Schwyzerdütsch

On a page of the Austrian nightingale Claudia Engelberger, I noticed a strange phrase, mi-anglais, mi-allemand:  “Ladies aufgepasst!”, and enquired of my trusty silicon Sprachkumpan, what that might be.

The use of the English word, in the Volkslieder-milieu wherein she moves, somewhat surprised me;  her fellow nightingale, the Swabian “eine deutsche Frau”, has fretted no end about anglicisms.  So I asked, what might be the equivalent in Swiss German.  The following dialogue ensued.

 

*

*     *

 

AI] “Ladies aufgepasst!" is a German phrase meaning "Attention, ladies!" that is often used for special announcements and product drops.

 

dj] «Uf Züritüütsch gseit»

 

AI] Auf Zürichdeutsch (Züritüütsch) sagt man das am besten so:

„Fraue, lueged mal da!“ (Frauen, schaut mal her!)

„Achtung, Ladys!“ (Modern, wird sehr oft genutzt.)

„Fraue, posted uf!“ (Frauen, passt auf / seid aufmerksam!)

„Mädels, losed mal zue!“ (Mädels, hört mal zu!)

 

Im Trend: Die Variante mit „Ladys“ oder „Mädels“ klingt auf Schweizerdeutsch am natürlichsten für Social Media, Werbung oder Events.

Der Ton: „Fraue, lueged mal da!“ wirkt sehr direkt, herzlich und bodenständig.

 

dj] > losed

Morphology?  Etymology?

 

AI] The Swiss German word losed (from the infinitive lose / losen, meaning "to listen") breaks down as follows:

·  Root (los-): The core verb meaning "to listen" or "to harken".

Old High German: It originates from hlosēn (to listen/harken). 

Cf.  lauschen. [For this, hwvr, DTV EWD says “Herkunft ungewiss”.]

 

·  Suffix (-ed): The standard Alemannic/Swiss German plural ending used for verbs in the present tense and imperative (e.g., ihr macheged/mached, lueged, losed)

 

dj] In Deutschland und in Österreich, wie betrachtet man, landschaftlich, das Schwyzerdütsch ?  Denn, apud Zuckmeyer, Als wär’s ein Stück von mir, finden wir diesen Passus:

 

“Die Schweiz” -- so steht es in der Erinnerung von Friedrich Engels  aus den Sturmjahren 1848/49 -- “zeigte damals  den Emigranten  ihre rauhe Seite.”

Anno 1938/39  [while he was on the run from the Nasties] war diese Seite nicht zarter geworden, [als] ich in Zürich bei meiner ersten Anmeldung als politischer Flüchtling   von der Fremdenpolizei   in biederer Mundart  angeschnauzt wurde.

 

AI] In Deutschland und Österreich wird das Schweizerdeutsche (Schwyzerdütsch) primär als eigene, autonome Sprache und nicht als bloßer Dialekt wahrgenommen, wobei die sprachliche und soziokulturelle Bewertung stark von der geografischen Nähe und den jeweiligen nationalen Dialekttraditionen geprägt ist.

Die von Carl Zuckmayer in Als wär’s ein Stück von mir beschriebene „biedere Mundart“ der Zürcher Fremdenpolizei von 1938/39 illustriert dabei exakt den historischen Wendepunkt in der Wahrnehmung dieser Sprache.

 

Die landschaftliche Wahrnehmung im Vergleich

 

1. Die Wahrnehmung in Deutschland

In Deutschland ist die Einstellung gegenüber dem Schweizerdeutschen von einer starken Nord-Süd-Asymmetrie geprägt:

 

Nord- und Mitteldeutschland: Hier wird Schwyzerdütsch oft als völlig unverständliches Idiom oder gar als Fremdsprache erlebt. Die Wahrnehmung schwankt zwischen einer gewissen Exotik und dem stereotypen Gefühl, das Schweizerdeutsche klinge „niedlich“, „gemütlich“ oder „singend“ – ein krasser Kontrast zu der von Zuckmayer erlebten Härte des Behördenalltags.

