Ian Duhig posted on Facebook:
Gabriel Moreno asked for the text of my poem for Elio Cruz, poet, artist and playwright from Gib who first got me writing poetry. He often wrote in Llanito, the language of the working class there now in danger of dying out — the title [“The Register”] refers to social register of Llanito, presumably what Bernstein would call a ‘restricted code’ of society’s poorer members although Llanito is linguistically very rich.
I was unfamiliar with Llanito; Wikipedia says:
Llanito or Yanito (Spanish pronunciation: [ɟʝaˈnito]) is a form of Andalusian Spanish heavily laced with words from English and other languages, such as Ligurian; it is spoken in the British overseas territory of Gibraltar. It is commonly marked by a great deal of code switching between Andalusian Spanish and British English and by the use of Anglicisms and loanwords from other Mediterranean languages and dialects.
The English language is becoming increasingly dominant in Gibraltar, with the younger generation speaking little or no Llanito despite learning Spanish in school. It has been described as “Gibraltar’s dying mother-tongue”. Llanito is a Spanish word meaning “little plain”. Gibraltarians also call themselves Llanitos.
Etymology
The etymology of the term Llanito is uncertain, and there are a number of theories about its origin. In Spanish, llanito means “little flatland” and one interpretation is that it refers to the “people of the flatlands”. It is thought that the inhabitants of La Línea with important social and economic ties with Gibraltar, were actually the first to be referred to as Llanitos since La Línea lies in the plain and marsh land surrounding The Rock.
Another theory for the origin of the word is that it is a diminutive of the name Gianni: “gianito”, pronounced in Genoese slang with the “g” as “j”. During the late 18th century 34% of the male civilian population of Gibraltar came from Genoa and Gianni was a common Italian forename. To this day, nearly 20% of Gibraltarian surnames are Italian in origin. It has also been speculated that the term comes from the English name “Johnny”.
It has also been hypothesized that the term originated as a reference to the language of the people, with llanito originally referring to the “plain language” spoken by ordinary Gibraltarians.
That last suggestion is absurd on its face (the two meanings of plain exist only in English, not Spanish); [I was wrong; see Noetica’s comment below.] I have no basis for judging between the otherssuggestions, but it’s certainly an interesting term. As for the rest of the article, I can’t tell what’s well founded and what’s folk belief (e.g., chachi ‘cool; brilliant’ allegedly from Winston Churchill). At any rate, mixed languages are fun. (Thanks, Trevor!)
(the two meanings of plain exist only in English, not Spanish)
You surprise me. There’s 13. campo llano for the physical-geography plain, but also:
That noted, there appears to be no noun analogue of French plaine (= *llana), in the relevant sense: but note Catalan plana, Italian piana, and Portuguese plano.
Well, hush my mouth! I Did Not Know That. Thanks for edumacating me!
So plains are plains because they are plain? That is pleasing.
‘Plain’ and ‘llano’ are relatives, apparently – both from Latin ‘plānus’.
So plains are plains because they are plain?
That’s geographers’ plains. Not to be confused with geometers’ planes, plainly because they’re plainly the “simplest of all geometrical surfaces”:
In whose imagination would introducing a homophone help “differentiate” anything? (It’s not like they were ever pronounced differently.)
As opposed to musicians’ Italian piano (soft), another doublet.
In whose imagination would introducing a homophone help “differentiate” anything? (It’s not like they were ever pronounced differently.)
It no doubt made perfect sense to the academics of the day, whose communications with one another would have been in writing at least as much as in speech, and who would have liked plane also because it looked just a leetle more like the Latin word, therefore making it more pleasing for “proper” educated discourse.
I like the derivation from Gianni, presumably a (mildly teasing) exonym. This would make the people of Gibraltar the jackeens of Al-Andalus.
Glad I was able to pay off a minute portion of my knowledge debt to the Hattery, Hat.
Here’s a really good discussion of the various theories. It’s referenced in the Wikipedia article. (Excuse the messy linking practice.)
Molly Bloom gets a mention on p. 415.
I have always wondered about the spelling “aëroplane,” since I don’t think anyone has ever made the first two vowels two different syllables.
That will be because it’s from ἀήρ (aḗr), which (like Aedes, which we discussed recently) contains two separate vowels, not a diphthong.
