Word of the Day

[mathhobbit]

Duumvir

Maybe it's Hawaiian in origin?

Comments

[sauergeek]

Unlikely, as per this page on Hawaiian language, Hawaiian has no D or R consonants. Our most common uu-bearing word — vacuum — also comes from Latin, so I'm not surprised to see another.

In Latin the pair of Us should have a glottal stop between them in both cases: vacu'um and du'umvir. (Now that last one looks like a Tolkien name, and the first could be from Bored of the Rings.) English, having no formal mechanism for indicating a glottal stop, despite using them, lost that gap in "vacuum" somewhere along the way, but kept it in "duumvir".

[sauergeek]

And having songvirused myself when I was writing "vacu'um", I finally remembered enough lyrics to find the appropriate Austin Lounge Lizards song: Life Is Hard, But Life Is Hardest When You're Dumb, which contains 'vacuum' with that glottal stop in its lyrics.

[mathhobbit]

Rhymes with Dumb!

[fredrikegerman]

I've seen vacuüm in a British book, along the same lines as Zoë.

[sauergeek]

...and Zaïre. I've seen the occasional umlaut in English, but I'd never really associated it with a glottal stop. I suspect this has to do with both English being — as should be expected — remarkably inconsistent about that usage, and speaking a bit of German.

I wonder if the umlaut is actually a glottal stop, and if it would work even if put above a consonant glottal stop. I somehow doubt it on both points. And yet, there it is, three different uses of an umlaut to indicate a glottal stop. Who ever said English was an unaccented language?

[kelkyag]

Then there's coöperate, which is less like a glottal stop and more "pronounce both of these vowels".

[sauergeek]

In my layman's understanding of linguistics, that's pretty much what a glottal stop is. I think I've seen cooperate spelled that way, but not often. And of course the glottal stop disappeared when the Harvard/MIT Cooperative Society got shortened to The Coop.