GATTO.

The wonderful Mary Beard is always worth reading; her recent TLS column “Man ist was man isst?” is about “the great horsemeat scandal,” but in the course of it she mentions parenthetically “a friend who recently reminded me that Elizabeth David referred to a celebratory dish of roast cat in Sardinia.” This caught my eye, as it did that of some of the commenters—”Gigi Santow said… Please, please, could someone provide corroborating chapter and verse for Elizabeth David’s cat feast in Sardinia?”—and Mary Beard provided the relevant quote: “An Italian friend of mine once told me that in Sardinia a peasant woman had said to her, ‘Christmas without a roast cat wouldn’t be Christmas’ (Elizabeth David’s Christmas, 2003: 133, under ‘Bread Sauce’).” In response, commenter Caroline said “Cat in Italian is ‘gatto’ but this spelling and pronunciation is used for ‘gateau’, cake in French. I believe that the cat for Christmas in Sardinia is a crunchy almond biscuit!” and Michael Bulley followed up:

Well, nearly. It isn’t to do with cats. Elizabeth David should have brought along a translator or her publishers should have used a proper proofreader. Here’s an extract from “The Sardinian Art of Pastry”:
“The most famous perhaps is the gatto. Prepared every year during the festival that honours a town’s local saint, it is basically a nougat made with sugar and almonds, and sometimes orange peel. What makes the gatto special is that it is painstakingly made to resemble in cake form the town church or religious structure in a miniature replica. During the celebrations, the gatto made especially for the occasion is made the centerpiece.”
In Sicily, however, the gatto is a cheese and potato pie.

There is further discussion of Sardinian gattò and the various ways of preparing it, which you can read at the link, but I wanted to provide the public service of reassuring everyone that Sardinians do not, in fact, eat cats for Christmas. (A tip o’ the Languagehat hat to AJP for the very entertaining link.)

Comments

  1. I enjoy the discrepancy between the British and US use of the word “cake”. As I understand it, the sort of thing that we call “cake” is called “gateau” over there (with the stress on the first syllable of course) to distinguish it from good old British baked goods of a generally denser nature.

  2. In a bookshop in Ely:
    Wife: “Would you like this book by Mary Beard?”
    Husband: “She’s not what I’d call a critical thinker.”
    Nearby witches/witnesses: glare, mutter, hate.

  3. You won’t believe it, but Americans are known to eat hot dogs!

  4. I remember reading that cats used to be known in Italy as “roof rabbits”. Back a few centuries ago when times were tough.
    Years ago I was browsing through a memoir of an officer in the Peninsular War. He describes a time when they were very short of food, when he came upon one of the regimental sergeants roasting a chicken and was invited to help himself. “Wherever did you find a chicken?” he asked between bites. “Well,” said the sergeant, “you remember that cat that was hanging around the barracks?” The officer jumped up in horror. “Young whippersnapper,” said the sergeant, “when you’ve been in the army as long as I have, you’ll be thankful for what you can get.”
    For years now I’ve been going through officers’ memoirs from the Peninsular War trying to find that book again (and it is amazing how many there are), but without success.

  5. I wonder if the original misunderstanding lies with Elizabeth David or David’s “Italian Friend”. given Italian regional prejudices and Sardinians known proclivities for eating odd things (casu marzu comes to mind), it’s possible David’s friend did confuse ‘gattò’ with ‘gatto’.

  6. As I understand it, the sort of thing that we call “cake” is called “gateau” over there (with the stress on the first syllable of course)
    No, it’s not that, though you’re right about the stress (we’re not trying to speak French). You’d never see a gâteau de Black Forest, for example; and a sponge cake is light and fluffy, not like wedding cake which is more like Christmas pud. I’ve never heard that there’s a rational sorting into cakes & gâteaus in England. It’s just a café or cafeteria game, as far as I know. And you’re much more likely to hear an Italian pastry name nowadays, as in the US.

  7. marie-lucie says

    cat/chicken/rabbit
    No doubt the soldier story is true in general but the details must have changed in the recounting: surely a roasting cat would look quite different from a roasting chicken, and people don’t usually help themselves from a roasting piece of meat before it is taken off the fire. It is more likely that the cat meat had been cooked in a stew, which could be kept simmering for a long time, and where the meat morsels were not easily identified.
    Some of my father’s forebears lived in Paris during the Commune (just after the 1870 war with Prussia). Since the Commune was an insurrection, the capital was besieged by government troops for a couple of months, supplies were cut off and Parisians were soon starving. Eventually all the zoo animals were killed for food – they would have starved anyway for lack of their own food. One of my ancestresses killed the family cat and cooked it. No doubt many other families did the same.
    When I was a child, my grandparents in Southern France raised a few rabbits as well as chickens. When my sisters and I stayed with them in the summers we ate stewed rabbit quite regularly. One year when our cousin (about 4 or 5 years old at the time) came to join us, she was horrified to learn that the meat she was eating was from one of the rabbits (they were not pets, but we used to help feed them). But since she was used to eating chicken at home in Paris (where she never saw a live chicken), she would eat the rabbit meat if she was told it was chicken.

  8. marie-lucie says

    gatto/gattò
    Or the importance of diacritics.

  9. I remember reading that cats used to be known in Italy as “roof rabbits”. Back a few centuries ago when times were tough.
    Not only in Italy. Dachhase meaning “cat” is known in Germany as well, and of course durin hard times, people eat a lot of things – my grandfather used to tell the story how, when he was a POW in France after WWII, some fellow prisoners caught and stewed the pet dog of one of the French overseers and he was allowed to join in the meal because he could contribute some onions that had fallen from a lorry. He said that he rarely enjoyed a meal so much in his life.

  10. Westerners often wonder at the number of things considered by the Chinese as edible. They forget that there have been numerous famines in China, forcing desperate people to try to eat just about anything that would not break their teeth.

  11. surely a roasting cat would look quite different from a roasting chicken
    As surely as there is more than one way to skin (and butcher) a cat.

  12. Just to say that the Red Poll cattle on Midsummer Common that she mentions belong to our vet’s wife. And very beautiful beasts they are. The cattle, I mean.
    http://findavet.rcvs.org.uk/find-a-vet/clarendon-street-veterinary-surgery-cambridge-2272/

  13. “You won’t believe it, but Americans are known to eat hot dogs! ”
    read, supposedly this was a joke about Dachshunds, which at the time were one more strange thing about all the German immigrants in the US. It’s still a fun pun to tease children with.
    “Christmas pud.”
    AJP, seriously, WTF? Surely the Holy Spirit doesn’t have….
    “Westerners often wonder at the number of things considered by the Chinese as edible. They forget that there have been numerous famines in China,”
    m-l, we forget our own weird things, like snails lampreys and possums and armadillos. Oh and cheese, guaranteed to squick out Chinese everywhere.

