Dmitry Pruss writes:
The infamous family of the viruses has been named after the Hantan river in Korea, but where does the river’s name originate?
As one can grasp from Reddit, “The hanja for the Han River 한강 is weirdly 漢江, which means “Han [Dynasty of China] River.” However: “The hanja (Chinese character) for 한 is 韓 which means Korea. This name is probably from when Korea was still a tributary state of China pre-late 19th century. It may also be from when Seoul was known as Hanyang.”
And then: “Actually, the 漢 in 한강 does not actually represent the word “Han” but is rather used for its phonetic value. It transcribes the underlying form 한, which is the attributive form of the archaic verb 하다 “to be great; to be big” (not to be confused with 하다 “to do” which is an unrelated verb) So the name actually means “The Great River” (and from this name is also derived other names concerning the River such as 한성, the archaic name of Seoul). This verb itself is no longer used in Korean but the closely related Jeju language still preserves it..”
Can the LH community bring some clarity?
Bring on the clarity!
The river that the virus is named for is the Hantan River, not the Han River (which is a different river in Korea). According to John Kelly at Mashed Radish, an etymology blog:
The homonym gave rise to a legend about somebody lamenting by the river.
So, regardless of the river / virus, is the homophony between Han (漢 “China”) and Han (韓 “Korea”) purely coincidental?
Han (漢 “China”) and Han (韓 “Korea”) are only homophonous in modern Korean.
In Middle Chinese, 韓 “Korea” was han with level tone and 漢 “China” was xan with departing tone (xanH) (they are hán and hàn respectively in Modern Standard Mandarin).
In 15th century Korean, as represented in the Tongguk chŏngun/Dongguk jeongun 동국정운 (東國正韻), 韓 “Korea” was hhàn ᅘᅡᆫ and 漢 “China” was hán 한
Whatever the origin, what are the known earliest uses of hantavirus or similar?
For some reason, I hadn’t expected the OED to have it, but it does (entry from 2003, s.v. Hantavirus):
Their etymology derives it from Hantaan virus, which is a bit earlier:
Etymology: “< Hantaan, the name of a river in Korea + virus n.”
The quote from 1993 is about the outbreak that year in the Southwest. This was significant as the first outbreak of the respiratory form of the disease. A particularly dry period led to a lot of infected mouse feces crumbling into fine dust, which was picked up by the wind and became an infectious aerosol.
I remember the year with great certainty, since spring 1993 was when I had my own extreme fever. As the hantavirus news came out a few months later, my father suggested that I might have had the normal (not respiratory) form of the disease. It wasn’t a terrible guess, but I pointed out that, had hantavirus not been in the news, nobody would have ever suggested it as part of the differential diagnosis (as no one did when I was actually ill). On one hand, I had been exposed to forest dirt a reasonable incubation time before I developed extreme fever and intense abdominal pain. On the other hand, I had no hemorrhaging, and while one of my kidneys looked “dense” on an early ultrasound, there was not the severe bilateral nephritis typical of hantavirus infection. Most likely, I was just exposed to some other, undocumented zoonotic virus.
Why is there a -t- in zoonotic? The last part is from νόσος.
That’s a good question, especially since the noun root is still zoonosis.
Hypnosis/hypnotic?
Consider also psychosis/psychotic or symbiosis/symbiotic. And others, I’m sure.
Neurosis/neurotic, sclerosis/sclerotic … Others frankly not in my own active lexicon like cyanosis/cyanotic … This may be more of a pattern in modern learned-sounding coinages than in the actual morphology of ancient Greek, of course …
Consider the outlier pair spasmosis/spasmodic (not spasmotic). Whence came the voicing in the adjective? (To be fair, spasmosis seems extremely rare …)
OED on zoonosis (2017) says it’s from French zoonose and/or German Zoonose “with remodelling of the ending after ‑osis suffix” (which is not related to νόσος). The earliest citations are in the plural (“The zoonoses are of course diseases derived from animals…”, in a book review of a French book), so I wonder if it was subsequently misread as the plural of a noun in ‑osis.
