Triumph of hope over experience

Tales from the word front

A while ago I published  

Words & Music: a Taster 

with the intention of testing the water – seeing if anyone was interested in such a book and inviting comments/reviews. It was met by great waves of apathy (apart from some welcoming [and welcome] comments in social media).

I persisted mulishly (in an asinine way?) with the idea, and have now completed two chapters (including much of the Taster – which may be familiar to some readers).  And this is now making its way through  the swings and roundabouts of Kindle Direct Publishing:

As with the Taster, the "published price" is to all intents and purposes nugatory ...

<aside>
(to use a word recently abused [or at least, used questionably] by Philip Hammond recently with the meaning "unnecessary" – he was talking about preparations for a no-deal Brexit. [The guilty misnomer is about 60 seconds into the clip posted on that page.]

The word means "having a negligible value" – the value of a nut (think of nougat). I suppose it could be argued in the chancellor's defence that, in planning terms, preparations for that suicidal frenzy might prove to be pointless, but the actual expense of making the requisite preparations would certainly not be nugatory – far from it. Users of the OpenVMS operating system, who resumed business within hours of the Twin Towers being brought down know about the expense of contingency planning and disaster recovery.)
</aside>

... as I will arrange (and publicize) free downloads from time to time.

But I think I've taken the idea as far as makes sense (perhaps further, given the paucity of feedback I've had on the idea). So I'm resuming the cudgels with sonorants, at least for the combination <vowel>+r.

b

PS I wrote this last week, thinking I was about to push the Submit button. But the "final" checks are going on and on. I hope there‘ll be something to show before the weekend

Update: 2017.10.27.14:55 – PPS

The wheels of Kindle Direct Publishinng are grinding away as I write:

(This was a  screengrab at one time, but Blogger has lost it.
There‘s a chance I can recover it.... Leave  it with me.)

I'm not sure why there are two of me, but in due course its pages will hit the ...er... fan.

Collections, connections, corrections, and convection: - CUM dancing

More tales from the word front

Thinking, as I have been, about sonorants, I was more than usually intrigued by a friend's question about words spelt in English either com- or con- (and, I have since realized, two other sonorants come into the same story: coll- and corr-).

Many such words derive in some way from a Latin word that uses CUM- as a prefix. But there are various ways that the M develops. In most cases the CUM- becomes con- but there are others. In this back-of-an-envelope table I give examples of the main ways:

The sort of Latin used to produce Romance vernaculars ironed out irregularities (eg "sing": cano canere cecini cantum was hard to learn for speakers of Latin for Speakers of Other Languages (LSOL – which is after all what we‘re dealing with); so those speakers preferred the regular canto cantare cantavi cantatum. Which gives  Italian, ‘cantare‘  Sp, Pg, Catalan cantar‘, Fr chanter etc etc.

As a result, generally, irregular verbs don't fare well in forming vernacular words (apart from learned/technical words like conference). The Italian for CARRY is nothing to do with ferre; it's sopportare, portare {Latin}] was easier to handle; the prefix in that case [I used Italian as an example, because that was my interlocutrix‘s  {not sure if that‘s a word; but it is now} focus] is sub).

This isn't to say that ferre has left no trace in modern Italian; but those traces are not obvious and well hidden. The effective parts of the verb (the ones people learn...

<autobiographical_note  essentiality="0"=>
The first time I met the word paradigm it was in a Greek Grammar book: if you learn the standard model (not that one, SILLY) you can work out any part of a verb on the basis of those four parts.
</autobiographical_note>

... to work out all parts of the verb) are fero, ferre, tuli, latum. (Compare this with 'to love': amo, amare, amavi, amatum. Ferre is the most irregular Latin verb I know).

Here are examples of words that survive, derived from this irregular verb:

• Fero -- apart from scholarly words like circonferenza, there's Lucífero (="Light-bearer")
• ferre -- Iron was called in Latin (and thence Italian) ferro because it was weight-bearing or just heavy
• tuli - can't find any; as the most irregular form of the most irregular verb, I doubt if it has any derivatives
• latum -- lato, meaning broad/wide/extensive, and words derived from that, eg latifondo

(I‘m not sure about   this   last one. This, from Etymonline, sv flat suggests  another possible derivation for lato:

flat (adj.)c. 1300, "stretched out (on a surface), prostrate, lying the whole length on the ground;" mid-14c., "level, all in one plane; even, smooth;" of a roof, "low-pitched," from Old Norse flatr "flat," from Proto-Germanic *flata- (source also of Old Saxon flat "flat, shallow," Old High German flaz "flat, level," Old High German flezzi "floor"), from PIE root *plat- "to spread."

And this Italian source suggests yet another. I should have paid more attention in my History of Italian lectures.)

The way con|m- words works reminds me of the way im-|n- words work -

• impossible, immoral, imbibe (combat, commemorative, compact)
  but
• infant, invective (conference, convection)
  
  but
  
• illegible, irreverent (collect, correct).

But whereas in- is what linguists call "a productive affix" (one used by current speakers, throwing up phonological changes on-the-fly as they form  negatives – and, incidentally, with attendant  problems for speakers of ESOL – particularly speakers of languages with different rules, such as the Spanish inmoral), the changes thrown up by Latin CUM- are lost in the etymological mists –  of current interest only for people who want to get the distribution of ms right in commemorative. (In fact, when a newer source [not Latin, as is the case with, say, condescension]  is involved in adding the prefix, these rules don't apply: co-dependant. not *condependant)

There are things to  be doing though.

b

From millstone to milestone

Purdah has been in the (UK) news of late; it's the fig-leaf of convention that the Tories are hiding their shame with (the shame of defying the law and letting UK citizens die a slow and painful death until May is good and ready).

But a rather less heinous sort of purdah has just released this blog. Longer ago than I care to think, I wrote that I'd suspend this blog until I'd published something. Well, here it is then:

But it's very slow going, and I'm not convinced the effort's worth it; there are other things (real writing, not this square-bashing) that I'd like to be getting on with. The only creative text here is the Intro and the Notes (which are much longer here than in the first book).

This section (AL-UL) is not freely downloadable yet – Kindle Direct Publishing can't hack the idea of starting free and rising to a minimum price afterwards, so wait until after the Bank Holiday (non-UK readers may need this explaining: it's an old UK custom that involves everything in the economy grinding to a halt, except for minimum-wage retail, leisure, and entertainments workers. According to some Labour Party thinkers, the institution of new Bank Holidays is the main plank of an economic policy – well, it worked for that  Latin chappy: panem et circenses [="bread and roundabouts"] – a reference to the electoral importance of food and traffic-calming).

b