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Why is the word Colonel pronounced like kernel when there is no R in the word?
Originally Answered:
Why is the word colonel pronounced kernel?
Vote #2, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Why is the word Colonel pronounced like kernel when there is no R in the word?
Vote #1 me, because I go a bit further. 🙂 I checked with OED.
So, the word started as colonnello in Italian.
The word became coronnel in French. Dissimilation, as Daniel points out. It’s also coronel in Spanish.
The word was borrowed into English in the 15th century as corronel. Pronounced with three syllables and an r.
In 1580, people started translating Italian military treatises into English, and spelling it as collonel.
Now, there were two pronunciations and two spellings in English of the word. The French corronel and the Italian collonel.
We reduced it down to one spelling by the 18th century. And we reduced it down to one pronunciation by the 18th century. And as too often happens in English, we use the one alternative in the spelling, and the other alternative in the pronunciation.
So, let’s ignore the spelling and stick to the pronunciation. I’ll add fauxnetics, with some disgust. According to dictionaries of English
- In 1710, it was /ˈkʌrəʊnɛl/ (currownell)
- In 1766, it was /ˈkɔːnɪl/ (cornill)
- In 1780 it was /ˈkɜːnɛl/ (curnell), the pronunciation it has now.
- In 1816, the older pronunciation (cor(o)nell with an o) was still around:
- “Both the English and Scottish, but particularly the latter, pronounce the word Coronel, and so do the Irish.” (C. James, New Military Dictionary)
- Some guy in 1825 spelled it phonetically as cawnel.
So what were the changes?
- Dissimilation of l to r, already back in French.
- Moving the stress from the last syllable (coronéll—it was French, after all) to córonell. That happened sometime in the 17th century, and it indicates the word being considered by English speakers as English now and not French.
- Dropping an unstressed syllable, coronell to cornell. Irregular in English, but it does happen. OED says that was first attested in 1669.
- The change that noone seems to talk about is cornell to curnell. That seems to me an assimilation of the vowels, from /kornel/ to /kernel/ (using fauxnemes): an /e/ before an /r/ is going to be pronounced as an /ɜ/. If English spelling was less silly, it would be kornell being respelled as kernell.
Is English a fascist language?
Arguendo, let’s accept your premisses:
Everybody expects non native speakers to know English and speak it fluently and hate them for not doing so. Also this language is invading all other ones.
That wouldn’t make English fascist, and using a loaded term like that inaccurately means people won’t take your argument seriously. (And that’s not a “native speaker” bias: the same objection would apply in any language that has borrowed the term to refer to a particular political ideology exemplified by Mussolini.)
To use my favourite term at the moment, as defined by one of the victims of Mussolini’s fascism:
That would make English hegemonic.
And there’s no malice to hegemony. It’s the stuff of the Melian Dialogue: “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
Is Classical Sanskrit the world’s first constructed language?
There’s a spectrum between conventionalised and artificial, and Sanskrit is somewhere along that spectrum. Specialists other than myself can answer better than I as to how artificial Sanskrit is.
We have no idea how old the Aboriginal initiate language Damin is, and therefore whether it is older than Sanskrit or not. It is clearly much further along the artificial axis than Sanskrit is, although it is still based on the Aboriginal vernacular language Lardil. (Read about it: it really is an astonishing language.)
Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?
Vote #1, Daniel Ross: Daniel Ross’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?
Vote #2, Brian Collins: Brian Collins’ answer to Has a proto-language ever been accurately constructed prior to discovery of a historical text in said proto-language?
I’ll add that Linear B is similar to Hittite: it is closer to proto-Greek than anything we had, and it was deciphered after proto-Greek (and proto-Indo-European) was reconstructed. It has the digammas of proto-Greek, and it was the labiovelars of proto-Greek…
… except, it’s actually the other way around. If we didn’t have proto-Greek as a guide, we wouldn’t have been able to decipher Linear B. The syllabary was utterly unknown to us, and we have no independent corroboration, save for the odd pictograph that cracked the puzzle (tiripode = tripod). So it’s not like Linear B was as much of an independent corroboration of proto-Greek as we might like.
Do Greeks marry Greeks or do they mix?
Depends on where and when, of course.
In Australia 40 years ago: almost never intermarried. In Australia now: often do intermarry; intermarriage exceeded 50% some time in the last ten years.
In Greece a century ago: almost never intermarried. There weren’t a lot of non-Greeks around to marry (depending on your definition of non-Greek, of course; I’m taking an expansive one). Now: less so.
Of course, that answer is a commonplace. More concretely: Greeks are by default endogamous in diasporas: they are rather attached to maintaining their cultural identity in the face of what they see as an external threat. Unusually so, compared with other migrant groups.
That gets mitigated by various interrelated factors.
- Size of settlement: small Maniat settlements in Italy in the 17th century assimilated rather readily.
- Local authority figures: the colony in Corsica did not assimilate in the critical first two generations, because they had a monasteryful of monks and several chieftains with them, urging them to stay Greek Orthodox.
