Hal is a Cornish place-name element which causes considerable confusion. It is often ‘translated’ as “moor”, giving the impression of an upland area, but actually the Cornish for “moor” in this sense is gûn or rôs. What hal actually means is “marsh” — a low-lying, wet tract of ground. Unfortunately, these places are often called “moors” in Cornish English.

The other problem with this element is that it turns up with the spelling <hale> in some place-names, as does the element hayl/heyl, which means “estuary”. For example, the name Penhale (there are two places with this name in this area) could mean either “the end of the marsh” or “the end of the estuary”.

Just to make things even more confusing, some names which appear to contain hal in fact contain hel, which means “hall”. An example is Halwyn not far from here. This means “white hall” and not “white marsh”.
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Photo credit: Ennor, Creative Commons Share Alike Licence

No, I’m not going fey. As you may have gathered from some recent posts, I have been looking at some of the orthographic features of various languages. I have come across a few symbols which are included in Unicode that I can’t find languages for (yet). You can see two of them to the left together with their Unicode numbers. Presumably, if they are included in Unicode, some language somewhere must use them. Any suggestions would be gratefully received. No fortune, but only fame awaits those who respond!

Shona, as you probably know, is a Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe, whose flag you can see to the left. There are also speakers in Zambia and other neighbouring states. Shona is famous (or should that be notorious?) for having so-called “whistle” fricatives. The voiceless one is written <sv> in the standard orthography of the language. Its voiced counterpart is written <zv>. So far, so good, though I should add that there are couple of corresponding affricates, written <tsv> and <dzv> respectively. Also <v> represents [w] rather than [v]. Shona has [v], but this is written <ṿ>. Still with me?

Both the Omniglot page and the Wikipedia entry for the language recognise that they are a bit out of their depth. One has to sympathise. When I was a postgraduate student at UCL in the 1970s I and all my fellow students failed to convince our fellow student, Alex Pongweni, a native Shona speaker, with our efforts to imitate his production of these dratted sounds.

Published descriptions all agree that these sounds involve multiple articulations, but they do not come to a consensus on what exactly is going on. One disagreement is as to whether they are double articulations, with friction noise being generated at two places simultaneously, or whether they are a primary articulation at the alveolar ridge with some sort of labial secondary articulation. The first of these ideas would lead to symbols such as [ɸ͡s] and [β͡z]. However, * and [zʷ], which is what the second idea implies, certainly would not have done for the sounds Alex Pongweni tried to get us to produce all that time ago.

* there should be s with superscript w here, but for some completely weird reason that combination refuses to display in my browser!

The first, a rather puzzling one, is Tuscarora, spoken in Southern Ontario in Canada, and in New York State and North Carolina in the USA. The orthography used for this language contains <eh>. This represents the vowel [ə̃]. As the letter <h> is used to represent [h] and <e> to represent [ɛ], it’s a bit difficult to see the logic behind this.

Vancouver Island

The use of underlining in Kwakiutl orthography, on the other hand, is rather neat.  Kwakiutl, also known as Kwak’wala, is spoken in the northern part of Vancouver Island and also in adjacent areas on the mainland.  It has <a> = [ə], <k> = [q], <kw> = [qʷ], <k‘> = [qʼ], <k‘w> = [qʷʼ], <x> = [χ], and <xw> = [χʷ]. It seems likely that whoever devised the orthography knew a bit about phonetics and perhaps had the IPA retraction diacritic in mind in including the underlined symbols.

Another nice thing about this language is what the speakers of it call themselves: Kwakwaka’wakw [kʷakʷakaʔwakʷ], which means “speakers of Kwakiutl”.

The final two languages use underlining to indicate nasalisation of vowels. Chickasaw, spoken mainly in Oklahoma, has <a> = [ɑ̃, ə̃], <i> = [ĩ, ɪ̃], <o> = [ə̃ʊ̃], and <u> = [ũ, ʊ̃]. Choctaw, spoken in central Mississippi, Louisiana and Tennesee, is practically the same.

Rutebeuf is the “nom de guerre” of a French trouvère (troubador). His true name is not known, but he probably was born in Champagne about 1230 and died around 1285.

Quite a lot of his writings have survived and you can see them in the original mediaeval French on the French Wikisource

Rutebeuf seems to have been quite a character. His songs contain many references to his poverty, though it is quite clear from other things he writes about that he received commissions to write from some very influential people. One of Rutebeuf’s problems seems to have been that he was addicted to gambling.

I first came across the name Rutebeuf in a song called Pauvre Rutebeuf recorded by Joan Baez in 1965. In a fit of nostalgia I downloaded the song from iTunes this morning. The song was put together by a French singer/song writer called Léo Ferré from extracts of various of the troubador’s songs, which he translated into modern French, well sort of.

Here it is.

You can hear Joan Baez singing the song on YouTube. She switches the text around a bit and doesn’t sing the last two lines

A couple of days ago a trip to Glendurgan near Falmouth. It is a subtropical valley garden. We went there to meet up with my nephew, his wife and two sons. Sam (aged 3) and Joseph (aged 5). The garden was first laid out in the 1820s and 1830s by Alfred Fox and was handed over to the National Trust in 1962.

One of the attractions of the garden is a cherry yew maze and another is the small hamlet of Durgan at the bottom of the valley which looks onto a small beach on the Helford River.

To the left you can see Sam’s preferred method of travel on the way to the beach. A jolly time was had by all and at the end of the visit at ice-cream o’clock Joseph expressed the opinion that the National Trust was very lucky to live in such a nice place.

The name of the village, Durgan, derives from Cornish Dowrgeun which means “otter water”. There is another valley garden called Trebah (meaning uncertain) just a mile or so to the west. You can see it on the satellite image at the top of the post.

The letter k used to write KTM is unique in two respects. (1) it is the only orthographic symbol which incorporates underlining. (2) it is used to reference two different dialects of a language — in effect it means a [k] sound, which in other types of Māori is an [ŋ] sound.

(2) above I still believe to be true, but (1) definitely is not.

Having been trawling through Omniglot, I have come across a handful of languages which use a Latin-based script and which use underlining for various purposes.

For instance, a few Native American languages which indicate voiceless vowels this way. An example is Comanche which has voiceless versions of all its six vowels <a e i o u ʉ> (the last represents [ə]). So <a> = [ḁ], <e> = [e̥] etc.

More on this another time.

There are lots of charming and/or peculiar place-names on the Isles of Scilly. How about Illiswilgig? This was recorded in 1584 as Inniswelsick, meaning “grassy island”. An even odder one is Izzicumpucca. Apparently this was originally Islonk an Bucca, meaning “the Bucca’s chasm”. A Bucca is a Cornish imp. A couple which always seem to me as if they ought to be somewhere in the Mediterranean are Minalto and Mincarlo. In both cases the first element is Cornish mên – “stone”. In the first name the second element is altow, meaning “cliffs, and in the second name it is carlyth, meaning “rayfish”.
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Photo credit: © Copyright David Lally and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence