Once again, three linguists on Facebook. beginning with Lauren Hall-Lew on Facebook on 10/4:
— LHL (Univ.of Edinburgh): I’ve been binging Desert Islands Discs, because most of my podcasts are political, and my heart can only take so much.
— AZ (Stanford) > LHL: (Side comment: for me, the spelling really has to be bingeing; otherwise it’s just bing-bing-bing like bullets, or Bing like Bing Crosby.)
— LHL > AZ: excellent point! I am a terrible speller!
I am ever alert for words, especially names, with initial Z, even more with initial ZW or Z … W … And then of course Z … Y, for which ZIPPY (the Pinhead) is the standout name. And then the restaurant name Z & Y flashed by me in a Facebook ad (before it got deleted, like all ads). Not just a restaurant, but an excellent one, and in San Francisco’s Chinatown. From the street:
Z&Y, opened in 2008 by married couple Lijun Han and Michelle Zhang; Z and Y are the initials of Michelle’s last name and Chinese first name
Today’s morning name was Zimbalist, which came to me at 4:10 am to the accompaniment of the delicious, very French, piano music of Erik Satie (to which it has no associations I can think of). I understood the name to refer to Stephanie Zimbalist, most famously (with Pierce Brosnan and Doris Roberts) a star of the American tv show Remington Steele. But then the topic branched wildly in many directions, in a way I couldn’t imagine organizing into a single posting. So, today, just one piece of that network of topics, the surname Zimbalist.
Zimbalist looks like zimbal + ist, an association surname, possibly an association to an occupation, and so it is: it’s a Slavic Jewish surname meaning ‘cimbalom / cimbal player’ (so it’s parallel to the common nouns pianist, violinist, accordionist, trombonist, clarinetist, etc.).
(The initial letter c of cimbalom represents a voiceless dental affricate [ts], spelled with a c in Russian, a z in German; because of the spelling with c, the name cimbalom is pronounced in English with an [s], and because of the spelling with Z, the name Zimbalist is pronounced in English with a [z] — yes, this is a multilingual, multiorthographic mess, but don’t blame me, I’m just the reporter.)
Now, briefly, to the instrument.
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).
Yesterday’s Zippy strip manages to combine abstract algebra (in the notion of idempotence) with linguistic behavior (in the notion of onomatomania):
The 12 days of Christmas click by as we advance to Twelfth Night — Epiphany Eve — and then on 1/6 to Epiphany itself, the day of the Three Magi, or Three Kings, conventionally each the king of a distant land, each with a characteristic appearance, each with a name, and each with his gift for the Christ Child in Bethlehem. In one tradition, Melchior (alongside Caspar / Kaspar and Balthazar) is King of Persia, the oldest of the kings (a graybeard), and the giver of gold (rather than frankincense or myrrh).
The thing is, I am Arnold Melchior Zwicky, son of Arnold Melchior Zwicky and grandson of Melchior Arnold Zwicky, the last of whom, oh yes, had brothers named Kaspar and Balthazar. I have the name, the age and the gray beard, but lack the kingdom and the gold. Yet for a brief period in January each year, I am Melchior as well as Arnold, I am resplendent, I am a king.
For this period, I rise above the fact that in my country all three parts of my name are seen as strange and foreign, none more than Melchior (for the rest of the year, when I have to clarify my middle initial, I say “M as in Michael”, leading many people to think that my middle name is in fact Michael, so they could call me Mike). Only this year did it occur to me that I should add Michael / Mike to my alter ego’s name Alexander / Alex Adams: ALEXANDER MICHAEL ADAMS, the weighty A. M. Adams, the amiable Alex “Mike” Adams, hookup name Alex, just Alex.
Now, two things. First , an alternative view of the royal Melchior, from a 2022 posting in which he’s depicted as, wow, not only young and virile but also as the (mythic) king of France. And then another 2022 posting that starts out being about okapis and somehow ends up with “M as in musk ox” for my middle initial (plus “O as in okapi” for the O of ARNOLD).
Meanwhile, Epiphany is coming and my royal robes need fluffing.
(Men’s bodies and man-on-man sex, discussed bluntly, so not suitable for kids or the sexually modest)
On Pinterest this morning, this painting by Polish queer artist Wojciech Woś (now working in Berlin):
Wayno’s Bizarro for 11/8 — yes, I am hopelessly overwhelmed with posting material, wondering whether I’ll ever catch up; on the other hand, my health has taken a turn back to normal awful, which I’m entirely able to cope with — is a Psychiatrist strip in which the patient is said to be suffering from (in fact, cowering behind the therapeutic couch in the grips of) the fear of contractions:
Of the types of traditionally-labeled “contractions” in English, the patient here — call him NoA — seems to exhibit sensitivity specifically to just one, now known in the linguistic literature as Auxiliary Reduction, AuxRed for short (in I am > I’m, I had > I’d, and you are > you’re), though in fact Wayno sees NoA’s sensitivity as triggered by all occurrences of the punctuation mark the apostrophe, of which there are a great many types — hence Wayno’s title for this cartoon, “Punctuation Trepidation” (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 7 in this strip — see this Page)
Now if this is NoA’s affliction, he’s in for a world of trouble, because in modern English spelling the apostrophe is used as an abstract mark for possessive forms of nominals — singular in someone’s cat and the queen of England’s hat, plural in the boys’ bat — a visual mark accompanying the possessive S; but while the the letter S in such forms corresponds to phonological content, the apostrophe neither represents phonological content nor indicates a place where some phonological content is omitted. So, how does NoA know that /sʌm.wǝnz.kæt/ in some sense has an apostrophe in it and he should cringe in fear at it?
… and, instead of taking the Zzyzx exit, catches a ride with a guy in a SYZYGY car to the end of the road, where one-point perspective takes you (so we are both out in the desert in San Bernardino County CA; and also in the artist’s meta-world, where perspective lines converge in a vanishing point, and that is truly the end of the road). All this in yesterday’s Zippy strip, which is rich in Z, Y, ZY / ZI, and ZYG. plus the occasional antic X:
(#1) Three things: Zzyzx Road; one-point perspective; and the word SYZYGY (the ZYG of which took my mind to the word ZYGOTE; while the concept of syzygy took me to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a wedding-feast of syzygy — of counterparts, contrasts, conflicts, and oppositions)
And then there’s zig; from NOAD:
noun zig: a sharp change of direction in a zigzag course: he went round and round in zigs and zags.
(which can then be verbed to yield to zig ‘to take a zig’, as in my title)
A new low-water mark in my erroneous ways: my 10/19/24 posting “striking language” actually appeared on this blog with a, um, striking typo in its third word, the surname of my old friend and colleague Ellen Kaisse (as I type it now, letter by letter, very slowly, so as to get it right on the first try; my rough drafts are veritable forests of typos, the product of seriously disabled fingers working at the speed of my thoughts). What my readers saw when this posting first appeared:
From Ellen Kaiise in e-mail to me
One of my typo specialties, the misplaced geminate (more on misplaced gemination below). What’s new about this example is that I failed to notice it through at least five passes of editing. And just now, when I looked at the stretch of text above, I had a moment when I didn’t see anything wrong with it. Presumably because the spelling wouldn’t affect the pronunciation in English: Kaise, Kaisse, Kaiise, Kaiisse, they’d all be pronounced /kes/. Compare this to the examples gogling, goggling, googling, googgling; in real life, again from my hand, the second of these occurred as a typo for the third, and the first two would be pronounced differently from the last two, so the error leaps out from the page.
