My illiterate search for the Sicilian animals (3)
« previous post | next post »
Well, now it is time to tell you the answer. (If you are saying "The answer to what?", you're in the wrong place. Start here, then go to here, and then come back.) Before I do, I should mention that half the readers of Language Log seem to have mailed me with their suggestions or quibbles or whatever. I'd like to express my sincere thanks to the other half. For the ones who suggested "sessilians", sorry, there are indeed animals that are sessile (rooted to the spot and immobile), and even a kind of barnacle called the sessilia, but they do not constitute an order called "sessilians" — you made that word up.
The thing I forgot is that there are spellings like Caesar, caesarean, caesium, etc. The fact that Americans generally use the Webster-simplified spelling cesium for the latter is as irrelevant as the fact that the bad Italian restaurant at the end of the mall that you mistakenly went to once spells caesar salad as ceasar salad: the crucial thing is that some words beginning with [s] do start with ca-, or to be more precise, cae-. (In fact there are one or two, such as coelocanth, that start with co-, leaving only cu- as always indicating [k]. The English spelling system really is an utter mess.)
But I never did find the word via dictionaries or word lists. (By the way, I fixed up the original post to mention that people had pointed out that the initial letters could have been ps- for all I knew. Quite right. But that turned out to be just another red herring to follow.) The way I found the order in question was through aimless searching of zoological taxonomies. I had a vital clue that you didn't have: I had heard Sir David refer to the Sicilian creatures in the same breath as amphibians and snakes. So I just went to Wikipedia and just started working up from reptiles and amphibians to older and more inclusive classes, going back and forth and following links to possibly relevant articles about reptilia and amphibia, until by accident I hit upon one that had a link to the order I was looking for (but had never heard of before): the caecilians (their order is also known as the Gymnophiona or a Apoda). Strange animals indeed. Blind subterranean legless amphibians with teeth, living only in the tropics. Very little is known about them in some respects. Fascinating. I really want to see one now. And my temporary illiteracy is over, thank goodness.
The people who figured it out were largely people who had heard the Radio 4 program and were thus equipped with the clue that they should look up amphibians and browse around in that biological area. As far as I know, virtually no one got it by searching dictionaries or word lists. The spelling defeated us all. Except for Bill Walderman, who hit on the brilliant and very rapid technique of telling Google to search for "cycilian": it promptly corrected him to "caecilian" and showed him pictures! Nice work, Bill. Honorable mention. But The very first person to mail in a correct answer was Paul Bickart — exactly thirty minutes ahead of the second, Ast Moore. All three of these will have their subscription fee to Language Log waived for one year as a prize.
The etymology of caecilian, by the way, goes back to a Latin root for blindness, or (equivalently) the Latin word for the "slow worm", which is a legless lizard that lives under things (it is not actually blind, but the Romans apparently thought it was).
Nathan Myers said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
Any one of those clues in part 2 should have sufficed. Actually, shame on everybody who has never let Attenborough's "Life in Cold Blood" hit the top of their Netflix queue and give away the game.
Linguistic confusion between worms, caecilians, snakes, slow worms, and (other) legless lizards ought to merit a whole nother column. Sadly, we'll never have a mammalian equivalent, because weasels are already as skinny as an endotherm can afford to be.
Simon Cauchi said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:23 pm
"I had forgotten (how?) about the emperors of Rome, and the most southeasterly of that city's hills, and bypassing the birth canal, and the radioactive soft metal isotope used in atomic clocks, and the opening part of the large intestine."
OK, now I get it: Caesars, Caelian, caesarian, caesium, and caecum, but how come you didn't mention the word for the division of a metrical foot between two words (in Greek and Latin prosody) and a pause in the middle of a line (in English prosody)?
Ray Girvan said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:30 pm
shame on everybody
Dunno. In the UK, we've had rather a surfeit of nature documentaries over the years, to the point of my attention glazing over (I think they invent half of these new animals).
I'd never heard of these guys, but I got to it via Google when I recalled the initial spelling of "Coelacanth" and tried "coecilians". That turned out to be an archaic spelling – actually "Cœcilians", but the oe-ligature dwindled around 1950 in favour of "Caecilians".
