What is chili?

Post by Dingbat
What is chili?
Peppers are consumed in this "chili eating" competition in China.
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-09/22/c_138412802_2.htm
It's chilli in Indian English, more commonly used in the plural - chillies.
In Texas, the stew called chili would be consumed in a chili eating competition.
The pepper kind is more likely called chile (eg. chile relleno).
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

I thought that Chile was only a country until I saw the US and Canadian
name of the spice. I accept that usage, but it always looks weird to me.

Peter.

--
Peter Young, (BrE, RP), Consultant Anaesthetist, 1975-2004.
(US equivalent: Certified Anesthesiologist) (AUE Hg)
Cheltenham and Gloucester, UK. Now happily retired.
http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk

Peter T. Daniels

2019-09-27 18:53:41 UTC

Post by Dingbat
It's chilli in Indian English, more commonly used in the plural - chillies.
In Texas, the stew called chili would be consumed in a chili eating competition.
The pepper kind is more likely called chile (eg. chile relleno).

No; that is the name of a dish that is borrowed from Spanish. I suppose
it might appear on a menu as "stuffed chilis."

Post by Dingbat
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

I thought that Chile was only a country until I saw the US and Canadian
name of the spice.

?

The reference provided above says

"The spellings are unique to different geographic locations. Chili (plural
chilies or chilis) is the standard American English name for the hot pepper
as well as the spicy stew, condiment, and spice in which it is a prominent
ingredient. On the other hand, in British English, chilli (plural chillies
or chillis) is typically used. The spelling chile is of Spanish origin and
is common in southwestern areas of the U.S. where that language is
frequently used."

Only in Jerry's small part of "the US and Canada" is the Spanish form
used (presumably M-W means _in English_).

Post by Peter Young
I accept that usage, but it always looks weird to me.

As well it should.

Peter Young

2019-09-27 21:40:58 UTC

No; that is the name of a dish that is borrowed from Spanish. I suppose
it might appear on a menu as "stuffed chilis."

Post by Dingbat
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

I thought that Chile was only a country until I saw the US and Canadian
name of the spice.

The reference provided above says
"The spellings are unique to different geographic locations. Chili (plural
chilies or chilis) is the standard American English name for the hot pepper
as well as the spicy stew, condiment, and spice in which it is a prominent
ingredient. On the other hand, in British English, chilli (plural chillies
or chillis) is typically used.

My f-w-i-a-l and I are visiting my brother and family in Montreal next
Tuesday for ten days. My sister-in-law is Montreal born and bred. When I
went there last time all their cookery books named the spice as chile.
Just out of curiosity, does Montreal count as included in the "small part
of the US and Canada"?� The attribution seems to have been snipped.

Post by Peter Young
I accept that usage, but it always looks weird to me.

As well it should.

Hey! Something was can agree on at last!

Peter.

--
Peter Young, (BrE, RP), Consultant Anaesthetist, 1975-2004.
(US equivalent: Certified Anesthesiologist) (AUE Hg)
Cheltenham and Gloucester, UK. Now happily retired.
http://pnyoung.orpheusweb.co.uk

Quinn C

2019-09-30 17:23:23 UTC

No; that is the name of a dish that is borrowed from Spanish. I suppose
it might appear on a menu as "stuffed chilis."

Post by Dingbat
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

I thought that Chile was only a country until I saw the US and Canadian
name of the spice.

Hey, I didn't write the passage or provide the link.

Post by Peter Young
I accept that usage, but it always looks weird to me.

As well it should.

Hey! Something was can agree on at last!

Right off, if they're "cookery books" (and not cookbooks), they don't
represent AmE.

All your "cookbooks" may be "cookery books" to PY. That's not a name
that should be left intact across dialects.

In Montreal, moreover, you need to take into account
the French spelling(s) of the word.

The usual French name for the plant or spice is "piment fort"; as a
dish, I believe "chili" is most common.