  14. “You won’t believe it, but Americans are known to eat hot dogs! ”
    read, supposedly this was a joke about Dachshunds, which at the time were one more strange thing about all the German immigrants in the US. It’s still a fun pun to tease children with.
    “Christmas pud.”
    AJP, seriously, WTF? Surely the Holy Spirit doesn’t have….
    “Westerners often wonder at the number of things considered by the Chinese as edible. They forget that there have been numerous famines in China,”
    m-l, we forget our own weird things, like snails lampreys and possums and armadillos. Oh and cheese, guaranteed to squick out Chinese everywhere.

  15. narrowmargin says

    For what it’s worth, my half-French friend (born, raised, educated til 18 in France), informs me that gateau is slang for vagina. He grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, but doesn’t know how long that usage has been around.

  16. Jim, when I was at school I was never any good at Divinity, as it was called, and it’s just struck me that I’ve got no idea of the role or point of the Holy Spirit (Ghost).

  17. “read, supposedly”
    i was surprised to find myself commenting in my absence, but that was SFR i am relieved to learn, for a moment almost like got panicked 🙂 what if i’m doing stuff not knowing myself, that’s like the greatest fear for a person to have i guess
    i like the funny cat pictures, less their videos, even less i guess it if its alive pets, what’s with the toxoplasmosis fear, so that is something like kind of sublimation/ distilling, taking just what one likes from a given thing, fb, for example, a very distilled experience of “friendship”

  18. For what it’s worth, my half-French friend (born, raised, educated til 18 in France), informs me that gateau is slang for vagina. He grew up in the ’50s and ’60s, but doesn’t know how long that usage has been around.
    My (not at all prudish) Dictionary of French and American Slang (1965) doesn’t have it, so it’s presumably more recent than that.

  19. According to Wikipedia, cat is still eaten in parts of China and Switzerland, and not as famine food.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_meat

  20. “Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright” presumably refers to meat for a cat, not meat of a cat?

  21. Dearieme: Indeed.

  22. marie-lucie: I didn’t say the story was true, I said I read it in a memoir. I wish I could find it again though, to check out some of these little details.
    When I was a child we frequently ate rabbit because it was cheap. But I had a little friend who wouldn’t eat rabbit because he read all those children’s books about little bunnies wearing waistcoats. So his mother used to cut off one leg in the kitchen and tell him “We’re having rabbit but you can have chicken”. Apparently he never seemed to notice all the rabbits had three legs.

  23. Hmm interesting !
    I’ve actually had Gatto (Scicily) whilst on my travels, it is actually very nice but was disappointed it wasn’t a proper Gateaux.
    Duck is another food many kids won’t eat especially if they’ve fed them bread recently. I was the same until I discovered crispy duck pancakes whilst at university!

  24. Oh and cheese, guaranteed to squick out Chinese everywhere.
    This statement is a wee bit 1975. Strong-flavored cheeses remain difficult to come by in China, but the country is also home to 700+ locations of Pizza Hut, not to mention countless fast food outlets offering cheeseburgers. In China’s villages cheese may remain unknown, but in China’s larger cities you’d be hard-pressed to find a representative of the middle or upper classes who hasn’t eaten it on occasion.

  25. The cheese slices in cheeseburgers hardly deserve the name of cheese.

  26. AJP – quick catch up on the Holy Spirit for you then – She doesn’t have a pud.
    “For what it’s worth, my half-French friend (born, raised, educated til 18 in France), informs me that gateau is slang for vagina. ”
    Speaking of pudding, that is slang in the US, at least in AAVE, for the vagina, and in more widely it’s more Cajun-sounding form “poontang”.
    And here the discussion curls in on itself…speaking of “cat”….

  27. marie-lucie says

    maidhc: Although the story may not be true in all details, I think it has a core of truth.
    More on cheese slices: for a number of years I was allergic to milk products and therefore could not eat cheese. A doctor told me that some patients with the same condition could eat processed cheese slices without having a reaction!

  28. m-l, where are you buying your cheeseburgers? I’m just saying that some relatively high-class lunch joints will offer burgers with Swiss cheese or blue cheese or pepper jack. I realize that these are only halfway from “American cheese” to good cheese, but I think good cheese would be wasted on a burger.
    Last week I bought some excellent cheese, not paying much attention, just whizzing through the Whole Foods (or “Whole Paycheck” as the cynics call it) and bought some soft cheese that just had an appealing label, thinking that we should have some good cheese for these visiting musicians who might or not be having dinner with us before they performed in our living room (long story), and it turned out to be really good. One of the musicians had once been to the place in California where the cheese was made. Everybody loved the stuff. Then I looked at the price, which I hadn’t even looked at in my whizzing: over $30/lb. Jeez, it better be good! But no regrets.
    I wouldn’t put it on a burger, though.

  29. marie-lucie says

    AJP: I’ve got no idea of the role or point of the Holy Spirit (Ghost).
    I am not well-versed in “Divinity” either, but I have read that the Holy Spirit (Ghost in this context meaning ‘spirit’), was a pre-Christian (and perhaps pre-Judaic) deity, conceptualized as a female bird which “moves over the waters”. Somehow it was integrated into Christian doctrine in the early days of Christianity, losing all its non-spiritual attributes to become one of the three God-persons (if I may use such a term), but it also appears in Judaism and Islam.
    In some (non-Christian) creation myths, the primordial cosmos was originally composed of heaven and ocean. A female bird (the only type of creature able to move between those two parts of the cosmos) made her nest on the water, laid an egg or eggs in it, and things started happening from there to eventually form the world as we know it. It could be that this was approximately the creation myth later superseded in the Bible by the more detailed Mesopotamian myth told in Genesis. In this case the Christian concept of the divine Holy Spirit would be the last avatar of the primordial female bird. This would explain why it sometimes appears visibly in the form of a dove (in French, une colombe, a feminine word – I don’t know about other languages).

  30. marie-lucie says

    Ø, I rarely eat cheeseburgers, or burgers of any kind, unless I don’t have much of a choice, and I don’t make them at home either. No doubt some of the current, upscale burger eateries use better cheese than the rubbery cheese slices commonly used in fast food joints.
    What kind of music were those people playing in your house?

