I just ran across the marvelous phrase “kenspeckle bop tunes,” and turned to the Concise Oxford
kenspeckle /’kɛnˌspɛk(ə)l/ adj. Scottish conspicuous; easily recognizable
—ORIGIN C16: of Scand. origin, prob. based on ON kenna ‘know, perceive’ and spak-, spek- ‘wise or wisdom’
Now, Old Norse spakr ‘wise’ is apparently from the PIE root *spek- ‘observe,’ which is the source of Latin specere ‘to look at’ and speciēs ‘a seeing, sight, form,’ Greek skeptesthai ‘to examine, consider’ and skopos ‘one who watches; object of attention, goal,’ and a great many other words — scroll down to spek- at the American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix for all the traces it has left in English. And if you scroll to gnō- ‘to know’ you’ll see the even larger number of traces left by that highly productive root, including ken. A nice, unexpected little Indo-European package!
All straight from Pokorny. :-/
From *spek- to skep-? Random metathesis is allowed now? When the Caucasologists do it, people howl…
I know, I know. But it’s such a beautiful vision…
It’s not like methatesis never happens: consider Skt. jihva ‘tongue’ > Pali jivha, or Skt. chakra > Hindi charka ‘spinning wheel’, or L parabola (< Gk) > Sp palabra, OE þrid > ModE third, or for that matter ModE iron > /aɪə(r)n/.
I know it does; I thought IEists were very wary of postulating it in irregular cases that are less well documented than your examples. (þrid, brid > third, bird is regular, isn’t it?)
There are only three native words ending with -ird, and as it happens the thrid one is a counterexample: gird < OE gyrdan < PGmc gurdjan, a causative < PIE *ghr-dh-, suffixed zero grade of *gher- ‘grasp’; insert laryngeals. (There is also dirt < drit, but that happened in ME times and can’t be related.) It’s not much of a rule that explains two out of exactly three examples.
That’s weird.
…No; a counterexample would be a -rid- word that had stayed -rid instead of becoming -ird-.
Of course, rid itself comes to mind.
Probably none. 🙂 I’ve begun to read the Google preview of “The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic“, though, so maybe I’ll soon litter the landscape in subscript numbers.
Indeed, rid is the only native -rid word remaining. So again, the supposed regularity explains two out of the three examples.
@Y I don’t think weird is a counterexample either.
I was just being a nird.
The Penguin Guide to Jazz on a 1989 bebop album by pianist Paul Bley, quoted in Wikipedia.
Includes:
“My Little Suede Shoes” (Parker)
“Ornithology” (Parker)
“A Night in Tunisia” (Dizzy Gillespie)
Kenspeckle enough.
Wouldn’t the presumed rule extend to words like ‘curl’, ‘dirt’ and ‘burst’, maybe even ‘spurt’? ‘Rid’ is different since the ‘r’ isn’t part of a cluster.
‘Kenspeckle’ sounds to me like a folk etymology of ‘conspicuous’ — quite possibly jocular.
Trond, the Dictionary of the Scots Language says “prob. of Scand. orig. Cf. Norw. dial. kjennespak, Swed. känspak, quick at recognising.” So there you are.
I wasn’t spak enough to kjenne a word I’ve never heard. Of course, these days spak means “feeble”.
Where I grew up in Devon we have “gert” for “great”, “shret” for “shirt”, “wert” for “writ”, “thred” for “third”…almost to the point where if you have a one syllable word with an ‘r’ as part of a consonant cluster at either end, you can happily move the ‘r’ to be part of a cluster at the other end without too much trouble (sometimes leading to non-Devonians falling for false compliments like “he’s the biggest part of this team”…also amusement at the phrase “frat boys”).
Oh. That’s some nice regularity. 🙂
känspak — tsk, tsk, DSL, it’s kännspak. It’s in Hellström s.v. känna, and he agrees on the spak part being from *spek-. For spak, Wikt is doing the ‘refer to Old Swedish spaker and then don’t list it’ trick — but it’s not a redlink because the page exists (it has a single Norwegian Bokmål inflected form on it). I call that cheating.
For what it’s worth, I was also guessing at a derivation from conspicuous. Better match than a lot of things you see, and the L is not in the Norse either, so it’s a good thing the dictionary isn’t built on our guesswork.
(Both Danish (spag) and Swedish has a sense development from ‘clever’ to ‘meek’).
TIL that the prehistoric hero Uffe hin Spage (in Denmark known from Grundtvig’s translation of Saxo Grammaticus’ Gesta Danorum, but also mentioned in Widsith) was something like Uffo mansuetus in the original Latin. So more like ‘reticent’ than ‘weak’. (The translation is from the first half of the 19th, but archaizing).
(He’s known but only in name, and I always assumed the near-modern meaning of spag as conflict-avoiding).
Nerd moment: Algol 68 has four classes of intrinsic type conversion: strong, firm, weak, and meek.
This here says there are
– three coercion criteria
– five “allowed coercions”: soft, weak, meek, firm, strong
– six “possible coercions”: deproceduring, dereferencing, uniting, widening, rowing, voiding
What a farrago of weirdness. No wonder 68 never got off the ground.
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A draft report was finally published in February 1968. This was met by “shock, horror and dissent”,[22] mostly due to the hundreds of pages of unreadable grammar and odd terminology. Charles H. Lindsey attempted to figure out what “language was hidden inside of it”,[26] a process that took six man-weeks of effort. The resulting paper, “ALGOL 68 with fewer tears”,[27] was widely circulated. At a wider information processing meeting in Zürich in May 1968, attendees complained that the language was being forced upon them and that IFIP was “the true villain of this unreasonable situation” as the meetings were mostly closed and there was no formal feedback mechanism. Wirth and Peter Naur formally resigned their authorship positions in WG2.1 at that time.[26]
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I now see Ritchie as a hero for leaving behind him the obfuscatory peacock strutting of Algol 68.
Yeah, soft too, and I swapped meek and weak. Too lazy to look it up, and I haven’t looked at it for 20 years or so. The syntax machinery in the Revised Report takes a special nerdview to love. As I remember, it took me a couple of weeks to even understand how it was even supposed to produce strings. A thing of wonder, and the people who protested were just weak of mind. (I’m not sure the language was really needed at the time, but it would be trivial to write a parser that interprets the specification verbatim and produces a syntax tree for an interpreter).
the people who protested were just weak of mind.
That would be a sixth type: “refuse to be coerced”.
The 60s sure did spawn much more craziness than I had been aware of.
Algol 60 was intended as a way to unambiguously specify algorithms in journal articles and so on, and there was never a standard way of doing input and output. You just declared a data structure and described what data it should hold to represent your graph or whatever.
Of course people immediately went off and made compilers for it.