Archive for the ‘Variation’ Category

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The Queen of the Day’s aria

February 9, 2025

🦉 🦉 🦉 three wise owls for Superb Owl Day, an annual American Sunday holiday devoted to the relaxed enjoyment of uncrowded public places — (weather permitting) in sight-seeing, strolling on city streets, visiting parks and zoos; or (indoors) shopping in stores, exploring museums, attending concerts and theatrical performances (when I was much younger, Superb Owl Day was an excellent occasion for a visit to the gay baths; no doubt you have your own spots that can provide relaxing pleasures)

Meanwhile, back at Ramona St. …

Playing on the Apple Music in my bedroom during my 2:30 whizz break: a ravishingly joyous soprano concert aria, or (as it turned out) Lied (with a warm and playful piano trio accompaniment), with some vocal figures worthy of the Queen of the Night. I thought of it as the Queen of the Day’s Song. In some Germanic language I couldn’t quite comprehend.

Ah, obviously one of Beethoven’s folksong compositions; when I actually got up, at 3:30, I went to my computer to track the song down:

“Wann i in der Früh aufsteh” (‘When I arise in the early morning” — celebrating morning on a Tyrolean dairy farm), Beethoven WoO 158a/ 4 — that is, #4 in his 23 Lieder Verschiedener Völker (‘Songs of Different Peoples / Various Nationalities’); from a 1997 Deutsche Grammophon recording; Janice Watson is the soprano; and the language is Tyrolean, a High German variety spoken in the western Austrian state of Tyrol (where it’s the majority language) and areas of northern Italy (in any case, in a region south of Bavaria and east of the part of Switzerland where the Zwickys come from)

You can listen to this very recording here.

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Posted in Dialects, Events and occasions, German, Music | 2 Comments »

The poetic groundsow

February 2, 2025

Links from Wayles Browne (a regular visitor to this blog from far above Cayuga’s waters), attached to my Ancho Rabbit posting from yesterday, which I will now expand into a posting for Groundhog Day (2/2):

The BBC reports on Groundhog Day: it’s six more weeks of winter.

And of linguistic interest: a Pennsylvania Dutch poem about the groundhog and his, or rather her, day [the BBC report “How the Pennsylvania Dutch created Groundhog Day”; in PaDu, it’s die Grundsau ‘the groundsow’] (as read by Cornell’s old grad student Mark Louden).

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Posted in Ethnonyms and demonyms, German, Holidays, Language and animals, Language and class, Language and ethnicity, My life, Poetry, Variation | Leave a Comment »

Beanies, baby

January 31, 2025

🐅 🐅 🐅  three tigers for ultimate January, and a day continuing the theme of late-January early-death birthdays: Robert Burns, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Edward Sapir in an earlier posting of mine (“Luminous birthdays” from 1/26); now, Anton Chekhov two days ago and Franz Schubert today

Meanwhile, tigers savage rabbits, but the rabbits of February are clamoring at the door, growing in size and ferocity, and are now prepared to chew up the tigers like mere blades of grass. A monument in bread to the coming triumph of these adorable but gigantic bunnies:


(#1) Today: from Benita Bendon Campbell, who got it from Jacqueline Martinez Wells

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Posted in Clothing, Events and occasions, Hats, Language and animals, Lexical semantics, Linguistics in the comics, Metaphor, Variation | 2 Comments »

Los Angeles looterers

January 11, 2025

Heard on MSNBC on 1/9, a reporter on scene at the Palisades wildfire in Los Angeles, noting that looterers had become a problem — using, not the agent noun looter, based on the established verb loot, but the agent noun looterer, based on the innovative verb looter (a verbing of the noun looter). A looterer is someone engaged in lootering, which is a kind of looting.