  31. J.W. Brewer says

    This blog is not pneumatologyhat, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_of_the_Holy_Spirit isn’t bad and makes the helpfully deadpan and counter-Whorfian observation that the grammatical gender of the various words for “spirit” is different in different languages (masc in Lat.; neut. in Gk.; fem. in Heb., to take some relevant candidates – the synonym-in-context “Paraclete” is masc. in the Gk.) but that presumably whatever the right theology might be on the subject should be consistent cross-linguistically.
    Doves in nature come in both male and female varieties, and I have never heard anyone claim (which doesn’t mean the claim hasn’t been made somewhere . . .) that it’s such a girly species of bird that metaphorical conclusions about the nature of the Holy Ghost should be drawn from the dove imagery as such. I don’t know if either Greek or Hebrew has a way of specifying the sex of dove referred to – if so, it doesn’t generally come through in English translation. Presumably Noah had at least one of each sex available to him on the Ark, and if there’s any tradition as to whether it was a boy-dove or girl-dove that was sent out and returned with the olive branch, I’m not aware of it. (In Luke 2:24 Mary and Joseph come to the Temple 40 days after the birth of Jesus to sacrifice a pair of either turtledoves or young pigeons, following the discretionary rule of Leviticus 12:8 – I don’t know if that was supposed to be two males, two females, or one of each; perhaps there’s rabbinical commentary on that question.)

  32. marie-lucie says

    JWB, even if the presumably original “bird” was not specified as to sex, laying eggs would make it obviously female, so that a grammatically feminine word could be selected for the actual species in order to remove a possible contradiction. Alternately, a grammatically feminine word for a given bird species could have influenced the mythological interpretation. Such things influence each other. Anyway, I am sure there have been all kinds of learned commentaries by scholars of all three Abrahamic religions (and perhaps yet others) on this topic. Obviously, I am not such a scholar.

  33. poontang < putain, not pudding (whose French analogue is boudin).

  34. JC: le boudin means ‘blood pudding’ or ‘blood sausage’, not any other kind of pudding (although the French word is apparently the form taken by the borrowed English word).
    Un boudin can also refer to something of the same shape as the sausage in question. It can also be a slang term for an overweight woman whose clothes are so tight that she seems to have been stuffed into them.

  35. There’s also the jinn-genie in Islam. I suppose that must be where David Bowie got the name. It’s interesting that all these spirits (& angels) are a bit ambiguous in their gender or sex. I still don’t think the extra character is necessary or helpful to the main story despite the attractive imagery but I’ve probably missed the point.

  36. About the cheese: I’ve given up shopping at our equivalent of Empty’s Hole Foods mostly because of the outrageous cheese prices. I now only shop at the Turkish grocery store. I’ve noticed the word “Kasar” on Turkish cheese. Could this be a loan of German Käse, and if so, why?

  37. Turkish kaşar = kasseri. (Note that Turkish ş = sh.)

  38. >Marie-lucie
    Sometimes I’ve read the word “palomo” (cock pigeon) telling to the Holy Spirit. Even, there are some paintings where you can see a ray of light between Mary and him that “transports” the baby Jesus.
    By the way, yesterday the Pope, who was chosen by this white pigeon, “resigned” by a white helicopter.
    >A. J. P. Crown
    Speaking of angels’ sex, do you want to start a byzantine discussion?

  39. Ah ha. Thanks. The one in my fridge doesn’t have one of those şs, but I see it was cheese made in Germany (“ein Stück Natur”).

  40. Jesús: Speaking of angels’ sex, do you want to start a byzantine discussion?
    Certainly not! Live and let live. Oh, all right, what, you’re saying Eastern angels are girls?

  41. There’s more than one way to deal with children who don’t want to eat rabbits. A nephew in Pennsylvania had a neighbor who started raising rabbits to stretch her food budget. When she brought the first bunch home, she told her small children not to give them names or treat them as pets, because they were going to be eaten. They of course ignored her, but only once. When she killed, cut up, and froze the first bunch, she carefully labelled all the packages with the bunnies’ names. They, when she served them for dinner over the next few weeks, she made sure to tell the children they were having Fluffy Stew or Roast Thumper or whatever. That solved the problem: the children did not name any of the later bunches of rabbits. Whether they were warped for life, I do not know: it’s probably too early to tell.

  42. >A. J. P. Crown
    Orient yourself : -) I only know the two appearances of the devil as man or woman to seduce us.

  43. They ] Then

  44. marie-lucie says

    In French, Italian and Spanish (among other languages), the word for angel is masculine (ange, angelo, ángel), so I am usually surprised to see angels represented as young women in pictures intended for the North American market. It seems to me that European angels are more androgynous in spite of their long wavy hair.

  45. >Marie-lucie
    That’s right. However, in Spanish, the hierarchy of angels has “potestades” et “dominaciones”, two feminine words. It’s true that they aren’t usually a well-defined iconography. On the other hand, angels are men in Gen (18, 2) and (35, 25), and I’ve just read the first representations like women were made in the XIV-XV c.

  46. >Marie-lucie
    I’m sorry! “…they don’t have usually…”

  47. The “stuffed entrail, sausage” sense is the oldest in English, per the OED. A 1287 quotation has “pundinges” in the middle of Latin text; the oldest purely English context is from 1325: “Þe pinnes beþ fat podinges / Rich met to princez and kinges.”

  48. John Emerson says

    The Goncourts’ main concern during the German siege and the Commune was the difficulty they had in getting meat, and the uncertainly about what kind of animal it was.
    While a history of famine may partly explain Chinese eating habits, things like tendon, the tips of chicken wings, chicken feet, and various exotic animals like cats and pangolins are considered delicacies and often are regarded as having medicinal value. KC Chang’s “Food in Chinese Culture” is very interesting.
    In my experience, Chinese regard eating new and different foods as an adventure and a learning experience, and the textures of foods are prized as much as the flavor (e.g., tendon has no flavor but an interesting texture.)

  49. Trond Engen says

    The “stuffed entrail, sausage” sense is the oldest in English,
    Pretty whorfian.

  50. J.W. Brewer says

    At least according to wikipedia, in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the Turtle” (where turtle = turtledove) the phoenix is the female and the dove is the male in the allegorical avian relationship – not that that necessarily has anything to do with the various Biblical doves. I suppose my real issue (not myself claiming to be a specialist) is that I am not finding m-l’s proposed connection between some sort of archaic mythical egg-laying bird not specified to be a dove and the various Biblical doves not specified to be female (and certainly not laying eggs as part of the particular bits of narrative they advance) particularly persuasive. There are lots of different species of birds floating around the Bible, not just doves. Indeed, I can think of at least one Biblical bird that is identifiably female – the hen to which Jesus likens himself in Luke 13:34. Does this mean that the apparently hen-like Jesus is not male? I think it only means that metaphors/similes are complicated and, you know, not to be taken overliterally.

