Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2010 December 31

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December 31

Characters and caricatures

Do these two words come from different roots? I've looked them up at dictionary.com but I'm not familiar with the abbreviations and such that they use to describe a word's origin.

For instance, the entry for caricature reads: "1740–50; earlier caricatura < It, equiv. to caricat ( o ) loaded, i.e., distorted (ptp. of caricare; see charge) + -ura -ure" I have no idea what all that means though.

Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 09:03, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

From around 1740-50, originally "caricatura", from an Italian word, itself equivalent to the compound of 2 parts:

* caricato which means "loaded id est distorted". (past participle of caricare; see the word "charge" in this very same dictionary)

* to which is attached the suffix -ura (plural -ure), replacing the -o.

Did that help? --Lgriot (talk) 09:24, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

I broke it all down into little chunks:

1740–50;      is the date of the first recorded use of the word.

earlier caricatura < It      Earlier than 1740, there was an Italian word "caricatura".

This actually means that caricature comes from an earlier (English) word caricatura, which in turn was derived from Italian. —Bkell (talk) 17:01, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

equiv. to caricat      Caricatura was equivalent to the word caricat.

( o )      I guess this means caricat is only a word-stem and needs to be given an ending such as "o" to be valid Italian.

loaded, i.e., distorted      Caricat means "loaded" in the sense of "distorted". (Bit of a stretch?)

(ptp. of caricare;      Caricat is the past participle of caricare.

see charge)      Follow the hyperlink to "charge" for information about "caricare".

+ -ura      Caricat with -ura tacked on the end gives caricatura.

-ure      Follow the hyperlink to "-ure" for information about -ura. -ure is the plural version of -ura.

The entry for charge says it's from Latin carrus, meaning wagon. So caricature has the same origin as car, as it turns out. It doesn't seem to have the same origin as character; looking that up on dictionary.com, it says the word comes from Middle English, from Old French, from Latin, from a Greek word for an engraving tool. Etymonline clarifies the connection between "charge" and "caricature" a bit - the key concept seems to be "overloading", hence "exaggeration", or "that face is like an elephant in a tata nano." Now I'm reading False cognate, which is entertaining. Apparently an old Japanese word for "mother" was "papa". 213.122.44.106 (talk) 09:48, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Good information on -ure, Lgriot, but you shouldn't mess around with other people's posts. 213.122.44.106 (talk) 10:33, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant to mention it, and only then correct it, but I was doing 3 other things at the same time and got confused! --Lgriot (talk) 12:39, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Latin pronunciation

When I have tried to correct the pronunciation of a person who was using a latin phrase and was trying to make it sound like a real latin pronunciation, (they were definitely not pronuncing it like most English speakers do) they have sometimes retaliated that we do not know how latin was pronunced since we have no recording, and therefore my correction is just as likely to be wrong than their original attempt pronunciation (my correction was using an italian pronunciation of the latin letters, which in at least one case was incorrect, since I had forgotten to use w for V). While we do not need to dwell on the unappropriateness of me correcting stupid (or otherwise) people, I have checked the article Latin spelling and pronunciation and I am wondering whether there is a complete consensus among linguists on the letter to phoneme equivalent presented there. Is reconstructive linguistics that powerful, that, no serious mind looking at the evidence gathered would disagree with these conclusions? It seems we even know around which time things started to change pronunciation, that is just amazingly precise! --Lgriot (talk) 10:54, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

A classic book which gathers together a lot of stuff in one place is Vox Latina by W. Sidney Allen. There are some features of ancient Latin which are rarely emulated in any modern pronunciation (such as replacement of word-final m following an unstressed vowel by nasalization of the vowel), but we know quite a bit about ancient pronunciations. On the other hand, there's a conventional ecclesiastical pronunciation of Latin (used in singing etc.) which is customary in its own sphere (it would only be "wrong" if it was claimed to be authentically ancient, which is usually not the case). AnonMoos (talk) 11:25, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

Regarding your "word-final m" comment, something I've wondered about the text of Bayeaux Tapestry: In many or perhaps all situations where they have a word ending in what you would think should be "um", they instead have just a "u", with a horizontal bar over it. Are they trying to convey what you're talking about? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:18, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Looking through my copy of the text, I see there weren't actually all that many, but this one from early in the work caught my eye: HIC APPREHENDIT WIDO HAROLDV ET DVXIT EVM AD BELREM ET IBI EVM TENVIT which means, "Here Guy has seized Harold and has taken him to Beaurain and held him there." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:26, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

