I’ve long been a fan of Irish curses (2003, 2015), so how could I resist Éanna Ó Caollaí’s 54 Irish curses you won’t have learned in school (archived)? It starts:
One question I am sometimes asked as a native Irish speaker is why Irish has no swear words or slang associated with it. The answer of course is that it does, but such words and sayings are rarely, if ever, taught in our schools. Rightly or wrongly, the degree to which we are able to curse and swear with any degree fluency will never be measured in an exam.
And maybe we are the worse for it. I can’t think of many better ways of learning a language than by celebrating its aesthetic characteristics. Of course in most cases, the swear words, curses and slang many of us encountered in our formative years first reached our ears outside the classroom.
I remember as a child returning to school after our summer holidays in the west of Ireland armed with an arsenal of words such as crabadán, bobarún and búbaire and, to the amusement of the teachers, phrases such as buinneach shíor ort and a dhiabhal de phogaí among others.
Then he gets to Brian/Flann/Myles:
Flann O’Brien once joked in a column in The Irish Times that the average English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words while the Irish-speaking peasant uses at least 4,000.
“Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big,” he wrote. “If it’s small, it’s a boat, and if it’s large, it’s a ship. In his great book, An tOileánach, however, the uneducated Tomás Ó Criomhthain uses perhaps a dozen words to convey the concept of varying super-marinity – áthrach long, soitheach, bád, naomhóg, bád raice, galbhád, púcán and whatever you’re having yourself.”
He went on to suggest that in Donegal there were native speakers who knew so many million words that it was a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time.
And finally he gets to the list of curses, which begins with Loscadh is dó ort ‘That you may be burned and scorched’ and ends with Buinneach dhearg go dtigidh ort ‘That you may have red diarrhoea,’ with many fine examples along the way (I’m particularly fond of the brief and effective Galar an bháis ort ‘The disease of death upon you’). Excellent stuff, via Catriona Kelly’s Facebook post.
“Imeacht go fánach ort féin is ar do chnapán miúlach: Off with you and your lousy lump.” What does that mean, exactly?
it was a matter of pride with them never to use the same word twice in a life-time
Equally effective for putting the Anglophone in his linguistic place is the Kusaasi method, viz. never to use the same word twice in exactly the same sense. (This has the added benefit of being the more effective, the fewer words there are in the dictionary, thereby saving valuable resources and thus saving the planet.)
Do Protestant Irish speakers invoke the Devil as much as the Catholics do?
Dineen has
—
cnap, -aip, pl. -apaidhe, and -apa, m., a lump, a mass; a knob, a ball, a button; anything dense; a dense human head; a blow, a rap, a hard knock; cnap phráta, a good “lump” of a potato; tá sé ‘na chnap, he is sound asleep.
cnápach, -aigh -aighe, m., an ugly or ungainly person; c. smulcaire (O’Ra.), cf. gearra-ch. (McD.).
…
cnapán, -áin, pl. id., m., a knob; anything large or stout; a lump; an excresence; in pl., cnapáin, lumps in the throat; cnapán uibh, …
—
So I am going for cnapán míolach = lousy (poss. literally housing lice) lump of a head. Btw, I don’t know the spelling miúlach but I think míolach must be meant.
why Irish has no swear words or slang associated with it.
Huh? Does anybody who knows of Irish as a separate language _not_ know it has swear words and slang? Isn’t Ulysses full of them — some minced, I suppose.
rarely, if ever, taught in our schools
So Ó Caollaí is talking about Irish as taught in Irish schools? Some sort of sanitised for young ears version?
“Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big,” [Miles]
Actually no. English has plenty of words for sea-going craft. If you were to argue they’re mostly derived from Dutch (as are ‘ship’, ‘boat’, ‘yacht’, ‘sloop’, ‘yawl’) or Germanic (‘skiff’, ‘ketch’), that’s a different matter. (‘dinghy’ poss. from Sanskrit, ‘corracle’ from Welsh/Irish)
Alyernatively forget lousy and translate “a halting journey to you and your lump of a mule….”
My uncles were impressed by their grandfather’s cursing in Irish in their youth. On one occasion, vexed by some farm related mishap, he uttered a string of curses, paused for breath, and gave a second blast, with no repetition. He took a dim view of cursing in English: it was not just vulgar, but crude.
Ship isn’t Dutch, it’s inherited (e.g. OE scip, pl. scipu) – it’s an early Latin loanword into some quite early form of Germanic, early enough that the shift of ph to [f] hadn’t yet happened in the Greek original: scyphus “some kind of pot”.
