I was reading the excellent and harrowing Nation article “Alone Among the Ghosts: Roberto Bolano’s ‘2666’” by Marcela Valdes, which I found via a MetaFilter post, and all the while part of me was annoyed at the use of what seemed to me the badly formed word femicide, a product (as I thought) of our politically correct era, like “herstory” to counter history. Then I checked with the OED and found that it’s been around at least since 1801 (“This species of delinquency may be denominated femicide“). It’s still ill formed, and it still irritates me, but at least it’s got pedigree.
It’s a crime, like genocide, that could use it’s own distinct word. Gynocide?
I wonder how old it is in Spanish. I’ll admit that I have no idea where to look for that information.
@zhoen: “Gynocide” will still irritate purists, as it mixes a Greek and a Latinate root. “Feminicide”, which is five times less frequent as “femicide” according to Google but still widely attested, might just do the trick.
Yes, “feminicide” is well formed but awkward, which is doubtless why it’s less popular (and only has one citation in the OED: 1833 Blackw. Mag. XXXIII. 545 Our transcendent powers of cold-blooded feminicide).
It’s better than womynicide, no?
…and ‘lady killer’ means something else.
matricide.
uxoricide.
Frederic Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth used the word in their 1953 science-fiction novel The Space Merchants, a satire on marketing tactics. The hero, a former advertising copywriter who left his company, is wanted on trumped-up charges of femicide.
Isn’t 2666 the book that Jim Salant said is really great?
Isn’t 2666 the book that Jim Salant said is really great?
Yes, though I’m not even a quarter through it. It’s like nine hundred pages, divided into five books, and though I was crazy about the first book, I haven’t yet had whatever it is that’s needed (time? energy? courage?) to dive into the second.
If you think of it as a haplology, it becomes respectable, no?
It would be a haplology if the base form were *femimicide, but as things are, I’m afraid I can’t award it that honor.
@Kári Tulinius I don’t know where to get the information either, but I am a native Spanish speaker and I think I am not wrong if I say that both words “femicidio” and “feminicidio” started to be used by the media after the crimes in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. I never read/heard them before. Their use is not widespread in Spanish and indeed, there is a high probability that somebody had already combined both Latin roots in the past.
matricide
uxoricide
Nijma, is it possible that these words might be taken to refer only to the killing of women who are mothers or wives, and not to the killing of any woman?
How about muliericide? gynoktony?
Make that gynoctony.
Groan. Why is it that I’m suddenly aware that most bloggers are men?
And why does this sort of thing bring out the worst in you? I mean, I read you guys. You’re smart. You’re witty. You’re intelligent. You seem to have good heads on your shoulders and good hearts. And yet… and yet… given the smallest chance you’re making up funny words for killing women.
It’s testosterone or the Y-chromosome.
Stuart, matricide seems sort of Freudian to me,
uxoricide I believe can refer to either a man or woman who kills a spouse. Then there’s murder, which is generic, but manslaughter and homicide are somewhat gender specific.
mab, why not brainstorm? Domestic violence is much more visible than it used to be, and seems to be entering political discussion threads more and more. Lynching technically means any kind of execution without trial, but has come to mean more or less a racial hate crime at this point, but the word is also being used in connection with men murdering their partners. Also there is “honour killing” which involves brothers killing their sisters, usually on the orders of their father. On the level of using words for political purposes, it would be nice to find a solid word for killing women that didn’t “sound funny” but had an emotional impact.
There’s also the fact that the linguistically inclined can forget all about the context of what they’re trying to establish a word for, being distracted by the bright shiny thing that a well-formed neologism is and forgetting about the reality of what it is that is being described.
I would say though that a word like ‘feminicide’ is pointless without a word expressing the killing of males, viricide?
uxoricide I believe can refer to either a man or woman who kills a spouse.
Not in my dictionary it can’t, nor should I expect it to; “uxor” is “wife.”
manslaughter and homicide are somewhat gender specific.
They are not.
are too
No, you are!
There’s also the fact that the linguistically inclined can forget all about the context of what they’re trying to establish a word for, being distracted by the bright shiny thing that a well-formed neologism is and forgetting about the reality of what it is that is being described.
Just like Oppenheimer and crew, prior to Gita-quoting?
is.
It’s still ill formed, and it still irritates me, …
It irritates me too. If it didn’t, I’d fix things so it did!
But why are we not irritated also by homicide? Shouldn’t it be hominicide, like OED’s hominiform and hominivorous? OED has a headword homiform: “erroneous [for] hominiform.” See also hominist: “One who advocates for men the rights and privileges conventionally accorded to women.”
It’s still ill formed, and it still irritates me, …
It irritates me too. If it didn’t, I’d fix things so it did!
But why are we not irritated also by homicide? Shouldn’t it be hominicide, like OED’s hominiform and hominivorous? OED has a headword homiform: “erroneous [for] hominiform.” See also hominist: “One who advocates for men the rights and privileges conventionally accorded to women.”
Nijma: manslaughter and homicide are somewhat gender specific.
No, indeed they are not, as jamessal already said.
If manslaughter referred only to the killing of a man, then there would be another word to refer to the killing of a woman, just as there are -cide words referring specifically to the killing of a king, god, father, mother, brother, sister, wife, newborn child, and yet other individuals. There is no such word specifically referring to the killing of a woman, which is why femi(ni)cide is being discussed as a possibility. man in this context is as in mankind, which refers to the human race in general. This generic meaning was the original meaning, even though the came to refer mostly to adult males.
Same reasoning for homicide, which means “killing of a human being”. In Latin the word homo, from the same root as in homicide, means just “human being”. In one of the Latin plays there is a dispute between husband and wife, in the course of which the wife declares Homo sum! “I am a human being!” when she feels that she is being treated as less than human. This word was generic, as opposed to vir “man (adult male)” and femina or mulier “woman”. (This Latin word homo has nothing to do with the Greek prefix homo- meaning “same”, as in homogeneous and other words).
Incidentally, the word woman is not from woe-man as some women think, but from Old English wif-man (the i was long), literally “woman-human being”. wif alone eventually became wife, which originally meant “adult woman”, whether married or not, as in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath which meant “the woman from Bath”. The expression man and wife also simply meant “man and woman” = a couple, a close association (as also in fork and knife or bread and butter).
Lynching technically means any kind of execution without trial, … but the word is also being used in connection with men murdering their partners.
My understanding is that “lynching” refers to unlawful public killing by a mob, as opposed to “execution” which refers to legal killing by a public official, after a decision by a legal authority. I am surprised that the word is being used for a one on one, private killing.
Homicide isn’t ill-formed. It’s a direct borrowing from Latin homicida.
Noetica: why are we not irritated also by homicide? Shouldn’t it be hominicide, like OED’s hominiform and hominivorous?
homicide was not formed as an English word by putting together Latin elements, but is an adaptation of the Latin word homicidium (not hominicidium), which is based on the root hom, not on the stem homin-. Who are we to tell the Latins that their formation of this word more than 2000 years ago was wrong?
OED has a headword homiform: “erroneous [for] hominiform.” See also hominist: “One who advocates for men the rights and privileges conventionally accorded to women.”
The other forms quoted from the OED are probably relatively recent coinages from when Latin was no longer a living language but its elements were cannibalized in order to create scientific terms (something that still goes on with Latin and Greek elements). For instance hominivorous could be an alternate form for man-eating as in man-eating tiger, which does not imply that the animal has an aversion to eating women.
As for hominist, it looks like it is intended as a perhaps humorous parallel to feminist in both form and meaning.
Surprised no one’s mentioned “gendercide”, a word I often hear come up on the anniversary of the Montreal massacre:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gendercide
The earlier comment about the thoughtless delight in shiny new neologisms reminded me of this snippet from a word of the day email I get. Today’s was ucalegon, and one of the sample quotes seemed very relevant, perhaps as a warning of the possible consequences:
“Mingling with the crowd gathered outside the burning dwelling, the ill-starred lexicographer simply could not restrain himself; after smugly flaunting the word ucalegon several dozen times, he was set upon by his neighbors and cast into the flames.”
– Novobatzky & Shea, Depraved and Insulting English
(2002)
@hat: why do you find it awkward? As far as I can see, it violates none of the usual constraints on English phonology, and is prosodically no worse than “femininity”, “feminization” or even “feminism”, all words that surely displeased listeners when first coined but are now widely attested.
Alon, it is not the constraints on English phonology, it is the faithfulness to Latin word-formation, which seems to favour the designation feminicide rather than femicide.
Most of the other -cide words, from Latin, have three syllables, and so does femicide, parallelling homicide, but at the same time fem is not a root, only a sequence of sounds parallel to hom (in spite of the similarity). Unlike the previously mentioned words, feminicide would have four syllables, like uxoricide “wife-murder” and sororicide “sister-murder”. (It is pure coincidence that these words all refer to women; matricide “mother-murder” follows the three-syllable pattern).
gendercide is an English-Latin hybrid, therefore ill-formed, and it does not correspond to the meaning pattern of the other -cide words. All the other words mean “killing of”, while this one would mean “killing because of” (since presumably not all members of the “gender” – if that means anything – would be targets for murder, unlike with genocide).
Michael:
OED has viricide in your sense, from 1766. But under a separate head it means “killing viruses” (cf. virucide).
Bill and Marie-Lucie:
There are two meanings of homicide: one (from homicida) means the person who does the deed; the other (from homicidium) means the deed itself.
Who are we to tell the Latins that their formation of this word more than 2000 years ago was wrong?
Why, we are no one to say it is wrong! But we can still be irritated, if our sensibilities are of sufficient reach. I am delighted to report my palpable indignation also at lapicide (OED: “One who cuts stones, or inscriptions on stone”; as explained at the entry for “-cide”, the meaning is both “kill” and “cut”). Since the stem is lapid- (as seen in lapidary, delapidate), the Romans might have had lapidicide instead. Ever wilful, they did not.
I am unruffled by both vermicide and verminicide, since they may be construed as from vermis and vermen respectively. But I reserve the option of being peeved by germicide. (Why not germinicide? Yes I know: not an original Latin formation.) And then there are such pullulating forms as spermicide, spermacide, and spermaticide, which pullulate and compete among themselves for acceptance. I set them all acide as semanticidal. (Seminicidal? Semicidal? You decide.)
