20 November 2009

A Gallimaufry

Greetings,

Some weeks, I just have so many snippets I want to chat about, I don't know what to leave out, so this week, I thought I'd hit you with the lot!

Here we have a pot pourri of pieces that have been gathering dust in my tiny mind ...

And funny you should ask about pot pourri (sometimes one word, potpourri), which we've come to accept as meaning "a mixture of dried petals of roses or other flowers with spices, kept in a jar for their fragrance" or "a musical medley" or even just "a collection of miscellaneous literary extracts."

All very lovely images, aren't they? Nice smells, nice sounds, nice associations.

But the truth, as so often happens, is far less attractive.

Let us delve a little deeper into our jar of pot pourri and see what we can find ...

Hmmm ... dictionary.com tells us that the word dates from 1611, when it meant (wait for it ...) "mixed meats served in a stew," from the French words pot pourri meaning "rotten pot."

Nice.

We have the Romans to thank for this, (who else?) because the term comes from the Latin putrescere, meaning "grow rotten." This same word gives us our English putrid, putrescence and putrescent.

It wasn't until 1749, when our Pommie cousins introduced the idea of a "medley," that we started using it in our modern sense of a "mixture of dried flowers and spices."

My attention was also caught early in the week by an article about new regulations that will make it compulsory for entertainers to inform their audiences "if they intend on miming."

Huh?

I know we had a little hissy fit about being "bored of" things a couple of weeks ago, and here we are again, faced with more abuse of prepositions. You intend to do something, you don't intend on doing it. "Intend" is one of those verbs that can be followed by either to + infinitive or the gerund with no difference in meaning, and this is obviously where the confusion has arisen.

Our hapless scribe could have written: "If they intend to mime..." OR "...if they intend miming," but not a combination of the two as above.

There's a list of some verbs and their prepositions here.

And finally, a radio comment I caught about some sporting entities from various countries ... One was "Italy-based," another was "Australia-based" and the luckless third was "Turkey-based."

Think about it ...

And finally, here's a problem child in English that may get your knickers in a knot ... or not: that crazy silent K we insist on whacking on the front of so many words.

One question arises ... Why?

Well, dear reader, funny you should ask ...

It appears mostly on those words we've pinched from the Germans (and early Germanic languages):

knot comes from the German knoten (to knit)

knife from kneif

knob from knobbe

knuckle from knochen (bone)

Well, you get the idea ...

So why don't we pronounce the K in our words as the Germans do? Why isn't it a k-nife, or a k-not? Because, it seems we (or at least our ancestors) got lazy about the same time as the Great Vowel Shift (which we've discussed before) and just decided to ignore the K when saying the words, but leave it there to help distinguish between pairs of words that had suddenly become homophones: "Once a knight always a knight, but once a night is enough ..."

This week's Little Something Extra has some fascinating reading about more of these silent letters that create so many headaches for people trying to learn English.

Thanks to Lark, from Tampa way, for suggesting some of this week's subject matter. Don't forget to send an email if you have any topics to suggest for future newsletters! (Click on the Contact button on any page on Write101 or just Reply to this newsletter.)

And to illustrate how difficult these silent letters can be ...

There was a young lady called Psyche
Who was heard to ejaculate "Pcryche!"
For while riding her pbych
She ran over a ptych
And fell into a hedge, which was pspyche.

This week's quiz:

Here are some terms used to describe English and its spelling ... read 'em and weep!

etymology, affricate, grapheme, morphology, phonology, phoneme, diphthong, phone, gemination, fricative

1. an un-segmentable, gliding speech sound varying continuously in phonetic quality but held to be a single sound or phoneme and identified by its apparent beginning and ending sound, as the oi-sound of toy or boil

2. a unit of a writing system consisting of all the written symbols or sequences of written symbols that are used to represent a single phoneme

3. the study of the distribution and patterning of speech sounds in a language and of the tacit rules governing pronunciation

4. a doubled consonant sound

5. an account of the history of a particular word or element of a word; the study of historical linguistic change, especially as shown in individual words

6. (of a speech sound) characterised by audible friction produced by forcing the breath through a constricted or partially obstructed passage in the vocal tract

7. a speech sound

8. the patterns of word formation in a particular language, including inflection, derivation and composition

9. a speech sound comprising occlusion, plosion and frication, as either of the ch-sounds in church and the j-sound in joy

10. smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English

And a story that shows us the importance of correct spelling ...

