Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 June 17

= June 17 =

"jiggity-jog"
"Home again, home again, jiggity-jog"

It seems like from a poem or lyrics, but what does "jiggity-jog" mean?--Analphil (talk) 07:07, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * It's from a nursery rhyme "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,/Home again, home again, jiggety-jig./To market, to market, to buy a fat hog,/Home again, home again, jiggety-jog./To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,/Home again, home again, market is done."
 * The "jigety-jog" is imitative of the motion of riding on a horse, and you bounce the small child on your knee in time to it. DuncanHill (talk) 07:12, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks.--Analphil (talk) 07:13, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I recall it to be "jiggety-jig-jig" and "jiggety-jig-jog", to match the number of syllables in the odd-numbered lines. — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 07:30, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Then you must have been singing a different tune to the one I know - "jiggety-jig-jog" doesn't fit! Alansplodge (talk) 08:46, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually, I don't recall it having a tune. I learnt it as a poem. — Cheers, Jack Lee  –talk– 19:21, 23 June 2011 (UTC)


 * To market, to market contains nonsense words.—Wavelength (talk) 15:07, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

presti-jicus
Translating some book, I found a sentence as follows:

Bud's telling me about his granddaughter winning some kind of "presti-jicus international prize," as he calls it.

'Presti-jicus' should be kind of intentional cacography, but I have no idea what it actually means. Please help.--Analphil (talk) 18:55, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I'm sure that's supposed to be an attempt at saying "prestigious". Looie496 (talk) 18:59, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * It seems you're right. Thank you.--Analphil (talk) 19:00, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * What book was that? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:07, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * GIYF. Robopocalypse, by Daniel H. Wilson. &mdash;Akrabbimtalk 20:26, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the info. Lose the GIFY lecture. The OP raised the question and should have supplied the source of that comment. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:33, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I would be most interested in knowing what language you are translating it into, and how you will replicate the effect. μηδείς (talk) 21:27, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * @ Baseball Bugs - No, the OP can phrase their question any way s/he likes, if you don't like what s/he does then walk away, not imply some nonexistent rule. Caesar&#39;s Daddy (talk) 07:36, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I asked the OP what the book was, and Akrabbim chirped in with a wise-guy, patronizing comment. You got a problem with any of this discussion, talk to Akrabbim. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:30, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * You don't need to tell us what happened: we can see it for ourselves. If you don't want a calculus lecture, don't walk into the maths office and ask what the area is under a clearly defined section of clearly defined curve. If you don't want snippy replies, try avoiding phrases like "lose the GIFY lecture" as single snippy sentences, since to most native English speakers they imply arrogance and a sense of entitlement, which I'm sure you did not intend. 86.164.66.52 (talk) 11:25, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Under multiple wings
"Jan took Sally under her wing" means Sally was under Jan's protection, care, or patronage.

Suppose that Sally is under the care of several people. E.g., "Jan, June and Jane took Sally under their...."

Would it be better style to say "under their wing", since the usual wording of the expression involves one wing, OR "under their wings", recognizing that they each have different wings, not one shared wing? Thanks, Wanderer57 (talk) 19:35, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I don't know that I've ever heard it used in the plural, but if so it would almost certainly have to be "their wings". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:08, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * In the singular form, definitely an old expression, 13th century or earlier. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:10, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The underlying metaphor doesn't make sense in the plural. The image is of a bird protecting a chick by covering it with it's wing -- there really isn't any way for multiple birds to protect the same chick like that. Looie496 (talk) 21:14, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I would tend to agree with that. So, if Jan, June and Jane are participating in essentially the same act of protection, they'd have a collective "wing", which would probably be the wing belonging to the organisation of which they are all members.  But if Jan, June and Jane were helping Sally in individual, separate and different ways, then they'd have their own individual wings.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  21:51, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Thank you all. Sheltering under multiple wings simultaneously creates a nonsensical image.  Multiple people providing shelter under a single wing gets into a grammatical mess.  I was sensing that problem and I much appreciate having it clarified.  I'm going with a wording that doesn't require any wings.