--
I found the Forshan religion restful. I found the Forshan
religious war less so.
-- J. Scalzi, Redshirts

Dingbat

2019-09-28 03:06:53 UTC

No; that is the name of a dish that is borrowed from Spanish. I suppose
it might appear on a menu as "stuffed chilis."

Texas has a substantial Hispanic minority, so it would be chile since the
reference says:
The spelling chile is of Spanish origin and is common in southwestern areas
of the U.S. where that language is frequently used."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

Post by Dingbat
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

I thought that Chile was only a country until I saw the US and Canadian
name of the spice.

?
The reference provided above says
"The spellings are unique to different geographic locations. Chili (plural
chilies or chilis) is the standard American English name for the hot pepper
as well as the spicy stew, condiment, and spice in which it is a prominent
ingredient. On the other hand, in British English, chilli (plural chillies
or chillis) is typically used. The spelling chile is of Spanish origin and
is common in southwestern areas of the U.S. where that language is
frequently used."
Only in Jerry's small part of "the US and Canada" is the Spanish form
used (presumably M-W means _in English_).

Post by Peter Young
I accept that usage, but it always looks weird to me.

As well it should.

Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

An early record of the name of the pungent pepper is in a 16th-century
dictionary of Nahuatl (a language of the Aztecs) in which it is transcribed
as chilli.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear duplicated.
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

Peter T. Daniels

2019-09-28 12:28:12 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

Post by Dingbat
An early record of the name of the pungent pepper is in a 16th-century
dictionary of Nahuatl (a language of the Aztecs) in which it is transcribed
as chilli.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/usage-chili-chilli-chile

What did <ll> represent in 16th-century Spanish?

Post by Dingbat
Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear duplicated.
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

Dingbat

2019-09-29 01:04:59 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

What did <ll> represent in 16th-century Spanish?

Dunno, but the Nahuatl words with [l:] that are listed here seem to have
a short [l] in modern Mexican Spanish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#Words_from_Nahuatl

Post by Dingbat
Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear duplicated.
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

Athel Cornish-Bowden

2019-09-29 07:39:13 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

What did <ll> represent in 16th-century Spanish?

Same as it officially does now: [lj], but largely giving way to [j],
not to mention [ʒ] and [d͡ʒ] in some varieties.

Post by Dingbat
Dunno, but the Nahuatl words with [l:] that are listed here seem to have
a short [l] in modern Mexican Spanish.

What do you mean by a short [l]? What other sort of l is there in
modern Mexican Spanish? Not ll, which is usually regarded as a
separate letter, not as geminate [l.l], as it can be in Catalan. (I say
"usually" regarded, because the Royal Academy changed its view on
digraphs in recent years, but ordinary people still regard ch, ll and
qu as letters.)

Post by Dingbat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#Words_from_Nahuatl

Post by Dingbat
Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear duplicated.
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

--
athel

Dingbat

2019-09-29 08:31:50 UTC

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

What did <ll> represent in 16th-century Spanish?

Same as it officially does now: [lj], but largely giving way to [j],
not to mention [ʒ] and [d͡ʒ] in some varieties.

In which varieties? I've heard that realization only in Portuguese.

Post by Dingbat
Dunno, but the Nahuatl words with [l:] that are listed here seem to have
a short [l] in modern Mexican Spanish.

What do you mean by a short [l]?

Not [l:] as it can be in Catalan.

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden
What other sort of l is there in
modern Mexican Spanish?

None, but an earlier Mexican Spanish might have had a dialect spoken by
those who had Nahuatl as a first/ ancestral language. Their pronunciation
hasn't survived in modern Mexican Spanish.

Post by Athel Cornish-Bowden
Not ll, which is usually regarded as a
separate letter, not as geminate [l.l], as it can be in Catalan.
(I say
"usually" regarded, because the Royal Academy changed its view on
digraphs in recent years, but ordinary people still regard ch, ll and
qu as letters.)

