The book said prune in fall or spring, and spring didn’t work. So this time I’m trimming in fall, and cutting it back until it looks like an Angry Orchard poster.
It gave us 2 good apples. But it’s right near our Japanese maple, it’s an espaliered apple and should be kept under control, so we hope ultimately to limb-up the taller maple to let them co-exist. If not, it’s curtains for the apple, which is up against the fence, anyway.
This is strenuous work, but I now have proper short loppers for the job and we are early enough to get the compost-trash to hold the branches I cut.
Whew!
Put the winter cover on the koi pond, and will shut down the pumps when it threatens freezing. We’re around the 36’s at night.
Quiet today. No howling from Tanner, which has been nearly constant for 4 months. Maybe we’re going to win this. I hope the poor fellow is not depressed.
My house came with several near-dead elderly apple trees (they’d been mauled by bears, neglected for a couple decades, and were suffering from drought) that had apparently stopped producing. Did nothing for ’em but trim out the dead branches… next year one had a solid mass of about 300 apples, all on one branch, which on a tree maybe 12 feet tall looked ridiculous. (Mediocre apples, unfortunately.) Lot of snow and rain this year and now two are producing… one had a few dozen pretty good apples, the other probably has over 1000 apples on it, no kidding (and better-tasting than last year’s). Way more than I can possibly use or even give away, but the deer have been scarfing ’em up, so they don’t quite go to waste.
Things to do with too many apples:
– juice them;
– make applesauce;
– make apple jam;
– make applebutter;
– make applesyrup.
If you pasteurize the jars and bottles of applesauce and applejuice, they’ll keep well for a while. Apple jam works like any other jam, you add sugar which helps it keep, and pasteurize as well if you want it to last for more than a year on the shelf. Apple butter I don’t know.
Apple syrup when storebought looks rather like marmite, a very dark brown, with a sweet but fresh taste and sticky jam-like consistency to spread on bread or pancakes. Homemade can be thinner and lighter brown, more like syrup (halfway between maple syrup and molasses, but fresher-tasting and less sweet, unless you add a lot of brown castor sugar) – just stop cooking and evaporating it when it’s to your taste.
The thing about apple syrup is that you can make it from windfall apples that are damaged, not quite ripe and not very juicy, if you remove the damaged bits before juicing them. No need to peel or core them, just clean and cut into chunks to juice them. Then reduce the juice to syrup by slowly cooking it for a long time with the lid off. If the apples are less than fully ripe and juicy, you need to add some brown castor sugar (or other sugar) to the juice while reducing it. This turns a kilogram of apples into about a (small) jam-jar of syrup.
Comment On the poor apples – next year, if you thin about 2/3 of them (leave about 6 – 8 inches between each apple along the limb) you will find the size and quality greatly improved
This may sound absurd, but if you are making fruit butter in small batches, your best friend is a slow cooker/crockpot. Fruit butters rely on long slow cooking to condense fruit into a sweet spread that contains no or very little added sugar, great for people watching their weight or diabetic. You can fill a crockpot with chopped fruit and let it cook for 2-3 days on low, topping off with more fruit as the original batch cooks down, and stirring occasionally. When the mass becomes one consistency without pools of juice, it’s ready to can; sadly, there’s no quick way around traditional canning processes, but you will still take one time-consuming step out of the process.
Comment Make applesauce. Add some dried dates, chopped up, some raisins. All your neighbors will be coming by asking what that wonderful smell is.
I remember one episode of PBS’s “The Victory Garden”, and I can’t remember Roger’s last name, but he showed how to prune an apple tree. He did it in early winter, if I recall, but if there are no leaves, it probably doesn’t matter by a couple of months. Anyway, the tree was severely overbranched with suckers all over. He did some massive pruning, and it looked like he’d butchered it, but he said that it would be fine in spring. You wanted it to have enough open space that a sparrow could fly through it. Aside from the suckers diverting energy from the fruit, it gets more light to the inner leaves. Branches that cross, or are growing downward need to go.
Are you thinking of Roger Cook (or even Koch) now on the “This Old House” series? I saw the same show, though my recollection is he said robin, a slightly larger bird, but other than that yes, one should do all that. The one thing I’d add is, taking care to prune just beyond the “branch collar” on all side branches, leaving no stubs.
I have a half dozen semidwarf trees in the backyard, 2 Gravenstein & 4 Esopus Spitzenbergs (TJ said they’re the best eating apple in the US (of his time) but he’s right!), and 18 roses. Apples are from the family Rosacea, so they are all pruned similarly. I’ll be pruning all those around President’s Day.
I think CJ’s timing may be OK, but suboptimal. The question is whether in her “zone” her cuts still have enough growing season before hard dormancy to seal-off from the rain and damp-induced molds and other infections (“healing” will have to wait for Spring and that’s the issue). The best time to prune is just as winter relents and just before “the sap starts flowing”, relying on Spring growth to heal over from the surrounding branch collar. The exact timing depends on one’s zone and may vary from year to year a bit.
