patina

[Mike Salovesh]

> Victoria Neufeldt wrote:
>
> Webster's New World, Random House, and American Heritage all show
> 'PATina' first and 'paTEEna' second (fairly recent editions).
> Merriam-Webster has it the other way around; the two variants were
> transposed for the Ninth Collegiate edition, 1983, presumably because
> of evidence for a change in prevailing pronunciation.  But none of the
> dictionaries mark their second pronunciation shown as a limited or
> disputed one, so the implication is that both are common in the U.S.,
> and that usage may be pretty evenly split (one or the other must be
> placed first, of course, even if the two are equally common).   The
> Gage Canadian Dict (1983) and the Concise Oxford Dict (1990) show only
> the 'PATina' pronunciation.
>
> Victoria
> Merriam-Webster, Inc. P.O. Box 281
> Springfield, MA 01102
> Tel: 413-734-3134  ext 124
> Fax: 413-827-7262

May I suggest that a third variant is missing?  Try rhyming the word
with "vagina": paTYEna.  (Cf. "raJYEna", a fairly common pronunciation
of  the name of the Saskatchewan city that honors Victoria Regina.)

Patina is a problem word for me: any time I actually have to say it
aloud I get tongue-tied, worried that I might use the "wrong"
pronunciation.  No, I'm not usually a prescriptivist.  The contexts in
which I might want to say "patina", however, are quite special.  For me,
the word is associated with knowledgeable and critical talk about
aesthetic judgments.  I guess I'm afraid some pronunciations are used as
a shibboleth by people who would secretly classify me with the masses
rather than with the cognoscenti. I don't want to have such people
relegate me to some dustbin because they don't like the way I say a word
. . .  I'd much rather get into a more meaningful fight about aesthetic
judgments.  Then if THEY disagree with ME, I'll dismember them verbally
first, then throw them into a multitude of dustbins, piece by piece.

The first time I paid attention to someone else's use of one of the two
dictionary pronunciations, I had been thinking that paTYEna was the way
"everybody" said the word.  I hadn't actually been conscious of anybody
saying it at all; patina was a reading and writing word I had known for
years, but would never have thought of dropping in a live conversation.

The first time I paid attention to the word "patina" as a speech product
was in a Humanities 1 class in my first year in college. When my
professor said "PATina", I didn't immediately connect what he said to
the word that had long been familiar in my reading.  I felt the need of
checking a dictionary before judging what he had done to "paTYEna".
(After all, the same professor had already forced me to recognize that
one of my favorite painters was a man, not a woman.  I just thought that
Joan was a perfectly reasonable name for a woman; how was I supposed to
know that Joan Miro's name contained an alternate spelling for a name I
would have written "Juan"?) When I looked up "patina", I was amazed to
discover that my  pronunciation wasn't even on the dictionary horizon.

Today, as I often do when pronunciations are discussed on ADS-L, I
spelled out "patina" to my wife without saying the word, then asked her
how she would pronounce it. Peggy gave two pronunciations.  First she
said "paTYEna", followed without hesitation by "or 'paTEEna'."  I guess
she must have come up with the same reading pronunciation I had invented
for myself, under pretty much the same conditions.

That suggests that it's worth asking the rest of the list if anyone else
out  there is familiar with this third pronunciation variant. I'm not
asking anyone else to confess to the verbal sin I've admitted here.  All
I ask is whether you have heard anyone say "paTYEna" as a pronunciation
of "patina".  (Yes, you ARE somebody -- but there's no need to tell us
that you're the somebody who committed this particular sin. I want to
know about the sin, not the sinner.)

Comments?

-- mike salovesh  <salovesh at niu.edu>  PEACE !!!