Alright, as usual, I’ve been neglecting the mystic side of this site. So, I’m going to talk a little bit about a particular morpheme (unit of meaning) which seems to come up frequently when one trolls the more mystical side of the internet: the suffix -mancy.

-mancy is what’s called a ‘derivational’ suffix, meaning that it is used to create new words by attaching to an existing word. Usually, these suffixes add a set meaning to a word. For instance, another derivational suffix, ‘-ness’, turns an adjective into a noun which describes a characteristic. So, we take “red” and add “-ness” to get “redness”, the quality of being red.

The function of the suffix -mancy is to indicate “using something as a means of divination (the telling of the future)”. So, we take a word like carte (an Old French word for ‘card’), and then tack on -mancy. Suddenly, we have “cartomancy”, defined as “using cards as a means of divination”, for example, reading the Tarot.

Etymology

Where does -mancy come from? One source, The Skeptic Report article “Divination: A Mancy for every Fancy” (great title), gives the etymology as:

…Many of these are described by words that end with the suffix –mancy, which comes to us from the old French word mancie, which in turn comes from the Greek mantis, meaning ‘prophet’.

However, the Oxford American Dictionary traces the word back to a different Greek word:

ORIGIN from Old French -mancie, via late Latin -mantia from Greek manteia ‘divination.’

I wouldn’t be shocked to find out that mantis and manteia are somehow related, if not different forms of the same root. Also, it’s worth noting that this Greek word mantis ‘prophet’ in the first etymology is still present in Modern English, in the form of the “Praying Mantis”, a type of insect.

Although the trail begins to blur several languages back, it’s fairly obvious that this origins of this suffix came up through Greek, then Latin, then went into Old French, when it was finally borrowed into English. It’s traveled a long way to get here.

Usage

This ‘mancy’ suffix occurs in many places to mark different divination methods. Necromancy is the occult practice of summoning the dead to gain knowledge about the future (necro is a Greek word borrowed into Latin which means ‘death’). Astromancy is an old term for Astrology, charting the stars for information about the future. You’ll recognize “astro” from “astronomy” and “astronaut”, it’s a Greek root which generally refers to stars or space.

Apparently, it can be used with nearly any Latin root to describe whatever sort of divination somebody’s bothered to perform. This site lists many other uses of the term, and discusses such obscure forms of divination as ‘nephromancy’ (the act of analyzing the kidneys of a sacrifice for divinatory purposes) and even ‘chalcomancy’, which is apparently a manner of divination performed by striking brass and copper bowls. Regardless of the specific root, though, you can be fairly sure that any time you stumble across this ‘mancy’ suffix, there’s divination afoot.

It’s also interesting to note that this suffix is still being used to create new words today (in Linguistic terms, it’s still ‘productive’). I got 32 hits on google for “blogomancy”, and more than 200 for “webomancy”. Considering the term “blog” has only arisen in the past few years, it’s safe to say that “-mancy” has stuck around as an independent suffix, and will likely be around for us to use for years to come. Perhaps -mancy’s continued popularity could even be used to predict the future of other Latinate suffixes in English. Anybody up for a little bit of Mancimancy?

I’m a big fan of the Quote Database at bash.org (Not safe for work, may contain strong language and subject matter). The site is a pasteboard for funny quotes taken from online chats on IRC and other instant message chat services. Although some of them are just wonderful in their own right (here, here and here), many of them have to do with language and language related issues.

One example of a Bash.org quote about language is this one, reproduced here in its entirely:

< %kiwibonga> Je ne donne pas un merde - I don’t give a shit
< %kiwibonga> THAT MAKES NO SENSE
< %kiwibonga> you cannot give a shit to someone
< %kiwibonga> in french
< %kiwibonga> that sounds like “I’m taking a shit in my hands and I’m keeping it for myself”

(For those unfamiliar with the source here, the above quote is referring to the English idiom “I don’t give a shit”, which means, roughly, “I really don’t care” or “I couldn’t care less”.)

This is a wonderful (and humorous) example of the fact that one cannot literally translate some idioms into another language and expect them to retain their meaning.

In many ways, an idiom is a phrase which has cultural meaning independent of the words that make it up. If I say “that’s the way a cookie crumbles” to a politician who just lost an election, I’m not implying that his campaign sat out too long, got stale, and then broke into small pieces when touched. Instead, I expect him to know that I’m saying that such things happen in life, and that I sympathize. There’s nothing in the words per se that carries the meaning, but instead, it’s based in a certain cultural knowledge shared by the two people.

When you start translating these idioms, you end up copying over the words, but the meaning is lost because there’s no shared cultural background. Once that’s lost, one has to read the literal meaning of the words, and thus, “I’m taking a shit in my hands and keeping it for myself”.

This principle isn’t necessarily universal. If I said “A bird in hand is worth one hundred flying” (from Spanish), most people could understand it to mean the same thing as the idiom “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”. “That’s flour from a different sack” (also Spanish), in context, would likely be understood to mean “That’s a whole different story”.