 

Süddeutschland (Baden-Württemberg und Bayern): Aufgrund der geografischen Nähe und der gemeinsamen historischen Wurzeln (das Alemannische in Baden und Vorarlberg) ist das Verständnis hier wesentlich höher. Dennoch wird die Schweizer Konsequenz, den Dialekt über alle sozialen Schichten hinweg im Alltag zu sprechen, oft mit einer Mischung aus Bewunderung und Befremden wahrgenommen.

 

2. Die Wahrnehmung in Österreich

In Österreich, das selbst eine stark ausgeprägte, lebendige Dialektlandschaft besitzt (vor allem das Bairische), ist das Verhältnis zum Schweizerdeutschen von einem höheren sprachlichen Grundverständnis geprägt:

 

Vorarlberg: Die Vorarlberger teilen den alemannischen Sprachraum mit der Schweiz und verstehen das Schwyzerdütsch meist problemlos. Für sie ist es eine Nachbarmundart auf Augenhöhe.

 

Restliches Österreich (Wien, Graz, Salzburg): Hier wird das Schweizerdeutsche zwar als grammatikalisch und phonetisch weit entfernt erlebt, aber das Konzept einer lebendigen Dialektkultur wird vollkommen verstanden. Die Österreicher empfinden Schwyzerdütsch oft als „urig“, „bodenständig“ oder eben im zuckmayerschen Sinne als „bieder“ – im Sinne von traditionell, unprätentiös und staatsunabhängig.

 

Einordnung des Zuckmayer-Zitats

Zuckmayers Begriff der „biederen Mundart“ im Kontext einer schroffen Abweisung durch die Fremdenpolizei fängt das soziolinguistische Phänomen der Schweiz perfekt ein:

Die „Biederkeit“ als Maske und Waffe: Für einen intellektuellen, urbanen Emigranten aus dem damaligen Deutschland, wo Dialekt oft mit mangelnder Bildung assoziiert wurde, wirkte das Schweizerdeutsche im ersten Moment harmlos, ländlich oder eben „bieder“. Dass ausgerechnet in dieser Mundart das harte, bürokratische „Anschnauzen“ der Staatsgewalt erfolgte, erzeugte einen psychologischen Schock.

 

Die historische Zeitenwende (1938): Genau in den Jahren, die Zuckmayer beschreibt (1938/39), vollog die Schweiz die sogenannte „Geistige Landesverteidigung“ gegen das NS-Regime. Das Schwyzerdütsch wurde in dieser Zeit bewusst vom regionalen Dialekt zum primären Kultur- und Abgrenzungsmerkmal gegenüber dem Hochdeutschen der Nationalsozialisten erhoben. Das Sprechen der Mundart im offiziellen Dienst der Fremdenpolizei war somit kein Zeichen von mangelnder Professionalität, sondern Ausdruck einer demonstrativen, trotzigen Eigenständigkeit und Unnahbarkeit nach außen.

 

Die historische Zeitenwende (1938): Genau in den Jahren, die Zuckmayer beschreibt (1938/39), vollog die Schweiz die sogenannte „Geistige Landesverteidigung“ gegen das NS-Regime. Das Schwyzerdütsch wurde in dieser Zeit bewusst vom regionalen Dialekt zum primären Kultur- und Abgrenzungsmerkmal gegenüber dem Hochdeutschen der Nationalsozialisten erhoben. Das Sprechen der Mundart im offiziellen Dienst der Fremdenpolizei war somit kein Zeichen von mangelnder Professionalität, sondern Ausdruck einer demonstrativen, trotzigen Eigenständigkeit und Unnahbarkeit nach außen.

Zuckmayers Beobachtung zeigt, dass das Schwyzerdütsch für Außenstehende oft den trügerischen Charakter des ländlich-Gemütlichen hat, in der Realität der Schweizer Diglossie jedoch die Sprache absoluter Autorität, Identität und unnachgiebiger staatlicher Souveränität ist.