But did anyone every pronounce it that way in English? (Maybe H. P. Lovecraft did.)
The immediate source of English aeroplane is French aéroplane, which was four syllables (now replaced by avion). Check the OED: under aero- comb. form. (rev. 2008), they note
aeroplane was entered in the 1933 supplement with a three-syllable pronunciation first, and four-syllable as a second option; in the 1972 supplement the second one was labeled as “now rarely”. The four-syllable pronunciation is also given as a second option in early editions of the Jones Pronouncing Dictionary.
The 1972 OED also added some citations with the catachresis symbol “¶In form indicating the once common dial. or vulg. but now obs. pronunc. (-iːəʊ)”:
Here’s the full context of the 1915 Aeronautics quote. It was a response to a letter apparently peeving about three-syllable “aeroplane”:
A plain is an area that looks like something that was planed, say out of planewood.
@Y, no ‘plane’ the woodworking tool is a separate doublet from Latin ‘planus’ “level, flat”; whereas plane tree from Latin ‘Platanus’/Greek ‘platanos’, ultimately “PIE root *plat- “to spread”) in reference to its leaves” [etymonline].
Plainly there weren’t enough homophones to cause confusion already.
Did you really think I was serious?
There is always room for more confusion.
And, platanus begat the unrelated plant plantain ‘banana’, which is unrelated botanically and etymologically to plantain ‘plantago’ — my favorite false doublet. And naturally, unrelated to plant.
Take 2: plantain and plátano ‘banana /Musa’ do in fact derive from the ‘flat’ word, per Corominas (3:345, under chato). plantago is related to plant.
And Merriam-Webster distinguishes them as “PLAN-tin” versus “plan-TAIN”. Maybe I’ll adopt that, though I’ve previously always used the second pronunciation even on those rare occasions I’ve talked about plantago.
Plantains I find quite topical, having just managed to get hold of some from the local supermarket. The Shorter OED is a bit more exotic on the etymology, suggesting a relation to the plane tree (the one that Xerxes fell in love with), and assimilation to Caribbean languages including Arawak, and one I’d never heard of : Galibi (may be a variant of Carib).
So plains are plains because they are plain? That is pleasing.
Well, most authorities say plains are plains because they are flat or level. But there is an etymological strand that reads Latin planum (or sometimes plana, etc.) as “[land] devoid of trees” (making a pleonasm of Australia’s Nullarbor Plain). So Niermeyer (Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus):
And at a separate entry:
Latham (Revised Medieval Latin Wordlist: From British and Irish Sources) gives modest support for “unwooded” with the words “open country”:
To me all this sounded suspiciously like Isidore of Seville*, but I have not found planus, -um, etc., used that way in Etymologiae.
DuCange et al. (Glossarium mediæ et infimæ latinitatis) give some support. For example:
Ktschwarz:
The immediate source of English aeroplane is French aéroplane.
Indeed it is, but how surprising that the French word very likely originally involved the Greek word πλάνος: “wanderer, vagabond, etc.” (connected with planet, of course). This turns up in Latin as plănus “imposter, cheat, mountebank, etc.” as opposed to plānus, -um, etc. Aéroplane was apparently coined by Joseph Pline** in 1855, for a gas-filled gliding aircraft.
* Isidore is patron saint of the internet! How appropriate, given the infamous unreliability of both resources.
** Presumably “Josèphe” rather, given his nationality; but he’s hard to pin down. Anyway, Pline’s namesake (in French) Pline l’Ancien was an even greater plănus than Isidore.
@Noetica
Land devoid of trees seems incorrect, this should probably be “unforested land” or “cleared land”.
Naturalis Historia, 16.39.1
gignitur et in planis. easdem arbores alio nomine esse per oram Italiae quas tibulos vocant, plerique arbitrantur, sed graciles succinctioresque et enodes liburnicarum ad usus, paene sine resina.
Naturalis Historia, 13.120.1
cetero andrachle est silvestris arbor neque in planis nascens, similis unedoni, folio tantum minore et numquam decidente, cortice non scabro quidem, sed qui circumgelatus videri possit: tam tristis aspectus est. similis et coccygia folio, magnitudine minor.
That’s how it’s pronounced; but I don’t think the spelling exists. I’ve only ever seen Joseph.