Well, why is there a -s- in νόσος? Inherited *-s- turned into *-h- and disappeared, so either we need some *-tj- or something, or it’s a loan…
Amazingly, however, even Beekes, for whom “it’s a loan” was almost the default, doesn’t actually seem to have gone there, but only to have said “of uncertain origin“…
…wait, there’s a link at the bottom to all 1808 pages of Beekes’s Etymological Dictionary of Greek on archive.org. Will wonders never cease. (Metadata: author “R. B.”; maybe the programmers couldn’t imagine someone not having a middle name. Beekes was admittedly Dutch, so he could fairly be expected to have three of them.)
And there it is at the bottom of p. 1023 and most of p. 1024. “There is no good etymology.”
Psychotic/psychosis and hypnotic/hypnosis come from a verb root plus -τικός or -σις. Νόσος is a standalone noun. So that would make zoonotic an analogical construction in English, albeit bad Greek.
Or, it could be (as WAry suggests), from zoo- + -osis, with an -n- thrown in for no special reason other than needing a consonant.
(IANAGL.)
Hantaan virus was first named in the 1978 paper of the Korean virologists who succeeded in passing it in the lab using the lung infection model of a local vole, but the viral nature of the disease has been known for almost 40 years prior. In 1940, Russian epidemiologists experimented with human subjects, proving that ultrafiltered urine of the patients (not containing particles larger than viruses) efficiently infects human volunteers, and that convalescent sera of recovered patients prevents such transmission. They first published the observations in 1944 in Russian, complete with the narratives of the extreme pain and suffering of their human guinea pigs, and later in 1959 in English. The Korean team in the 1970s knew that it was exactly the same disease because they obtained sera of the Russian Korean survivors who escaped to South Korea. I assume that the volunteers were recruited from the ranks of the Gulag, but it’s a conjecture.
The same Korean 1978 paper mentioned that during WWII, Japanese researchers also experimented with transmission to human subjects. I assume that it was happening in the infamous Unit 731 but I haven’t read the Japanese reference. In those days, a lot of epidemiology research was tied to bioweaponry exploration programs. But quite clearly, Hantaan was absolutely unsuitable for military applications…
And there it is at the bottom of p. 1023 and most of p. 1024. “There is no good etymology.”
I like his final snappy dismissal: “This disproves the whole account.” Mic drop.
As I mentioned in my recent comment on gayageum, the character 韓 probably was originally chosen to record the same self-appellation from the southern part of the Korean Peninsula that otherwise gave its name to 伽羅 *kara and later 伽倻 *kaya, the namesake for the zither gayageum. While 韓 is pronounced 한 han in Modern Korean, it is reconstructed as *[ɡ]ˤar in Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart).
Gaya (가야 in Modern Korean) was the name used by several ancient minor polities that existed in the southern Korean Peninsula until the early sixth century CE. It is usually written as 伽倻 today in Chinese characters, but this only dates from the latter part of the Goryeo period (918–1392), 倻 being a character invented in Korea specifically to record this name. Earlier, it was written as 加耶 (also 가야 gaya in Modern Korean). Still earlier there was a proliferation of forms such as 加羅, 伽羅, 迦羅, 柯羅, all pronounced 가라 gara in Modern Korean, as well as 駕洛 가락 garak, 加良 가량 garyang, 狗邪 구야 guya, and 賀羅 하라 hara. So it is supposed that the name recorded was something like *kara.
韓 dates from an even earlier period than the Gaya. Around the first century BCE, three tribes or tribal confederacies known as 馬韓 마한 mahan, 辰韓 진한 jinhan, and 弁韓 변한 byeonhan emerged in the central and southern parts of the Korean Peninsula, collectively known as 三韓 삼한 samhan or the Three Hans. As the Gaya polities are roughly the territorial successors of the Byeonhan, it stands to reason that Han is an earlier form of the name that became Gaya (*kara).
