I recently ran across the odd word aviso — odd not in itself, but because of its variety of meanings and its restricted usage. I found its Russian equivalent in Irina Polyanskaya’s 2002 novel Горизонт событий [Event horizon], which I’m enjoying even as I have no idea what it’s “about” or where it’s going. Here’s the passage:
Зима 1992 года выдалась снежной. Белым снегом засыпало фальшивые авизо, чемоданы с компроматом, офисы с компьютерами, русские батальоны из Пскова и Рязани, переброшенные в Таджикистан, Абхазию и Приднестровье.
The winter of 1992 was snowy. White snow covered fake avisos, suitcases with kompromat, offices with computers, and Russian battalions from Pskov and Ryazan deployed to Tajikistan, Abkhazia, and Transnistria.
My Oxford Russian-English dictionary has the following entry:
ави́зо, indecl., n. 1. (comm.) letter of advice. 2. (naut.) aviso, advice-boat.
Which certainly makes it seem as if aviso is an English word, but it’s not in AHD or M-W, even the unabridged Third New International. It is, however, in the OED (entry updated December 2011):
Pronunciation: Brit. /əˈvʌɪzəʊ/, U.S. /əˈvaɪzoʊ/
Etymology: < Spanish aviso advice, intelligence (c1400), dispatch-boat, advice boat (1626) < Middle French avis advice n. […]
Now historical.
†1. A piece of intelligence or news; a report, a dispatch; (also) a piece of advice, an instruction. Cf. adviso n. 1, adviso n. 2. Obsolete.
In quot. 1589 as the title of a manual for traders.1589 J. Browne (title) The marchants auizo.
1597 R. Cecil & J. Herbert Let. 23 Mar. in T. Birch Hist. View Negotiations (1749) 123 Thus have we now delivered your Lordships an account..of the substance of our avisos.
[…]†2. caravel of aviso: a caravel used as a dispatch vessel (cf. advice n. Phrases 4, adviso n. 3). Similarly barque of aviso, etc. Obsolete.
1596 W. Stallenge Let. 2 Aug. in Cal. MSS Marquis of Salisbury (Hist. MSS Comm.) (1895) VI. 315 There was four carvells of aviso despatched.
[…]3. A dispatch boat, an advice boat. Cf. advice n. 8, adviso n. 4.
1714 Let. 3 June in C. King Brit. Merchant (1721) III. 225 There are at present in this Bay an Aviso or Pacquet-Boat, and four other Ships fitting for Vera-Crux.
[…]
1996 J. P. Harrison Mastering Sky viii. 104 Until the mid-1930s, the transit between Dakar and Natal, continued often to be made by avisos, as the boats were called.
It’s interesting that English doesn’t have the commercial sense of the Russian word, for which remittance advice is used; it’s also interesting that when I checked the Национальный корпус русского языка I found that the Russian word is used exclusively in the commercial sense in modern times (the latest cites for the naval sense are from the 1940s and refer to the 18th and 19th centuries) and that it is almost always used with the adjectives фальшивые ‘false, spurious, forged’ or чеченские ‘Chechen.’ Wikipedia has an article Aviso that says:
The term, derived from the Portuguese and Spanish word for “advice”, “notice” or “warning”, an aviso, was later adopted by the French and Portuguese navies to classify their medium-sized warships designed for colonial service. The term continued to be used in the French Navy to classify the D’Estienne d’Orves-class patrol frigates until 2012, when the remaining ships of the class were reclassified as offshore patrol ships. It is equivalent to the modern use of “sloop” in other countries.
Is this word familiar to you in any language? (The word sloop, incidentally, is “Borrowed from Dutch sloep. Doublet of chalupa and shallop.”)
Wikipedia gives “sloep” as the Dutch version of English “sloop” but these seem to be two different types of boats, in current usage. I am not sure what the correct translations would be.
Also belonging to that family of words are German Avis and Aviso and Polish awiz and awizo.
I’m very familiar with the word aviso in Spanish with its ordinary meaning of notice. The web is full of avisos legales.
I had no idea it is also an obsolescent term for a kind of warship. However, the Argentine Navy still uses it for six of its units
@bertil Wikipedia gives “sloep” as the Dutch version of English “sloop” but these seem to be two different types of boats, in current usage.
