Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 August 23

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August 23

Lord and Word rhyming?

Is there any dialect of English, either current or historical where lord and word rhyme? When I read the LDS hymnbook, there are a *lot* of hymns where that have that as a rhyme.Naraht (talk) 09:03, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Hymns are notorious for terrible eye rhymes; there are any number of examples of "move" rhymed with "love" for example. A famous one is Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, which tries to rhyme "come" with "womb". Alansplodge (talk) 11:54, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

The word "lord" has a rather complex etymological history, since a compound of two stems was eventually whittled down to a monosyllable, a process that took centuries to complete. By contrast, "word" has been a monosyllable for well over a thousand years (in the nominative and accusative cases), since word-final short vowels deleted in various circumstances in pre-Old-English. As a teen, I was kind of baffled when I saw "wind" and "mind" rhymed in an old poem (a much simpler case). Wikipedia article is Eye rhyme... AnonMoos (talk) 11:58, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

The article eye rhyme covers two somewhat different things, visual rhymes and historic rhymes (where the example obey/tea is not even visual). I find the idea that hymns, which are meant to be sung and heard, employ purely visual rhymes to any significant extent rather implausible. To me it seems conceivable that word used to be pronounced /wɔːd/ until maybe even quite recently. Wiktionary gives historic pronunciations only for Middle and Old English, which is a bit old. Also, move and love (given that neither pronunciation has much to do with the spelling) conceivably diverged from a common pronunciation. I've seen these sort of "eye rhymes" also in Wordworth or Coleridge, for instance, and would love to see a reference that connects these to the evolution of pronunciation. --Wrongfilter (talk) 13:24, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Phonographs not being available before the late 19th century, the usual way for linguists to infer historic pronunciations is by analyzing rhymes, so that any answer to your question would be by way of circular reasoning. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 16:25, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

No. Linguists and others who described the pronunciation of their day existed before the invention of phonographs. I'm always reminded of a scene in Le Bourgeois gentilhomme which clearly describes the rolled r that was used in Molière's time but isn't in modern French. --Wrongfilter (talk) 17:00, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Although a great many hymns were written in the late 19th century, when vowels were spoken pretty much as today. God Defend New Zealand written in the 1870s rhymes "star" with "war", which can only be a visual rhyme and not a archaic pronunciation. Alansplodge (talk) 21:35, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

How about calling this an imperfect rhyme (I like "approximate rhyme" best)? Maybe I'd feel better about the concept of "visual rhyme" if the article eye rhyme was better referenced. As it is, that term suggests to me something that is no better than a pun, rhyming "cough" and "though", for instance. --Wrongfilter (talk) 13:43, 28 August 2023 (UTC)

The term "wind", as in air movement, can be heard in some early phonograph records pronounced to rhyme with "mind", or like the same as to wind a clock. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:05, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

In music class in school we were taught that the "winds" in A Life on the Ocean Wave ("the winds their revels keep") is pronounced to rhyme with "minds". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:48, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Apparently wind's transition from long i to short i began in the 18th century.[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:08, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Which would have meant the <i> in wind went from "short i" to "long i (should this be /ai/ or [ai]?) and then back to short i. What an odd language English is. This from 1789 rhymes "behind" with "wind". Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 03:36, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

It's much more economical to posit that the medieval vowel lengthening change (whose effects are also seen in "child", "wild", "kind" etc) applied to different sets of words in different dialects, and that standard English first adopted a form of "wind" (meaning air movement) with a lengthened vowel, but this was later displaced by a form with an unlengthened vowel, originally from another dialect. AnonMoos (talk) 20:11, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Questions

1. Does Spanish have any words where letters ⟨ue⟩ and ⟨ie⟩ appear in beginning of word without preceding ⟨h⟩, as if words huevo, hueso and hielo were spelled uevo, ueso and ielo?
2. Do other Germanic languages than English also have gerund?
3. Does English have any native words which have letter K before A, O or U?
4. Are there any Western European languages where letter Q can not be followed by only U in native words?
5. Are there any English words with onset /ks/ or /ps/, or coda /mb/ or /ŋg/?