Bar for following nasal is an abbreviation. Portuguese uses tilde for a nasal vowel because (as in French) it was originally vowel+/n/ or +/m/, often written with a bar, which could be 'swashed'. —Tamfang (talk) 04:44, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

And the tilde article expands on the subject further. Thank you! ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:21, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

There are also various local traditional/conventional pronunciations of Latin, including a German one, an English one, etc.; the Italianate one is just another local pronunciation, although it has come to be something of a standard for church singing (and, in some institutions, even for mediaeval Latin in general!). None of these should be considered "wrong" as long as one is aware of the fact that they are all conventional/traditional rather than Classical. Any of them is, of course, superior to just pronouncing at random.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 04:16, 1 January 2011 (UTC)

The abbreviated -um in the Bayeux tapestry is fairly typical, but that's not really why the words are abbreviated; writing materials were not as abundant and cheap back then, so they wanted to save space, and they abbreviated pretty much anything that could be abbreviated. For example, if that bit of the Tapestry, "hic apprehendit wido haroldum et duxit eum ad belrem et ibi eum tenuit" was in a manuscript, it might be abbreviated "H aphd W H e dux e a Br e i e tu" with all sorts of lines and squiggles...of course, certain lines and squiggles mean certain things, so you can usually tell what it says, especially if the syntax and grammar are also clear (but that is not always the case). Palaeography and scribal abbreviation go into this in more detail.

Also, for pronunciation, in the medieval studies program where I am, people tend to pronounce Latin as if it is normal English, or they use the Italianate pronunciation. I guess some people might need to focus on pronunciation for metrical purposes, but it's not like we talk to each other in Latin or anything, so it usually doesn't matter. When I was doing Latin tutorials I just pronounced it like English, to make things easier. (It did matter once, when we were discussing rules for Latin Scrabble - should we acknowledge vowel length? We ended up not doing that...) Adam Bishop (talk) 03:54, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

I'm glad to hear that at least some use the "normal English"-like pronunciation for mediaeval texts. Ideally, one may want to use the local pronunciation of the country that the text under discussion comes from, but an easier and equally logical approach is to stick to the traditional pronunciation of your own country/linguistic community, which is a natural continuation of the one used there in the Middle Ages. The idea that one should use the Italian pronunciation for any mediaeval Latin text of any provenance makes no sense to me, it is historically inaccurate and seems to suggest that the modern Vatican somehow retrospectively holds the copyright on the Middle Ages.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:34, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

91.148.159.4 -- As the "traditional" English pronunciation of Latin developed, it became subject to the Great Vowel Shift, and so was semi-incomprehensible to continental Europeans (and of course quite inaccurate to any authentic ancient pronunciation). For this reason, a number of people from the 16th century on have been extremely anxious to get rid of the traditional pronunciation (though it apparently lingered on in some limited contexts until the 19th century). AnonMoos (talk) 11:40, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

It's true that the English Latin changes are a little extreme, but: 1. I think continental Europeans who know English (i.e. almost all of them nowadays) would find it easy to understand, and people don't tend to speak a lot of Latin to each other anyway (somehow traditional pronunciation did survive until the 20th century without leading to catastrophies). 2. Other traditional pronunciations are not so divergent, so incomprehensibility is not an argument against them; 3. That is still not an argument for adopting an Italian-style pronunciation, of all things. If one must strive after international comprehensibility, it is better to stick to the neutral classical version. As for "inaccuracy" - again, all traditional pronunciations are pretty inaccurate with respect to the Classical one; we are talking about mediaeval Latin, in any case. For post-Chaucer English mediaeval Latin, Great Vowel Shift pronunciation is as accurate as it gets. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 12:11, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I have a little school Latin text from 1919 (in the UK), which comes with a foreword talking about encouraging classical pronunciation, and that 'many' have complained that this is silly because it means the boys (and it only refers to boys) will not say the phrases like everyone else in conversation, and they'll sound like they got it wrong. And they won't understand when other gentlemen use Latin phrases in conversation. I know, even today, I've been corrected because I unthinkingly used a classical pronunciation for a phrase, when the normal English pronunciation in conversation is quite different. 86.164.58.246 (talk) 13:04, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Again, I'm glad to hear that, although I understand you're not happy about it. :) The solution is to know and practice both pronunciations; it may require some versatility, but it's nothing compared to learning Latin in the first place. In practice, whenever one learns a new European language, one also learns a new traditional pronunciation of Latin to go with the Latin loanwords, whether one likes it or not. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 12:17, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Interesting how this question has triggered an awful lot of comments that do not even try to answer the question (except for AnonMoos'). So I'll assume that indeed we know A LOT about the classical pronunciation, and that the conclusions are not questioned. I don't think I'll have time to read Vox Latina --Lgriot (talk) 13:05, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Well, no need to be snippy...AnonMoos answered your question, so we didn't really need to try. And now you're going to ignore the answer anyway. Hooray for the Reference Desk. Adam Bishop (talk) 15:24, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