  51. “poontang poontang > pudding.
    Oe, that sounds like Teleme jack. It has always been kind of special. It also ages well.God knows what that would cost.
    “While a history of famine may partly explain Chinese eating habits, things like tendon, the tips of chicken wings, chicken feet, and various exotic animals like cats and pangolins are considered delicacies and often are regarded as having medicinal value.”
    Yes, John. None of those things is bubba food in China. Pangolins cost enough to set a poor peasant in the sticks up for a year, or used to. even chicken feet are a little spendy, since everyone liks them and you only get two per bird. They are fun stewed lightly with soy sauce and aromatics for a beer munchy.

  52. Surely the point of the wings on birds, angels & messengers is that they allow the winged creatures to fly down from heaven and then back up again. Remember this all took place before the cell phone.

  53. When I was young my little sister cracked us all up by saying “angel boat” when she meant “ferry boat”. To her, I suppose both angels and fairies were mythical creatures with wings. What else is there to say?
    If I’m honest, I’m not very far beyond that view of things. Oh, I know that angels are messengers from God, or at least that that’s what the Greek word suggests. But I also know that Jacob wrestled with an angel at the foot of the ladder. Was that angel a messenger? What message did he bring? I also know that angels are good and devils are bad. But then why did Jacob wrestle with a good guy? Sorry, I just don’t really get it.

  54. When I read that ears like crests on birds and other animals in Haida art symbolized spiritual beings, I twigged that the wings on angels, cherubim and putti symbolized the same. You could also throw in Hermes’ winged heels. And angels were androgynous because sexless.

  55. You could say that only gods themselves don’t need the wings (and devils, perhaps).

  56. Bathrobe says

    In popular culture an angel is feminine, but this hasn’t totally edged out the older usage — there is the angel Gabriel, who is obviously male.
    I thought the devil was a fallen angel.

  57. Wings are used as attributes of angels from V c.
    >Bathrobe
    Curiously Madrid is one of the few places in the world where you can see a monument to devil as fallen angel.

  58. Here it is. I especially like this bit (note the two alternating types).

  59. There’s also a completely unconvincing one in Brooklyn.

  60. >A. J. P. Crown
    “note the two alternating types”
    Yes, apart from their mouths (smilingly or not), ones have wings with feathers (like birds) whereas others have webbed wings (like bats).
    By the way, all of them are sexless although one seems to have breasts; wings and breasts as the sirens.

  61. That’s a good point about the wings, Jesús. I thought they looked like dragons.

  62. marie-lucie says

    Thanks AJP and Jesus for pointing to the fallen angel’s statues. The Spanish one in bronze is much more convincing that the white marble one in Brooklyn.
    The Devil’s name is Lucifer, ‘light-bearer’ in Latin, a name still used in other languages along with Satan. Wikipedia gives the origin of the Latin name (a translation from attributes of the Morning Star in Hebrew or Greek). The article also shows Blake’s representation of Lucifer as very obviously male (and wingless).
    iakon: Hermes’ winged heels
    Hermes is a god in the Olympian pantheon, but his role is to be the messenger of the other gods, so he has wings, like angels (“messengers”), except that his seem to be symbolic rather than functional.

  63. Empty: The “angel” formulation of the wrestling scene is late. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles with a man who comes at him at night when he is alone: with what purpose, we can only guess. The contest is even until the man cheats by magically dislocating Jacob’s hip with a single touch. Then the man demands Jacob’s name, and renames him Israel (“triumph God”, syntax unclear), because he has wrestled with God and man and overcome.
    When Joseph returns the question, he’s put off with “Why do you ask?” (an early example of Jews answering a question with a question!) Jacob then assumes he’s been wrestling with God himself, despite the fact that he was beaten by the man, whereas the man said that Jacob had overcome God. The whole incident ends, as often, with our being told that the story explains one of the kosher laws.
    The only Biblical reference to Joseph and an angel (messenger, yes) is in Hosea, an 8th-century-B.C.E. prophet:
    In the womb he grasped his brother’s heel;
        as a man he struggled with God.
    He struggled with the messenger and overcame him;
        he wept and begged for his favor.
    He found him at Bethel
        and talked with him there—
    YHWH God Almighty,
        YHWH is his name!
    It’s not usually those who overcome who weep and beg, is all I can say.

  64. marie-lucie says

    Ø : to her … both angels and fairies were mythical creatures with wings
    I have always been puzzled by the quite different definition and iconography of “fairies” in France and England (I am not sure about other countries). In French tradition, les fées look like very beautiful women, of adult human size, with only a radiance about them that shows they are supernatural. They don’t have wings or other non-human attributes. These are the good fairies, which protect humans (usually females), often as their “godmothers”. There are also bad ones, which look like withered crones. In the story of La Belle au bois dormant (“Sleeping Beauty”), a bad fairy curses the newborn girl, but a good fairy saves her by altering the terms of the curse.
    In English tradition, fairies are tiny flying creatures with transparent wings, the size of a very small bird at most. How could such a creature act in human ways, let alone be a “godmother” to anyone?

  65. >Empty
    Speaking of Jacob, I didn’t read anything about a ladder in this passage. Nevertheless, there is a lot of angels in the Jacob’s dream ascending and descending a ladder.
    >John Cowan
    Joseph or Jacob?

  66. >Marie-lucie
    I don’t know but I imagine this statue caused a scandal in those days.

  67. marie-lucie says

    Jesús: I can imagine!

  68. Oh m-l, don’t forget A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Spenser’s Faerie Queene. And you might be interested in The Fairy Feller’s Masterstroke, a famous (in England) Victorian painting by the eccentric Richard Dadd that must be more in the French tradition you’re describing. My favourite Victorian fairies are Kate Greenaway’s of the later English type: The Elderberry Fairy, for example.

  69. Jesús: Joseph was a slip for Jacob that I didn’t completely correct. In any case, Jacob’s dream of the ladder is distinct from, and precedes, the wrestling scene, which is presented as an entirely real nocturnal occurrence, not a dream.
    m-l, you raised the point about fairy back in 2009, and I replied with a long quotation from Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories”; search on that page for the phrase “Tolkien on elf and fairy” for the full context, but the key passage is this:

    It is perhaps not unnatural that in England, the land where the love of the delicate and fine has often reappeared in art, fancy should in this matter turn towards the dainty and diminutive, as in France it went to court and put on powder and diamonds. Yet I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of “rationalization”, which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to have become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.