So it seems: nearly every English sailing term (except ‘Port’ = LHS) is borrowed from Dutch — that is C16th Dutch/the Great Age of Sail.
To answer @Hat’s question: yes ‘sloop’ is intimately familiar to me: I own one. (Though it has no “gaff-topsail” — I make do with a spinnaker instead.)
Etymonline: “small fore and aft rigged vessel with one mast, generally carrying a jib, fore-stay sail, mainsail, and gaff-topsail,” 1620s, from Dutch sloep “a sloop;” probably from French chaloupe, from Old French chalupe “small, sloop-rigged vessel,” which is perhaps related to English shallop [OED]. But according to Barnhart and Watkins the Dutch word might simply be from Middle Dutch slupen “to glide,” from PIE root *sleubh-.
wiktionary for Dutch ‘sloep’ gives ‘(historical) A sloop’ as above; also ‘A small boat, with oars and historically often with a mast.’. So yes the modern Dutch sense seems to have morphed.
wikip on ‘List of ship types’: A fore-and-aft rigged sailing vessel with a single mast; later a powered warship intermediate in size between a corvette and a frigate
I wasn’t greatly aware of the ‘powered warship’ sense. All the boats I’ve messed around in have been sail-boats; nearly all sloops.
Etymonline adds: In old military use, a small ship of war carrying guns on the upper deck only (1670s).
Sloop Deck [from some sort of fandom page]: ‘The sloop has two decks in the stern with the upper deck for helm and sail controls and lower deck for the Map Table, Voyage Table, Weapon and Ammo Chest’. So this is larger sailing vessels, but still with a single mast and fore-and-aft rig. The Sloop Deck is where you’d serve Pimms after the day’s sailing.
Wikipedia has a whole List of Ship Types — but even that is incomplete (it includes Ketch but omits Yawl). They’re distinguished by number of masts; relative size of masts (Schooner vs Ketch); fore-and-aft vs square-rigged vs some mix of the two (Barquentine, Brigantine).
There was a gruesome murder case in NZ some years ago, where crucial evidence depended on which type of boat was involved: at night, after a few Pimms, with boats moored closely together, it’s difficult to tell which masts(s) belong to which boats.
German Avis and Aviso
I’m familiar with the commercial use (which Duden notes for both words), but Duden also has “light, fast warship” for Aviso; it notes that use as obsolete.
To answer @Hat’s question: yes ‘sloop’ is intimately familiar to me: I own one.
Sorry if my question was ambiguous — I was asking about the word aviso. I figure most English-speakers know about sloops, even if they couldn’t define the word (I certainly couldn’t).
I definitely know the Russian авизо though cannot tell what it means exactly. It was a part of a scheme for a local (Chechen) bank to ask the Central Bank in Moscow to send them some cash as a payment for something or other. In other words, it was some internal bank system transmission in order to get and steal cash.
“Suitcases of kompromat” is something Russia’s first and only vice-president Alexander Rutskoy claimed to have on the 1992 Yeltsin/Gaydar cabinet. No one AFAIK ever seen them or their content, but no one ever doubted that there was a lot of corruption associated with that government.
What “offices filled with computers” refer to, I do not know.
I know авизо as a word that ends in -зо, from the listing of such words in one of Lev Uspensky’s linguistics books; the others were пузо “belly”, железо “iron”, and ариозо, apparently some theater-related thing.
In the book, the word was described as бухгалтерский термин, i.e. “an accounting term”, without any specific description of what particular term it was.
I think I’ve seen the word in some other context as well, but I do not recall now what particular context it was. It was more likely to be a kind of banking operation than a kind of ship.
@do
I did not take s kompjuterami to mean “filled with”. To me the snow is covering/burying a dynamic modern office with a shiny new computer on each desk, visible through large windows until the snow covers these windows. But I would have to read more.
The Chechen aviso fraud was also associated with 1992–3, just like the suitcases full of compromat — so it seems safe to read the falsified avisos of the passage as referring particularly to that. Which makes me wonder if the offices full of computers are also a topical reference for the time, not just a generic image — though like the falsified avisos they work well enough as the latter.