Except, as LHards will recall, that lapidicidium occurs in the Modern Latin of Roberto de Sarno. But stonecutters in Classical Latin are lapicida, even though they worked in lapicidinae (“quarries”).
it is the faithfulness to Latin word-formation
Serious question – why should this matter when forming English words? We allow back formations that aren’t true to their “roots”, why not words like femicide that might be described as “inspired by” or “after the pattern of”? If we were forming words from Latinate roots for use in Latin, I could see a point to fidelity, but if if the end product is for our use then why should we worry about etymological purity, something that English has prided itself on never having given a Continental about?
Apart from the fact that concern for faithfulness to the word-formation rules of the “parent” language would represent an heretical break with English tradition, there’s also the fact that the word being created is not the sum of its parts, etymologically speaking. If Latin never had a word that meant “killing a person solely because they have no Y chromosome”, then why should a word being coined to serve that function observe Latin’s rules? In Indian English, two common words are funda and senti. Both were created as contractions of standard English words, fundamental and sentimental. Neither words means what their “parent” word does, as evidenced by this discussion of “senti”. The roots were modified to suit a new purpose and not in a way that accorded with the rules of the language from which they came, but in accord with the rules of the language doing the modifying. Isn’t this exactly what has happened with femicide?
Thank you for the additions, Noetica.
I agree with you about the ignorant lapicide (where did the OED get it from?). For the others, it seems that the 3-syllable words are the most common: vermicide, germicide, spermicide (as well as fungicide in the same general semantic field) are the only ones I am familiar with. (Note also the prevalence of the -mi- sequence in many of the words, occurring just before -cide as also in homicide, which might influence the choice of femicide).
Among human-killing words, I forgot suicide, literally “self-killing”, also a trisyllabic word.
(Um, the stonecutters are lapicidae. A slip of the fingers. They are not, germanely, lapidicidae.)
m-l and noetica — interesting for someone like me who didn’t study Latin and couldn’t figure out the “ill-formed” complaint. I wondered about the OED and viricide; almost all the dictionaries I found gave the sole definition as “an agent that destroys or inhibits viruses.”
I was well and truly hoist by my own syllable-juggling antics. Let me rework one of my sentences, drawing together various corrections:
marie-lucie: Thanks for doing the heavy lifting here, and saving me a lot of work!
Nij: Once again you find yourself clinging doggedly to the losing side of an argument.
why do you find it awkward? As far as I can see, it violates none of the usual constraints on English phonology
Nothing to do with phonology. Besides what m-l said, it dislike it because it falsely implies “homicide” is somehow male-specific (just as “beefburger” implies hamburgers are made of ham).
Who are we to tell the Latins that their formation of this word more than 2000 years ago was wrong?
Someone needs to take those bastards down a peg. Improper word-formation was the least of their crimes.
If we used “hominicide” instead of “homicide”, we’d have no word for the act of killing hominy.
Who are we to tell the Latins that their formation of this word more than 2000 years ago was wrong?
Someone needs to take those bastards down a peg. Improper word-formation was the least of their crimes.
If we used “hominicide” instead of “homicide”, we’d have no word for the act of killing hominy.
why should this matter when forming English words?
There’s no “should” about it. It matters to some people (like me and the even stricter Noetica) and not to others (like you). Why should I like chunky peanut butter and my wife smooth? Такова се ля ви, as the Russians say.
Ah, as Thesaurus Linguae Romanae Et Britannicae (1578 edition) attests, they did indeed use lapidicida, along with its contraction to lapicida. A lapse on their side, no doubt.
Heavy lifting? Indeed. Quarrywork. Sisyphean.
i dislike it because it falsely implies “homicide” is somehow male-specific
That makes sense to me, but is that meaning implied or inferred? I ask because the first thing I thought of when I read femicide was “now we need a male-specific equivalent”. The idea that “homicide might be the victim of a “reverse etymological fallacy” did not even occur to me. Then again, I always thought “beefburger” was a sort of bak-formation inspired by “chickenburger” and possibly an attempt to say “this is real, edible food, not tofu”. I have never met anyone who thinks hamburgers are made from ham, despite the widespread use of “beefburger”. I do see the potential for “femicide” to implant the “homicide= killing a MAN” idea, though.
Why should I like chunky peanut butter and my wife smooth?
Again, thanks for presenting the situation in terms I can grasp. May that’s a fem/hom issue too, since the chunky/smooth split in my household follows the same gender pattern as you describe above.
etymological purity, something that English has prided itself on never having given a Continental about
Is that really true? for colloquial usage, yes, but the prescriptivists seem to have given a lot of thought to conformity with Latin.
I am not defending etymological purity at all costs, I have been pointing out the sometimes conflicting patterns that might influence the choice of one form or another. A word femicide would be an obvious parallel to homicide, but since the other woman-centered words – feminine/femininity, feminize/feminization, feminism/feminist – are all built on femin- not fem, femicide seems oddly incomplete. But …
…. meanwhile Noetica has brought up that lapicide is from Latin lapicida (not lapidicida which would be the expected etymological form).
I did not know the Latin word (or the English one), hence my earlier reaction, but it looks like the Latins were not above chopping a syllable off the first word of the compound in order to make it conform with the general pattern. This could be used as a point in favour of the word femicide even if someone were concerned about faithfulness to Latin word-formation.
LH, Stuart: Don’t overgeneralize: I prefer chunky peanut butter myself, when I do eat it.
Okay folks, here are a couple more questions in the “word formation from ancient languages involving death” department.
I noticed that press reports on the polo horses that died all used the word “necropsy.” Makes sense: necropsy = looking at a dead body. Apparently this usage dates to the mid-1800s. Q #1: Is necropsy ONLY used for non-human dead bodies?
Autopsy = an eye-witnessing (1651); personal observation, ocular view (Webster 1812); dissection of a body to determine cause of death (1678). I can see how “eye-witness” came to mean “opening up a body to see for yourself what caused death,” but necropsy is the more logical choice, no? Anyone else find that weird?
Also,I had never before considered the need for a word to describe the act of killing hominy. But now that you mention it, I don’t see how I lived this long without it.
Nij: Once again you find yourself clinging doggedly to the losing side of an argument.
You misunderstand, Hat. I’m not clinging to anything. My “is too”, “is not” response is meant to poke fun at the kind of reasoning that just asserts something in an argumentative way. Are we supposed to believe something because someone simply declares in a bullying tone that something is true? I don’t find that kind of authoritarianism particularly useful no matter how many credentials the person has. If someone wants to engage me on that level, they will not find me cooperative. This same thing happened before not to long ago and the effect was personally disturbing enough to me that it interfered with doing the things that were important to me in my life at that particular moment. It’s one of the reasons my comments have been shorter and more laconic lately. I have no desire to be sucked into some sort of drama. I’m certainly willing to learn, and I find the thread interesting and quite pertinent, but I also hope I have some unique perspective to add to the mix, and that other bloggers find what I say to be worth considering, otherwise I would just lurk. I have to go to work now, otherwise I would try to find time to comment on the actual subject of the thread. Sorry for the derailment, but I really don’t know what else to do.
etymological purity, something that English has prided itself on never having given a Continental about
Is that really true? for colloquial usage, yes, but the prescriptivists seem to have given a lot of thought to conformity with Latin.
Marie-lucie, I am grateful for your detailed explanations of the technical reasons for describing femicide as “ill-formed” As always I learned much from your post.
The problem, as usual existed solely between my keyboard and my chair. I had missed the fact that Hat was stating a subjective opinion.In a twist the irony of which is almost suffocating in its richness, I misread Hat’s post by taking it at face value. It’s the sort of situation that makes me wish our gracious host was not such an emoticonophobe, because there are several really expressive ones that would fit here.
That said, I do think that English as a language has never cared about etymological purity, even though prescriptivists do. If English did care, surely there would be no “television”?
LH, Stuart: Don’t overgeneralize: I prefer chunky peanut butter myself, when I do eat it
You’re right of course, marie-lucie, all generalisations are dangerous. My response to Hat had been intended as a question, not a statement, but the “be” fell off the end of “may” and I forgot the the question mark. Maybe I shouldn’t be posting at 00:52?
It was my turn to be ironic.
Do all linguists prefer chunky, just as all linguists seem to be good at mathematics? More important, is there an emoticon that indicates a preference for smooth?
Piercing questions, AJP. Being a non-linguist who has never liked or been good at maths, and whose house currently has only smooth peanut butter, I have no answers.
I prefer chunky, though I’m not good at math. But then I’m not a linguist.
It seems everyone is avoiding my emoticon question. No wonder people get mad around here.
AJP: Do all linguists prefer chunky, just as all linguists seem to be good at mathematics?
I have never had the opportunity to determine other linguists’ preferences in peanut butter. Interesting research topic perhaps, but I prefer to leave it to someone else.
As for being good at mathematics, I think that depends on the individual. I am not particularly good at it, in spite of being the daughter and sister of math teachers.
I have no intelligent observations on emoticons, but I still wish someone would tell me about necropsy and autopsy.
I’ll leave it to Marie-Lucie, it’s her turn to be ironic.
I used to have a link to a protocol for necroscopies on juvenile tapirs, but it went dead on me.
I used to have a link to a protocol for necroscopies on juvenile tapirs, but it went dead on me.
Autopsy and necropsy seem to mean exactly the same. According to The Free Dictionary:
Perhaps the difference is that autopsy is used more commonly for human bodies and necropsy for animal bodies.
I can tell you about necropolises, or necropoleis, as the G(r)eeks down at Wiki would have it.
OED on necropsy (entry revised Sept. 2008):
Pathological examination of a dead body; post-mortem examination; an instance of this; = AUTOPSY n. 2a. [Dissection of a dead body, so as to ascertain by actual inspection its internal structure, and esp. to find out the cause or seat of disease; post-mortem examination.]