I deal with a different set of circumstances. I need to prune a fig tree, a Brown Turkey, which is still bearing right now. I’m fairly sure which branches need to go, but I want to wait until it’s done for this season, and the tree has had a steady trickle of figs — enough ripening for eating a couple a week out of hand, but nothing like enough for canning or drying. The thing is bushing out with many whippy branches, and tends to bear on new wood, so pruning has been a series of false starts. There is no such thing here as ‘true’ dormancy, just slower growth.
Whew, I am back! (Permanently, I hope.) — For over a week now, I have not had an internet connection due to — the electricity for half my apartment went down when a breaker failed, and there was a leak or clog in the air conditioner / heater drain line. So the electrical outlet for my cable router (internet) and washing machine and dryer and half the apartment, all were off, with water from the A/C dripping into the bathroom, hallway, and carpeting.
After three calls, finally, finally, someone has been out to begin repairs, the guy broke for lunch, and is due back to finish up later. His English is worse than my Spanish, but if I understood him correctly, someone else is supposed to be out to (finally) fix the vent line to my dryer, so it can work properly again.
So, hurray, at least for a little bit, I have a web connection and can let people know I did not disappear into a wormhole somewhere and end up who-knows-where! — And once the electrical is fixed for sure, I can do other things that have been waiting over a week. Friends have promised to pick up the small grocery list, so that will be done too.
Very fortunately, my fridge and stove still worked, and I had hot water, so I was not entirely out of it. But I was seriously considering whether I’d have to have a hotel room or ask to be moved into another apartment while this one was fixed.
Oh, and the pest control guy was by. An honest mix-up (he claims) but once repairs are done, we can then schedule that to be done, so there will definitely be a short hotel stay for a day or two when that happens.
Woo-hoo! Civilization, ain’t it grand?! — I was seriously getting frustrated at the situation not getting resolved. So, so glad this is getting fixed and I can communicate and, ahem, see to cook food and clean and all those other things of, ah, a certain kind of domestic tranquility. (OK, so that’s not really what the Founding Fathers and Mothers had in mind with that phrase, but let’s just go with it. đ )
Hurray, on the road to progress. I will be very glad if the repairs are all done today, at least the major two.
(I have asked friends to buy me a couple of lanterns or task lights that run off batteries or some such, too, to have light in emergencies like what I’ve just had.)
I hope to get back on tonight. Off for now to do other necessary things.
I have missed everyone! — I have much catching up to do.
Comment Hello Blue
Commenti am sorry. I don’t track c j cherry for other folks. Bluecatship. Do you have a blog? Maybe you could reference it?
I do have a blog, but I have not posted to it in (oh my, far longer than I thought). I see I should restart that.
My website: http://www.shinyfiction.com/
It has also not been updated recently, but there is fan audio there, original small attempts at writing (gay-friendly) fiction, some poetry usually lacking in rhyme or meter, and various other odds and ends there, including some things for C.J. Cherryh fans.
My old blog is at: http://www.shinyfiction.com/blog/
I should restart posting there and find some way I want to keep up with that.
I’m mostly working on font ideas, still in various stages. I have a site for this in progress, but when I do have fonts ready, I expect to submit them to at least two vendors, who can reach font buyers better than I can alone. I’ve been thinking of adding a blog there, which might get more regularly updated, albeit with geeky font-design mutterings.
—–
It is refreshingly civilized not to have water dripping onto the floor and in danger of reaching the carpet. It is most pleasant not to contend with this while at one’s bathroom sink, getting ready in the mornings and evenings. It is quite civilized and welcome to have electricity and therefore lights, the ceiling fan, one’s internet access and cable, and the washer and dryer once again working, with a new breaker to support the power.
The dryer vent apparently requires me signing a waiver at the mgmt. office before they’ll have someone over to do that. So this will happen when I’m over there next.
Pest control will happen at some rather-near-to-middle future point.
Groceries are supposed to happen tomorrow, friends have promised.
There is an episode or two of the latest season of Doctor Who to watch when I next watch. So I am remaining spoiler-free regarding the new lady Doctor. However, I expect this will be another enjoyable season. (I enjoyed the heck out of Missy, previously. Really well done.)
So, hurray, civilization! — My cats are also quite pleased at the lack of a water hazard. Heh. But probably more pleased that I am no longer so nose-out-of-joint aggravated.