(Pott itself actually occurs as a mild dysphemism for “ship” in, inevitably northern, German.)
Another mild dysphemism in, inevitably northern, German is the word Pisspott for the humble abode of the fisherman and his wife (she of the determination to cede first place to no man).
Poor dear, it was just too much and it all went to her head. I suppose the story can be read as a sympathetic parable of feminism.
Thanks @DM. I was taking from etymonline/Dutch ‘schip’, but yes every Germanic language has a cognate. I see no Latin or Greek.
Most English nautical vocab comes from Dutch — borrowed over various centuries, so it was a fair guess.
So do you have a source for borrowing _from_ Latin/Greek? scyphus could be a sound-alike/again a semantic connection seems weak. What did Odysseus call his? What did the Greeks call those Phoenician monster cargo transports?
The question here is how the Germanic *p dropped from the heavens.
Possible native sources:
– PIE *b (through Grimm’s law), which did not exist. Especially not as a suffix or as a “root extension” ( = suffix at some earlier stage).
– PIE *pn, *bhn or theoretically *bn yielding PGmc *pp (through Kluge’s law), which would have been shortened at the end of an overlong syllable. But, first, that would require a root *skeyP- followed by a suffix *-nó-; the root would, again, not be simply *skey- but something longer for no clear reason. Second, what the suffix is doing there would also need an explanation; and, third, the short *i does not make the syllable long enough to shorten the expected *pp.
The Romans had ships in the North Sea since Caesar invaded Britain, and soon after that Romans started maritime trade along the Frisian coast and into the larger rivers. I can’t quite remember if they’re known to have called some kind of ship scyphus, but I think they are…
@DM The question here is how the Germanic *p dropped from the heavens.
Fair point. So was Pokorny given to ignoring inconvenient stray consonants? — like all the best amateur etymologists.
Greek original: scyphus “some kind of pot”.
It’s not obvious to me how the semantics goes from something to put liquid into, to something to put into liquid. And drinking-vessels being generally round would make them terrible as any kind of sailing-/rowing-vessel. Greek, Roman, Viking ships are all long/narrow/fishlike. You don’t make a cup by bending long, narrow woodstrips into a ring — at least not until modern wood-steamers/carvel construction.
Whereas *skei- “to cut, split,” I had all figured out as starting with floating logs; roping them together to make a raft; cutting them to a more streamlined shape; splitting into planks.
OTOH etymonline ‘cup’ gives
Note “a kind of ship”. But “heap”, “beehive”. This *kup- seems something of a wonderword — can we all just connect up stuff like that? — with the get-out-of-jail “probably”.
Latin scyphus = “cup, goblet, communion cup”; σκῠ́φος “a drinking vessel with a deep body, flat bottom, and two small horizontal handles near the rim and used especially in ancient Greece” [M-W]
Would “the shift of ph to [f] ” in Greek have meant that σκῠ́φ- etymons didn’t interfere with kyp- etymons? Despite them both ending up in Germanic* as -p. Wherefrom the word-final -pf in German?
Another mild dysphemism in, inevitably northern, German is the word Pisspott for the humble abode of the fisherman and his wife (she of the determination to cede first place to no man).
Indeed, when my mother told me the story in English, she called it the pisspot, which on investigation turns out to have been in the language since Middle English days at least. The verb is ultimately < Latin *pissiare, inherited by the Romance languages (in some languages it takes the form /piʃ-/ and in Aromanian /kiʃ-/) and borrowed into English from Old French. The Russian verb писать (homonymous with the native verb ‘write, paint’) is < German or Dutch pissen < Middle French.
And drinking-vessels being generally round would make them terrible as any kind of sailing-/rowing-vessel.
Irish, Welsh, and Scottish coracles (< W cwrwgl, Ir ScG currach < Proto-Celtic kurukos ‘boat’), however, are round or oval. You use an 8-shaped stroke to paddle them, something that Winnie-the-Pooh (being English) doesn’t manage to figure out.
For the common semantic shift of ‘container, vessel’ > ‘ship, boat’, compare Catalan vaixell; ‘barrel, cask, ship’ and French vaisseau ‘vessel, ship’ (English vessel), from Latin vāscellum, diminutive of vās, ‘vessel, dish, container, vase’.