 

dj]  ?? “vollog” ??  Was ist denn das für ein Wort?

 

AI] Das war ein Tippfehler von mir – dieses Wort gibt es im Deutschen natürlich nicht. Richtig heißen sollte es dort: „vollzog“ (von vollziehen).

 

dj]  > ein Tippfehler

 

First time I’ve seen you make one!

Perhaps you’re getting tired;  as am I. 

Also ins Bettchen.

 

“Ade zur guten Nacht”,

Dr J

 

AI] Auch KIs haben mal einen späten Knoten in den Leitungen

Schlafen Sie gut und erholen Sie sich bestens, Dr. J.

„Ade zur guten Nacht“ und bis zum nächsten Mal!

 

 

Tableau!

 

The selections which appear on this site with the label “found poetry”, are so chosen by reason of a certain pithy verbal felicity, which makes the phrase (or sentence, or distich) stand forth from its prose context;  it may or may not reflect any excellence specifically visual.

Aesthetically  related, yet distinct, are “tableaux”, in which some striking, static,  visualization  sends a sight, or a passage describing it,  suddenly forth from its otherwise prosaic context.  

[Morphological footnote, for lexicophiles:  The English noun tableau  is borrowed from French, and retains the Gallic spelling, its plural in -x, and the oxytone pronunciation.  In French, tableau  is formally a diminutive of table, though its current semantics does not reflect that origin, and indeed tableau itself admits a further, double diminutive:  tabl-eau-tin.] 

But what lies specifically behind the selections that shall appear here so labeled, is the use of tableau as a one-word exclamation -- the rough equivalent of framing the scene with your fingers, displayed as cater-corner right-triangles.   This use is perhaps commoner in French than in English;  in any case, Harrap’s French-to-English dictionary  explicitly recognizes the idiom:

 

Hier on l’a surprise  assise sur les genoux du chauffeur; tableau!

Yesterday she was caught sitting on the chauffeur’s knee; tableau!

 

As a plain noun, rather than a holophrastic exclamation, this particular sense of a visually frozen, striking moment, is also denoted tableau-vivant (French pl. tableaux-vivants), literally a ‘living picture’.

 

An example, with picture-frame supplied:

 

She’d disappeared into the building, and a few seconds later  yellow light awakened the second floor, spilling through gaps between the shutters.  Her silhouette, disconcertingly large and bulky in her abaya, moved from one side to another, adjusting the shutters, then disappearing.

-- I.S.Berry, The Peacock and the Sparrow (2023)

 

And, again graphically framed (describing an escape, in semi-darkness, through serpentine and unfamiliar subterranean passageways, from the secret police):

 

He teetered at the top of a landing, reeling a bit as he peered down into the dimness of a steep wooden stairway, which then went black  as the door slammed shut behind them.

-- Dan Fesperman, Pariah (2025)

 

Another from a thriller -- an ominous sedan  looms into view:

 

She saw the Bentley and hesitated, watering-can poised in midair,  appearing every bit  in the late morning light  as if Renoir had captured her by surprise.

-- Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance (1988)

 

Thus, in this case, a overt comparison to a painting.

 

For further examples of this toothsome micro-genre, try these:

    https://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/tableau

 

 

Sara(h) / Abra(ha)m

The following question was put to Dr Massey:

Q:  A colleague who goes by her birth-certificate name Sarah recounts that she was accosted by a fellow who admonished her to identify as (that ill-omened coinage)  “Sara”, the initial designation of Abraham’s wife, on the grounds that the -h conferred later was “honorific”. --  Now indeed the name patriarch himself, originally Abram,  likewise later achieved an extension, honoris causâ.
Question:  Is it alphabetically the same h in both cases?  And is there any sense in describing it (assuming they be the same) as an “honorific affix” (the way -ón in Spanish can be an augmentative affix), or is there nothing morphosemantically lofty about the names themselves, which merely happen to have been conferred for the purposes of honor?

