801-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Percontation Marc Picard commented on my piece: “The distinction between percontation and interrogation is alive and well in modern linguistics, except that they’re called wh-questions [who, what, why, when, which, where, plus how] and yes-no questions. In spoken English, as well as in many other languages, I suspect, there’s a clear-cut prosodic difference between them in that the former have a rising-falling intonation and the latter a simple rising intonation.” Another pair of terms for them, Catherine Hurst explained, is open-ended and closed questions.

Several other readers asked about a type fount, which I had where they would have used font. Fount is an unfashionable British English spelling of the same word; both forms derives from French fondre, to melt or cast. The other fount, meaning source (as in “fount of all wisdom”), is a different word, a back formation from fountain on the pattern of the pair mountain, mount. The church font is — like fountain — from the Latin for a spring, fonte, in this case in the phrase fontes baptismi, the waters of baptism; in time font moved from the thing contained to its container.