Sumana Roy’s LARB essay How Does the Writer Say Etcetera? is one of those pieces that could have benefited from merciless editing — the writer flies off in all sorts of only vaguely relevant directions — but that has some interesting things to say. It begins:
The first sign of my little nephew’s moving closer to adulthood wasn’t when he used a cuss word for the first time—he still hasn’t, I must hasten to add—but when he said “etcetera.” I think he was around six years old. Records of his height and weight were being maintained by his parents and pediatrician, but it was his growing into language—lisping, mispronouncing, and, most of all, his daily acquisition of words—that excited me. Suddenly, without any kind of preparation or announcement, he had used the word: etcetera, a word that could hold the entire world in it. It could mean only one thing—he had grown aware of the world, and he had grown up.
A few years later, preparing for a Bangla test, he was writing answers to a quiz that his mother had set up for him. It was an exercise from Bangla grammar—“shondhi bichhed”; he would have to break up a word to reveal the two words that had come together, poetically, sometimes by design, sometimes almost accidentally, to form it. It was fun, even though I still struggle to accept his growing at this pace, to see him breaking up words as he had once broken toy cars. One of the words in the test was “ityadi.” Tuku, as I call my nephew, wrote the answer quickly, without patience: “iti + adi.”
Ityadi—“iti” and “adi,” the end and the beginning, from the end to the beginning.
Etcetera—“et,” meaning “and,” and “cetera,” “the rest.” This has the sense of leftovers.
What does this difference in name for a similar concept—one having the sense of including everything, the other the sense of remainder—imply for those who live in these languages? How do the two concepts affect creative practice? When do we feel compelled to say “etcetera” or “ityadi” or even “blah blah,” not just literally or in a manner of speaking but in the way we experience and create the world?
Later (much later) we get:
I turn to my colleague Naresh Keerthi, a scholar of Sanskrit, to find out more. As he reminds me,
Sanskrit words such as -ādi, -ādya, -mukha, -pramukha -prabhṛti (beginning [with], first, foremost, most prominent), as the second member of a compound, give the sense of “etcetera.” For example, rādhādyāḥ gopyaḥ (Gopis beginning with Radha = Gopis such as Radha), or agastyapramukhā(ḥ) munayaḥ (Sages with Agastya being the foremost = Sages such as Agastya). The syntax of these etcetera terms is usually of the pattern “X-(etcetera term) A” where A is the common noun (sage, cowgirl) and X is the specific example (Agastya, Radha).
What I take from this is that these suffixes that attach themselves to certain words amplify their sense of accommodation. “Adi,” meaning “from the beginning”—the suffix in ityādi that “is a sandhi of the quotative particle iti and the word ādi”—when it attaches itself to “iti,” meaning end, becomes the most capacious space imaginable. It can hold anything. “Write that He is without end,” says Guru Nanak. Why is God never referred to as “etcetera” then?
What does this system of thought—of -adi, -adya, -mukha, -pramukha, -prabhrti—do to those who live in the languages where etceterization is made possible through the attachment of these suffixes? How different is this from, say, “blah blah”? And how does this affect our creative practice?
Naresh also tells me about the Dravidian terms for etcetera:
Tamil—mutaliyāṉa, mutalāṉa; Kannada—muntāda, modalāda; ityādi = ivē muntāduvu; Telugu—modalaina. They all seem to be calques/parallels of the Sanskrit expressions. They all translate to “beginning with.” Words such as Mutal and muṉ mean front, fore, lead. The Hindi word for etcetera is of Persian origin: va gairah, which derives from “gair,” meaning “other.”
That a sense of othering, of marking difference, is coded in the intuitive code of etcetera rises to the surface when one becomes aware of this etymological detail. Other words for etcetera in Hindi include “amuka”—in common with Bangla—which would translate into “such and such a person.”
In both these Hindi words, there is a distinction between centrality and background created by etceterization. In many Indian languages, such as Bangla, the onomatopoeic urge turns the second sound into an etcetera: in “natak tatak,” “natak” means “drama” but “tatak” means nothing; it is just a rhyming sound that holds in it the inexpressible etcetera.
On “natak tatak”-type reduplication, see the LH posts on a similar phenomenon in Turkish from 2017 and earlier this year.