- Time: the second generation of Greek Australians didn’t intermarry; the third did.
- Sense of threat: the Greeks that migrated from Corsica and Mani to New Smyrna Beach, Florida were a minority of the settlers; the majority were Minorcans (especially once malaria got the Maniots). In New Smyrna, it was the Minorcans and the Greco-Corsicans against the cruelty of Andrew Turnbull. In Corsica, the Greeks were at constant war with the Catholic Corsicans for another three generations; in Florida, the same Greeks intermarried with the Minorcans immediately. The Minorcans weren’t the threat any more; the English were.
When did μπ and ντ start being used for (m)b and (n)t in Modern Greek?
Let me unpack your question there, Uri.
When did μπ stop being pronounced [mp] and started being pronounced [mb], with voice assimilation? Early. It does not occur in Southern Italian Greek (them saying [panta] instead of [panda] for “forever” really sticks out), but it does everywhere else in Greek, and it’s a change that could have happened before /b/ without a preceding nasal went to /β/ > /v (which was in place by 1st century AD). I don’t doubt that we’re talking 1st millennium AD for /mp/ > [mb].
When did μπ start being used to transliterate /b/ in foreign languages, just as ντ started being used to transliterate /d/? Late. The giveaway is initial μπ, which violates Ancient Greek phonotactics. I wrote on the various transliterations of Bagdad in Byzantine sources, at Nastratios in Pagdatia. They uniformly use either Beta (anachronistically), or Pi for the initial /b/. Looking at the Lexikon der Byzantinischen Gräzität, initial μπ for loanwords with /b/ seem to become routine only from the 13th century on, though there look to be sporadic earlier instances.
Will the 2011 edition of the Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon by the TLG ever be published in print?
I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did.
But while a lot of work over several years went into the TLG redaction of the 1940 LSJ (involving myself among others), that work involved proofreading, corrections to mistagging, typos or misprints in the digitisation (and very occasionally the source text), and updates to the hyperlinked citations. No substantive textual content was altered or added. The hyperlinks wouldn’t make sense in print, and the corrections over the source text really were slight. I don’t see an incentive for the TLG to do so, when the original LSJ is still in print.
The TLG Canon hasn’t been reprinted since 1990, and that represents original TLG work, which is updated and available online. If that has not been reprinted in book form, LSJ is far unlikelier still.
Again: I no longer work for the TLG, and I didn’t get to speak for the TLG when I did.
Why isn’t Esperanto the global lingua franca?
As is so often the case here: there are some good answers (Vote #1 Andreu Massana’s answer; Vote #2 or #3 Laurie Chilvers’ answer), there are some bad answers, and this is my answer.
- The initial hope of Zamenhof, and indeed of most people in the auxiliary language movement, was that the global language would be imposed top-down, by a committee of wise people.
- That’s not what happened, and that was never likely to happen. Lingua francas are bottom-up affairs. They are bottom-up affairs, to be sure, that harness an existing structure of power. But usually people don’t learn the empire’s language because the empire told them to. They learn it because it’s in their interest to.
- Esperanto, FWIW, endured as a bottom-up affair itself; and as I was discussing with Clarissa Lohr in the related answer to Could Esperanto seriously become the lingua franca?, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Esperantists are now what Zamenhof had called “Esperanto chauvinists”.
- When a language is adopted bottom up:
- Noone cares how perfect the language design is. People are prepared to jump through all sorts of hoops if it will get them advantage. They put up with English spelling, after all.
- When China overtakes America, it’ll be interesting to see whether Chinese As Lingua Franca will put up with Chinese characters. It may well do.
- Noone cares how rich the culture of the empire is. You think all those kids learning English in Indonesia give a damn about Milton?
- Conversely, all those people who assert how culturally vacuous Esperanto is? I give even less of a damn about you. That’s an argument from ignorance.
- Noone cares how flexible and adaptable the language of the empire is. They’re learning it for purely instrumental reasons.
- Noone cares how fair the power imbalance is: yes, the natives of the empire speak the language better than you ever will, but we redress the power imbalance in our face with the tools we have now, not with the tools of future hope.
- People care about their own culture surviving, and keeping the empire’s lingua a second language; but they don’t care as much as you might like. Languages die all the time, after all, and they usually die through the choices made by their speakers.
- What people do care about is how much access to power and money they can get through the lingua franca. That’s why the native languages of empires tend to do quite well. There is a niche for pidgins (such as the original Lingua Franca), when there isn’t a clear dominant player, or when the language contact is more circumstantial; but that isn’t the world we’re talking about now.
What is the latin rendering of “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting¨”?
Differunt pornographia eroticaque per luminatione.
I could try to come up with something more historically accurate for pornography and erotica, maybe invoking the Ars Amatoria. But frankly, the reference is to film, and I don’t think historical accuracy is worth it.
What is the latin rendering of “Pornography is literature designed to be read with one hand”?
Pornographia litterae sunt uno manu legendae.