Outside of Europe, there is a Semitic parallel: Ugaritic ảnyt and Hebrew אֳנִיָּה ʾŏniyyāh ‘ship’ on the one hand, beside Arabic إناء ʾināʾ ‘container, receptacle, vessel, plate, dish’, Ge’ez ንዋይ nəway ‘vessel (container), untensil’ and Akkadian unūtu ‘tools, equipment, household utensils’ on the other.
Perhaps obscurely related to the family of Bengali ḍiṅā, Hindi ḍẽgī, etc. (> English dinghy), there is a virtual Old Indic *ḍōṅga showing up first as Prakrit ḍoṁgī- ‘small box for betel’, ḍuṁgha- m. ‘water-vessel made of coconut shell’, but then later as Bengali ḍoṅa, ḍuṅi ‘canoe, boat’, Nepali ḍũgo, ḍuṅo ‘small boat (usu. of one piece of wood)’, Marathi ḍõgā m. ‘a sort of boat or canoe’… (This *ḍōṅga is doubtless of non-Indo-Aryan substrate origin, but there is nothing old in Dravidian or Munda to compare, and the initial retroflex speaks against any borrowing from an early Dravidian or Munda source.)
And returning to Celtic, there are two examples. There are Breton lestr ‘receptacle, vessel, boat, ship’ and Old Irish lestar ‘container (for liquids); ship, boat’ beside Welsh llestr ‘cup, dish, vessel, ship, boat’ having both meanings. But there is also possibly another example in Old Irish long ‘ship, boat’, and Welsh llong ‘ship, large boat’, beside Cisalpine Gaulish LOKAN interpreted as ‘urn, tomb’ acc. sg. (in an inscription from Todi in Umbria, [AT]EGNATI∙TRUTI[K]NI │ [KAR]NITU∙LOKAN∙KO[I]SIS │ [TR]UTIKNOS, interpreted as ‘for Ategnatos, a son of Drutos, Koisis erected the tomb, son of Drutos’, with ng written K in this writing system). However, some have taken the Irish and Welsh words from Latin (nāvis) longa ‘long (ship)’.
Note also Herakles depicted during the course of his 10th labor, travelling in the golden δέπας ‘bowl, cup’, fashioned by Hephaistos, in which Helios would float back from the west to the east every night.
писать (homonymous with the native verb ‘write, paint’)
Different stress.
Also Spanish bajel, though that must be a Catalan borrowing — otherwise one would expect *vasiello or perhaps *vajello
Does anybody who knows of Irish as a separate language _not_ know it has swear words and slang? Isn’t Ulysses full of them — some minced, I suppose. […]
So Ó Caollaí is talking about Irish as taught in Irish schools? Some sort of sanitised for young ears version?
Yes and yes. The vast majority of living humans who know anything of Irish are anglophone Irish people who only know about it from school lessons. The main exclamation in my textbooks was “a thiarcais!” [“Good Lord!”].
Most people will have only a vague idea of the difference between the version of any language they learnt in school and the version used by native speakers, typically “they talk much much faster and run the words together”. I recall a Russian, teaching introductory university phonetics, using an Irish phrase as an illustrative example, and Irish students “correcting” her pronunciation; of course the professional phonetician was perfectly reproducing what a native speaker would say, whereas the students were reproducing their school approximations.
Poverty of the syllabus > poverty of the stimulus.
I don’t recall much Irish in Ulysses as opposed to Finnegans. Bloom would know almost none.
It is a valid question to what extent Irish vulgarisms have been replaced by English-origin ones in the Irish of L1 speakers. My father recalled, as a dispensary doctor in Conamara in the 1950s, a constipated man complaining “ní raibh crap agam le coicís” [“I haven’t had a crap for a fortnight”]
I still have the impression that Irish is more inclined to curse – as in wishing bad outcomes – and English is more inclined to swear – as in using Bad Words. But maybe I just don’t know enough bad words!
@jen
Curses are for the weak; the strong use their strength to foist bad outcomes on others, then use bad words when this does not work out as planned…
English: “Sticks and stones can break my bones / But names can never hurt me.”
Irish: “Sticks and stones can break my bones / But names can send me into spiraling and terminal depression.”
Or at another level, the English had court jesters; the Irish had public satirists.
Fair point. So was Pokorny given to ignoring inconvenient stray consonants? — like all the best amateur etymologists.
No, Pokorny’s approach was to be inclusive and capture as many derivations from roots as were attested, ready to rather include some doubtful examples than leave out material. His dictionary was meant as a repository for the use of specialists who would know (or go and check) the discussion about specific etymologies, not as the last word on them.
@DM: What is the source for the skyphos etymology?