--40bus (talk) 19:59, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

For #3, English has thousands of words which contain a K followed by A, O or U. You'll have to explain what you mean by "native word", but some examples are "askance", "backache", "backup", "beckon", "blackout", "blockade", "breakable", "cookout", "cuckold", "drunkard", "hickory", "hookup", "jackass", "kale", "konk", "kooky", "kudos", "likable", "lookup", "oakum", "pickaxe", "skate", "skoal", "skull", "skunk", "talkative", "walkout" and many others. CodeTalker (talk) 22:53, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

About 2., I'm not sure on whether I get the distinction, but it seems that other Germanic languages use the present participle similarly. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:22, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

For question 1, I found "uebos" and "iertare" by browsing Wiktionary. RudolfRed (talk) 00:22, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

uebos is Old Spanish and iertare is Romanian. Wiktionary does list the Japanese surname Uehara as occurring in Spanish as well, and there's the proper noun Uezán. For ie, it only gives ietsista, an adherent of Ietsism. The reason /we/ and /je/ are always spelled with a silent h at the beginning of a word is that several centuries ago, no predictable distinction was made between i and j or between u and v. Therefore, hierba and hueso were given silent hes so readers would know they weren't *jerba and *veso. —Mahāgaja · talk 08:12, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

For question 4, consider French cinq, coq, etc. GalacticShoe (talk) 01:45, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

For 5, dialectically yes for /ŋg/. Some dialects do have a hard "g" at the end of words that end in the /ŋg/ sound, see for example the film Forest Gump, where the title character has such an idiolect. --Jayron32 12:10, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

This /ŋg/-with-a-hard-g, both in and at the end of words, is also a feature of some English Black Country accents such as that of Birmingham. Think Ozzy Osbourne.

(Note for Americans – 'Black Country' is a reference to the landscape-blackening soot and other pollutants arising from the coal mining and heavy industries that flourished in the area – nothing to do with anyone's skin colour.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.140.169 (talk) 18:55, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Can you point at a specific example of /ŋg/-with-a-hard-g in Ozzy's speeches or performances? 147.234.72.58 (talk) 19:06, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

In some performances of "Paranoid", the line "People think I'm insane because I am frowning all the time" you can hear Ozzy often insert a hard "g" like sound (an "intrusive G" maybe) into "frowning all" so it comes out something like "frowning gall". It's been a minute since I've listen to the original studio recording, but I am pretty sure it's even in that one. --Jayron32 12:41, 30 August 2023 (UTC)

40bus -- There are some dialects of English in which a "G" can be added to a word ending [ŋ] when the next word begins with a vowel, most famously in the case of "Long Guyland". This phenomenon is similar to "intrusive R" or "linking R" in non-rhotic dialects, or "liaison" in French. However, the [g] is not actually in syllable coda in this case. The sequence [ŋg] in syllable coda only occurs in non-standard forms of English. AnonMoos (talk) 19:57, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

(5) When reading out mathematical formulae, I'd pronounce the names of the Greek letters xi and psi with initial /ks/ and /ps/ respectively (because otherwise it's hard to distinguish them). Double sharp (talk) 12:36, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. I learned xi as "zigh" and psi as "sigh", clearly distinct. --142.112.221.64 (talk) 13:40, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, I guess I have to correct myself there. I would probably use "sigh" for ψ if ξ didn't also occur (which is the more common scenario). The problem is that I've also heard "sigh" for ξ, so when that occurs I put in the Greek initial cluster /ks/ to make things completely unambiguous. If ξ and ψ are in the same formula, then the habit I have for ξ spills over to ψ (with initial /ps/) for the same reason. Double sharp (talk) 02:16, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Along the path leading to modern English pronunciations of Greek letter names (not in ancient Greek itself of course), initial "X" in "Xi" would be pronounced the same as the initial "X" in "Xylophone", etc., i.e. as [z] (probably from earlier [gz] as in "exact" etc). AnonMoos (talk) 19:54, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Spanish has úes and íes as the plural for letters u and i. Notice that u (and i) form there with e a vowel hiatus, not a dipthong as in huevo or hielo; that's indeed why u and i carry the acute accent. Pallida  Mors 13:39, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

(1) I guess that Spanish uses ⟨hie⟩ and ⟨hue⟩ because, until recently, uevo ielo could be misread as vevo jelo. —Tamfang (talk) 16:15, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

That's precisely the hypothesis given by Mahagaja above. Pallida  Mors 16:55, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

d'oh —Tamfang (talk) 15:24, 29 August 2023 (UTC)