1842 R. DUNGLISON Med. Lexicon (ed. 3) 470/2 Necropsy, autopsia cadaverica. 1860 T. H. TANNER On Signs & Dis. Pregnancy vii. 288 At the necropsy the corpus luteum was found in the right ovary. 1880 M. MACKENZIE Man. Dis. Throat & Nose I. 99 At the necropsy of a case.. ulcers were found on the lateral walls of the pharynx. 1891 Cycl. Temp. & Prohib. 628/1 Necropsy reveals either an empty heart or black fluid. 1910 Practitioner Apr. 453 More definite evidence of the existence of gastrostaxis, apart from gastric ulcer, is obtained from biopsies and necropsies. 1939 Amer. Midland Naturalist 22 741 A necropsy of the squirrels failed to indicate any major ailment and the viscera were free of inflammations. 1968 Brain 91 490 An unsuspected (oat-celled) carcinoma of the bronchus was found at necropsy. 1999 New Yorker 18 Oct. 92 McNamara performed necropsies, and when she opened the birds’ skulls she found that they’d had brain hemorrhages.
Interestingly, although the definition doesn’t limit it to nonhuman subjects, it clearly seems to have developed in that direction; I guess a need was felt to separate animals from humans lexically.
OK, I’ll tell you about one.
There’s a Victorian necropolis — it’s really a huge cemetery, but it was called the London Necropolis — that had it’s own railway station and line to transport bodies and mourners directly from central London into the cemetery.
Among those buried there are Rebecca West, Dodi al Faid, John Singer Sargent and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, who had earlier been caught on a polaroid with the headless man, Duncan Sandys.
Necropsy and necroscopy both are used occasional.
Necropsy and necroscopy both are used occasional.
Necropsy is 100x more common, though, per Google.
Necropsy is 100x more common, though, per Google.
Tapir vet manual, including necropsy procedure.
Tapir vet manual, including necropsy procedure.
LH: I guess a need was felt to separate animals from humans lexically
Or perhaps the differences in use developed in different specialties, since medical doctors and veterinarians do not deal with the same bodies, alive or dead, and therefore rarely encounter each other on the job or read each other’s professional literature.
Thank you, O! Learned Ones. Very nice necropolises. (And fascinating tapirs, too.)
I’m still wondering why there was a need to distinguish between animal and human autopsies. I’m not convinced that it’s “the sacredness of human life even after it ends.” Languages aren’t logical, but still – if I were casting around for a suitably scientific name for a look at a corpse, and I had settled on ancient Greek as my source language, I’d go with necropsy instead of redefining autopsy. But that’s just me.
My, APJC, the duchess was a pistol.
In the universe where video recordings have no practical resolution limitations, coroners always say necropsy when they have occasion to autopsy an animal instead of a human. So at least those writers feel that the distinction is absolute.
‘Chemical restraint’ is a vet’s phrase that could, no doubt, be used euphemistically.
mab: I’m still wondering why there was a need to distinguish between animal and human autopsies
Consider the frequency and the circumstances under which the two kinds of autopsies are performed. Consider also the histories of the two words and their contexts of use.
necropsy calls up related words definitely suggestive of death and decay, such as necrosis and necrophagous besides necropolis. There are no such reminiscences in autopsy.
For the French equivalents, autopsie is first attested in 1573, nécropsie (same meaning) in 1836 (references from the Petit Robert). The nécro- words are all attested at least a century later than autopsie, the earliest one being nécromant “necromancer” (someone who calls up the spirits of the dead), and they do not refer to the physical aspects of death until the 19th century.
Since technical vocabulary (from Latin and/or Greek) tends to be very similar in French and English, and to spread quickly between languages because of translations, autopsy was probably used much earlier than necropsy, a much later technical term. In addition, an autopsy is frequently reguired in a forensic context, so that it belongs to the general as well as legal vocabulary, while the more specific technical word necropsy applied to animals would probably be infrequent in the same setting and therefore used mostly in a veterinary context.
I think that autopsies are just more fraught and less businesslike than necropsies. The naming difference is as silly and pointless as any other polite euphemism, but allows people to imagine that there’s some difference, and that their dear mother is being handled more reverently than some anonymous tapir would be.
I think that autopsies are just more fraught and less businesslike than necropsies. The naming difference is as silly and pointless as any other polite euphemism, but allows people to imagine that there’s some difference, and that their dear mother is being handled more reverently than some anonymous tapir would be.
In 1943, Margaret Sweeny had a near fatal fall down an elevator shaft while visiting her chiropodist on Bond Street.
That’s supposed to explain her nymphomania, but how do you fall down an elevator shaft, and who cares whether she was visiting a chiropodist?
In 1943, Margaret Sweeny had a near fatal fall down an elevator shaft while visiting her chiropodist on Bond Street.
That’s supposed to explain her nymphomania, but how do you fall down an elevator shaft, and who cares whether she was visiting a chiropodist?
autopsies vs necropsies
I didn’t even know the word necropsy (perhaps because I don’t have animals) before reading the other comments here, and I don’t think that many people know that word, while they are familiar with autopsy (which has its own euphemisms: post-mortem, etc). The word necropsy appears to have been coined much later than autopsy, so that it is not like the average person feels the need to decide which of the two words to use.
fall down an elevator shaft while visiting her chiropodist
Presumably the chiropodist was not practicing in the elevator shaft, so the lady couldn’t have fallen while visiting him/her, only before or after. It is likely that the otherwise irrelevant chiropodist was included in the story in order to emphasize that the lady had a respectable reason for being in the building.
It was likely her bad foot that caused her to topple down the elevator shaft. Funny that they don’t say whether it was Old Bond St. or New Bond St.
The Dukes of Argyll are a rum lot, I think one was a nazi, or something. The 9th Duke (who was married to Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, as well as having been Governor-General of Canada) is thought to have been mixed up, with Ernest Shackleton’s brother, in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels. I wasn’t aware that the Irish had crown jewels.
Se our most reasonable assumption is that, in the same building in which her chiropodist had an office, she fell down an elevator shaft while having hot sex.
Se our most reasonable assumption is that, in the same building in which her chiropodist had an office, she fell down an elevator shaft while having hot sex.
I suspect that her chiropodist was a Bunbury pure and simple and was used to explain more or less everything.
I suspect that her chiropodist was a Bunbury pure and simple and was used to explain more or less everything.
than some anonymous tapir would be.
Anonymous to you, maybe, but not to its friends and relations.
I imagine that tapirs all have colorful nicknames like Squinteye John and Lardass Bill. I don’t imagine them being named Algernon DeVere III.
But perhaps I’m terribly wrong.
I imagine that tapirs all have colorful nicknames like Squinteye John and Lardass Bill. I don’t imagine them being named Algernon DeVere III.
But perhaps I’m terribly wrong.
According to report, all tapirs could be named Long Dong Silver, so none of them are.
According to report, all tapirs could be named Long Dong Silver, so none of them are.
JE: I suspect that her chiropodist was a Bunbury pure and simple
Please explain. I have never run into this phrase before.
Watch it, John Emerson, or you may find yourself under ‘chemical restraint’.
An imaginary friend, from The Importance of Being Ernest, by Oscar Wilde.
Algernon: Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
Jack: What on earth do you mean?
Algernon: You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.
Everyone should read TIOBE once a year.
Algernon: Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don’t try it. You should leave that to people who haven’t been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers. What you really are is a Bunburyist. I was quite right in saying you were a Bunburyist. You are one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know.
Jack: What on earth do you mean?
Algernon: You have invented a very useful younger brother called Ernest, in order that you may be able to come up to town as often as you like. I have invented an invaluable permanent invalid called Bunbury, in order that I may be able to go down into the country whenever I choose. Bunbury is perfectly invaluable. If it wasn’t for Bunbury’s extraordinary bad health, for instance, I wouldn’t be able to dine with you at Willis’s to-night, for I have been really engaged to Aunt Augusta for more than a week.
Everyone should read TIOBE once a year.
Thank you, AJP. I read the play a long time ago, but had forgotten this detail. Very useful. The chiropodist too.
I have read about some women inventing entire imaginary families in order to have something to share with their colleagues at work.
More than one woman?
AJP: Yes. Not many, but more than one. The practice is also useful for single women travelling in woman-unfriendly countries (Saudi Arabia, etc), where a wedding ring and pictures of children are supposed to come in handy in many social situations. (I have not tried to go there myself).
My first wife and I traveled to Syria before we were married, and we very quickly learned not only to claim we were married but to invent a couple of kids we’d left back home with my parents, because otherwise the questions were just too unavoidable and repetitious and annoying: “You don’t have children? Really? Why not? You are so young! Is there something wrong?” etc. etc.
Thanks for the informed speculation on necropsy/autopsy; I’m satisfied now.
And for the Duchesss link, which reminds me that I’ve led a very sheltered life after all.
And the tapir jokes; I didn’t know one could make tapir jokes. (Are tapirs inherently funny?)
When I go to Turkey and Egypt I sometimes dig out my old wedding ring and flash it around. Despite my advanced age (although age didn’t seem to stop the Duchess, did it?), there is always a fair amount of insistent attention (all Americans are rich, did you know that?), and after awhile I gave up bravely fending it off. For the purposes of my visits I have a large Russian husband who occassionally drinks too much and flies into jealous rages. He’s in the hotel right now, resting up.
I have read about some women inventing entire imaginary families in order to have something to share with their colleagues at work.
Again from Earnest:
Ah, Wilde. Where would we be without him? Don’t we just marvel at the cunning punning choice of Miss Prism, to name the character responsible for the original mix-up?
@marie-lucie: I was precisely talking about “feminicide”. See comment #2, where I proposed it as a well-formed alternative to “femicide”.
@hat: I fail to see your point. “Feminicide” (or whatever form finally gets entrenched in English) is hyponimous of “homicide”, just as “viricide” is. Claiming that ‘it falsely implies “homicide” is somehow male-specific’ is equivalent to claiming that “bycicle” implies that “vehicles” are four-wheeled.
This reminds me of Jean-Claude Romand, who prenteded he was a doctor, and fooled his family and friends for eighteen years. His “Bunburry” was a job at WHO. Eventually, he committed femicide and infanticide, and made an unsuccessful suicide attempt. There are several books, films and documentaries about his case.