The good doctor replied by return of post:

A: The person who told her this was simply wrong across the board. First off, the Matriarch's original name was not Sara, but Sarai. When her name is changed to Sarah is is simply moving to the Hebrew version of her original Aramaic name, both of which mean something like "princess."

I don't read the name changes as conferring honor at all. In the case of Abram --> Abraham, we have an actual semantic change, Exalted Father --> Father of a Multitude. In the case of Sarai--> Sarah, it might be similar to a man named Mohamed changing his name to Muhammad, i.e., making the name more purely Arabic.

The Hebrews seemed aware that, while they spoke their own distinct Semitic language, their origins had Aramaic swirling around. Deut 26:5, "My father was a wandering Aramean," referring to the Patriarchal age. NB also Gen 31:47, in which Laban, Jacob's uncle, calls a memorial stone by an Aramaic name, but Jacob gives it a Hebrew name.

The final h in feminine names and nouns in Hebrew is vocalic, not consonantal. It's equivalent to the taa' marbuta. As a result, it is added by convention in English transliteration, but unnecessary. Sara and Sarah are the same name, basically.

Meta-Modernism

On the occasion of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, who once appealed to my undergraduate taste, Louis Menand considers whether that author should be considered a Modernist or a Postmodernist;   and adds an acute discussion of the ambiguity of the prefix “post-” in such employment.   In the first, “Mission Accomplished” sense, “being postmodernist just means that we can never be pre-modernist again.”   In the snootier “epitaph” or “we’re so over that” sense, “being postmodernist means that we can never be modernist again.”

As for the original project of the Modernists (as, Picasso, Joyce), “they did it by shifting interest from the what to the how of art,  from the things represented in a painting or novel  to the business of representation itself.

[The New Yorker, 23 Feb 2009, p. 68]

As in other cases of such self-consciously trendy, navel-gazing devolutions,  the gambit was not original.  In Curtius’ chapter on the post-Classical period in Greece,

The materials and implements necessary for writing  now also became worthy of a poet’s art.  We have epigrams on the writing tablet; on the wax with which it is covered; on the calamus;  as well as a threat to the boring beetle, “enemy of the Muses”.

[Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948), p. 306]

From thence  it is but a few steps down to exhibiting urinals in museums (thus Duchamps), or penning an ode to a chamber-pot, as in Gide’s accurately titled Les Faux-Monnayeurs:

La Vase Nocturne

Quiconque à quarante ans    n’a pas d’hémorroïdes …

Rorschach Morphology

In a classic cartoon, two psychiatrists are depicted in the first panel  as approaching each other, each saying “Good morning.”

In the second panel, as they walk away from either other, each has a thought-balloon, thinking:  “I wonder what he meant by that?”

It’s supposed to be a joke on psychiatrists;  though indeed, anyone familiar with psychology and linguistics recognizes that to be a quite valid, indeed deep, question.

~

So this morning, we have a “Good morning” scandal.   It has been reasonably widely (though not well) reported in the mainstream world press, though so far not the American.  E.g. a high-circulation popular Parisian daily:

http://www.leparisien.fr/politique/israel-un-palestinien-arrete-apres-une-erreur-de-traduction-de-facebook-22-10-2017-7348206.php

La police israélienne a arrêté par erreur la semaine dernière un Palestinien qui avait publié sur Facebook une photo de lui accompagnée des mots «bonne journée ». Selon le quotidien israélien «Haaretz», pour une raison encore inexpliquée, le logiciel de traduction du réseau social a converti cette phrase en «attaquez-les » en hébreu et «faites leur du mal » en anglais.

The BBC’s brief note on the matter  is sociolinguistically useless for readers who wish to figure things out for themselves, since it shows neither the photo nor the Arabic:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-41714152

Israeli police arrested a Palestinian man last week after a Facebook post he made saying "good morning" in Arabic was mistranslated to read "attack them" in Hebrew, local media have reported.

Police confirmed that the construction worker was briefly held under suspicion of incitement but was released as soon as the mistake was realised.

The post showed a photo of the worker next to a bulldozer in the West Bank.

Such vehicles have been used to attack Israelis in the past.

