Re: OFF-TOPIC: Pocinators & [lE"pri:S@nz] [was: Non linguistics books by Chomsky]

Stephen Mulraney scripsit:

> Commiserations on the Oirishry. The imdb.com entry refers to "A
> mysterious Irishman", and "Og the Leprechaun". Ok, maybe it's not so
> bad, it seems to have a more serious side to its plot too. Which seems
> like an absurd thing to say about a musical involving leprechauns.
It wasn't a full performance; the performers did the musical numbers and
some of the non-musical context around them, with a narrator to fill in
the rest of the plot.  From what I gather from the program notes and
the Internet, the work was intended as a satire on racism, though this
element didn't carry as much freight as it probably did in 1946.

The actor playing Og made leprechaun-ness an explicit metaphor for
gayness, which is probably not the author's intent, though the use of
"fairy" makes it an accessible reading of the text.  :-)  In this context
it worked well enough as broad farce.

To be fair to the Irish Rep (http://www.irishrep.org , not to be confused
with Chicago's Irish Rep which is at http://www.irishrep.com ), this is
rather a departure for them: they normally do a mixture of classic
Irish theatre and the works of modern Irish playwrights:  see
http://www.irishrep.org/history.htm for a full listing.  I've been a
subscriber for two years and have seen some of their earlier productions.

> On this topic, a friend of mine once suggested that she had heard some
> Americans say /l@"pri:S@nz/ for /"lEpr@xO:n/. I don't recall the
> context, and can't remember if it was meant to be a joke or not. Has
> anyone heard this in the wild?
Never.  Americans realize /x/ as [k], of course, and some of us unround
/O/ to /A/, but otherwise I've only heard fairly standard pronunciations
of this word.  It's a nice example of methatesis at work, too:
E leprachaun < ModI leipreachán < OI lu + corpan 'little body', where
corp < L corpus.

> This post brought to you  by the letter 3 and the number 0xF
The letter 3 is good, but surely the number V would be a better choice?

See long commentary at Ataltane LJ.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
If a soldier is asked why he kills people who have done him no harm, or a
terrorist why he kills innocent people with his bombs, they can always
reply that war has been declared, and there are no innocent people in an
enemy country in wartime.  The answer is psychotic, but it is the answer
that humanity has given to every act of aggression in history.  --Northrop Frye

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