It may well evolve to "Cecilians", which gets a non-trivial number of hits, in line with the many other US English words where "ae"/"oe" has become "e".
Skullturf Q. Beavispants said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:37 pm
I got the hint in post #2, and I was subsequently quite pleased to discover that Google's auto-complete feature corrects for (some) spelling mistakes. I started to type "caesil," and "caecilian" came up despite the incorrect fourth letter.
Stephen Jones said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:47 pm
Of course it's much easier to find them if you look up amphibia in Wikipedia (they're no, but of course that means going through the Linnaen classification as opposed to a modern one.
J. W. Brewer said,
August 17, 2009 @ 5:54 pm
Noah Webster presumably was not personally responsible for the standard American spelling of cesium which was apparently not discovered (and thus presumably not named) until after his death. More interesting question is perhaps why the general ae->e reform was not applied in AmE to caesar but "caesium" was treated differently. The assasinated Roman guy is Julio Cesar in Spanish, after all. And Caesar salad is said to have been devised by a fellow originally named Cesare Cardini, so he did an e->ae to seem less foreign-looking to an American clientele. But it's not Saint Caecilia even in BrE (although Cecily sounds pretty close to Sicily). Maybe proper nouns are particularly resistant to any sort of rule-driven consistency.
Jerry Friedman said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:06 pm
@Nathan Myers:
"Linguistic confusion between worms, caecilians, snakes, slow worms, and (other) legless lizards ought to merit a whole nother column. Sadly, we'll never have a mammalian equivalent, because weasels are already as skinny as an endotherm can afford to be."
Not to mention some mollusks and insect larvae. And weasels have been called vermin and varmints, as have more robust mammals.
No doubt many here saw this relevant article or the research that it describes.
Greg Morrow said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
I knew what you were talking about at the end of the first paragraph of post 1: obscure order of animal plus "sicilian" = caecilian. I have an interest in zoology; I was familiar with the critter.
Without that foreknowledge, I doubt I would have been able to get it from a verbal reference, although I would have jumped straight to Bill Walderman's Google solution–its spelling-guessing has proven as ridiculously powerful as its search function.
John Cowan said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:15 pm
Of the seven traditional hills of Rome, the Aventine is actually the southernmost. That led me in the wrong direction for a bit, but the other clues put me on to cae-. So then it was a matter of typing c a e c into my browser's search box and seeing caecilians pop up in the very first place (kudos to Google Suggest). I don't know exactly why I didn't try c a e s first, but I didn't.
Note this picture of Sicilians eating their mother (safe for work, I assure you).
However, the traditional pronunciation of caecilian, confirmed in various places, begins with [si:], so if you heard [sɪ] as in Sicilian, something went wrong between Sir David's brain and yours.
Nathan said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:29 pm
In English, the unstressed vowels that don't get reduced all the way to [ə] tend to come out pretty close to [ɪ], so the Sicilian pronunciation makes perfect sense.
And I guessed what the animal in question was immediately after reading the title of the original post. I read about them as a kid.
Philip (flip) Kromer said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:29 pm
By the way, for publicly available word lists to grep through: the largest easily-available are probably the British National Corpus Word Frequency Lists from the University of Lancaster (see also). These come with part of speech, lemma/headword connections, frequency and corpus dispersion. They're also proken down by spoken v. written, conversation v. task-oriented speech, and imaginative v. informative writing. Infochimps.org has a broad index of many other word lists too, as does the Linguistic Data Consortium.
Not as handy as /usr/share/dict/web2, but a really neat resource for deeper breakfast-table questions.
Lance said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:34 pm
The not-quite-linguistic way that I found what you'd been looking for was to take a best guess at the spelling and typing it into Google, trusting it to correct my spelling (which it did, after a few tries). I also realized that, as I'm a subscriber to the full online MW dictionary (and which many academics may have through their libraries), I could get it by searching for rhymes for "Sicilian".
