Category Archives: language

May 7

Sherbet

On Saturday, DS and I were buying food for a cookout. Always in the mood for some sort of dessert, but knowing I should restrain my impulse for my favorite ice cream (Dove brand vanilla with brownie chunks, and chocolate ganashe covering on top–yum!), I suggested sherbet. I initially pronounced it “sherbert,” then moved on to (jokingly) pronouncing it “sherbit” because of the spelling on the container. I also tried “sherbay.” DS corrected me back to the “sherbert” pronunciation, but I declared that that could not be the right pronunciation because there was no “r” at the end. It didn’t make any sense. Well, the Wordsmith has explained it in his new column on words at MSN.

So how did we get from sherbet to sherbert? When we borrow a word from another language, we often naturalize its spelling and sound (in Italian sherbet becomes sorbetto, in French sorbet). There are not many everyday words in English that follow the pattern of sherbet, but there’s plenty of company for the -bert ending: Herbert, Robert, Albert, Dilbert, etc.

I think if the word is going to be pronounced “sherbert,” the second “r” should be included in the (American) spelling because the disconnect between the spelling and the pronunciation makes me a little nuts. (I’m not usually bothered by word/pronunciation disconnects, but there is something about adding an “r” to the pronunciation of “sherbet” that seems a little ridiculous…kind of like when people jokingly pronounce “fajitas,” “fagitas.”)

cross-posted at Word Play

May 4

Misc.

I had a dream I lost my job. In the dream, my job involved some sort of medical duties…I think I was drawing blood, or something. I lost it the same day I got it. Someone I haven’t seen in real life for ten or eleven years was with me, and she invited me to lunch once we received the news. As if I could afford lunch with just having lost my job. As if there were no problems at all. I declined and said I was going to go visit my mom & step-dad. I think I was going to ask if I could move back in with them.

*******

I despise how expendable companion animals are in this society. I sympathize that people are struggling financially (as you can see from above, my own concern with finances is permeating my sleeping brain), but it seems once you’ve made a commitment to an animal, it should be absolute. I’d no sooner return the cats to the pound because of my finances than I would turn out a friend or family member from the guest room. We may all be eating beans and rice—the cats and the people—but we’re all in it together.

*******

And thank you, William Rhoden, for asking why we continually give horse racing a pass:

“The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.”

This, of course, is in response to the death of Eight Belles in yesterday’s Kentucky Derby.

******
I’m working with a friend at the center in hopes of helping him with his English. He had asked me several times if I could teach him English; I told him I couldn’t “teach” him, but I could practice with him. In our sessions, we discuss the work he’s doing in his English class. During the most recent session, he was trying to understand when to use “we” and when to use “us.” Alternating between English and Spanish, I tried to explain objective case. He thought the difference was based on the people included in the pronoun (“we” included the speaker, but he was defining “us” like “them”). I corrected this and then asked if his teacher had explained objective case. He said no.  I asked if he had learned the basics of sentence formation (noun, verb, adjective, etc.) He said no. Granted, this may have been covered before he started attending classes because it seems like fundamental information to have for anyone wanting to understand how and why we select the words we choose. I don’t get the sense he is learning the 1st/2nd/3rd person breakdown either, which (I think) makes memorizing all of this information much easier. The only reason I remember the Spanish I remember is because we had to learn the various word endings based on the 1st/2nd/3rd person approach. I tried to diagram the pronouns for him, but I couldn’t explain what the diagram was meant to indicate. The language always fails me when things get too complicated.

Apr 28

Almost to the finish line

I’m about finished with the biographical profile I’ve been working on this semester. It’s not due until Wednesday, but I’m turning it in tomorrow since I won’t have any more time to work on it after tomorrow morning. I’ve asked DS to read it once more, to look for mistakes or places that could use more elaboration. Once he’s read it, I’ll likely read it six more times before I print it out because I’m slightly obsessive/compulsive. I’ve been working to tweak the language of the piece; I find the language I default to in first drafts is rather cumbersome—using two words when one would be more effective, finding a lot of “thats” (lately I’ve found myself disliking the word “that” and what it does to my prose—it’s useful when it’s necessary, of course, but it’s not necessary as often as one would think).

Speaking of language, the first book on my To Read list–once this paper has been turned in–is Anthony Burgess’ book, A Mouthful of Air: Language, Languages…Especially English. It was a steal at a local used bookstore, and I’ve been waiting until I finished my school work to get started on it. It looks like the time is here!

And next Monday: Radiohead!