The question is why the reporter went for the elaborate innovative noun looterer rather than the simpler established noun looter. In the context, it was clearly not a mistake, and the reporter repeated it. And then it turns out that the usage wasn’t her invention on the spot; the verb looter and its derived agent noun looterer are attested from others. Even with reference to the Los Angeles fires; from the iHeart podcasts about the fires:

2 days ago — That’s just the estimate. Speaker 2 (00:43): So the Los Angeles Police arrested a possible arson suspect … twenty looterers have been arrested

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Posted in Connotation, Conversion, Derivation, Lexical semantics, Morphology, Pragmatics, Variation, Verbing | 1 Comment »

Rabbit stew 2: vanella

December 1, 2024

Another Rabbit Day item in the stew (see my earlier posting today “Rabbit stew 1: Asian soup spoons”), taking off from this Facebook posting by Greg Morrow yesterday (with some editing by me):

In sort of an opposite of the pen–pin merger [AZ: in which syllable-offset /ɛn/, as in pen, and /ɪn/, as in pin, are both realized as [ɪn]], local dialect (including mine) has [vǝnɛlǝ] vanella as the pronunciation of vanilla [vǝnɪlǝ].

(Heard it today in the grocery, and I was like, yes that’s right, wait a second…)

A further comment went on with the idea that this ɪ > ɛ (before l) that gives widespread US vanella was in some way the opposite of the ɛ > ɪ (before n) shift that gives us US midlands inkpin [ɪŋkpɪn] ‘(ink)pen’.

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Posted in Dialects, Lexicography, Pronunciation, Variation | 8 Comments »

A dozen (or so) senses of the C-word

November 22, 2024

(Well, consider the title if this posting, which tells you that it’s going to get into some vivid descriptions of sexual parts and sexual acts — plus a photo that’s just barely WordPressable — and you’ll see that it’s not suitable for kids or the sexually modest; and from here on, you’re going to get the C-word raw and unconcealed, but your enthusiasm for this dirty talk will probably be diminished when it turns out that this posting is mostly about lexical semantics)

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Posted in Address terms, Context, Dialects, Gay porn, Insults, Language and the body, Language change, Lexical semantics, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification, Style and register, Taboo language and slurs, Variation | 6 Comments »

Apostrophobia

November 16, 2024

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?

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Posted in Comic conventions, Language processing, Linguistics in the comics, Perception, Possession, Psycholinguistics, Psychology, Singular & plural, Spelling, Style and register, Variation, Writing conventions | 1 Comment »

SoCal lads with spread-lip smiles

November 12, 2024

…  and boy-foot bear with teak of Chan … no, no, Kent McCord and the Nelsons’ Rick, that’s the ticket.

(Tales of male-male desire and sexual acts — so this posting will be edgy for some readers — but not particularly vivid tales, and the photos are there for faces and torsos, not genitals)

Rick and Kent, figures of attractive, desirable masculinity — the first from my teenage years (there was a lot I didn’t understand in the Rick, or teenage hard-on, years, during which Ricky got me off, a lot), the second from young adulthood (it was during the Kent years that I gained some self-knowledge and entered into serious, life-long relationships with other men; suddenly it was important that Kent was not only a really hot guy as Officer Jim Reed on Adam-12, but that he also presented himself as a sturdy, dependable and empathetic nice guy, so an eminently satisfactory object of adult lust). Note: I was perfectly aware that Rick and Kent were, by all accounts, uncomplicatedly straight (as it happens, they became buddies when they worked in tv together); what I had in my head were fantasy Rick and Kent, and their kisses were sweeter than wine.

Now I tell you that Rick, Kent, and I were / are all essentially the same age; Rick 4 months older than me, Kent 2 years younger. (Rick died in 1985, but Kent is still alive, and he’s a great-looking 82-year-old.)

And while they’re interesting as objects of desire (on tv and elsewhere, notably from the 1950s through the 1970s), they get a posting here because of a characteristic facial gesture that they share: the spread-lip smile, a feature of Rick and Kent that large numbers of straight women and gay men find powerfully attractive (and that, no doubt, makes many straight men envious).

