Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

My old friend Chris Stewart of South Africa chided me today for sending out anything so outdated as teraflop for a Good Word. Indeed, over the weekends I’m recycling some words from four years back for the benefit of those who have subscribed since then and for myself, who has discovered the joys of weekends off. Over the course of those four years, electronics has grown immensely smaller and faster, so Chris is right in trying to lead me to the future. Here is what Chris said in part (I left out the chiding section):

“Just a few weeks ago I had an e-mail exchange with a friend of mine in the software industry on the subject of Intel’s new generation of processors. These consumer items contain about half a trillion transistors on a single chip. I said soon individuals will be able to purchase portable computers containing teratranny chips (a word I coined to indicate a trillion transistors). I mention it purely as an example of unsurprising synchronicity since terra- as a prefix is clearly becoming more common.”

“Having said all that,” Chris continues, “tera- is already passe whereas peta- is on the rise. Peta- seems to have a peculiar contrived etymology; at least its antonym femto-, which is also on the rise) seems to have more solid origins (being Danish for “fifteen”). Doubtless exa- will soon become commonplace, while atto- / femto- / pico- are already with us, e.g. inkjet printers are described in marketing materials as dispensing picolitre droplets. SI units are a bit weird, therefore interesting.”

Indeed, according to Wikipedia, “IBM’s supercomputer dubbed Blue Gene/P is designed to eventually operate at three petaFLOPS.” The Free Dictionary offers five entries for pemto-, and its definition for pemtovolt is “one quadrillionth of a volt (or one thousandth of a nanosecond)”. I must admit to being surprised that someone deferred to Danish rather than the much heavier authorities of Latin and Greek for this prefix.

I also like Chris’s word teratranny and the implication of petatranny processors in the future. It is gratifying to know that the English language can still keep up with the rapid changes in computer and electronic technology.  The number of transistors possible in a single chip seems to be paced by the number of dollars in the US national debt. Is there a connection?

Brian Thornton wants to know if I can explain the use or misuse of the adverb off: should we use it alone or with the preposition of. Should we say, ”The cat jumped off the table” or “off of the table”?

Well, maybe I can at least define the problem. The adverb off is in the process of becoming a preposition. As an adverb, its object requires the preposition of: “The button flew off [of my shirt].” As this word becomes more and more a preposition itself, the additional preposition of becomes redundant: “The button flew [off my shirt]“. (I used square brackets here to set of the prepositional phrases.)

I am speaking only of the adverb off. Like many words in English, this word has several functions. It is also a prefix (an off-white dress), and adjective (the lights are off), and a verbal particle (Lenny took his hat off). It started out as an adverb, though it apparently was never happy in that function and hence is currently changing careers. While it is in the process of change, we should use whichever form those around us are using; both forms are correct.

This historical shift is not unusual. Out is another example of an adverb becoming a preposition. Out, too, is still used mostly with a preposition to mark its objects: “Melvin came out [of the house]“, “Lucinda Head is out [of her mind]“. It has picked up a new meaning, however, “out through”, and in that sense, of cannot be used: “The dog sniffed his food once and flew [out the door]“. Out is lagging materially behind off in its career shift but it seems to have begun the journey.

Many other adverbs are prepositions and conjunctions: after and before may be all three:

     • I’ve never seen him before. (Adverb)
     • I saw him before he grew the beard. (Conjunction)
     • I knew her before the war. (Preposition)

I’m sure you can think of others. Nothing amiss here: multifunctional words that belong to several categories are commonplace in all languages.

Language is not stagnant. It is changing all the time. Language change is not simply the coming and going of words; that is the least interesting change in language. Words are shifting from one category to another, the categories themselves are changing, syntactic structure is changing, juggling words as it goes along. All this is taking place now right under our noses, where tongues and lips are constantly churning out grammar and vocabulary, producing nuances that eventually add up to new dialects and even languages.

We at Lexiteria are in the process of developing a collection of folk etymologies. Along the way we have stumbled over an interesting facet of words that might be called “reverse folk etymology”. Folk etymology is the conversion of a foreign or unfamiliar word into one that is more familiar, such as the conversion of French dormeuse “sleepy (one)” to dormouse and kith and kin to kissing kin. The opposite would be to make a recognizable word unrecognizable.