 * Www.etymonline.com to which Baseball Bugs linked is excellent. I had not seen it. Thanks.  !Wanderer57 (talk) 22:51, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It's a good resource. I learned about it from someone else on this page, some time back. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:15, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

It would be better to say "under their care/guidance." μηδείς (talk) 21:23, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. The perils of slang. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:34, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

'etymology' or history of 'bat shit'
Phrases such as 'bat-shit insane', 'batshit crazy' or 'he went bat shit' can be found in many printed sources, the web, and even batshit gives the insanity usage as a disambiguation. Is there any rhyme or reason for this usage? Or is it just a historical quirk? I thought perhaps there was some link between guano exposure and mental health, (à la mad hatters), but I cannot find any evidence of this. OED is not especially helpful, but does mention the possible influence of "(to go) ape-shit". Any ideas? SemanticMantis (talk) 20:03, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary suggests that it (along with batty) is ultimately derived from the idiom "to have bats in one's belfry," which makes sense to me. Deor (talk) 20:50, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Searching Google Books, the earliest uses that show up go back to the 1940s, but they used it as a synonym for bullshit. The first book that shows up using it to mean crazy is Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors, published in 1967. Looie496 (talk) 20:57, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks! SemanticMantis (talk) 13:51, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * In some dialects of English, the -shit suffix is a generally intensifier which gets appended onto lots of words describing often personality traits. From "batty" we get "batshit" (crazy) from "chicken" we get "chickenshit" (cowardly), there's also "apeshit" (enraged), "horseshit" (which is roughly a synonym of bullshit).  So its not unique to bulls and bats.  -- Jayron  32  04:31, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
 * As with this item at about 40 seconds into the clip. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:14, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, intensifuckingfier, exactly. μηδείς (talk) 05:02, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Rabies, which is notoriously spread by bats, is mistakenly present in bat guano. Rabies can result in mania if untreated, hence the term "bat shit crazy".

German "zug" (in all its meanings) in English


Is there really a single English word that properly captures what German means by the word "zug"? I'd thought it simply meant "train" (which confused me no end when I saw de:Bernard Montgomery described as a "Zugführer" - when he was quite obviously a soldier, not a train conductor). On looking at the DE->EN dictionary, I see lots of words or phrases that use "zug". So firstly I guess that when one talks about "zug" meaning railway train, that's just a (situationally appropriate) contraction for "Eisenbahnzug". Equally if we were talking in a military setting it's be reasonable to think it meant a military unit (does it, incidentally, mean any specific size of unit, like a troop or company, or is it just "unit" in general)? But looking through all those zug word and usages in the German dictionary, I can't think of any English word that would fit for "zug" in all places. In some cases "unit", in some "collection", in some perhaps "element", in some maybe nothing more than "thing" or "item". Is there really a concept I'm missing here, or is "zug" a word Germans stuff into places that need a word, like "thingy"? 87.113.44.172 (talk) 20:30, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The Wiktionary entry for Zug notes that it is also used to define a Platoon amongst other definitions. Nanonic (talk) 20:53, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Based on looking at some German sites, the word derives originally from the verb ziehen, which means to draw; to pull along. The corresponding noun thus means something is is pulled along, or more generally something that moves in a continuous or sustained way -- thus it can refer to a train, a body of troops on the march, an avalanche rushing down a hill, etc.  I don't think there is a single English word that has such a broad meaning. Looie496 (talk) 21:11, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * How about get? No such user (talk) 21:38, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, words like get, go and do have a huge range of meanings. The same with certain Latin roots such as fac-/fic- which is the cognate of "to do". μηδείς (talk) 21:50, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Excuse me for being imprecise. I didn't mean to say that no English word has an equally broad meaning, just that no English word has the same broad meaning. Looie496 (talk) 01:36, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