I made an error yesterday. The Dukes of Argyll are not to my knowledge linked with nazism; indeed, most of the political conniving, somersaults and double-dealing of the Campbell family had been accomplished by the close of the 17th Century. I was thinking of the friendship with top nazis that led to Rudolf Hess parachuting into Scotland in 1941 looking for peace; but it was the 14th Duke of Hamilton who was responsible for that.
uxoricide- Not in my dictionary it can’t, nor should I expect it to; “uxor” is “wife.”
I have read this wrong; it can also refer to the man himself. Actually it’s mariticide that can be used for either one, but usually refers to a wife who murders a husband. These are both too specific–neither one is the “solid word for killing women that doesn’t ‘sound funny’ but has an emotional impact”.
manslaughter and homicide are somewhat gender specific.
They are not.
I realize these words have specific meanings in law and law enforcement, and would be used in a specific way in, say, newspaper accounts where the information is taken from a police department. But for discussion of domestic violence in political threads, they just won’t do. Whether it isn’t good Latin or not will not matter–people who form political discussion groups probably don’t even know what an OED is. They’re going to get as far as hom in homocide and think it sounds like French homme or Spanish hombre and then they’ll see “man” in manslaughter and think it actually means “man” and not “man and woman”. Then, by the time you hyphenate it with some other word to try to make it specifically about killing women, the word will have no emotional impact left at all.
Oh, and if you tell them that mankind refers to the human race in general, they will put your IP in their spam filter. I’m surprised that a blog with so many people devoted to understanding language (not to mention hats) would be so unaware of gender neutral language. Here’s the wiki, and here’s a short essay with some examples.
“lynching” … I am surprised that the word is being used for a one on one, private killing.
The phrase coined was “woman lynching”. One definition of lynch: “To execute without due process of law, especially to hang, as by a mob, ” or ” kill without legal sanction”. The idea that killing women is “one on one, private killing” would be considered a highly political (and unfortunate) statement. A case in point was the Sarah Palin noose which only came down after weeks of demonstrations. A similar Obama noose got someone in custody within hours.
Here’s a typical paragraph:
Interestingly enough, I turned up a definition that distinguishes between femicide and feminicide:
The “Network” is the Argentine Network of Journalists for Non-Sexist Communication in an article about non-sexist language for reporters.
This language is just so intuitive for me I’m surprised people want to quarrel with me over it. So I checked a couple other blogs to see how they were using words about killing women. Here are the results for a liberal and a conservative blog, both written by women:
~~~~~~~~
liberal blog:
homocide: 2 ghit 1) “murder behind closed doors in the Senate Democratic Caucus”, “Oh, it’s a homocide alright but what is behind it?” 2)”his fan club is ready to commit homocide-suicide”
manslaughter: 4 ghits (police court charges)
woman lynching: 3 ghits (all referencing the other blog)
femicide: 1
feminicide: 1
conservative blog:
homocide: 0
manslaughter: 4 (newspaper quotations or police jargon)
woman lynching: 777 ghits
femicide: 73 ghits
feminicide: 0
~~~~~~~~
mab:For the purposes of my visits I have a large Russian husband who occasionally drinks too much and flies into jealous rages.
Nicely done. Two thirds of them want to get married to get a visa, the other third wants to frolic. If you are traveling alone it’s best to tell them you’re a virgin just for personal safety. This will not sound weird no matter how old you are. The rest can be discouraged by a finance at home. But then you will have no one to talk to.
the questions were just too unavoidable and repetitious and annoying: “You don’t have children? Really? Why not?
You can put it at the doorstep of Allah and they will stop asking questions. There is a phrase for this that I have forgotten but all you have to do is get the idea across. You would probably have to muster some piety to use this, but no one wants to question the will of Allah.
Nijma,
I’m going to assume that your comment above contains a recurrent typo and that your web research was based on the more typical spelling of homicide rather than the unusual homocide. But it seems an uphill battle, and somewhat speculative, to formulate an argument based on the presumed ignorance of others. Why would someone who’s never heard of the OED jump to etymological conclusions at all, let alone based on knowledge of French or Spanish? In my experience, people who are truly uninterested in language rarely see such parallels, and are more inclined to latch on to crude puns, such as using homocide [sic] to refer to hate crimes based on sexual orientation. And I would not be so quick to dismiss the technical legal definitions, because it seems like everyone thinks they know them, and I suspect that the word homicide is sufficiently prevalent in news accounts and tv shows that people know what it means. Everyone know from popular culture about some police department’s “homicide division”, and no one assumes that homicide detectives are assigned solely to investigate crimes against men – television drama demonstrates otherwise. And in my opinion, people are sufficiently familiar with the previously-mentioned phrase of “hate crime” to more readily understand sentences like “the suspect was charged with a hate crime in connection with the woman’s murder” than “the suspect was charged with femicide.”
And please don’t interpret this to mean that I have any objection whatsoever to people using “femicide” if they so desire. I personally think that “hate crime” is adequate, and that “femicide” fails to distinguish between sex crimes perpetrated by serial killers, who for horrifying but nonetheless clinically interesting reasons have bundled murderous tendencies with sexual desire, and crimes that are specifically motivated by hatred against women as such. Those are two very different types of motivation. But the people who frequent the blogs you mention don’t sound like they’d be interested in my opinion anyway.
SnowLeopard, can someone be charged with something called ‘a hate crime’ in the US? If so, it’s something I hadn’t realized and it sounds to me (a layperson) quite significant. Unlike ‘murder’, it’s alleging a motivation for committing the crime. It’s also saying that US society is making a specific moral condemnation of ‘hate’ as well as ‘murder’ or ‘violence’. Is that so?
people who form political discussion groups probably don’t even know what an OED is. They’re going to get as far as hom in homocide and think it sounds like French homme or Spanish hombre
By all means, let’s dumb down the language so that even the most ignorant will not have to experience a moment of cognitive dissonance.
Also, what SnowLeopard said. And there’s no need to treat us to elaborate explanations of the implications of using “man” for both sexes; we’re not ignoramuses in these parts. But it’s one thing to avoid using “man” that way and quite another to go through the vocabulary looking for other words that might be tainted by association. “Manslaughter” is an ancient word that is not going to change, and the only thing that’s accomplished by complaining about it is a feeling of self-satisfaction, something that in my experience ideologues of all sorts are too prone to. Personally, I’ve been a feminist since around 1970 and am careful to use gender-neutral language when it matters, but I’m not about to go down the “womanslaughter”/”herstory” road.
AJP: This is an ongoing debate; I myself am firmly against the idea of “hate crimes,” which not only tries to base the law on presumed states of “hatred” but implies that killing persons of one gender/race/orientation is worse than killing those of another. We need to eradicate distinctions in treatment, not build them into the system.
AJP: Linked is the text of the New York statute. These sorts of things, like gay marriage, tend to be handled on a state-by-state basis, and I don’t know without looking it up whether there’s a corresponding federal statute. If you read the legislative preamble, I think it’s fair to say that there was a desire to express moral condemnation of the act of selecting the target for one’s violence based on membership in a particular social group. But more generally, note that motivation and intent are always relevant to a murder charge — hence the defenses of insanity and self-defense, and the aggravating factor of premeditation.
I am inclined to respectfully disagree with one aspect of Mr. Hat’s position here. As I read this particular statute, no social group is favored over any other, and a decision to target only men, or whites, or some other group would also satisfy the element of the crime under discussion. And “hatred” generally, while it may be condemned by the legislature, is not itself subject to prosecution. It’s evidence that hatred on the basis of a protected social category served as the motivation for violence that results in the higher criminal penalty. The legislature indicated that it found such evidence particularly devastating to the social fabric, and I can see their point: if someone was selected as a target solely because of their group status, then everyone in that group will start to feel like a potential victim, especially if that type of crime is held to be no worse than any other. As Mr. Hat states, there’s plenty to debate here, and I can easily imagine situations where the statute may be subject to abuse. But I don’t think that hate crimes legislation necessarily entrenches divisive attitudes. We have seen other civil rights statutes remove discriminatory conduct from the domain of civilized discourse, and hopefully there will be a day when hate crimes legislation is regarded as quaint and irrelevant to society’s problems.
AJP: You always know it’s a genuine American Political Issue if it’s been addressed on The West Wing.
I suppose censure of immoral or violent behavior towards one part of society goes back in the US and England to their respective abolition of slavery, then. And, as SL says, ‘hate crimes’ wouldn’t be that different to slavery: it’s illegal no matter who is hated or enslaved.
Duh. It’s a subject that only just occurred to me.
That’s probably true. I don’t watch it now that there’s a real president.
“which not only tries to base the law on presumed states of “hatred” but implies that killing persons of one gender/race/orientation is worse than killing those of another”
I don’t perceive the latter at all as part of hate crimes legislation, and as for the first, would you also be in favor of eliminating the the distinction between first and second degree murder? negligent homicide etc? There’s a long tradition of taking into consideration the mental state and motives of someone who has killed another.
You can argue that the distinctions introduced by hate laws are unnecessary (I might or might not agree) but I hardly think of them as an aberration in legal history.
(Forgive me if this has already been answered, but the thread was already rather long when I saw it for the first time, and I may have missed things.)
Anyway, many of us were taught many years ago that in Latin homo was not the same as vir, but despite the tendency to think the confusion is due to modern ignorance I think it must be pretty old, at least vulgar Latin and maybe even classical, because I think all the main modern Romance languages use words derived from homo to mean man as opposed to woman. I imagine you must know this sort of thing, Marie-Lucie.
Snowleopard: homocide/homicide
Oopsie, yes, it was a typo I pasted from somewhere late at night. Not my only typo last night either, but we won’t mention the other ones…
Looking again, both homocide examples came from two comments by the same person, a chemist, who was using it to mean “destructive ideas” and not “murder of homosexuals”.
Looking at both blogs again with the corrected spelling gives a few more hits:
homicide (liberal blog) 28 ghits (mostly about police matters and studies of crime statistics), one use for destructive ideas “commit political homicide”
This one is strictly about women, but I still think it’s mainly in the crime statistic department: “…the leading cause of death of pregnant women in the US is homicide…”
homicide (conservative blog) 47 ghits (mostly about police and court matters)
other uses: once as a television program called “Homicide”, once to mean a destructive idea, three instances as a person who kills or shows rage: “the hero as homicide”, “homicide bombers” in Israel, renaming–and reframing–“suicide bombers”, and “and he did one of those fits of rages I have seen men do. I dunno…homicide is sooo much on the surface for some men…”.
other coined phrases: domestic murder, woman-baiting
These are activists who care the most about these issues and are probably in the vanguard as far as coining words and experimenting with new language. Even with the corrected spelling, “manslaughter” and “homicide” just aren’t coming up as words used in their ordinary conversation to mean “killing women”.
