Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[hwhatting]

I'd just note that if learned Latin is involved, medicī doesn't help at all: it's both singular genitive and plural nominative. This is pretty common in Latin. But if you're naming a family, wouldn't you use the plural genitive medicōrum?

In my experience, it's not unusual for family names derived from patronymics or occupations to be formally singular, and when you can pluralize them, they often follow specific family name patterns instead of the pluralisation pattern of the underlying noun (e.g. German Schmidt / Schmitt / Schmied "smith"; if you talk about the family, you don't use the regular plural die Schmiede, but the family name plural die Schmidts / Schmitts / Schmieds). To take a patronymic as an example, the family name is Mendelsohn, not *Mendelsöhne, and if you refer to the family you pluralise the singular-based last name as die Mendelsohns (using German and not English examples here, because English has the same issue as Latin that the genitive singular is identical to the nominative plural).
Russian avoids the problem by using possessive adjective based surnames for patronymics.

Concerning the Italian names, in my copy of Lausberg's "Romanische Sprachwissenschaft" they are not listed as remnants of the old genitive, so he seems to agree that they are nominative plurals in origin.

[WeepingElf]

Thank you for your replies. Yes, I think those Italian surnames in -i are from plurals, not genitives.

[keenir]

An inherited genitive is unlikely; Italian dialects lost the morphological genitive very early on.

One theory I read, which makes sense, is that it's a reborrowed genitive.
As in, clerks would write down Marco, son of Antonio in Latin: Marco (filius) Antoni.
Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

I was curious about the Medici... they apparently traced their ancestry to a dude named Medico di Potrone, born in 1046. He's said to have had healing abilities, thus the name. The story seems fishy to me: if medico was a nickname, why wasn't his real name remembered?

my hunch would be that nicknames are easier to remember,

I'd just note that if learned Latin is involved, medicī doesn't help at all: it's both singular genitive and plural nominative. This is pretty common in Latin. But if you're naming a family, wouldn't you use the plural genitive medicōrum?

maybe they opted to avoid that, so as to emphasize the di Potrone one?

[bradrn]

Something interesting I just realised after writing in another thread:

Speaking of which, ‘mysterious stranger’ strikes me as being rather clichéd.

‘Clichéd’ is a weird word when you think about it. The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’, from which is derived the past participle cliché ‘stereotyped’, or as a noun ‘a stereotype’. This was then borrowed into English as the noun ‘cliché’, which was then verbed, making the past participle ‘clichéd’. So ‘clichéd’ really has two past participle suffixes in a row! Loanwords are fun…

(Apparently ‘cliché’ also exists as an adjective, but Wiktionary marks it ‘sometimes proscribed’. Which is interesting in and of itself, since it means that the more French usage is less favoured — the reverse of the usual situation for prescriptivist advice.)

[Ares Land]

The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’,

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

[bradrn]

The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’,

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

Huh, interesting! To me as a learner it seemed immediately obvious — are there any words at all which end in -é but are not past participles?

[Ares Land]

The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’,

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

Huh, interesting! To me as a learner it seemed immediately obvious — are there any words at all which end in -é but are not past participles?

One example that comes to mind is reflexes of Latin -as: été, santé, qualité, etc...

I think it's not unusual to have nouns that do derive from past participles, but where the original verb is uncommon. Examples that come to mind are décolleté, culotté

Then there are cases like effronté; the TLFi has an Old French verb esfronter ('to hit in the forehead', apparently). So a past participle at one point, but the original verb has been lost in Modern French.

[bradrn]

That's funny because I didn't know there was a verb in the first place (though of course it makes sense, given the final -é!)
It's specialized vocabulary and rather uncommon.

Huh, interesting! To me as a learner it seemed immediately obvious — are there any words at all which end in -é but are not past participles?

One example that comes to mind is reflexes of Latin -as: été, santé, qualité, etc...

Aargh, of course. I didn’t think. (Though I didn’t know they all had the same Latin origin!)

I think it's not unusual to have nouns that do derive from past participles, but where the original verb is uncommon. Examples that come to mind are décolleté, culotté

Then there are cases like effronté; the TLFi has an Old French verb esfronter ('to hit in the forehead', apparently). So a past participle at one point, but the original verb has been lost in Modern French.

Interesting, thanks!

[Raphael]

This is more a specific language than a linguistics question, but there's no "Spanish Questions"-thread here at the moment, so here it goes:

The popularity of the “¿Por Qué No Los Dos?”-meme makes me wonder: Is there an equally short-and-to-the-point way of saying "Why can't we have neither?" in Spanish?

[Travis B.]

I wonder who when writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_i ... mily_names thought that /ˈbeɪnər/ for Boehner or /ˈɡreɪnɪŋ/ for Groening were somehow irregular... to me at least they are entirely regular, and not pronouncing those names those ways would be irregular... (Obviously they weren't familiar with the fact that German-American names are awfully regular in their typical pronuncations.)