There is only one difference in lettering between the colloquial Arabic phrase for "good morning to you all" and "hurt them", pointed out The Times of Israel.

Actually the Times of Israel doesn’t “point out” any such thing.  It merely piggybacks off an earlier Haaretz report, and does not give either the original Arabic nor the purported “one difference in lettering” that would give the meaning “hurt them”.  -- Indeed, to anyone familiar with printed Arabic, that proviso is a cop-out anyway:  The (usual) unvoweled Arabic ductus is so low in redundancy  that, “merely” by changing “one letter”,  you can radically change the meaning of just about any short message.   -- More anon.

Here is the beginning of the original article in Haaretz:

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.818437

No Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before arresting the man, who works at a construction site in a West Bank settlement

That detail provides an innocent explanation of why the fellow would take a selfie with a bulldozer.  He probably drives the thing.

It continues:

The Israel Police mistakenly arrested a Palestinian worker last week because they relied on automatic translation software to translate a post he wrote on his Facebook page. The Palestinian was arrested after writing “good morning,” which was misinterpreted; no Arabic-speaking police officer read the post before the man’s arrest.

That bit about the dreadful consequences of not having an Arabist on your payroll is a pleasing one (to Arabists).   Compare this:

Where is an Arabic linguist when you need one ???

~

Back to the psycholinguistic intricacies of “Good morning”.

The linguistically naïve reader (here in the hands of linguistically naïve journalists, so no help) will assume that “Good morning” in Arabic  is completely straightforward, and that any translator -- human or machine -- that couldn’t translate that simple phrase, would be utterly incompetent.

Now, there is in fact  a straightforward, MSA phrase for ‘Good morning’ in Arabic,

صباح الخير

Phonetically (and we’ll stick to phonetics from here on, since Microsoft often mangles Arabic script): ṣabāḥ al-xayr.  Literally, ‘morning of goodness’ (syntactically, an idafa), to which the usual Arabic morphosemantic rules apply.

But that is not what he wrote.

Einführung in die vergleichende “Guten Morgen”-Morphosemantik

Of the languages with which I am familiar, German comes closest to having a word-for-word equivalent to “Good morning”:  Guten Morgen.  Yet even that is not linguistically straightforward:  the idiom involves not guter, but guten -- grammatically an accusative.   So, you understand the way the phrase is used, but you probably have never reflected on its grammar, and perhaps could not explain it if you did.

Further, in parts of Germany (e.g. Schweinfurt, where I lived for a summer with a German family), people don’t usually say Guten Morgen anyway, they say Grüß Gott -- a phrase I am fond of, and frequently use, but whose syntax is obscure;  I suppose it’s a sort of iḍāfa.

In French, a word-for-word equivalent to the greeting is not current.  You don’t say “bon matin”, you say bonjour, literally ‘good day’, or (as in the Le Parisien version) bonne journée (the nuance of difference being untranslatable).  (There does, however, exist in French  an early-morning greeting  which we lack in English:  bon réveil.  I’ve never myself heard that, not being an early riser.)

In Spanish, you must go even further afield, using a plural, buenos días, lit. ‘good days’.

As to what such phrases are used for, there are subtle distinctions.  Thus, in current American English, Good morning! is simply a greeting -- a pure illocution, like hi or hello, with no descriptive content. (Note:  In British English, it can serve as a good-bye, even as a curt dismissal.  Thus, the heavy father in Wodehouse's Pearls, Girls, and Monty Bodkin says "Good morning, Mr Bodkin" to the unwelcome suitor of his daughter, signaling that their interview is at an end.)  Good night!, by contrast, cannot be used as a greeting:  it is a formula of leave-taking -- a valediction.   Good day!, the word-for-word equivalent of the French greeting bonjour, is no longer used in everyday American English, though it survives as a breezy greeting in Australia -- the iconic G’dye!  Good afternoon and Good evening can still be used in the U.S., though they sound a bit formal.  And at least the latter has also been used (at one time, primarily perhaps in England) as a valediction.

