babel/babble (was Re: Sorry-)

in article <ILwtD7.oLo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, chris ambidge
<ambidge@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> asks:

>>>I've found my iPod to be very useful when living in NYC, for
>>>blocking ut the babel and the rail noise on my current commute.

> [jack]

>>Another eggcorn? Babble vs. babel?

> isn't that the etymology, so one is the parent and one is the
> child word?

> sorta like "bedlam" and "Bethlehem [Hospital]"

in a word, no. "babble" is onomatopoetic, and came into english
probably from dutch, possibly through french. (there's an obsolete
spelling "babel" of "babble", which i assume is irrelevant here.)
"Babel" is a hebrew place name; british dictionaries, like the OED,
give only the pronunciation with "long a" (as in "babe") for this
word, while at least some american dictionaries, like AHD4, give a
variant pronunciation with "short a" (as in "Babs"), which is a
homophone of "babble". my guess is that the development of the
short-a variant was indeed influenced by "babble", thanks to the
overlap in meaning.

"Babel" (sometimes in a lower-case variant "babel") has been around in
english for about 500 years in the meaning 'a confused turbulent
medley of sounds'; the OED has cites from 1529. this makes things
like "the babel and the rail noise" (from a speaker of american
english) hard to interpret: is "babel" here the 'turbulent medley'
word (historically derived from "Babel"), or is it an eggcorn for
the homophone "babble"?

meanwhile, a comment by Nigel Pond in the eggcorn database --
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/contribute/comment-page-33/#comment-485
reports "Tower of Babble" as almost mainstream in the u.s., but not in
the u.k., not surprisingly given the observations about pronunciation
above. (the first time pond heard it was when he moved to the u.s. in
1995.) "Tower of Babble" gets ca. 29,300 google web hits, many of
them probably conscious plays on words; some of them are surely
genuine, but it's hard to pick those out.

so we haven't yet put either spelling into the database as an entry.

zotling


.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Tower of Babel
    ... so here it is from memory: ... Wizard's wife: Look at all these buildings named after famous men! ... Babel of voices is a lot of people all talking at once and making a fearful racket, whereas babble is jabber-talk, or burbling, or wittering on, or indeed the sound that a baby or a brook makes, and none of these is usually anything like loud enough to be a Babel. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Busted again
    ... Technically we all live where an overpass will be built. ... but my Babble fish wouldn't babble. ... Babel - as in Tower of Babel - fish. ...
    (alt.smokers.cigars)
  • Re: Busted again
    ... Technically we all live where an overpass will be built. ... but my Babble fish wouldn't babble. ... Babel - as in Tower of Babel - fish. ...
    (alt.smokers.cigars)
  • Re: Busted again
    ... highway overpass. ... but my Babble fish wouldn't babble. ... Babel - as in Tower of Babel - fish. ...
    (alt.smokers.cigars)