[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”.
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.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
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.
