Samuel Harrison writes,

In the streets of Paris, it is not uncommon to see a large fluorescent-green truck driving slowly down an avenue, with a powerful pressure-hose sweeping dust, graffiti, and debris off surfaces and into the gutters. These trucks are produced by the German manufacturer Alfred Kärcher GmbH & Co., the motto of which is “simply clean.” “Kärcher” has entered French vocabulary as a colloquialism to describe any type of high pressure street-sweepers. However, as the French Presidential elections draw nearer, the word has found new significance.

It is June, 2005, and Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior, is questioned on an incident in which an eleven year old boy was killed by a stray gunshot in a suburb populated largely by Muslim immigrants. Sarkozy, using the well-known image of the pressure-cleaners, responds that the area should “cleaned out with a Kärcher.” He has since done just that, in a tough-on-crime stance previously rare in France’s domestic policy. Though immigration control and more stringent anti-criminal policy are hardly his cornerstone policies, his ideology has now been deemed “Karcherism”, his actions “Karcherizing”, and his supporters “Karcherists.”

Sarkozy, or Sarko as he has recently been nicknamed, a devout Roman Catholic of Graeco-Hungarian immigrant ancestry, could well be described as a pressure hose pointed at an otherwise “stale” French political world. His aggressive campaigning as Minister of the Interior and Minister of Economy, Finance and Industry over the past five years have served a resounding wake-up call to democratic-socialists, who had anticipated an easy victory in 2007. In his manifesto “Testimony: France in the 21st Century”, he sets out his sweeping reform schemes calling for a fairer taxation system, the need to “dynamite” France’s sclerotic welfare system, a lowering of the ludicrously high minimum wage, an end of France’s leather-bound adherence to the Revolution-born law of laïcité?—?separation of Church and State?—?, greater cooperation with the US and UK, a “full-throttle” French military mission to Iraq, and a strict control of immigration.

These bold and so-called iconoclastic policies have marshaled strong support for Sarko?—?support soon to be put to the test in the French primaries. Out of twelve runners, only four are considered to have very substantial support from voters. As the leading right-wing candidate, Sarko’s main competition for conservative votes will come from François Bayrou, a more moderate politician whose campaign platform remains murky, and Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extremely radical right-wing leader who has been fined and imprisoned for assault and battery of EU dignitaries and “minimizing the Holocaust”, and described by detractors as a neo-Nazi. On the left, a Hilary-esque Ségolène Royal represents the Socialist Party, who poled second at 22%, coming in just after Sarko’s 28%.

In the French system, all twelve candidates will be on the ballot for April 22nd. If no candidate accrues more than 50% of the votes?—?and, if the fractured poles are any indication, they will not?—?then the two highest-scoring candidates will face off in a secondary election. Based on poles by Ipsos, experts predict a close race in the primaries, with Sarkozy and Royal, who has managed to largely unite the left, coming out on top. In the secondary election, predictions hold that Sarkozy will be able to count on the defeated Le Pen’s 13% supporters and at least half of Bayrou’s 20%, while the 16.5% who made up the remaining voters will be largely divided between the two.

Kärcher reports a rise in sales by 13% since Sarko’s remarks. Sarkozy hopes to guide his country to a “brave, new vision for France as it engages the world of the twenty-first century.” In a country whose modern order and policies were born in misguided Revolution, some new vision is long overdue. Perhaps Paris’ streets, long stained with blood from the guillotine, will be washed clean with the none-too-gentle blasts of a Kärcher.

Gabriel Bertilson pictures,

Early meadow-rue

And goes on to write,

John said something about my writing a post on liturgy, so here’s something like that. (He also talked about my doing worship, but that’ll be my next post.)

Liturgy comes first from the Greek ?????????? (leitourgí?), public service, service of the gods, public worship. This in turn is from ?????????? (leitourgós), public servant, minister. This is from *?????? (leîtos), public, a variant of *?????? (l?itos), and -????? (-ergos), that works.

?????? comes from ????/???? (l?ós/le?s), a variant of ???? (l?ós), people. In Attic Greek (the dialect spoken in Athens; the most prestigious one) an original ? (?) turned to ? (?) in most places (except after ?, ?, and ?); in Ionic, however, it turned to ? everywhere. An example given in Wikipedia is Attic ??????? (ne?ní?s) vs. Ionic ??????? (ne?ní?s), young man.

The alternative form of the variant form, ???? (le?s), probably comes from the length of the vowels being exchanged by quantitative metathesis.

?????? is only recorded in the substantive uses (that is, uses in the function of a noun) ?????? (l?iton), public hall (in the neuter) and ?????/???? (l?it?/l?t?), priestess (in the feminine).

-????? (-ergos) comes from Greek ????? (érgon), work, deed. Interestingly enough, this is in fact the cognate of our English word work. The ? (g) corresponds to English k, and the English w corresponds to the obsolete Greek letter ? (w) called digamma that was originally in the word (??????, wérgon). This letter is named from the fact that it was made from two capital gammas (?) put together. (It’s where our letter F comes from.)

So, then, if ?????????? (leitourgós) comes from *?????- (leîto-) and -????? (-ergos), why isn’t it ?????????? (leitoergós), with the same vowels as those of the parts making it up? The reason is because of contraction. When an ? (e) and ? (o) come together, they change into the long vowel ?? (ou).

