I’m reading From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey by Pascal Khoo Thwe (as is Joel of Far Outliers, who posts some good quotes from the early chapters), and I ran across an intriguing word on page 55: “The cacophony of the monsoon gone, the music of the cold season worked up to a climax in the songs of birds both native and migratory, especially the scarlet minivets and the swallows.” I looked it up in my smaller dictionaries and came up empty; finally the big Webster’s informed me that it was a cuckoo shrike of Asiatic origin, etymology unknown. (They’re colorful little fellows, as you can see here.) The only other dictionary I could find it in was, of course, the OED, whose entry reads in its entirety:
minivet (‘mInIvIt). [Etym. obscure.] Any bird of the campophagine genus Pericrocotus.
1862 Jerdon Birds of India I. 418 The Red Shrikes or Minivets (as Mr. Blyth has called them in the Museum Asiatic Society). 1862 Jerdon Birds of India 425, I have found this Minivet extensively spread throughout India. 187. Cassell’s Nat. Hist. IV. 30 The Grey Minivet (Pericrocotus cinereus). 1880 A. R. Wallace Isl. Life iii. 44 The brilliant little minivets are almost equally universal.
I find it very odd that a word that entered the English language in the mid-19th century has no etymology (an official word, as it were, and not a slang term); I can only surmise that the word is simultaneously obscure and banal-sounding enough that it has not attracted the attention of etymologists. (I assume “Mr. Blyth” is Edward Blyth, among other things curator of the zoological museum of the Asiatic Society of Bengal; since he died in 1873, over thirty years before the relevant fascicle of the OED appeared, he wouldn’t have been available for questioning, but he surely didn’t make the word up out of thin air.)
One annoying feature of words like this, rare terms for things that are common in some other part of the world, is that it’s very hard to find out what the translation is in languages where they’re common. My standard example is fenugreek, which is ubiquitous in the cuisines of India and surrounding countries but which, because it’s virtually unknown in English-speaking countries, is not to be found in the English half of bilingual dictionaries. Thanks to the internet, of course, we have the recourse of googling the scientific name (Trigonella foenum-graecum in the case of fenugreek) and hoping something will turn up in the language we want, but that’s not exactly a reliable solution. The trouble is that a truly unabridged bilingual dictionary would cost more than anybody’s willing to pay to create. Ah well.
“I looked it up in my smaller dictionaries and came up empty”
Is there some reason, Hat, why you don’t just go to the OED straightaway?
And, more to the point: “smaller dictionaries”? Whatever the hell do you own those for?
I own as many dictionaries as I possibly can. And I like the M-W Collegiate and the American Heritage, so I try to give them a chance to enlighten me before I haul out the big guns. After all, if you only use the OED, how are you ever going to find out how obscure a word is?
While you’re reading about Burma, may I recommend The Glass Palace by Amitav Ghosh? It’s one of those sprawling historical novels which has been the undoing of many a writer. It’s not his best work — that would be the stunning In an Antique Land, about which I can gush at length, if you like — but it’s not bad. In particular he manages to bring to life some pretty sweeping changes (political, cultural, even ecological) in the colonial and postcolonial periods of one unlucky little country.
Thanks — I like Ghosh’s writing (I’ve got Antique Land), so I’ll look for it.
The OED has revised the minivet entry and now has the following etymology:
Not very satisfactory, but better than nothing. And the annoying feature mentioned in the final paragraph of the post has become less annoying thanks to Wikipedia; under fenugreek you can find dozens of equivalents in the list of languages on the left.
…on the top nowadays. 87 currently.
As always, the best things in life are free.
Means: what had been called Muscicapa miniata was taken out of Muscicapa and given its own genus Pericrocotus*, and then (though quite likely in the same paper) other species were referred to Pericrocotus, too.
* Not to be confused with Percrocuta, which was like a spotted hyena (Crocuta), only more so. And I don’t mean “spotted” as far as I know.
on the top nowadays.
Right, I keep forgetting that not everyone preserves the old format in amber the way I do. (And bless Wikipedia for letting me do it. [And curse the OED for not letting me!])
