Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 December 4

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December 4

Final a pronounced /iː/

Hooray for Santy Claus
Hooray for Santy Claus
You spell it S-A-N-T-A C-L-A-U-S
Hooray for Santy Claus!

That's the theme song of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, which by the way is in the public domain in the United States and can be downloaded here.

What I'm wondering about is the very clear "Santy" pronunciation in the recording. I know that there are some old regional dialects that do this pretty systematically to final a's. I think I read about this in Tom Dooley, whose name may actually have been Dula. But these kids didn't sound like cowboys or particularly Appalachian (to the extent I can tell), and if they were the age they sounded, they're not that much older than me.

Is this an older or regional accent, or maybe just a diminutive of endearment? But they keep the a when they spell it out.... --Trovatore (talk) 01:54, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

It's been around a long time. Alluded to in this bit from A Night at the Opera:

Groucho: That's in every contract. It's a sanity clause.

Chico: Ha! You can't fool me! There ain't no Sanity Claus!

←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:20, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

"Santy" is common in certain parts of the American South. And, apparently, Ireland. Really, this just seems like fairly normal English vowel variation. If I say "Santa Barbara" the pronunciation is more of a schwa sound than the "ah" you would expect. "Santa Clara" almost reaches the /iː/ sound you asked about. But the pronunciation of "Santa" as distinctly "Santy" is fairly well marked as childish or uneducated. While the sound may approach that in some circumstances in some dialects; the repeated, deliberate pronunciation in that song definitely comes across as that of children. Which is kind of appropriate, given the source. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 06:01, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I think the early part of what you're describing is probably just the weak vowel merger? I have the weak vowel in these phrases too, with varying realization that could go as far as /ɪ/. But I would never realize the weak vowel as /iː/; that doesn't sound very "weak". As an aside, the IPA really ought to set aside a phoneme for the weak vowel. The /ə/ is the best we have, but causes issues in articles like Sierra Nevada, on which certain editors enforce having the pronunciation key show an /ɪ/ in "Nevada", in spite of /ə/ being much more intuitive to American speakers. --Trovatore (talk) 19:30, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

The para-IPA letter for this is ⟨ᵻ⟩. A lot of our entries still have that letter in the coding, but the template displays it as ⟨ɪ⟩. By changing the template, we could switch all of those over to ⟨ə⟩. — kwami (talk) 03:25, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Another example that comes to mind is the Stan Freberg song "Christmas Dragnet", in which a character named Grudge turns from skepticism to belief: "Look! It's Santy Claus!" Definitely a childlike exclamation. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:08, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Nor should one forget Mad Magazine's Sandy Claws, often a department-store Santa who terrorized the happy, expectant children who approached him. —— Shakescene (talk) 03:31, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Sandy Claws is from Mad? The moniker is best known from The Nightmare Before Christmas nowadays... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:35, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

As a side note, the earliest printed instance I could find of "Santy Claus" on Google Books was in this 1868 magazine. Santy as a general name has apparently also existed for a while too, as seen in this 1853 directory. GalacticShoe (talk) 16:35, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Wiktionary wikt:Santy has it as a diminutive -y. But historically, Santa Claus is based on Dutch Sinterklaas and was spelled various ways in English from early on. See for example Old Santeclaus with Much Delight from 1821, before A Visit from St. Nicholas. So the "Santy" pronunciation may be just as old as the "Santa" spelling and pronunciation. --Amble (talk) 20:43, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, that makes sense. What strikes me about this little jingle is that it explicitly gives the spelling with an a, but pronounces it with /iː/. --Trovatore (talk) 20:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Study of archaea

I would expect the term for this would be archaeology, but this term already exists and means the study of human cultures of long ago. What term has been proposed for the study of archaea?? (If you don't know what this word means, look here.) Georgia guy (talk) 15:01, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Back in the 90s, a term that seemed to be relatively accepted was archaebacteriology, as can be seen in this 1990 paper (see institution 1 under the authors), this 1991 book (see abstract), and this 1997 paper (see page 6, under "Acceptance and Doubt", which also mentions archaeologists of the other variety.) Since the general trend has shifted away from using archaebacteria, I imagine these terms might be outdated. In the modern day, it appears that archaeal biology is widely accepted, as seen by its use by Nature, and also by UIUC. I find this to be the best, least ambiguous solution (since we also have to avoid confusion with fields like archaeobiology.) GalacticShoe (talk) 16:59, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Archaeaology is tempting. Bazza (talk) 10:19, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

I admire the amount of consecutive vowelage going on here. GalacticShoe (talk) 15:02, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Really off topic, but I find it sad that we have the word "agriculture" for the science of farming instead of eieiology. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:14, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Khajidha, Do you really mean eiei- is a prefix meaning farm or did you get it from the song "Old McDonald Had a Farm"?? Georgia guy (talk) 12:28, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Almost certainly the latter. GalacticShoe (talk) 15:29, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

To go deep into the rabbit hole: Even if that was a possibility, I'm not sure it would be accurate. Ancient Sumerian (or the language spoken wherever agriculture was invented) might not have those precise sounds, or grammatical rules against so many consecutive vowels. A 'sumerianized' version I could get behind, though. (Or one derived from their version of Old McDonald.) 71.112.180.130 (talk) 16:11, 8 December 2023 (UTC)