Then ?????????? (leitourgí?) came into Latin as l?t?rgia. Earlier in the history of Greek, the vowels ?? and ?? were pronounced like Latin ? and ?. Later they changed to ? and ?, and by the loss of length (which is present now in Modern Greek), they were pronounced in medieval times as i and u. So the reason for their transliteration into medieval Latin as ? and ? was probably either because of its scholarly pronunciation, or merely as a recognition of how it was pronounced formerly.

And then l?t?rgia came into English as liturgy. Generally Latin feminine nouns like l?t?rgia that end in -ia (not, however, -tia; that generally changes to -ce) change to -y in English, presumably from the Old French -ie.

So that’s about all I have to say on that.

And an announcement. The links to soundfiles in my previous posts have been modified so that when you click on them they’ll open up in a new window (or a new tab if you have my version of Firefox). Then if you click on a new one, it’ll go to the same window.

I learned how to do it from Marco Schuffelen’s webpage with soundfiles of Dutch words; he used it with some of his links. It’s quite an impressive site that he’s made. If you have any interest in learning how to pronounce Dutch, that would be a good place. (Of course, depending on what dialect you wanted…)

And I’ve put one of my pictures at the top of this post. It’s a picture taken at Nerstrand Woods State Park (I think) of an early meadow-rue. The early meadow-rue is a plant in the anemone family, though the only really obvious similarity it shares with anemones is the shape of its leaves.

So that’s all for today. I may get in some soundfiles later…

Edit: Added transliterations that pop up when you put your mouse over the Greek words, due to the fact that some of the characters that I used in my other transliterations aren’t in most fonts. A “/” put after a vowel indicates acute accent; a “^” indicates circumflex accent; a “:” indicates a long vowel.

Gabriel Bertilson writes,

In English most nouns form their plural with -s. Why, then, do we have man, feet, and mice rather than mans, foots, and mouses?

These nouns did in fact at one time form their plurals with a regular suffix. The Proto-Germanic word *fót, foot for example, had *fótiwiz as its plural. And the plural of Gothic fótus was fótjus.

So apparently there must have been some change that affected English at some time during its history that didn’t affect Gothic and Proto-Germanic. That’s indeed the case. This change is i-mutation or umlaut (not the Umlaut diacritic, though the diacritic is used in German writing to indicate it, but the phonological process).

I mentioned it in the last post, but here I’ll see if I can set it out more systematically.

First, i-mutation changes a vowel when there’s an i or j (a consonantal i) in the syllable after it. So *fótiz fits this description, and *manniz (Proto-Germanic men) and *músi (Proto-Germanic mice) as well.

Second, i-mutation changes the vowel by making it more like the sound i.

So front vowels – English bod and baud in some pronunciations of English (the one, for example, of most people in Minnesota), and bad, bed, bade, bid, and bead – were raised. That is, they changed to the sound “next in line” after it. In the list I gave, each sound would change to the one after it – bad to bed, bed to bade (or more precisely, a monophthongal version of it) or bead, etc.

A modern example of raising is a certain American pronunciation of -ing. (This is one aspect of what’s sometimes known as the California vowel shift – though it by no means occurs only in California.) Because of the ng sound (known in linguistics as a velar nasal), the i, which is pronounced in other varieties of English the same as the vowel in bid, is pronounced instead roughly as the vowel in bead. Sometimes the ng is somewhat palatalized (at least in the way I hear it) to something similar to the sound in RP new.

Back vowels, – English bod and baud in other dialects of English, and bud, bode, bood – on the other hand, were fronted. That is, they changed to the corresponding front vowel. Baud (this is the American non-rounded back-vowel pronunciation, not the English rounded back-vowel pronunciation) would change to bad, bud to bed, bode to bade (or a version of bode pronounced, like bode is, with rounded lips: Old Norse *beyd), bude to bead (or, again, a version of it pronounced with rounded lips: Old English/Old Norse *býd).

So… in Old English the front vowels were æ, e, and i/y/ie. Through i-mutation æ would change to e, e to i, but i, y, and ie couldn’t move up any further toward i, being right there.

The Old English back vowels were a, o, and u. I-mutation changed o to e, and a to æ in most cases, except with a nasal (m or n) following it, where it would change to e. (It would also in that case sometimes be written o, indicating that it was likely pronounced differently from the a in other places.) The vowel u changed to y.

Now we come back to our original words. Old English man(n)/mon(n), man changed to men(n) in the nominative plural with i-mutation.

Old English fót, foot changed to fét (and in some dialects , a rounded é sound) in the nominative plural, and sometimes had the same vowel in the dative and genitive singulars.

Old English mús (this Old English long u generally changed to Modern English ou), mouse changed to mýs in the plural. It’s interesting to note that the -e of the Modern English singular and -ce of the plural seem to have crept into our spelling without proper warrant. (Or else those bringing it in found “mous” and “mise” not very attractive… a sentiment I can somewhat understand.)

Now I’ve come to the end of my post… a rather long one. If you’ve read it this far, good job, and you’ll now be released from your misery. So I say, Wesaþ gé hále! and if the adjectival ending on that was wrong, Be ye whole!

Edit: Soundfiles, image of fœt with acute added.