Conference thebay::joyoflex

Do diacritics like the n-tilde in Spanish and the various vowels- 
with-circumflex in French count? As I recall, the former is an 
abbreviation of double-n and the circumflex used to be an 's'.

Wook

    Re .0: In French, many words ending in -al or -ail have plural in -aux.
    This comes from the way medieval scribes abbreviated -als or -ails,
    which looked a bit like an x. Then the habit was formed, and
    pronunciation of the plurals followed new spelling. Examples are
    "journal, journaux", or "travail, travaux".
    			Denis.

    So the spoken language followed a move made by the written language?!

    Re .3:
>    So the spoken language followed a move made by the written language?!
    
    	Yes, as far as I know. But, as this knowledge comes from a teacher
    back when I was in high school, I could certainly not swear that it is
    true. It sounds reasonable, albeit a bit uncommon, though.
    			Denis.

    What about Rx?
    
    					andrew

    The �, ll of Spanish, the �, � of Norwegian, etc. are not "our" letters
    with "their" diacritical marks.  They are separate letters of the
    alphabets of these languages.  This is a fundamental case of written
    language following the spoken language, using the standard Latin
    character set with additional furbelows to create new characters needed
    to express the sounds and words of the existing language.
    

    Re .5:
    
    Is Rx used as an abbreviation for another character-string?  I'm not
    familiar with such a usage but I could well believe it.  It's a form of
    the Chrismon, a monogram for "Christ," from the first two letters of
    "Christos" in Greek, XP, chi rho.  Like the cross, it's often used as a
    piece of religious ornamentation, especially, I think, on communion
    wafers at one time.  From the fact that ailing folk were often given
    both communion (in case they didn't survive) and medicine (in hopes
    that they would) -- or were even given communion AS medicine, Rx became
    a symbol for pharmacology.
    
    So I could well believe that Rx is used for "Christ," "communion,"
    "medicine," or "prescription," but I haven't happened to run across any
    of those usages.
    
    Re .6:
    
    It's been a long time since I ran across "furbelow" in a conversation."
    
    Earl Wajenberg

    Rx isn't the Chrismon.  It is a morphed abbreviation of the Latin
    "Recipe" which is the second-person singular imperative verb "take." 
    All prescriptions and medical instructions for use by medical personnel
    are written using Latin.  E.g., the abbreviations O.D. and O.S. for
    eyeglasses refer to "Oculus Dexter (right eye)" and "Oculus Sinister
    (left eye)."  The letters NPO on a hospital patient's chart are an
    abbreviation for "Nihil Per Orem (nothing by mouth)," and the word
    "Stat" that you hear in all the TV medical dramas is for "Statim
    (immediately)."  The letters p.d., accompanied by a number, are "per
    diem (each day)."  And so on.

 I could hazard a few hypotheses about the etymology of "furbelow" but not in a
   pubic notesfile.



  

    It's from the French ferbel�.  Another English variant is falbala.
    
    Sorry to rain on your parade, DrDan, but this *is* a family notesfile.

    Re .1 Sort of (re enye) but Tom's right too. Philologically, most �s in
    Spanish derive from an underlying (usually Latin, although the Latin's
    often disguised by the dropping of an intermediate vowel) word that had
    two nasals (not necessarily both the same): e.g. do�a < DOMINA. But the
    sequence of the change was more probably [2 people in Iberia said
    something based on DOMINA, but having only two syllables connected by a
    palatalized nasal] [2 medieval monks spending 8 hours a day/six days a
    week copying latin manuscripts started using a squiggly device to
    indicate 'there's more of this word but I can't be bothered to spell it
    out/ isn't it obvious anyway'] [3 some more recent - I'd guess 18th c.,
    but I could be way out - writer of Castilian borrowed the squiggle and
    used it to invent a new consonant that symbolized the palatalized nasal
    that had existed in Iberia for centuries]. So present-day speakers of
    Spanish as a first language don't say `oh, that's an N with a tilde'
    they say `oh, that's an enye' (trans. Bob Knowles).
    
    And when you say, Wook, that the circumflex `used to be' an `s' it'd be
    safer to say that the circumflex in French is usually a sign that
    somewhere back in the etymological hinterland of the word a letter -
    often S - has been omitted. Sometimes, though, the circumflex is
    just a lexicographical convention - as in the distinct DU and D�.
    
    b

    .11
    
    Citing the distinction of du and d� to posit that the curcumflex is a
    lexicographical convention is, I think, an error.  D� means that which
    belongs to a person, the person's property, as in things the person
    stores or keeps.  The Latin original is DYNAMIS, which can easily be
    seen to elide into something that eventually dropped its terminal S and
    in so doing acquired the circumflex.
    