Post by Dingbat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#Words_from_Nahuatl

Post by Dingbat
Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear duplicated.
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

--
athel

Athel Cornish-Bowden

2019-09-29 08:41:12 UTC

On Sunday, September 29, 2019 at 1:09:16 PM UTC+5:30, Athel

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

What did <ll> represent in 16th-century Spanish?

Same as it officially does now: [lj], but largely giving way to [j],>
not to mention [ʒ] and [d͡ʒ] in some varieties.

In which varieties? I've heard that realization only in Portuguese.

Post by Dingbat
Dunno, but the Nahuatl words with [l:] that are listed here seem to have
a short [l] in modern Mexican Spanish.

What do you mean by a short [l]?

Not [l:] as it can be in Catalan.

I thought you were referring to modern Mexican Spanish. They don't
speak a lot of Catalan in Mexico.

What other sort of l is there in> modern Mexican Spanish?

None, but an earlier Mexican Spanish might have had a dialect spoken by
those who had Nahuatl as a first/ ancestral language. Their pronunciation
hasn't survived in modern Mexican Spanish.

Not ll, which is usually regarded as a> separate letter, not as
geminate [l.l], as it can be in Catalan.
(I say> "usually" regarded, because the Royal Academy changed its view
on> digraphs in recent years, but ordinary people still regard ch, ll
and> qu as letters.)

Post by Dingbat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_from_indigenous_languages_of_the_Americas#Words_from_Nahuatl>

Post by Dingbat
Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear

duplicated.

Post by Dingbat
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

--
athel

Dingbat

2019-10-01 15:15:36 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

FWIW, Welsh English too has intervocalic geminates; the example I've seen
is <butter>.

What did <ll> represent in 16th-century Spanish?

Post by Dingbat
Almost any consonantal phoneme in nahuatl can appear duplicated.
https://www.quora.com/Which-consonants-can-be-geminates-in-Nahuatl

Dingbat

2019-10-31 07:27:14 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

Uh oh, I forgot to bring this up earlier. Re. a 50-year-old British
pronunciation of <onion>, I heard it as [ɐɲːən] with a long palatal
nasal much like in Malayalam [mɐɲːə] meaning yellow (adj). Yet,
the Cambridge dictionary gives only a pronunciation of /ˈʌn.jən/.
FWIW, I've heard that pronunciation too.

John Dunlop

2019-10-31 09:00:30 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Uh oh, I forgot to bring this up earlier. Re. a 50-year-old British
pronunciation of <onion>, I heard it as [ɐɲːən] with a long palatal
nasal much like in Malayalam [mɐɲːə] meaning yellow (adj).

Where did you hear it? A nasalized "onion" can still be heard in ScE. I
have some ingans hanging up in the greenhouse.

https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/ingan

Post by Dingbat
Yet, the Cambridge dictionary gives only a pronunciation of
/ˈʌn.jən/. FWIW, I've heard that pronunciation too.

That's the general pronunciation. Only dictionaries of regional dialects
would have anything else.

--
John

Dingbat

2019-10-31 11:06:53 UTC

Post by John Dunlop

Where did you hear it?

A Brit who decided not to return to Britain when India became independent. I don't know where in the UK he was from. A bachelor but adopted an Indian family and was an exemplary surrogate father and grandfather to them. I got to know him because his chauffeur ran me down while I was riding my bicycle, accidentally of course. I took a spill but was uninjured. He died about 1980.

Post by John Dunlop
A nasalized "onion" can still be heard in ScE. I
have some ingans hanging up in the greenhouse.
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/ingan

Post by Dingbat
Yet, the Cambridge dictionary gives only a pronunciation of
/ˈʌn.jən/. FWIW, I've heard that pronunciation too.

That's the general pronunciation. Only dictionaries of regional dialects
would have anything else.
--
John

I find here that /nj/ can be realized as a palatal nasal in English. <onion> is one example given.
http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t10061.htm

... or approximately a palatal nasal
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/gjxph/is_there_any_difference_between_a_palatal_nasal_%C9%B2/

The other word I've heard [ɲ] in is <monument>, with its /njU/ realized as [ɲʏ]. This was on a BBC radio broadcast about 1970, not from a person I could see.