As I also mentioned in the earlier comment, the name Korea in English and other European languages comes from 句麗 or 高麗 *kɔrɛ which was a self-appellation used in the northern part of the Korean peninsula.
Meanwhile, 漢 in the names of the rivers 漢江 한강 han’gang (Han) and 漢灘江 한탄강 hantan’gang (Hantan) is usually thought to represent a native word meaning “big”. I’ve seen it asserted that older folks used the name 한여울 hanyeoul for the Hantan, where 여울 yeoul means a shallow, fast-flowing river. The character 灘 탄 tan can mean the same thing, so it is being used for its meaning in this case (although in Chinese I see the character used more often for beaches). The 1861 map Daedong yeojido (大東輿地圖 대동여지도) records the Hantan as 大灘 대탄 daetan with the character 大 meaning “big” which also leads credence to this etymology.
For the Hantan at least, it seems fairly certain that the name comes from a transcription of a native name into Chinese characters mixing phonetic matching in the first part and semantic matching in the second. I’m not as sure about the Han River, which started being referred to as 漢水 한수 hansu already around the fourth century CE (although I couldn’t find information on the exact source). It was called 阿利水 아리수 arisu in the Gwanggaeto Stele of 414 CE and 郁里河 욱리하 ungniha <uk-riha by the Korean kingdom of Baekje of the same period (although there is debate whether these names refer to today’s Han River). For what it’s worth, 漢 is reconstructed as *n̥ˤar-s in Old Chinese (Baxter-Sagart), 阿 and 利 are reconstructed as *qˤa[j] or *ʔˤa and *C.ri[t]-s respectively, and 郁 and 里 are reconstructed as *qʷək and *(mə.)rəʔ respectively. I can only speculate on the possible relationship if any between these names.
It’s difficult to find a satisfying etymology for 한 han in the sense of “big” in Korean (it is no longer productive, only surviving as the prefix in numerous words), but it has been suggested that it is simply the verb 하- ha- “to do” with the adnominal suffix -ㄴ -n. If that is correct, then it would be difficult to reconcile with this element being used in the earlier names for the Han River. But it seems plausible to me that later on the name Han River did in fact come to be understood as meaning “big” whether or not that was the true origin.
漢 in the names of the rivers 漢江 한강 han’gang (Han) and 漢灘江 한탄강 hantan’gang (Hantan) is usually thought to represent a native word meaning “big”
So they’re all Mississippis.
(The Kusaasi just call the White Volta Kɔlig “River”: no need to specify “big” when all the other local rivers are so very insignificant.)
On the parsing of 漢:
This character is used for the root that is used for Han (the dynasty), but it is sometimes erroneously translated as meaning “Han Dynasty.” That would be like saying that the English word brown means “a Labour prime minister.” As a proper noun, its usage has diverged from the original meaning of the root, which IIUC is usually understood to mean something like “manly” or “strong.” This causes a lot of confusion when people find it in words like Japanese 痴漢 (roughly “pervert, molester”), and assume that the Japanese word for pervert means “Chinese guy.”
The han element in Hangang is understood to mean big or wide; at least that’s what Koreans will tell you when you ask them. The thing is, this is compatible with both the theory that the character is used purely phonetically to transcribe a long lost native root, and the theory that it is based on the original Chinese meaning, which is only a short semantic distance from the concept of bigness.
“Or, it could be (as WAry suggests), from zoo- + -osis, with an -n- thrown in for no special reason other than needing a consonant.”
Wiktionary actually says:
“From zoo- + (itself from Ancient Greek ζῷον (zōîon, “animal”)) + Ancient Greek νόσος (nósos, “disease”) (compare also nosology); the surface analysis is almost, although not quite, zoo- + -osis; compare also anthroponosis.”
In other words, reanalysis at some stage of -nosos to -osis. The “n” isn’t a filler, but a relic of the original formation.
Jongseong Park: Thanks, I was hoping you’d weigh in on this; it’s satisfying to get all those details.
As for the Chinese translation, Google AI gives us the following.