The English cognate is tug as in tugboat. The Proto-Indo-European language cognate is *deuk-. The Latin cognate is duco/ducere as in duke, duchy, dux bellorum, con-duct pro-duce, etc. μηδείς (talk) 21:39, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Take off every zug! Nyttend (talk) 22:04, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Other things Zug can mean are a turn in a game (Du bist am Zug = "it's your turn") and a draft of air (especially in the compounds Luftzug and Durchzug, the latter of which means "cross-ventilation"). —Angr (talk) 07:24, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * A tugboat is called a Schlepper in German? Oy! ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:26, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yep, and a tow truck is an Abschleppfahrzeug. I literally laughed out loud the first time I saw this sign in Germany and mentally translated it as "Illegally parked cars will be shlepped away at owner's expense." —Angr (talk) 14:05, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Priceless. I wonder if the average German knows how funny that word has become in English. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 20:03, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * American English, maybe. It has little or no meaning down under, at least.  I'm vaguely aware of it but if pressed I could not have told you what it means.  It doesn't appear in WP.  Wiktionary has it, but there's nothing humorous about it.  So, what's the joke?  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  21:12, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * What?! You want maybe I should draw you a picture? μηδείς (talk) 21:31, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I think that "funny" may also need translation in this context if that video is supposed to be funny. Tevildo (talk) 21:35, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm none the wiser already. --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  21:55, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Jack, I wouldn't say there's anything inherently funny about it, it's just very Jewish (so there's humor in the unexpectedness of someone who's clearly not Jewish using it) and it's very slangy (so there's humor in the unexpectedness of encountering it in a context where otherwise a rather high register is being used. So seeing a formally written sign saying "Illegally parked cars will be shlepped away at owner's expense" would be funny, while hearing an elderly Jewish man saying "Oy, I had to shlep all the way over there and for nothing!" wouldn't be. (BTW, in case anyone reading this thread didn't notice, Medeis referenced the Yiddishness of this word with his use of Yinglish syntax in You want maybe I should draw you a picture?.) —Angr (talk) 22:01, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * !rgnA,אַזאַ אַ מענטש איר זענען μηδείς (talk) 03:51, 21 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Angr. I get it now.  That it was Yiddish/Jewish was always clear, and I got Medeis's thing.  I think that many Americans have this Yinglish milieu with them from birth, and it's second nature to them whether they're Jewish or not.  But many other parts of the anglosphere simply don't have that cultural element, and have to pick up what they can from books, movies and TV.  And asking questions in places like this.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  22:12, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * "Schlep" is funny because it's like saying "haul" or "drag", only more colorfully. In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten included this quote from the New York Post of Sep 29, 1957: "Queen Elizabeth will schlep along 95 pieces of baggage on her trip here." I have a hunch it wasn't the queen herself doing the schlepping. Also, a "schlepper" in Yiddish is a person of low repute, literally "a drag", so calling a tugboat a "schlepper" is funny. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:43, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Reminds me of Mark Twain, The Awful German Language: "Strictly speaking, Zug means Pull, Tug, Draught, Procession, March, Progress, Flight, Direction, Expedition, Train, Caravan, Passage, Stroke, Touch, Line, Flourish, Trait of Character, Feature, Lineament, Chess-move, Organ-stop, Team, Whiff, Bias, Drawer, Propensity, Inhalation, Disposition: but that thing which it does not mean -- when all its legitimate pennants have been hung on, has not been discovered yet." ;-)--91.12.214.70 (talk) 18:45, 21 June 2011 (UTC)

Yiddish/English
Not to start a megillah, but the use of Yiddish expressions in American English is pervasive. Go to 2:15 of this clip, where "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" starts, and bonus points to anyone who can say (without looking it up) what Groucho means by "Did someone call me Schnorrer?" :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:53, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Here's a supposed American Indian speaking Yiddish, which is funny even if you have no idea what he's actually saying:

Then there's this, an overdub of A Hard Day's Night in a mix of Yiddish and English, and fittingly one of the comments added to it "It's been a hard day's schlep".

←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 01:22, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, I had to look up "Schnorrer", but the "dancing" Groucho does after saying that is completely ridiculous. I should watch the whole film. Pfly (talk) 09:45, 21 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I remember the opening of the TV show Laverne & Shirley, where they did the hopscotch chant "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!" Viewers were assumed to know what those Yiddish words meant. Well, I didn't.  According to Yiddish words used by English-speaking Jews, Schlimazel means a chronically unlucky person, but to me watching that show, it sounded dangerously close to the word schemozzle, which means a complete mess, and seems to be found in many parts of the anglosphere.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  02:02, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * According to EO, that term shemozzle is "probably" derived from schlemazel. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:08, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Apparently the "Hasenpfeffer" part refers to a type of rabbit stew (yipe!) called "pepper rabbit". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:19, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Hasenpfeffer in Germany is a stew made from rabbit and thickened with blood (yes, ewww!), so I'm a bit dubious if that is really a Yiddish word. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 15:31, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Wasn't Hasenpfeffer Incorporated the name of the brewery where L&S worked? —Angr (talk) 17:24, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