—–
Be advised that a full bowl of Chunky Soup in the microwave, if the turntable spills it over, creates a mess entirely disproportionately larger than the actual volume of creamy, chunky soup might lead one to believe. It is possible that I have discovered some trans-dimensional reality-distortion factor, which I do hope does not cause problems in my stomach. — Cleanup took more time and effort than one might have reasonably expected from a previously clean microwave. But it was done. — That the microwave is a few feet away from the washer and dryer, in the kitchen, might have something to do with this, in the way of unguessed connections with the matter of disappearing socks, a known phenomenon around washers and dryers. — One had not before noticed any oddities regarding microwave ovens and food preparation and more valume than was previously there. But one advises this in case there might be a phenomenon hitherto unknown to science. — If it should happen that this proves the key to faster-than-light or interstellar travel, please remember it started with a can of ordinary Chunky Soup (Broccoli Cheese Potato) emptied innocently into an ordinary ceramic bowl. — One shall remember in future that said bowl is too prone to turn over on the microwave turntable, and thus not to use it in there. — So, who know, some space-time effect involving the expansion of matter in a turning device — might be the key to star-flight. Heheh. (Or more probably, the overuse of soap and a sponge and paper towels in cleanup.)
But Ben, the point is you post more here about your life than CJ does and there is nothing rlevant to CJ or her work in it. Is that appropriate here? CJ is our focus, not you. Get a clue!
Never intended to bother anyone about my life or anything that matters to me. But I’ve gotten plenty of comments lately from various people, various places. OK, I get it.
“Not relevant? Too Long, Didn’t Read?” OK, you can skip it. But hey, if I share a personal opinion, or some event that matters to me, or something I think is funny or enlightening, or something vitally important or frustrating — or just for the sake of simple fellowship with other human beings who might just possibly _like_ me or what I think and feel? — Aw, come on, people. But yeah, if it bothers you, if you don’t care, sure, skip it.
It bothers me that, in places I go to be with fellow fans or people who might like the same things, who might be friendly, too many times lately, I’ve been called out for posting, whether for style or content. All right, I get it. — As I have said before, I don’t have much of any circle of friends in person anymore. That is largely why I post the way I do, I think. It’s called wanting to belong, to be friendly and to be befriended. To matter to others in some way.
So OK, sorry to have bothered people. Never mind if I just wanted to say something funny or poignant or thought-provoking, or something that matters to me from my personal life. I’ll keep it to myself and refrain from posting anything not strictly on-topic. But it bothers me that too often lately, I’ve been called out for just being me or saying anything, whether about my life, or whatever else. I’ve had it. I will still be around and I’ll still post occasionally, but dang, folks, why do so few people care about others anymore? Honestly, that’s how I feel.
@CJ — I personally apologize for any controversy. I do not want to cause you or the fans here any trouble or controversy. I have never intended for anything I say to bother people. I would rather that they enjoy it or understand, or that it sparks some feeling in common. — BW
Ben, it’s not that nobody here cares about others. I’m sure that is not the case here! But things about your life unrelated to CJ and her work properly do belong in your own blog attracting your own community of friends, not intruding on hers. Certainly you understand that. Nobody wants you to disappear from here. Be relevant! Man, that’s a thing we all should aspire to, being relevant.
That’s your problem. We can read or not read comments as we wish.
I was making oatmeal in a microwavable plastic cup with a lid. The lid was the mistake…the oatmeal escaped and made a mess of the turntable. It’s fine without the lid, though.
I have made oatmeal in a 2-cup Pyrex storage dish – that might work for your soup. (Maybe even a bigger size. Do they do three or four-cup storage dishes? They come with lids, but I wouldn’t nuke the soup with one on.)
Yep, the smallest size bowl from my Pyrex nested 3 set is perfect for one can of Campbell’s Chunky or Progresso; I believe it’s 2 1/2 cups. When in doubt, lay a napkin or papertowel over top. You want steam to escape, but only steam!
Câmon guys, be nice. You can always scroll on by.
You must know what goes on in “social media” these days. We have been nice here. It is only respectful to remember whose blog this is and remain relevant to “herself” and her works. It’s “being nice” when that is forgotten to say so in a polite, respectful way. Nobody has “dissed” BCS here.
I agree with Smartcat. Maybe I too wander off topic too much or too long, but I really enjoy the far-ranging friendly discussions here, and the chance to be myself in how and what I react to, as long as I stay polite and either vaguely related to the topic or on a topic known to interest at least a few people here, which to my mind includes (if one wishes) mentioning important or interesting events in one’s life, like hurricanes, Hawaii’s volcano, illness, or my mom’s death.
We’ve become a community on here, and for me that means I tend to be interested in how people are doing.
Talk ranges widely, around CJ and Jane’s books, SF ideas, other book recommendations, games and anime and movies, cats and koi, spring flowers, gardening and pond care, aquarium care and house renovations, Latin and linguistics, geneaology and history, astronomy and scientific discoveries, weather and wildfires, allergies and recipes, house elfs/ball jointed dolls like Wiishu and a bit of knitting/sewing, and whatever else comes up tangentially…
I’d miss that free discussion if we all had to limit ourselves to the main post topic insofar as it connects to CJ.
As Smartcat said, if a topic doesn’t interest you, you can always scroll past.
^^^ THIS ^^^
No one forces anyone to read anything here. (Or, as gets pointed out elseweb, no one makes you click on links.)
