Back in 2014 I posted about Scots Yiddish, saying of David Daiches’ autobiographical Two Worlds: An Edinburgh Jewish Childhood “I actually own a copy of Two Worlds, and now I’m even more eager to read it”; over a decade later, I’m finally reading it, and the very first sentence gave me post material. Although the author’s name in itself is good material — Wikipedia says:
His brother was the prominent Edinburgh QC Lionel Henry Daiches. Although Lionel retained the older, traditional pronunciation of their surname as ‘dyke-iz’ /ˈdaɪ χ (or k) ɪz/, David returned from the US with the Americanized ‘day-ches’, /ˈdeɪ tʃɪz/.
Interesting! Does anyone know the origin of the surname?
And that first sentence reads:
A windy Spring day in Edinburgh, with bits of paper blown down the street and two small boys from Sciennes School kicking an empty tin can along the gutter.
Naturally I wanted to know how to say Sciennes, and Wikipedia obliged: it’s /ˈʃiːnz/ (SHEENZ). Which is an odd spelling/pronunciation match, made odder by the etymology: “The name is a corruption of Sienna in Italy, and comes from the Dominican Convent of St Catherine of Scienna.” I can see turning Sienna into Scienna (more impressive-looking), but how did they end up with that pronunciation?
Here are a couple of nice Hattic bits from a few pages later:
occasionally my father received letters addressed to R.S. — or Robert S. — Daiches, Esq.
André Prost, indefatigable compiler of West African language grammars and dictionaries (including one of Toende Kusaal) is found listed in quite a few bibliographies as R P A Prost.
(R P is actually “Révérend Père”: Prost was a White Father.)
Having lived in Edinburgh, I knew how to say “Sciennes.” It never occurred to me to wonder why it was spelt like that … after all, Scotland is the land of Kirkudbright and Milngavie … (and Menzies, but that one makes sense. Also Dalziel.)
I figured this would be an Eddyshaw trap; now I wait for Jen to show up…
A Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue has an entry for Senis, Seynis, Scheines. Also: Senys, Senyis, Seins, Seanis, Sheins, Sheynes, -is, Cheyn(i)s.
Good lord almighty — what an efflorescence!
Consistent spelling is for the English. (They need it because they’re not so well educated.)
David has already said more or less what I was thinking!
Hm. This webpage claims that Daiches is “derived from the Yiddish word dayan, meaning judge”; doesn’t sound very convincing without further evidence.
The rabbinical father had an unusual first name which lacks the excuse of being his birth name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salis_Daiches Note that the school is mentioned in the wikibio of the father.
The Ashkenazic family name דײַכעס (variously romanized, for example, Daykhes) has the same stem as the Northeastern Ashkenazic family name דײַכין (variously romanized, for example, Daykhin), that stem being the Yiddish female given name דײַכע (Daykhe), noted for example on page 819 of Gold’s Studies in Etymology and Etiology, which Harkavy said in his dictionaries of 1925 and 1928 came from the Yiddish female given name יהודית (yudes ‘Judith’), though that derivation presents phonological difficulties.
Possibly, however, one or more middle links are missing. They might be found on page 391 of Salfeld’s Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches.
Yiddish דיין (dayen) ‘judge [in a Jewish court of law]’ is irrelevant.
So Daiches is to Judith as Bashevis to Bathsheba?
Thanks, Maxwell!
“So Daiches is to Judith as Bashevis to Bathsheba?”
Yes, in these respects:
1. Yiddish possessive -s in the family names so ending versus female given names with no affixation of any kind in Judith and Bathsheba.
2, The family names ending in -s are Yiddish whereas the female given names are English.
So Daiches is to Judith as Bashevis to Bathsheba?
just plain yes, from me. it’s the possessive ס- | -s [how’s that for an accidental smiley!?]. i think opinions differ on whether to interpret the underlying byname as (for example) basheve’s husband or her son; my money’s on both.
I suspect French influence on the spelling – the modern French for Siena is ‘Sienne’, but older French quite often seems to have ‘sc’ where modern French would have ‘s’ (e.g. ‘scet’/’sait’). No idea about the pronunciation, though!