Bradley Skaggs said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:42 pm
I simply went to the Wikipedia article for "Sicilian"; at the bottom was a link to the article for "Caecilian", describing it as an amphibian. Hurray for disambiguation pages!
Sarra said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:51 pm
As far as I know, virtually no one got it by searching dictionaries or word lists.
Got you – wait for it… you'll kick yourself.
…
I searched for *ilian. And got it.
Stephen Nicholson said,
August 17, 2009 @ 6:56 pm
I encounter situations like this on occasion. I'm a bad speller, and occasionally my spell checker comes backs with suggestions that don't resemble the word I'm looking for. First try to re-spell the word. If this fails, I yell at the computer an over-enunciated pronunciation of the word. When that fails, I got to my word book and bad speller's dictionary (a dictionary alphabetized by the incorrect spellings).
My last resort is, like you, to find the word in a context I know it will be used. This can be tricky sometimes, but it works when asking someone how to spell X isn't possible.
Ian Preston said,
August 17, 2009 @ 7:17 pm
Some words begininning with [s] start with co- too: coelacanth, coeliac, coenobyte, coesite, etc. So is cu- in fact the only impossibility?
Ellen said,
August 17, 2009 @ 7:58 pm
John Cowan, I noticed the pronunciation /siːˈsɪliən/ in Wikipedia, but seems to me that pronunciation can't be right for an English language pronunciation, because it has a long vowel in an unstressed syllable.
Mike said,
August 17, 2009 @ 8:12 pm
I got it within the first few results of a Google search query "underground brazil amphibian blind". All these words were in Attenborough's early discussion of the order. And then I kicked myself for not thinking of "cae"…
Changing the egrep query to "^[cs][aiey](e|c|ss?)[a-z]*l[a-z]*ne?$" produces "caecilian" as the second result from the web2 dictionary file.
ø said,
August 17, 2009 @ 8:20 pm
I solved it in a matter of seconds by dumb luck. The first thing I tried was a search for "circilian". The extra 'r' was a completely wrong guess, but this worked anyway. Google said "did you mean 'cicilian'?" and provided a link to an article on "cicilian worms", which proved to be in fact an article on the animal called "caecilian" (which is not a worm, and which, come to think of it, I had in fact heard of when I was writing a report about reptiles and amphibians when I was about 10 years old, but it didn't come to mind when I read the post yesterday).
J. W. Brewer said,
August 17, 2009 @ 8:25 pm
@Ian Preston: ??? Oh, you mean the words usually spelled celiac and cenobite. Coesite is a word I don't think I know under any spelling, but if the wikipedia claim that it was named after a researcher surnamed Coes is correct, I'm skeptical that it would be commonly pronounced with an [s]. It seems plausible that some obscure word standardly beginning cy- would have a variant spelling out there beginning cu- while retaining an [s] pronunciation, but I don't have an example at hand. The pronunciation/spelling difference between Cyprus and cuprous (even though the latter derives etymologically from the former) is pretty striking, however.
Ian Preston said,
August 17, 2009 @ 9:05 pm
@J W Brewer: You're right about coesite – there's at least one online dictionary that says it starts with [s] (the first that comes up with a pronunciation on Google) but it must be mistaken and so was I so scrub that from the list. I agree that cenobite is more common but, for me anyway, coeliac is the spelling I'm used to and I've never seen coelacanth spelt otherwise. The point is not whether they're common but whether they exist.
Ray Girvan said,
August 17, 2009 @ 9:09 pm
J. W. Brewer: I'm skeptical that it would be commonly pronounced with an [s]
ex-geologist mode: right. Definitely koʊsaɪt or kəʊsaɪt.
mollymooly said,
August 17, 2009 @ 9:43 pm
The OED website's Advanced Search on pronunciation sI"sIlI@n gives "Sicilian", whereas si:"sIlI@n is needed to give "cæcilian". This accords with John Cowan's comment on the pronunciation, but the Compact Oxford, American Heritage, and Merriam-Webster have the short vowel in both words.