@hans, dm
Kroonen (2013 ) “Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Germanic” has
—
skipa- n. ‘ship’ – Go. skip n. ‘id.’, ON skip n. ‘id.’, OE scip n. ‘id.’, E ship, OFri. skip n. ‘id.’, OS skip n. ‘id.’, Du. schip n. ‘id.’, OHG self, see/ n. ‘id.’, G Schiff n. ‘id.’
(LW).
An early loanword from Lat. scyphus m. ‘drinking cup’ = Gr. [skyphos] m. ‘cup, can’. Cf. OHG scif’vessel’ and sciffi n. ‘id.’
—
Here he does not seem to say the Latin or Gr. word meant ship, but seems to imply something like “drinking vessel > “hollow oblong thing” > “hollow oblong boat”
For a word going the other way, showing the same association, there’s gravy boat.
@PP: Thanks! Kroonen is a start, I’ll check. The time window where Greek /u/ > /y/ > (Latin /i/), but /p_h/ still a stop, is relatively short, but it could fit.
Patrick O’Brian, an Englishman who pretended to be an Irishman, got a lot of humor out of the inability of his Irish hero, Dr Maturin, to distinguish among the many sea-going craft that were immediately identifiable by his English hero, Captain Aubrey.
There is an obvious similarity between watercraft and containers. Boats and jars are both waterproof, although they differ in whether the goal is primarily to keep the water in or out. So it is not surprising that besides vessel, there are other words that also refer to both kinds of structures.
As a word for a sort of container (usually a natural one), hull goes back to old English. However, I was surprised that the nautical sense is listed separately by the OED. it does not appear in until the sixteenth century, and the OED does not give a definitive answer as to whether it descends from the “shell, pod, or husk of peas and beans; the outer covering or rind of any fruit or seed” sense, saying only that it is “possibly the same word…, but decisive evidence is wanting.”
Another, more clearcut case is tub, for which there is a separate meaning listed as a term for watercraft:
However, I think some of the effectiveness of this usage comes from the fact that calling a boat a “tub” suggests that it floats or steers about as well as something which was not even designed to be a boat.
I don’t think Patrick O’Brian necessarily correlated landlubber v. seadog with Irish v. English so much as with reader surrogate v. author surrogate.
W cwrwgl, Ir ScG currach < Proto-Celtic kurukos ‘boat’
Is cwrwgl related to cwrw ‘beer’ by any chance?
No, cwrw is from Old Welsh curum.
Along with the Dutch version and English cup, it comes from Latin cuppa, which developed from cūpa by the littera rule.
(…By the same author: the first-ever textbook of Tocharian B. You’ve always wanted to learn Tocharian B, you just didn’t know!)
Perfect for a wide, flat-bottomed ship that can haul stuff around the obscenely flat North Sea coast.
I completely forgot where I got it from, but it’s easily possible that it’s Kroonen’s idea. (I don’t have his quite inaccessible dictionary.)
A few hundred years probably. The limiting factor is the origin of [f] in Greek, but we can date that: on a wall in Pompeii there’s a PILIPPHVS, where some hapless Roman couldn’t remember where the aspiration went and put it on the one that was already louder. The first attested FILIPPVS comes from the following century, when, conversely, Ptolemy consistently transcribed Germanic /f/ with φ. So, basically, the Romans must have passed the word on as soon as they showed up on Germanic shores.
@prase
To add a bit to what hat said, Matasovič has:
—
*kormi ‘beer’ [Noun] G01D: OIr. cuirm [i n] W: OW curum, W cwrw [m] CO: OCo. coruf gl. ceruisia, MCo. kor GAUL: curmi, curmi (Vertault), korma PIE: *kerm- (IEW: 572) COGN: Russ, korm ‘fodder’, ?Lat. cremor ‘broth, pap, juice made by boiling grain’ ETYM: The reconstruction PCelt. *kormi- is preferable to the alternative *kurmi-, because such a vocalism can more easily be related to the PIE root ♦kerm-; Gaul, curmi must have the vowel u by a secondary development. Lat. ceruesia, ceruisia ‘beer’ (Pliny, 22.64) was borrowed from a Celtic form with the e-vocalism. Falileyev does not adduce OW curum. REF: LEIA C-277f„ GPC I: 649f„ LP 55, EIEC 82, Lambert 1994: 123, 191, Delamarre 133, Campanile 1974: 31, de Bernardo Stempel 1999: 245, PorzioGemia 1981: 108.
