Katie raised an interesting point in yesterday's comments box.
Well, interesting to me, though very probably mind-numbingly boring to the rest of you.
She said, '
I can't get over the British spelling of haemorrhoids though. Do you pronounce it haymer-hoids?'
Now, putting aside my unjustifiably piqued curiosity about (Heaven forfend!) any possible hæmorrhoidal fascination on Katie's part (OW! I felt that all the way from Berkeley), it has been a goodly long while since I last spuffled and blathered rantily about language and the abomination of Websterism, but it's a new year so let's start it as I mean to go on by offending people (well, Americans anyway, in revenge for Katie's translation of IBS as Irritable British Syndrome … hee hee) in my usual patronising and pedantic fashion.
Listen up: it's time to talk ligatures and diphthongs.
Quite apart from the fact that I have never been able to say the deliciously lippy and tongue-tastic word 'diphthong' without grinning, diphtongs
(grin) and more specifically the lovely ligatures have long held a perverse and needlessly pedantic fascination for me.
If anyone's unsure, a diphthong is what happens when vowels cuddle up next to one another and a ligature occurs when things get out of hand and they fetch the bondage ropes and get a serious snuggle on.
Anyhoo … Ligatures:
For a start, I've always thought they look beautiful. Derived from Latin calligraphy the Æ and Œ ligatures are exceedingly sexy, especially when written in the late Roman uncial form.
But mostly it was the Cæsar/Kaiser thang that first grabbed my attention and made me aware of the ligature, way back in the mists of time when I was but a swotty little pimple-faced grammar school boy sitting in Latin class.
Such was the power of the ligature that it startled me into paying attention in class, wresting my adolescent mind - albeit temporarily - away from its musings on the strangely swelling bumps lately adorning the chest of the girl who lived down the road.
It was old Mr. Abbot, the fusty Latin Master who, during our very first Latin lesson invited guffaws of ridicule by declaring that Julius Cæsar should probably more correctly be pronounced Youlius Keezar.
Okay, so he backed it up with enough hard evidence to convince us that the Roman 'C' was a 'hard C' and that 'J' only came along much later and wasn't fully accepted until the 18th Century, but it still left poor Goldsmith, our token Jewish kid with several weeks of You-ish jokes to contend with.
Yet it was not the 'J' and the 'C' that lodged themselves in my brain and set me along the road to linguistic insanity, but the Æ ligature itself.
In defence of my pedantry please take into account that an upper-sixth former in the school I attended attained quite correctly the rank of 'Præfect' as opposed to 'Prefect' which was a type of Ford car.
I remember discussing the ligature thing with old Abbot a few years later - after I had discovered what ladybumps were and had endured five years of compulsory Latin - such were the diverse joys of English puberty in my day.
It seems that over a few hundred years, during the successive waves of Visigothic, Hunnish, Vandal, Ostrogothic, Teutonic, Lombard and Frankish invasions of the wretched corpse of the Roman Empire the ligature and the hard 'C' went their separate ways: the Hunnish and Teutonic languages of the Eastern half of Europe carried off the hard 'C' and the Frankish and Romance languages of Western Europe got custody of the ligature.
The result being the German 'Kaiser' (Roman hard 'C' and phonetically mispronounced digraph replacing the ligature) and the English 'Cæsar' (incorrect Romance soft 'C' and classically pronounced ligature) for the same word, neither of which Cæsar (Keezar) himself would have recognised unless he was very drunk.
Things stayed pretty much that way in the tiny and esoteric world of the ligature for over a thousand years (except in Scandinavia, where they have their own highly idiosyncratic set of rules for ligatures, along with everything else in life); English and German speakers knew where they stood, and as long as there were no Norwegians in the room everybody could pretty much guess what was being said.
Then - inevitably - some idiot sailed across the Atlantic, along came the US of A and it all ended in tears.
Millions of Europeans, with their wildly different pronunciations of the same letters, joined Russians, Africans and Asians in a race to empty the New World of its rightful peoples and replace them with what turned out to be a complete linguistic fuck-up unparalleled in history.
And into this mess rode my arch nemesis, Noah smegging Webster.
Yes, I'll admit that when you have a nation of several million illiterates from dozens of different countries and decide upon one official language it is a good idea to get them started speaking that language with some simplified spellings, especially with a language as rich and complex as English.
But for fuck's sake, as soon as they have a basic grasp of the language, teach it properly!
These days there is no excuse whatsoever (I don't count wilful ignorance as an excuse) for using Webster's simplified spellings.
'Pedophile'? What the fuck's that? Break the Webster version of the word down into its Classical roots and it means someone who likes feet!
Which is wrong to a quite hideous degree.
The word is 'pædophile.' Simplify it and the meaning is lost.
Use the ligature! Same goes for hæmorrhoids and diarrhœa, encyclopædia and œstrogen, æsthetics and œuvre.
Simplified spelling robs words of their meanings, reducing them to little more than random abstract symbols.
When it comes to ligatures, if you're too lazy to hit the 'alt' button on your Mac, at least use the ae and oe digraphs instead (as did the morons who made the signs for Boots the Chemist in yesterday's post). But never dispense with them altogether: 'encyclopedia' is ugly and horribly wrong, 'encyclopaedia' is inelegant and lazy, but 'encyclopædia' is sexy and cool.
And correct.
I know I keep harping on about Webster, but there are far more English speakers in the British Commonwealth and the world at large than there are in the USA and if we can spell correctly then people in the US can learn, too. Simplified spelling is for simpletons. Stop it. Now!
Websterism served its purpose 150 years ago but it is now as obsolete and worthless as the muzzle-loading flintlocks and wagon trains and smallpox-infected blankets that were its contemporaries.
I know it would cost money to change it after all this time and I know you really can't be bothered but mule-headedly sticking to a simplified and dumbed-down version of one of the world's richest and most eloquently expressive languages not only debases English but it makes Americans look lazy and dim. Sticking stubbornly with simplistic and inarticulate Websterism smacks of the thuggish, redneck, Joe Sixpack attitude that says intelligence is BAD (duh) and ignorance bliss, that showing culture and sophistication means you're unAmerican. It smacks frankly of dumb fucks with guns, scared shitless of being thought smart. Sorry, guys, but that's the view from the outside world.
If you can't give up your precious Webster at least make a start in the right direction and use the ligatures. Please. If you don't wish to adhere to historical precedence then use them because they are beautiful (æsthetically pleasing, if you will).
Do try to pronounce them correctly, too (a stressed and elongated 'ee'). If you're going to profess to speak and write in English, learning the language would be a good place to start.
Toodle Pip!
Your Pedantic Pal,
D.
This was the village a few minutes ago.
This was my winter jasmine, living up to its name when I got home last night (after much slithering and sliding; nobody bothered to grit the roads … again).
Tis NOT the season for driving.
Norwich only got a light dusting of snow, but it was enough to ensure people stayed away so we got the pick of the best comfy sofas for breakfast at Pret.
At least the low winter sun was nice.
Yeah, yeah. I know snow's pretty, but it can just bugger off to Norway or Minnesota or someplace where it's more welcome.