Wiktionary notes “adviso” as an obsolete (in English) variant of “aviso,” with an illustrative 17th-century quotation from Thos. Browne: “Whereof at present we have endeavoured a long and serious adviso.”
I didn’t even know “advice boat,” although I am vaguely familiar with the financial-document sense of “advice” in English — I’ve certainly seen it in passing on multiple occasions but I’ve never actually had motivation or occasion to focus on how such an “advice” technically differs from other-but-similar-seeming genres of financial paperwork.
I did not take s kompjuterami to mean “filled with”. To me the snow is covering/burying a dynamic modern office with a shiny new computer on each desk, visible through large windows until the snow covers these windows.
Same here, and I assumed it was simply that computers had just become a widespread thing in Russia rather than that there was some reference specific to 1992 (as with the avisos and suitcases). But we’d have to ask someone who went to sleep in 1992 and just woke up.
I’ve come across the word in Patrick O’Brian’s novels, though I couldn’t have told you what kind of vessel it was. For example: “Yes, Mr Richardson, you will take the Pearl aviso with four good hands and run up to Port-Louis…” “I am very short of sloops and avisoes.” (Courtesy of the Aubrey/Maturin text search http://singularityfps.com/pob/ )
It was more likely to be a kind of banking operation than a kind of ship.
I remember now that it was in fact a ship; having looked up the plausible places where I could have seen the word, I found that it referred to the Japanese cruiser Chihaya, or, as Gleb Doynikov’s Возвращение Варяга [“Return of the Varyag”] called it, авизо “Чихайя”.
Courtesy of the Aubrey/Maturin text search http://singularityfps.com/pob/
What a great resource — thanks!
Peter L.: The Chechen aviso fraud was also associated with 1992–3, just like the suitcases full of compromat — so it seems safe to read the falsified avisos of the passage as referring particularly to that. Which makes me wonder if the offices full of computers are also a topical reference for the time, not just a generic image — though like the falsified avisos they work well enough as the latter.
I was going to say that all three references read like time-capsules, or maybe rather like postcards with historical motives. The passage is meant to bring back an image of Russia in 1992 — and then drape it in snow like a Christmas card, surely for deliberate contrast.
From the conversation on the page below, I get the impression that launch is the best English translation for the modern usage of Dutch sloep: https://www.boatdesign.net/threads/how-is-this-kind-of-boat-called-in-english.29766/
What Giacomo Ponzetto said covers my case exactly (except that I haven’t studied the Argentinian navy), so there is no point in repeating it.
However, it’s quite common for borrowed words to acquire quite specific meanings that they didn’t have originally. For example, sombrero just means “hat” in Spanish, any sort of hat, but in English it means the sort of hat Mexican peasants wear in films. Likewise a mosquito is any sort of small flying insect in Spanish, but a rather specific beast in English.
@bertil: Launch is pragmatically probably the easiest term to describe that kind of boat. However, launches can also be substantially larger, like the “launches” used by the U. S. Coast Guard. I think a more precise term for that kind of open-topped motorized pleasure boat would be runabout.
Very interesting word!
Aviso, in the nautical sense, appears several times in Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence, as here, in a letter of 30 August 1808 to Albert Gallatin, about sending William Short as the US diplomatic representative in Russia (here is Jefferson’s draught of a letter to Alexander I from the day before).
@Athel Cornish-Bowden:
we had this conversation a couple of years ago. What you’re saying is only true of Chilean Spanish; elsewhere, the term has the same reference as in English.
The Danish queen boards her Royal Ship in a (motorized) chalup. I think that task used to be filled by a rowboat with crisply uniformed navvies — probably pictured here, but not with satisfactory clarity. In 1921 (ODS) the word was thought to be from F chaloupe < Du sloep, but in a newer dictionary it’s given as directly from dialectal French chaloupe = ‘nutshell / small boat’. TLFI sits firmly on the fence (ouch). EDIT: On a closer reading, TLFI does favor the nutshell theory.
There’s a doublet slup, by way of Dutch, which is the single-masted sailboat corresponding to E sloop.
TLFI does favor the nutshell theory.
Yes: “il semble difficile d’admettre avec FEW et Bl.-W.⁵ un empr. du néerl. sloep au fr.”