Excrescent -t in Amongst and Whilst Part I

Some writers prefer to use amongst and whilst to among and while. I'm not sure what drives this preference (do the -st forms sound more formal to some?), but the -t in these forms doesn't mean anything. The -s on the other hand is our old friend the adverbial genitive.

The -t is what historians of the English language call an excrescent -t. Excrescent means "superfluous outgrowth". A famous example of an excrescent -t is that in the word varmint, which is a dialectal form of vermin with a characteristically southern English lowering of er to ar (seen also in the development of varsity from university, and parson from person) and a final -t that means nothing whatever but is a mere outgrowth from the previous consonant [n].

Excrescent -t tends to develop after n and s. This is because, in forming the sounds [n] and [s], the tongue is already in a convenient position to produce a [t]. This is what's known as an intrusive homorganic plosive. "Homorganic" because the sounds [n] and [t] are produced with the tongue in exactly the same position (on the alveolar ridge just behind the top front teeth); a "plosive" is "a consonant sound made when a complete closure in the vocal tract is suddenly released" (David Crystal, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages). So by the time your tongue is in place to sound an [n], why not do a bit more and sound a [t], too? (The plosive consonants in English are, by the way, [p], [b], [k], [g], [d] and [t]).

Intrusive homorganic plosives are among my favourite phonological phenomena. The word mushroom, for instance, was sometimes spelled (and presumably pronounced) in the 16th and 17th centuries with a final [p], as in the forms moshrump, moushrimpe, mushrompe, and even mushrumpt (two excrescences for the price of one!).

While amongst and whilst exist as variants alongside among and while, against is one example of an excrescent -t that has become entirely standard. I'll write more about it in my next post.

Volcano Causes Disruption in Speech Flows

When I checked a few minutes ago, the phrase "Eyjafjallajokull pronunciation" was the 79th most popular Google search going. I'm not sure how that compares to the rush for the definition of "transgression" after a certain pro golfer's personal confessions of a few months ago, but clearly, it isn't just air travel that the Icelandic volcano has disrupted.

Patrick Smith, who writes Salon's Ask the Pilot column, wrote last Friday that Eyjafjallajökull "can only be pronounced correctly after consuming at least six cocktails"; not content with that, he came back on Monday opining that it is "a word that looks and sounds like the alphabet exploded".

The New York Times characterized the name of the volcano as a "16-letter, six-and-a-half syllable, 47-Scrabble-point name". Actually, you can't play proper nouns in Scrabble, but the point is taken.

Anglocentric, histrionic, linguistic fright aside, perhaps it's not too much to observe that, in fact, Icelandic is as a written language much more phonetic than English. By that I mean that the relation between script and sound is more consistent in Icelandic than in our notoriously hard-to-spell-and-pronounce language.

The NYT's recommended "EY-ya-fyat-lah-YOH-kuht" is pretty close to the mark, but I also like the BBC's "AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl-uh", mostly because in specifying that that's "oe" as in French coeur, they haven't forgotten that the umlaut over the o in jökull indicates a rounded vowel. The BBC guide also recognizes that the double ll in this last element must be pronounced as [tl], just as in the middle element fjalla. That final l, by the way, should be articulated but not voiced.

If none of that makes much sense, you can hear a recording of the proper pronunciation here.

I was going to come on and pontificate about how eyja is cognate with island and fjall is related to the Yorkshire fell, meaning "hill" or "high moor", but I see that the work's already been done for me here (scroll down to the part in blue, by David Shaw).

So instead I'll just muse randomly about the double-l spellings. My hubby, who teaches Old Icelandic at the local university, tells me that as far as anyone knows, the -ll- in words like fjalla and jökull was pronounced as an extra long [l] — as in, say, pronouncing the name of Mel Lastman (with apologies to Torontonians for the reminder of our former mayor's existence). 

Through a process of dissimilation (defined by David Crystal as "the influence exercised by one sound segment upon another, so that the sounds become less alike"), the first l in the pair became pronounced over time as [t]. 

Something very like this dissimilation is found also in Welsh, where ll is pronounced [chl] (ch pronounced as in loch), as in the place name Llandudno.
 
In French and Spanish, on the other hand, -ll- is pronounced as a glide (as though it were y), as in ville or quesadilla. But I've also heard some Spanish speakers (especially from Latin America) pronounce the double-l as a voiced palatal fricative [ȝ], as in the initial consonant of French jaune.

No grand point to make here — just enjoying the variation!

Suffix-fu

A few weeks ago I was reading Andrew Leonard's column at Salon.com and came across the following sentence (about the new function for biking directions on Google Maps):

     My hope is that a properly designed and administered
     system will marry Google's algorithmic-fu with localized
     human intelligence and, over time, we will get a platform
     of bike-rich geography that just keeps improving.

Algorithmic-fu? A quick Google search ensued. It appears that -fu is a productive nominal suffix meaning something like "prowess." It is most heavily used by techies, hence such neologisms as metric-fu, emacs-fu, Script-fu, and gym-fu (a "fitness minigame" iPhone app).

There is also Google-fu (amusingly debated at this online forum), defined by a netizen as


     the uncanny ability to hit on the right combinations of
     words and phrases to make Google [hit on] a half-
     remembered webpage that you saw once back in 2002.


Without question, the suffix -fu is from kung fu, a Chinese phrase that when used by English speakers refers only to the martial art made famous by David Carradine in that 1970s TV show. But kung fu in Chinese (gongfu in Mandarin, gang hu in my native Teochew) may be used of anything that is performed with great skill and/or labour.

Indeed, the first sense listed for gongfu in my Concise Oxford Chinese-English Dictionary is "time." You gongfu zai lai ba means "Come again whenever you have time". It is only senses 2 and 3 that define gongfu as "effort;work; labour" and "workmanship; skill; art" respectively.

And it is the gong element that does the heavy lifting, so to speak—this is the element that means "work," "worker," or "man-day" (whence the sense of time develops). Our -fu, on the other hand, means "husband" or "man."

So to be perfectly correct, we should be using Google-fu to mean "master of Google." Instead, we see it used to mean something like "(mysterious) power," as in My Darknet style Google-fu is more powerful than your Wetware style Google-fu (whatever that means).

By the way, the posters on Google-fu were all agreed that the -fu suffix had been introduced into English by Joe Bob Briggs. I had never heard of him (I do not get out much), but I now know that he is a film critic and comedian who would sprinkle -fu phrases throughout his reviews of B-horror movies.

Future English: Previous and Next

I have noticed that, apart from pop-up ads and spam protection, email systems also differ in the way that they allow users to navigate back and forth through messages without returning to their inbox.

In my Gmail account, I have noted with approval that to get to a more recent message I click on "newer"; to get to a less recent message, I click on "older." This is very fine, and in keeping with Google's pledge not to be evil.

In my Yahoo and Fastmail accounts, on the other hand, "previous" means newer and "next" means older. In other words, previous means next and next means previous. This is perverse. It doesn't even make sense from a spatial point of view, because everyone knows that the newest message appears at the top.

I don't know if lexicographers of current English have picked up on this. But when I'm old and the barista at Starbucks says, "Can I help who's previous?", I'll know where it all began.