Re: “This has the sense of leftovers.” One could, I suppose, respond “[citation needed].” Or perhaps “sez you” or “speak for yourself, lady.” One starts with the problem that the overwhelming majority of English users of “et cetera” have no Latin, and indeed spelling it joined up as “etcetera” is sort of a big flashing neon sign tending to confirm that one has no Latin. Suppose one asks someone with no Latin to gloss “et cetera” with individually comprehensible English words. One might get, inter alia, “and the rest” or “and so on” or “and everything else.” All of these could be thumbsuckingly thought to have subtly different implications from each other, just as joined up “etcetera” is claimed to have, if one goes down the Etymological-Fallacy rabbithole, different implications from “ityadi.” But “et cetera” means all of those paraphrases and/or none of them. The one closest to the Latin has no pride of place.
Relatedly, the smaller number of Anglophones who recognize and use the phrase “ceteris paribus” (employing the same Latin adjective) may in most cases likewise not actually have Latin. And the “ceteris paribus” concept is often expressed in less opaque morphemes as “all things being equal” rather than the more pedantically-correct “the other things being equal.” You can also split the difference with “all else being equal.” The first of the three options has that expansive or inclusive vibe that “ityadi” is claimed (at least by etymology) to have, doesn’t it?
the more pedantically-correct “the other things being equal.” You can also split the difference with “all else being equal.”
You may be overthinking this, senator. They both boil down to “some things are more equal than others”. This is the obverse of “some things are more different than others”.
In Kusaal it would just be nɛ linɛ kpɛlim “and what remains”, just like καὶ τὰ λοιπά in Greek.
(Like Hausa, Kusaal uses the same pronominals for “a certain” and “another”, so nɛ bʋnsieba could equally well mean “and other things” or “and certain things”; not really what is generally meant by “etc.”)
Welsh has ac ati “and so on”, where ati is an impersonal form of the preposition at “to, toward” (because Welsh prepositions can do that, why not.)
Ruminations sparked off by JWB’s remarks:
It occurs to me that English “etc” (and presumably its equivalents in other SAE languages) is actually ambiguous about whether the cetera are more of the same kind of thing or something significantly different.
My Sprachgefühl for Kusaal is nonexistent, but I think that you would probably have to express these differently. The “rest/remainder” construction works for the former case, but not the latter, where you really would need to say something like nɛ bʋnsieba “and some (other) things” rather than nɛ linɛ kpɛlim “and what remains.”
I’ve always thought that Greek καὶ τὰ λοιπά means just the same as Latin et cetera. I think Modern Greek “κτλ” does mean the same as English “etc” (though I wouldn’t swear to it), but the Classical Greek perhaps actually doesn’t mean quite the same as the Latin?
I would probably read “etc” as “and so forth”, and my impression is that English speakers do usually mean und so weiter, ac ati by it. On yet further reflection, is the issue actually that Latin et cetera does not in fact mean “and so forth”?
(This would of course be in accordance with Eddyshaw’s Law: “no English word transparently derived from Latin means the same as the the Latin original.”)
[All this is basically what JWB said, only more prolix. I have the honour of my people to uphold.]
If “etc.” is feared to be unclear, then perhaps prefer English expressions “and the rest”, “and the like”, “among others”, “and so on”, “or whatever”, etc.
So how do you say “etc” in Irish?
Aux armes et caetera
While Hindi va gairah is entirely Arabic – “and other than it” – the conventional modern Arabic equivalent of etc. is in fact ilā ākhirih “up to its end”. Which differs philosophically from the other expressions discussed in that it explicitly entails a finite list.
@de
Agus / is araile, usually abbrevated to srl.
Normal Pooh : etc. : srl. :: Tuxedo Pooh : &c. : ⁊rl.
The Faclair Beag says that you can write msaa for ‘mar sin air adhairt’, but I’m not sure how common it is. mollymooly reminds me that I have seen 7c (with the abbreviation for agus), which is a nice bit of language mixing.
Don’t trust my instincts, but I think it might be more common to write ‘agus rudan eile’ than it would be to write ‘and other things’ in English
In German, usw. and etc. are interchangeable except for register.
What JeninEd calls “the abbreviation for agus” is what wikipedia calls “the Tironian et (⁊, equivalent to &).” If the glyph had long meant “et” in (some varieties of) written Latin before it was borrowed by Goidelic, who’s to say it doesn’t still mean (loan-word) “et” in 7c?
,@jwb
I don’t think Irish or Gaelic ever loaned et. The word was spoken long form as agus or abbreviated as is, even when the Latin abbreviaton was used..