The following list of words have “lost words” in them, words we no longer see or hear when we speak:

• sweater (hidden word sweat)
• business (hidden word busy)
• atonement (hidden words at one)
• disease (hidden word ease)
• necklace (hidden word lace)

We no longer think of sweaters as clothing designed to make us sweat but to simply keep up warm. Business in no longer ‘busy-ness’ and has come to be pronounced [biznis] or even [bidnis]. Atonement is a form of repentence, making up for bad deeds, and not making anything at one with another. The pronunciation of this word makes it clear that it has been reanalyzed as [atonment].

Disease has come to be something much more painful than simple uneasiness or discomfort. But that is the meaning it began with. Finally, Lace worn around the neck is no longer called necklace; necklaces are countable things made of almost anything but lace. Concomitantly, their pronunciation has shfted to blur the word lace: [neklis].

These are examples of two discrete processes. First, semantic drift, the tendency of the meanings of words to drift way from their original meaning over time . The second is the tendency of words to be reanalyzed and pronounced differently over time. The examples above starkly reveal the two critical historical changes that words undergo if they remain in English for centures.

William Hupy has one of the sharpest eyes for quirks of language that I know of. Today it occurred to him that, while we skip the pronunciation of the L in salmon, we clearly pronounce it in salmonella. He wondered why.

Let me begin by saying that whether the L is pronounced in either word depends on where you are from: I’m from the South and we pronounce the L in both words sharply. I’ve been kidded about my pronunciation of salmon for decades in Pennsylvania, where I live now.

Among people raised in the North, however, unless L is followed by a vowel, it is pronounced [U] (the vowel sound in would and should), that is, before (voiceless) consonants and at the ends of words. My sons, who were born and raised in Pennsylvania pronounce milk [miUk] and hill [hiU]. This pronunciation is certainly common throughout PA, southern NY, and NJ. (In Serbian, by the way, L becomes other rounded vowel, O, in the same positions and is written that way. The past of biti “to be” is bila  ”she was” but bio “he was”.)

Now, since the L in salmon appears before a consonant, we would expect it to be pronounced [saumon] in these regions, as we hear almond sometimes pronounced. Most folks up North, however, have adopted the simpler pronunciation [sammon].

That leaves us with the question of salmonella. The problem here is probably what we might call ‘retroinfluence’. Though pronunciation is supposed to influence spelling (I’m not kidding; even in English), sometimes it works the other way around. We probably see salmonella written more frequently than we hear it spoken, so pronounce the L. We more than likely hear salmon more frequently than we read it, so the pronunciation change turns up there.

The latest Beltway clichés are beginning to irritate me and I can no longer resist the inclination to complain about them. “Put some skin in (the game)” brings up memories of falling and scraping knees, elbows, heads, and the like. 

This cliché replaces “ante up”, which replaced “cough up”, whose demises please no one more than me. ”Put some skin in” is milder than “give a pound of flesh”, donated by Shakespeare but still it is pretty raw. “Ante up” comes from poker; it means literally to put more money in the game and hence is more fitting for the financial crisis than “putting in more skin” (unless, of course, you’ve been skinned by Bernie Madoff).

OK, the image is bad, so what is better? Let’s try “give/get a haircut”, as to give GM employees or AIG managers a haircut. Well, that isn’t a graphic image of an injury but then it doesn’t really imply a contribution to the cost of resurrecting our economic institutions. Hair cuts are something we all get on a regular basis and implies willingly giving up something we consider superfluous. It implies no kind of sacrifice at all which is the very point of these metaphors.

This is what comes of ignoring our poets and listening to the faces on radio and TV that talk faster than they think. Clichés, of course, are simply metaphors that catch on and are repeated ad nauseum by those who cannot come up with their own. I’m sure at least one poet in our midst has dreamed up a better metaphor than the ones that are morphing into clichés even as I click away now.

Yesterday Martin Kirk raised this issue:

“I am trying to find out whether there is a word to describe the written linguistic situation where a word is unintentionally misspelled, resulting in another correct word which makes sense in the context but is the opposite of that intended in an ironic way, e.g. cease the opportunity instead of seize the opportunity or relive the pain instead of relieve the pain.”

