Dr. Goodword’s Language Blog

I received considerable flak in reaction to my recent treatment of the word socialism, specifically my claim that the Nazis were enemies of the socialists. Several people pointed out that the word Nazi was short for National Socialists and that the Nazis were socialists. (I have since added a corrective note.)

In the 1930s socialism was very popular. Everyone in the industrialized world was joining socialist parties, socialist unions especially. Several nonsocialist parties added “socialist” to the name of their party in order to build membership. We should focus on the next word in the Nazi Party’s name: Nationalist, for the Nazi party grew out of the “far-right racist völkisch German nationalist movement and the violent anti-communist Freikorps paramilitary culture”, according to Wikipedia.

The fact of the matter is that the socialists and communists were even more popular after World War II, because the Nazis were just as focused on eliminating socialists and communists as they were on eliminating the Jewish population. But the socialists and communists fought back. They entered the underground and were known as “the resistance” and the “underground” in censored US war films.

But the Europeans knew who constituted the “resistance” and “underground”, so following the war, even more people joined the Social Democrats (Marx’s party), the Christian Socialists, and even the Communist Party, soon to be known as the Eurocommunists. Just before I retired in 2000, 60 French cities had communist mayors.

So, we shouldn’t judge a party by its name any more than we should judge a book by its cover.

My wife and I recently took a pair of our grandchildren to visit one of the many large caves in Pennsylvania and was guided by a young girl who hoped to graduate from high school next year and go on to college.

Hopefully, she will take the opportunity to work on her vocabulary in her senior year. In explaining how bats can live in the cave when all the lights are out, she asserted that they possess “that sono-thing”. Close but no cigar.

She then told us that there were other rooms in the cave that are not open to the paying public. One was recently discovered by Penn State students as they were “splunking”. She then added, “Splunking is crawling around in a cave. Not everyone knows that word.” Indeed, I didn’t, though I use spelunking from time to time.

A year from now she will be voting.

Probably half the words in English were borrowed from Latin or its descendants, French, Italian, and Spanish. Today English is hardly recognizable for the Germanic language it is, cousin to German, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish.

Originally, the plural forms of Latin nouns were borrowed along with the singular forms, so that the plural of abacus was abaci, of cactus, cacti. As time passed, however, that has changed in bewildering ways.

Abacuses and cactuses have all but totally replaced cacti and abaci, and foci is used as a plural of focus only in academic institutions. All dictionaries now list the plurals of callus and sinus as calluses and sinuses as the only options.

On the other side of the coin, most speakers don’t even know that agenda and media are, in historical fact, the plurals of agendum and medium. (Radio is one medium.) More and more I hear “a phenomena” presumably spoken by people who don’t know that the singular is phenomenon.

Gigi Marino, Editor of the Bucknell Magazine tells me she is weary of reading “I am an alumni” in letters to her office. The plural of the Latin word for “pupil”, alumnus, has not changed and is not even in the process of changing. The plural of this word is not optional but only alumni. It is the plural, not the singular. “I am an alumnus,” is the only way to express the singular sense of this word.

I suspect the reason for the plural of this word taking over the singular is the awkwardness of the expected change, alumni > alumnuses. No matter, the only plural for this word is alumni.

One final note. Not only did English borrow the Latin word for “pupil” as its word for “alumnus”, it borrowed the feminine forms: alumna and plural alumnae, pronounced [ahlumnee] to refer to female alums. Again, alumnae is the only plural form of alumna.

So, what if we are talking about several graduates, some men, some women? The general rule in Latin and all related languages is that in the general form covering both genders is the masculine. So alumni may refer to several male graduates or a mixture of male and female graduates. Also, if you are not sure whether the alum is male or female, alumnus is the general term to use. (This a grammatical rule that has nothing to do with sexism, by the way.)

In response to our Good Word May Day, Monika Freund sent me her remembrances of another European May Day custom that persisted to the late 50s:

On April 30 all the bachelors of a village came together in the local pub and auctioned all the girls off: the one who made the highest bid (later redeemed in beer) was allowed to set a May tree,  meaning, a young man who wanted to date a girl would decorate a young birch tree with ribbons and put it into the front garden of her parents’ home.

He was then allowed to come for Sunday Kaffeetafel all May. The girl who got the highest bid of all became “May Queen” and the highest bidder was “May King”. If a boy from a neighboring village wanted to set a tree, he had to buy himself a place at the pub event at the rate of four crates of beer.

Today’s Good Word is pandemonium, brought up by the current pandemonium on Tahrir Square in Cairo. While editing this word, Paul Ogden, my friend and editor in Israel, had these thoughts, which struck me as worthy of being shared.

Tahrir means “liberation” in Arabic. It’s related to Hebrew herut “freedom”, the original name of Menachem Begin’s party. Hebrew has another related word, shikhrur whose meaning lies somewhere between “independence” and “liberation”.

There is also a big Turkish newspaper called Hurriyet, a word no doubt adopted by the Ottomans from Arabic. Finally, there’s also a big Turkish newspaper called Cumhurryet, which means “Republic”. It was evidently also lifted from Arabic, because the full name of Libya is something like Jamhuuriya al-Libya. (C is pronoounced in Turkish as J in English and Libyan.)

• http://www.hurriyet.com.tr
• http://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libya

Often writing systems lack a letter for a sound and that lacuna is covered by a digraph, two letters representing one sound, like English SH and CH. German has a trigraph, SCH which stands for the same single sound that Croatian, Czech, and Slovene represent with the one letter Š.