Thank you, folks.
BCS, I have noticed that the Chunky line of soups come in a slightly over-sized can. The extra volume may be your problem. I’ve made a mess with a can before, trying to put it in a usual container.
Some computer mice have a little button just behind the scroll wheel. The button change the scrolling from tick, tick, tick–a few lines at a time–to wheeeeeeee!!! It’s very easy to skip or scan through a lot of text.
Maybe we all need to remind ourselves that CJ writes here if and when, maybe as stress relief, maybe as a free sample? In any case, she moderates with a light hand: we are a community. We wander to all kinds of topics. We might even mention Linux and penguins.
The weather here in SoCal is charming. Tropical Storm–once major hurricane in the deep Pacific–Sergio dissipated yesterday, and its remnants are blanketing the Southland with scattered thunderstorms, even on the coast, and darker than usual clouds. The air is fresh and crisp and wet.
This summer was hotter and drier than ever, there was a sprinkler ban for longer than usual, and even the grassy road verges went completely yellow and dried out in a lot of places, which never happens here – queue much grumbling about the weather, the heat and drought.
Then September started off with an autumn storm, and a week or two of grey rain and wind. Though at first everyone was happy with the rain, pretty soon people were sad to be plunged into gloomy wet fall weather so completely and soon.
Now for the last few weeks we’ve had the most gorgeous late summer weather, and everyone is enjoying it to the hilt!
Isn’t it funny, how that short cold and rainy interlude completely resets people’s attitude?
I heard one peal of thunder last night, but only one. It wasn’t raining hard in my area, either. The cool nights have been lovely this week.
BCS, I held off from saying something earlier, more from being careful than polite. I would have said what others have suggested, basically that it’s not *your* blog.
I’ve really enjoyed many of your posts describing your trials and tribulations, but I also was finding them longer, more frequent, and less relevant.
So please try to keep it a bit shorter, and consider your audience.
Hanneke was concerned that her posts may have been too far off-topic, but I think she gets the balance just about right, as do the other contributors. I think this is a great community and I wouldn’t like to lose anyone, including you, BCS.
Discussing what we should post or length of post is all moot! Itâs CJâs blog and she alone makes decisions about it.
As I said before, if you donât want to read it scroll on by.
Pretty much my point; it’s her blog and we should respect that.
Smartcat and Hanneke have it right, I think. It’s up to CJ to make decisions about her blog, and we can scroll by what we don’t want to read. Personally, I enjoy BCS’s remarks, and the wide-ranging discussions among all of the regulars here, and would miss them if they stopped contributing.
What I do not like is sturm und drang on the blog. Please.
I get busy and I don’t always have anything new to post. I am glad to read what you wish to post. There is always a scroll key for whatever I am or am not following.
But prunes are from a plum tree. Maniacal laughter. Oh I love the English language.
Jonathan up here in slowly cooling New England.
@NosenDove, and raisins are from grapes. Strange how our English language twists and turns. đ€. Do other languages do this?
I can’t think of any fruity examples in Dutch, except for raisins: druivenrank = grapevine (not used for “hearing it through the grapevine”, which we hear “in the walking-corridors / in de wandelgangen”, where courtiers, ministers and cabinet members walk between official business meetings and do the real deals…), druif = grape, and rozijn = raisin.
The rest just get “dried” added, like “dried plums”.
Nor do we have the difference between animal and meat that English has (pig – pork, cow – beef); in Dutch those are pigmeat and cowmeat. Well, technically cow is the female, and our word refers to all kinds of cows, so maybe bovinemeat? That sounds too fancy for an ordinary cow-steak! Lots of different cuts of meat do have different specific names.
English Scrabble or Wordfeud is much more fun to play, as you have so much variation, so many more words – our poor straightforward Dutch with its rigid spellings makes the game a lot less flexible and interesting đ
Do you have a grid work to which you are tieing the apple branches?
Languages are funny about words or classes or words that contrast in some way.
The archaic, now poetic or Biblical and Shakespearean use of “kine,” which is the old plural for “cows,” and could mean either “only female cows” or “many cows and bulls as a group.” A dictionary lookup tells me “kine” comes from Middle English “kyn”, from Old English “cyna,” in which that Y is close to our long U sound (EW) like in French tu or German ĂŒh. So ultimately, it was Old English cĂ» (cow) + -en, the plural marker, and cĂ»en went to cyna, and then in Middle English, the Y went from ĂŒh to ih, before moving to long and short Y/I in Modern English, with that AH-EE our long I and Y have. — And Dutch likely has a similar word for (female) cow and cows, and for (male and female) group of cows…and quite likely a separate word for a bull, a male cow.
European languages have many entirely different, contrasting words for the male and female large animal pairs, and sometimes a third neutral word for groups of large animals. English keeps many of these, but other languages have them too. (Spanish toro y vaca, for bull and cow, for instance.)