LH: By all means, let’s dumb down the language so that even the most ignorant will not have to experience a moment of cognitive dissonance.
It’s not a question of “dumbing down” as much as finding the language to promote a specific set of attitudes or actions. You could think of the f-word in the same way–is it vulgar and “dumbed down”, or is it a short word with impact used to quickly convey an emotional state?
Personally, I’ve been a feminist since around 1970 and am careful to use gender-neutral language when it matters
I noticed that a long time ago and I like it.
the only thing that’s accomplished by complaining about it is a feeling of self-satisfaction
While it’s impossible to keep people from having thoughts of hatred, expressing those thoughts publicly can be made unacceptable. Do you know Ebay has a policy against “profanity, hate speech, threats of violence or defamatory comments”, but somehow the Palin noose got put up for sale on Ebay? I doubt if they would allow items associated with slavery or the holocaust. That kind of casual acceptance of public expression of violence against women is the sort of thing that can be changed.
expressing those thoughts publicly can be made unacceptable.
Perhaps, if you’re willing to set up a Gulag. I’m afraid we’ll have to agree to disagree about this; I am, and always have been, in favor of the fullest possible range of expression, with everyone free to say what they want and hurt feelings be damned. One of the few things that’s kept me in some sense proud to be an American over the last few depressing decades has been the First Amendment, and the willingness of the gutsy folk at the ACLU and elsewhere to force the powers that be to keep observing it. Let the Nazis march, let the bigots rave, let the sexists proudly display their sexism; let everyone see, in Bill Burroughs’ words, “what is on the end of every fork.” It is only by free exchange of views, however repellent some may be, that the truth can prevail; trying to suppress speech one does not like is not only authoritarian, it never works. That’s my soapbox, and I’m sticking to it.
I don’t mean to prevent any kind of expression. You will find all kinds of hate speech comments people have left on my site. I leave them stand, replace the profanity with asterisks so that I look child-friendly to search engines, and point out how idiotic–and unacceptable–the comment is. The Ebay thing seems a little different though, because it creates a market value (and therefore demand and supply) for hate.
I would join you on your soapbox for that, Hat, but respectfully disagree with regard to “hate murders.” In the first place, US law does distinguish among states of mind when committing a crime, and in the second, that’s really not the point here. It’s this: 1) we think getting drunk and bashing someone on the head unto death without intention to do real harm is bad; 2) we think bashing them on the head with intention to do real harm is worse; 3) we think plotting to bash them on the head unto death is even worse. We also think bashing someone on the head unto death just because that someone is in a group you hate is also worse than 1) and 2). You don’t have to prove “a state of hatred” at the moment of bashing. And it doesn’t say that killing X is worse than killing Y. It says that if you kill someone just because s/he is black, white, Chinese, gay, etc etc etc. that is a more heinous crime.
I’m not entirely convinced that “sending messages” with types of crimes is effective, but if someone beats up black kid or hangs a noose in front of their house (as I think happened recently), I’d want the perps to be charged with the more serious hate crime than with vandalism or assault.
Which (sort of) brings up back to femicide/feminicide: it’s one thing to say “a lot of women got killed,” but IMO it’s another to call it femicide or whatever. (Yes, I know I’m heading in a direction most of you loathe and disdain, but there it is.)
It says that if you kill someone just because s/he is black, white, Chinese, gay, etc etc etc. that is a more heinous crime.
Yeah, I understand that, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. Of course I hate the idea of someone being killed because “s/he is black, white, Chinese, gay, etc,” but I don’t think that’s a good road for the law to go down. I could, of course, be wrong.
Athel: in Latin homo was not the same as vir, … [the meaning change] must be pretty old, … all the main modern Romance languages use words derived from homo to mean man as opposed to woman.
This is a common evolution which has occurred in other languages as well, from a generic meaning “human being” to “man” meaning male adult. This evolution does not necessarily mean that men are considered as the typical kind of human being, but can be explained by the fact that since there is always a specific word for “woman” (because of the unique childbearing role), the meaning of the generic word, eg the original word “man”, tends to become narrowed to that of “male adult”.
Nijma, this explanation does not mean that I don’t know that mankind is nowadays often replaced by humankind in order to have a word with generic meaning.
hate crime: this sort of crime is not limited to murder, or a less serious physical crime such as assault, but can also encompass things like desecrating cemeteries of a particular religion or writing and disseminating literature inciting hatred towards a particular group.
woman-lynching: I had never come across this term before, and it does not sound right to me because it suggests killing of a woman by a mob, in public. When referring to a woman killed by her husband in her own home, there is no publicity and no other killer or approving abetters or spectators. It is in this context that I referred to it as a “one on one private killing”. Of course there are important societal issues bearing on this type of crime.
Jean-Claude Romand, … committed femicide and infanticide
He killed his wife and children, so he committed uxoricide (not a legal term at present) by killing his wife, but not strictly infanticide since this term usually applies to the killing of a newborn by its mother. Infanticide is usually committed by a woman who is not prepared for pregnancy or motherhood (eg is young and unmarried) and does not show the usual obvious signs of pregnancy (eg does not gain weight or change shape), so that nobody notices, she herself is in denial or even ignorance that she is pregnant, and when the child is born (usually very quickly and always without help) she is horrified and wants to get rid of this “foreign body” as soon as possible. In many countries this crime is considered quite distinct from murder.
m-l:mankind is nowadays often replaced by humankind in order to have a word with generic meaning
My understanding was that women, not being expected or allowed to participate in public life, were excluded intentionally and the language reflected the reality of women not being able to vote, etc.
Of course we Viking women have always been an exception, having been expected to run the homestead singlehandedly while the guys were off in their boats doing the summer “shopping”. During the Viking rule in York, the British were amazed that Viking women went to the local markets and engaged in trade.
LH:I don’t think that’s a good road for the law to go down
I am curious as to why Hat doesn’t like the idea of a separate category for “hate crimes”. I can understand the difference between someone getting killed accidentally, maybe hit by a car, and an intentional killing, but I’ve never given hate crimes much thought.
Every time there is an incident here it seems the authorities are eager to keep things quiet in order that a particular area not get a reputation as a racial trouble spot and start an out-migration of fearful people that would lower property values. Whenever there is a dead body on the street it is always said that they were killed elsewhere and the body dumped here, or that it was a gang shooting that started in another neighborhood, or if the person was local that it was a traffic accident and not a gang incident.
marie-lucie: You are correct that hate crimes can include property damage, such as desecration of graves in a cemetery, but, at least in the text of the statute I linked to, they do not extend to the dissemination of literature. Under US law that would be deemed an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. Although there are US civil rights statutes that do have the consequence of punishing hate speech, they are confined to specific situations, such as employment, rather than regulating behavior more generally, and the standards for successfully bringing a claim for a hostile work environment against one’s employer are relatively strict. Thus a single stray remark or joke, depending on context, usually would not support a claim, but displaying a noose or swastika probably would, especially if management failed to take swift and appropriate action to address it.
Nijma: (about mankind = humankind)
My understanding was that women, not being expected or allowed to participate in public life, were excluded intentionally and the language reflected the reality of women not being able to vote, etc.
I think that words like mankind and manslaughter are older than the right to vote for just about anybody. Surely manslaughter did not exclude women from being considered victims of crime. See my comment above about the origin of the word “woman”, which does include “man” as generic.
But it is interesting that in Victorian England, when women had hardly any rights, there was a woman on the throne, the only one who had any official say in public affairs. She did nothing to advance the rights of other women though.
SnowLeopard: Here in Canada the list does “restrict free speech” in the manner you describe. See
http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/hatecrimes/
But a couple of famous cases have shown that it is extremely difficult to prosecute “hate literature” successfully.
m-l: She (QV) did nothing to advance the rights of other women though.
Though, in fairness, neither did very many others, before her death. Her daughter Princess Louise (wife of Gov. Gen. of Canada) is thought to have been a suffragist.
AJP: neither did very many others, before her death
True, but she was in a truly unique position.
It’s unheard of — nowadays, rightly so, in my (republican) opinion — for British monarchs to unilaterally advocate, in public, social changes of that kind. Traditionally, their influence has been out of the public eye, and what we can say about QV is that she stood up for herself very successfully in an environment that was hostile to anyone who wasn’t an upper- or upper-middle-class male member of the Church of England. Think of some of the men who tried to manipulate her: Lord Melbourne, Peel, Lord Aberdeen, Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord Salisbury — among them some of the greatest statesmen of the nineteenth century. I think that not giving way for over 60 years against people like that created a remarkable precedent for the role of a woman in society.
How does that work??? Is it seriously postclassical?
DM: is it seriously postclassical?
That I don’t know. If it is not actually formed directly on the root hom (which could be a back-formation from homo), it could result from the loss of the ni syllable of a possible hominicidium (as in lapicida from lapidicida by loss of the di), perhaps by analogy with the majority of the other words, where the first element usually has only two syllables (eg pa-tri–cidium).
It goes back to Seneca.
LH, You mean that it is attested for the first time in Seneca, but does it mean that he invented it? It is probable that the proliferation of -cidium words for the murder of a variety of people is a fairly late phenomenon. Can you direct me to your reference?
Oh, of course he didn’t invent it, I just meant that’s the earliest attestation given in the Oxford Latin Dictionary.
My Hispanic students tell me the word for murder is asasináto. They used it in connection with the Juarez killings. They don’t seem to know any specific words for killing women and even asasináto seems to be too long–they prefer crimen “crime”, and lump killings together with anything else seen on TV crime shows.
One of the reasons “femicide” seems so unsatisfactory to me is the length of the word. One or two syllables would be more pithy. “Feminism” also has echoes of “femininity”–I remember auditing a university level philosophy class years ago where the students didn’t know the meaning of the word “feminist”–they thought it had something to do with femininity. Gak. How I loathe the color pink, not to mention fru-fru’s and ruffles–what kind of legacy is that?
