[Ads-l] "I say...Lusitani-ay"

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Evening Herald (Ottawa, Kans.) (May 25, 1912), p. 1:

Around her neck she wore a yellow ribbon,
She wore it in December and in the month of May;
And when they asked her why, oh why, she wore it,
She said 'twas for the U.C.T. that came from Ottawa.
Far away, etc.


JL


On Sat, Jan 29, 2022 at 10:31 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> _The Jolly Tar's Garland _(n.p., n.d), p.2, dated by ECCO to "1780?"  Lots
> of long esses, capitalized nouns, and italics in this 8pp chapbook.
>
> Oh! the French hath broke our Peace Boys,
>       In the Lands of America,
> But Royal George of England
>       Is Governor by Sea.
>
> JL
>
> On Mon, Oct 2, 2006 at 10:18 AM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> That could be the explanation, but in Arnold's case it comes in the very
>> final word of the poem. This creates, to my ear and sensibility, an
>> extremely bathetic fall that I'd have thought Arnold would have eschewed.
>>
>> What I'm getting at, with the help of Gabby Hayes, is the possibility
>> that "Californiay," "Lusitaniay," and "Asiay" (or something closer to
>> monophtongal / e /) may once have been standard pronunciations.( / E / in
>> both "say" and "Lusitania" seems like a plausible alternative.)
>>
>> My own phonology calls for / s Ei / and Lusitani / ^ /.  Pretty bathetic
>> in combination.
>>
>> JL
>>
>> *Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>>* wrote:
>>
>> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>> -----------------------
>> Sender: American Dialect Society
>> Poster: Charles Doyle
>> Subject: Re: "I say...Lusitani-ay"
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Or is it poetic license? There may have existed certain sorts of "rhyme"
>> that were (by tradition) deemed poetically acceptable whether or not they
>> correlated much with anybody's pronunciation.
>>
>> John Donne (c1600), in his "Valediction: Of Weeping," used a similar
>> rhyme: "On a round ball / A workeman that hath copies by, can lay / An
>> Europe, Afrique, and an Asia, / And quickly make that, which was nothing,
>> all."
>>
>> --Charlie
>> ____________________________________________
>>
>> ---- Original message ----
>> >Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 06:41:59 -0700
>> >From: Jonathan Lighter
>> >Subject: "I say...Lusitani-ay"
>> >To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>> >
>> >In 1879 Matthew Arnold wrote a sonnet titled "S. S. Lusitania"
>> concerning an offspring's voyage on the ship of that name (not the one
>> torpedoed in 1915).
>> >
>> > At the conclusion of this very serious sonnet, Arnold rhymes
>> "Lusitania" with "I say."
>>
>> > This is obviously not "eye-rhyme" and seems unlikely to me to be "slant
>> rhyme." It reminds me instead of how character actors like Gabby Hayes used
>> to pronounce "California" in old westerns.
>> >
>> > Does anyone know enough about standard mid-Victorian pronunciation
>> and/or poetic practice to elucidate this "rhyme" ? Did Arnold have some
>> in-between diphthong in both words ?
>> >
>> > JL
>>
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>
> --
> "If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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