infantilism

In LPD one of the innovations I introduced (as compared with the then EPD) was a set of entries devoted to affixes and combining forms. This was actually one of the most difficult parts of the book to write: I had to try to distil the contents of works such as Erik Fudge’s English Word Stress (HarperCollins, 1984) into something snappy and clear at each entry.

So my entry for -ic, for example, reads as follows:

-ic stress-imposing ɪk —periodic ˌpɪər i ˈɒd ɪk || ˌpɪr i ˈɑːd ɪk

The example(s) were meant to be carefully chosen to show the stress effect (if any) of the affix. Here, -ic causes stress (and therefore a strong vowel) on the preceding syllable -od-, which in the base form period is unstressed and weak.

I didn’t attempt to provide lists of exceptions (if any). In the case of -ic there are hundreds and hundreds of regular cases, alongside a handful of exceptions such as Arabic, catholic, heretic, rhetoric.

Last week I was brought up short by the word infantilism. This word is stressed on the -fant-: ɪnˈfæntɪlɪzəm. Why?

Comparison with the base forms infant, infantile, both with main stress on the initial syllable ˈɪn-, shows that this change of word stress placement must be attributed to the suffix -ism. (I shall ignore the question of whether or not we wish to recognize a secondary stress on the suffix itself.)

Yet -ism is one of the suffixes usually regarded as having no effect on stress. Think of radicalism, clericalism, feudalism, parochialism, imperialism, capitalism, territorialism, nationalism, liberalism, journalism, naturalism, fundamentalism, creationism, magnetism, relativism, negativism and large numbers of other cases.

Are there any other words like infantilism, in which the suffix appears to impose stress on a syllable different from that stressed in the base form?

In mechanism ˈmekənɪzəm and evangelism ɪˈvændʒəlɪzəm the stress goes on the second syllable back from the suffix: compare mechanic(al) mɪˈkænɪk(əl) and evangelic(al) ˌiːvænˈdʒelɪk(əl), in which -ic has its usual effect. There’s no base form *mechan, though there is a combining form mechano- ˌmekənəʊ-. There’s a rare word evangel ɪˈvændʒəl (OED: “now arch. or rhetorical”). There’s no obvious base form for monotheism, polytheism, synergism or syncretism.
In the case of catholicism kəˈθɒlɪsɪzəm the suffix -ic regains its usual ability to impose stress on the preceding syllable, despite its failure in catholic.
There’s some uncertainty or variability about word stress placement in opportunism, obscurantism, mercantilism and Adventism.

So perhaps the best pedagogical rule would be:

-ism has no effect on word stress. There are two important exceptions: catholicism and infantilism.

Orme

Llandudno Bay is flanked by two steep headlands sticking out into the sea, the Great Orme ɔːm and the Little Orme. As we gazed on the Great Orme, one of my friends asked me the etymology of ‘Orme’. I said I thought it was probably a form of worm. I was aware that in the Gower in south Wales there is a promontory called Worm’s Head, and I had a sort of feeling that orm was the Norse or Danish word for ‘worm’.
I was nearly right. But my questioner wasn’t satisfied. How, then, she asked, was this great headland similar to a worm, an earthworm?
What I had forgotten was that the English word worm used to mean ‘serpent, snake, dragon’. Orm still has that meaning in Scandinavian languages, though in English this sense had died out by about 1800.
It is easy to imagine how seafarers could liken this headland to a dragon or a snake.
According to Owen and Morgan, Dictionary of the Place Names of Wales, the Orme at Llandudno is from ON ormr ‘snake’, but Worm’s Head in the Gower is from OE wyrm.

The Welsh name for the Great Orme is Y Gogarth. Fancifully, I wondered if that had any connection with arth ‘bear’ (cognate with Greek ἄρκτος árktos), with an intensifying go- and a hypercorrect initial prevocalic -g- as in gwyneb for wyneb ‘face’. Then it could mean ‘great bear’. But no, apparently the earlier form was gogerdd, meaning merely ‘ledge, terrace’. Very disappointing.

an epitaph

On Monday we had a coach outing from Llandudno, to Caernarfon, Criccieth, Betws-y-Coed and the majestic scenery of Snowdonia (Eryri). Mountains always lift the spirits.

One place we stopped at was the village of Llanystumdwy ɬan(ə)sˈdɨmduɨ, where David Lloyd George is buried. He was the only British prime minister not to be a native speaker of English.

By his grave there is a memorial stone bearing an epitaph in verse.

Y maen garw, a maen ei goron, — yw bedd
Gŵr i’w bobl fu’n wron;
Dyfrliw hardd yw Dwyfor lon,
Anwesa’r bedd yn gyson.

ə ˈmaːɨn ˈɡaru | a ˈmaːɨn i ˈɡoron | ɨu ˈbeːð
ˈɡuːr iu ˈbobl vɨːn ˈuron
ˈdəvrliu ˈharð ɨu ˈduɨvor ˈlon
anˈwesar ˈbeːð ən ˈɡəson

My literal translation:

The rough stone, and the stone of his crown — is the grave
of a man who was a hero to his people;
cheerful Dwyfor* is a beautiful watercolour,
it caresses the grave for ever.

(* Dwyfor, ‘two seas’, is the name of the district in which Llanystumdwy is situated.)