FWIW, I haven't found an English speaker who uses [ɲ] in <canyon> or <lasagna>; I've heard only [nj]. French <lignes> has [ɲ] in a terminal context but I don't know how English speakers would say it cuz it's not used as a word in English.

Peter T. Daniels

2019-10-31 14:01:14 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

That's nothing more than (once again) your native phonemic system
overlaying a foreign (English) phonemic system. English doesn't have
palatal nasals, so "onion" has the sequence /ny/. Whether there's a
phonetic difference between [nj] and [ɲ] is a separate question and
of little concern in analyzing English. Russian, for instance, manages
to distinguish between palatal, palatalized, and followed-by-a-palatal
consonants: difficult for Anglophone learners!

Dingbat

2019-11-01 08:28:08 UTC

Post by Dingbat
Indian English seems to (accidentally) retain the Nahuatl pronunciation,
with a geminate l (chill-lee).

Standard English has long consonants only at morpheme boundaries, as he
pointed out shrilly. (Which doesn't rhyme with chili.)

That's nothing more than (once again) your native phonemic system
overlaying a foreign (English) phonemic system. English doesn't have
palatal nasals, so "onion" has the sequence /ny/.

When it has [nj] as in the most common pronunciation, I hear it as [nj].
This Brit says [nj]:

Post by Peter T. Daniels
Whether there's a
phonetic difference between [nj] and [ɲ] is a separate question and
of little concern in analyzing English.

I've heard [nj], [ɲj] and (rarely) [ɲ:] from Anglos. These references
seem to confirm the latter two except that the 3rd is described as
[ɲ] rather than [ɲ:].

<<Italian has 2 sounds that sometimes appear in English -
the {l,n} in million, onion.>>
https://books.google.com/books?id=mYApDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA15

In Oz English, nasal stops may assimilate to a palatal place of
articulation before [j]. The symbol for the palatal nasal is [ɲ].
Eg: <onion> [ɐɲjən], <union> [ju:ɲjən], <on your own> [ɔɲəɹəʊn].
https://books.google.com/books?id=GjRDYfxXZeEC&pg=PA137

FWIW, [ɲ] is spelt as <ny> in Catalan and Indonesian;
I don't know how they spell [nj].

Post by Peter T. Daniels
Russian, for instance, manages
to distinguish between palatal, palatalized, and followed-by-a-palatal
consonants: difficult for Anglophone learners!

I've read that Rioplatense (Argentine) Spanish has a palatalised nasal
in place of standard Spanish's palatal nasal.

Peter Moylan

2019-11-01 10:08:21 UTC

Post by Dingbat
In Oz English, nasal stops may assimilate to a palatal place of
articulation before [j]. The symbol for the palatal nasal is [ɲ].
Eg: <onion> [ɐɲjən], <union> [ju:ɲjən], <on your own> [ɔɲəɹəʊn].
https://books.google.com/books?id=GjRDYfxXZeEC&pg=PA137

"May" does not mean "must". What you are describing is a low-prestige
dialect.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Dingbat

2019-11-01 12:35:45 UTC

Post by Peter Moylan

"May" does not mean "must". What you are describing is a low-prestige
dialect.

Dialect speakers could view dictionaries as prescribing the standard
dialects by virtue of describing only them.

I heard [ɲ:] when I was not yet too very fluent in English, so it's
conceivable that I heard [ɲj] as my /ɲ:/ phoneme in Malayalam
[mɐɲ:ə] from Old Tamil [mɐɲɟɐ].

It wasn't [nj]; I'd have heard that as my /nj/ in Malayalam [ɐnjə]
(meaning other/ different), a word of Sanskritic origin
<https://www.sanskritdictionary.com/?q=anya>.

Peter T. Daniels

2019-11-01 15:31:27 UTC