Y worry ?

An observant TV watcher wrote recently to the Radio Times to point out the apparent coincidence of two quiz programmes on the same evening asking competitors about English words with no vowels. Both cited the term 'syzygy' as an example.

But no: we wouldn't be able (in English, anyway) to pronounce the word at all if it had no vowels. In this instance the repeated letter y functions as a vowel - once for each of three syllables. The first two letters y in this word represent the Greek vowel 'u' (known as 'upsilon') since the Greek capital upsilon looked very much like our capital Y. The third y in this word represents the Latin vowel termination -ia, because in Late Latin the Greek word was borrowed in the form syzygia, and it was 'Englished' into the word syzygy in the 17th century.

The Greek basis of the word syzygy is built of two main elements: the first is the prefix syn- meaning with, together; the second is the noun zygon meaning a yoke. So the term means a 'yoking together' (especially in the contexts of astronomy, biology and mathematics). Not a word we all use every day.

But we do write and read the vowel y frequently: words such as frequently, for instance; and silly, untidy, style, why, idyll, lymph, tyrant, democracy, company, felony, lady, lychee, tyre, Phyllis, lynch, lychgate, Amaryllis . . . .

So in our language the letter y can serve as either a vowel or a consonant. As the latter, it is uttered as a voiced palatal (a term that means we make the sound with the back of our palate at the same time as releasing a little grunt - try repeating it, and you'll find that's true).

Y worry ?

Sound and Soul

This pedant regularly buys The Big Issue. Our local vendor extends such friendliness and charm that it's a pleasure to meet and chat with him every week. It so happens that I also support The Big Issue's aims and agree with perhaps 85-95% of what its writers have to say to us. One of the great things about it is that its seems to accept that the opinions of members of the public are entitled to be heard, considered and understood, even if they may sometimes be wrong.

It was interesting to note that one of its racier regular contributors tells us this week that he is grateful for having had some Latin drilled into him when he was at his Comprehensive School: "Latin taught me that there was actually some ancient meaning to our muddled language". Hear, hear.

But a modicum of Greek can also shed light on our muddled (but very rich, nevertheless) language, and it would have come in useful in the editing or proof-reading of another article in the same issue, reminiscing about London's Portobello Road in the 1960s. Three lines within the opening paragraph tell us that "the Portobello was a cacophany of late 1960s flamboyance; beads, bells, long hair, psychedelic music . . ."

Our word 'cacophony' should have one a and two os, not two as and one o. The phon- element, as in 'telephone' and 'sousaphone', and of course 'phonetic' and 'euphony', means 'sound' or 'voice'. 'Euphony'* means 'good, or pleasant, sound'; 'cacophony' means 'bad, or unpleasant, sound'. [Epiphany, by the way, as we can tell from its spelling, is from a different root: the Greek verb phaino, meaning to 'appear'. Greek epiphaino means to 'shine forth'.]

* The euphonium is mellow-sounding tenor instrument in a brass or military band. What the tone of a cacophonium would be like I don't even want to imagine.

'Psychedelic' is usually spelt in dictionaries with an e as its second vowel (we may count the y as the first), rather than an o. This is because the person who coined the word (H Osmund, as recently as 1956) spelt it in this way. Actually, although Greek psyche has no o in its stem, when the ancient Greeks themselves coined compounds with it they used the vowel o, creating such terms as 'psychomantis' (meaning someone who conjures up the spirits of the dead); and 'psychomacheo' (meaning to fight to the death, or to the last flicker of life). So, although the author of the Big Issue article is technically correct, it is only because the person who first coined the word got it wrong.

The 'del-' element in 'psychedelic' is borrowed from the Greek verb delo-o meaning to reveal or signify; so the intended significance of the term is really 'soul-revealing'.

Sound and Soul