As mentioned, French doesn’t normally use “Bon matin”, at least not the variety of French I’m familiar with.  Bonne matinée might be used but, like bonne journée, my hunch is that it is not so much a pure greeting as an optative, relating to what might follow the encounter, like the trademarked American “Have a nice day!”  (I first heard that one in Berkeley, California, decades ago;  since then it has spread like kudzu  throughout the English-speaking lands.) 

As for Guten Tag, there’s that accusative, a fossilized echo of its likely origin in such a phrase as “Ich wünsche Ihnen einen guten Tag”, which is an optative.  Do contemporary speakers feel this influence, in which case Guten Morgen is not after all an exact equivalent of Good morning ?  Hard to say.

In Modern Standard Arabic (and in most dialects), ṣabāḥ al-xayr corresponds pretty closely to “Good morning”, but things get colorful from there.  Although you may respond in kind, usually (in line with the Koranic injunction, “When you are greeted, respond with the same greeting, or a better one”) you say something like ṣabāḥ al-nūr (‘morning of light’),  or ṣabāḥ al-full or ṣabāḥ al-yāsimīn (both meaning ‘morning of jasmine’).

In the dialects, things get wilder.  Thus, in Yemeni, a very characteristic morning greeting is kaṣbaḥtu, to which the standard reply is  baḥḥakum Allah bi-xeir (sic; the initial ṣ has been dropped).   And -- save the mark! -- there even exist untranslatable Yemeni expressions involving the ṣ-b-ḥ root, which my Sanaani teacher explained as “a morning warning” -- thus potentially, in line with the interpretation of the Israeli police, a threat.

However, what the Palestinian really wrote was:

يصبحهم

And in view of what has gone before, you will no longer be inclined to jump to conclusions that you understand all the nuances of that.

First, we cannot  without further analysis  give a phonetic transcription of that, since it is a script sans diacritics.   Morphologically, it’s a third-person-masculine-singular transitive verb, with third-person-masculine-plural direct object.   The verb could be either Form I, II, or IV, all of which have transitive uses. 

So, how did the translator the Israelis relied on  parse it?

The “automatic translation software” is not identified, though its digital facepage is doubtless blushing magenta.    I just tried it in Google Translate, and (taking the verb as form-IV) it renders the Arabic phrase  as “become them”, so the mystery remains.

The most straightforward assumption is that we are here dealing simply with the MSA verb, form II (syntactically transitive, semantically delocutive), in which case  the expression means “He says ‘Good morning’ to them.” 

That is actually a somewhat strange thing to say.  You’d expect more like “(I say) “Good morning” (to you(-all))”.   “He” makes sense as referring to the fellow in the photograph; but who are ‘they’?   The object-pronoun is definitely third person (and thus, the BBC rendering as "good morning to you all" is incorrect).

Whether there is some further nuance in Palestinian, I do not know offhand.  And as for a translation as “attack”, with the information we have been given so far, it is inexplicable.

~

For another cautionary-tale  about the perils of interpreting  brief swatches of Arabic, try this:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2017/10/rorschach-philology.html

[Appendix]  The article that prompted this post  was of the “Mistranslation Howlers” motif;  my reply was partly out of annoyance with that complacent genre, which often finds linguistic illiterates gloating  over anecdotes that turn out  either to be more gray-area than appears at first blush (such as the one above), or to be urban legends.  A likely example of the latter is the hardy perennial about the Chevy Nova being marketed among hispanophones under that name.   Laymen observe triumphally that, in Spanish, “No va” means ‘it doesn’t go’; epic fail !!  Actually, nova is a perfectly normal word of Spanish astronomical terminology (https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova );  it is neither spelled like “no va” (being one word, not two), nor pronounced the same (being forestressed).