However, in most cases, the meaning of an idiom comes not from the words themselves, but from the originating culture. The moral of this story: When you translate idioms word-for-word, if the snake bites you, there’s no remedy in the pharmacy.

(That, or you’re playing with fire. Either way.)

What do Flickr, Tumblr, Pooln, and Kaboodle all have in common? The obvious answer would be to say that they’re all “Web 2.0″ sites, relying on user input and participation to succeed. However, there’s a less obvious (and far more language-related) characteristic that these and many other Web 2.0 sites share: Syllabic Consonants.

Phonology 1013: Syllable structure

Take an utterance like “Eddie poked a badger with a spoon”. There are several different ways we can break this down into smaller parts. We could simply break it into words (as we do in writing), giving us “Eddie”, “poked”, etc. At the other end of the spectrum, we could break it into individual sounds (phonemes), giving us “ɛ”, “d”, “i”, “p”, and so on.

However, as all speakers of all languages know (at some level), there’s a middle step: syllables. A syllable is a phonological unit comprised of one or more sounds which are naturally grouped together in speech. We would break our above example into syllables as follows: “E-ddie poked a ba-dger with a spoon”.

Most speakers, if asked to repeat something very, very slowly, will naturally break words into syllables, and all languages can be described in terms of syllables. Syllables are handy for determining the stress pattern of a word (in some languages), for dictating when sounds are allowed to be used (the velar nasal can’t start a syllable), and they play a major role in the phonology (sound system) of most languages.

A syllable has two sections. The first is the onset, or beginning of a syllable, is always a consonant (or several). Not all syllables need one, but they’re pretty common. For example, in the word “bat”, the onset is “b”. The rhyme (or rime) is the second part of the syllable, and is composed of the “nucleus” and the “coda”. The coda is the final consonant(s) of a syllable (t in “bat”). Coda consonants are less common, and some languages (like Hawaiian) don’t allow a coda at all.

The nucleus, however, is the fundamental piece of a syllable. You can have a syllable with no onset or coda (”a”), but you have to have a nucleus. The nucleus of a syllable is usually a vowel (as in “bat” or “scowl”), but some languages allow consonants to live in that spot and function as a syllable’s nucleus. When that happens, it’s called having a “syllabic consonant”, and is represented in the IPA with a small vertical line under the sound.

Some languages use syllabic consonants frequently. For instance, as one of my readers pointed out in a comment, in Czech, syllabic R’s are used frequently, and can result in seemingly unpronounceable sentences like “Strč prst skrz krk” (’Put your finger down your throat’). However, most relevant to our discussion, in English, only /l/, /r/, /m/ and /n/ can be syllabic, and only in certain situations.

Now that we know what a syllabic consonant is, we can better explore the world of Web 2.0.

Syllabic Consonants and the Web

As you can now see, Flickr, Tumblr, Pooln, and Kaboodle are all pronounced with syllabic consonants at the end of their names (/r/, /r/, /n/, and /l/, respectively). This is interesting to me for two reasons.

First, syllabic consonants (especially /r/) are extremely common at the end of Web 2.0 site names (see this list for proof). First flickr, then variations on it, and now sites like tumblr and even twitter are on the syllabic bandwagon. At first, I thought that it might be an isolated case (with the -r ending just being trendy), but then I noticed that other syllabic sites were popping up. Kaboodle ends with a syllabic /l/, and now sites like pooln are working their way through the other syllabics in English. It’s worth noting, though, that google beat everybody to the syllabic /l/, even though they don’t draw attention with the trendy spelling.

Second, people seem to be recognizing the syllabicity of these final consonants, and skipping the written vowels altogether when creating their site names. The flickr -r may well have started the game, but now completely unrelated sites are becoming Web 2.0 by not including the written vowel in words with syllabic endings. Pooln chose its site name over “Poolin” or “Poolen”, tumblr over “tumbler”, and I suspect it’s only a matter of time before the first sites ending in /l/ pop up (at the time of writing, rumbl, tumbl and bumbl were already reserved). Interestingly, I’m yet to see a syllabic M site (perhaps because we generally just write the m with now vowel, as in “chasm” or “orgasm”). Who knows, though, maybe “phantm” is the next Web 2.0 ghost hunting site

Web 2.0: Complexity, Interactivity, Syllabicity

So, it’s pretty tough to deny the correlation between “Web 2.0-ness” and syllabic consonants. Of course, there are plenty of Web 2.0 sites that are vowel-nucleus-only (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace), but there does seem to be a trend at work here.

What does it all mean? Well, if you’re hoping to start a new Web 2.0 business, you might want to talk to a linguist or a phonologist. Syllabic consonants might not be the only key to success, but do you really want to take that chance? I assure you, my rates would be quite reasonabl.