My Hispanic students tell me the word for murder is asasináto.
Asesinato. (The legal term is homicidio.)
Spanish asesinato has the French equivalent assassinat, which also means murder (not just murder of an important person). The perpetrators are respectively el asesino and l’assassin (both masculine gender nouns), and the verbs are Sp asesinar and Fr assassiner “to murder (somebody)”.
These words have the same origin as hashish: the (at least semi-legendary) Hashishim are supposed to have been thugs at the service of an old chief living in a castle in a remote mountainous area, who drugged his followers with hashish before sending them on murderous rampages.
I used to think “homicide” was an American invention, simply because all the way to this thread I had never encountered it in any other context. No equivalent exists in German. In case anyone’s interested, there’s murder, manslaughter, and reckless killing (Mord, Totschlag*, fahrlässige Tötung), and then there are only more specialized terms like Tötung zur Befriedigung des Geschlechtstriebes (“killing for fulfilling sexual urges”, not literally).
* “Dead-beating”.
Not legendary at all, except in the sense that legends grew up around them (the same is true, of course, of George Washington). There’s a decent Wikipedia article about them; the “old chief” was Hassan-i Sabbah.
Ah, of course I should have double-checked with Wikipedia first.
legends grew up around them
That’s what I meant by “semi-legendary”, since there was some truth buried among the legends, or legends overlaying the truth, if you prefer, but I was not sure of which part was which.
It looks like the hashish link is a legend after all.
But killing someone *simply because he is gay* is generally intended to send a message to all the other gay (or black, Jewish, female, etc) people that “you could be next”. It’s terrorizing them. It is worse than murdering someone because you hate him, want his wife/money/job, or don’t like the way he looked at you. A hate-crime killing, proper, is directed at a *class*.
asesináto/asesinato
My students came up with asesino and asesina on their own (for murderer), but had to go to the dictionary to give a name to the crime itself. I would not have spelled it with an accent myself–the second to the last syllable would already be automatically accented–but it definitely had an accent in the dictionary. I didn’t think to check the dictionary’s publisher. Of course as always I would defer to the Hattian wisdom in this question.
Ridger: I agree with you. A hate-crime killing is more than a single crime: it combines the murder of an individual with, by implication, uttering death threats (to the class of potential victims) and incitation to murder (to others who could be encouraged to commit murder against the same group).
Nijma: Do other words in the dictionary have an accent in a word where the place of stress is predictable? it could be just a typo, as the accent is definitely not needed in this case. I thought that perhaps the dictionary in question marks stress in every word, but that would seem far-fetched for Spanish, where the spelling is clear enough in this respect, unlike English. I read a fair amount of Spanish and have never seen this word, or one with a comparable stress pattern, written with an accent.
Ridger is right. I remember a take-back-the-night promotion that had the slogan “there is a curfew for women and it is enforced by rapists”. The same principle as the murders of the volunteers who were doing voter registration in the South back in the 60’s. Hate crimes enforce “second class citizen” behavior by setting a example of anyone who does not “know their place.”
m-l, It has to be a typo. Spanish pronunciation is very regular; the accent mark is used when the word does not follow the rules. I was going to say my little home Spanish pocket dictionary is too small to have the word, but good heavens I have an internet connection. The first 40 or 50 google hits for the accented form of the word shows NONE of them actually being spelled with the accent.
Now that I think of it, Spanish also has another way to use accents depending on word usage that has nothing to do with pronunciation. Que, cuando, donde, si, and probably some others, change their meaning somewhat, but not their pronunciation, when written with accents. I can’t think of why asesinato might fall into this class, though.
The original reason the question was interesting was to find out if there was a separate word for killing women, maybe one that would fit into a “hate crime” context. They don’t think of the Juarez killings like that though. They were saying it’s either the mafia or someone high in the government, and lump it in with other inexplicable crimes like the story of some woman who killed her children.
A nice bit from Don Quixote (spelling modernized somewhat):
“Calla”, dixo don Quixote. “¿Y dónde has visto tu, o leído jamas, que caballero andante aya sido puesto ante la justicia por mas homicidios que hubiesse cometido?”
“Yo no se nada de omecillos [grudges]”, respondió Sancho, “ni en mi vida le caté a ninguno […].”
Nijma: Spanish also has another way to use accents …. Que, cuando, donde, si, and probably some others, change their meaning somewhat, but not their pronunciation, when written with accents. I can’t think of why asesinato might fall into this class, though.
All the words you mention, that can occur with or without accents, are grammatical words. Because of the evolution of the language, they ended up having two functional roles, and two meanings depending on whether they are stressed or not. A word with a regular, “dictionary” meaning always carries stress and therefore obeys the regular rules, according to which the default stress, normally occurring on the last but one syllable, does not need to be indicated by an “accent” when written. The word asesinato is part of the majority which follow this rule, so any stress mark on this word must be a typo.
homicidios => omecillos
femicide => demiscythe? chemitithe? theminside? emecide?
needs work.
I can: to distinguish the noun (“murder”) from the (masculine) past participle (“murdered”). Does that ever happen in Spanish?
The past participle is asesinado.
autopsy/necropsy
My understanding, which may be incorrect or merely obsolete, is that in human medicine at least, autopsy is only applied to individual actions, whereas necropsy is the general activity. When a pathologist cuts up Tom, Dick, and Harry, these are autopsies, but she is practicing necropsy.
How do you fall down an elevator shaft?
By reason of the door opening when the elevator is not there.
gendercide
This seems to me to be like genocide, and to mean the killing of women (or men) with the intention of eliminating the gender as such.
Oh, and the Irish Crown Jewels (which have never been recovered) were worn by the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland (essentially a viceroy) in his capacity as the Grand Master of the Order of St. Patrick, the Irish analogue to the Garter (English) and the Thistle (Scottish). They were also worn by the Monarch when new knights were invested, hence the term “Crown Jewels”. There have been no new knights since 1936, and the last knight died in 1974, but the order has not formally been abolished; Ulster King of Arms, the chief herald for Northern Ireland, remains as the sole surviving officer of the Order.
Note that there are at least five candidates for the headless man, and indeed their may have been two distinct headless men.
Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) must have thought “femicide” sounded awkward too, judging from how it’s introduced in “The Screwfly Solution” (1977):
Sheldon would have heard the word from 1970s feminism, and would have known that it was unfamiliar to Analog readers and needed to be introduced.
I wasn’t aware that the Irish had crown jewels
I believe they were first described as “crown jewels” when the rules of the Order of St Patrick were revised, shortly before the jewels were stolen. Probably most people were unaware Ireland had crown jewels until they read “Irish Crown Jewels Stolen” in the newspapers. Probably nationalists would have objected to the description except that it made their theft that much more amusing.
The technical German word for homicide, per Wikt.en, is Tötungsdelikt, which makes sense: it’s a close variant of English wrongful killing, but with the adjective-noun relationship reversed.
Why the United States doesn’t have Crown Jewels?
{thinking} perhaps the English stole them.
No adjective at all: Tötung and Delikt are both nouns.
Re US crown jewels: the king was head of state in the 13 colonies (and the Queen still is in Canada) but the colonies were not part of the United Kingdom (neither was Ireland at the time the colonies became independent). So the US (and Canada) never had its own king and did not need crown jewels. Scotland was a separate Kingdom until 1707 and Charles II (also King of England) was the last Scottish king to employ the Scottish Crown jewels. Wales had crown jewels because a local king was trying to rule all of Wales and the Crown jewels were really aspirational. No local king had ruled (or even claimed to rule) all of Ireland for a long time, and the English kings ruled Ireland through force and benevolent neglect, employing for this purpose a viceroy whose most loyal followers were low Protestants who hated jewels and too much ceremony in principle.
Why the United States doesn’t have Crown Jewels?
Mostly on the account of not having a crown, presumably, but I suspect that if there ever were any they would probably have burned down in 1814 anyway.
There are still people who think our Dread and Sovereign Lord is George III, despite being both crazy and dead. If you are going to have a king, a dead one seems to me like the best kind. The Breslover Hasidim, the most Mahayana of all Hasidic sects (complete with mantras, Tripitaka, and an analogue of the Heart Sutra), have been without a rebbe since 1810, and are sometimes called the Hasidim of the Dead.
Arthur seems a good choice (on numerous grounds.)
And now I wonder whether the Hawaiian Kingdom (1795-1893/5) ever had crown jewels (and if yes, whether any have been preserved).
[Incidentally, my favorite line from the Wikipedia article for the Hawaiian Kingdom: “In 1822, Queen Kaʻahumanu and her husband King Kaumualiʻi traveled with Captain William Sumner to find Nihoa, as her generation had only known the island through songs and myths.”]
All systems of royal power probably have objects that mark royalty and are inherited with the title — regalia — but “crown jewels” in the more narrow sense of actual jewels for an actual crown, or even the wider meaning of “special crown, sceptre and globe richly decorated with precious stones”, are a fairly recent and European thing.
John C.: The technical German word for homicide, per Wikt.en, is Tötungsdelikt, which makes sense: it’s a close variant of English wrongful killing, but with the adjective-noun relationship reversed.
David M.: No adjective at all: Tötung and Delikt are both nouns.
Substitute “dependent*-head relationship”. In English, it’s reasonable to see the dependent in an equally stressed noun noun compound as acting as the adjective in a nominal phrase.
* I don’t like the term “dependent”. It’s not a good metaphorical match to “head”, and not a good description of its role in the phrase either.
No adjective at all
Right. I should have said “with the modifier-modified order reversed” so as to be comparative-categorically correct.
As for “dependent-head” terminology, it too is rather vexed: in Mädchen, which part is the head? What about Kaninchen?
Hasn’t stopped North Korea…
Well, those have a derivational suffix instead of a lexical prefix… so I suppose their heads are cran morphemes (derived in the first case from Magd, “unmarried woman” > “handmaid”).
But I’m not used to head/dependent terminology at all.
So you’d think, but the communis opinio is that it’s the suffix that is the head: for example, it assigns the gender and the plural marker (namely zero), and saying so preserves the general head-last nature of German NPs. Whether -chen in Kaninchen is synchronically a suffix is a separate difficult question. (By the way, TIL that Duden lists Kanin ‘rabbit skin, rabbit fur’ as still current.)