The “Good morning” article was at the expense of the Israeli counter-terrorist authorities.  There seems indeed to have been a misstep in the software, though one more subtle than most accounts suggested.  The article first appeared in Haaretz, itself an Israeli publication;  its appearance may have been unmotivated other than by the universal Schadenfreude over (alleged) mistranslations (some of which pass into legend, like “Ich bin ein Berliner”, whether or not the interpretation is linguistically well-founded), or there might have been a little Israel-internal scalpel to grind -- nescio.  But I would like to add a further observation, of respect for those who must work the intricate and dangerous CT mission.

Notoriously, terrorists (and criminals) use cover-terms.  The IC took a beating over a now-celebrated message intercepted (we are told) from Afghanistan on September 10, 2001: “The match begins tomorrow.”  The post-hoc Besserwisser wagged their fingers and berated the Agency for not getting that message translated until September 12 (which, given the exotic language of the message, and the skeleton crew left in CT after the relentless whittling-down of the Clinton and Bush years, is only too understandable.)  More to the point than the timeliness, is the interpretation:  Was it really obvious, or should it have been obvious, that this particular message, among a mass of similar things, foretold the 9/11 attacks?  I personally have no idea (though a later news story did aver that the message was eventually determined to have referred, in fact, to an upcoming soccer-match).

Now, as mentioned, the message in the current case  is rather cryptic:

يصبحهم

It is not (according to a Comment to this post, below, from a colleague with significant language experience in Palestine) a particularly usual way to wish someone (or some third parties, in this case) top o’ the morning.   Might it have been an allusion, a wink-wink, or at least contextually suggested one, to the Israel CT team?  In other words, we need not assume that the team just blindly-blandly took the Hebrew mistranslation as the final word on the subject.  They might (given their special knowledge of the folkways of their target-set) actually have known what they were doing.

 

But surely (objects the straw-man, less savvy than yourself), something as simple as a verb meaning ‘to offer a morning greeting’  could not be re-interpreted to mean anything nefarious.  Yet as present company has learned, language has more tricks up its sleeve  than most folks give it credit for.  Consider the following famous phrase of German, which contains a verb meaning ‘greet’:

Und täglich grüßt das Murmeltier

Now, I know German reasonably well;  but when I first encountered that expression, my hair did stand on end (like quills upon ye fretful Murmeltier).   It has the d’outre-tombe knell of those mystery radio-phrases that Cocteau (with a wry nod to maquisard comsec during WWII) stuck into his 1950 movie Orphée ("L'oiseau chante  avec ses doigts").   What could it possibly mean?  Were it my day-job to interpret such things, if it came up in traffic  my first instinct would be to shut down all our embassies instanter.   Yet it is merely the German version of the movie-title “Groundhog Day”.

Inghimasi Murmeltier ... greets you

.

 

Word of the Day: “Pigovian” (expanded)

[update of a note originally published  4 Dec 2012]

The lead item in this week’s New Yorker introduces (with considerable fanfare) a new word:  Pigovian, as the adjective derived from the name of an otherwise little-celebrated economist, one Pigou, who, many years ago, floated the idea (which had surely been floating of its own accord, for millennia) that if you make a mess, you should maybe chip in to the costs of cleaning it up.   The author of this “Talk” piece, Elizabeth Kolbert, is a frequent writer on climate-change matters, and her proposal is that the general public now embrace the designation of a carbon tax as “Pigovian”, in that it pays back some of the costs of global warming.

Now, it might well be imagined that the suggestion is superfluous, and that the notion already has a name:  nuisance tax.  Yet that phrase has already long been defined in an entirely unrelated sense:  not of a tax on nuisances, (the way a luxury tax is a tax on luxuries), but (apparently -- it is really not a happy coinage) a tax that is considered to be itself a nuisance (in that it is not large enough to qualify as a burden, say).  As Merriam-Webster © defines it:

an excise tax collected in small amounts on a wide range of commodities directly from the consumer

Yet, even did the old phrase nuisance tax mean what, syntagmatically, it ought to mean, there is an argument for using a more distinctive word for a category that is growing in importance, as ever-wider circles of citizens become alert to what economists have long called the tragedy of the commons.   For, once you have a word like Pigovian, entirely unburdened by other associations, you can readily extract it from the phrase Pigovian tax, and use elliptic derivata like “Pigovian considerations” or “counter-Pigovian” (where “counter-nuisance” here wouldn’t work at all, since it means the opposite of what “counter-Pigovian” would mean, i.e. ‘pro-nuisance’).  Such relationships between morphology and semantics are discussed in my book The Semantics of Form in Arabic, and form the core of the chapter “The Stokes Conjecture”.