    You then replied (rightly, I think):

    It must be through a misunderstanding of the French word féerie, originally “supernatural power or world of the fairies”, that the word “fairy” came to be applied to one of the beings in question, in replacement of earlier “fay” (as in “Morgan le Fay”, from la fée Morgane, after English had lost much of the gender distinction in nouns). So Spenser’s “Faerie Queene” perhaps did not mean the queen who was a fairy but the queen of Fairyland. […] Perhaps the Victorian miniaturization of fairies was a way of diminishing the actual power of those feminine characters: such tiny beings would not be capable of wielding magic wands and change the destinies of humans.

  70. >John Cowan
    I thought that. As regards the dream I wanted only to point out that lots of angels appeared there.
    On the other hand, and as you know, St. Joseph had a dream where an angel warned him about the massacre of innocents. Saramago looks at this passage from an unusual angle: Joseph feels remorse for what he did.

  71. AJP: Before I saw, or rather deciphered, that picture (it seems to seriously need cleaning), I had read “fairy feller” as “someone who fells fairies”, or perhaps simply “fairy fellow” (i.e. male fairy), but no, it’s “(tree) feller who is a fairy.” A quick education in noun-noun compounds!

  72. John, you’re right about the title and I wonder if the ambiguity was perhaps intended by Richard Dadd; “masterstroke” clearly has an intended a double meaning. It doesn’t need cleaning, it’s just one of those pieces that doesn’t photograph clearly. I’d say it was because all the tones (values) are like mud, but that’s not true of the Fitzwilliam version, which is also next to impossible to decypher in reproduction. You’ll just have to go and see the originals.

  73. David Marjanović says

    Jehovah’s Witnesses are careful to illustrate all angels with beards.

    Or the importance of diacritics.

    Indeed!

    Westerners often wonder at the number of things considered by the Chinese as edible. They forget that there have been numerous famines in China

    And both the famines, and the tradition of eating anything that moves, are said to be southern things. China is very big.*
    * Important textbook sentence for learning the tones of Mandarin, but I digress. 🙂

    it’s just struck me that I’ve got no idea of the role or point of the Holy Spirit (Ghost).

    Epicureanism: the soul consists of the lightest and most jittery atoms, they quickly disperse after death so it’s impossible to put them back together, so there can’t be an afterlife.
    Paul the Apostle accepted all this and added the spirit to it. Since then, Westerners have talked about “body, soul and spirit” without understanding it. Paul went on to interpret God in an analogous way, especially the mentions of “the breath/spirit of God” such as in Genesis 1.
    Much of the New Testament in general and Paul’s epistles in particular are reactions to Epicureanism.

    a dove (in French, une colombe, a feminine word – I don’t know about other languages)

    The German cognate of dove is feminine: Taube.

    I am not finding m-l’s proposed connection between some sort of archaic mythical egg-laying bird not specified to be a dove and the various Biblical doves not specified to be female (and certainly not laying eggs as part of the particular bits of narrative they advance) particularly persuasive.

    Me neither. Genesis 1, the one with God’s spirit floating above the waters, is the Mesopotamian-derived one.

  74. marie-lucie says

    JC, thanks for the quotes, and for the link to the earlier discussion. I had an idea that I had made a similar comment before, but did not remember it clearly. I had forgotten the entire Tolkien quote and was glad to read it again, both for content and style.
    Searching for the relevant comments, I reread the entire thread, which was mostly about Indo-European and relevant topics in historical linguistics. Etienne actually said that the comments could be used as notes for a lecture, and later almost as a textbook! It was worth rereading, and I wonder if some of the topics need refreshing 4 years later.

  75. David Marjanović says

    Searching for the relevant comments, I reread the entire thread

    Me too 🙂

    I wonder if some of the topics need refreshing 4 years later

    Definitely! For example, the Moscow School finds (a little) evidence for phonemic tones in Proto-Indo-European!

  76. J.W. Brewer says

    On the German dove being feminine, I see that Luthers Bibel has the relevant part of Mark 1:10 as describing a vision of “den Geist gleich wie eine Taube herabkommen auf ihn.” So the (masc., at least grammatically) Spirit is likened unto a (fem., at least grammatically) dove, apparently without unacceptable cognitive dissonance.

  77. marie-lucie says

    JWB, in French too, the Mark quotation would be about le Saint-Esprit, sous la forme d’une colombe ‘the Holy Spirit, in the shape of a dove’. This does not mean that the Holy Spirit is literally a dove.
    You forget that grammatical gender does not always imply biological gender: in fact, in most cases it does not, since most nouns do not refer to living creatures. There are many cases where the same things or living creatures can be referred to by synonyms of opposite genders (eg “pumpkin”: Fr. la citrouille or le potiron; “seagull”: la mouette or le goéland).
    There can be a cognitive dissonance if such things or creatures are anthropomorphized, but not otherwise. For instance, the title of the novel “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” where the main character is supposed to be male was translated into French as Jonathan Livingston le goéland, taking advantage of the possibility of choice with the noun referring to the bird. If the main character had been a female gull, with a female name, the choice would undoubtedly have been la mouette. But the availability of such synonymous pairs is restricted to a few nouns.

  78. >Marie-lucie
    Not only it can be a “problem” of gender in some languages but sometimes it’s also of number. You know, on Pentecost: “And there [the Holy Spirit] appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire.” Spanish and French (among other languages) have feminine words to tongues.

  79. China is very big
    中国 很 大 zhōngguó hěn dà; very cool!
    There’s a Middle Chinese version too: the Emperor asks “What are these four tones of which you scholars speak?”, and the scholar Shen Yue replies “Tien1 tsi2 shiang3 jieat”, meaning “The Son of Heaven is holy and wise”, or freely rendered “Whatever Your Majesty chooses to make them.” “But,” we are told, “the Emperor never would follow them”, presumably because he didn’t get the joke. (Note that MC tones 2 and 3 are Mandarin tones 3 and 4 respectively.)

  80. John Cowan: thank you for the link to the original discussion. Yes, I re-read it too.
    Marie-Lucie, David: I maintain that that thread definitely could serve as a substitute for a lecture or even a textbook on historical linguistics. Also, if anything my skepticism regarding most alleged instances of substrate influence is even stronger now than it was back then.
    Indeed, I wonder: could the popularity of substrate theories outside of Romance be a form of “survival in the periphery” of an idea once dominant in the center? In the late nineteenth/early twentieth century substrate theories were very popular among Romance scholars, and Romance linguistics was an influential field within historical linguistics more generally. By the second half of the twentieth century, when substrate theories were systematically disproved within Romance, the field had lost its former prestige and as a result the credibility of substrate hypotheses in other subfields remained unaffected by their being discredited among Romance scholars.
    David: tones in Proto-Indo-European? Reference or Link, please! That was a possibility Guy Jucquois mentioned once, I believe.