It may show that all theories break down at the microscopic level, or the differencet between compounding and derivation, but I think it shows that things can be nested in many ways. I don’t see any reason why a derivation like Mädchen can’t take properties of its own without inheriting them from the head of its internal structure. Hell, a whole sentence can be the head of a new phrase. You’ll have to draw parantheses in the syntactic tree or something, but that’s not my problem.
That’s hard to decide in this case: all diminutives are neuter*, but all end in -chen or -(e)lein, so it’s at best hard to tell if the suffixes or the fact of being a diminutive that assigns the gender; the choice of plural formation is always determined by the end of the word (in ambiguous ways pretty often), which may or may not be because the head is always at the end…
* Except for some of those used as personal nicknames, which is a regional thing.
the fact of being a diminutive that assigns the gender
Not likely. The unproductive suffix -ling (Wikt.en lists 38 -ling diminutives) assigns masculine gender even to feminine nouns. I grant that Erdling may just be a calque of earthling rather than an actual derived form, but that can hardly be true of Häftling ‘prison inmate’. (Some of the 38 aren’t even from nouns, though, like Mietling ‘hireling’ < mieten or the weird Fiesling ‘meanie’ from an adjective that apparently spread from Low German / Dutch in the 20C.)
By contrast, English has hundreds of such words, many of them not in the OED, suggesting that the suffix is still as productive as it can be in a language that doesn’t use diminutives much (by contrast, Afrikaans has things that look like stacked diminutives: baadjie < Dutch < Malay baju < Persian becomes baadjietjie). Earthling is itself interesting: in OE it meant ‘plowman’, but was then lost and reinvented in the late 16C in the sense ‘occupant of earth (as opposed to heaven)’, which is still current, and then in the late 19C in the sense ‘occupant of earth (as opposed to some other planet)’.
Another TIL: in at least some forms of German, diminutive -chen keeps its vowel distinct whereas accidental -chen as in Eichen ‘oaks’ does not. For me the distinction is one of juncture (+ for the diminutive, – for the trees), which is one of those things that you know when you hear it, even if you can’t say what it is exactly.
I would dispute that -ling is a diminutive suffix, at least synchronically. Even most of the words listed are not diminutive. If anything, its productive uses are slightly deprecative when forming nouns designating persons and “items that undergo / can be used for an activity” when used to form nouns designating things from verbs.
@hans
It looks to me like there are 3 ling suffixes in German:
1. Verb stem + ling: Findling
2. Noun + ling: Häuptling
3.Adjective ending in lich-ich+ing: Liebling
1-2 seem to be originally neutral. I think 3 has a Kosename (compare English darling) vibe which might have spread to the others. There are some formations not clear to me, I. e. Sonderling I think is 3 but could be 2 and I think Sprössling is 2 but could be 1. Also I think forms like Griechling are calques of Latin forms with -ulus, which have a contemptuous force.
Yes, for me, diminutive -chen is completely invariant [çɛn] while accidental -chen undergoes full reduction & assimilation (Wochen -[xːŋ̩], Eichen -[çːŋ̩]).
But I’m sure the real reason for that is that diminutive -chen is simply alien to Upper German. In places where it’s native, you do find phenomena like bisschen coming out as [ˈbʉʃn̩].
Historically, -ling is a missegmentation of -ing, which was a vaguely patronymic suffix in the early Middle Ages (Merov-ing-, Carol-ing, Capet-ing-) and still is in modern Icelandic (Íslending “Icelander”). This has caused diminutive meanings, which then branched out into endearing, contemptive, and merely nominalizing.
I had never encountered Mietling, Blendling or Sanderling, and most of the others are very rare (e.g. Bitterling is a kind of mushroom that doesn’t come up much in conversation because it apparently tastes bitter but won’t kill you, Grünling aka Grünfink is the greenfinch…).
I know sanderlings (in English), because they’re the birds that run like cartoons. They presumably don’t really have three legs joined in a circle, but they do very well at giving that impression!
The OED gives this for the English word:
Etymology: Possibly representing Old English *sand-yrðling , < sand sand n.1 + yrðling ploughman (see earthling n.1)
So a sanderling is a sand-earthling!
And a plover is a cross-linguistic pun?
-ling
Exactly the same story in English, of course: a princeling rules no serious kingdom. In one of Poul Anderson’s books, a ruler is called the First (cf. Fürst) and his son the Firstlin’; the ruled are known in lower case as nords.
plover
The OED3 can’t decide: it may be < pluvia ‘rain’ for reasons unknown, or an imitative form assimilated to pluvia for reasons unknown. (I sound like Lucky in Waiting for Godot.)
Unlike -lein in German, -ling is not a basically neutral diminutive. It’s not exactly neutral in English either, but it feels like the connotations are more pronounced in German. That would make sense, of course, since -ling is fairly rare in German, compared with English, where it is quite productive and much closer to being the default diminutive (to the extent that English has such a thing).
There are some formations not clear to me, I. e. Sonderling I think is 3 but could be 2 and I think Sprössling is 2 but could be 1.
I’ve never seen a noun *Sonder, but there’s a verb sondern, so Sonderling could be 1 or 3. Sprössling is clearly 2; the verb-derived cases of nouns in -ling are always built on the infinitive stem, and the infinitive is sprießen. The base here is Spross “sprout, shoot, scion”.
Also I think forms like Griechling are calques of Latin forms with -ulus, which have a contemptuous force.
Quite possible. This specific subtype has a 19th century bookish feel to me, typical for the nationalistic sort of historical novel (“Professorenroman”) where the Germans / Germanic people are the good guys and the Romans or Romance people (“Welsche”) are the bad guys.
I’ve seen Greekling, but it’s translationese (from Latin).
@hans
Thanks. DWDS does not provide good etymology for the -ling suffix but does this for the -lings suffix (basically what David M said plus erstarrtes Genitiv s). I found a couple of things I do not understand
1. There are many cases of adjective + lings in German but (apart from lich => ling: Sonderling, Liebling etc) the only strong case for adjective + -ling I know is Frühling (although I would prefer this to be Frühe-e+ling). Did Frühling originally refer to young lambs etc. and only later to the time of year or was it the other way around?
2. Dutch borrowed German plötzlich but then changed it to plotseling. DWDS says the plotz part in plötzlich is onomatopoeia. It also says platzen is from eine lautmalende Bildung but does not connect this with plotz! Latin explodere / plaudo is given in Wiktionary a perhaps PIE etymology and Wikt does not mention onomatopoeia here. For klatschen, a semantic match for plaudo, DWDS says schallnachahmend. Do you or David M know what is really going on here?
Frühe-e+ling
That’s not what to expect, the compositional form of adjectives is almost always identical to the form used as predicate, which is früh.
For the rest of your questions, I can’t say much, as I am far away from my etymological dictionaries.
I don’t.
Spring is also called Frühjahr, which is obviously the early part of the year, früh + Jahr.
John C.: the communis opinio is that it’s the suffix that is the head: for example, it assigns the gender and the plural marker (namely zero), and saying so preserves the general head-last nature of German NPs.
Me: I think it shows that things can be nested in many ways. I don’t see any reason why a derivation like Mädchen can’t take properties of its own without inheriting them from the head of its internal structure.
Other derivations where the main semantic information is in the stem and the grammatical information is in the suffix are -er of e.g. Lehrer, -in of e.g. Lehrerin. In eine Lehrer and die Lehrerin, the indefinite and definite articles take gender from the noun but carry case for the whole construction. At each step, the head-dependent or modifier-modified-relationship is reversed between a semantic and a formal grammatical point of view. Now that I think of it, this duality, the outsourcing of grammatical headship to affixes and particles with little (or very general) semantic baggage of their own, is what makes morphology work at all.
I don’t know what to with the general head-last nature. Except that I don’t think any human system is completely consistent. And it doesn’t need to work the same at all levels.
Yes, except you’ve been tripped up by the two adjective declensions: ein Lehrer “a/one male teacher”, der eine Lehrer “the one male teacher”.
@dm
re der eine Lehrer I always parsed this as dereine (compare dereinst or derjenige), so as somehow indivisible. But I suppose you could still try to split it and say the last part is the head. But in that case the der part carries the gender and the eine part carries only the number, so it is a fractured head☺
l got tripped up, but it was by my own switching from Lehrerin to Lehrer in the first example. The weak (definite) form of the article is like Norwegian.
the only strong case for adjective + -ling I know is Frühling
Rohling comes to mind. And Fremdling. Neben Fiesling auch Miesling.
Neuling, Wüstling, Feigling, Schwächling, Weichling, Winzling, Liebling, Bitterling, Nützling.
And lots more here.
@stu
Thanks for that, loads of new vocab.☺
Wüstling/Neuling have a pedigree, unlike say Rohling, which is one of hans’ professorenroman or yellow journalist words. But maybe Wüstling is from a verb or noun and not from the adjective wüst (or was created by attraction to Lüstling) and Neuling is neulich-ich+ing. In any case your linked list shows the adjectival route to -ling words is far less productive than the nominal or verbal route.
Rohling is the standard technical word for a half-finished piece of metal, wood, leather, plastic etc that will be further machined / finished. Here are photos of different kinds of them.
To associate the word only with Professorenromane or yellow journalism, one must know zilch about manufacturing. That word is spelled the same, but is a different word – if anything, it is probably derived from the manufacturing term.
With regard to heads: in syntax, the concept is pretty straightforward in principle: the head of a phrase is the component that sets the overall syntactic role of the whole phrase, so noun phrases are headed by nouns and verb phrases by verbs. There are already one or two slightly counterintuitive consequences: for example, a prepositional phrase is headed by the preposition, not its complement.
It’s not at all clear to me how to generalise this principle to word-internal structure, nor whether it’s particularly fruitful to do so. Noun case endings have often been declared “heads” on the grounds that they are analogous in function to prepositions/postpositions and set the syntactic role of the whole word, which is logical but doesn’t seem likely to lead to any startling new insights into morphology. Moreover, in a language (like Kusaal) in which nouns have sg and pl suffixes but there is no number agreement, I can see no reason at all to call such flexions “heads”; similarly with verb endings marking aspect. Singulars and plurals, perfectives and imperfectives, occupy the same syntactic roles in sentences.
