h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I notice that my local sandwich shop has "Breakfast roles - €2.99"
I wonder who is playing the bacon....

Perhaps it's meant to be more akin to fierce & fiend?

Of course 'fiery' is one of the few English words where an apparently 'odd' spelling is at least phonetically correct - 'Figh-er-eee'. This is truly unusual in a word where the olde English spelling used the thorn dipthong. As accents changed and ideas of correct spelling took hold many of our modern vowel pairs resulted in variables like fairies and faeries.

In most words ending with a final silent 'e', the 'e' is only a guide to show that the word is pronounced with a 'long' (some call it hard) vowel. The silent 'e' modifies the internal vowel and distinguishes 'pat' for 'pate' and 'hat' from 'hate'.

The usual standard to make an adjective is to add a 'y', and in the case of words ending in a silent 'e' it gets dropped completely as in icy, racy, dicy, lousy, etc. But changing the internal vowel from 'i' to 'ie' is rare if not unique. It must be that thorn dipthong thingy at the source.

I have been thinking long and hard about this one, but I was so young when I learned how to spell fiery I cannot remember the story behind it. I want to say it was taught to us as a completely unique configuration, but something tells me there are other words that morph to oddball spelling variations when they shift from being nouns to forming adjectives and adverbs.

Being a little fuzzy this Saturday morn, the only other 'example' of an odd word spelling that comes to mind is 'library'. And maybe its friend 'February'. But these are not actually in the same situation. They're just words that need to be remembered carefully to achieve correct spelling.

So maybe that's all I was ever taught about 'fiery'; that it does not follow the regular rules and requires special attention (like remembering those extra 'r's in the February library that no one ever pronounces).

Still thinking,
~jwf~

I say libRary.

<<"Random is merely the demand for money from a kidnapper with a cold.">>

Ah, I cheated ... Because I'd heard that before, I chose turnip. (We watched Blackadder 2 last night.)

Pffft!

Kosh

You have me foxed ~jwf~ by calling the thorn a diphthong; I would call it a consonant (ð, sounding as th). Isn't a diphthong a mixture of vowels (æ etc.)?

The word I is a diphthong, as choral directors know well -- choirs must be trained not to go "ayeeee" but to spend most of the note singing "ah" with a tiny "ee" tucked in at the end.

Fiery is perhaps a singularity; it could have gone like wiry and miry, and we may never know quite why it didn't.

http://hake.com/gordon/w3-spec.html gives a list of html special characters including thorns and some diphthongs.

Perhaps when you said "the olde English spelling used the thorn dipthong" you were referring to the 16th-17th century practice of writing the thorn as a y, turning "the" (ðe) into "ye", still pronounced "the".

Which is the source of our modern "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe", all examples of which do indeed deserve to be thrown in a fiery furnace.

I am grateful to:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/comedy/nowshow.shtml

for the following:

"I went for a day out to the National Shire Horse Centre.
It's a bit like the National Shy Horse Centre but the horses as less confident."

Well worth a listen, if you haven't already.

>> You have me foxed ~jwf~ by calling the thorn a diphthong.. <<


My mistake.
Sorry about that.

Of course a diphthong is:

>> diph·thong (dfthông, -thng, dp-)
n. A complex speech sound or glide that begins with one vowel and gradually changes to another vowel within the same syllable, as (oi) in boil or (iy) in fine.<<

I was referring to the sliding vowel sound in 'fiery'.
Even the single 'i' in fire has a slide, 'figh-er', so it seems that 'fiery' is written with a double vowel to preserve that slide as 'figh-er-eee' which might otherwise have become 'figh-ree' if it had come to be spelled 'firy'

My confusion and error was looking up 'fire' and seeing the olde English spelling of 'fyre' which used an obsolete character for the 'y'.

This 'y' character has a name but it is not 'thorn'.
I thought I knew and would remember the name of this character as I began typing. Obviously it didn't come to mind and I must have unconsciously substituted 'diphthong', a similarly obscure word which is also the name of an obsolete character that evolved into 'th'.

My two normally editorial typing fingers did not catch the error. And in previewing my post I must have been so dazzled by my own words I failed to see the mistake.

Sorry to confuse.

~jwf~

>> ..."olde English spelling used the thorn dipthong" you were referring to the 16th-17th century practice of writing the thorn as a y.. <<

Yes, that's it.
See, you did figure it out after all.
And hey, thanks for explaining it to me too.
I knew there was a reason I mistakenly called that old 'y'-for-'i' a diphthong. I mean a thorn. Or NOT a thorn.


First there is no mountain, then there is.


~jwf~

" ... This 'y' character has a name but it is not 'thorn'."