  81. marie-lucie says

    Etienne, my exclamation marks were not intended to be disparaging! It is true that the discussion was very meaty. I trust that you know what you are talking about regarding (im)possible substrate influences in Romance, but that does not mean that substrates cannot be invoked in other language situations. Of course, they would have to be very well substantiated.
    Tones in PIE? I share your skepticism, or even astonishment. I too would like to know the alleged evidence for this proposal. Moscow linguists are often very creative, sometimes a little too much.
    My impression is that tones are generally assumed to have evolved from cases of vowel-consonant sequences where the consonant weakens and ultimately disappears, after some of its formants (is this the right term here?) have been transferred by anticipation to the preceding vowel, creating a tone superimposed on the vowel: for instance, a sequence [aX] could evolve into [a] uttered with a low tone, while [at] could create a mid tone and [aky] (where [ky] is a palatal) a high tone. Such tone-formation is apparently well-attested for the history of Chinese, which is documented over many centuries. So if there were tones in PIE, it would mean that some consonants (and the vowels they affected) would have to be reconstructed for a Pre-PIE stage, with less evidence available than for the currently reconstructed consonants and vowels. I am sure that PIE must have had an ancestor, and probably also “sister” languages, and that is what the Nostratic hypothesis is concerned with. Do Nostraticists entertain the possibility of PIE tones? If so, on what grounds?

  82. Marie-Lucie: oh, I didn’t take them as disparaging, rest assured! But throw in a bibliography cross-referenced to various points in the discussion and I think we’d have a fine textbook.
    Re tonogenesis: actually, my understanding is that the scenario you sketched above was first presented for Vietnamese, on the basis of comparative Mon-Khmer evidence (non-tonal Mon-Khmer languages exhibit, in cognates with Vietnamese words, a systematic relationship whereby a given tone in Vietnamese corresponds to a given final segment in other Mon-Khmer languages), by a French scholar named Haudricourt in the 1950’s. Only later was it argued that Chinese tones arose in the same way.
    But diachronically tone can arise in other ways. Four that come to mind:
    1-Some prairie Algonquian languages (Arapaho is one example, I think) have a four-tone system which arose through the transformation of the original long-short phonemic vowel distinction of Proto-Algonquian and a stress system: so that one Arapaho tone goes back to long stressed vowels, another to short stressed vowels, and so on.
    2-In Lhasa Tibetan a tonal distinction arose (inter alia!) through the loss of voicing as a phonological feature in stops: so that a phonemic distinction between (say) /ta/ and /da/ in Classical Tibetan (a non-tonal language) is now, in Lhasa Tibetan, a phonemic tonal distinction made on the /a/, with both syllables now both beginning with /t/.
    3-Related to this is the rise of tones in Punjabi, which was similar to 2, but in this case involving the loss of voiced aspirate stops: according to their position in the word, they allophonically affected various neighboring vowels in terms of tonal contour: after voiced aspirate stops merged with other stops these tonal contours became phonemic.
    4-Finally there is tonogenesis similar to 2 and 3 but where no merger of consonant phonemes occurs: rather, loss of a segment in a given position modified the syllabic structure of a word, so that an originally allophonic tonal istinction became phonemic. A case in point which may surprise you: some varieties of French!
    Thus, in some recorded accents of French a tonal distinction was found to exist between LAC and LAQUE (both homophonous in the standard: /lak/). The spelling is quite faithful to the phonological history of the word: LAQUE, unlike LAC, was originally bisyllabic. Meaning that, whereas the /la/ of LAQUE was originally in an open syllable, the /la/ of LAC never was. It would seem that an original allophonic tonal distinction between (stressed) open and stressed closed syllables became a BONA FIDE tonal system in these varieties of French when the loss of final schwa caused LAQUE to become monosyllabic.

  83. Fascinating! These threads are a continuing postgraduate course for me.

  84. marie-lucie says

    Grand merci, Etienne! Tone and tonogenesis have been a very neglected part of my linguistic training. I should really try to catch up. I am especially curious to know what French dialects have tone.
    Thanks for referring to André Haudricourt, who had very interesting ideas.

  85. Indeed, there has to be more than one mechanism for tonogenesis, given that although Proto-Tai apparently had only four tones (usually labeled with capital letters to avoid confusion with Chinese tones, where A, C, B, D [sic] correspond to Middle Chinese tones 1, 2, 3, 4, and where D is the tone of all syllables ending in stops), its descendant Kam has fifteen tones by usual reckonings, nine in syllables that end in vowels or nasals and six in syllables that end in stops. This suggests at least two tone splits, possibly a third as well.
    Kam uses a Hmong-style tonal spelling, where the final written consonant indicates the tone; this is preceded by the actual final consonant if there is one, so that medc ‘ant’ is pronounced [mət] with the tone contour 2-1-2 represented by c. The tone also affects the quality of certain vowels: -ed is pronounced [et] or [ət] depending on the tone.

  86. Trond Engen says

    Type 4 is the standard explanation for Scandinavian tone — or at least the one I’ve been touting because it makes most sense to me. The contour of three syllables was squeezed onto two.
    In the emeticity thread I got this idea that the process of phonological reduction that led to the tonogenesis in Chinese was similar to what we now see in Danish, and that Danish may well develop a tonal system. But the thread got closed before I came around to adding it.

  87. The only Biblical reference to Joseph and an angel (messenger, yes) is in Hosea, an 8th-century-B.C.E. prophet [Joseph was a slip for Jacob]
    Genesis, Chapter 28, Verse 12 (KJV): and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.
    The Hebrew word for angel is מלאך malakh. Robert Alter translates the word as messenger, as does Klein. Klein derives it from לאך send, and gives cognates in Phoenician, Aramaic, Syriac and Ugaritic, plus loanwords from Aramaic in Ethiopic and Arabic.
    A related word, מלאכה milakha, means work or occupation. Klein derives it from לאך send, hence a literal meaning of mission. (Modern Hebrew uses another word for mission.) מלאכותי milakhuti means artificial in Modern Hebrew.

  88. >Paul Ogden
    Yes, it’s the ladder of Jacob’s dream already mentioned: http://cuadrosparaunaexposicion.blogspot.com.es/2011/05/nueva-escena-biblica-para-identificar_26.html

  89. Other other Paul, is there any obvious connection between מלאכה milakha and מלאכותי milakhuti ? In English & Norwegian & German I’ve always liked the link between art, artifice and artificial.

  90. Paul Ogden: I mean, the only reference to Jacob wrestling with an angel (rather than a man) is in Hosea.

  91. is there any obvious connection between מלאכה milakha and מלאכותי milakhuti ? In English & Norwegian & German I’ve always liked the link between art, artifice and artificial.
    I suppose it’s the same sense development we see in English forge. One forges metal at a forge but forges a document. The first activity is honorable, the second not.

