MELTEMI.

Another word whose etymology I had always vaguely wondered about but never investigated beyond the immediate source is meltemi, borrowed from Modern Greek and meaning ‘etesian (annual) summer wind in the Mediterranean’ (or “Etesian,” as Merriam-Webster would have it for some unknowable reason—it’s not from a proper noun but from an ordinary Greek adjective, etesios ‘annual’). I looked it up in the OED and found an interesting speculation:

Etymology: < modern Greek μελτέμι Etesian wind and the related Turkish meltem offshore breeze, of uncertain origin. Compare Italian meltem (19th cent.).
A possible etymon for both the Greek and the Turkish words (which are probably loanwords) is Italian maltempo bad weather.

I’d be interested to know why they think maltempo is a more plausible etymon than it looks at first glance, but an interesting speculation is better than a void.

Comments

  1. Trond Engen says

    This is of course a question for Nich Nicholas, but he seems to have gone into hibernation.
    If I remember correctly, Italian loans in Greek, and especially those pertaining to navigation and trade, are from Venetian. Venetian (and Northern Italian in general) has lost masculine(/neuter) endings much like French (Milan, Turin). a > e is more difficult. Could that be an effect in the target language? Turkish vowel harmony?

  2. Also “breeze”, according to Online Etymology Dictionary, could come from O. Spanish but our Academy says that “brisa” has an uncertain origin.

  3. Trond Engen says

    Cut and paste without the paste. Now I lost the final retorical question and afterthought: “And meltem be a back-loan? I don’t really believe that, though.”

  4. marie-lucie says

    breeze
    According to the TLFI (French online dictionary, very detailed), the word is attested in writing in several languages in the 16th century (eg French brise perhaps borrowed from Spanish brisa), but the earliest documents are in Catalan (brisa) and Italian (brezza), both attested in the 15th C. From there the origin is uncertain. English breeze is attested later. The Catalan and Italian words (of slightly different origins) seem to indicate that the original reference was for a wind of the Mediterranea, and the name was later adopted by sailors on other seas.
    In French, la brise over the land is a mild, pleasant wind, like breeze, but on the sea la brise de mer is a much stronger wind.

  5. Bert Bruins says

    I was going to suggest that the Dutch “bries” might have influenced both anglo-saxon English “breeze” and Spanish “brisa” (Flemish/Dutch influence at Spanish 16th century court/Spanish troops in the Low Lands at this time), but the 15th C. Catalan and Italian references appear to make this less plausible….

  6. Nişanyan’s Turkish Etymological Dictionary gives the definition “a sea breeze blowing at certain times in the summer” and says that Greek μελτέμι is from Turkish, but gives a question mark for the etymology. I like the Venetian theory, though. Vowel harmonization is plausible for the a to e switch. Also, in modern Turkish /e/ has the allophone [æ] before /m n l r/, though I’m not sure how far back that goes.
    The dictionary says the first recorded instance was in Meninski’s Thesaurus linguarum orientalium. Meninski seems to be an interesting character (and one who surprisingly has not yet made it into the English Wikipedia): he worked for the courts of Poland and the Holy Roman Empire as an ambassador and interpreter, and had an acrimonious dispute with a certain Podesta, I’m not sure about what.

  7. marie-lucie says

    Dutch bries
    The TLFI mentions English and other Germanic languages, the earliest citation from this group being a Friesian word (unfortunately, I can’t see all the diacritics, even the French ones, on my screen, so the Friesian has a question mark instead of the letter in the middle, thus br?se, that’s why I did not try to quote it). But the article concludes that the Germanic languages (whose usage of the word is attested toward the end of the 16C) borrowed the word from a Romance source, most likely Spanish.
    English breeze is perhaps more likely to have been borrowed (aurally) from French brise. This would mean that at the time of borrowing the English long vowel “ee” had already evolved into the sound found in French “i” (which is phonetically lengthened by the following [z] sound). The timing fits in with what is known of the gradual evolution of the English long vowels. Had French brise been borrowed a century or two earlier, an English “brise” might have now rhymed with “rise”.

  8. Between Trond and Stephen it looks like a good case has been made that the Turkish word (which thence entered Greek) derives from a Venetian cognate of Italian MALTEMPO.
    But something isn’t right with “Italian MELTEM”: (Tuscan) Italian words cannot (with a few monosyllabic exceptions) end in a consonant. Even if the word was re-borrowed from Greek or Turkish, I would expect some kind of phonological adaptation (cf. the more recent GIPPE, from English JEEP).

  9. Garrigus Carraig (f/k/a komfo,amonan) says

    The incomplete word in TLFI is brîse.
    I would swear I once knew a woman named Meltemi, but can’t remember anything else about her.