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Posted in Acting, Actors, Facial expression, Language and the body, Language of sex, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Phonetics, Photography, Variation | Leave a Comment »

“I have a ##”

October 20, 2024

So my caregiver León Hernández Alvarez said to me last Tuesday; ## represents a word I totally failed to recognize, at the most elemental level; I didn’t recognize any of the sounds in the word, though I thought it was probably of the form CV. L then came closer to me and said it again, more slowly: “I have a n#”. Ah, an initial n — a Spanish n (distinct from an English n), but clearly something in the [n] zone, and followed by a vowel.  On the third repetition, I was able to identify the vowel: u — a Spanish u (distinct from an English u), but clearly something in the [u] zone. Apparently, L was telling me that he had a [nu].

I recognized the word phonetically, but still totally failed to recognize the lexical item he was talking about. Surely he didn’t have a GNU. Is there such a thing as a NOO? Ah, finally it dawned on me: L was telling me he had a NEW. Hmm, a new what? And then, finally, the realization that he was telling me that he had a piece of news, that he had reconstructed a singular NEW ‘report of a recent event’ from the word NEWS ‘report of recent events’.  This is clever, but alas mistaken.

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Posted in Agreement, Count & mass, Dialects, Errors, Grammatical categories, Language change, Lexical semantics, Modification, Semantics, Singular & plural, Syntax, Variation | 6 Comments »

Namesakes and surnamesakes

October 12, 2024

This is going to take us surprising places. Our guide will be the distinguished Slavist Wayles Browne, in (edited) excerpts from e-mail he sent me on 10/9:

I discovered your blog when [WB’s Cornell colleague] Michael Weiss wrote about early attestations of the term ruki rule [in Sanskrit and elsewhere: see the 4/22/24 posting “On the transmission of ideas: RUKI gets around”]. Since then I’ve been looking at older postings as well as your day-to-day ones. On 1/9/14 [in the posting “A recent birthday”, on the birthday of Nikolai Marr], you wrote, after quoting this from Wikipedia:

Marr earned a reputation as a maverick genius with his Japhetic theory, postulating the common origin of Caucasian, Semitic-Hamitic, and Basque languages. In 1924, he went even further and proclaimed that all the languages of the world descended from a single proto-language which had consisted of four “diffused exclamations”: sal, ber, yon, rosh.

that

Marr eventually fell out of favor with Stalin.

Quite true, and there’s more to the story than that. After Marr died, his follower Ivan Meščaninov and others managed to get Marrism accepted as the official Marxist approach to linguistics, but finally in 1950 a Georgian linguist went to his fellow-Georgian Stalin and persuaded him that it was all fatuous and bad for the whole science of linguistics. Stalin then published an article in Pravda with essentially common-sense views of language. The name of the Georgian linguist? He was a namesake of yours: Arnold Chikobava.

In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian, the language(s) that I work on the most, ‘name’ is ime, ‘namesake’ is imenjak, ‘surname’ is prezime, and a person you share a surname with is, quite logically, prezimenjak. It would be nice to introduce surnamesake into English too.

So we start in Ithaca NY (with the Cornell Indo-Europeanist scholar Michael Weiss), pass through Ancient India (and the Sanskrit language, which was the topic of my PhD dissertation, back in the Cretaceous Period) on our way to the Soviet Union under Stalin, where we encounter the nutcase linguist Nikolai Marr, who takes us to Soviet Georgia (in the Caucasus) and the linguist Arnold Chikobava, whose name, coupled with mine, reminds WB that the Slavic language(s) BCS (in the Balkans) have the eminently useful term prezimenjak ‘surnamesake’. In this is concealed a good bit of complexity in the notion of namesake (which I have, in fact, posted on, so we’ll get to that eventually), plus a wonderfully sly choice of wording in WB’s reference to BCS as

the language(s) Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian

(which will require some explanation for readers who are not entirely up to date on the linguistic situation in the Balkans).

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Posted in Dialects, Linguists, My life, Names, Naming, Serbo-Croatian, Variation, Zwickys | 4 Comments »

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