Bill Poser said,
August 17, 2009 @ 10:11 pm
I got it first try. The mere fact that Geoff's searches using the obvious expressions did not work was sufficient to tell me that it probably began with <cae>. I just googled "caecilian" and got the Wikipedia article.
Incidentally, the change of Latin /aj/ to /e:/, though not generally reflected in spelling until much later, is known to have taken place in spoken Latin by c. 200 BCE. Julius Caesar himself probably did not have an [aj] at least in his colloquial speech.
J. W. Brewer said,
August 17, 2009 @ 10:17 pm
There also seem to be various dinosaurs starting coel- with an [s]. When you combine this with coelecanth and the caecilians, the pattern suggests that something funny is going on here with biologists. Some possibilities: 1) biologists have trouble with standard AmE spelling conventions; 2) biologists believe international uniformity in technical terms within their field is so important that even the Americans will adhere to BrE conventions; 3) biologists are working in the Linnean tradition where names of species and higher-order taxonomic groupings are not coined in English any more than they are coined in Swedish, but are rather coined in someone's best approximation of Late Latin. If it's 3, I don't know that it tells us anything at all about (American) English spelling conventions, other than the notion that all spelling conventions are subject to ad hoc exceptions for proper names taken from other languages, with Qatar, Caesar, and a new Scientist-Latin coinage like Coelurosauria all being instances of such ad hoc exceptions.
Steve said,
August 17, 2009 @ 10:19 pm
Reasoning that the ending is the least problematic part of the word, I found it by searching on *lian at the onelook dictionary.
http://www.onelook.com/?w=*lian&ls=a
The 73rd entry is aquatic caecilian.
KCinDC said,
August 17, 2009 @ 10:34 pm
My initial guess from the hint about English orthography in the first post was that the word started with a silent letter — psycilian, perhaps?
david said,
August 18, 2009 @ 1:20 am
Oh, Caecilia!
You're shaking my confidence (in dictionaries) daily.
Nicholas Tam said,
August 18, 2009 @ 6:58 am
I couldn't get it after post (1). I did get it after post (2) because Geoff dumped the cae- clue right in front of us, and I verified it with the use of a dictionary search of sorts.
Meet Zyzzyva. It's a Scrabble word study program that allows quick substring/anagram searches in a corpus combining entries from five or six different dictionaries. I punched in CAE*, and lo and behold, CAECILIAN. Not as flexible as grep, of course, and the word list has the distinct disadvantage of a) only going up to words of 15 or fewer characters, and b) excluding compound words, proper nouns, and all sorts of things taboo in the board game.
And in retrospect, I could have typed in *ILIAN after post (1) and seen the match.
Troy S. said,
August 18, 2009 @ 8:45 am
I'm also proud to say I got it one the first post. Those six years of Latin and Classics came in handy for something, I suppose. (I remembered the blind Roman dictator, Appius Claudius Caecus, who had the Appian Way built.) It is curious that the form "coecilian" ever appeared at all, as oe appears to be a ligature for a Greek diphthong that Latin lacks. Spurious ligatures seems to have been introduced in a few other words though, all I can think of at the moment is "foetus" which is derived from the Latin "fetus."
Graham said,
August 18, 2009 @ 8:49 am
Doesn't the episode suggest that dictionaries, unlike Scrabble books, cannot be seen as just spelling lists? Words are interconnected with each other and concepts, so that a word shorn of context (here: noun, animal genus, amphibian) is and deserves to be a lost entity.
naddy said,
August 18, 2009 @ 8:55 am
Incidentally, the change of Latin /aj/ to /e:/, though not generally reflected in spelling until much later, is known to have taken place in spoken Latin by c. 200 BCE.
This seems implausible. Caesar was borrowed by Germanic with a diphthong (cf. German "Kaiser", emperor), which cannot have happened in Republican times.
Nitty said,
August 18, 2009 @ 9:29 am
I searched for "animal c" in Google (without the quotes). The answer showed up in the first or second result, without having to click through. I think this just shows that a dictionary is not always the best tool for the job.
Mr Punch said,
August 18, 2009 @ 9:29 am
There are also sessilians, which are some sort of barnacle.
