Look at this list:
Antigone
Aphrodite
Chloe
Hermione
Irene
Kalliope
Nike
Penelope
Phoebe
Zoe
All these are originally Greek names of supernatural beings (except Antigone?). The e is a feminine ending. Most of them are used now as women’s names. When Americans pronounce these names, with one exception they usually pronounce the final e.
The exception is “Irene”. I have heard British people say “I-reenie” but never an American. Is this because of “Good Night Irene”?
At one point when I was maybe eleven years old I bought a 45 of the Weavers singing Good Night Irene. It was my favorite song. The record had Tsena Tsena on the other side. I fell in love with Tsena Tsena which I had never heard before, but I still liked GNI too. For some time after that I looked for other records by the Weavers but I never saw one. Perhaps that was about the time the McCarthyites blacklisted them?
I was also attracted by the harmonies of some pieces by Bach. Now I think that the thing TT and Bach (and others of my favorite music, like some Procol Harum) have in common is the existence of both major and minor chords in the same piece. But when I asked my music teacher what was so wonderful about Bach she said she had never understood Bach.
Oh well.
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Well it clearly shouldn’t be “I-reenie”.. a long ‘e’ without a silent ‘e’ ending? It should be more like “-rehnie”. I’m on the fence as to the pronunciation of the leading ‘I’.
The first Irene I ever heard of was the actress Irene Dunne (pronounced in two syllables). She predated the Weavers’ version of Goodnight Irene, though probably not the song itself. Seemingly unperceived as a Greek name, Irene probably followed the model of Arlene, Charlene, Marlene (unless you were Dietrich) etc.
Does Tsena Tsena have minor chords in it? I remember it playing cheerfully at the swimming pool during my youth, and don’t recall so much as a diminished seventh.
Having recently read Eric Siblin’s The Cello Suites and also being faced with the impossible task of getting an old sofa down from our bedroom past a bunch of furniture that wasn’t there when it went up, I felt a pressing need to reread Douglas Adams’ “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency”. It provided no help with the sofa, but I still love the explanation of where Bach came from.
I listened to the weavers perform it on you-tube and all the guitar chords were major. Nevertheless it still sounds modal or something to me and I have always found that particular sound compelling. I don’t know enough music theory to know what makes it different from Good Night Irene, for example — I can hear some sevenths in GNI but not that modalish sound.
I have ordered the Douglas Adams book through the library! I need answers!
By the way, I remember reading that the producers were furious that Tsena Tsena got so popular after GNI got popular since they were both on the same disk.
Charles Wells
I decided that the major & minor alternations I was hearing were in the vocal harmony. I found a copy of Tzena Tzena on the net and indeed there are minor and major chords in the vocal parts, acting like passing tones only they are chords. The guitar chords are all major.
Charles Wells
Probably no real reason. They’re all from Greek, and the treatment is just inconsistent, it might have something to do with the path of borrowing, so that for example words taken directly from Greek like Antigone will tend to keep the original final ‘eta’ as ‘long e’ in English, whereas if they go through French (scene), they’ll lose it. And regardless of prior history in English, ‘Hellenicizers’ would tend to follow the Greek more closely, perhaps to the point of saying ‘neekay’ not ‘naykee’.
People my age would naturally say “Eye-reenie” and “Nigh-kee”. Young people, at least college educated ones, would say “Ee-ray-nay” and “nee-kay” assuming they recognized them as “foreign”. This shift occurred during my lifetime. I wrote about it here: http://sixwingedseraph.wordpress.com/2008/10/27/english-pronunciation-heads-for-catastrophe/
The point of that post is that English spelling used to have irregularities but now on top of that it has two classes of words “nonforeign” and “foreign” with different rules for pronouncing vowels. I am NOT claiming we can undo this change!
Charles Wells
it’s just ignorance of greek, pay it no mind.
nee-kay is vulgar-foreign for n,i,k,e
because “i” is eee *consistently*
(in, say, croatian… the case known to me)…
and likewise “e” is *always* A-as-in-Acorn.
this consistency was a tremendous advantage
to me when i learned to read croatian
“fluently” without (much) understanding at about
age 10. other slavic language have the
same rigid orthographic conventions,
god bless ’em. these appear to be very
well known. it’s *good* news.
pointed hebrew allows many a 13-year old
to fake it pretty well the way i did in zagreb.
(for the same reason: consistent vowels.)
i “first” became vividly aware of the very possibility
of “irene-ee” in the remake of the forsythe saga
bbc miniseries. i saw the originals again a little
later; sure enough it was there too. if you live
long enough you forget more than you ever knew
at any one given time along the way. whee.
owen (by the way) thomas.
we communicated some when
you were preparing the handbook.
somewhere along the line causing you
to type out my favorite citation of me
and favorite keep-the-serial-comma
counterexample yoking me and jerry uhl.
(who i’d been crossing lances with
in some random math newsgroup
about his computer-driven vision
[and whatnot]).
(i forget about the “vlorbik kibrolv”
moniker sometimes when i go on
commenting jags and forget that
i won’t always be recognized.)