  92. marie-lucie says

    AJP: I’ve always liked the link between art, artifice and artificial.
    “Art” did not always mean painting, sculpture, music, etc but “high degree of skill”. This is the meaning of Latin ars,artis and it is also found in Shakespeare, for instance to refer to medical skill.

  93. artistic, artful, artificial, artisanal, arty, artsy, artsy-fartsy

  94. and apparently artifactual as well

  95. “high degree of skill”
    our ur (u is oo like in tool) works the same way, urtai, uran means skillful, ur chadvar mean skills, urlag becomes art, urlah – to do something artful, urlan is a study room
    ur – ars, artis – maybe some connection could be like construed there, no?
    but maybe every language constructs the similar meaning words the same way like that, but in russian it’s coming from iskus – temptation? iskushat’- to tempt, then it becomes iskusnui – skillful, iskusstvo-art, maybe iskus meant skill too but lost its that original meaning somehow
    english and japanese arts are borrowings i understand, from latin and chinese, so every word related includes either art or jutsu i guess

  96. not either or, but each of
    we have a saying buruu yarij zov oilgoh – to speak wrong but understand correctly, recalled that

  97. We place no reliance
    On virgin or pigeon;
    Our method is Science,
    Our aim is Religion.

         —Aleister Crowley

  98. George Gibbard says

    re Vietnamese tonogenesis: the split conditioned by lost final consonants depended not on the place of articulation of the consonant, but on the state of the glottis: I think I seem to recall that the four catgories in Vietnamese correspond to the following final consonant categories in Khmer: stop; s; h; anything else or nothing. Vietnamese also underwent a crosscutting split conditioned by the glottal state at the beginning of the syllable, yielding eight contrasting tones.

    two other cases of languages developing tone:

    in conservative dialects of Serbo-Croatian (I don’t remember which ones), there is no tone; stress may fall on any syllable, and I believe it is in general associated with falling intonation. In innovating dialects, stress may never fall on the final syllable, an in stressed initial syllables there is a contrast between falling and rising tone. Of course what happened is that the peak was shifted from the beginning of one syllable to the end of the preceding syllable, unless there was no preceding syllable in the word. Serbo-Croatian had earlier lost the proto-slavic contrast between acute (high or rising?) vs. circumflex (falling) accent in long nuclei (the second mora can be a liquid, otherwise the nucleus is a long vowel) because long acute nuclei were shortened.

    Sanskrit first lost the acute:circumflex distinction seen in the ancestor of Greek and Balto-Slavic, but then innovated a new acute:circumflex distinction when accented high vowels were desyllabified before another vowel, which thereby acquired the new circumflex (svarita) accent. As to the realization of the accent, though, it is not the case as some westerners seem to believe that acute (udatta) is high and circumflex (svarita) is falling. Instead, prescriptively, the following rules apply:
    an unaccented (anudatta) syllable not in the environment of an accented syllable has mid tone.
    an acute (udatta) syllable has mid tone, and the preceding syllable (if unaccented) has low tone, and the following syllable (if unaccented) has high tone unless the syllable after that is accented, in which case the syllable between the two accents has low tone.
    A circumflex syllable has high tone, and the preceding syllable has low tone, and the following syllable is unaffected; I don’t know if all this applies when a circumflex syllable is followed by an accented syllable.
    Canonically low tone is a whole tone lower than mid, and high tone is a half tone higher than mid.

    A language developing pitch accent: Somali nouns may have prominence on either of the last two moras. Overwhelmingly, feminine nouns have it on the final mora and masculine nouns have it on the penultimate mora: plainly the feminine nouns have lost a feminine suffix which affected the position of the accent. Somali has pitch accent and not stress because a word may also lack an accent, in the case of (1) the final element of a noun phrase in the subject case, and (2) a finite, non-progressive main verb in clauses without subject focus.

    Pullo, not Pulo. The suffix sometimes causes gemination of a stem-final consonant, cf. debbo ‘woman’, pl. rewbe. I don’t know why my computer isn’t letting me shift to my IPA keyboard right now, but the bb in ‘woman’ is not implosive whereas the b in ‘women’ is. As to the origin of Pulaar initial mutation, this is covered in Greenberg’s The Languages of Africa, and for nouns it is clearly demonstrated that the reason is lost noun class prefixes, still retained in related Seereer; meanwhile the Pulaar noun class suffixes were originally an article.

  99. George Gibbard says

    Oops! Vietnamese doesn’t have eight contrasting tones, it has two contrasting tones for syllables ending in a stop and six contrasting tones for other syllables.

    Tone is a matter of fundamental frequency (F0) which is not affected by the formants (F1, F2…) which encode place of articulation.

  100. Thanks very much for that extremely informative comment!

  101. David Marjanović says

    Sanskrit first lost the acute:circumflex distinction seen in the ancestor of Greek and Balto-Slavic

    That sounds very outdated (mid-20th century at the latest) to me; PIE is usually not thought to have constrasted any tones even in stressed syllables, and Greek… may never have been considered particularly close to Balto-Slavic.

  102. George Gibbard says

    So it isn’t the case that the Greek acute:circumflex distinction and the Balto-Slavic one are cognate, but it used to be thought that they were?

  103. marie-lucie says

    PO: The Hebrew word for angel is מלאך malakh. — from לאך send, —
    A related word, מלאכה milakha, means work or occupation. Klein derives it from לאך send, hence a literal meaning of mission

    This reminds me of calling as another word for “profession, occupation”, something felt not as freely or rationally chosen but resulting from some inner compulsion (which may be felt as an outer, perhaps supernatural compulsion, as in “he was called to the priesthood”).

  104. marie-lucie says

    The Hebrew word for angel is מלאך malakh.

    Then that must be what the name Malachi is from!

  105. cheese, guaranteed to squick out Chinese everywhere

    There is now a boom in cheese in Beijing. The Chinese are not only eating more cheese, they are also making it. I was asked at a supermarket checkout (Sam’s Club, actually) by another (Chinese) customer, “Is that Beijing Blue you’ve got there?”

  106. George Gibbard says

    My memory of whatever I read, which I’m sure was several decades old, was that tone was reconstructed not for PIE but for Proto-IE-minus-Anatolian, and that circumflex tone at least sometimes resulted from contraction of two syllables, while long acute tone at least sometimes originated from loss of a laryngeal in a syllable coda.