The hyena-crocotta relationship, previously
I find it very odd that a word that entered the English language in the mid-19th century has no etymology (an official word, as it were, and not a slang term)
Origin uncertain; perhaps (with unexplained alteration) < classical Latin miniātus (see miniate adj.)
The Red Shrikes or Minivets (as Mr. Blyth has called them in the Museum Asiatic Society)
A favorite café of mine keeps avadavats on its verandah along with canaries and budgies, and today they and their -vat reminded me of this word minivet.
One would think that Jerdon’s reference is to Blyth’s Catalogue of the birds in the Museum Asiatic Society (1849), available here, but I couldn’t find the term minivet in that work. However, under Pericrotus speciosus (no. 1148), Blyth notes the name in Arakan, which he gives as Nget-meng-tha ‘Prince-bird’, and similarly under P. roseus, the name Nget-meng-tha-mee ‘Princess-bird’.
To engage in some rank speculation about the origin of minivet in this connection… It is interesting to consider the pronunciation of the Burmese versions of these names. Burmese ငှက်မင်းသား ṅhak maṅʹʹsāʹʹ, literally ‘prince bird’, is pronounced /ŋ̊ɛʔ mɪ́ɰ̃ðá/ or the like (using an acute to note the Burmese high~high falling tone). For the s, loosely /ð/, compare note 1 to the chart here. Burmese ငှက် ṅhak /ŋ̊ɛʔ/ is ‘bird’, while မင်းသား maṅʹʹsāʹʹ, /mɪ́ɰ̃ðá/ or the like, is literally ‘king’s child, king’s son’. As the rankest speculation, I wondered if this Burmese maṅʹʹsāʹʹ /mɪ́ɰ̃ðá/ ‘prince’ might be what is behind minivet. Perhaps the Arakanese/Burmese name got garbled as minivet in transmission out of Arakan to Blyth by hunters and naturalists in the field. (Before 1853, only Arakan was directly under British control.) If Blyth in fact introduced the term minivet, we can ask ourselves what his English was like… He was born in London and seems to have grown up in straightened circumstances. Perhaps the Burmese s (already /ð/ intervocalically in Burmese (though not in Arakanese) by that time?) was perceived or rendered as /v/ by Blyth.
For the final -t, perhaps compare Chindit, from ခြင်္သေ့ khraṅse´, or /t͡ɕʰɪ̀ɰ̃ðḛ/, ‘lion’. However, the second syllable in the original Burmese word khraṅse´ has a creaky tone easily interpretable by English speakers as -t, whereas the second syllable of maṅʹʹsāʹʹ ‘prince’ has a high falling tone.
End of rank speculation.
The earliest English-language records seem to be from India. A Dravidian source, like Tamil மின்சிட் miṉciṭ could be it.
Ed.: ☞ Telugu మినివెట్ miniveṭ.
Whoa! If that’s not borrowed from English, it looks like a smoking gun.
not everyone preserves the old format in amber the way I do
At your age, the amber has not hardened yet. Consider that it’s still just sticky resin that you can struggle out of, to have a look around. When you’ve found that the new format is inacceptable – as I usually do – you can return to the resin and wait for rigor to set in.
People have held on to the bible in all shapes, sizes and variants for 2000 years. I see no good reason to truckle to the UI toffs who want to support only one OED format.
Also Kannada ಮಿನಿವೆಟ್ Miniveṭ and Hindi मिनिवेट minivet, but Malayalam തീക്കുരുവി theekkuruvi < തീ thee ‘fire’ + കുരുവി kuruvi ‘sparrow’, alongside മിനിവെറ്റ് minivettu.
Rats, it looks like they’re all borrowed from English.
Which in turn is a descendant of Tamil, so it all works out in the end.
I’d like to think that Tamil miṉciṭ is related to miniveṭ, but I’m not sure how that would be. Proto-Dravidian *c [ts] is lost or weakened in variously in different languages, in ways that apparently are not yet completely figured out. So if the Tamil c is a retention, whence the /v/ [w]? Is it a weakened *c? Or perhaps one of the vowels used to be a back one, which induced an epenthetic v?
