Leah

By which I mean: what happened to your vowels. How'd they all get so high

Gaelic is really the Yiddish of Goidelic languages

I thought fay was only used as an adjective but Google ngrams say otherwise. Strange that "fae" and "fairy" rose in prominence together since 2000, but "fay" as a noun declined when Victorians got into fairies in the 19th c.

Indeed! (The duets where Alex sings together with pre-transition vocals recorded for that purpose are particularly cool IMO)

Samhain, by Alexander James Adams from the album Life's Flame

Good question! It's "fae" on her bandcamp: heatheralexander.bandcamp.com/track/samhain

But that page is surely more recent than the 90s, so the same question could be asked. I might have have a copy of the CD but unfortunately am away from home this week so can't check to confirm.

I suspect one could find many more examples looking at folk lyrics from the 80s and 90s. In addition to the other reasons people mentioned for its use, it's a convenient alternative to "fairy" etc. in a context where you're trying to rhyme.

This occurs in Heather Alexander's song "Samhain" ("the gentle fae"). The only version online is from a 1996 album but it's a live recording. I'm pretty sure the song was written without influence from the Changeling game, if that came out in 1995.

NSF give me a time machine so I can do a sociolinguistic study on these guys

His father was born in England but became an exile before he turned one. And his father spent most of his young years in exile as well. Were they speaking Scots/English that was like 100 years out of date by Charlie's time?

Screenshot from the Wikipedia page for George Murray. It describes Charles Stuart as "a young man brought up in Italy whose first language was French, and whose mother was Polish."

Do we have any records of what kind of accent Bonnie Prince Charlie had when speaking English or Scots? It must have been phenomenally strange.

¢ is very cute to me

Ah thank you! That makes sense. In California everyone just uses c for /ts/

Wiktionary says there was a proto-Muskogean form "¢akliCₐo". Anyone know what on earth ¢ is supposed to be? Perhaps an old typewriter-derived Americanist version of ç?

The rodeo one is so weird, I love it

Thank you for digging these up! Exactly what my mind went to when I saw that post

She's just speaking Ladino!

“She” is a weird word The mysterious origin of a simple pronoun

But it might also be some kind of dialect compromise, with a southern vowel and a northern onset? Very weird www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/she-is-a-w...

Etymonline has a different story: pronunciation of hēo converged with he, so the feminine demonstrative seo was substituted.

Thinking about this as per usual on Halloween. But only this year did I learn that an early 20c farmer found the actual Crom Cruach stone, the one supposedly smashed by St. Patrick. It's just sitting in the county museum in Cavan??? And no one on the entire internet has shared a good picture of it?

Perfect descriptions

That's fascinating

I wonder if tepidus was also recognizable as a cognate in the period when Latin influence on Albanian was strong

I'm the guy in Poland going "I don't agree with their policy of slaughtering entire countries, but I think we should hear them out about those meat pies."

Wiktionary said it's connected to inchoatives (by analogy?), so my guess was that it went "be warm" > start to be warm > be a little warm > be mostly cool > "be cool." That seems like such a stretch though.

Of course you have this! 😸 Very interesting family - the possible Afro-Asiatic connection is intriguing.

Do you know any more about the semantics in Albanian? Everyone else kept the "warm" meaning. (Latin shifts it a bit with tepid but weakening seems very different than getting an antonym.)

I used to live right down the street from the Rio. Saw some great shows there (and it really is a great marquee). Break a leg!

cof - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

Also the most general word for "die" has a wild etymology:

PIE tep "be warm"
> PA tpē "to cool" ("rebuilt analogically" per Wiktionary)
> Pre-A. ptof (metathesis #1)
> mod. A. ftoh
> ftof (alternative form for funsies)
> stof (alternative of that alternative)
> cof /t͡sɔf/ "die" (metathesis #2)

Screenshot showing text from one paragraph in the "Bees in Mythology" Wikipedia page: "Bees have a special status for Albanians. The bee is considered a sacred animal, associated with human life. When an animal ceases to live, Albanians use the verb ngordh or cof; when a bee ceases to live, they use the verb vdes (which is used to refer to human death). Meaning that for Albanians bees are beings of a higher caste, like humans. The bee also has a special status in the Albanian customary law – the Kanun – which dedicates specific laws that deal with beehive possession, damage and theft, the value of the bee, and the ownership of swarms of bees."

wait this is cool

Mythical River Sticks

I was a copy editor for my college newspaper and if this had happened on my watch it would have haunted me for life.