The specific case of older French sçavoir (sçay etc) is based on a false etymology (scire rather than sapere). But there may well be other examples
Yeah, the “sc” is piquant but not problematic; it’s the pronunciation that’s super-weird (surely not Italian influence?!).
@hat
Pronunciation à la Sean Connery?
From p. 105 of Paul Johnston, ‘Older Scots Phonology and its Regional Variation’, ch. 3 in Charles Jones, ed. (1997) The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language (boldface added to the immediately relevant bit; apologies for any OCR and automatic html conversion errors):
At first I thought Siennes was another simply case like English Marseilles and Lyons. But von Sienis gets a few hits on Google Books from German books from the 17th century, too… A crossing of Latin Catharina Senensis and with vernacular forms like Catherine de Sienne ? There are also some 16th century instances of Siennes as the name of the city in French. I’ll leave it to others to investigate this problem if they are interested…
Thanks very much for that extremely relevant quote!
Siegmund Salfeld comments on the etymology of the name Daykhe in his edition, Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches, p. 391 here, under Deiha. Salfeld’s reference to Förstemann (1900), Altdeutsches Namenbuch, goes here. (Further etymology easily accessible in the Wiktionary under gedeihen.)
Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, p. 694, gives Daykhe among the examples of words with the vowel I₄ (mostly inherited Germanic vocabulary) but doesn’t discuss the particulars of its etymology:
Does the proposal of deriving Daykhe ultimately from יְהוּדִית Yəhûḏîṯ originate with Alexander Harkavy? If so, in which work of his? I couldn’t find Daykhe in the list of names at the end of his dictionary in its online version, or in the list of names in his Yiddish manual for obtaining US citizenship. I would like to know how such a derivation might work.
I would like to know how such a derivation might work.
Me too; it’s certainly not self-evident.
Xerîb says, “I couldn’t find Daykhe in the list of names at the end of his dictionary in its online version,”
https://archive.org/details/nybc211297/page/n534/mode/1up?view=theater
page 526 > left-hand column > fourth line from the end of the column, to which line is appended the last footnote in that column.
Thank you again Maxwell.
How does the Hattery do it? Especially in the middle of what should be everybody’s holiday.
The more obscure the question, the more prompt and specific the answers; and they arrive armed to the teeth with cites.
I know. Every time I ask what I think is a terminally obscure question, someone pops up within an hour or so with the answer.
i’d think beider would be the one to look to for the yehudis-to-daykhe history; i don’t have his onomastic books, myself.
and a side-note on the weinreich: i think i’ve mentioned alexis manaster ramer’s lively essay on “grayz”, “A Really Offal Etymology”, before (it’s on academia.edu), which makes a somewhat grisly case for an etymology from early NHG “greis”, and provides a critique of earlier etymologies. these include scholarly or popular arguments for (using his transcriptions and definitions) hebrew gərīʕūth [inferiority] or migraʕath [inferiority] or geredh [erasure]; slavic gre^x [sin]; NHG Kreis [circle]; unspecified (i think implicitly yiddish) *kraysmeser [a ritual protective knife]; yiddish (or german) unspecified [grey-haired]; yiddish grayzl [curl]; and even slavic-via-romanian greşeală [error].
his conclusion on the state of yiddish etymology more generally:
i think i’ve mentioned alexis manaster ramer’s lively essay on “grayz”, “A Really Offal Etymology”, before (it’s on academia.edu)
I can’t find it; link?
But I did find this on his Academia.edu page:
Words for “error: Polish byk (‘bull’)
That’s funny, since “bull” was an English word of obscure origin for a kind of error, stereotypically supposed to be Irish. One of etymonline’s examples is, “It would surely be better, Mr. Speaker, to give up not only a part, but, if necessary, even the whole of our Constitution, to preserve the remainder.”
[AMR]’s lively essay on “grayz”
here.
Thanks! I can only read the abstract, but that’s definitely lively.
‘Schir’ is exactly the example of unexpected initial ‘sh’ that was floating around too deep in my mind for me to ever dredge it out by myself – thank you, Xerîb!