Josèphe. Put it in Google Books (in quotes) and you’ll get a lot of hits
Oh, a female version recently reverse-engineered to bypass Joséphine. Like Bénédicte (I’ve met one).
Not only that, cf. Flavius Josèphe.
David M:
… but I don’t think the spelling exists.
My inattention: you’re quite right that as a male given name Joseph is standard. Josèphe serves in other uses.
PPaddy:
Land devoid of trees seems incorrect, this should probably be “unforested land” or “cleared land”.
Those three overlap in the semantic landscape, with awkward uncertainties such as when wooded land is cleared and then some Pliny-mentioned tree is planted there. The sources I quote cover both cultivated land and land that is merely “unwooded”.
Quite a loose affair. For example, while a great deal of flat land is cleared (for human use one way or another), much is wooded. And much cleared or otherwise unwooded land is not flat (in the sense of roughly parallel to the earth’s idealised surface: “level”). What would our various authors variously call a flat-grounded forest, a bare mountainside that was always like that, or a hilly region cleared for viti-, agri-, or horticulture (or to make dwellings, say)? All of these would qualify as planus (or -um or -a) by one definition or another.
Isidore and many others use planities for plain (to give the English cluster-concept word); others simply use campus – which is weirdly connected to Greek καμπή (“a winding, a bend”), from PIE *kh₂em- with similar non-straight-or-level connotations. The ways of etymology are indeed tortuous.
a few words common throughout Spain may be of Llanito origin, notably chachi meaning “cool” or “brilliant” (from Winston Churchill) and napia meaning “big nose” from the Governor Robert Napier, 1st Baron Napier of Magdala.
I wish someone would just delete this section of the Wikipedia article on Llanito.
I went down a rabbit hole on these two words this afternoon. Some notes from a Mad Hatter’s tea table quickly written up for LH readers who may be interested (apologies for OCR and tagging errors and any other infelicities):
1) napia: Spanish napias, pl., ‘nose, schnoz’ is well attested from the late 19th century. At the other corner of Spain, far from Gibraltar, Galician has napia. And Asturian has napia with the eastern dialectal variant ñapia. Note the ñ-, which is the typical treatment of initial Latin n- in the inherited vocabulary ñome ‘name’, ñabo ‘turnip’, ñada ‘nothing’. Note also the following from the Grande Dizionario della lingua italiana (here):
The 1587 publication of these verses by Giovanni Paolo Lomazzi is here. This is a good bit earlier than Robert Napier’s becoming governor of Gibraltar in 1876. Cf. also Venetian napa from Giuseppe Boerio Dizionario del dialetto veneziano of 1867:
However, many phonological and morphological problems arise if one tries to put together a unified Romance protoform for these scattered colloquial terms.
As an aside… Borrowing from Germanic sources (the family of Old English nebb) has been suggested. Kroonen treats this family here under *nabja- and adds: “Another potential lead is Gaul. nebba ‘bill’ as recorded by Pliny (thus already Kilian 1599: 334), but the word is not attested in the later Celtic languages”. Is the word even attested in Latin? Kroonen’s reference appears to be derived from a remark in Kiliaan 1599, at the entry for Dutch Nebbe. What and where exactly is this nebba in Pliny? I have not been able to find nebba in Pliny’s works or anywhere else in Latin. Perhaps Kiliaan got it from Petrus Nannius, Miscellanea (1548), here:
The bulga is known from Festus: bulgas Galli sacculos scorteos appellant (Paul. ex Fest. 35, 1) ‘the Gauls call leather bags bulgas’. In Pliny, there is ganta (Nannius’ spelling ganza is doubtless that of the versions available to him at the time):
But where does Nannius’ nebba derives from? From a work of Glarean? From René Verdeyen ‘De neppe à nozé et nifeter’, p. 395–404, in Charles Bruneau et al., ed. Mélanges de linguistique romane offerts à Jean Haust (1939):
Maybe more later.