More on why "shlep" is funny
Humorous effects in words can be caused by the use of unusual phonology. The sequence /shl/ doesn't occur in native English words. Non-coronal letters like /p/ (and /k/ etc.,) are more humorous and less common than the coronal consonants produced in the middle of the mouth, such as /s t r l/ and /n/ which are coronals, and may be familiar to gameshow fans. Shlep is funny because of the way it sounds, and its connotation ungainly dragging, and, by extension, a clumsy person. μηδείς (talk) 01:27, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Question can anyone think of the phonological term for the non-coronal consonants? Something like peripheral, but my encyclopedia's in storage. μηδείς (talk) 01:27, 19 June 2011 (UTC)
 * WHAAOE. —Angr (talk) 06:15, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Hmm, but peripheral consonant only includes bilabials and velars, not any other non-coronal places like palatal, pharyngeal, or glottal. Still a useful term, though.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 05:21, 20 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I think it also has to do with the fact that during the early to middle part of the 20th century, most of the prominent comedians in the US were of Jewish descent. So when they were doing their acts, they played to what they knew. When they played a funny old man, they emulated the funny old men that they knew, like their grandfather or their uncle. It's gotten to the point where if someone in the US thinks of a funny old man, they intrinsically think of a little old Jewish man. I can't remember who it was, but I heard a comedian talking about ad libing an old man bit, and toward the end one of them went something like "Why do we both have a Yiddish accent? Neither of us are Jewish!" So words and phrases from Yiddish like "shlep" made it into comedy routines in large part because the comedians were Jewish (that, and the words sound funny). -- 174.31.219.218 (talk) 06:07, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Comedian: Two Jews got off a bus...
 * Heckler: Hey! Why does it always have to be two Jews? Why couldn't it be two Chinese?
 * Comedian: OK, two Chinese got off a bus. One turned to the other and said, "So, tell me, Chan, how was your son's bar-mitzvah?"
 * ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 07:33, 19 June 2011 (UTC)


 * I swear I looked! Thanks, Angr.

/r/ in Italian vs Spanish
I have two friends who speak Italian, one non-natively, whom I've known for a very long time and who's been studying Italian for about 4 years, and one natively, whom I met during her foreign exchange stay in the States. I thought it would be interesting to introduce them and we had a very interesting evening, but there is one comment from the native speaker that intrigued me as a linguistics student. She said of the non-native speaker that while he speaks very well, he "pronounces his r's like a Spaniard" (even though he does not speak Spanish). I assumed she meant that he used /ɾ/ in addition to /r/, because /ɾ/ is not a phoneme in Italian. However, looking back I realize that [ɾ] does occur in Italian, as an allophone of /r/, and furthermore their distribution in Italian and Spanish is identical ([ɾ] intervocalically, [r] when written /rr/ and at the beginnings of words, free-variation everywhere else; the difference is that in Spanish they can distinguish words whereas in Italian they cannot). And now my question (finally!): What difference is there between the Italian /r/ and Spanish /r/ that IPA seems unable to capture? I have already determined it could not be a question of distribution, nor of sound since both sounds occur in both languages. Thanks. 72.128.95.0 (talk) 22:16, 17 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Where was the native Italian speaker from? Did she have a native dialect different from the standard? μηδείς (talk) 22:21, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

she was from Tuscany from a well-off family so I assumed she spoke fairly standard Italian... 72.128.95.0 (talk) 17:54, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * The distribution of /r/ is not the same in Spanish and Italian. According to  this article in the JIPA, Italian /r/ can (but doesn't have to) become [ɾ] intervocalically (and apparently in some onsets like [tɾ]), whereas in Spanish, the positions that [r] can surface are much more limited (in fact, you're probably better off saying the underlying form is /ɾ/ for Spanish). Even in emphatic speech, Spanish [r] is limited. If you look towards the bottom of that article (you'll probably need your campus's VPN or be on campus to access it), you'll find a phonetic transcription of a paragraph of Italian speech, with [r]s in intervocalic positions, where you wouldn't find them in Spanish. The article even transcribes some of them as long , which definitely would not be how they'd surface there in Spanish.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 19:25, 18 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Yes, I too have heard that r in Italian and Spanish is different, but I’ve never seen any actual explanation of the difference. I’ve come to assume they are talking about the fact that /ɾ/ doubles to /r/ after /n/, /l/, /s/ or a word-boundary (as well as when written double, of course), whereas in Italian /ɾ/ doubles to /r/ only in cases of radoppiamento sintattico or being written double.