@PP, so if you saw “7c” in a text, how would you read it aloud? Although maybe that’s just a Scottish thing?
Alternatively, one can think of the “Tironian et” as just like the ampersand, which regardless of etymology-equivalent isn’t an “abbreviation” for any specific word but represents different words in different languages. An ideogram, of sorts …
@jwb
That is whatvi meant. Although someone steeped n Latin might have read it as “et ceteta”.
Hungarian stb. abbreviates s a többi ‘and the others’, pronounced as one word [ˈʃɒtøbːi]. s is a short version of és ‘and’.
Another alternative?
And the whole megillah
“ The whole megillah means the entirety of something, especially something that is an entanglement of intricate arrangements or a long, complicated story. The whole megillah is an American idiom taken from Yiddish. In Hebrew, the Megillah is one of five books read on special Jewish feast days. The Book of Esther, read on Purim, is especially long and complicated. A tedious and complicated story came to be called the gantse Megillah in Yiddish, which translates as the whole Megillah. The term migrated into mainstream American English in the 1950s, probably through Jewish performers in nightclubs, on radio and on television. The idiom the whole megillah was tremendously popularized by its use on the television show Laugh-In on American television in 1971. When referring to the scriptures, Megillah is capitalized. When used in the idiom the whole megillah, the lowercase m is used.”
source: https://grammarist.com/idiom/the-whole-megillah/
The irony is of course that the Five Megillot are indeed the five very shortest books of the Tanakh (or “Hebrew Old Testament” or what have you), at least if you follow the traditional Jewish custom of lumping all twelve so-called “Minor Prophets” into a single Book of the Twelve. But it is not customary to read any of the longer books straight through in a single sitting (at least not aloud and in public), which is what makes e.g. Esther* seem really long in that context.
Absent context (including its spelling) “megillah” when heard doesn’t sound too markedly Semitic and indeed I think as a boy I became aware of “the whole megillah” as a synonym for e.g. “the whole enchilada” and may have assumed a megilla was another Mexican food item of which I had not been previously aware. Although it was mildly puzzling that it didn’t quite rhyme with “tortilla.”
*The Masoretic Hebrew version of Esther, which is (by comparison to the LXX Greek version) the short one.
An old, incomplete, attempt, many updated, meaning backdated:
1799 the whole kit of Irish patriots
1833 the whool boodle [OED]
1838 the whole jing-bang
1842 the whole kit and kin [GB-UK]
a1848 the whole caboodle [OED]
1849 the whole kit and boodle [LC]
1859 the whole boodle [LC]
1870 whole shebang [MQ]
1882 whole ball of wax [MQ]
1888 whole shooting match [US]
1898 the whole kaboodle [LC]
1954 the whole megillah [GN?]
1955 the whole rigmarole [OED. Times UK]
1956 the whole nine-yards
1957 the whole enchilada
****
w (nother) kettle of fish
not “akin” to seeking original Mac in hey/say Mac
whole hog
whole mess
whole bunch, deal
whole jingbang/jimbang
whole schmeer/shmeer/shmear….
In German, usw. and etc. are interchangeable except for register.
Which is the formal one (if that is the right distinction)?
In Modern Hebrew, וְכוּלֵי / וְכֻלֵּי vekhuléy, from Aramaic וְכֻלֵּיהּ ‘and all of it’ (technically, ‘it’ is 3.sg.masc.)
In English, everyone knows it’s “exetera”, “ect.” for short.
If I may focus on phonology -In French the usual realization of the expression is /ɛtseteʀa/, but a substantial minority pronounces the word with a “Church Latin” pronunciation: /ɛt͡ʃeteʀa/.
I have never heard this in English (In this position /ts/ and /ks/ seem to be the only two variants). I am curious: 1-Does a Church Latin-influenced pronunciation (i.e. with /t͡ʃ/) exist (or did it exist once?) anywhere in the English-speaking world, and 2-Does this kind of variation in pronunciation exist in other languages?
“the whole nine-yards” has been antedated to 1907
“excetera” is also common in France; my impression is that it is not condemned quite as harshly as in the anglosphere, though TLF notes “L’Ac. fr. met en garde, dans un communiqué du 2 oct. 1969, contre une prononc. «excetera».” Perhaps relatedly, “expresso” is a standard variant of “espresso”. Perhaps relatedly, much French coffee requires addition of Monin syrup to be potable.