Surprised in Seattle said,
August 18, 2009 @ 11:37 am
I expected to see a bunch of comments from people saying "I already knew the word, so nyah."
Rikku Hakumei said,
August 18, 2009 @ 12:08 pm
@ Troy S.: Classical Latin doesn't lack the oe diphthong; it's present in common words such as poena (punishment), moenia (city walls) and foedus (ugly or treaty). Later, however, my understanding is that the diphthong became identical to ē; hence mistakes like foetus for fētus (and even foemina for the femiliar fēmina).
Doug Sundseth said,
August 18, 2009 @ 2:24 pm
"For the ones who suggested "sessilians", sorry, there are indeed animals that are sessile (rooted to the spot and immobile), and even a kind of barnacle called the sessilia, but they do not constitute an order called "sessilians" — you made that word up."
No, not actually. "Sessilian" can be found in the wild in technical contexts. For examples, see, for instance:
Here:"4.2.4 Asymmetric barnacles and sessilian monophyly"
Or here: Citation internal to the paper and I don't have a subscription. Google search reveals this fragment – "Their study was based on three representatives of sessilians…"
Or here: "An alternative topology forcing sessilian monophyly was significantly rejected by our topological tests (P and PP < 0.001)."
Whether "sessilian" is an Order, I am not competent to say; I'm not the marine biologist you are looking for. But the word is not "made … up".
Gav said,
August 18, 2009 @ 2:27 pm
Nathan #1 – think cryptid. Loss of legs? – cetaceans! Endothermia a problem? – Heterocephalus is pretty cool! Run them both through the Darwiniser and you get a legless cold blooded 100 ton eutherian troglodyte and I'm not talking about my sister-in-law either …..
Sili said,
August 18, 2009 @ 3:08 pm
"Foetus" is a mistake? Damn. I just knew is was "fetus" is SA, so I Britified it.
I got it almost immediately, since I had to google the critters a while back when David Marjanovic´ mentioned in passing in a comment on Pharyngula.
ron said,
August 18, 2009 @ 3:32 pm
For anyone who remembered that the residents of Northern Exposure's Cicely, Alaska, were called Cicelians (pronounced like Sicilians), atop the results of a Google search for Cicelian is "Did you mean: Cicilian".
Nathan Myers said,
August 18, 2009 @ 3:37 pm
Gav will be here all week. Tip your waitrons!
But I didn't know naked mole rats were secondarily ectothermic. Thanks for that.
Bill Poser: Thank you for the note about pronouncing Caesar. I had long wondered about that. I will no longer be tempted to pronounce it in the German way. Evidently the Germans were fooled by the Latin spelling too. I often hear people make a similar mistake by pronouncing the "t" in "often", although "debt" and "doubt" seem still safe. It pleases me to hear my mother-in-law, who has prescriptionist tendencies, rhyme "Monday" with "Grundy" at home.
Andrew said,
August 18, 2009 @ 5:50 pm
It's interesting that Latin 'oe' seems definitely to have been abandoned in most English derivatives (except 'foetus', where it shouldn't have been in the first place); 'poena' produces 'penal', and 'foedus' produces 'federal'. Where 'oe' is used in English it is normally in words derived from the Greek.
The Latin word for 'heaven' has been written as both 'coelum' and 'caelum' – I think the latter became standard in church Latin, though. This produces 'celestial'. English words in 'coel', like 'coelacanth', represent Greek 'koilos' meaning 'hollow'.
Philip D. said,
August 18, 2009 @ 7:35 pm
I was wondering about this as soon as he said that "c" never represents a sibilant before "a"
language hat said,
August 18, 2009 @ 8:31 pm
Bill Poser: Thank you for the note about pronouncing Caesar. I had long wondered about that. I will no longer be tempted to pronounce it in the German way.
I'd like to see Bill's response to naddy's point about the Germanic borrowing as /kaisar/ (so in Gothic as well as German); Grandgent (Vulgar Latin, p. 88) says "The regular change of æ to ę took place largely in Republican times in unaccented syllables; in stressed syllables in the first century of our era and later." (Emphasis added.) We are here, of course, dealing with a stressed syllable.