When the international medical community adopted Hantavirus, different Chinese-speaking regions translated it based on two different linguistic approaches:
汉滩 (Hàn tān) — The Pure Geographic Translation:Mainland China and Taiwan medical researchers initially used 汉滩 because it was the direct, historical Chinese character name (漢灘) for the Korean river. It is a literal translation of the origin site.
汉坦 (Hàn tǎn) — The Mandarin Phonic Translation:Mainland China later standardized its medical terminology through the National Committee for Terms in Sciences and Technologies. They chose 汉坦 as a strict phonetic transliteration of the English word “Hanta.” The character 坦 (tǎn) was selected because its Mandarin pronunciation closely matches the English syllable “ta.”
汉他 (Hàn tā) — The Taiwanese Phonic Translation:Taiwan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare also chose a phonetic translation of the English “Hanta.” However, in Taiwanese Mandarin, the character 他 (tā) is the standard phonetic choice to represent the English syllable “ta”.
“reanalysis at some stage of -nosos to -osis” — which had apparently already happened in French and German: zoonose as if analogous to sclérose, nécrose, etc.; Zoonose as if analogous to Sklerose, Nekrose, etc. And once you have a noun ending in ‑osis, then the adjective is naturally with ‑otic, and likewise French zoonotique, German zoonotisch.
If zoonosis had been correctly formed from Greek, it would be… zoonosos, right? The plural would be zoonosoi (snooty) or zoonososes (anglicized), as with topos. The adjective would then be… zoonosic?
(Plural of topos: previously.)
Just phonotactically, “hanta” looks as plausibly Japanese as Korean, but wiktionary advises that the Japanese lexeme ハンター is a loanword from the English word “hunter.”
Just phonotactically, “hanta” looks as plausibly Japanese as Korean, but wiktionary advises that the Japanese lexeme ハンター is a loanword from the English word “hunter.”
As to “zoonosic,” if the noun is analogous to “topos” then wouldn’t the best adjective by analogy be “zoonopical”?
Topic has some history as an adjective in English (says the OED), even though it’s obsolete. Cosmic from cosmos is another parallel, so I’d say zoonosic would do fine.
Topos, cosmos, logos, mythos, nomos: relevent since they’re also from 2nd declension Greek nouns.
Chaos, ethos, xiphos, pathos, bathos, telos, kudos: irrelevant (if you’re going to be snooty) since they’re from 3rd declension Greek nouns.
Typical of Artificial Idiocy.
Indeed, it seems unlikely that matching English was the motivation. But switching from a direct translation of the river to a phonetic transcription makes sense if you’re not trying to unfairly associate a disease with a particular place (similar to how most English speakers stopped using “Wuhan Flu” for Covid).
Backing up a bit, if English did have a learned-coinage word “zoonosos” it would be possible to work out what declension the parallel unattested word in ancient Greek would have been, and how ancient Greek might have regularly derived a cromulent hypothetical adjective from that hypothetical noun. But English doesn’t actually have that word, so … (Turns out English does have, in a sufficiently jargonish register, an adjective “nosotropic,” which has apparently resisted the temptation to expand to “nosotropical.”)
I don’t think a theoretical less-snooty plural of zoonosos would have actually been *zoonososes; this is indeed regular, but this kind of ending would have been incredibly unstable. I think the OTL plural zoonoses seems like a likely simplification; alternately it could have been reinterpreted as a Latinate term in -osus, resulting in **zoonosi.
I don’t think I can rule out **zoonosa, but I’m not sure what kind of analogy would have resulted in it. Plausibly the word would just stay rare and technical enough for the snooty plural zoonosoi to be the only one actually used.
IIRC we discussed the plurals of cosmos on LH a few years ago. But maybe that was Language Log…
It was Language Log: Strictly correct plurals of flower names (cosmos is the name of a flower). And I’m sure you’re right that hypothetical zoonosos and its plural would be incredibly unstable. There are very few other words in English formed from νόσος as a suffix, and they’ve also gone to ‑osis: ochronosis; anthroponosis and dermatozoonosis, apparently modeled on zoonosis, not independently formed; dermatonosis, rare and condemned: “there can be no such word as dermatonosis”, use dermatosis instead, fools!