Does a Church Latin-influenced pronunciation (i.e. with /t͡ʃ/) exist (or did it exist once?) anywhere in the English-speaking world
If so, I’m not aware of it.
The string “whole nine yards” is attested from 1855.
My post was about similar expressions, in case anyone was interested.
Which is the formal one (if that is the right distinction)?
Both are formal in the sense that you can use them in formal texts, speeches, etc.; using etc. makes you sound somewhat academic / classically educated / trying to sound refined / sometimes indicates pomposity.
The OED doesn’t list the ek- pronunciation et all. Bah.
It does give examples of etc. used as a euphemism: “A pair of new boots & Buckskin &c’s in which the soldier is to be equipt.” — “Hush! hush! for up I go, To put a light Silk pair of tight Etcæteras on below.” — “‘All the things you silly geese have muddled up till you don’t know your etc. from an etc.’ A very coarse comparison, such as never before .. had I used to a woman.” — “I am etcetera’d if I stand it.”
I’m not aware of evidence that Church Latin was ever a thing in German-speaking places. ce ci cae coe cy get [t͡s], and g never changes.
It’s widespread enough that some people pick it up when they learn English. Just today I watched an Estonian use it in an English YouTube video – and he’s fluent in Russian, so it’s not like [t͡s] is too much for him personally.
In its list of translations of etc., the Wiktionary says Turkish vesaire is ‘dated’, but this label just strikes me as wrong—and the person beside me, whose job it is to write reports for the Turkish Ministry of the Interior on the distribution of foreign aid to Syrian refugees and earthquake victims by the Turkish Red Crescent in eastern Turkey, agrees with me. Also interesting is Turkish falan, whose use can approach etc.
It’s widespread enough that some people pick it up when they learn English.
I wonder what other languages have homegrown colloquial pronunciations with /k/, like French and English.
Georges’ Handwörterbuch has:
So apparently Cicero used (et) cetera for “and so forth”, while Quintilian has ceteraque (his) similia.
I thought I remembered Akkadian kīam(ma) ‘etc.’, ‘and so forth’, from Boğazköy Akkadian as well as Akkadograms in Hittite, and indeed Black et al. do list this meaning (see definition 1 here), but I couldn’t locate it in the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary just now, nor any use in a text. This just shows the need for the new Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary with electronic search capabilities—although the use of etc. as an abbreviation within definitions might make searching for this particular Akkadian lexical item difficult.
@DM: Not [t͡s], but [ts]. There’s a phonological boundary there, like “it seems” and unlike “Etsy”.
Is there no such boundary in “Etsy”? Your average microphone-incompatible Briton does the whole unreleased-and-glottalized thing even to the [t] within /t͡ʃ/.
Maybe “Etsy” is borderline. “Blintzes”, then.
Urban Dictionary has an et chetera entry, oddly ascribed to a Maltian accent.
In German, etc. is quite often read out as “e-te-ce” instead of “et cetera”. This normally isn’t done with usw., except jokingly, so it may have something to do with people knowing the abbreviation, but not the Latin it stands for. Is that a thing with English speakers, too?
“Itsy bitsy” as in spider? or bikini?
AntC
(I think my pronunciation of “etcetera” would not be a reliable data point. On account of the Latin, you know. I’ve even used “ceteris paribus” in anger.)
Huh. I thought that was an idiosyncrasy of one person (here in Berlin) who uses that as a filler.
(It reminds me of the colleague who, in presentations in her native English, likes to end sentences in “as well, too!”.)
Spanish, for one
FWIW, etc. (spelled out in speech), etcetera, (“French” c), osv. (only in writing), og aå videre (spoken, and written when emphasizing tedium. Both of the latter can be doubled or tripled). In Swedish, osf = och så framdeles which some claim is solecistic for framledes.
I’ve never heard anybody put a /k/ in there, or an /sj/ for that matter. That is not to say it can’t happen, but /ts/ is core phonotactics in Danish and does not need to be avoided. Fortis /t/ is sibilized already instead of being aspirated like /p/ and /k/. I’ll let the Swedes answer for themselves on this account, somehow it doesn’t sound as strange if I use a Swedish mouth shape.
a light Silk pair of tight Etcæteras on below
compare john la touche & earl robinson, in Ballad for Americans: “all of them i / am the etceteras / and the and-so-forths / that do the work.”
Perhaps relatedly, “expresso” is a standard variant of “espresso”. Perhaps relatedly, much French coffee requires addition of Monin syrup to be potable.