This verse, like all formal Welsh poetry, exhibits the phenomenon known as cynghanedd kəŋˈhaneð, in which the consonants in the first part of a line of verse are echoed in the second half. (See blog, 22 Dec 2007.)

y maen garw, … maen ei goron…
dyfrliw … dwyfor lon…

I think I’m right in saying that the particular verse form here is known as the englyn unodl union ˈeŋlɨn ˈɨnodl ˈɨnjon (“straight single-rhymed englyn”). This consists of four lines of ten, six, seven and seven syllables. (I think garw in the first line is scanned as a monosyllable.) The eighth syllable of the first line introduces the rhyme, -on, which is then repeated in the last syllable of each of the other three lines.

côr meibion

From time to time it’s good for native speaking teachers of English to experience life from the point of view of the language learner.
Over the weekend I was in Llandudno, north Wales, for the British Esperanto Congress. One of the highlights was a performance by an excellent local male voice choir, Côr Meibion Maelgwn ˈkoːr ˈməibjɔn ˈməɨlɡʊn. This choir, who won the first prize for choral singing in last year’s national eisteddfod, are strict about using no language but Welsh in their rehearsals and socializing.

I had been asked to say a word of thanks afterwards, in Welsh and in Esperanto. The latter is no problem for me, but my Welsh comes entirely from books and from evening classes in London, so I am not very confident in the spoken language. Nevertheless, I thanked them in my best attempt at good fluent Welsh, managing to include a reference to one of the songs they had just performed. The choir members looked appropriately pleased and modest, and afterwards their leader and I exchanged a sentence or two of small talk.

I felt rather proud of myself. But no one congratulated me on my language ability. To begin with I felt a little disappointed at that.

But then I thought: if a non-native-speaking professor of English at some overseas university thanks me in good English for a lecture I have just given, I don’t congratulate him or her on the fact. I treat it as normal and unremarkable.

For me as a NNS of Welsh, to have my use of the language taken as normal and unremarkable is the best accolade I could receive.

(Or perhaps they were just being polite.)

Cameronian deaccentuation

As is well known, in English we dislike placing the intonation nucleus on the same word in successive intonation phrases.
This dislike extends to reaccenting a word with the same meaning, and even to reaccenting a repeated morpheme.
If we want to say

That is destructive, not constructive criticism.

we obviously need to use contrastive accentuation. But we feel awkward retaining the lexical stresses

That is destructive, | not constructive criticism.

Rather, we tend towards

That is destructive, | not constructive criticism.

However, there may be some difficulty in identifying what exactly counts as “the same morpheme” in this connection.
I wonder how many of you noticed, as I did, the way David Cameron, at his first joint press conference yesterday with his new coalition partner Nick Clegg, promised that

cooperation | wins out over confrontation.

Clearly, he felt that the second -ation counted as a repetition of the first, so chose to shift the accent to the earlier part of each word.
Personally, I suspect that I’d’ve stuck with

cooperation | wins out over confrontation.

Alternatively, I might have gone for

cooperation | wins out over confrontation.

But we make these deaccentuation decisions on the fly, and can be very inconsistent about them, coming out with accent patterns we might later have preferred to repair.
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I shall now be away for a few days. Next posting: 19 May.
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vowel charts again

Derek Rogers writes

On 27th April you posted on your blog a comment from Gwen Awbery that she couldn't find software for drawing vowel charts, and I put up a comment a couple of days later to say that I was developing such a package. I have now published that package - it's called Vowel Chart Maker. It works from a script, includes automatic Sampa recognition, handles Unicode and non-Unicode fonts alike and is free to download (with some limitation on functionality).
It's available on my website, at http://www.rational-language-learning.co.uk/vowel-chart-maker.htm
Could you please make this known on your blog?

On David’s website there are instructions for using the program to draw vowel charts in Word 2008. My own version of Word is 2007, so these instructions did not exactly apply, but I think I know enough about Word to make the appropriate changes. Even so, I found the first of David’s instructions very difficult to interpret.

1. Download the file and Copy Image

The file is an .exe file, so after downloading it presumably you have to run it, before doing anything else. Running it installs the program. Then presumably you have to run the program (when you’ve sussed out exactly where it has installed itself). This produces the following.

The instruction was to Copy Image. But in the Edit menu there’s no Copy or Copy Image option. Ctrl+C has no effect. To begin with I could not find any way to “copy image” except by taking a screenshot of the entire window (Alt+PrtScrn). After further exploration, I think that what you are supposed to do is probably go to the File menu and do Save bitmap.
The help file supplied launches straight into requiring you to write a “script” and set “parameters”, with no explanation of what these terms might mean. I am sure this is fine for programmers, but it is definitely not fine for the rest of us.
Perhaps I’m being obtuse, or perhaps (as so often) a programmer’s technical skills are not matched by an ability to draw up clear non-technical instructions for others to follow.
Let me know if you find Vowel Chart Maker easier to use than I did. And Derek, perhaps you’d like to have another go at explaining to non-techies like me exactly how to use the program.

nefandum

I’ve never been one to utter what in English are quaintly known as four-letter words. My parents never swore, my brothers don’t swear, my partner doesn’t swear. My colleagues at work didn’t, most of my friends don’t.
Not using a word oneself doesn’t necessarily mean not being familiar with it in the mouths of others. I still remember my surprise at boarding school in the south of England when, having grown up in the north (but in an RP-speaking family), I first heard a southerner say fʌk. Till then I’d supposed the word to be fʊk, as pronounced by northerners with no FOOT-STRUT split.

The theme for our choir’s summer concert this year is the Seven Deadly Sins.

One of the songs we’re due to present is a Lily Allen number, with which those of you who have lived a less sheltered life than I have may already be familiar. Unfortunately because of other commitments I shan’t be able to take part in our performances on this occasion, so I shall be spared the dilemma of wondering whether I can bring myself to sing in public what I would not say even in private.