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December 27, 2024 @ 10:42 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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That's a pun on "Boxing Day", ICYMI…
December 27, 2024 @ 10:42 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistics in the comics
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S Frankel said,
December 27, 2024 @ 11:15 am
Unfortunately Bach, a Lutheran, never had occasion to write an Officium Defunctorum a.k.a. Bach's Office for the Dead.
Kate Bunting said,
December 27, 2024 @ 11:36 am
Boxing Day being a British thing, but the pun on 'baroque' doesn't work in British English!
Nick Z said,
December 27, 2024 @ 1:02 pm
It works much better than Bach thing for Boxing. The completely different vowels (in British English, at any rate), and sibilant – dental fricative alternation made it utterly opaque to me until I was told what that was meant to represent.
Philip Taylor said,
December 27, 2024 @ 1:47 pm
Like Nick (above) "Bach thing day" went straight over the head of this Briton, whilst "I baroque it" was immediately obvious. But I winced at the use of "shoot", where most Britons would say "shit".
Roscoe said,
December 27, 2024 @ 2:09 pm
If you performed “Und es waren Hirten in derselben Gegend,” BWV 248 (Part 2 of the Christmas Oratorio) on its assigned date of December 26, would it be a Bach sing day?
Geoff M said,
December 27, 2024 @ 2:56 pm
While J.S. Bach never composed a requiem, his youngest son wrote a partial one!
Chas Belov said,
December 27, 2024 @ 3:26 pm
@Philip Taylor: Actually, "shoot" is a common American euphemism for "shit" and one I would expect to see in a newspaper strip, which Frazz is.
Philip Taylor said,
December 27, 2024 @ 5:19 pm
OK, understood Chas. But it does surprise me how prudish Americans can appear to be, using "darn" where I would say "damn", "shoot" where I would say"shit", and so on — it somehow seems incongruous in a society that (for example) allows for the open carrying of loaded firearms in a public place, in some cases without even requiring the issue of a permit.
HS said,
December 27, 2024 @ 6:25 pm
"Bach" has a completely unique meaning in New Zealand English – it refers to a small holiday cottage, usually located by the sea. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_(New_Zealand) . It is pronounced "batch" and is derived from "bachelor hut" (and not from "bachelor pad" as that Wikipedia article claims – the name goes back to huts used by single workers on major public works projects in New Zealand a century ago, well before anybody in New Zealand would have heard of a "bachelor pad"). As a result, New Zealanders have a tendency to pronounce the name of the great German composer as "batch".
So a "bach day" is in fact a real thing in New Zealand, and a particularly enjoyable one in nice sunny summer weather around Christmas time….
Andrew Usher said,
December 27, 2024 @ 7:07 pm
Philip Taylor:
Americans say shit, damn, etc. with a similar frequency to you. They're just not generally printed in the papers. So when Chas said he 'would expect to see' it in a comic strip, that's mainly why.
It's true that 'shoot' and 'darn' are more familiar to Americans, also (I assume) 'heck' – on the other hand I think substitutes for the F word are common everywhere.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo.com
RfP said,
December 27, 2024 @ 8:38 pm
And then there are the Bach Flower essences, developed by Dr. Edward Bach, and available in pharmacies or natural grocery stores—or chemists shops—in many countries.
Dr. Bach happened to be Welsh, and pronounced his name like “batch.”
But perhaps not surprisingly, they’re pronounced by most people as if they were developed by a famous German composer.
Peter Grubtal said,
December 28, 2024 @ 2:26 am
In England the euphemism for s*** is "sugar".
The asterisks appeared when I spoke the text in without euphemism.
Linda Seebach said,
December 28, 2024 @ 9:31 am
My late father-in-law, who was fond of puns, used to explain to people who mispronounced his (and my) surname, "You know, you go to a concert to hear Bach? Our name is "See Bach."
I've more often been addressed as "Ms. Seebotch" by nuisance callers.