    But you are right, probably, in your supposition about the Mediaeval
    monks and their copying habits; Latin-language literature is replete
    with abbreviations.  For example, if this were a letter written to a
    friend in classical Latin, I could well sign with the following Latin:
    
    DE RICARDO NASHVENSIS IDIBVS APRILIS ANNO VRBIS CONDITAE MMDCCXLVII
    
    (From Richard of Nashua on the Ides of April in the 2747th year since
    the founding of the City)
    
    But, keeping in mind the conventions commonly used by the Romans, I'd
    more likely sign it this way:
    
    DE R.O N.IS ID. APR. A.V.C. MMDCCXLVII

    Spanish alphabet blocks for children have individual blocks for 
    
    		C CH N � R RR L LL 
    

re .12:

DYNAMIS?  When I studied Latin, there were no Y's in it.

    He's just being a Y's guy.

    In Spanish, I is "i latina" and "Y" is "i griego".
    

    Re .14
    
    There weren't many words using a Y in Latin, that's for sure, Gerald. 
    The letter Y was not native to Italy, but Latin pulled words such as
    DYNAMIS from Greek, in which the sound in question was written with a
    upsilon.  Most Latin textbooks are happy to omit such very occasional
    borrowings, as they serve to muddy the waters for many students who
    will probably never encounter such things.
    
    The classical Latin alphabet, as used by the Romans, contained the
    following 23 letters:
    
    A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
    
    The letter J came into use in about +VI, and U appeared much later
    (+XVI or so) as a back formation from the minuscule form of V, which
    was u.  W is more correctly named in French, "double-V," and it was in
    fact indicated by placing two Vs together, as in the Latinization of
    Germanic names such as VVALTHARIVS, Walter.
    
    -dick

    Re .12
    
    �Citing the distinction of du and d� to posit that the curcumflex is a
    �lexicographical convention is, I think, an error.  D� means that which
    �belongs to a person, the person's property, as in things the person
    �stores or keeps.  The Latin original is DYNAMIS, which can easily be
    �seen to elide into something that eventually dropped its terminal S and
    �in so doing acquired the circumflex.
    
    Please don't think I was suggesting that, generally, the circumflex
    is a typographical convention. Of course it's not, and I don't think
    it is. But in some cases it is. I was not thinking of D� as in `give
    him his due' - I can see the connection there with DYNAMIS. I was
    talking about the past participle of `devoir'. The connection there
    with DYNAMIS is less clear to me.
    
    Moreover, it is rare for the Nominative in a Latin root of a Romance
    derivative to survive. In the early breakdown of spoken Latin it seems
    that there was not so much a Nominative/Accusative [etc] distinction,
    more a Subjective and a generalized Objective. In French the two
    survived only (through the langue d'oc, which preserved the inflexion)
    in a few pairs such as
    
    		Subjective		Objective
        	==========		=========
    		gars			gar�on (<...ONEM)
    		bers			baron
    		copain			campagnon
    		pois*			poisson
    
    * Interesting one. It meant `fish' in AF, I think (from the Latin
    PISCES, but it survives today only in the linguistic fossil `porpoise'
    (which means PIG-FISH).
    
    So, even if DYNAMIS has anything to do with `devoir' (which I will take
    some persuading about), it's most unlikely that its final S (in the
    nominative) would have survived its first step into French, let alone
    as a more recent circumflex.
    
    But French is not the only language that uses a circumflex; in
    Portuguese, for example, 
    [NB: The rathole ain't over till FORTY2::KNOWLES mentions Portuguese.] 
    the word `tem' is distinguished lexicographically from the word `t�m'
    (in fact the second of the two has two syllables). From a philological
    perspective one could point to the Latin TENET and TENENT from which
    they derive; but o homem na rua [the man in the street, and note,
    incidentally the derivation HOMINEM > homem, not HOMO >homem] just 
    sticks a circumflex on to make it clear that the subject of the verb is 
    plural.
    
    b

    .18
    
    In the interest of moving forward, I'm going to do a giant backstep
    here and withdraw DYNAMIS as the root of d�.  I just this weekend did
    some further research on that very etymology, and I was wrong. 
    
    Larousse defines d� as �(p. pass� de devoir) 1. Que l'on doit...�  The
    correct root, then, of d� (debt), the past participle of devoir, is
    D�BITVM (debt), the past participle of D�B�RE (to owe), which is the
    actual root of devoir (to owe).  So there isn't a terminal S to have
    been lost, but there is a lot of other miscellaneous litter that was
    dropped.
    
    So you have not plugged the rathole, only dug it deeper.  :-)
    
    -dick

    I just found another example: je�ne, meaning fast (the noun). This
    derives presumably from the Latin JEJUNIUM - no s there either, but
    as you said of D�BITUM `a lot of other miscellaneous litter that was
    dropped.'
    
    b