Languagehat has an entry about Messrs Pullum and Liberman’s ruminations over the number of new words that enter the language each year: placed at 20K by Don Watson in an article in the Australian newspaper The Age. “As rebarbative as ‘GDP-L-fucose synthase’ may be, I don't see any principled way to distinguish it from the long line of terms that have preceded it, from atmosphere through phlogiston and quark.” Quark, how I love it. The German dairy product, thicker than yoghurt, thinner than cream cheese and not to be confused with the desktop publishing software or the character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Here’s how physicist Murray Gell-Mann says he coined the word, pronounced kwork, for those funny little particles that physics today is so full of. And, I guess that answers the question that Paul Pfalzner asked and which I quoted in an entry earlier this year.
[Addendum 12/26/03: Mark Liberman has an update.]
Gell-Mann says the word is obviously meant to rhyme with Mark in the Joyce quote, but I think it's much more likely to represent the word "quart" and thus have the "or" sound. But that's an unintuitive rendering of -ark (are there any words where that's pronounced "ork"?), so the pronunciation is bound to fluctuate.
Posted by: language hat on December 25, 2003 12:57 PMIn 1963, when I assigned the name "quark" to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been "kwork." Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark"
I wonder where he got the sound from.
Posted by: PF on December 25, 2003 05:25 PMLH: Well, there's thwart and wart for quart and the proper noun Wark for quark, but that's about it. [via Rhyming Zone.]
PF: I've no idea, though I've been meaning to read The Quark and the Jaguar. There may be more of an explanation in it.
For fun, here's a GIF of the particle chart, not to be confused with Particle Man.
