Very briefly noted.
Passed on back on 11/9 by Michael Palmer on Facebook, this fine reworking of the map of Austria as an ostrich:
MP came across it on the Language Nerds Facebook site, but I don’t know who created the image in the first place
In English, Austria (a Latinization of the German name Österreich ‘eastern realm’) and ostrich (from a compound of the Latin avi- stem meaning ‘bird’ and the Greek struth– stem meaning ‘ostrich, big sparrow’) have only medial /str/ as clearly shared material, so are very distant puns, if they count as puns at all. Much the same is true of Spanish Austria and avestruz. Things are even more distant in Italian (Austria and struzzo) and of course German (Österreich and Strauß).
But in French, as I pointed out on Facebook, by the accidents of phonological change, Latinized Austria > Autriche and the avi– + struth– compound > autruche, yielding a truly fine pun: Autriche is an autruche!
So Austria not only looks like an ostrich, in French it sounds like one too. This makes me happy.
November 15, 2024 at 5:35 pm |
I hear them both with initial /ɔstr-/, so punnier than “more distant compounds”. Merriam-Webster agrees with my conclusion:
Aus·tria ˈȯ-strē-ə ˈä-
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Austria
os·trich ˈä-strich ˈȯ-,
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ostrich
November 15, 2024 at 6:25 pm |
In both General American and (British) Received Standard, the two vowels are distinct. The US now has a fairly large dialect area in which the cot / caught distinction is leveled in favor of /a/, and a small area (yours, apparently) in which it’s leveled in favor of /ɔ/. M-W, you show us, lists all of these variants; NOAD gives only the distinct pronunciations (which are, as it happens, mine), presumably on the grounds that the distinct pronunciations are the majority usage and that the levelings are quite general — people don’t pick a variant item by item, but if you level elsewhere in favor of one of the variants, you do it here, so listing the leveled pronunciations just clutters the dictionary up with redundant information.
Two things. One, there might be some people for whom the leveling in favor of /ɔ/ is not general, in which case if this variant is of some frequency and isn’t perceived as non-standard, it should be listed too.
Two, independent of all of that, the phonetic difference between [a] and [ɔ] isn’t very great, so Austria and ostrich might be more similar that I made out, though they still differ in final /i.ǝ/ vs. /ɪč/.
November 17, 2024 at 7:18 am |
I suspect that the pun intended here is visual rather than auditory: Österreich and ostrich don’t sound much alike, but they have a fair number of letters in common.