S Frankel said,
December 28, 2024 @ 10:21 am
@RfP – If Dr Edward Bach was Welsh, then his ancestors would have pronounced their last name like the German composer. And (at least) one of them might have been of small stature, since the word means "little" in Welsh.
Robert Coren said,
December 28, 2024 @ 10:52 am
@Roscoe: I did see a reference on Facebook on Thursday to "Bach sing day", and was tempted to suggest that every day *should* be such.
RfP said,
December 29, 2024 @ 1:09 am
@ S Frankel
That's really interesting!
I've always wanted to learn more about Welsh, and now I at least had to look up one word—which I hope I got right, and which I hope leads to further investigation on my part:
Diolch!
Andrew Usher said,
December 29, 2024 @ 3:20 pm
And 'Bach sing day' feels like a perfect homophone for 'Boxing Day', not that I'd use either.
While the pronunciation of Bach is relevant, I'd mention what seems like a puzzle: the vowel in British English. It seems to be an almost invariable rule that a foreign word having a short vowel in a closed syllable, like 'Bach', is Englished with a short vowel in Britain; is Bach the only exception? The long vowel is obviously not American influence, nor can it be ordinary BATH broadening, which never occurred in this environment. So you'd expect with a high degree of certainty Brits to say 'Bach' like 'back', yet they don't.
Philip Taylor said,
December 29, 2024 @ 3:46 pm
'Bach sing day' feels like a perfect homophone for 'Boxing Day' — perhaps in your topolect, Andrew, but not in mine. For one thing, "Bach" is aspirated, "Box" is not, and the vowel sounds are very different : /a/ v. /ɒ/.
HS said,
December 29, 2024 @ 6:47 pm
> "the word means "little" in Welsh."
Yes, the Wikipedia page gives that as an alternative etymology for the New Zealand "bach". I've never heard that theory before and I'm extremely skeptical. Despite that article's claim that "sizeable populations of Welsh miners relocated to New Zealand during mining booms", the article it links to shows that the numbers were tiny.
I think I should clarify what I meant when I said that New Zealanders have a tendency to pronounce the name of the composer as "batch" because I think that wording could give the wrong impression. It would be better to say that you occasionally hear a New Zealander pronounce it that way, presumably as a result of the pronunciation of the New Zealand bach. I don't think any well educated New Zealander would pronounce it as "batch", and certainly not any classical music fan, but I have occasionally heard New Zealanders pronounce it that way – presumably people who are only familiar with the name from seeing it in writing.
Like Philip Taylor, "I baroque it" was immediately obvious to me but "Bach thing day" was completely opaque, and not helped by interference in my mind from the New Zealand "bach". But since New Zealanders tend to have Christmas Day at home with the family and then head off immediately afterwards on their long summer holiday at the bach, for many New Zealanders Boxing Day is quite literally a "bach day" – and at a pinch I suppose you could possibly stretch that to being a "bach-ing day"… (Though no New Zealander would say that, and the pronunciation is wrong anyway.)
Andrew Usher said,
December 31, 2024 @ 12:38 am
Philip Taylor:
This is one of the standard American/British differences and your posting as if unaware is, at least, irritating. We don't distinguish PALM and LOT. Now by IPA /a. the vowel you said you use in 'Bach', did you mean TRAP or PALM? Given my next paragraph it's rather pertinent and, unfortunately, there's an ambiguity in how people have used the IPA in this area .
Yes, the name Bach is 'aspirated' (pronounced with a fricative at the end) by most but that becomes hardly audible before an /s/ so the pun would work just as well.
Philip Taylor said,
December 31, 2024 @ 4:39 am
When you say "We don't distinguish PALM and LOT", Andrew, are you speaking for all Americans or for a subset ? As to "Bach" (the composer) in British English, the /a/ IPA was intended to represent anywhere in the BATH-PALM-START continuum — I have never heard any (knowledgeable) speaker of any language use the TRAP vowel when speaking the composer's name.
Philip Taylor said,
December 31, 2024 @ 5:01 am
P.S. Had I intended the TRAP vowel, I would have used IPA /æ/.
