
@Athel: You may recall that Mike Lyle used to complain about that assimilation.
Wikipedia discusses all the possibilities assimilations of nasals in Spanish except the one in inmediato and inmortal. Very annoying. I was surprised that it says there’s an [mn] in alumno, himno, and the like. I thought [m] couldn’t occur at the end of a syllable except before a labial consonant, though I think I have heard it in alumno.
@DE: I have some but not all of the assimilations in that article. In particular, I think I have a glottal stop for the /t/ in “it could” etc. when I’m careless, not a complete assimilation to the following consonants. (On the other hand, I have complete assimilation of the first /t/ in “first step” etc.) I also think I have
We’ve really no idea when the last L1 speakers of Sumerian died …
Perhaps it’s still spoken, somewhere in the Caucasus or Zagros…
I also think I have
an actual [n] in “London Bridge” and the like. An [m] might intervene between that and the [b], though.
The later sentence sounds misogynistic, racist against the Welsh, and snobbish — that is, for 2014… I think a good editor should have told him to take the whole thing away and start again
This is the Spectator we’re talking about here, right? The magazine with a regular column by Rod Liddle? The style sheet probably says to never knowingly pass up a chance to sound that way, especially if you can pass it off as a joke.
Yes, the hope of salutory editorial input at the Spectator is likely to be misplaced.
It was Frazer Nelson at that point. He was a Cameroon in those days, but has since shifted right, like the Conservatives in general, and espoused their current orthodoxy that
witchesimmigrants are the cause of all misfortunes.The Spectator used to have a very good crossword. It may still do, for all I know …
I owe Anthony Burgess a debt for helping me remember how to spell Polish człowiek ‘human, fellow’, whose Russian version appeared in Clockwork Orange as chelloveck. I haven’t found much use for another word I remember from Clockwork Orange slang, horrorshow, and I don’t remember much of the rest of the slang.
I have no idea what ‘Anglo-Saxon’ could reasonably mean, though.
Usually it means the language of Beowulf, usually called “Old English”.
So absolutely no one spoke it in Murray’s day. Or alternatively it was spoken in Canada, Australia, the United States, most of Great Britain, and widely used in India, Malaya, Burma, Rhodesia, South Africa, etc.
Do lay people generally assume that Old English is a separate language from modern English, the way that Latin and Italian are considered different languages? My sense is that many people do view Old English/Anglo-Saxon the way modern Greeks view 1st century Koine. It’s simply an older version of the same language. Lewis seems to be staking some weird position adjacent to both those. Maybe he thought obscure Northeast dialects and/or Scots are so archaic they are still essentially “Anglo Saxon”.
I think one mental-taxonomy difference is that Lateish Latin famously split into multiple daughter languages. So everyone agrees it’s its own language rather than merely an archaic version of French or Italian etc. to avoid nationalistic fights over which of those it would be. Whereas (pace Scots …) Old English has no significant descendants other than Modern English so that issue does not arise. Same situation (plus more nationalism) with Greek.
Pointless to speculate about what Lewis “thought” when writing that. He was just bullshitting.
One salient difference between English and Greek is that if you go to church in Greece (or, to be fair, even at certain places in New York City) you will generally hear the Scriptures read in 1st-century koine, whereas I don’t believe there’s any congregation in the world that habitually reads from the various Anglo-Saxon versions of the Gospels in its regular Sunday services. However “archaic” the KJV and e.g. the even older Coverdale Psalter may sound to modern ears, they’re both “Early Modern English” from a technical standpoint and accessible to us in a qualitatively different way than Old (and maybe even Middle) English is.
Obviously there are those who sincerely (and perhaps even correctly) believe that Modern Greek has evolved so much since the NT was written that it would be useful for it to be read in Modern Greek translation, but that’s a touchy issue which has in the past led to fatal consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_riots
Back to Burgess: the legendary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Linna posted the following complaint on Facebook yesterday. “How is it that the almighty Google Translate refuses to interpret Nadsat? How gloopy!”
Mike Lyle is probably the former contributor to alt.usage.english whose disappearance I regret the most.
…oh.
Maybe that’s exactly why: Spanish simply doesn’t do consonant length (outside the very special case of rr); assimilation would lead to total loss of the etymological n, and so the learned borrowings need to refrain from the assimilation. Similarly for the -mn- wordsb.
(I’m reminded of the idea that the good old Indo-European s mobile, bane of neogrammarians everywhere, arose because PIE didn’t allow long consonants even across word boundaries, meaning that *-s C- could not be distinguished from *-s sC-.)
Very widespread and very common. (And very noticeable to me because southern German doesn’t glottalize at all – by destroying aspiration, the High German Consonant Shift took the need for actively taking aspiration away away… wait… I should try that again.)
Unlike nadsat, that’s a masterpiece I appreciated immediately: it’s хорошо given a convincing English folk etymology.
@DM. Speaking of rr, it’s irreverente in Spanish. Which only changed from inr- to irr- in post-Augustan Latin, according to Wikt. But for cultismos I guess that it’s more important whether the person introducing it knew about etymology in Latin and could restore in- than whether it had one or the other form in whatever kind of Latin that gave rise to Western Romance.
(I recently read an article that tried to make a case for the trill taking up both consonant slots before the vowel in Spanish syllable structure. So there’s a trill in Enrique because two slots available, but in varieties where it becomes Endrique, the trill turns into a flap. But it also smacked of OT and Chomsky, so I promptly forgot where I found it).
There genuinely can be a mismatch between phonetics and phonotactics in cases like that.
Kusaal /k t p/ between vowels* are realised as single [k t p], except in very slow speech, but they always pattern as double consonants when it comes to the realisation of tonemes (which is sensitive to whether syllables are open or closed), even in ordinary rapid speech.
* Intervocalic /k t p/ in native Kusaal vocabulary always arise from original consonant clusters, but so, very often, does intervocalic /r/, which is invariably realised as a single consonant. (Kusaal does have actual contrastive gemination of consonants, but only in the case of /l m n/.)