I would expect any word derived from Greek -ος to have a Latinate -us ending, with -i plural.
That’s the way to bet, but there are a few that never got into Latin (νόσος) and some that came through French where the ending fell off (e.g. spasm; the OED does record some use of spasmus as an English word, but it lost out).
Because Pres. Putin attracts so much attention, non-specialists tend not to know that the Russian Federation does nominally have a prime minister, who is presently M.V. Mishustin. This English translation of a speech he gave a few years ago on the Russian healthcare system contains the sentence “Clinical trials of tissue engineering products for the treatment of arthronosos and fractures are nearing completion, promising many patients the opportunity to receive such advanced treatment.” http://government.ru/en/news/50924/
I suspect there’s probably a more idiomatic medical-jargon word than the extremely rare-or-archaic “arthronosos” to translate whatever Russian word he used into English, but is there perhaps a Russian medical-jargon word that looks like it really ought to have “arthronosos” as its English analogue? Indeed, you can also find “arthronosis” in a 2015 text (published by Springer) titled _Liquid Crystals in Biotribology_ whose four co-authors all have names suggesting they might be L1 Russophones.
The corresponding sentence from the Russian version of the article has no blatantly jargony words:
“Завершаются клинические исследования продуктов тканевой инженерии для лечения болезней суставов и переломов. Такую терапию сможет получать очень широкий круг пациентов.”
AFAICT the part corresponding to “arthronosos” is болезней суставов “[of] joint diseases”. I’m not sure why it was translated that way. FWIW the Russian phrase is in plural form.
EDIT:
Google finds three results for “arthronososes”: two versions of this beautiful “English-Word Information” [sic] page and one Russian paper.
Google also finds three results for “arthronoses”: two different Russian papers and a Veterans Affairs file of all things.
There are zero results for “arthronosoi”, “arthronosi”, or “arthronosa”. My impression had been that Russian sources generally use “arthronosos” as both singular and plural.
I didn’t have enough time to edit this into the previous post, but I tried the possible Russian renderings “артронос”, “артроносы”, “артроноса”, “артроносос”, and “артронозос”, which had zero [non-typo] results, and “артроноз”, which did get one relevant-looking result, but on closer look it was almost certainly a mistake for “артроз” (i.e. arthrosis – the usual Russian term for osteoarthritis).
So, whatever it is, it’s almost certainly not a Russian word. It seems that there is/was some medical dictionary that for some reason used the obscure English word “arthronosos” as the translation of otherwise normal Russian terms meaning “joint disease”.
I made a basic mistake when I commented earlier about the etymology of the element 한- han- meaning “big”: “it has been suggested that it is simply the verb 하- ha- “to do” with the adnominal suffix -ㄴ -n.”
I based this on the Pyojun Gugeo Daesajeon (표준국어대사전, “Great Dictionary of Standard Korean”) giving the etymology of 한- han- as 하- ha- from 하다 hada as attested in the Yongbi eocheon ga (龍飛御天歌 용비어천가) from 1447. However, the Middle Korean form of the verb 하다 hada meaning “to do” as attested in the same work is ᄒᆞ다 hota (in Yale romanization), so this can’t be the same verb. Rather, it must be an obsolete adjective (or descriptive verb) meaning “to be big” as mentioned by Dmitry Pruss in the original post.
I left in this incorrect assumption in my earlier comment despite it looking wrong to me because I misinterpreted the dictionary, and now I’m feeling really embarrassed.