…
*koruko- ‘(leather) boat’ [Noun] GOID: Mir. curach [o m] W: MW corwg, corwgl [m] ‘coracle, vessel, body’ ETYM: A connection of these words with PIE *(s)koro- ‘leather’ (OCS kora, Lat. corium, IEW 939) appears probable.
—
IEW is Pokorny, maybe there are updates to either the PIE or PC etyma, but I am not good at finding them.
on a wall in Pompeii there’s a PILIPPHVS
Rix mentions a FYLLIS, also from the walls in Pompeii, so it seems by the time the vulcano erupted the change had already happened. That means that either PILIPPHUS was scratched into the wall earlier, or it had already become a fixeded and wrongly remembered spelling for a loaned name.
mollymolly – O’Brian did use Maturin to prompt Aubrey to explain things relating to the sea or the sky that the reader might not understand. He also used Aubrey to prompt Maturin to explain things relating to medicine, languages, and natural science. But my point was intended only to cast doubt on Flann O’Brien’s claim that the English can distinguish only between big and small watercraft – an unlikely assertion in any event, given that the English were the greatest seagoing nation in the history of the world, while the Irish never got much beyond floating around in their curraghs.
Ah, I see. The idea that Myles might be taken seriously enough to require rebuttal had not occurred to me.
Physical size may not be the only criterion for the English.
In William Gerhardie’s Futility, Sir Hugo, an English diplomat of quite transcendental pedantry, which with him becomes a kind of Dadaist art, at one point carefully explains to a Russian general that “Only His Majesty’s ships are ships. All other vessels are boats.”
The idea that Myles might be taken seriously enough to require rebuttal had not occurred to me
He was quite right about the bicycles, though.
Ah, I didn’t know about the FYLLIS. Some graffiti were written decades before the eruption, though, so the PILIPPHVS could just be older.
Not much farther back, there was someone famous (some Cato or other?) who mocked a Greek for being unable to pronounce [f].
Cicero (according to Quintilian.) Cheap lawyer’s trick – he was trying to undermine his (the Greek’s) credibiility as a witness. If the man can’t even talk proper Latin, why should we believe anything he says?
“Only His Majesty’s ships are ships. All other vessels are boats.”
His Majesty’s submarines, however, are boats.
Brett wrote:
Keep in mind that that was written in 1899. Most current dictionaries, with the benefit of another century of scholarship, seem to be satisfied that it is the same word. (Oxford’s own current dictionary is the exception; they probably just haven’t re-examined the etymology.) Some earlier evidence of the nautical sense appears in the Middle English Dictionary, with the earliest dated a1400:
… though, looking at the four-line poem as a whole, it doesn’t make sense to me:
Envy is destructive as a worm destroys a tree, rust destroys a knife, and death destroys life—but a ship doesn’t destroy the sea, so I don’t get it. It will be interesting to see what the OED makes of this in the revision. The MED does have other citations from the 1400s, but in some of them it’s not clear whether they mean hull (outer structure) or hold (interior space).
I think the poet is comparing visual manifestations so he thinks ships visually mar the sea, the way rust mars the shining blade or worm mars the smooth tree. An early eco-warrior or Fascist (Mussolini thought a lot of hovels, markets, etc., marred the glory of inner-city Rome)
PlasticPaddy wrote: *kormi ‘beer’ [Noun] G01D: OIr. cuirm [i n] W: OW curum, W cwrw [m] CO: OCo. coruf gl. ceruisia, MCo. kor GAUL: curmi, curmi (Vertault), korma PIE: *kerm- (IEW: 572) COGN: Russ, korm ‘fodder’, ?Lat. cremor ‘broth, pap, juice made by boiling grain’ ETYM: The reconstruction PCelt. *kormi- is preferable to the alternative *kurmi-, because such a vocalism can more easily be related to the PIE root ♦kerm-; Gaul, curmi must have the vowel u by a secondary development. Lat. ceruesia, ceruisia ‘beer’ (Pliny, 22.64) was borrowed from a Celtic form with the e-vocalism. Falileyev does not adduce OW curum. REF: LEIA C-277f„ GPC I: 649f„ LP 55, EIEC 82, Lambert 1994: 123, 191, Delamarre 133, Campanile 1974: 31, de Bernardo Stempel 1999: 245, PorzioGemia 1981: 108.
Lovely to intuit en passant that the melodious L ‘ceruesia’ is the likely ancestor of “dos cervezas, por favor,” refreshing in a coracle or a skip.
…