Sarra said,
August 18, 2009 @ 10:30 pm
"Foetus" is a mistake? Damn. I just knew is was "fetus" is SA, so I Britified it.
Pedants will tell you it's not "right", but in terms of usage in British English, it most certainly is right. Loosely speaking, no statistically significant user of BrE will ever write "fetus".
Noetica said,
August 19, 2009 @ 3:50 am
sessile (rooted to the spot and immobile)
I believe that motile is a better opposite of sessile than mobile (implied in the gloss "immobile"). Whatever is sessile not only isn't moving, it cannot move. OED, at "sessile":
But to match the trait character of sessile we need another adjective suggesting trait rather than state. OED has at "motile":
See this article at Wikipedia ("Sessile animals typically have a motile phase in their development. Sponges have a motile larval stage, which becomes sessile at maturity."). I recall that this is how we did it in Biology 101. See also such references as this journal article.
Noetica said,
August 19, 2009 @ 3:54 am
There is a serious glitch, or seven, in this software. I could not see the second half of that message in preview, and had to post "blind". Hence this anomaly:
Evan said,
August 19, 2009 @ 4:24 am
after reading your original post, I googled it and found the answer here. Google made me literate again!
Stephen Jones said,
August 19, 2009 @ 6:36 am
You've brought a whole new meaning to 'statistically significant'. The British National Corpus has 128 entries for 'fetus' compared to 225 for 'foetus'.
naddy said,
August 19, 2009 @ 9:55 am
Spurious ligatures seems to have been introduced in a few other words though, all I can think of at the moment is "foetus" which is derived from the Latin "fetus."
This isn't limited to English. French has fœtus, German Fötus. Presumably the oe spelling was introduced in medieval Latin.
Patrick Hall said,
August 19, 2009 @ 2:09 pm
I found it with some Python:
>>> words = open('/usr/share/dict/web2').read().decode("utf-8").splitlines()
Put all the words in web2 into an array.
>>> len(words)
234936
Quite a wordlist, web2…
>>> from difflib import get_close_matches
sicilian siciliana sicilica
I got nothin'. You can set the number of matches, which I did repeatedly until something showed up (I went to 60, it's actually at #56):
>>> print ' '.join(get_close_matches('sicilian', words, n=60))
sicilian siciliana sicilica Sicilian sicinnian vicilin sicilienne cilia
silicean silicane sickling sicarian sibilant sialidan scillain
oscinian musician civilian ascidian Siculian Licinian Basilian
sociologian sigillarian Sicilianism Priscillian sirian simlin
simian silvan silica silane sicula scolia ascian Lilian stickling
squillian spiceland sincaline siglarian sicklemia sickleman
sicilicum sibilancy sibilance scintling scillitin schilling scalarian
physician oscillant musiciana ciliation chiliagon
caecilian biciliate basilican bacillian Trichilia
Ingrid Jakobsen said,
August 20, 2009 @ 12:49 am
Proving my genetics geekiness, I got it from the first post, based on Caenorhabditis elegans.
mollymooly said,
August 20, 2009 @ 12:54 am
The NED fascicle containing "foetus, fetus" was published in 1897 and notes "The etymologically preferable spelling with e in this word and its cognates is adopted as the standard form in some recent Dicts., but in actual use is almost unknown."
The rather more recent Economist style guide states "fetus (not foetus, misformed from the Latin fetus)"
However the Daily Telegraph and Guardian, which have fewer American readers, stick with "foetus" (and "foetid").
[(myl) I don't want to miss the opportunity to point to this joke.]
Sarra said,
August 20, 2009 @ 8:54 pm
You've brought a whole new meaning to 'statistically significant'.
Sorry! I knew it was a stupid phrase to use, but no other was coming to mind, and I just wanted to get the comment posted.
The British news press, for one thing, does favour 'foetus' to the extent that I don't recall ever having seen 'fetus' in print or online in any news article.
