I recently looked up the word ipecac (an emetic), which turns out to be short for ipecacuanha, and found that although the OED’s ancient (published 1900) entry gives this etymology:
< Portuguese ipecacuanha /ipekaˈkwanja/ , < Tupi-Guarani ipe-kaa-guéne.
Notes
According to Cavalcanti, cited by Skeat Trans. Philol. Soc. 1885, 91, the meaning of ipe-kaa-guene is ‘low or creeping plant causing vomit’. The word is said to be a descriptive appellation applied to several medicinal plants, the proper name of the Cephaëlis, which produces the ipecacuanha of commerce, being poaya.
…the currently accepted one is much more interesting; Wiktionary:
From Brazilian Portuguese ipecacuanha, from Old Tupi ypekakûãîa, from ypeka (“duck”) + akûãîa (“penis”).
Also, my wife and I watched Sentimental Value last night; it’s a terrific movie, and all the acting is good, but Renate Reinsve is spectacularly good and should get all the prizes. My question, of course, is about her surname; this site says “The name is derived from the Old Norse elements reinn, meaning reindeer, and sve, which can be associated with to be or to dwell,” but there doesn’t appear to be an Old Norse sve, and I’m wondering if anybody has any better information.
How about vé instead? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/v%C3%A9#Old_Norse
It appears to come from the reconstructed proto-Germanic wīhą = sanctuary or sacred place and also yields Óðinsvé which becomes Odense in modern Danish.
Thanks a lot, Hat. Thanks to you and the internet I know more than I did yesterday about the evolution of duck anti-rape anatomy, and saw the cheerful title of a video, “Duck with Prolapsed, Gangrenous Penis Gets a Trim,” which I did not watch.
Anyway, the source of that etymology is Navarro’s excellent Dicionário tupi antigo: língua indígena clássica do Brasil, which also quotes Padre João Daniel’s 1757 Tesouro descoberto no rio Amazonas: “É ũa raiz delgada, cheia de nós, e do feitio do genital dos patos, e daqui vem o chamarem-lhe os naturaes pecacuenha, que quer dizer na sua língua genital do pato.”
How about vé instead?
It would make sense, but then where does the -s- come from? As far as I know, Norse doesn’t have an s-connector like German.
Skeat’s quote is here, as part of an article, “Words of Brazilian Origin”, which would be handy if it were more reliable. He quotes Cavalcanti’s 1883 The Brasilian language and its agglutination, which even if you don’t know anything about the language, looks handwavy and suspect.
I may be busy these days, but I still recognize a question for me when I hear it.
Reinsve is transparently a Norwegian farm name. Unfortunately, it’s not in Rygh and it’s not searchable as a toponym at Norgeskart.no. There could be several explanations for that. The one I prefer is that it’s a “delingsnavn”, a name coined when a larger entity was split up. In this case it would seem to have seized to exist after the family adopted the farmname as a surname in the late 19th/early 20th century.
The head of the compound would be the overarching farmname, which could be either Ve “sanctuary” or Sve “farm established by slash-and-burn”. I’ve not seen the latter in indefinite form, so I’ll go for Ve. There are a handful of those across the country, but since I know she was born and raised near Drammen in Eastern Norway, the most likely is probably Ve in Ringerike, now completely built over by houses.
The modifier rein could be either 1. ON hreinn m. “reindeer” (but likely used as a male name), or 2 ON rein f. “edge of a field, demarcation line”. With Sve, the modifier might perhaps even be ON hrein adj.f. “clean”, but I’ve never seen that used in a farmname.
Edit: Modern Scandinavian certainly has a connecting -s, a descendant of the ON m.sing. genitive -s.
@Y: Your new knowledge may give you a more accurate picture of feathered glory.
I may be busy these days, but I still recognize a question for me when I hear it.
It certainly was for you, and I’m glad you responded to the call.
Modern Scandinavian certainly has a connecting -s, a descendant of the ON m.sing. genitive -s.
Ah, I had assumed that it would only occur if there was a genitive -s in the picture. I have learned many things today!
Well. I think that’s a matter of definition. In this case it’s ether “the Ve of (belonging to) Rein” or “the Ve of (by) the borderline or edge”. Is the latter a genitive or a connector?
Edit: Note also delingsnavn “name formed by division” in my previous comment.
It all is clear to me now!