Perhaps its 'wau' or 'digamma' you were thinking of



By U151503 Gnomon:
A2451890 The Development of the Western Alphabet
A216073 The Greek Alphabet

By U189406 Almirena:
A2922077 Thorn - The Missing Letter of the Alphabet



In F27741?thread=16599 manolan (remember manolan?) wrote

"... In the older period there were two other letters: (1) F: 'uau', called digamma (i.e. double-gamma) from its shape. It stood after [epsilon] and was pronounced like [omega]. f was written in Boeotian as late as 200 B.C. (2) [koppa] koppa, which stood after [pi]. Another [sigma], called san, is found in the sign [sampi], called sampi, i.e. san + pi."

Have spend an hour reading the backlog, and have a few comments. Forget them if you think they are outdated, but here's my two cents...
'Folk' has something similar in my native tongue: Dutch. 'Volk' means the inhabitants of a certain area/country that consider themselves as a whole. 'Volkeren' is not only the plural, but is used in a broader sense as well, meaning people in general. Note that people just living in the same country do not necessarily have to be a 'volk', they can be said to form several 'volkeren' in the same country.
'Random'... I have always thought that something is random if you can't see any connection between the thing that is supposed to be random, and the rest of all you can see/measure. In that sense, a number a computer has printed out can be random.
The rudeness, or lack of, of Australians: the thing about carting people off to far away places with no way to get a speedy conversation going, has the inevitable effect of the developement of 'new' words. Things that exist both 'here' and 'there' get names. The names do not have to be the same. Again, as I am Dutch, I tend to think of the difference beween Dutch and Zuidafrikaans. The same goes for Spanish (Spain and Latin-America), English (Britain and the Commonwealth) and French for obvious reasons.
Apart from the impossibility in former times to get together across thousands of miles through communication technology, and thus coming up with different words for the same thing, there is something else.
A dodo simply doesn't exist in Europe. 'Dead as a dodo' can therefore only be invented as a figure of speech by someone going to Fiji and later noticing the extinction of said bird. OK, that's cutting a few corners, but it was the best example I could come up with.
And now the capital-thing. Why is it we type 'I' in a capital, but 'you' with a small 'y'? Do we think more of ourselves than we do about others?

Will be back later

Dodos (dead) were brought back stuffed to grace British homes and museums; so the phrase "dead as a dodo" could have been home-grown; but I get your drift.

That's interesting about the Dutch usage of 'volk'. Any other obvious Dutchisms in US English? The Swedes gave them 'Hi' (Hej) and the Irish 'So long' (Slán) and there are many many Germanisms.

One that I would bet on (though it never could be proved) is 'Outa sight' which is a rough transliteration of Ausgezeichnet, which rhymes (more or less) and means the same: remarkable, excellent, outstanding.

Another thing I suspect is a scenario of how Abba (was it?) misunderstood the word "uptight" in the lyric

When you're feeling all right
Everything is uptight
Just sing a song that goes . . .

They thought (so my story goes) it was a positive epithet, from hearing Stevie Wonder (was it?) singing

Baby, everything is all right
Uptight clean out o' sight . . .

-- which I interpret as "uptight all gone", but the Swedes thought that 'uptight' was being used as a synonym for 'outa sight' in the latter's usual sense (excellent etc.). And it could have been; it's a good thing when music is 'tight', that just means together; but 'uptight' means nervy, stressed. </>

>> 'uptight' means nervy, stressed <<

Yes, that is now the generally accepted meaning.

But the origins are more specific and from the wonderful world of drug use and abuse. In times of stress and fear, part of our natural human 'flight response' includes a retraction of the scrotum. The testicals withdraw to allow better locomotion. (See also: "How's it hanging?")

It has also been suggested that the expression refers to the anus and the constriction of the sphincter muscles in times of fear and stress. It is this 'anal' association that may have resulted in the (much earlier - 1963) use that was understood by a very young Stevie Wonder who is after all blind.

To keep things like drug paraphanalia 'outa sight' is a natural response when one starts to feel 'uptight'. That's why border guards often conduct body cavity searches.

~jwf~

Verry Interresting. So anal -- Freud would love it! (Or is it just a load of cobblers?)

But I still bet "outa sight" means "ausgezeichnet". Keeping your gear out of sight sounds a bit uptight to me. Let it all hang out.

So, that's the explanation of up tight! Weird...

Goyahka,(?) you make a very good point about the mutation of languages as speakers move geographically far apart...

<>

Actually, extreme fear and stress has the opposite effect. In the cockney rhyming slang 'to lose one's bottle', "bottle" stands in for "bottle and glass". Any elaboration needed?

Final note on random. A string of digits is random if the shortest algorithm for reproducing them is the string of digits itself.

Noggin