(I could only come up with ‘sal’ and ‘schal’, which are the wrong way round as ‘schal’ is apparently the more anglicised form.)
bourdon (lit. ‘bumblebee’) denoting a missing word (but also a characteristic type of walking stick used by pilgrims especially on the way to Compostella)
I just recently came across Eugène Boutmy (1874) Les Typographes parisiens: Suivis d’un petit dictionnaire de la langue verte typographique, available here on archive.org (see Jacques, p. 43, for the etymological treatment of bourdon).
I see your Daiches and your Sciennes and raise you… Cooper. Watch the second video (the rest is cringe). It seems this particular Cooper isn’t even possible in the phonotactics of most of English.
…and that one is a weird word anyway; it’s sollen in specifically High German for no reason I know of.
I don’t know what he means by that or where socialism with a human face comes in, but the Moscow School has definitely inherited the vice of the Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch: including anything and everything that might conceivably have been present in the last common ancestor, even if two or three irregular developments would need to be assumed (plus three more that weren’t recognized as irregular at the time), so that in the end half the dictionary is garbage – and many readers will take a look at it and think the whole thing is garbage.
Really? I get the abstract, then a list of “related papers”, and then the whole paper. (Often followed by another list of “related papers”; I didn’t check this time.) I’m not logged in or anything, in fact I get a “sign up already!” notice that covers half of my screen till I click it away.
Really? I get the abstract, then a list of “related papers”, and then the whole paper.
You’re right! I saw the “related papers”, and just assumed that was all I got without signing up. Thanks!
Thanks to Maxwell Martin for the link to Harkavy’s big dictionary. Even if the etymology taking Daykhe from יְהוּדִית Yəhûḏîṯ is incorrect, perhaps Harkavy’s laconic treatment indicates that there was a folk-etymological association of the name Daykhe with the name Yudes among some people?
I hope someone with access to Beider’s A Dictionary of Ashkenazic Given Names chimes in. I am struggling to imagine exactly what the scenario deriving Daykhe from Hebrew Yəhûḏîṯ would be like… Perhaps -dī- was extracted from an early Ashkenazic Hebrew *Yudī́s (cf. Yiddish Yudes) or the like, and the diminutive -khe(n) added, or the something along those lines. (Are there other examples of such a clipping and extraction in Yiddish onomastics?) But then I don’t understand how Daykhe could regularly have the diphthong -ay-. Offhand, I would have expected the Hebrew vowel to show up as Yiddish i (vowel 31, as for example in בְּרִית bərîṯ > bris, not vowel 34 usually representing OHG -ī-).
There seem to be two unrelated words here. Per English Wiktionary for the English word, and French and English Wiktionaries for the French word, all of which are at cross purposes:
— Bourdon ‘walking stick’ < Late Latin burdō~burdus ‘mule’ <? Celtic , presumably because it supports a weight (but unrelated to English bear/burden!) French WAry compares the semantic shift to that of chevalet ‘saw-horse’ and (more doubtful, I think) chevron ‘rafter’.
— Bourdon ‘bee’ < Late Latin burdō <? Frankish *boʀdō ~ *buʀdō < PGmc *buzdô ‘beetle, grub’.
English drone ‘one who does no useful work’ comes from the male bee (whence also the sound and the musical term). It has more recently been confused with worker bees, it seems, and shifted to ‘one who does tedious work’. Nothing to do with mules, though.
I imagine the French typographer marked missing terms with a stick, not with a drawing of a bee.
Perhaps not if it really is from Celtic.
“Bumblebee” specifically, AFAIK.
But then I don’t understand how Daykhe could regularly have the diphthong -ay-. Offhand, I would have expected the Hebrew vowel to show up as Yiddish i (vowel 31, as for example in בְּרִית bərîṯ > bris, not vowel 34 usually representing OHG -ī-).
Hm. Just on the subject of vowels in nicknames, do people know how James became Jem and Jim, Charles became Chuck and Chick, Mary become Molly (not to mention Polly), and Margaret became Meg and Midge (not to mention Peggy)? Though there are some patterns there.
Guggenheimer and Guggenheimer’s Jewish Family Names:
(W is Who’s Who in World Jewry. T is R.D. Tkacz, Qontros Haššemot [sic; ‘pamphlet of names’, 6 volumes, here].)
