Mala Educacion

So yesterday was Valentine's Day, and in lieu of real roses (unimpressive and hideously overpriced at this time of year), I made my sweetie a quantity of royal-icing roses, which means they set rock-hard and can be picked up and satisfyingly crunched between the teeth. (The secret is meringue powder.) I added a few drops of vanilla extract to the icing and of course upon reading the label I was distracted by the word "Madagascar", which is the source of what some consider the best vanilla in the world (and I'm not having anything but the best in my kitchen, certainly not that horrible artificial stuff that's a by-product of the paper-making industry).

There's nothing so very strange about the word itself: what threw me was that I suddenly remembered that the adjectival form of the word isn't the expected "Madagascarian" or "Madagascarese", but "Malagasy".

Isn't that a hell of a thing? And then as I was musing on that word--making roses is not particularly mindful work once you know how--and rolling it around in my head, it suddenly occurred to me that Hitchcock once made a WWII propaganda film called "Aventure Malagache", and it I thought that surely "Malagasy" and "Malagache" have to be related, and of course they are.

But how did an "-l-" turn into a "-d-"?

Try an experiment. Say the words "rate", "late", and "date" with some degree of animation; as you can see, the mouth does quite a bit of moving, and it's hard to imagine that the initial consonantal sounds have anything in common. Now round your mouth as if you're saying "Oooh!" and form the sounds "r", "l", and "d". As you can see, all three consonants are intimately related, practically the same thing (which is why Asians, whose languages usually have either "l" or "r" but not both, or some intermediate sound between the two, can have such trouble distinguishing between them in English). All three sounds are alveolar: they're made with the tongue pushed up towards the palate and the top teeth.

This explains a number of things, such as why a rolled "-r-" in some words can sound like a "-d-", as in the Italian pronunciation of "mozzarella". And that's the secret behind the strange metamorphosis of French "Malagache", derived from "Malagasy", into "Madagascar": an "-l-" turns into a "-d-" with ease, particularly if the listeners aren't listening very closely.