Monin sirup popcorn
Has anybody spelled it etetera or ettetera…? (Probably not, because the word is usually abbreviated in the first place, but I should ask.)
I just asked myself if the abovementioned name “Etsy” derived from “et c.” Then I asked Wikipedia, which quotes the founder in Readers Digest:
@ulr:
Thanks!
I wonder if it’s possible that Cicero was in fact calquing the Greek καὶ τὰ λοιπά when he said et cetera? He actually recommends calquing from Greek (as opposed to borrowing) elsewhere as a strategy for getting round the patrii sermonis egestas, after all.
And on reflection I think this very discussion is tending to show that what seems like a perfectly natural and simple expression in English “etc” is actually a rather odd concept, with no single straightforward equivalent in languages that haven’t borrowed it (or calqued it) from Latin. Maybe it didn’t start with Latin, either …
Ityadi does not, in fact, mean “from the end to the beginning” etymologically at all:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%87%E0%A4%A4%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%AF%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A6%E0%A4%BF#Sanskrit
It’s rather “thus-beginning” (with a pleasant Babylon 5 vibe.)
No “ends” were harmed in the creation of this expression.
The second element is not a “suffix”; it’s a noun. The journo is showing the customary journalistic ignorance of linguistics, though (for a change) ignorance of Sanskrit rather than English grammar.
The whole thing is a Sanskrit compound adjective, just like the well-known epithet of the Buddha
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%A5%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%A4#Sanskrit
The subsequent business about “othering” is just bollocks (to use a technical linguistic term.) You could say exactly the same thing about the “cetera” part of “et cetera”, with just as much (or as little) justification. Cicero (thanks, ulr) knew better …
@DM: Not to my knowledge. /ts/ is a valid combinations of phonemes, as in ætse, but does not occur syllable-initially, and a form like †etetera would seem likelier if it was resyllabified e.tse.te.ra. Also for some reason it feels like more like aspiration in words like etage than in words like tog. (Slightly less fortis? I don’t have Praat set up so I’m basically talking through my hat).
__________________
(*) Sibilization of /t/ is not new; it has been the target of peevers for a few generations, with mocking spellings like †Tsivoli in comedic fiction. It may even have been stronger at one point.
(**) Sibilantification?
@Lars Mathiesen: Can you think of any nice Danish minimal pairs or near minimal pairs illustrating the contrast between t [tˢʰ] (~[d̥ˢʰ], as I think you suggest) and ts [ts]? Also, is German z perceived as t or ts? (For those speakers for whom t is fairly affricated, at least.)
Tuku, as I call my nephew, wrote the answer quickly, without patience: “iti + adi.”
Ityadi—“iti” and “adi,” the end and the beginning, from the end to the beginning.
Ityadi does not, in fact, mean “from the end to the beginning”
Roy’s analysis of the Sanskrit compound is of course not accurate, but I imagine Roy and her nephew were influenced by the meaning of ইতি iti ‘end’ in Bengali. Note also اتي iti even in Fallon’s 1879 Hindustani dictionary here. And note Childers, A Dictionary of the Pali Language, p. 162 here: ‘Iti is generally placed at the end of a book or of a chapter or section, to introduce the title’. All this continues the general use in Sanskrit, where iti invariably follows and marks the end of quoted material or a train of thought. As Monier-Williams puts it in his dictionary s.v. इति iti: ‘In quotations of every kind इति means that the preceding words are the very words which some person has or might have spoken, and placed thus at the end of a speech it serves the purpose of inverted commas.’
In the other direction, Danish to “2” absolutely sounds like it begins with a German z.
@DM, I’m not surprised. There is no [d̥ˢ] or [d̥ʰ], the aspiration is the main phonetic differentiator between lenis and fortis and the difference is neutralized in all the expected positions for SAE. Lots of minimal pairs in Anlaut, though. (For lenis/fortis; finding a good one for /ts/ vs [tˢ] is harder because the former cannot stand in Anlut and there are very few morpheme-internal occurrences, and when searching they drown in compounds. Linking s interferes spectacularly as well. And even when two written forms look like they should work, syllabilification knocks it down in speech. [skråtag has the right stress {and fortis /t/} to contrast with something like skrotsag which is plausible but probably not attested, but the /t/ in the latter closes the first syllable so I wouldn’t count it as a pair).
I just saw exct. in a YouTube comment. Given where X and C are on the keyboard, this could be a typo for ect., but…