Conference thebay::joyoflex

I always thought it was the pronunciation "loo-tenant" for "lieutenant" that was
peculiar.

:-)

Jon in the UK

    Go look it up!
    
    That said, I'd guess lieutenant was a borrowing from Norman French,
    at a time when the "u" had more of a "v" character than it does now,
    giving a hypothesised pronunciation of /lyuvtenant/, followed by
    assimilation of voicelessness from the /t/, etc., etc.
    
    			-John Bishop

    .2 sounded like a sound guess to me; and `go look it up' is OK advice
    for one scholar who doesn't know a fairly trivial answer to give to 
    another. But not everyone here's a scholar of the history of language,
    so not everyone here would know _where_ to look it up. (People who
    would can't get into a decent library, but that's another matter.)
    
    I had to make do with looking it up in the SOED (where it said that 
    forms _spelt_ with an -f- appeared in English (whatever that was in 
    those days) in the 14th century), and in my old copy of Elcock's
    Romance Languages (where it said that at one stage in the
    incredibly complex evolution of French phonology the vowel sound
    in `lieu' was a triphthong, with the /e/ clearly enunciated [there's
    a more recent edition of Elcock, but my reference is p. 359]).
    
    .2's /u/ -> /v/ -> /f/ suggestion strikes me as reasonable, 
    but the precise evolution of the -f- spelling from LOCUS [where 
    it _did_ come from] is something that I doubt anyone could 
    explain plausibly or adequately in the DMCS.
    
    b

My reasons for asking here were two-fold.

First of all, I looked in the biggest dictionary I had at my disposal, which was
the Random House Dictionary of the English Language Second Edition Unabridged.

Here is the derivation that it gave:

[1325-75; ME < MF, n. use of adj. phrase "lieu tenant" place holding. See LOCUM
TENENS, LIEU, TENANT]

It gave no derivation for the "leftenant" pronunciation, though it did mention
it as a British use except in the navy.  John's /u/ -> /v/ -> /f/ makes sense.
Does anyone know anything about the naval exception to the "leftenant" pronun-
ciation?

The other reason is, of course, my high regard for the level erudition of noters
in this august conference. :-)  (Actually, I wasn't in any particular hurry to 
get the answer, and I thought it might be of interest to my fellow lexers.)

Wook

BTW, the derivation of lieu is as follows:

[1250-1300; < MF < L "locus" place; r. ME "liue" < OF "liu" < L; see LOCUS]

and for locus:

[1525-35; < L; OL "stlocus" a place]

    Maybe we should look into the derivation of "lee" meaning
    the downwind side of something.

Actually, my form of "lee" derives from Chinese and means "plum tree".  I myself
am Korean and the pronunciation of the relevant Chinese character in Korean is
"yi".  The "lee" pronunciation is an anglicized version of the Chinese character
and is sometimes pronounced "rhee".  In Korean, initial /r/ and /l/ sounds are
very rare, though both occur medially and finally.  How's that for peculiar? :-)

I didn't mean to ruffle any feathers by my wisecrack in reply .4.  No offense 
was intended on my part.  (I hope none was intended on the part of reply .5, 
but I didn't notice a smiley.)

I still haven't found anything definitive regarding "leftenant", but I'll pass
on the derivation that John proposed to the party who brought up the question in
the first place.

Wook (Let me tell you what that means sometime.)

    Re: .4, .5, and .6
    
    No offense taken and none given (I hope).
    
    I thought no offense was possible and therefore no smiley face was
    necessary. Unless informed otherwise, I think I'll continue to believe
    that. But dealing with cross-cultural issues, I suppose one can never
    be certain.
    
    So when do we get to find out the meaning of "Wook"?  I presume it
    doesn't come from the Star Wars character.  :-)

Wook means "Intricate Patterns" or "Elegant Designs".  It's pronounced more like
/ook/ so the semivowel tends to be less consonantal in character.  The /oo/ is
more like the sound in "food" rather than "cook", but since it caused a great
deal of confusion in my youth, I have chosen to anglicize it, as can be seen in
my personal name.

Star Wars gave me a great deal of notoriety in the social circles in which I
traveled at the time (school, church, etc.).  A couple of young boys at church
took to calling me "Chewbacca", or "Chewie" for short, for a period of about 6
months after the release of the film.  It still comes up from time to time.  It
was as bad as the fact that the anglicized pronunciation of my name rhymes with
an alarming number of words, real and imagined, in the English language.

The most ambitious juxtaposition of rhyming words goes something like this:

"Wook took a look at a cookbook in the nook."

BTW, is there a more concise way of saying "one of the words that rhymes with
a given word"?

    Re: .8
    
    How about, "... a rhyme of <given word> ..."?

    Or in British English, "a rhyme FOR <given word>".
    
    Jon
    

    G'day,
    
    Like sounding words are homophones, n'est-ce pas?
    
    so Wook and book are homophonic and are homophonemes?
    
    dj
    

I thought homophones sounded the *same* rather just *similar*.