Danish seems to take the n-graph cake in this respect wasting FOUR letters for the same consonant sound with a quadrigraph. We find it in a few surnames like Schjødt where the first four letters represent the single sound that SH represents in English and Š in those Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet.

The interesting thing about this quadrigraph is that it contains the digraphs for the same sound in several Indo-European languages using the Latin alphabet: CH in French, SH in English, SCH in German (a trigrph), and SJ, which is used in most Danish words.

SCHJ is the only quadrigraph I know of. I know some consider combinations with the GH digraph in English to be quadrigraphs, e.g. eight and though. These are not quadrigraphs, though, for they represent two sounds. Eight represents the sound [eyt] and though, [ðow], i.e. the two sounds of diphthongs, a vowel plus a reduced consonant. This is not the case in Danish. It is true, as I say, that the Danish quadrigraph occurs only in surnames like Schjeldal, Schjelderup, Schjødt, Schjønberg, and Schjønning but they are true quadrigraphs.

Does anyone out there speak a language that has another?

An old acquaintance, Daniel Razumov, sent me an interesting Russian word with an unexpected story. Here is the story he tells:

“I have very nice example of Russian word “shmon” (шмон)  ’body search’ which is very similar to the Hebrew word “shmone” ( שמונה )  ’eight’.  My friends and I thought the similarity odd but coincidental.”

“Then we discovered that in the Soviet GuLags there was a body search at eight ‘clock each morning, and since many Jewish people were serving time in those prisons due to their ‘wrong’ political perspective in those days, the Hebrew word ‘eight’ was transferred from Yiddish or Hebrew to Russian slang as a body search.”

The semantic drift of words can be absolutely fascinating but also tell us so much about our history, where we are coming from and where we are going.

Andrea wrote a few days ago in reference to our Good Word squalid the following:

“In response to the squalid Good Word: the minute I read in your text that squalare meant meant ‘to be covered with a rough, scaly layer, be coated with dirt, be filthy,’ I thought of scales and wondered whether the concept “squalid” is related to fish scales. [This] would also make sense because of the identical word for a large fish in Latin squalus and filthy. So not that fish become stinky, but that being covered in scales when you are a fish and to be so dirty that you are scaly (when a person) are similar.”

In fact, I can mentally picture a squalid house falling apart like fish scales fall from a fish, so I am in sympathy with Andrea’s connection. In fact, I tried to suggest that without committing myself to a firm connection since I could find no etymologist who would agree with me.

The problem is that if this were the case (and I believe the similarities too close for it not to be), it was the case before Latin developed from other Italic languages and we have no record of words that are ambiguous between “scaly” and “squalid”. So we have to rest on “in all probability”. That is as far as even I have courage to wander.

This morning my wife and breakfasted at a local Pennsylvania Dutch (= Deutsch “German”) restaurant where two new and very young waitresses served us. My wife ordered two poached eggs. A few moments later the manager came out and asked if she really wanted two poached steaks. Apparently, poached steaks were not ordered very often at Ards Farm Market & Restaurant.

Well, my wife didn’t order two poached steaks either, but it is easy to understand how someone raised among the German-Americans in our area would have made the mistake. My wife asked for two [potsht egz]; that is the way she pronounced it.  At the end of German words, however, voiced consonants like [g] and [z] are pronounced without voicing (vibrating the vocal cords), so [g] becomes [k] and [z] becomes [s]. Our cook heard the waitress order two [potsht eks] = “poached steaks’. Now that is exactly how someone with a “Dutch” accent would pronounce poached eggs but not how someone without an accent would hear it.

Final unvoicing, changing a voiced to an unvoiced consonant at the end of a word, is common. The incident reminded me of my first breakfast in Serbia decades ago. My wife and I had never breakfasted in Serbia before, so we were not sure what to expect. However, we were in the big city, Beograd, and in Beograd they are prepared for the foreign tourist. For that reason the most prominent menu entry was “hemeneks”. My wife wondered what in the world that was. I explained to her that this would be the way she would hear ”ham and eggs” pronounced for the coming year.

Yvonne Owens couldn’t help being struck by both the phonetic and the semantic similarities between our recent Good Word podunk and Potemkin and wondered if the two words were related.

For all its similarity, Potemkin has nothing to do with Podunk. Podunk is a word from an American Indian language while Potemkin comes to us from Russian. The Russian word is a commonization of the name of Grigory Potemkin (or Potyomkin, as it ir pronounced in Russian). Potemkin was a favorite of Catherine, probably her lover, and for the majority of her reign, the most powerful person aside from Catherine in Russia.

According to European legend, in order to impress Western European dignitaries visiting Russia, Potemkin very quickly built several settlements in territories taken by Catherine from Turkey in order to convince those dignitaries that the land now belonged to Russia and that Russian would not surrender it under any circumstance. To make the point, Western Europeans had to see Russian putting the land to Russian use, even though the peasants compelled to move into them left soon after the dignitaries departed.

Although unrelated to podunk, Potemkin’s action bears a striking resemblance to the action of Israelis in building settlements in the West Bank territorities siezed during the Six Day War. Both instances are based on the assumption that “possession is 9/10 of the law” plus the additional difficulty of undoing what has already been done. The difference, of course, is that Israel is building real settlements; Potemkin built nothing more than empty shells of buildings grouped to look like settlements in an unsettled territory.