language

-some

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A document quoted someone’s fear of harm from “terrible terrorists” in his country of origin. I commented to a colleague that I’d written a blog post about words like terror (n) – terrify (v) – terrible / terrifying / terrified / terrific (adj) and also awe (n) – awe (v) – awful / awesome (adj) and that we don’t use –some as much as other adjective endings (terrorsome exists but is very rare). He replied that there is a hymn, Let us with a gladsome mind. I responded with another, less well-known hymn O gladsome light, a translation of the ancient Greek hymn Φῶς Ἱλαρόν, phos hilaron, better known as Hail, gladdening light.

I started wondering how many words there are ending in –some. The Free Dictionary lists 272, but we can put three groups of words aside in short order.

The first is those in which –some means body (from Greek σῶμα, sôma), most often in words relating to the cells of biological and botanical bodies. By far the best known of these is chromosome, but The Free Dictionary lists 129 others, from aerosome to virosome. Some of these are very obscure. Pages for Mac recognises only 39 of them. In most cases, the first half of the word is a combining form ending in o-. If I know the meaning of the first half of the word, I might be able to guess at the meaning of the whole, but knowing that megasomes and microsomes are large bodies and small bodies respectively doesn’t help me know of what. 

The second group is those which mean ‘a group of x people or things’, of which The Free Dictionary lists twosome to eightsome and also twasome, which seems to exist only in the name of a specific Scottish dance.

The third is a small number of place and personal names.  

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Relatives

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Last night I went to a small family dinner/party for my great-niece’s birthday. One of my great-nieces. My oldest great-niece. My oldest sister’s son’s oldest daughter. My nephew is my sister’s oldest child, but not her oldest son, because his two siblings are women. My great-niece is my nephew’s oldest child and oldest daughter, because her two siblings are girls. How much information do we need, and how many relationships do we have words for in English?

At the party were (I started typing all the reasonable ways to refer to each person, but it started getting messy. In most cases I could add ‘one of my _s’, because in most cases I have more than one of each):
my sister and brother-in-law
my nephew, niece-in-law (less used than mother/father/sister/brother/daughter/son-in-law) and great-nieces
my niece-in-law’s mother and father
my niece-in-law’s sister and niece
my niece-in-law’s uncle, cousin and cousin once removed (both female, but we don’t specify that in English)

It’s easier from my great-niece’s perspective, because she’s genetically related to everyone. There were her sisters, parents, aunt, cousin, grand-parents, great-uncles, first cousin once removed and second cousin. 

I usually wouldn’t have to go into this much detail about who was there. In most cases I can just say ‘relatives on both sides of her family’. 

Last week, for Seollal/Korean New Year, the Korea Herald had an article about relationship terms, especially newly-weds negotiating them at family gatherings. As well as my own Australian relatives, I also have my wife’s Korean relatives, who unfortunately I get to see less often. During my second stay in Korea I attended the family gathering without her (she’d visited between Christmas and mid-January but had returned to Australia by Seollal). A colleague who had also married a Korean woman was astonished that I would willingly attend/had willingly attended a family gathering without my wife. I like my Korean in-laws, even though/maybe because I can’t communicate much with them. Food, drink, no conversation, no problem.

As a COVID-time project I joined Wikitree, a co-operative genealogy site. The last I saw, they stated that they had 25 million profiles linked. That includes links by marriage, which obviously increase very quickly. Another brother-in-law’s brother-in-law’s second cousin’s husband is a Very Important Person, but Wikitree doesn’t know about some of those people, because it’s not my place to create entries for them. Instead, it links me to him a longer way around, not even tracing us to our common direct ancestor.

A single syllable

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I recently composed music for a poem which contains the word single. When I was typing the words in the music notation file, I was momentarily flummoxed by where to divide the word (indicated with a hyphen in music notation). sin-gle didn’t look right, but sing-le looked totally wrong (as it’s not related to ‘sing’). Various websites suggested sin-gle, but Google’s AI Overview told me “No, you should not hyphenate the word “single” because it is a one-syllable word.” Huh?

A syllable is built around a nucleus, which is most often a vowel, but in English can be a small number of consonants, l, r, m, n or ŋ (ng). Other languages allow more (see the Wikipedia article.) The nucleus of the second syllable of single is l. Or maybe it’s ə for some people.

There are two complications. The first is that we pronounce single as sɪŋ g(ə)l, which should be spelled sing-gle, which looks totally wrong. The second is that we sing vowels for as long as possible, and either place the consonant on the beginning of the next syllable (especially if it starts with a vowel), or as late as possible (especially if the next syllable starts with a consonant. (One score one choir I sing in found on the internet took this to its logical extreme and had words like e-xce-lsis and a-gnus, which were very distracting.)

The same poem contains the word nightingale, which similarly is night-in-gale. gale is clearly a separate syllable, but the same two complications apply.  

I thought I remembered another song using single, but it’s actually simple, to which most of the same issues apply.

PS Language Log has a series of posts on AI’s inability to count the number of times a certain letter appears in a word or word in a text, starting here.

O lonely me!

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Two of the choirs I sing in are holding regular online sessions to keep us going musically and socially. The conductor of one choir finishes each session with a rousing rending of something well-known (which we have to sing by ourselves to her piano accompaniment, because it is impossible to sync multiple people within an online session). Last night’s rend was the Italian song O sole mio. To the extent that I’d ever thought about it, I had assumed that it meant O alone/lonely me, because sole is obviously the same word as only/alone/lonely and mio is obviously the same word as me. As the conductor was scrolling around the music on her screen that she had shared within the online session, I saw that the English title is My sun. 

Latin sōl, sun became Italian sole; solus (only) (which I knew through the liturgical text Quoniam tu solus sanctus) became solo; me stayed as me; and meus became mio. So O alone/lonely me would be O solo me. Except that Latin and Italian don’t use object/accusative pronouns in this way; it would have to be O solo io, the equivalent of English O alone/lonely I.

O sole mio is actually in Neapolitan, which is either a dialect of Italian or a closely related Italo-Romance language, depending on who you ask, but there’s far more about Italian on the internet, so I had to rely on that. 

I wondered whether sōl/sole and solus/solo are related, because the sun is possibly the prototypical example of something alone, but no. But they both have been traced back to proto-Indo-European, so they’re both very old words.

There are four related issues. The first is that using adjectives before pronouns is restricted to examples such as poor you or lucky me (compare *tall you and *short me). The second is that me is more natural here than I (while you is both the subject/nominative and object/accusative form). The third is that lonely can be used attributively or predicatively: I am lonely, O lonely me, while alone can only be used predicatively: I am alone, *O alone me. The fourth is that only, alone and lonely are all based on one and that only is very different: *I am only, *O only me.