  107. PO: The Hebrew word for angel is מלאך malakh. — from לאך send, —
    A related word, מלאכה milakha, means work or occupation. Klein derives it from לאך send, hence a literal meaning of mission.

    m-l: This reminds me of calling as another word for “profession, occupation”, something felt not as freely or rationally chosen but resulting from some inner compulsion (which may be felt as an outer, perhaps supernatural compulsion, as in “he was called to the priesthood”).

    German Sendung can mean a shipment, a tv/radio broadcast, or a mission in the Christian sense. For the latter the word Mission is usually employed nowadays, to avoid any association with Navy CSI or your Amazon package, which would be unintentionally funny.

    The non-colloquial Sendbrief or Sendschreiben refers to a missive intended to be read by many people, and persists only in biblical contexts, for example Paul’s Sendbrief to the Romans. Luther’s Sendbrief an den Papst Leo den Zehnten was an “open letter” formally adressed to one person.

    A Beruf is a vocation or profession, a Berufung is a calling (such as to the priesthood).

    Originally and literally, it was the Christian God who did the sending and calling. This God sends people on missions, and calls on them to deliver the goods. The modern “inner compulsion” is the dregs of that meaning.

  108. Note that the verb לאך is unattested in Hebrew, though inferred from מלאך and מלאכה, and from Semitic cognates.

    Malachi has been interpreted as either a proper name, or indeed, as ‘my messenger’.

  109. Malachi has been interpreted as either a proper name, or indeed, as ‘my messenger’.

    Not sure what you mean there. It’s self-evidently a proper name; if you mean one that never at any time had a lexcal meaning as well (e.g., ‘my messenger’), that seems unlikely, especially for a Semitic name.

  110. Hat: The point is that מַלְאָכִי mal’akhi appears only once in the text, in Mal. 1:1, where it is not self-evidently a name. The text “A prophecy: The word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi” (NIV) could just as well be read “A prophecy: The word of the Lord to Israel through my messenger,” and that’s basically what the Septuagint says: “Λῆμμα λόγου κυρίου ἐπὶ τὸν Ισραηλ ἐν χειρὶ ἀγγέλου αὐτοῦ θέσθε δὴ ἐπὶ τὰς καρδίας ὑμῶν”. Indeed, the word is almost too simple to be a name: you’d expect (quoth Wikipedia) something like mal’akhiah ‘messenger of YHWH’. In later usage it is of course a name.

    The ambiguity of אָדָם‎ adam is similar: different translations don’t agree on when to write “the man”/”the person” and when to write “Adam”, though the tendency to use “Adam” increases as the text goes on.

  111. Ah, sorry, I completely misunderstood!

  112. Either interpretation of מלאכי is not completely satisfactory. As you say, John, it’s an odd personal name, but well suited as a descriptive term for what is usually called a prophet. On the other hand, the first person reference (implying that God is the speaker) is extraordinary. There’s a common formula, “The vision of Isaiah, son of Amotz”, “The words of Jeremiah, son of Hilkiyahu, of the priests of Anathoth”, “The prophecy envisioned by Habakkuk the prophet” (using the same word, מַשָּׂא ‘that which is borne’, implying a speech to an audience, as in Malachi); “A prophecy [מַשָּׂא] to Nineveh. The book of Nahum the Elkoshite”, etc. The opening of Malachi fits exactly with that.

    To complicate matters, we have 3:1, הִנְנִי שֹׁלֵחַ מַלְאָכִי וּפִנָּה-דֶרֶךְ לְפָנָי “I hereby send forth my messenger [מַלְאָכִי], and he shall clear a path in front of me.”

    According to Hebrew Wikipedia, the issue has split both traditional and modern Biblical scholars over the ages, with no satisfactory resolution.

  113. I should add that the Septuagint’s solution is appealing: by reading מלאכו ‘his messenger’ instead of מלאכי ‘my messenger’, the verse makes complete sense, at the expense of lengthening the leg of the written yod to form a vav, and of using a descriptor instead of a proper name. (There must be a rhetorical term for this anonymization, but I don’t recall one.)

  114. David Marjanović says

    So it isn’t the case that the Greek acute:circumflex distinction and the Balto-Slavic one are cognate, but it used to be thought that they were?

    I think so. Wikipedia to the rescue:

    The following changes are apparently post-Mycenaean:
    […]
    Rise of a distinctive circumflex accent, resulting from contraction and certain other changes.”

    In Balto-Slavic, “circumflex” is just the absence of “acute” in that “acute” is an innovation as largely explained further below in the very, very long article. Scroll down a bit to “The accentual system” to appreciate what a can of worm Balto-Slavic accentology is, and what kinds of things seem to have happened to PIE stress on the way to Balto-Slavic.

    Assuming that the laryngeals were immediately lost in the non-Anatolian branch does not work, because they were lost in quite different ways in different subbranches.

    The current textbook reconstruction of PIE is a language where, like in modern Russian, there is only one kind of stress, though it can fall on any syllable in a word and can fall on different syllables in the inflectional paradigm of a single word in poorly predictable ways. But if, in “The accentual system” above, you click on “Proto-Indo-European accent” (I’m trying not to put too many links into this comment), you’ll find under “Modern theories” that not only has the Proto-Balto-Slavic stress placement not been matched up with that of either Ancient Greek or Sanskrit so far, but in a quarter of the cases the latter two contradict each other, and this – as explained there – has been suggested to mean that PIE was a tone language, where sequences of tones developed into stress placement in different ways in different branches. I wonder where that will lead.

    (One reason I’m so curious is that Proto-Altaic has recently been reconstructed as a tone language.)

  115. David Marjanović says

    Following up on my previous comment which is now in moderation, on the talk page it says some kinds of Latvian can still have “acute” on any or all syllables of a word, not just the stressed one.

  116. Man, I did not know there were dialects of Latvian that preserve the three-accent system on long vowels. Or rather, I may have known that when I was studying Balto-Slavic four decades ago…

  117. marie-lucie says

    Several decades ago I took a graduate course in which the textbook was something like “Teach yourself Latvian” (not one of that well-known series but something similar) and we tried to learn what we could about various aspects of the structure of Latvian. I don’t remember any mention of stress, let alone tone.

  118. @ m-l: The stress in Latvian is word-initial, this is widely seen as a sign of Finno-Ugric influence / substrate. The “tones” in Latvian are indicated in good dictionaries, but I have seen tourist dictionaries and simple “Teach Yourself” type textbooks simply ignoring them; perhaps that was the case in the textbook you saw as well.

  119. David Marjanović says

    And again Wikipedia to the rescue. 🙂

  120. I’m reading Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, and I just got to this sentence: “He showed such a liking for the potato gattò that my mother served him a second very generous portion and promised him, even if in her usual reluctant tone, that she would make it again before he left.” So it’s in Naples as well as Sardinia.

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