This is another of those questions so niche I can’t even believe I’m asking it, but Hatters have come up with some pretty recherché answers before, so here goes. I was looking up the credits for Raymond Pellegrin (who’s in Le deuxième souffle, which I recently watched as part of my Melville mania) when I noticed a weird entry: “Dtàt lìam pét (1971).” Of course I had to find out more, so I googled it and discovered it’s a Thailand/Hong Kong coproduction also known as H-Bomb and Scramble Operation Alpha. (Christopher Mitchum’s Wikipedia page, which IDs it as H-Bomb, also says 1971, but IMDb says it’s from 1976 and this site says 1977!) I think the title Dtàt lìam pét is Thai, but I have no idea what it means and no way of finding out, since that transliteration only gets me the movie and I don’t have it in the Thai alphabet. And Thai Wikipedia (Google translate) calls it “Diamond cut” (and says it’s from 1975)! I don’t expect anyone to be able to clarify the dating, but if anyone knows Thai and can tell me what the title actually means, I’ll be grateful.
Per that Thai WP page, it’s ตัดเหลี่ยมเพชร, which GT Romanizes as tạd h̄elī̀ym phechr. W-ary says ตัด is the verb ‘cut’. เหลี่ยม is the noun ‘angle, edge, side’, the adjective ‘pertaining to angles, edges, or sides’, or the ‘classifier for angles, edges, sides’. เพชร is ‘diamond’.
I don’t know anything about Thai.
So it does mean ‘Diamond cut’! Thanks very much for your research; for someone who doesn’t know anything about Thai, that’s pretty impessive.
I think the Thai actually means something like “cut diamonds.”
The last bit should perhaps be phet.
In order, the morphemes are “cut”, “edge” and “diamond.” Maybe.
Others will know better.
http://www.thai-language.com/id/131710
http://www.thai-language.com/id/131891
http://www.thai-language.com/id/133260
[Edit: ninja’d by everyone]
The movie is about stealing a nuclear warhead, with action.
I don’t know Thai, but:
The translations of the first and third word are confirmed by english-thai-dictionary.com, but I can’t find เลี่ยม there. Google says it means “inlaid” and translates the entire phrase as “diamond cut”.
Googling “ตัดเลี่ยมเพชร movie” finds this, which seems to be the same movie although the title is translated as “Great Friday”.
Good lord! Thanks very much for that, and I have a new respect for ChatGPT.
And I see that site gives the year as 2518, which apparently = 1975.
I see that the final “diamond” element is ultimately from the Sanskrit vajra (as in Indra’s weapon of choice.) That’s a bit more nuclear-warhead-y.
Described in English here (about a sixth of the way down, first movie of 1975). It has a Chinese title, too, but that’s a kettle of fish of a different color.
Nice plot description! “This movie is fully packed with actions sequences such as train collision, boat chase, shooting, car chase, helicopter gunned down… The movie includes multiple treacheries and double agents.” OK, I’m sold.
The Chinese title, 氢弹大勒索, is (I think) “the Great H-Bomb Blackmail”, which seems more punchy.
Ah, vajra, which can apparently refer to either lightning or diamond, or something else again, a powerful weapon for protecting the Buddha (something like that).
Or “club”, as in Greco-Buddhist vajrapāṇi depictions, or “hammer”, the latter found all the way to Finnish.
…and lots of other things. 😮
I particularly like 4. ‘a kind of penance (feeding for a month on only barley prepared with cow’s urine)’ and 5. ‘sour gruel.’
Vájra is an exact cognate of PGmc. *wakraz “vigilant”, which seems to preserve a more original meaning of the root (as does vigilant). The shift to “strong, hard” is Indo-Iranian — maybe “active” -> “insisting” -> “forceful” -> “strong” -> “hard”? I guess all that could have been forged by the hammer.
Pah. An obvious borrowing of Mooré wáoko “force, strength, might, brutality.”