I was just noticing that people couldn't avoid going into irrelevant discussions, instead of focusing on the precise question, which is a recurring issue on this desk. I don't think the question was actually fully answered though, I was told to read a book, which is fine, but no one said yes / no to my question, which was is there a scientific consensus or not. So until I have bought that book for £18 on amazon and found the time to read it, I'll just have to make an assumption. I am not sure what snippy means, sorry English is not my mother tongue. --Lgriot (talk) 17:16, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

Oh, well, they weren't completely irrelevant, but to answer your question more directly, we can't know for sure what Latin sounded like because there are no recordings of native Latin speakers. But there is scientific consensus, and our Latin spelling and pronunciation article that you mentioned earlier explains the consensus. We know what the sounds must have been, because ancient authors sometimes describe the sounds. Poetry also depends on certain pronunciations, and some sounds can be reconstructed from the way they have evolved in the modern Romance languages. So, yes, we do know how ancient Romans probably pronounced Latin, but because Latin is so similar to so many modern languages, modern people tend to pronounce it in the way that is most familiar to us. Adam Bishop (talk) 21:52, 4 January 2011 (UTC)

My post may have been irrelevant to the OP's question, but it was relevant to the specific incident he described - Italian pronunciation is not "original" Latin, and before one corrects another speaker's pronunciation that is not Italian, one should always be aware of the possibility that they may be using a traditional pronunciation different from the ones you're used to. As for the original question, I didn't think it needed answering any more than AnonMoos had already answered it: yes, historical linguistic is a science, and yes, there is a very stable scholarly consensus on what Classical Latin sounded like. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 12:11, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

French Verb

I am just looking through some French verbs that follow the same pattern as commencer, in that the c just before the infinitive gains a cedilla in the first person plural to retain the soft pronunciation, and one such verb that is listed, in the first person plural, is 'nous façonnons' meaning 'we craft, manufacture' but I don't understand why this is 'façonnons' rather than 'façons'. Can someone explain? Thanks. asyndeton talk 18:23, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

The infinitive is façonner, hence je façonne, tu façonnes etc. It does not follow the pattern you're looking for. My dictionnary doesn't list a verb *facer which would behave like that. --Wrongfilter (talk) 18:29, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

(ec) The verb is façonner (cf. English "fashion"), so nous façonnons is the regular form that one would expect. I don't think it really is of the type you're looking for, as the 'ç' is always followed by an 'o' in any form of the verb. The fact that the verb stem ends contains "on" is a bit of a red herring. As another example, the 1st person plural of donner (give) is not nous dons. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 18:35, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

It's some relief to find out that it's regular; I just couldn't fathom it otherwise. That verb can have a nice pencil line through it. Thank you both for your help. asyndeton talk 18:56, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

A little bit late (edit conflict). The verbs that end with -cer take a cedilla under the c before "o" or "a". For example: Placer, je place/nous plaçons. (Others: amorcer, annoncer, avancer, cadencer, concurrencer, etc., etc.) But, façonner does not end with -cer. Façonner is a verb that derives from façon, the c with its cedilla is already there. It conjugates like aimer — AldoSyrt (talk) 19:07, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

"Façons" would be Haplology... AnonMoos (talk) 19:17, 31 December 2010 (UTC)