I would still want a confirmation in Beider. The Hebrew seems a weird thing to name someone. To my mind, Yiddish given names, male and female, have positive connotations.
thanks for putting in the link to AMR, Y!
and that “dakh” looks to me like a classic version of the “can i find a hebrew etymon, no matter how implausible” game, which happens a lot with yiddish surnames that are transparently from place-names, especially in rabbinic and/or zionist sources. (c’mon, people: at least make a good pun! that way we can all know you understand you’re making it up!)
I got a hot tip on Beider’s book. He dismisses Harkavy’s “Judith” and Salfeld’s “Dorothea”, reasonably I think, and refers to the following sources:
Salfeld’s Das Martyrologium des Nürnberger Memorbuches lists early attestations of Deiha ~ Diha and its derivatives (Daykhe, Dayle or so), and suggests that it comes from MHG dîhen ‘to prosper, thrive’, after Förstemann’s Altdeutsches Namenbuch, which lists a number of names, including the feminine Thiha.
Simon Seror’s Les noms des Juifs de France au Moyen Âge may be more apposite. It notes The lovely Dieuaie < Dieu-Aide and also its specifically feminine form Dieuaide, appearing in Normandie from ca. 1200 on and in England from 1230, and elsewhere. Diea (as דיהא / דייהא) appears as women’s names in Nürnberg in the early 1300s. Seror speculates, “«Dex-Aie» était la devise de Guillaume le Conquérant, ce qui expliquerait peut-être pourquoi «Dieuai» était un nom assez courant chez les juifs d’Angleterre et de Normandie.”
Only the hypochoristic Daiche and such remained in recent times.
“Consistent spelling is for the English. (They need it because they’re not so well educated.)”
Wouldn’t it be great if commenters refrained from ethnic slurs?
Dude, it’s a joke, and a funny one. Learn to read the room.
The English can take it. They are a proud and ancient warrior race.
Speaking of odd spelling/pronunciation matches, the closer Jhoan Durán just got traded to the Phillies, and (since I haven’t been keeping up with baseball lately) I wondered how his first name was pronounced; I discovered it’s /ˈjoʊan/ (YOH-ahn)! I had guessed it was a respelling of Juan.
Also, in the Daiches book I encountered the Scots word peevers ‘hopscotch’ (DSL); the OED (entry revised 2005) has, s.v. peever:
Etymology: “Origin unknown.”
Jhoan Durán […] /ˈjoʊan/ (YOH-ahn)!
So “Johann” with the double n singularized for Spanish reasons and the h and o reversed for creativity or error? But I wonder how much he and his parents struggled in the DR to get that J pronounced German- rather than Spanish-style.
Jhon is quite common among the current generation of Latin American sportsmen, including “Jhonatan dos Santos Rosa (born 9 September 2002), known as Jhon Jhon or just Jhonatan”. He is not to be confused with other mononymous Brazilian soccer players Jhonata, Jhonnatan, Jhonnathan, or Jhonnattann
But Brazilian is not to be confused with Spanish-speaking, and I’m not sure what relation Jhon might have to Jhoan.
Also Jhonattan Vegas, the Venezuelan golfer. US commenters call him ‘yonatan,’ but I don’t know if that’s what he goes with.
ETA: I think they also call him ‘Johnny Vegas,’ which sounds much cooler.
There’s also the American
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jhonen_Vasquez
I give up.
Just change your name to Dhavvidd.
Is <jh> meant to enforce an affricate pronunciation instead of a [j]~[ʝ]?
I’ve wondered about that.
I have to quote this passage from Daiches about “the redoubtable ‘Dub-Dub’, Mr W.W. Anderson” (a teacher at George Watson’s Boys’ College) for the enjoyment of DE:
Och, Knox with his clavers, and Clavers with his knocks!
O Scotland! How thee a double darkness mocks!
Thy name is Σκοτία, and thy teacher, Nox!
(I do not know the source of this stirring distich. Presumably, some sort of Episcopalian, and therefore, doubtless, no better than they should be.)
Just change your name to Dhavvidd
The correct spelling, of course, is “Dafydd.”
“Dàibhidh” is also acceptable, for those in the Hen Ogledd.
The Premier League International Relations Department got every player to enunciate his own name, though Jhon Duran (Colombia and formerly Aston Villa) may have been confused by the prompter.