Then we also sometimes see contrasting words for differences like “boy” and “girl” (or older “knave” and “maiden” and “youth(s)”) — And “young’uns” for young ones blended with an older alternate plural, youngens, an alternate of youth, youths. — For some reason, the words for “boy” and “girl,” are very volatile, and may change often as one word gets used informally for “male, boy or man” or “female, girl or woman” and various older or younger distinctions, or positive or negative connotations to do with age or work or other status. (So a churl and a knave are both negative-ish, but originally were two words for kinds of boys, the latter being a male child or adolescent up through, colloquially, adult males; and then a youth was either an adolescent male or could include males and females, but was mostly usually males more than females. And then later, words like “lad” and “lass” and “boy” and “girl” got added. And then “jack” and “Joe” and “guy” were added, generalized from common male names.) — But periodically, some new word gets into fashion and displaces the older words, which get lost or acquire modified meanings. This happens often, apparently, for the boy-and-girl words in languages, because people’s ideas of what constitutes a general or specific or a proper or common word for these, has a little wiggle room as to ages and status. (Think how “kids” (another word that changed meaning) are sensitive about being a little kid, a big kid, or ooh, a teen.) Then we add on expectations of social roles (and relationships of various kinds) to further muddle things. Our current idea of a “teenager” is rather different, and the word itself is only from the 20th century, for instance.)
We get other things like that, or the animal in the farmyard versus meat on the table distinction in English. (Why? Because the Saxon English became the conquered class and the Norman French became the ruling class, and the two groups used their native words for things, and when the Saxons and Normans did something truly unusual and merged, along with some Vikings and Danes, to become one English people, we kept the different words as useful distinctions.)
It’s odd: In French, a “raisin” is not a raisin, and a “prune” is not a prune in their English sense of the dried fruit. In French, they are the undried, fresh fruits, grapes and plums, and you’d add “sec” (dry) after, to say the dried fruits. In French, I’m not sure if there’s a modern cognate for uva, grape, from Latin. (Spanish keeps that as uve.) But in French, un vin, les vins, mean wine and wines. (My memory says I am forgetting a word for the grapevines, the plants as grown in the fields, and probably some other specialized words for viniculture.)
So for some reason, Middle English people created a distinction between the fresh, undried fruits and the dried or preserved fruits, and yet they did that mostly for raisins and prunes, but not apples or pears or others. (A “pear” is essentially a borrowed Middle French word anyway.) So we don’t have apples as the fresh fruit, and pommes as the dried fruit, for instance. — It doesn’t usually follow consistent, logical patterns, as to why we get those classes of words. It just happens organically.
The Saxons didn’t make a thou versus ye distinction on familiar versus formal terms. Those were strictly any “single you” and “plural you,” whether your family and friends or the most respected people around. The Norman French made a distinction in three ways: tu (and thou) were always singular, familiar (family and friends) or juniors or lower in status, and vous (and ye) were either plural or could be you in the formal and respectful, or older, or higher status people for either singular or plural. And then “on” (one) could be one, someone, anyone, no one, one singular person where the gender was unspecified and general, because it didn’t matter to the context. (English already had dialectal variant forms for “one” and “ane/ain” and the Norman French “on,” related, influenced the dominance of the English form, one, rather than ane or ain.)
We get they, them, their(s) from a Danish / Viking import. This is how significantly the Danish and Viking raids and colonies in England influenced English life, along with the Danelaw. (And it’s why Beowulf keeps referring to Danish groups. It’s a Danish and English story, not solely English / Saxon.) — Otherwise, we’d have kept something like heo or hey for “they,” and maybe heir for “their.” We did keep the hem form in ’em, informal them. (And hir and hine (his’n) and hit and hits (it and its) sort of stayed on.)
Languages do a lot of odd things in moving around over the centuries. We borrow words and reshape them for new uses, and old words get discarded or reshaped with slightly newer meanings, sometimes until they are displaced entirely or split in two.
For some reason, English dropped “thrice” as old-fashioned, along with twain and thrain, and changed erst to first, keeping erst in expressions like “ere long” and “erstwhile” and otherwise using only “first.” (And borrowed French second, instead of whatever the old two-based form was (not twain, which is “in two parts, twinned, twined.”) It should be something like twoeth or twaith or twit or twin, but those don’t ring a bell for me. — So even the most basic, deep-down words can change, replaced by new ones.
We somehow decided “coolth” would become old-fashioned, but “warmth” was still useful. So now we’d say coolness, and fresh or freshness means newer, brisk, rather than cool, in current English. — But coolth ought to be a good word still. It’s a perfectly fine word and people would know what it means, but it strikes most people as poetic or old-times now, while warmth is common.
We somehow dropped “yestere’en” in favor of the too-long, yesterday evening, with its unnecessary and not-so-accurate “day” stuck in the middle. Yestere’en or something like it would have been useful.
What? I’ve got to use my English major trivia for something, don’t I? đ Hahah. Forsooth!
