A second follow-up on back-accented nadir in (American) English, now about the history of the word, whose antecedents in English include both front-accented pronunciations (as is — on the testament of dictionaries for British, American, and Australian English — standard throughout modern English) and back-accented ones (as I reported on in previous postings, with some surprise).
The questions are how English settled on front accent and where the exceptional back accent comes from, and I lack the resources to answer those questions, since the sources I have available to me provide spellings, not pronunciations, and accentuation isn’t marked in English spelling (so we have the homographic front-accented noun PRESENT and back-accented verb PRESENT). What I need is help from people who are familiar with the evidence on the accentuation of Middle French and Middle English (material that’s entirely unavailable to me; I don’t have access to a scholarly library).
The background. From my 2/6/25 posting “Back-accented nadir 2”:
A first follow-up — there will be at least one more — to my 2/3 posting “The nuh-DEER” that reported on back-accented pronunciations of nadir ‘the lowest point in the fortunes of a person or organization’ (NOAD), based on what I heard as MSNBC went past me while I was working at my computer (but then was unable to find on the MSNBC site).
… [about] a 2/2/25 MSNBC interview of Nikole Hannah-Jones by Ali Velshi … throughout this interview, Velshi and Hannah-Jones use only back-accented pronunciations of nadir: /nǝdír/ and sometimes /nàdír/ (a variant I hadn’t reported on before).
… I’ve tried … seeking reports (and if they exist, studies) of back-accented nadir, to get past this one particular case [plus the pronunciation advice on the net on the word nadir, which includes a number of back-accented clips], but so far without any success. I don’t have the resources to investigate usage on this point, so I am again asking for help.
Well, here I am again, deeply ignorant, in yet another way.
On the source of English nadir. From the OED:
Of multiple origins. Partly a borrowing from French. Partly a borrowing from Latin.
Etymons: French nadir; Latin nadir.
Partly < Middle French nadir point opposite the sun (c1366 as nador), point opposite the zenith (1558), and partly < post-classical Latin nadir point opposite the sun (a1050 as nadair; from c1230 in British sources), representation of the nadir on an astrolabe (early 14th cent. in a British source), lowest point (late 14th cent. in British sources), both < Arabic naẓīr opposite to, over against (also used as noun). … Compare Italian nadir (a1313), Spanish nadir (1515), Portuguese nadir (17th cent.).
Now, here’s the thing. The accent on Latin nadir was on the first syllable (with vowel [a]), as it was on all two-syllable words in the language. On the other hand, in the Romance languages descended from Vulgar Latin, the accent seems generally to have switched to the final syllable — and certainly did in the history of French: Modern French nadir is [nàdír].
So there was a possible source of final-accented nadir in French, after the stress shifted in that language — either with (a) the accent pattern borrowed into some varieties of Middle English (for which we would need some evidence); or with (b) modern French nadir taken wholesale as an elegant foreignism in current English. It’s also possible that (c) some occurrences of final-accented nadir are spelling pronunciations: attempts to use the spelling NADIR, on its own, to predict the pronunciation of this exotic-looking word, a strategy that will take you to a bunch of exotic words spelled with IR that are all pronounced with final-accented [ir]:
emir ‘a Muslim ruler’; wazir (a variant of vizier) ‘a Muslim official’; panir ‘Indian cheese curds’; the surnames Sapir and Shamir; the geographical names Pamir (the mountains) and Zaire (the country)
(a pile of models for final-accented nadir). So final-accented nadir isn’t at all crazy. But it also isn’t standard English.
Now, I have no way of knowing how many of the scenarios (a) – (c) have actually played out in the history of English; for that, we need evidence not accessible to me. Once again, I ask for help.
February 23, 2025 at 9:20 am |
Nowadays when we have questions, we often ask an AI, but I have grave doubts that they would be useful in this case!
February 23, 2025 at 10:36 am |
😀 I note that AI answers on Google are not only peppered with flat-out errors, they are mostly answers to questions that the AI agents are prepared to answer, rather than the question you asked, which is entertaining, but infuriating.