Sunday Trivia 11

English is a language fond of borrowings. As James Nicoll once said, "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." By most estimates, only a quarter of modern English words have Germanic roots. About 30% are French, 30% are Latin, 5% are Greek, and the remaining 10% are from other languages. (Of course, many of the most common words are Germanic, so this statistic can be misleading.)

But people are resistant to change, and throughout the history of English there have been movements to avoid borrowings and stick to words of Anglo-Saxon origin. The resulting constrained language has been called Anglish, Saxonised English, and even Blue-Eyed English. Understandably, it can get a little hairy. Terms like birdlore to replace ornithology or tonesmith to replace composer are cringe-worthy even though they're analogous to handbook and manual, which we use interchangeably. My favorite piece of Anglish writing, and a great example of why it's so hard in modern English, is the essay "Uncleftish Beholding" by Poul Anderson. (Uncleftish beholding means atomic theory.)

Your trivia question today concerns borrowings of the most impure sort. Name a word that modern French has borrowed from English and which English originally borrowed (in part) from Norman French.

Eunoia, etc.

Hey guys,

Through a couple of classes here, I've been introduced to the work of Christian Bök, who is an amazing experimental poet. My favorite project of his is Eunoia (literally "beautiful thinking"), a book which, along with some other miscellany, has five chapters, each of which uses only one vowel. I just ordered it online and I'm pretty excited to read it. Bök prepared for it rigorously, and tried to use as many words that obeyed the one-vowel rule as he could find.

I'm probably partial to it because univocalic writing is something I've attempted before in prose, which you can find on my small site for constrained writing from my younger days, OtherWORDly. I only did it for E and O, my acumen not as quite as honed as Bök's (note dramatic understatement.) Also on that site are some abecedarian stories, where each word starts or ends with the next letter of the alphabet; some "counting stories," in which each word has an ever-increasing number of letters; a story without E; and a sort of prose riddle.

Texts which leave out letters are more generally called lipograms. One of the most famous of these is Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright.

Anyway, I can't let this go without giving you some trivia. Bök chose the title Eunoia at least in part because it's the shortest word he could find in English that contains all five vowels. So, the answers to all the trivia below are words that also contain all five vowels.

Can you name:

1. A word with all five vowels that rhymes with eunoia?
2. A country with all five vowels?
3. A nine-letter word with all five vowels in order?
4. A scientific term consisting only of the five vowels?