Assorted comments

[Wilson Gray]

On Nov 27, 2004, at 11:37 AM, Douglas G. Wilson wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET>
> Subject:      Re: Assorted comments
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>> .... the phrase would then read "muddled doofs"
>> which could be a shortening of "muddled doofuses".
>
> "Doofus" is too recent, I think. Its possible ancestor "doof"" is
> easily
> old enough, in Scots (says HDAS). Neither of these appears frequent in
> the
> US English of 1902 (I can't find them, at a glance).
>
>> "honq" and "xonxa" look to be the same word, as trascribed by two
>> observers
>> with different transliteration conventions ....
>
> I believe these are the same word. I doubt there is a separate "pink"
> but I
> haven't researched the matter fully and don't intend to. Wolof lexicon
> and
> grammar are AFAIK utterly unrelated to the etymology of the English
> "hip"
> or "honky", although I would change my position immediately if any
> grain of
> evidence were put forth. "Xonxa" is one dictionary's spelling; I think
> it's
> standard. "Honq" is of unknown provenance, possibly a casual
> transcription,
> I don't know or care. But note that the forms adduced for the
> etymological
> assertions are ones which are orthographically closer to the target
> word
> (in order better to convince the fastidious savants of Wikipedia, NYT,
> etc., maybe).

How is the word, funky, pronounced in BE? It's pronounced as though
something like "fonky," right? Now, suppose that there was an ordinary
word of American English, hunky, that was originally used as a term of
opprobrium for certain peoples of Central-European extraction. Now, how
would this word, hunky, be pronounced in BE? It might well be
pronounced something like "honky," right? Is that a reasonable
supposition?

-Wilson Gray

>
> BTW: "Peking" vs. "Beijing": the "pe"/"bei" distinction seems to be
> merely
> a choice of transcriptions of the same sound but the "king" vs. "jing"
> seems to reflect a recent (during last few centuries) 'fronting'/
> palatalization (pronunciation shift) in northern (particularly Beijing)
> Chinese; I suppose the shift is probably still in progress. The "k" is
> the
> older version, presumably adopted from a dialect which had not
> undergone
> this shift at the time of the spelling choice (some dialects still
> don't
> have the shift) ... or possibly from a conservative 'formal'
> pronunciation
> (e.g., Chinese opera pronunciation retains some old features like this
> still, AFAIK).
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>