Andrew Usher said,
December 31, 2024 @ 10:09 pm
I actually suspected that and had to ask only because IPA /a/ is used so loosely, and in British English transcriptions is generally used for TRAP if used at all. As stated, I think it's a mystery why at least some Britons _don't_ use TRAP.
As for my PALM = LOT, this is a well-studied matter, the complete results of which can hardly be summarised here. But it is unanimously agreed to be a GA feature, and its absence continues to decline even the regional variants that can make the difference. My criticism was not arrogance but a reaction to your apparent presumption that you could question my knowledge of my own dialect without doing any research.
Philip Taylor said,
January 1, 2025 @ 5:29 am
"My criticism was not arrogance but a reaction to your apparent presumption that you could question my knowledge of my own dialect without doing any research" — there was no intention to "question [your] knowledge of [your] own dialect" whatsoever, Andrew — I was merely pointing out that what may be homophonous in your topolect is not necessarily homophonous in other topolects.
As to "why at least some Britons _don't_ use TRAP", if this is in the context of the composer Bach, then I would suggest that anyone speaking of Bach will almost certainly be familiar with at least some of his work and will have heard the name spoken by others (typically radio announcers/presenters). I can, of course, imagine a child from a non-musical family seeing "Bach" on the printed page and thinking to himself "/bætʃ/" but he would almost certainly be corrected if he were to use that sound when referring to the composer in speech.
Andrew Usher said,
January 1, 2025 @ 9:12 pm
I know that they would not be homophones for everyone; even though I did not explicitly state it, I was speaking only for myself. It should be clear by now that I am hardly linguistically naive.
I already wrote, in the same post I mentioned the homophony, why I'd expect to hear TRAP – that's /bæk/ or /bæx/ of course, not the illiterate /bætʃ/. In one sentence: borrowings with short A in a closed syllable regularly become TRAP in Briiish English, and there seem to be no others that got the long vowel. I agree that now the pronunciation is fixed by usage, but that doesn't explain how it arose.
Philip Taylor said,
January 2, 2025 @ 4:12 am
If you could give some examples of "borrowings with short A in a closed syllable [which have] become TRAP in British English", the reason may become more clear, but as an a priori explanation I would suggest we attempt to honour the authentic pronunciation of famous personal names rather more rigorously than we do "everyday words" — we don't (for example) speak of /ˈtʃɒp ɪn/ (Chopin) or /ˈjæn ə sek/ (Janáček) [tho' we do tend to get both the middle vowel value and the stress pattern incorrect for the latter].
Philip Taylor said,
January 2, 2025 @ 4:44 am
… or even /ˈdʒæn ə sek/ (too familiar with the authentic pronunciation to even think of this travesty when I commented earlier …) !
Andrew Usher said,
January 2, 2025 @ 10:19 pm
Pasta? Or another famous German fellow, Thomas Mann?
Philip Taylor said,
January 3, 2025 @ 4:21 am
Well, while I believe that "pasta" would be closer to /ˈpasta/ in Italian (and while noting in passing that French "pâté" can be rendered both as /ˈpæt eɪ/ and /pɑː ˈteɪ/ in British English, depending on the speaker), is not German "Mann" almost identical to English "man" (/ˈmæn/) ?
Oh, and please add to my list of composers the names of whom we endeavour to pronounce correctly in British English "Dvořák" — never have I heard / ˈdvɔː ræk / except from children and complete ignorami (tho' we do frequently omit the initial /d/, just as we sometimes omit the leading /p/ in "Przewalski's horse", John Wells' LPD transcription of which is unlike anything I have ever heard in British English — /prəʒ ɪ ˈvæl ski / — to my mind, most educated British speakers [try to] use something close to the Polish version /pʂɛˈvalskʲi/.).
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
January 3, 2025 @ 9:43 am
Really? Yinz work up an authentically Czech /ř/ just for the name? Does the /r/ in my name get rolled too, or do I have to compose a bunch of music first? If so, that's a remarkably British way of encoding status and class hierarchy into the very structures of proper names themselves.