Don’t be embarrassed — it happens to all of us, and the only way to avoid it is to never utter anything but platitudes. One of the great benefits of running this blog for a couple of decades has been my getting thoroughly accustomed to making an ass of myself in just about every conceivable way, which I hereby dub The Human Condition™.
some medical dictionary that for some reason used the obscure English word “arthronosos” as the translation of otherwise normal Russian terms meaning “joint disease”
or perhaps a translator who was trying to work out a more generalized term based on english “arthritis” from some flavor of first principles? (or, i suppose, an LLM cued by the proximity of “arthronosos” to some other term or terms in its source material)
Well, why is there a -s- in νόσος? Inherited *-s- turned into *-h- and disappeared, so either we need some *-tj- or something, or it’s a loan…
A very attractive etymology of Greek νόσος as ‘binding’ was presented recently by Daniel Kölligan, ‘“Semantically unconvincing” Historical Semantics and Etymological Practice’ (2025), beginning on slide 32 here, with semantic parallels on slides 28–31 and a handy overview of previous proposals on page 36. (PIE root *Hnedʰ- : Vedic nah-, present náhyati ‘he binds, fastens’; see the reference in LIV that Kölligan cites here, p. 227, but Kümmel following Schumacher (2004) has subsequently associated Irish naiscid, -naisc ‘binds’ with Latin nōdus ‘knot’, Old Norse nót ‘large net as for fishing or sealing’, under a new root *neh₂/₃d-, I believe.)
On the semantic typology, cf. for example also the Andreas (577–81):
(Inspired by the verses, Luke 13:15–16, that Kölligan cites?)
I wonder if LH readers can think of other examples of ‘disease, illness’ = ‘binding’. Short comment because I must go to bed now.
Another interpretation of the text in Luke is that it is not so much the infirmity that bound the woman but Satan Himself, using the infirmity as a means. FWIW this pulls together on one webpage various reference sources on the Greek “bind” verb and its other NT occurrences. https://biblehub.com/greek/1210.htm
NB that in other Bible passages you can find “bind” in a “medical” context, but it’s not a metaphor for the disease or infirmity, it’s a “good” use, i.e. the idiom to bind up [someone’s] wounds. Like sutures, I suppose.
The only non-literal use of Kusaal lɔ “tie, bind” that I know of is the idiom lɔ nɔɔr, literally “bind the mouth”, which means “fast.” It seems to be a very widespread regionalism.
The Good Samaritan doesn’t lɔ the robbery-victim’s wounds in the Bible version: what he does is vilig them, “wrap them up.” Lɔ seems only to be used of tying things up or tying things together.* It is what Satan did to the unfortunate lady in Luke 13, but then it has to be, to make the setting-animals-loose metaphor work.
* Not knots, though, which rate their own verb, gbin “to knot.”
As far as I can tell, καταδέω in classical (as opposed to NT) Greek only means “tie down” etc, and doesn’t seem to be used for binding wounds à la Good Samaritan. But maybe this is Luke deploying specialised medical terminology.
“bind the mouth”, which means “fast.” It seems to be a very widespread regionalism.
Is ‘iftar’ often ‘opening the mouth’ or ‘untying the mouth’, then? (Robinson seems to give Hausa buɗe baki as a word for ‘iftar’.)
“Bind the mouth’ is all the way over in Swahili, too: -funga in kufunga ‘to tie, fasten, bind; to fast’; mfungo ‘fasting, a fast’ ( = saumu), etc. I wonder, is this an independent development in Swahili? I have not been able to find anything in hadith or any Arabic idiom or usage that immediately struck me as a likely source.
Fasten in the gloss to the Swahili above reminds me… The historical semantics of the Germanic family of English fast ‘abstain from food’ (see for example the explanation in the Wiktionary here) are usually taken to be slightly different (cf. Gothic fastan, translating variously τηρεῖν ‘keep (a commandment, a precept), hold fast to’, φυλάσσειν ‘keep, keep under guard, guard, observe’, φρουρεῖν ‘keep, guard’, νηστεύειν ‘fast, abstain from food’ (as at Matthew 6:16 aþþan biþe fastaiþ, ni wairþaiþ swaswe þai liutans gaurai ‘Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance’, etc.)).
Is ‘iftar’ often ‘opening the mouth’ or ‘untying the mouth’, then?