[Raphael]

I wonder who when writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_i ... mily_names thought that /ˈbeɪnər/ for Boehner or /ˈɡreɪnɪŋ/ for Groening were somehow irregular... to me at least they are entirely regular, and not pronouncing those names those ways would be irregular... (Obviously they weren't familiar with the fact that German-American names are awfully regular in their typical pronuncations.)

What are those names doing on a list of irregularly spelled English names, anyway?

[Travis B.]

I wonder who when writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_i ... mily_names thought that /ˈbeɪnər/ for Boehner or /ˈɡreɪnɪŋ/ for Groening were somehow irregular... to me at least they are entirely regular, and not pronouncing those names those ways would be irregular... (Obviously they weren't familiar with the fact that German-American names are awfully regular in their typical pronuncations.)

What are those names doing on a list of irregularly spelled English names, anyway?

I did note that there were very few German(-American) names on that list. One notable one though was Schlumberger, which is in particular because it is an Americanized version of a Frenchified version of a German name, i.e. /ˌʃlʌmbərˈʒeɪ/.

[Nortaneous]

I wonder who when writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_i ... mily_names thought that /ˈbeɪnər/ for Boehner or /ˈɡreɪnɪŋ/ for Groening were somehow irregular... to me at least they are entirely regular, and not pronouncing those names those ways would be irregular... (Obviously they weren't familiar with the fact that German-American names are awfully regular in their typical pronuncations.)

They're also missing the pronunciation of "Grosvenor" that I'm familiar with - it's allegedly prescriptively incorrect, but in Grosvenor-Strathmore, the only pronunciation I've heard is /groʊ̯vznər/.

[Ryusenshi]

‘Clichéd’ is a weird word when you think about it. The original French verb is clicher ‘to copy/stereotype’, from which is derived the past participle cliché ‘stereotyped’, or as a noun ‘a stereotype’. This was then borrowed into English as the noun ‘cliché’, which was then verbed, making the past participle ‘clichéd’. So ‘clichéd’ really has two past participle suffixes in a row! Loanwords are fun…

The same thing happened for sautéed, where the past participle sauté was borrowed into a verb in English. In this case, the verb sauter is still widely used in French: "to jump", but also "to cook in a frying pan and toss around".

[Glass Half Baked]

This is more a specific language than a linguistics question, but there's no "Spanish Questions"-thread here at the moment, so here it goes:

The popularity of the “¿Por Qué No Los Dos?”-meme makes me wonder: Is there an equally short-and-to-the-point way of saying "Why can't we have neither?" in Spanish?

With my very limited knowledge of Spanish, "¿Por qué no ninguno?" sounds like it should work, but the only version I am certain is grammatical is "¿Por qué no ninguno de los dos?"

[zompist]

This is more a specific language than a linguistics question, but there's no "Spanish Questions"-thread here at the moment, so here it goes:

The popularity of the “¿Por Qué No Los Dos?”-meme makes me wonder: Is there an equally short-and-to-the-point way of saying "Why can't we have neither?" in Spanish?

With my very limited knowledge of Spanish, "¿Por qué no ninguno?" sounds like it should work, but the only version I am certain is grammatical is "¿Por qué no ninguno de los dos?"

Just checked with my wife, who's a native speaker of Spanish. Both of these are OK; her suggestion was the first one.

[Raphael]

With my very limited knowledge of Spanish, "¿Por qué no ninguno?" sounds like it should work, but the only version I am certain is grammatical is "¿Por qué no ninguno de los dos?"

Just checked with my wife, who's a native speaker of Spanish. Both of these are OK; her suggestion was the first one.

Thank you both!

[Richard W]

Does anyone have any specific sound changes that they remember occurring in their own speech that were not merely growing out of "little-kid-speak"

Yes. As I was proceeding from Pump Court to North Court at about the age of 21 I realised I had changed the English nucleus from [jʊə] to [jɜː], as in words like pure.

[Linguoboy]

You don't agree with Wikipedia's suggestion that it's a hobson-jobson anglicisation of Mac Ambróis?

I don't know. Possible, but I wonder how certain it is.

This is also the etymology given by Patrick Woulfe in his Irish names and surnames, considered a standard reference work.

It seems plausible to me given that the Scottish Gaelic pronunciation of Mac Ambróis should be something like /ˈmaxg amˈpɾɔːʃ/ or /ˈmaxg ˈampɾɔʃ/.

[Travis B.]

Does anyone have any specific sound changes that they remember occurring in their own speech that were not merely growing out of "little-kid-speak"

Yes. As I was proceeding from Pump Court to North Court at about the age of 21 I realised I had changed the English nucleus from [jʊə] to [jɜː], as in words like pure.

This for me a matter of carefulness and register, rather than a consistent sound change; e.g. pure can be both /pjur/ and /pjɜr/ for me, with the former being more careful and formal and the latter being less careful and formal.