Do you lisp your way through Francisco de Goya, or is it only the /r/s that tell the tale?
Does Andrew Carneigie's mother's pronunciation of her own last name break the tie between the Pittsburgh and NYC pronunciations?
So many questions…
Philip Taylor said,
January 3, 2025 @ 2:22 pm
« that's a remarkably British way of encoding status and class hierarchy into the very structures of proper names themselves » — well, we're a very class-conscious nation :-)
As to "work[ing] up an authentically Czech /ř/ just for the name", no, we tend to use the same /rʒ/ (or possibly /ɹʒ/) approximation to which I alluded in our earlier discussion of "Jiří". And yes, you may well get a rolled /r/ in my pronunciation of your name, but that has nothing to do with my pronunciation of r-háček — it is simply because if I don't roll my "r"s, they come out as "w"s (and have done ever since I was a child), although that is far more noticeable when the "r" is followed by a vowel rather than an "s" as in your case. As to Goya, I have never had occasion to speak his name in full (all the discussion so far has been concerned with composers' surnames, not given names), but I routinely correct BBC announcers when they speak of /ˌbɑː se ˈloʊn ə/ !
Andrew Usher said,
January 3, 2025 @ 8:35 pm
– Words like 'pasta' do exist and many linguists have acknowledged them. They might be called (a subset of) 'foreign A' words. This point wasn't about how you (Philip Taylor) think they ought to be pronounced, but how they actually are.
– Mann and Bach have the exact same vowel in German. The Internet makes it unnecessary to take my word for it. The former is not identical with English man, besides the vowel being shorter, the quality is for me (and probably for you) somewhere between PALM and STRUT.
– The two pronunciations of "pâté" actually reflect two different ones in French – with a short or a long vowel. Today's standard French no longer has long vowels, and its short A was and is more front than that of most languages (i.e. similat to English TRAP).
– As for "Dvořák" the A is long (that's what the accent mark means), but you weren't talking about that vowel. Americans associated with classical music indeed say mainly /rʒ/ for the composer, while other uses of the name get ordinary /r/; I assume non-rhotic speakers generally make the consonant just /ʒ/, which is no worse an approximation. Americans unable to say /dv/ don't drop the /d/ but separate the two with a schwa.
– Philip Taylor's pronunciation of /r/ is idiosyncratic and not representative of any dialect; certainly not standard British, which does not seem to have [r] (trilled) occurring any more often than in standard American.
Philip Taylor said,
January 4, 2025 @ 5:28 am
Pasta — please note, Andrew, that I wrote 'I believe that "pasta" would be closer to /ˈpasta/ in Italian', thus tacitly implying that I fully accepted that we do not (generally) pronounce the word in the same way in English — we typically use the ASH vowel for the first and a schwa for the second.
Mann and Bach — I would welcome an informed opinion from David Marjanović or another native speaker regarding (a) your assertion that they have the same vowel in speech, and (b) how close (or otherwise) each is to the vowel in English "man".
Andrew Usher said,
January 4, 2025 @ 9:11 pm
I can only suggest that, as I implied before, you may listen to any one of the pieces of audio available online to answer the latter point. That is what I did to be sure, and if you would verify me, you could do the same.
Philip Taylor said,
January 5, 2025 @ 7:29 am
Not being a trained phonetician, Andrew, I am not certain that I can rely on the evidence of my own ears, whence my request to David (or another native speaker) to inform us whether Germans (or Austrians, in David's case) hear exactly the same vowel in Mann and Bach, and how close each is to English "man". In Google translate's audio rendering of Ein Mann namens Johann Sebastian Bach I hear the same vowel in Mann, Johann, Sebastian (both occurrences) and Bach, which in all cases is close to (but not identical to) the vowel sound of English "man" but a longer "a" in namens, which I would render in IPA as /a:/. http://tom.brondsted.dk/text2phoneme/, on the other hand, asserts that the second "a" in Sebastian is also longer.