“I have quries this with the Oxford Dictionary Press‘s ‘question line’ and they suggest that I am describing a malapropism. I do not agreee withn this. Have you any better sugestions.”

I can think of a couple of points in this connection. First, however, remember that languages are spoken or signed. Writing is a superficial attempt at symbolizing what is spoken. Fewer than 2000 of the world’s approximately 6700 languages and dialects have functioning writing systems. While writing has some effect on language change (adding the T in the pronunciation of often), it is marginal to the point of being trivial.

The question, then, resolves to one of whether mispronunciation leads to permanent language change. The mispronunciation of courtesy led to curtsy and, if you follow our Good Word series, you know that ornery was once a mispronunciation of ordinary. These words are examples of phonological reduction, very common in language; we see it all the time in contractions.

This process is not usually referred to as malapropism, which is usually the mispronunciation of a word so that it sounds like another, e.g. a fire distinguisher or a wolf in cheap clothing. My favorite was actually written in a freshman thesis at Bucknell some years ago: a devil-make-hair attitude.

The words you mention (relive – relieve, seize – cease) are only accidentally similar and are wholly unrelated derivationally and historically. The only similar normal historical change I know of is a change in pronunciation that leads to the loss of the relationship of a derivation to its base or origin. I call them words with hidden words within them for lack of a term and they seem to have caught only my eye (or, more properly, ear).

I’m thinking now of words like disease which today is unrelated semantically to ease, the word it was derived from. No one out of the cloth associates atonement with its origin, the phrase at one. We don’t think of business as simply the activity of being busy any more.

So far as I know, I’m the only one writing about such words and I haven’t named them yet. What do you think we should call them?

Sorry I didn’t get this out earlier. Watch PBS tonight (February 26, 200) for what promises to be an interesting program on dying languages.

The Linguists

Thursday, February 26, 2009 10 – 11:00 pm – PBS

This special chronicles the race of two scientists—David Harrison and Greg Anderson—to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India and Bolivia, the linguists confront head-on the very forces silencing languages: racism, humiliation and violent economic unrest. Their journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, revealing communities at risk when a language dies. (CC, Stereo, HD, 5.1)

I’m not sure when Sara Goldman asked me this question. I hope I answered her but I just found this blog entry that I had started but never finished. In case others might be interested in the origin of the distinction between soft Cs and hard Cs, will finish it now.

This is what Sara asked:

“When did the letter C change from the K sound to a soft C? I studied Latin; Caesar was pronounced [kaisar] from which comes German Kaiser, which means that’s how the ancient Germans pronounced it, I think. When I took Latin, all C’s were spoken K, e.g. circus was pronounced [kirkus].  But I’d like to know more about the K to C sounds.“

First, let’s talk about both [k] and [g] sounds since they are identical except you vibrate the vocal cords in your larynx when pronouncing [g]. Otherwise, both are pronounced by raising the tongue to the top of the soft palate way in the back of your mouth and momentarily stopping the flow of air from your lungs (try a few ‘kahs’ and ‘gahs’ and see for yourself).

Both these sounds tend to undergo “palatalization”, that is, their pronuncation changes because, over time, speakers move their tongues forward to the hard palate, where [ch] and [j] are pronounced.

This normally occurs when [k] or [g] are followed by a “front” vowel, a vowel formed by raising the tongue in the front of the mouth. Front vowels  are [i] “ee” and [e] “ay” in most Indo-European languages. This is why soft Cs most often appear before I and E: city, certain but cough, catch.

The problem here, as you can see, is that a consonant, formed by raising the tongue to the back of the mouth, is followed by a vowel formed by raising the tongue in the front of the mouth. The tongue has to move a great distance in a very, very, very short time. The tendency is for the back consonants, [k] and [g] to move forward over time toward the middle of the mouth, where, as I mentioned, [ch] and [j] are pronounced.

These consonants usually spend some time as [ch] and [j], pronounced by raising the tongue to the middle of the mouth.  This is why kirke became church everywhere in English except in Scotland, where you still hear kirk. (This is an example of the front vowel moving to the back to meet the consonant, too.) It is a common change, still rampant in Portuguese but common in Late Latin, just before it divided into French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

In French and Spanish, however, the [ch] and [j] sounds continued to move forward until they become [s] and [z], respectively, pronounced almost in the same spot as [ee] (letter I) and [e] (letter E). So what began as a [k] sound in Caesar [kaisar] became Cesare ([chesare]) in Italian, then moved on to become Caesar [sezer] in French and [seezur] when English borrowed it.