Apr 10

Interconnections

With one essay, Guy Davenport demonstrates to me the difference between looking at American Gothic and seeing American Gothic.

“We can see a bamboo sunscreen–out of China by way of Sears Roebuck–that rolls up like a sail: nautical technology applied to the prairie. We can see that distinctly American feature, the screen door. The sash-windows are European in origin, their glass panes from Venetian technology as perfected by the English, a luxury that was a marvel of the eighteenth century, and now as common as the farmer’s spectacles, another revolution in technology that would have seemed a miracle to previous ages. Spectacles began in the thirteenth century, the invention of either Salvino degl’Armati or Alessandro della Spina; the first portrait of a person wearing specs is of Cardinal Ugone di Provenza, in a fresco of 1352 by Tommaso Barisino di Modena. We might note, as we are trying to see the geographical focus that this painting gathers together, that the center for lens grinding from which eyeglasses diffused to the rest of civilization was the same part of Holland from which the style of the painting itself derives.

Another thirteenth-century invention prominent in our painting is the buttonhole. Buttons themselves are prehistoric, but they were shoulder-fasteners that engaged with loops. Modern clothing begins with the buttonhole. The farmer’s wife secures her Dutch Calvinist collar with a cameo brooch, an heirloom passed down the generations, an eighteenth-century or Victorian copy of a design that goes back to the sixth century B.C.

She is a product of the ages, this modest Iowa farm wife: she has the hair-do of a medieval madonna, a Reformation collar, a Greek cameo, a nineteenth-century pinafore.

Martin Luther put her a step behind her husband; John Knox squared her shoulders; the stock-market crash of 1929 put that look in her eye.” [my favorite line]

The train that brought her clothes–paper pattern, bolt cloth, needle, thread, scissors–also brought her husband’s bib overalls, which were, originally, in the 1870s, trainmen’s workclothes designed in Europe, manufactured here for J.C. Penney, and disseminated across the United States as the railroads connected city with city. The cloth is denim, from Nîmes in France, introduced by Levi Strauss of blue-jean fame. The design can be traced to no less a person than Herbert Spencer, who thought he was creating a utilitarian one-piece suit for everybody to wear. His own example was of tweed, with buttons from crotch to neck, and his female relatives somehow survived the mortification of his sporting it one Sunday in St. James Park.”

From the essay, The Geography of the Imagination

I can honestly say I’d never given much thought to buttonholes before reading this piece.

Jan 22

A Random Post about Trilling

I’m saturating my brain and ears with Spanish in an effort to get myself to a conversational level. This is not an unreasonable plan, as I took four years of Spanish in high school and have a very (very) basic understanding of it. I can conjugate my verbs and know how to pronounce most of the words I see. However, my vocabulary is limited and my conjugation is slow. So, when I’m listening to my podcasts, and the speaker provides a Spanish sentence, I can feel the gears in my head grinding as I translate each word, then determine the ending of the verb: (tiene…is that you have or he/she/it has?) (it’s he/she/it has)(…okay, so tiene la llave is he/she/it has the key…) and so forth (can’t you see the gears grinding?) Now, whether I’ll ever get to normal speaking speed remains to be seen, but I’ll be practicing with madre, and I’ll be watching some telenovelas in hopes of improving my listening comprehension.

What really throws my pronunciation for a loop is my inability to trill my r’s. I’ll think I’m making progress, then I get to a word that I simply cannot say with the proper trilling . It makes me a little crazy. This came up in my French podcast lessons as well. For example, the phrase I’m feeling good = je suis en forme. The teacher on the podcast says the word “forme” with a beautiful trill of the r. He warns that English speakers may have trouble trilling the “r” in “forme” because it’s so subtle. When the student who is working with him trills it with no problem (she’s learning French along with the listeners), he explains it is because the two of them are Scottish, and Scottish speakers trill their r’s.

A few weeks ago, I received my Word of the Day email, and it highlighted the word(s) “dog’s letter.” Dog’s letter is another way to say the letter R. The email gave this explanation for the term: From Latin littera canina, literally dog’s letter. In Latin the sound of the letter R was trilled. Think Grrr! of a snarling dog. A good example of a trilling R is none other than the Spanish word for a dog: perro. I took only a year of Latin and I’m sure I couldn’t trill my r’s then either.

The inspiration for this trilling post came from listening to Pound read Sestina: Altaforte (link on the right). He’s rolling his English r’s very easily (and dramatically). I wonder why there isn’t more r trilling in American English? At least no one I know trills their r’s in casual conversation.