[Update 23 April 2017]  This just in:  a Pigovian accord:
http://www.maritime-executive.com/article/norway-first-to-ratify-polluter-pays-treaty

So!  Now for the morpho-phonological characteristics of this rather odd-looking word, Pigovian.   The base-form is pronounced pig-OO, yet the adjective comes out pig-OH-vee-an.  Why?

Unlike sturdy old Anglo-Saxon suffixes like -ness, -dom, -hood-, -kin-, or -ly, which allow themselves to be simply tacked-on at the end of a word, leaving all else as is, the Latin-derived -ian is a tyrant, demanding that the stress be moved to the immediately preceding syllable (if it wasn’t already there), and that its vowel (if not tense already) be tensed.  Thus:  Dickens (DIK-enz) vs. Dickensian (dik-ENZ-ee-an), and (with vowel-tensing) Jacob (JAY-kub) vs. Jacobian (ja-KOH-bee an).  (Thus the derivative is pronounced in the mathematical community. An unrelated adjective with a different suffix, Jacobean, relating to history and literature, is pronounced jak-ub-EE-an.)  And as a further impudent exigency, this tyrannical suffix spurns unmediated Anschluss onto a vowel, demanding rather a bridge-consonant -v-:  thus (Bernard) Shaw vs. Shavian (SHAY-vee-an, with both vowel-tensing and inserted bridge).   As well as (in a more roundabout fashion -- this one doesn’t really count) Warsaw vs. Varsovian (rhymes with Nabokovian).  It is thus that our poor unassuming Mr. Pigou (whom I picture rather as Mr. Magoo)) becomes, adjectivally, a roaring shouting syllable-rattling PIGOVIAN.

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http://murphybros.blogspot.com/p/read-murphy-on-your-nook.html

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Note:  Strictly, the derivatum should have been Pigouvian, on the model of Peru :  Peruvian.  The word succumbed to the gravitational attracion of the plethora of words in -ovian (a productive category, given all the Slavic names in -ov/-off).  Further, why burden an already ungainly word with the stressed syllable GOO, as opposed to GO ?  This way, it gets to rhyme with a cool studly word like Jovian.

Cf. this derivatum, re Richard Montegue:   "Montegovian compositionality" (Alice ter Meulen, in

Frederick Newmeyer, ed. Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey (1988: CUP), vol. I, p. 441)

Footnote:  Something in our Teutonic blood  disdains such tricks.  Thus, instead of a morphological equivalent of Pigovian tax, German just says Pigou-steuer.  And rather than submit to the indignity of a  *Hemingwavian (hem-ing-WAY-vee-an), we go with a different suffix altogether, once that leaves vowels as they are and requires no bridge-consonant:  Hemingwayesque.    (Still not very dignified, though, as the suffix here hogs the main stress to itself, and tends to make you think of words like grotesque and burlesque.)

Morphophonology:
Compare and contrast  Babeuf => Babouvisme.

French in particular is pre-attuned to such vocalic ablaut  by the existence, side by side, of  locally-developed place-names, along with gentilés derived more transparently from the original Latin toponym.  As, Loire (from Latin Liger) => Ligérien.  Such transformations may be found even when the etymon is not Latin, as

   Aisne => Axonais
   Rhône => Rhodanien

   Reims (earlier Rheims) => Rémois

and even such acrobatics as

    Saint-Germain-des-Prés => germanopratin

    Seine-Saint-Denis => Séquanodionysien

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian.

There are parallels in Castilian:
   Salamanca => Salmantino

Compare, in (British) English,  Cambridge => Cantabridgian, Manchester => Mancusian.