English is a lovable mutt of a language. It’s a mix of everything. (Yes, I know, there are several other descriptions of English language habits, more colorful and possibly less, ah, flattering. Heheh.) Oh well, mutt or guttersnipe or street urchin or, ah, other terms.
English has room for those.
Hmm, Dutch loves doubled vowels. Just about any two vowels together make up a single sound that used to be distinctive, and now has changed and is still going through a change. Then IJ and UW go along with all those, just to be very inclusive and add to the mix. Exactly what and why Dutch did that seems to be because it was in the middle geographically between English, German, and French powerful languages, and borrowed from all three while becoming its own power to be reckoned with. Dutch needed a way to keep track of all those vowel sounds, and got around it by doubling up everything, more or less. (That’s a very loose impression, not quite accurate.) I’m still surprised how written Dutch has things from English and French and German, in with its native forms, which are so close to English.
I still can’t quite wrap my head around why Irish and Scots Gaelic do what they do for spelling, though. There are two grammatical, phonetic processes going on with softening of sounds in certain combinations, and with ah versus y/I/e and w/u/o, where the y-group does things and the softened consonants plus h h-group does things, both separate, both with some logic to it built-in, but ugh, the spelling is (to me) a nightmare. I haven’t read up enough on why it does that. Oh, and I seems to be put after a vowel to show length, for its own reason. Why, I don’t know. Then they kept the old spelling going back centuries, which has often been mashed together (elided) in modern speech, so you can get very long strings of letters that compact down to something unexpected. (So far, to me.) I still don’t understand the regular patterns going on or why they happen. I haven’t read nearly enough about it to have any idea of how Irish / Scots / Gaelic work, except that the grammar is significantly different from either Latinate or Germanic languages, even though Gaelic is a cousin to both families.
Back to font-making. Friends missed something for me on Friday, and if they aren’t by today or tomorrow, I’ll have to find some other way around it. Nuts, guys, I’ve reminded them often enough and been promised enough, they couldn’t have forgotten. It’s been edged out of their important things to do for friends list, it seems. Ooh, if only I could easily do some things and didn’t have to rely on others for help. Telling myself to be patient and give them a chance, surely they didn’t forget. (They couldn’t, I reminded them Thursday and got promises.) Phooey. I need better options. And more (reliable) friends. And I could wish for a loyal (handsome, cute) manservant. (Yeah, that is so not happening, haha, but I could still wish.)
Thanks for the very nice synopsis of English paired vocabulary words and also vowel sounds, BCS. Among other things, I hadnât realized that Dutch was undergoing a vowel sound shift currently.
Let me see if I can dust off my Celtic Languages PhD and add a bit on Irish and Scottish Gaelic spelling system (Iâm afraid that my understanding of its vowel systems is not nuanced at all, being really a Scottish Highland culture specialist and not a linguist per se).
I actually like the Gaelic spelling system: those “annoying” hâs all over the place and the way that the eâs and iâs seem sprinkled willy-nilly next to consonants is really very regular, predictable and represent clues to pronunciation.
First for the hâs. Originally (upto the 1700s or so in Scotland and well into the 20th C in Ireland, those intrusive-looking hâs next to consonants â especially the first consonant of a word â didn’t appear in the writing at all. Instead, the original scribal practice was to put a dot above the consonant. That was the clue that the consonantâs pronunciation had morphed into a different but related sound. I assume because of the printing press, it became easier to use an âhâ after the consonant rather than produce separate type face of consonant + dot-on-top.
Let me illustrate the sound shift with one that we can all recognize from other languages too. The sound B, when “lenited” (that is, shifted in pronunciation in the way now marked with an H), becomes pronunced “V” and written “bh”.
Think of the Latin word for book or “liber.” That middle B has shifted in French to a V â “livre.” Some dialects of Spanish today regularly pronounce (initial only?) B as V also. Some of the other, regularized lenitions include “th” and “sh”, which both are softened to an H when pronounced. “Mh”, on the other hand, is pronounced as a V.
All the Celtic languages use this lenition sound shift as a regular, “productive”, grammatical feature. (Welsh does it too, but inconveniently doesnât mark the shift with an H or a dot. You just have to know, when reading, what the original consonant would have been.) In Gaelic, for example, the word “mo” (meaning “my” and, yes, the M there is historically linguistically related to English âmyâ and Latin âmeaâ, etc.) changes or “lenites” many consonants following it. “My boat” is “mo bhata.”
This grammatically âproductive” pronunciation shift actually marks where proto-Celtic words (as in, the language a fair while before Christianity and writing came to the British Isles) such as my, your and feminine nouns originally ended in a vowel. Those vowels, although long gone, still have ghostly effects/shifts on the pronunciation of consonants that follow them.