You can read about these changes in almost any history of Romance languages (whence we borrowed most of our words). My favorite is Martin Harris’s “History of Romance Languages” but you can find it along with Peter Boyd-Bowman’s “From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts” in most college libraries or at Amazon.com. (You can also find my The 100 Funniest Words in English there, too.)

David McReynolds today became the third person to call into question our claim that forte meaning “strong point” should be pronounced [fort] rather than [fortay]. He writes:

“Concerning your 100 most mispronounced words: Forte pronounced [for-tay] is a musical term meaning “loud”; it is Italian. Forte meaning strength is pronounced [fort]; it is French.”

“Modern dictionaries allow for both pronunciations of forte meaning “strong”, but the original and more correct remains [fort].”

It is difficult to determine when a language change has taken place definitively. Finding a word in print or even in a dictionary does not mean that it is a part of the language. However, in this case, I think the change has taken place and it is time to admit it. Here is what the American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), which we consider the best US English dictionary, has to say about the issue:

“The word forte, coming from French fort, should properly be pronounced with one syllable, like the English word fort. Common usage, however, prefers the two-syllable pronunciation, (fôr’-ta), which has been influenced possibly by the music term forte borrowed from Italian. In a recent survey a strong majority of the Usage Panel, 74 percent, preferred the two-syllable pronunciation. The result is a delicate situation; speakers who are aware of the origin of the word may wish to continue to pronounce it as one syllable but at an increasing risk of puzzling their listeners.”

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the pronunciation as “fo:ti, fo:te, formerly fo:t,” omitting, as the Britons are wont to do, the R. The point is, this shift is not limited to the US but has occurred throughout the English-speaking world.

The origin of a word is irrelevant to its pronunciation in English. Those words from French, pronounced in the French way, cannot be convincingly be considered English words: if an word used by English-speakers has the same sound and meaning as a French word, what claim does it have of being English? It is possible to use foreign words in conversations if both coconversationalist are familiar with the language in question.

I would disagree with the inconsistency of AHD in claiming that [fort] is the “proper” usage. If 74% of the educated population and the editors of the OED think that the ENGLISH pronunciation is [fortay], then we would seem constrained to using that pronunciation or run the risk, as the AHD note warns, of puzzling our listeners. (Our Mispronounced Words glossary is aimed at promoting clearer speech.)

In fact, all the dictionaries may be in error in claiming that English forte was borrowed from French fort and not Italian forte: both words have the same meaning (among others) in their respective languages. Where did that final E come from? The OED claims that, “As in many other adoptions of Fr[ench] adj[ective]s used as n[oun]s, the fem[inine] form has been ignorantly substituted for the masc[uline].” My impression is, however, that those who use the term at all are far from ignorant people and, moreover, include knowledgeable speakers of French and Italian.

Hence I see no reason impeding the pronunciation of this word [fortay] and much speaking in its favor.

Susan Kappel raised an interesting question today: Why is the motto of the state of New York “wood-shavings”? The point is, the motto and only word in Latin on the Great Seal of New York is Excelsior. The packing material state?

Well, no; excelsior is actually the comparative degree of the Latin word excelsus “high”, hence it means “higher”. The superlative is excelsis, as in Gloria in excelsis Deo “Glory to God in the highest”. As Susan very aptly put it: “For packing material it’s a pretty grandiose name!”

The now common noun excelsior was not always a common noun. It originated as a proper noun, the name of the American Excelsior Company, which began manufacturing the curly wood shavings for packing frangible products in 1888. It is still the world’s largest manufacturer of this product but also produces a complete line of packaging materials in addition to being the eponym of excelsior.

Like Kleenex, escalator, and aspirin, American Excelsior’s product dominated the field to the point that referring to it simply as excelsior led to the commonization of the word. Unlike Kimberly-Clarke, who legally convinced publishers to switch to “tissue”, American Excelsior apparently has no complaints over integrating its name into ordinary English since it uses the word excelsior in lower case letters on its website.