Disputatio:Jazz

Cur Anglice blues = Latine glaucum?

Three problems:

1. Glaucus, -a, -um is more like 'gray, grayish, gray-blue'.

2. Modern Latin words for varieties of 'blue' include azureus, caeruleus, caesius, cyaneus, cobaltinus, lazulinus, venetus. According to the way the OED sorts the senses & examples of the term (in English), the bluishness here is a generic bluishness, perhaps akin to Oxford blue and the blue imagined in the phrase true blue. Those aren't likely to be glaucus in Latin.

3. English blues is a plural word, and it has a genuine singular (blue) ; accordingly, the Latin for blues could better be plural.

Perhaps the connotations of the Latin adjective lividus 'blackish blue, black-and-blue', are not irrelevant here. IacobusAmor 19:58, 17 Februarii 2007 (UTC)

I must say I find glaucum, as a "Latin" rendering of blues, bizarre and a bit pitiful. What it brings into my mind is glaucoma, and the illusion of self-sufficiency implemented by borrowing a word from Greek looks odd enough. (By the way, the Greek Wiki has μπλουζ not γλαυκό or γαλάζιο, and rightly so.) Nor is lividum an appropriate word, either. The meaning of blues can't possibly be reduced to colour terms, nor to the connotation associated with this adjective (which is 'envious'). Quite simply, the linguistic sign blues carries such a complex of cultural sentiments in it that can't be fulfilled by any fancy word from Latinate vocabulary. --Neander 03:00, 17 Aprilis 2008 (UTC)

I agree with all that, except that I do sometimes think of the color blue when I think of the blues. Here's the etymology:

blue (the color) → blue (sad) → blues (the sads) → blues (a sad musical genre).

Colors and their meanings often part ways. To blue-pencil texts that I'm editing, I use a red pen! ¶ Note that the Greek uses the sounds of the words, not the letters: μπλουζ, not βλυες. Ergo, following the same principle, the Latin should be blūz, not blues? and jazz should be tiēz? and rock should be rāc? IacobusAmor 03:30, 17 Aprilis 2008 (UTC)

No. The Greek is transcribing the English into a whole different alphabet; beta, lambda, upsilon, epsilon, and sigma do not have the same history of abuses as the cognate Latin letters do, so a transcription by sound is more useful. On the other hand, the English language's use of Latin letters is based on about a thousand years of continuously identifying Latin sounds with the English ones. Admittedly, the reference values used for both have drifted; nevertheless, it may be more prudent to at least begin with that identification when borrowing the word, rather than treating it as the production of a barbarous culture not at all versed in the Latin alphabet. —Mucius Tever 02:30, 18 Aprilis 2008 (UTC)

On the en blues page under etymology it says, "Later during the 19th century, the phrase was used as a euphemism for delirium tremens and the police, and was not uncommon in letters from homesick Civil War soldiers." Could that be used as the Latin equivalent of the music genre...or do u think it's too much of a stretch? --Secundus Zephyrus 17:41, 17 Aprilis 2008 (UTC)

There seem to be competing etymologies of the blues. This is not an unexpected thing to happen in everyday life, though Greek ἔτυμον 'real, true' may suggest another attitude. Re colours, when I'm thinking of the blues, something darkish (but not quite blue) comes into my mind. But to me, blues is above all a sign that kind of denotes a certain performative style with, say, 12-bar structure, and the "right" context or athmosphere, and so on. This sign is certainly pronounced differently in different languages (in Finnish, [blūs]), but somehow it may be beyond the point to base the Latin lemma on some normative pronunciation duely transliterated. IMO, it's the written form blues that does the job of indicating what it's all about. (For a similar reason, I also favor rock and even jazz, however they're pronounced in various languages.) These are global cultural icons which may lose something of their "indoles", if they're dressed with parochial clothes. (NB, I'm talking here about languages with Latin alphabet.) --Neander 01:15, 18 Aprilis 2008 (UTC)

"iazium" → "iazzium"? melius "iazza"? vel indeclinabile "iazz"?