A new young monk arrives at the monastery. He’s assigned to help the other monks in copying the old canons and laws of the church by hand. He notices, however, that all of the monks are copying from copies, not from the original manuscript.

So, the new monk goes to the head abbot to question this; pointing out that if someone made even a small error in the first copy, it would never be picked up. In fact, that error would be continued in all of the subsequent copies.

The head monk, says, “We have been copying from the copies for centuries, but you make a good point, my son.”

So, he goes down into the dark caves underneath the monastery where the original manuscript is held as archives in a locked vault that hasn’t been opened for hundreds of years.

Hours go by and nobody sees the old abbot. So, the young monk gets worried and goes downstairs to look for him.

He sees him banging his head against the wall, and wailing, “We forgot the R. We forgot the R.“ His forehead is all bloodied and bruised, and he’s crying uncontrollably.

The young monk asks the old abbot, “What’s wrong, Father?”

With a choking voice, the old abbot replies, “The word should be celebRate!”

Last week's quiz:

What sort of a tailor would you make? Match up these sewing terms ...

baste, worsted, chambray, gimp, dolly, bespoke, twill, cummerbund, gorge, voile

1. broad waist sash, usually pleated, which is often worn with black tie and tuxedo - CUMMERBUND

2. one of the basic weave structures in which the filling threads are woven over and under two or more warp yarns, producing a characteristic diagonal pattern - TWILL

3. the seam formed at the point where the lapel meets the collar of a jacket or coat - GORGE

4. to loosely assemble garment first fitting - BASTE

5. thin, semi transparent cotton, woollen or silken material used in the making of shirts - VOILE

6. lightweight cloth made of long staple combed woollen yarn - WORSTED (Named after the village of Worsted near Norwich in England, a centre for worsted weaving)

7. a garment that's custom-made from scratch to a customer's specific measurements and requirements - BESPOKE (Dates back to the days when a customer ordering a garment would select and reserve a cloth that was then "bespoken" or "spoken for")

8. a flat trimming of silk, wool, or other cord, sometimes stiffened with wire, for garments, curtains - GIMP

9. plain weave lightweight cotton fabric primarily used for shirts - CHAMBRAY

10. fabric covered wooden structure used in tailoring as base for pressing - DOLLY

The teacher announced that to practise spelling, all members of the class would say what their fathers did for a living and then spell the occupation. Mary went first. "My Dad is a baker, b-a-k-e-r, and if he were here, he would give everyone a cookie."

Next came Tommy. "My dad is a banker, b-a-n-k-e-r, and if he were here, he'd give each of us a quarter."

Third came Jimmy. "My dad is an electrician.'' But after struggling through a number of attempts to spell the word, the teacher asked him to sit and think about it for a moment while she called on someone else.

She then turned to Johnny. "My dad's a bookie, b-o-o-k-i-e," Johnny said. "And if he were here, he'd lay you 8 to 5 that Jimmy ain't never gonna spell electrician."

A Little Something Extra

"Many people are perhaps not aware of the astonishing fact that nearly every letter of the English alphabet is silent in some word."

Here are three reasons why English has so many silent letters:

Old English was 90% phonemic (words sound the same as they look). But from the beginning of the 15th century, we began to borrow words from other languages. Because grammar and usage rules are different in other languages, adopted words did not follow the rules of English pronunciation.

The English language 'borrowed' the Latin alphabet, and so we have only got 26 letters to represent around 41 different significant sounds. This means that we must attempt to use combinations of letters to represent sounds.

In the Middle English Period, William Caxton brought the printing press to England. As time passed, pronunciation continued to change, but the printing press preserved the old spelling. That's why today we have words that end in a silent 'e', or have other silent letters in the middle, like 'might'. In fact, modern day English is only 40% phonemic.

You'll find a list of rules to help you spell in the rest of this article here

Some thoughts on silent letters in English here

A list of English words with those infernal silent letters that you can listen to being spoken on this BBC site here 

And a list of some of the differences in spelling between the British, Canadian and American systems here

Word of the week: Gallimaufry (n) a hodgepodge; jumble; confused medley

French galimafrée, from Old French galimafree, sauce, ragout : probably galer, to make merry; see gallant + mafrer, to gorge oneself (from Middle Dutch moffelen, to open one's mouth wide, of imitative origin).

Oxymoron of the week: simple spelling

And a Latin phrase for when people start confusing you ...

Nescio quid dicas

[NAYS-kee-oh KWEED DEE-kahs]

(I don't know what you're talking about)