2) chachi: The online version of Seco et al., Diccionario del español actual (here) gives one of the meanings of chachi as ‘auténtico’. Coromines–Pascual treats the family of Caló chachipén, chachipé ‘truth’ under de chipén (here). It is odd that no forms directly reflecting the Romani simplex adjective čačo ‘true’ seem to be found in sources for the vocabulary of Caló, although čačo is well attested across Romani varieties. I see no reason to doubt the etymology of chachi from the family of Romani čačo ‘true, right’, čačipen ‘truth’, etc. (Click through the links in the Wiktionary to reach the Indo-European root etymology.)
I went looking for early attestations of a word chachi in Spanish on Google books. The earliest I could find occurs in the 1847 zarzuela ¡Es la Chachi!, with a text by Francisco Sánchez del Arco that contains a good number of words from Caló. For example, consider, the following passage (print version here, p. 10) in which we find a use of chachi.
Of the other Caló words in this passage, sonsi is given by various sources as ‘mouth, lip’ and, as an interjection, ‘quiet! silence!’. I haven’t found an ulterior etymology for it yet. LH readers may recall in this regard the proverb which Prosper Mérimée puts in the mouth of Carmen, ‘Rivière qui fait du bruit, a de l’eau ou des cailloux’, and whose original Mérimée gives in a footnote:
Mérimée apparently took this from George Borrow (1841) The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain.
Here is a treatment of arromales from Jorge M. F. Berna, ‘Los gitanos en España y el posible origen del caló’, in Ivo Buzek, ed. (2016) Interacciones entre el caló y el español. Historia, relaciones y fuentes:
It has been suggested (here, bottom of page 175) that Romani arman represents a derivative of the word appearing in later Sanskrit as arman ‘cyst of the eye, pterygium?’, known from Sushruta. But Turner does not list any other Middle or Modern Indic reflexes of this word. (It has also been suggested that Romani arman is related a rare Vedic word árma- formerly usually translated ‘ruin, waste(land)’, but perhaps meaning ‘fountain, spring, source’ instead—obviously this etymology falls away if the Vedic word has no notion of ‘ruin’.) Another suggestion is that it is Persian آرمان ārmān ‘wish, desire’ but also ‘sorrow’… I’ll leave it there.
Several other Caló words occur in other parts of this zarzuela. There is puró ‘old’ (specifically used as ‘old chum’ in this text?); cf. Hindi-Urdu बूढ़ा بوڑھا būṛhā ‘old’, etc. And I think chimullar here means ‘talk; talk idly, go on and on’ and is a variant of chamullar; compare Sinti čamâva ‘chew; talk, speak’ (in Turner under cárvati). And Ostabel must be variant (influenced by ¡hostias!, perhaps?) of Undebel, Ondebel ‘God’ (debel, devel ‘God’, with an element on- of disputed origin. Perhaps it contains reduced form of Romani andre ‘inside, in’, with Ondebel generalized from an equivalent of ¡por Dios!, repeated so often that it took the place of the simplex Debel.
Of course, chachi must have been well-known, or at least easily interpretable, to the general audiences for zarzuelas in the 1840s, when this particular zarzuela knew a moderate success. Antonio García del Canto (1861) Los tres hijos del crimen, novela filosoficosocial (as wretched as it sounds) set in Sevilla, has a female character named Chachi, too.
And in the 27 December 1902 issue of the weekly periodical Blanco y Negro, there is humor piece in Andalusian eye-dialect set in Sevilla, ‘La Cocina’ by Melitón Gonzáles, in which one of the characters, a young man, is called Er Chachi. There are some other Caló words in this piece. One is the nickname Er Puripé (Romani puripén ‘old age’). Another is mengue ‘devil’, said to be Romani beng ‘the Devil’, itself said to have originally meant ‘frog’, as an abominable creature; Sanskrit vyaṅga- ‘frog’. (This Czech slang word bengo, bengoš ‘cop’, of Romani origin, is very cute.) It is odd, in any case, that all the attestations I could find were nicknames…
I suppose the variant chanchi has an affective -n-, which is not a very satisfactory explanation. But then, the -n- in the much older word gringo from griego, has not been satisfactorily explained either.
Wow. As always, your spadework is impressive, and you’re right, that part of the article should go.
The goddess Akismet has rejected my reprieve. Ah, kısmet değilmiş!
I have fought Akismet and wrestled her into submission… this time. But she’s never defeated for good!
Land devoid of trees seems incorrect, this should probably be “unforested land” or “cleared land”.
A champaign, q.v.