KONGO!
Does that *wakraz lead us to Hereward the Wake? Not to be confused with Hereward the Woke.
I don’t think wake can be a regular outcome of *wakraz, but both the verb and the noun wake are from the same root. Either way, I suppose Hereward’s epithet meant “vigilant” rather than just “not asleep”.
German wacker, not wach. The former is an obsolescent attribute of long and hard fighting and of the heroes who do it.
Even some farmers need to be wacker im Acker
Demise of a soccer team: Wacker vom Acker.
Scand. vakker now means “beautiful” — used of people, landscapes or anything. I guess it owes its modern form to Low German, or else it should have rhymed with ager/aker/åker “cultivated field”, here too.
Yeah, West Germanic consonant stretching (*-k.r- > *-k.kr-).
wacker
I recall a beery conversation of thirty years ago in the reception room of a linguistics department among Germanisten and native speakers of German in which I was told that the surname Wackernagel (as in Wackernagel’s Law) originally meant something like ‘geiler Ständer’, ‘einen munteren Penis habend’, vel sim. True? An upward movement of the little finger extended from the fist was used to demonstrate. Or were they just taking the piss?
(Wilhelm Wackernagel’s family was originally from Basel, and Jacob was born there. Nagel is apparently common for ‘penis’ in some varieties of Swiss German, and I have encountered German nageln from Germans.)
Vájra is an exact cognate of PGmc. *wakraz “vigilant”
An alternative root etymology of Vedic vájra- (Avestan vazra-, Persian gurz ‘club, mace’) is as originally *‘breaker, smasher, crusher’, from the root seen in Hittite wāki ‘he bites’, wakkanzi ‘they bite’; Tocharian A, B wāk- ‘split apart, break, burst’; Greek ἄγνυμι ‘break into pieces, shatter’. Nowadays this root is often reconstructed as *u̯eh₂g̑- (or *u̯eh₂g-) ‘break’, as here, p. 664, in Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. The g̑ would be required by Vedic vájra-, Avestan vazra-, etc.
A full exposition of this etymology is found in chapter 42 ‘The name of Meleager’ in Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. From page 413 in that chapter:
Fun fact: the vájra-word was also borrowed into Uralic at some point—see the cognates here. So cognates in Samic, Finnic, and Mordvinic… this grouping is Juha Janhunen’s ‘Finno-Samic’, Jaakko Häkkinen’s ‘Finno-Mordvin’, I think.
I was told that the surname Wackernagel (as in Wackernagel’s Law) originally meant something like ‘geiler Ständer’, ‘einen munteren Penis habend’, vel sim. True?
Then Wackelnagel would be a declined form.
Or were they just taking the piss?
I vote for this derivation. Cornpone linguist humor.
Xerib: An alternative root etymology of Vedic vájra- (Avestan vazra-, Persian gurz ‘club, mace’) is as originally *‘breaker, smasher, crusher’, from the root seen in Hittite wāki ‘he bites’, wakkanzi ‘they bite’; Tocharian A, B wāk- ‘split apart, break, burst’; Greek ἄγνυμι ‘break into pieces, shatter’. Nowadays this root is often reconstructed as *u̯eh₂g̑- (or *u̯eh₂g-) ‘break’, as here, p. 664, in Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben. The g̑ would be required by Vedic vájra-, Avestan vazra-, etc.
That’s better. I really should have looked beyond Wiktionary, but it was too much hazzle when Bjorvand & Lindeman didn’t have the word.
The weapon might have been originally the ‘biter’; for the semantics compare IE *bheid- in Germanic (bite, beissen) and its association with the WEAPON in Germanic legend. [etc.]
Added data point: The “boat” word < *baita-, if that originally denoted a log boat or dugout canoe.
Then Wackelnagel would be a declined form.
Non ommnes possumus semper.
Wackelnagel
Der Wechsel von r zu l bewirkt die Erweichung im vorderen Glied.