From 43m45 of the same video, watch Erling Braut Haaland say his name his own way and how he suggests commentators approximate it.
The two geographic names Vaysl (Vistula) and Vayslits (a city in the district of Kielce) are Slavic-derived
But it looks like they went through High German with its diphthongization of /i:/, see Weichsel for the river and, as an example for a city name, Leipzig from an original *lipьskъ.
I’m imagining that the way Rev. Lovejoy said it. (I can’t find it on YouTube.)
If this type of thing was intended, I’d assume it to be trying to suggest an American Spanish /h/ instead of the English affricate. “If you’re Spanish you can consider the h to be silent, if you’re English you can consider the j to be…”
The rabbinical father had an unusual first name which lacks the excuse of being his birth name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salis_Daiches
I just got to this passage about his father:
Nobody ever notices my name is David. I don’t make much of a deal about it being one of my given names, but I was pretty angry when my ex-wife didn’t know it.
The Wittgensteinian theologian D Z Phillips (with local connexions hereabouts) has always struck me as a fine example of the Cool Middle Initial community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewi_Zephaniah_Phillips
(“Dewi”, of course, is a perfectly normal name round here. “Zephaniah”, not so much.)
Shouldn’t it be Seffaneia?
“Sephaniah” in my Morgan-version Beibl.
“Ph” is OK. (The 1588 Bible has “sarph” for sarff “serpent”, even.)
But. “Z” is right out, of course. One has to draw the line somewhere.
Haaland with a (short) [χa-] was a surprise. But then I have very little experience of mountain troll dialects. (If he was Danish, it would be [hɔ-] or maybe [hɔ:-]).
Haaland is pronounced Holland?
But [χ] is an even bigger surprise. Can I hear that somewhere?
I didn’t play the clip, but that’s certainly not how it’s pronounced back home at Bryne, south of Stavanger. Anywhere you go in Norway, you’ll hear it as [‘ho:-] – the only significant variation on the tone contour. I guess he’s using the English pronunciation from his father’s time in Nottingham Forest, Leeds United, and Manchester City. IIRC, they both changed the written form of their surname from <Håland> to <Haaland> when Erling was signed by Red Bull Salzburg.
Jhonnattann
That looks like it came out of the Orrmulum school of spelling.
How does Martin [‘ø:də”go:r] pronounce his name?
@Trond Engen: As an oddity, when I think of how to pronounce the city name Stavanger itself, I always hear it in Tim Pigott-Smith’s incredibly posh English accent—because of his narration of the early seasons of Battlefield. Pigott-Smith’s French seems impeccable, but his Norwegian not so much.
Nobody ever notices my name is David.
My middle name also. But any context I might use it there are already a bazillion Davids; my first name is relatively rare. (Cue Bruces sketch.)
Stavanger is stressed on the second syllable. Apart from that, it’s very straightforward. Southwestern dialects has uvular r, which will pull the unstressed e (schwa) towards [a], but that’s subphonemic and would sound wrong from someone apical like me.
@DM, here as mollymooly said.
Also [χuβendias] spelled Ruben Dias (Portuguese) at 42:55.
Ødegaard? Oh, he’s Norwegian, all bets are off. But if he’s playing for Arsenal, he might be in that same Youtube video.
But it’s a perfectly cromulent Danish surname too (“deserted farm”, well, must be “formerly deserted” if enough people lived there to take their family name from it), and in Standard Danish [ˈø:ðəˌg̥ɒ?] would be pretty close. ([ð] post-alveolar).
Me: Southwestern dialects has
Another half-correction. “Southwestern dialects have” < “The Stavanger dialect has”.
@Lars: Ødegaard (with variants) is pretty common for a toponymic surname. There were resettled farms with that name (usually deserted after the Black Death) in every other parish.
There are 160 people with the surname Ødegaard (146) or Ødegård (14) in Denmark. Not wildly common, but not really rare either.
WIWAL, the next village over was Øde Hastrup, but there were about 5 families living there at the time. I never looked into when it was “øde”.
When I went to Copenhagen in 2010, it took me a few minutes to notice it wasn’t [l].
