So that's why mama's crying.

I'm in the middle of Michael Babcock's The Night Attila Died, a intriguing investigation into the cause of the Hunnish tyrant's death (or murder). Last year, I wrote about the book, which at the time was yet to be published. I jokingly added that I would be reluctant to buy something that would make me think of the old Paper Lace song, "The Night Chicago Died," every time I picked it up:

"I heard my mama cry
I heard her pray the night Chicago died
Brother what a night it really was
Brother what a fight it really was"

To which entry Dr. Babcock himself replied in an email,

"I'm the author and I came across your post yesterday while pacing the virtual hallways of the Internet waiting, like an expectant father, for my book to be released on July 5.

"Needless to say, I never saw the Paper Lace connection. This has less to do with any specific cultural deficit on my part than on the popular mispronunciation of Attila's name. So here goes with my pedantic response. The analogy works well when you replace the trisyllabic Chicago (with its accent on the second syllable) with the trisyllabic Attila (with its accent on the second syllable). But here's the problem: the accent in 'Attila' doesn't fall on the second syllable. Philologists (I'm one) argue that Attila's name is formed from the Gothic word for father, atta, with the accent on the first syllable: AT-tila (not a-TIL-la). The diminutive suffix -ila transforms the name into a term of affection, into (roughly) something like 'Daddy.' Which, to bring things full circle, would explain why Mama is crying. By the way, all this is discussed in Chapter 4 of my book."

According to Dr. Babcock, when "Proto-Germanic" split off from the mother tongue, Indo-European, some time before 500 B.C., part of what distinguished the new language was a shift in word accent, moving to the first syllable. Much of the English language retains this tendency, and in some regions of the United States, the tendency is rather strong: in the South and in many African-American communities, for example, PO-lice and DEE-troit are common pronunciations of police and Detroit, words of French (ergo, Latin) derivation).

"Cultural snobs may regard this as a mark of unsophistication," Dr. Babcock writes. "[T]he linguist, however, hears an ancient pedigree behind these pronunciations, a linguistic force that's over theree thousand years old."

All this is extremely interesting, I think, and The Night Attila Died is wonderfully absorbing and well-written.