This time I've run the now-customary Google check on foetus vs fetus on the Times, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph and BBC News websites, and in every case 'foetus' registers in the thousands (2,050 to 6,630), while 'fetus' only garners around the hundreds (98 to 348). And while I didn't check each result, I did see 'fetus'/'fetal' cropping up mostly in more secondary-source positions, such as comments from web users or from quoted experts.
Results for the medical press could well be different – interestingly, 'fetus' does outnumber 'foetus' on nhs.uk. But again – it's from my experience being surrounded by a living BrE corpus (with far more than 353 citations!) of school textbooks, advice leaflets, fiction and nonfiction books, local and national press and so on, that I feel qualified to say it's 'foetus' that's currently standard usage. I do think things might be changing, however – I was intrigued to find a rough parity of citations between the spellings when I queried the websites of two UK examination boards.
Sarra said,
August 20, 2009 @ 8:55 pm
"to the extent that I don't recall ever having seen 'fetus' in print or online in any news article" – forgot to edit to mention the fact that I'm well aware of all the cognitive reasons why I'd not remember such a thing – discarding the anomalies as errors etc. I'm not meaning to suggest that I genuinely have never read the 'fetus' spelling in those contexts.
Andrew Clegg said,
August 21, 2009 @ 11:23 am
This one threw me a bit since I've seen the word 'caecilian' before, but assumed both the c's were hard 'k' sounds and the first vowel rhymed with 'eye'. (Sorry, not good with IPA)
It probably comes from having a Latin textbook at school featuring a character named Caecilius — who was always pronounced something like 'kaikilius' by our teachers.
I can't actually think of any Latin words in Latin (rather than borrowed into English) where a c is pronounced s — but it has been a while…
(BTW I'm not Catholic but I'm told they pronounce Latin slightly differently from classicists?)
K said,
August 21, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
FWIW, I got it by the same Wikipedia-reading method, but only after I'd made a trip to Radio 4 Listen Again to get some much-needed context from the original programme!
Sarra said,
August 21, 2009 @ 4:05 pm
(BTW I'm not Catholic but I'm told they pronounce Latin slightly differently from classicists?)
I've learnt Latin at school once-upon-a-time and sung it working with many different musicians – both my school Latin teachers subscribed to the same model of pronunciation, the features of which I'll try to rack my brains for…
– hard 'c's in 'Caecilius', 'cena' etc
– ae as 'aye'
– hard 'g's e.g. 'magnum'
– 'v' as 'w', I think, but I'm not sure
etc.
The choral Latin, on the other hand:
– c usually as 'ch' – 'coelum' = 'chēlum' (sorry for terrible representation but I hope you get the idea)
– 'excelsis' as 'eggshellsis' or 'ex chelsis'
– 'ti' as 'tsi' – 'exspectatio'
– 'gn' as 'ny' – 'magnum' = 'manyum'
etc. Some will describe church Latin as fundamentally Italianate, but it's been used in various different countries so long that each has its own peculiarities. I actually have a small pamphlet somewhere describing several different conventions used in English churches, from which the church choirmaster is encouraged to pick one and stick to it, I think!
Stephen Jones said,
August 23, 2009 @ 5:20 pm
I've actually gone back and looked at the BNC examples. Whilst 'fetus' has half as many hits as 'foetus' it is in fact only in the academic and miscellaneous category that we find it, not a single example in fiction or newspapers. 'Foetus' however, appears 30 times in the fiction category and 22 times in the newspaper category, so we do have the strange situation that a spelling which has one third of the hits for the word in the BNC, may never have been seen by the average British layman in British media.
Andrew Clegg said,
August 26, 2009 @ 11:38 am
Sarra — that chimes with what I remember a teacher saying about church Latin.
So how 'caecilian' became 'sisilian' and not 'kaikilian' or 'cheychilian', I don't know…
Sarra said,
August 27, 2009 @ 12:58 am
Caesar -> Caesarean, whose first syllable is identical (apart from the voiced s) to 'caecilian', and you can see how natural it is for 'ee' to collapse to 'i' when the syllable becomes unstressed.
How did we get 'Caesar'? Goodness, I don't know.