Fair and fare are homophones.  Wook and book are rhymes of/for each other.

"Rhyme" just didn't sound right to me, but the definition of "rhyme" as a word
that rhymes with a given word is given as a tertiary meaning in my American 
Heritage Dictionary (office edition).

Wook

    Remember, any verb can be nouned.

	From the COD of Etymology:

	"Lieutenant: [...] forms in 'f', to which the traditional English
	pronunciation corresponds, appear in XIV; influence of LEAVE
	is possible [...]

	roger

    Re: .14
    
    Would somebody please translate .14 into English.  I don't understand
    the shorthand at all.

    COD = Concise Oxford Dictionary
    
    [...] = editorial ([]) omission {...) - i.e. stuff that Roger cut out
    	    as not being to the point
    
    "forms in `f'" = "forms [of the word] that have an `f' in them"
    
    XIV = 14th century
    
    `influence of LEAVE is possible'
    	[I'm not sure whether this is shorthand, but it's philologist's
    	cant]
    	= "maybe the development of the pronunciation of LIEUTENANT with
    	   an `f' was influenced by the existence of the word LEAVE, in ways 
           the dictionary writer either doesn't  have room to
           discuss or isn't sure about [I'd guess they were talking
           about LEAVE in its military sense, alias `furlow' in some 
           parts of the world, but the point of saying `influence ... is
           possible' is that someone else has to do the guessing, so if 
           anyone can be proved wrong - it's someone else.  Me cynical?]
    
    b
    
    ps
    Maybe I should block a potential rathole now by saying that I use
    `cant' here in the meaning `argot/jargon of a particular trade' rather
    than `nonsense'.

    Thank you.

	Perhaps LIEUTENANT was written LIEVTENANT at some stage. 
	The letters U and V were not differentiated in the Latin world; 
	confusion between them is very common in the literary language 
	of the French Middle-Ages.

	As mentioned in .2, the group VT tends to "harden" and eventually 
	becomes FT.
	
	The hypothetical LIEVTENANT evolved into forms like LEFTENANT
	-- if you say LIEVTENANT several times, you'll see how natural 
	an evolution it is.  The corresponding pronunciation survived,
	at least in British English, until today.
	
	The past tense of TO LEAVE followed the same pattern. From an
	archaic regular form LEAVED, it evolved into the current LEFT.
	The evolution of this frequently-used verb possibly served
	as a model for LIEVTENANT. 

	This influence of LEAVE may explain why the 'f' forms of 
	LIEUTENANT appeared in English, but not in French or German.

	roger

I'm not sure this is the best place for this, but my response time forbids
a proper search for the "perfect" topic.

I was watching an A&E channel rerun of the old BBC Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries
(the ones with Ian Carmichael) last night.  One of the suspects is named
Strachan, which all the other characters pronounce as "Stracken".

I always thought Strachan was pronounced "Strawn".  Could anyone provide a 
bit of illumination (especially one of our British colleagues)?

-dave

    Re .19
        
> I'm not sure this is the best place for this, but my response time forbids
> a proper search for the "perfect" topic.

    You mean that similar topics are strewn all over the place?

    I've known Strawns and Strackens. I believe that Strawn used to be
    the socially-more-acceptable form, but nowadays
    
    	1	There's all sorts of inverted snobbery, so people whose
    		fathers called themselves Strawn make a point of calling
    		themselves Stracken
    
    	2	A lot of people don't want to apply the U/non-U rules
    
    	3	A lot of people know of those rules, but don't know how
    		to apply them
    
    	4	A lot of people don't know of them
    
    	5	A lot of people do, and don't care
    
    I've a feeling Scottishness may come into it somewhere, but I'm not
    sure. Anyway, the distinction is falling into disuse as far as I'm
    aware.
    
    b

Interesting....  The Strachan I knew in high school pronounced his
name Strah-han (emphasis on the second syllable).

-- Cathy

Although I'm British, I fall into category 4 ("don't know").  The non-phonetic 
pronunciation of Strachan is not one I've come across so it doesn't seem as 
well-known as, say, Marjoriebanks (pron. Marchbanks) or Cholmondley (pron. 
Chumley). I've probably spelt those wrong but you get the idea.  

I think most British people would also be equally ignorant and pronounce it as 
`Stracken'.

Jon

    re: .22
    
    I knew a Strah-HAN, too.  He was of Irish ancestry, if that means
    anything.
    
    --bonnie

    I would think that Strachen is a Scottish name...well anyones I've
    ever come across were Scots. The person you know could well be of
    Irish origin as a lot of the Presbyterians(sp) who emigrated to
    the USA originally spent dome time in the northern part of Ireland.
    
    I've always heard it pronounced 'Straaken' as in the city in Germany
    called Aachen!
    
    You could cross post your query is the Scotland notes conference...
    where I'm sure you'll get all the info on pronunciation,origin
    etc...I'll post the NODE details etc in here later.
    
     Rgds.,        
    
    - Dave Keating.