 * I’m surprised to hear that the distinction between the flap and the trill forms minimal pairs in Spanish but not Italian. Surely the caro–carro distinction applies to both.  I think you need to explain what you mean.  — Chameleon 13:39, 20 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Both the JIPA article I cited in my post above and the WP article on Italian phonology list only one rhotic sound (the trill /r/) as a phoneme of Italian, but the WP article on Spanish phonology lists both /r/ and /ɾ/ as phonemes of Spanish. Therefore - represents a minimal pair in Spanish but a homophonic pair in Italian. If anyone has access to this authoritative-looking book, it would surely address this question with a lot more detail.--el Aprel (facta-facienda) 19:51, 20 June 2011 (UTC)


 * But caro and carro are obviously not homophones, any more than casa and cassa are. The article is just using the convention of writing the symbol once for the sound that is considered single, and twice for the sound that is considered double (i.e. /'karo/ and /'kasa/ versus /'karro/ and /'kassa/).  With a bit of IPA pedantry, this becomes /'kaɾo/ versus /'karo/ instead.


 * So, I repeat. Both languages use the single  sound (whichever IPA symbol we choose to represent it) most of the time that it’s written with a single .  Both language use the long  sound (whichever IPA symbol we choose to represent it) whenever it’s written double.  Additionally, a single  is doubled up if any of the following apply:
 * In Italian, syntactic doubling; e.g. a rivederci is pronounced arrivederci because a is a doubling word.
 * In Spanish, at the beginning of any word; e.g. rey is pronounced rrey (indeed, I’ve read mediæval texts that spelt it rrey or Rey to represent this doubling).
 * In Spanish, after certain consonants; e.g. alrededor, sonreír and Israel are actually pronounced alrrededor, sonrreír and Irrael.
 * That’s the distribution of the  and  sounds in each language. I’m not really concerned with which IPA conventions are used, but is there any actual subtle distinction between the articulation of the sounds in each language?
 * I’m sometimes mistaken for a native speaker of Spanish, so I think I’m pronouncing the sounds perfectly in that language, but I’m willing to believe that I am introducing foreign  sounds into my slightly less fluent Italian. The other possibility is that when Italians say someone is pronouncing his rs like a Spaniard, they just mean he’s always doubling them at the beginning of words.  — Chameleon 23:29, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Just by the way, Italian casa is pronounced /'kaza/, not /'kasa/ as in Spanish. --Trovatore (talk) 23:30, 20 June 2011 (UTC)
 * No, the traditional pronunciation of casa is /'kasa/. /s/ and /z/ form a minimal pair in Italian, e.g. /'kjɛse/ (‘asked’) versus /'kjɛze/ (‘churches’).  Non-Tuscan pronunciation tends to level this distinction in favour of /s/ in the south and /z/ in the north, but that’s another matter.  — Chameleon 01:01, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
 * You're going by Tuscany? There they pronounce it /'haza/. --Trovatore (talk) 01:06, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Not exactly; I’m going by standard Italian pronunciation, which was historically based on a form of educated Florentine in which a /z/ versus /s/ minimal pair existed but which rejected certain other features that one can hear today in Florence, such as the intervocalic realisation of /k/ and /tʃ/ as [h] and [ʃ]. I am of course aware that the northern dialectal levelling of /s/ and /z/ to just /z/ is gaining ground in the standard language.  I lived in Milan, and my own pronunciation wavers between /'kasa/ and /'kaza/.
 * This is all well-established stuff within Italian linguistics. Do you actually not know, or are you just trolling out of some pro-northern bias?  — Chameleon 03:18, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I lived in Padova, but for a couple months in Siena. I don't ever recall hearing /'kasa/.  /'haza/, yes. --Trovatore (talk) 06:14, 21 June 2011 (UTC)
 * That’s surprising, but not impossible: Tuscany is diverse. The Florentine pronunciation is /la 'hasa/ (after a vowel without syntactic doubling), /ak 'kasa/ (with syntactic doubling), and /per 'kasa/ (other positions).  Only the first of these is dialectal.  The word casa is actually the one used to exemplify the sound /s/ in the Italian Wikipedia article on it. — Chameleon 07:08, 21 June 2011 (UTC)