Annoyingly, those V pronunciations have shifted somewhat in different Gaelic dialects. The main, Scottish Gaelic ones (which I am most familiar with) keep to a fairly firm V sound. Many Irish dialects have softened that V further into a W or âwuh” sound, so that “mo bhata” gets pronunced more like “Mo wahta.” Mind you, we often see Vs and Ws shifting in Germanic languages too, think of English âwhatâ (originally HW as BCS would point out) but in German pronounced “vas.” An Austrian friend of my familyâs, despite having spoken English for decades since he was teen, often says âwillage” instead of “village.”
Quickly on to the eâs and iâs that sometimes seem to stud Gaelic words too (as this treatise is getting awfully long and it is my bedtime too). Many Gaelic consonants have both “broadâ and “slenderâ pronunciations, as we say in Celtic Studies (if it wasnât so late, perhaps I could remember the more standard linguistic terms for these). To mark/show in writing that a consonant has a “slender” pronunciation, you put an E or an I next to it.
Take the well-known Irish name, Sean. Whatâs that E doing next to the S? Itâs simply telling you that the S is “slender” and therefore not pronounced like a regular, broad S (âssss”) but like SH (as in English “shush”). Irish borrowed the name from Norman French “Jean” and it here is nicely preserving the soft sound of that J. Scots Gaelic, by the way, apparently remembers the Norman name in a lenited version (probably from the vocative O Jean, in Gaelic pronounced “A Shean”) which became the name “Ian.”
The final bit of my quickie, Gaelic spelling lesson is when a slendar or broad (pronunciation) consonant comes in the middle of a word or name. So that there is no pronunciation confusion, both vowels on either side of the consonant need to be in the same “broad” or “slendar” category. Take the Gaelic name for James or “Seamas.” The initial S is pronounced like English âSh” (as in “shush”), so it has an slendar E after it to indicate that. However, the middle M is pronounced “broad.” To prevent any confusion, the M is shown flanked by the broad vowel A on either side. If the M were slendar, the name would be written “Semeas” and pronounced “Shay-myeas.” Many âslendarâ consonants often have a hint of a “yuh” to them.
So, to conclude what has turned into a lecture; far from being confusing, the historical spelling system of the Gaelic dialects in Ireland and Scotland actually represents a very regularized orthography which clues the reader in as to the wordâs pronunciation. Welsh also has a very regularized orthography which reflects that languageâs pronunciation. However, it doesnât put in those handy hâs so as to preserve a clue for the reader as to what the original consonant was before lenition.
And the Gaelic word for “book”, borrowed long ago from Latin “liber”? â it shows both lenition and the marking of consonants as broad or slendar. It is “leabhar,” and classically pronounced “lyev-ar.”
How would that work with “Siobhan”? I think it’s a beautiful name, and it seems to be becoming more popular. But the spelling…! I’m guessing from what you said, Si=Sh, o=É, bh=v, and “an” much like English.
We had someone working at the library whose name was Siobhan, and it did parse out much the way you thought — Shee-van, accent on the second syllable, v almost a vh sound, and an elongated a (remember the ‘schwa’ from elementary school?)
Books on Welsh tend to have a table somewhere in them showing the mutations (radical, soft, nasal, aspirate):
c, g, ngh, ch
p, b, mh, ph
t, d, nh, th
g, – , ng
b, f, m
d, dd, n
ll, l
m, f
rh, r
Well, thank you for some new (or at least reviving some seriously forgotten) information to me, Paul. Iâve only done some two or three weeks of modern Welsh âand that years agoâand while I certainly remember that Welsh has grammatically-induced initial mutations of words in general, I certainly have forgotten most of them. Plus, I never learnt how to spell modern Welsh (that few, informal weeks of book learning) so never learnt the rules in detail. You might have noticed that I didnât give any Welsh examples in my tome above. Also, Old and Middle Welsh, which I did study formally for a few years, didnât write down most of the mutations. You just sort of vaguely remembered them professors reading aloud (if you were me) or you flat out memorized the rules if you were a serious linguist (not like me: I go in for social history and material culture).
Not to be a pain, and prolong this topic, I had no idea we had so many really educated people on this list, but if the vowel is supposed to be a V, why not write a V instead of having either a dot or an h? Does this sprinkling of h’s make reading or speaking difficult for a native person?
Jonathan up here in NH where the leaves are a turnin.
Look at all the stuff English does that’s left over from previous pronunciations and spellings….
Yes, thatâs what I love about English spelling â you get to see the history of words.
The Gaelic orthography (spelling system/conventions) uses an H because it clues in the reader as to the original consonant that the mutated sound is temporarily replacing. For the native (or skilled learner) Gaelic speaker, the sound is not so much a V and the mutated (aspirated, actually)bsound that a M or a B makes. And, indeed, in many dialects, itâs not so much pfronounced like a V so much as like a W sound.
No, itâs not hard to learn the spelling system. Within a few weeks of study, pronouncing the combo “bh,” “mh”, “fh”, etc. correctly becomes second nature. So much so that I get confused when I see Hindi spellings that use âh” to mark different types of aspirations.