The majority of the Kusaasi are quite happy with their own traditions and have no particular interest in becoming either Muslim or Christian, so I don’t think there is a standard Kusaal locution for iftar.
However, the Mamprussi are more influenced by Islam, and Naden’s dictionary does indeed give the Mampruli for “break a fast” as n-lɔrigi noori “untie the mouth” (= Kusaal lɔdig nɔɔr. Lɔdig “untie” is the reversive derivative of lɔ “tie”; Volta-Congo languages do like their reversives. In Western Oti-Volta, the actual reversive suffix has disappeared, but there still are reversive derivatives. It’s all part of a fiendish plot to confuse foreign linguists.)
It seems to be a very widespread regionalism.
Heath, A Grammar of Koyraboro (Koroboro) Senni, gives Koyraboro Senni meː-haw and Zarma mé-haw ‘Ramadan’ (lit., ‘mouth-tie’) as well as Koyra Chiini hammeː ‘Ramadan’ ( < **haw-meː ‘tie-mouth’), with the elements reversed. I wonder if the two different formations say anything about whether such expressions originated as calques on terms outside Songhay? Are such expressions absent in Mande and Fula varieties? I couldn’t find anything in Hausa.
(I have a special interest in this because a good friend just began a job distributing zakat for building wells and buying livestock in various countries—Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, and Senegal so far—and the activity is concentrated around the two Eids.)
Interesting!
And Humburi Senni actually has mé-fér-méy “mouth-untying” for “iftar” specifically!
Perhaps “widespread regionalism” was displaying my Oti-Voltacentrism. (Though the Grũsi language Kasem has it too: vɔ ni “fast”, ni-vɔrɩ “fasting”: both individual components go back to proto-Central Gur.) I wonder if the Oti-Volta languages actually calqued this on a Songhay expression? “Circumcision” is another Islam-adjacent term where Oti-Volta languages have borrowed from Songhay.
Well-building in the area I know is an eminently worthwhile activity. Quite apart from the obvious benefits, the area I worked in in Ghana had virtually no trachoma: nothing to do with my ophthalmic skills, and everything to do with the fact that a charitable organisation had sunk deep wells in all the villages decades before. If people don’t have to spend hours a day* walking to fetch water, they wash their faces a lot more often …
* I have vivid memories of a village far to the south of us, where the geology was all wrong for well-sinking. The women all got up before dawn in the dry season (i.e. for half the year) to walk two hours there and two hours back to the nearest water source, carrying it all in as many containers as they could manage. Lots of trachoma thereabouts …
Mashed Radish follows up: Ebola is another virus named after a river. “Ebola” is a French mis-analysis of the name Legbala from the Ngbandi language. John Kelly cites a source saying that Legbala means “white waters”, but couldn’t find any confirmation of how the word was formed in Ngbandi. Maybe somebody here knows more.
Karl Johnson liked to name viruses after rivers. Supposedly, he felt naming them after towns was too stigmatizing. Besides ebola and hantavirus, he named the virus responsible for Bolivian hemorrhagic fever after the Machupo River. That river name is obviously indigenous, but a quick search turned up no information about its meaning.
The Nipah virus, too, sort of, after a place named Sungai Nipah, literally ‘river of nipa palm’, in Malay.
@ktschwartz:
Dunno any Ngbandi language, but in Sango (a Ngbandi-based creole), “water/river” is ngú and “white” is vurú (which precedes its noun), which doesn’t seem very hopeful.
There are lots of Ngbandi languages. Contrary to Greenbergian lumpery, “Ubangian” is not a thing, and Ngbandi is not related to Volta-Congo (unlike Gbaya, which is.) Have a Greenbergian Mass Comparison and see …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubangian_languages
(Cf Kusaal nyin “tooth”, nɔɔr “mouth”, tiig “tree”, di “eat”, and Moba lánm̂ “tongue”, all with clear proto-Bantu cognates: compare them with the “Gbaya” row and the “Nbandi” row.)