@DM, that seems to be a very common reaction for people with other phonetic systems; As a native speaker, the two sounds are not even vaguely similar. I don’t know what first language learners think, but /l/ for /d/ (appriximant) isn’t one of the stereotypical child learner confusions. /d/ (occlusive) for /s/ or /k/ are well known, as is [ʃ] for /s/.
Comedians will do [i̯] or /z/ (otherwise non-existent in Danish) for /ð/ and easily be understood. But not /l/ either. I’m thinking that maybe /l/ in other languages has more room for variation (in tongue position or spectrum) but then Danish /l/ is never “dark” and maybe it gets pushed to the corner farthest from /ð/ for maximum redundancy.
(The /l/ of Swedish can be much further back, and I can see how that sound could overlap with the Danish /ð/ which Swedish doesn’t have. In ON the fricative was dental or properly alveolar at least, but Swedish strengthened it to /d/ in some words and elided it in others after it split from Danish. I don’t recall an example now but there are cognate pairs between Da and Sw where Sw is missing the consonant that Da has as /ð/, and others where Sw has /d/. Norwegian probably the same).
Seems to appear/disappear even within Danish:
https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=far
far eller fader substantiv, fælleskøn
Udtale far: [ˈfɑː] fader: [ˈfɑː] (i underbet.) [ˈfæːðʌ] pluralis [ˈfεðʁʌ]
Well, yes, mor, far, bror. But those are exceptionally high-frequency words, and note as DDO says, the fricative is still there in the plurals which kind of proves their status as exceptions.
On the other hand, look at an item like Da bryde (sig om), Sw bry (sig om) (‘care about’ < 'bother'). That was brjóta in ON, but the /t/ has gone all the way to zero in Sw. No trace even in verb inflection, it has a bog standard weak conjugation bryr, brydde, brytt.
(The doublet Da bryde, Sw bryta (‘break’) is strong in both languages: bryder/brød/brudt and bryter/bröt/bruten. [bruden is archaic in Da, Sw has brutet neuter and brutit supine]).
OK, I’ve added Den Danske Ordbog to the sidebar — that audio feature is indispensable.
I see your Daiches and your Sciennes and raise you… Cooper.
Reminiscent of Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia in 2018-22, who pronounced his surname with a voiced “th” but inevitably had it pronounced with a voiceless “th” by the majority of people saying it. At least people did reduce the “a”.
Whereas Waltham (Massachusetts) is pronounced /ˈwɔːlθæm/ (WAWL-tham), with an unstressed but unreduced final vowel, by locals.
Incidentally, in my perusal of Edinburgh topography I discovered Lovers’ Loan, which introduced me to the Scots loan, cognate with English lane though not meaning quite the same thing.
Heh. I immediately wondered if it might be cognate with (chiefly) Trønder lein “hillside (toponymic element)”, but it’s not. It’s instead cognate with (chiefly) Trønder lån f. “long, section-built timber house, usually on a farmstead” < ON lǫn f. “stack, heap, row” < PGmc *lanu-.
I also wondered if Eng- lawn might be an inter-dialect loan from Scottish/Northern, but Wiktionary says no.
Leine f. 1. “leash”; 2. “thin rope” as in “clothesline”; 3. the river Hanover is on.
That surely is a cognate of Eng. line and Norw. line f. “thin rope”. It could look like an old borrowing from Latin.linea, but it’s homonymous in ON with lina f. “cloth of linen”. Perhaps it’s the form of one and the meaning of the other.
Wiktionary sez “from Proto-Germanic *līnǭ (‘rope, string’)”; there’s a long list of descendants at that last link.
(I meant “Semantically, it could look like an old borrowing …”)
Yeah. that fits. *līnǭ doesn’t look that much like a borrowing from linea, so “rope, string” is probably just another specialized meaning of “linen product”.
Long vowel in West IE, short vowel in Balto-Slavic and Greek. Intriguing. The opposite would almost make sense…
Could it be Gmc. /i:/ < PIE /*ei/? Then these would be just ablaut variants.
That works for Germanic and Latin but not for Celtic; it’d need to be a loan from one of the other two there. But if that can be arranged (is the Celtic just Old Irish?), all we need is a grammatical justification for the ablaut variant, and that’s beyond me anyway. 🙂