Vide supra. IacobusAmor 03:42, 16 Iulii 2007 (UTC)

On a purely graphic level, 'z' is a double-length consonant. Doubling it in a Latin word would be like writing three or four l's in a row. Of course in foreign words the rules bend a little, but for one reducing the zeta count, that would be the justification: in English it needs to be doubled to show that it is long (or rather, that it makes the vowel short, which in the English system is essentially the same thing), but Latin does not need to do this. (The argument for keeping the 'zz', of course, is that it is in the original.) —Mucius Tever 17:44, 21 Iulii 2007 (UTC)

Re "in English it needs to be doubled to show that it is long"—no, it doesn't. Carl Yastrzemski's nickname is Yaz, and it's an exact rhyme of jazz, as are the male nickname Chaz and the last syllables of topaz and Alcatraz. Does Chaz, "an English model known for her smile, and her naturally big breasts" (en:), pronounce her name otherwise? IacobusAmor 14:14, 5 Decembris 2007 (UTC)

Why would she? The purpose of the doubling is to "close" the syllable (again, the term is imprecise) but all those words have z already closing syllables. It is an ordinary convention in English to drop a doubled consonant when final, e.g. blogger : blog :: mapped : map :: flatten : flat; jazz is only unusual in that it keeps the doubled consonant in its bare form. If you want to say something is like Yaz or Chaz, you write Yazzy and Chazzy, just like jazzy—not Yazy and Chazy, which would be expected to rhyme with crāzy—the -zz- is part of the stem, even if an orthographic deletion rule on the bare stem drops it. Of course there is the ocassional exception, and I expect z would be especially prone to this, living mostly in foreign and slangy words, which don't like to follow the rules. (Topaz actually does have a stem in just -z-, from Greek via Latin; I'm not sure whether the length of its vowel might be made to change in certain circumstances, the way rātio changes in rătional.) —Mucius Tever 16:14, 7 Decembris 2007 (UTC)

As for indeclinable iazz, I'm pretty sure the LRL has 'musica iazzica' or some such, so reverting to an indeclinable should be unnecessary. —Mucius Tever 17:44, 21 Iulii 2007 (UTC)

vide Recentis Latinitatis, habet iazensis musica -- Secundus Zephyrus 07:38, 5 Decembris 2007 (UTC)

I can't see why '-i-' is needed before the 'm' if it is to be put in second declension. Double 'z' in Latin is as impossible as double 'x', but would not 'iaz' be possible delining as a 3rd dec. neuter? 82.36.94.228 22:16, 21 Ianuarii 2009 (UTC)

I too have been wondering where the intrusive -i- came from, and iaz, iazis n. works for me; I wonder how musica iazica—not, presumably, musica iazzica—could convey the mutually exclusive senses of 'jazz music' and 'jazzy music' (the latter meaning, of course, 'nonjazz music'). IacobusAmor 18:04, 22 Ianuarii 2009 (UTC)

Also, no-one has yet mentioned Greek τζαζ (apparently indeclined), which would produce Latin tzaz. --Gabriel Svoboda 16:29, 22 Ianuarii 2009 (UTC)

"Jazzy"? Well I suppose there is iazensis, iaziscus, iazicalis, even iazicularis, iazaceus....Tergum violinae 14:51, 23 Ianuarii 2009 (UTC)

Jazz

There seems to have been some king of agreement on Disputatio:Ringum that this article should use simply jazz (indecl.). Movenda? Gabriel Svoboda 19:31, 21 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

Adnuo. Alii? Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 19:33, 21 Februarii 2010 (UTC)

I thought Vicipaedia preferred attested forms to unattested ones. Hence iazensis musica. IacobusAmor 14:17, 9 Septembris 2010 (UTC)

Greetings. I have added the name musica iazzica (API: ['jatsika]) in the article after my lexicon Norstedts svensk-latinska ordbok by Ebbe Vilborg (second edition from 2009).

Donatello (disputatio) 02:35, 2 Februarii 2013 (UTC).