  10. marie-lucie says

    Thank you, GC.
    I don’t know why I can no longer see the accented letters in the TLFI. I used to, and I have not changed my computer or software. Fortunately, only the TLFI screens are affected. Here for instance I can type using either the US keyboard or the Canadian French one, which puts the accents in the right places (I also have the French keyboard, but there are more differences from the English keyboard with which I learned to type). I have to alternate with the US English keyboard to do italics, bold etc but that is not a big problem.

  11. In connection to the etymology of meltem, it is interesting to note that modern Turkish fırtına “storm”, alteration of earlier fortuna, furtuna, is a borrowing of Greek φορτούνα (see Du Cange), itself from Italian fortuna (the sense “fortunale, burrasca, tempesta sul mare” being present already in Dante (Purgatorio, XXXII.115-117):

    e ferì ‘l carro di tutta sua forza;
    ond’el piegò come nave in fortuna,
    vinta da l’onda, or da poggia, or da orza.

    As Longfellow translates:

    And he with all his might the chariot smote,
    Whereat it reeled, like vessel in a tempest
    Tossed by the waves, now starboard and now larboard.

  12. Fascinating! And looking up fırtına in my Turkish dictionary I happened on fingirdek ‘coquettish, frivolous,’ which is a delightful word.

  13. My Turkish Sprachgefühl is very far from perfect, but fingirdek is not a word I would use lightly at all. Recently, I came across the related verb fingirdemek in last week’s instalment of a karikatür bandı (bande dessinée or comic strip) called Ama arkadaşlar iyidir, in the notable leftist Turkish satirical weekly Uykusuz. In it, a man is confronted by a giant fearsome vision of the matriarch of a family (rather like the supernatural being seen after around 1:05:51 here in this Turkish horror film). She says,

    Senin kızı orda burda fingirderken görmüşler… O kız töreye karşı gelmiştır… Namusu bozulmuştur… Senin de namusun gitmiştir… Ailemizin şerefine leke sürmenin cezası bellidir… töremize göre bu kara lekeyi temizlemek senin işindir… O KIZ VURACAKSIN OĞUL!!!

    Which is something like:

    People have seen your daughter traipsing around, acting like a tramp… That girl has gone against our ways. Her honor is ruined. And your honor is gone, too. The punishment for staining the honor of our family is clear… According to our custom, it is your job to remove this black stain… YOU MUST KILL THE GIRL, MY SON!!!

    At least where I live, in Upper Mesopotamia, if one says that a young woman is fingirdek, it puts her virtue seriously into question. Them’s fightin’ words—her father or her brother would have to defend her. My Kurdish and Zaza housemates, who are sitting next to me as I write, confirm this.

  14. George Gibbard says

    Senin kızı orda bursa fingirderken görmüşler ‘People have seen your daughter traipsing around, acting like a tramp’

    is it not Senin kızını?

  15. No, I have the October 1 issue of Uykusuz right in front of me:

    Senin kızı orda burda fingirderken görmüşler…

    See for example http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/iken.htm for the case of the subject of the aorist + iken. And of course the possessive pronominal suffix can be omitted on the governed noun when the genitive of the pronoun precedes, in the colloquial language.

    It’s difficult typing when the power keeps going out, as it does here, in preparation for the election…

  16. Like Hat, I was charmed with the sound of the words “fingirdek” and “fingir finger” and “fingirdemek” when I first discovered them in the dictionary. And then I was disappointed when I discovered I couldn’t use them as lightly as I could “coquettish” or “flirtatious” in English.

  17. George Gibbard says

    And of course the possessive pronominal suffix can be omitted on the governed noun when the genitive of the pronoun precedes, in the colloquial language.

    I didn’t know that, thanks!

    In Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence, a friend of the narrator creates a carbonated beverage called Meltem.

  18. George Gibbard says

    Senin hüsnü, benim aşkı, senin cevri, benim sabrı
    Demâdem artar, eksilmez, tükenmez, bînihâyettir!

  19. For Language Hat readers who are interested, those well-known lines

    Senin hüsnün, benim aşkım, senin cevrin, benim sabrım,
    Demâdem artar, eksilmez, tükenmez, bî-nihâyettir.

    Your beauty and my love, your persecutions and my patience,
    Increase every moment, unabating, inexhaustible, without end.

    are by Zeynep Hatun, a 15th-century poet, one of the first two known female poets in the Ottoman Divan poetic tradition, along with Mihri Hatun.

  20. Mersi!

  21. Rica ederim.

  22. The notion that Etesian is a proper noun seems to be as old in English as the word itself: it appears capitalized in Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny, and at least half the OED’s quotations since then, right up through 1853 (the entry was published in 1892). Googling for Etesios finds only the Spanish and Portuguese plurals (not capitalized), and for Etesius a now-defunct UK company of that name.

  23. Huh. Weird.

  24. I mean, of course, an adjective derived from a proper noun, dammit. Though it’s also used as a noun in the sense ‘etesian wind’.

Speak Your Mind

*