And, among other things, when the “dot above the consonant” writing system first was developed, V was not pronounced like a modern, English V (and still isnât in many other languages). The aspirated “hâ sound is only perceived as a V by English (and Scots) spellers of the past several hundred years.
V is not an inherently English letter, and not particularly old. In German, V is pronounced like an English F; and in Polish, the V sound is represented by W. While their roots are very old, our alphabet is usually called Roman; but in Roman inscriptions V represents a U sound.
As the Roman alphabet spread, sometimes displacing runes or ogham or other alphabets, whoever introduced the alphabet set the conventions. For example, Japan got Roman letters from the Portuguese, so the letters have Portuguese phonetic values; while Australian aboriginal names were rendered using English phonetic values, leaving Aussies utterly befuddled by Spanish place names like La Jolla.
In the case of Celtic, the adoption of the Roman alphabet may have preceded the 1066 amalgam of Anglo-Saxons and Normans which eventually led to modern English. (I’ve very unsure of the exact time.)
When monks were copying books by hand, and parchment was scarce and often reused, alphabets and spelling were not standardized. When cheap paper-making and printing reached Europe, that started to freeze spelling. The US Constitution spells choose chuse at least at times. When movable type presses were introduced (Gutenberg etc. c. 1600), that tended to freeze alphabets since a new letter required creating new movable type.
Later, Samuel Johnson helped fix British spelling while Noah Webster likewise for American, leading to colour/color, tyre/tire, traveller/traveler…. If anyone thinks phonetics is actually a solid foundation, I invite you to consider the six or seven pronunciations of -ough or the three pronunciations of slough (rhyming with rough, bough, and through).
(Corrections, please, BCS and all.)
@Walt, even Spaniards would be puzzled by “La Jolla”. It was a made up word by an Anglo.
On a more general level, your point about the evolution, “muttification”, of languages shows how long lasting historical events can be and can be traced, and in particular how culture affects those traces. Also one can see differences caused by the presence or absence of women.
Norse culture made inheritance “primogeniture”, so “second sons” went “a viking” (translation: “a raiding”) and Ireland was one of their targets. The “Dukes of Dublin” (coindicentally my ancestors Sigtrygg Silkbeard and Brian Boru) were Norse, not Irish. But when these “warrior” males took Irish women, their clture left child care to the mothers and the mothers that taught the children to speak Irish. The linguistic traces of Norse language were relatively minor.
Another example is in the Norman Invasion. It was a top-down takeover of the ruling class, though in comparison to the Norse in Ireland, the proximity of France meant the Normans brought more of their women than the Norse. The native English of some stature didn’t entirely adopt French, but they did adopt some scattering of words and “frenchification” of their pronounciation of English words, to appear allied with the power structure. That also worked top-down. So English remained what can be described in broad strokes as a Anglo-Saxon Germanic language in structure, with a “French gloss” of vocabulary and pronounciation. French made more impact on English than Norse did on Irish.
In the New World, lanuage traces of migration, if not invasion, can be seen in the related Dineh and Shis-inday (Navajo & Apache) people of our Southwest. Their creation myths may say they entered the earth there between the four sacred mountains but their language is Athabaskan, from the Yukon. They were ancestrally hunter-gatherers, as were the Athabaskan peoples. They migrated into land of Uto-Aztecan speaking Pueblo people, and because they came as family bands, maintained their language and culture largely intact.
Finno-Ugric in Europe also shows prehistoric, in the sense of undocumented in “the historic record”, migration. It’s really amazing how languages can document the migration of peoples so long after the fact. But also even whether it was migration or conquest.
Hi, all. Fall has definitely fallen in the flatlands. I’m in long sleeves and socks, and last night I had to turn the heater on. Cold and rainy.
Hope everybody made it through the various recent weather events safely.
Hi, WOL! I heard y’all were getting a front coming through. (We got maybe a quarter inch of rain Friday night, along with a little t-storm, and then yesterday was windy.)
Yes, we got that wind storm in the Boston, MA area too. I was going to call it a squall, but it definitely lasted longer and ushered in overall windy and cold weather for today. Brrr, we may well have a frost tonight. I brought in my lemon tree yesterday but am foolishly gambling that it wonât frost and not picking my green tomatoes.
Actually, I am being lazy: I got home well after dark this evening, hungry and not wanting to go out into the cold yard to pick tomatoes by feel. Weâll see. I suspect there will be frozen flowers too and the demise of this summerâs bounty.
Sunny but cool today with more fall clean up and winter prep in the offing.
Late yesterday afternoon we had a mini windstorm come through, then the power went out. Fairly common here. Fortunately it came back about an hour later so we didnât have to get the inverter or gas cook top out.
No frost yet, so dahlias, morning glories, moon flowers, petunias etc blooming madly. Plus all the fall wild flowers which continually sets off the old sneeze-o-meter.