In derivation, affixes which change nouns into verbs etc could reasonably be called “heads” by the general principle (treatments of Eskimo languages do this, talking about such suffixes as “light verbs”, all the more plausibly because they are so spectacularly productive.) But I can’t see why affixes which leave parts of speech unaltered should be called heads. The argument that if they determine gender (in languages which have such things) they are therefore heads might be persuasive in some gender systems but is not so at all in others. In NIger-Congo languages it’s commonplace to derive words by changing the noun class (i.e. gender) of a stem (thus the Mamprussi speak Mampruli and live in Mampurugu, just as the Kusaasi speak Kusaal and live in Kusaug) but this reflects the (often weak) semantic associations of the genders/classes themselves, just like the German diminutive/neuter thing. If your gender system is completely arbitrary with no semantic associations then it’s easier to make a case that a derivational suffix is the head because it determines the gender, but very few such systems are known, and otherwise it’s hard to think of a way that you could guarantee that a change of gender induced by a derivational suffix had nothing to do with the semantics.
Several Western Oti-Volta languages preserve a diminutive noun class with the sg suffix la, as in Mooré bùllá “kid” beside bʋ́ʋga “goat.” The sole survivor of this class in Kusaal is the adjective bil “little”, and the Kusaal for “kid” is the noun-adjective compound bʋbil “goat-little” (this sort of compounding is the regular construction with modifying adjectives throughout the entire Oti-Volta family.)
You might be tempted to say that in bʋbil the adjective is therefore the head, but in the related languages which retain the noun classes as grammatical genders, in noun-adjective compounds the final class suffix is regularly determined by the gender of the noun, which is therefore clearly the head. The Kusaal adjective bil is exceptional, precisely because it preserves a noun class which is specifically diminutive.
@stu
Guilty as charged. Missed the real Rohling also in DWDS korpus 1473-1927. My knowledge of things Roh in German is restricted to literature, hat may also like this:
https://www.deutschelyrik.de/sie-sassen-und-tranken-am-teetisch.html
I do indeed. “Die Herren, die waren ästhetisch,/ die Damen von zartem Gefühl.”
@PP: My knowledge of things Roh in German is restricted to literature
Like this ?
Roh-der Roman.: Sex, Lügen & Rohkost.
Fun orthographic fact: Wüstling and Lüstling don’t rhyme.
Rohling is two different words, separately derived from roh at different occasions for different purposes from its two different meanings, “raw/unfinished” and “rude/brutal”. That latter meaning is most likely derived from the former, but at a much earlier date, I bet.
German abounds in doublets like these, especially if you cast your net wider in time and space. The example I have in mind is Verhandlungen, which means nothing but “negotiations” today, but into the early 20th century showed up in the names of journals evidently analogous to transactions as in the Earth and Environmental Science Transactions of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (the current name of a real journal, with a capital The in the middle that is mercifully ignored in abbreviation: Earth Env. Sci. Trans. R. Soc. Edinb.).
That’s actually stressed on the first syllable, so the spelling is honest; and *jenig doesn’t otherwise exist, unlike jener/jene/jenes.
Eh, the whole German language has about five endings and scatters them at random across noun, verb and adjective inflection. In this case, definite singular adjectives happen not to distinguish gender in the nominative (-e), genitive (-en) or dative (-en again), but they do in the accusative (-en m., -e f./n.). 😐
In Niger-Congo languages it’s commonplace to derive words by changing the noun class (i.e. gender) of a stem (thus the Mamprussi speak Mampruli and live in Mampurugu, just as the Kusaasi speak Kusaal and live in Kusaug) but this reflects the (often weak) semantic associations of the genders/classes themselves, just like the German diminutive/neuter thing.
…This sort of system sounds far too familiar to me from somewhere – I want to say Esperanto, for some reason, even though I highly suspect that Zamenhof had never so much as heard of any Niger-Congo languages. (And even though Esperanto doesn’t have gender, as noun classes or otherwise – not any more than English does, anyway.)
In retrospect, Esperanto or otherwise, this sort of thing just sounds logical. Are there any similar derivational systems (not necessarily involving gender) in SAE or near-SAE languages? I can’t think of any offhand, but, again, it sounds far too familiar.
Esperanto may be approaching this in current usage, but originally, at least, it was far more irregular. And had a few comical roots to apply this irregularity to.
@January:
I think it’s largely a question of degree. Virtually all noun-class/gender systems have some sort of correlation with meaning, and again in virtually all it’s only partial. (I was reading the other day an account of a language in which gender assignment seems to be entirely arbitrary, which the author rightly flagged up as a rare linguistic curiosity. Unfortunately I can’t remember which language just now …)
Thus French has a very strong but not perfect correlation in human-reference nouns between sex and gender, but while there are some other fairly consistent subgroups with meaning and gender correlation, they cover only a minority of all nouns. Languages with more than a measly two genders have more opportunities for meaning-gender subgroups; they vary a great deal in how far they actually take those opportunities.
Kusaal is fairly typical for Niger-Congo; the classes no longer function as actual genders with agreement of pronouns and modifiers in Kusaal, but the morphology is all still there in noun flexion for number. There are seven basic classes: by sg/pl suffixes they go
a/ba: exclusively human-reference (but many human reference nouns belong to other classes)
ga/se: large animals; tools; trees; most human-reference that don’t belong to to a/ba; many others with no common thread of meaning.
go/de and re/aa: all fruits; 90% of organs/body parts; re/aa contains all names of languages; go/de contains almost all common nouns (as opposed to proper nouns) describing locations; many others with no common thread. All human-reference nouns in go/de are pejorative.
fo/ii: [two original classes fallen together] (a) animals (b) small round things, including all names of seeds
bo: all nouns in this class are gerunds except for “porridge”, “war” and “soap”
mm: all liquids and abstracts, apart from a few nouns which have ended up in this class because their original classes have been lost in Western Oti-Volta. Nouns for liquids either belong here or are formally plural.
Other Western Oti-Volta languages preserve a diminutive la/li class; other Oti-Volta languages preserve a u/i “long thin things” class and a separate “tree” class which has been lost in the Western group with transfer of all its members to ga/se.
Most noun stems in fact belong to only one class, but it’s hardly surprising in view of the various class-meaning correlations that the system is exploited for derivational purposes (other nouns which share the same stems and differ in class alone are “bee”/”honey”, “hunter”/”deep bush country”, “tree”/”medicine.”)
To be honest, I’m not quite sure how to characterise this sort of derivational process. In my Kusaal grammar I just ignore the theoretical issues and call it “stem conversion”, but that seems to miss something important: it’s not just the same as the sort of null-derivation that verbs nouns in English. I should probably read up on the issues a bit more (there’s a big literature on it.)
Still, even gender-impoverished SAE languages can do this to some extent, notably by using masculine and feminine forms of a single human-reference stem for male and female referents.
Esperanto does something a little similar by (for example) using the same stem with -o for a noun, -a for a related adjective, but that is unequivocally a matter of derivation rather than flexion. I don’t think there are any general rules about the semantic relationships; each pair is pretty much ad hoc (but I don’t know much about Esperanto, and could well be wrong.)
As far as “logical” goes, I think all natural languages are chimaeras: lots of logical subsystems, lots of bizarre unmotivated exceptions; and the logical bits don’t always coincide across languages, so when learning a new language there is always that exhilarating combination of frustration at sheer arbitrariness punctuated by islands of “wow! what a neat way of expressing it!”
The example I have in mind is Verhandlungen, which means nothing but “negotiations” today, but into the early 20th century showed up in the names of journals evidently analogous to transactions
And that early meaning is what I associate with it, since I learned my German (such as it is) to read just such journals.
Noun classes in Khwarshi:
Khwarshi like many other Daghestanian languages uses the semantic factor to a
greater degree than morphological and phonological factors. The number of genders ranges from three to eight within the Nakh-Daghestanian group of languages. The languages with a larger number of genders all have male and female human genders, whereas the principle of assignment of nouns to other genders is not obvious, and it depends on semantic and formal criteria which vary from language to language. In Khwarshi, there is a distinction between the male and female genders, Gender 1 and Gender 2 respectively. To this extent the system is semantic. The assignment of the remaining three genders is not clear.
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/14522/a+Grammar+of+Khwarshi.pdf?sequence=2
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things 0 : 1 Porridge, War and Soapy Gerunds
Porridge, War and Soap will be the title of my forthcoming epic all-human-life-is-here novel of pan-European conflict.
Such novels hitherto have all been strikingly limited in scope, touching on the vital role of the quartermaster’s store only superficially, if at all.
Esperanto does something a little similar by (for example) using the same stem with -o for a noun, -a for a related adjective, but that is unequivocally a matter of derivation rather than flexion. I don’t think there are any general rules about the semantic relationships; each pair is pretty much ad hoc
There are rules, in fact, though of course they are not exceptionless. The Saussure-Kalocsay (yes, that Saussure) model divides all E-o roots into object (O), action (I), and attribute (A) roots, named after the vowel endings. Then it defines each direct conversion (one that replaces the final vowel) in terms of one of E-o’s derivational suffixes. The inherent word class of a root is covert: you simply have to learn that komput- is an I-root and you need to say komput-il-o ‘compute-tool-N’ for ‘computer’, whereas martel- is an O-root and although martel-i means ‘hammer-V’ you don’t say *martel-il-o for ‘hammer-N’ but simply martel-o.
By the same token, -ec- expects an A-root and generates an O-stem meaning ‘characteristic described by (the root)’, as in ruĝ-ec-o ‘red-ness’. However, if it gets an O-root instead, as in ŝton-ec-o ‘stoni-ness’, the O-root is automatically converted to an A-root in the sense ‘has the characteristic quality of (the root)’, and then into an O-stem.
More detailed explanations and suffix tables by Don Harlow.
Surely it’s not that Saussure, but his brother?
Pascal Tréguer at wordhistories.net has found famicide and femmicide in 16th-century French, precursors of current French fémicide or féminicide. And when one of the French sources was translated into English in 1718, the translator used “Femmicide” as an English word.