I knew somebody who was visiting a hospital in then-Zaire during the 1995 Ebola outbreak. She didn’t actually know about the outbreak at the time of her visit, but she said that in retrospect there had been rather a lot of covered bodies on gurneys being wheeled down the corridors …
The official death toll seems like a pretty major undercount.
νόσος […] gebundene
back to binding for a moment: there’s a fairly well-known yiddish folksong (and in this repertoire if there’s one, there are more), Fun Groys Dasad [out of great pain/anguish] that uses that image in the course of describing heartsickness (a mixture of love, regret, and hopelessness) as a debilitating illness. the relevent verse goes:
khapn, khapn tsurik kon ikh nit
vayl mayne hent zaynen farbunden
un efenen mayn biter harts
aroyszen voltn zikh di vundn
to catch, to catch and return* i cannot
because my hands are bound
and to open my bitter heart
would reveal my wounds
the hands here are pretty purely metaphorical, and present to enable the speaker’s anguish to be presented as a binding (and to allow a rhyme with “vundn” [wounds]. they contrast with both literal/physical hands in the preceding verse (which are underneath the speaker’s head as she lies down to sleep) and a series of hypothetical and imagined physical hands in succeding verses (the hands that could not write enough to explain the pain of the speaker’s life, even if there were enough ink and quills in the world; the hands of a prisoner who is chained as deservéd punishment, not gratuitously by divine will).
but “farbundn” can also mean “united” (as in “der ratn-farband” [the soviet union]). i wonder whether that’s related to this usage: the sufferer being united/bound up with what causes pain – here more emotional than physical; in that passage from the Andreas more definitively bodily.
.
* the sense is more like “i can’t undo anything”, but the phrasing is a bit oddly structured, and the sense is conveyed partly by carrying over “khapn” and “tsurik” from the last line of the verse before.
Nice song, thanks. (Original lyrics, transliterated and translated, YouTube.)
But what is this “דאַסאַד”? It seems to exist only in this song.
@brett
Re machupo, here is what I could find:
1. Arawak hydronyms
El morfema hidronímico tariana -pua ‘cl.tramo de río, camino’, reportado por
Aikhenvald (1994; 2003, 199), forma parte de los hidrónimos awadu-pua e iɾi-pua
listados en el Cuadro 3. El nombre de río awadu-pua constituye un doblete con
awadu-aɾi ‘río del pájaro awadú’
https://journals.iai.spk-berlin.de/index.php/indiana/article/download/2949/2401/6571
2. Mojeño trinitario vocabulary:
TRONCO=MACHUPU’I
https://mojeño.trinidad.gob.bo/todas-las-palabras
It seems to be possible that the ma is a prefix used in demonstrative adjectives, and the chupo part means ‘tronco’ or even ‘tramo de río, camino’ as above.
@hat
Dovid Katz has
dosade noun, plural in -s, gender f, annoyance (Ukrainian досада)
https://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/dictionary.cgi?word=%D7%93%D7%90%D7%A1%D7%90%D7%93
EDIT: link is not working for me, enter “dosade” in the search window to find.
Ah, that makes perfect sense, thanks!
usually when there’s a yiddish word that isn’t in a given dictionary, it’s a slavic loan (with different dictionaries drawing the line of what counts as a yiddish word differently).
Sure, it just seemed odd that a word used in the title of a well-known song seemed to have no existence elsewhere.
I wonder what happened with the vowel, i.e. why dasad and not dosad. Also, in the version here, the same singer pronounces it as dasod. Could these be these variable back-formations from a reduced vowel in the sung versions, where both syllables are accented?
(The New, Improved Google refuses to look only for דאסאד, even in quotes. It does give me plenty of Hebrew articles about Assad, De Sade, and asado.)
Desaad
Der Groys Desaad!
I wonder what happened with the vowel, i.e. why dasad and not dosad.
Looks like Russian or Belarusian akanye to me, Russian досада has the stress on the second syllable and is pronouncef [da’sada].