Wow, so fenugreek is virtually unknown?
I got used to seeing it in English (so much unlike Russian pazhitnik which I associate with the tetris author) and assumed it is Common.
(the spice itself, as we discussed earlier, appears in a number of things that I like and eat, e..g pastirma/basturma).
the spice itself, as we discussed earlier, appears in a number of things that I like and eat, e..g pastirma/basturma
Standard pastrami, in the US and here in Germany (available at Turkish butchers), involves no fenugreek. Coriander seeds are used in the curing process.
However, I find internet recipes saying that fenugreek is used instead of coriander in some places, such as Turkey.
@Stu, no, coriander is used in pastrami (another word I once in a while come across in English texts, maybe “virtually unknown” as well:)).
Basturma is very different, but of course related. It looks like the first picture in WP Pastirma. It is very hard, salty, and has an unique (for a Russian eater) smell which may very well belong to fenugreek. WP, pastirma: “Finally, the dried and pressed meat is covered with a spice paste called çemen.”
çemen/çaman is fenugreek (and as Wiktionary informs me, also caraway), so in my case it did not work as in LH’s, I first learned the Armenian name of the spice and much later found that the obscure Russian word pazhitnik (in unknown relation to Pajitnov who authored Tetris) is just čaman.
Apparently it is our cumin-word, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/չաման#Old_Armenian. But I don’t quite understand how cumin is similar to fenugreek. (if they are, then maybe for some people coriander is “similar” as well?)
UPD: I see, you edited your comment, I’m answering its first version.
It seems there are different pastrami-making traditions. There is no fundamental clash between fenugreek and coriander, after all. They appear together among the ingredients of many an Indian spiced sauce.
But I don’t quite understand how cumin is similar to fenugreek
There is absolutely no similarity, whether of taste, smell or appearance, between cumin/caraway seeds and fenugreek seeds or leaves (Hindi methi).
You can order small quantities of spices through the internet and see for yourself. Or buy them at Indian/Pakistani/Turkish groceries.
I see, you edited your comment, I’m answering its first version.
The fat lady sings until the edit time runs out.
Apparently one more word could have lended something to/from* the shape or meaning of čaman: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/چمن#Persian
* wiktionary, lend: “(proscribed) To borrow.”
Actually I confused it with “rent” which confuses me by its bi-directionality…
“Proscribed” ? All that means is that “lend” used in this way will confuse people. It’s a dialectal thing, I suspect.
As for “rent” – the trick is to regard the verb “rent” not as a word-by-itself. Word-by-itself is an illusion created by dictionaries.
There are two different verbal expressions which can’t be confused: “rent to” and “rent from”. These expressions are atoms – if you try to understand them by “analyzing their components”, you will lose your marbles.
The noun “rent” is merely the amount of money that changes hands.
“Lend (to)” and “borrow (from)” are inconfusable.
A lot of the “etymological” discussions here remind me of the complexities of subatomic particles. They do not necessarily help you understand macro phenomena such as “rent to” and “rent from”.
When you get confused at the macro level, it’s not always a good idea to seek clarity at “lower levels”. In many cases it’s better to slide up and down the levels. Or stop fretting, and instead memorize what’s right and wrong for now, and just get on with it.
Constructivism is your friend. “Reality” is for obsessive-compulsive folks.
From Sloterdijk: “paranoia is the truth about the truth”.
“Proscribed” ? All that means is that “lend” used in this way will confuse people. It’s a dialectal thing, I suspect.
The confusion between lend and borrow is old in English (though the OED makes no mention of it under either word) but firmly nonstandard. Googling for [lend borrow] turns up a huge number of pages explaining the standard distinction. For what it is worth, the analogous sell and buy do not seem to be readily confused.
@Stu, in Russian we use sdat’ lit. “off-give” and snyat’ “off-have” for renting.
Situations when you need to sdat’ flat or snyat’ flat are canonical (I am not sure if “you need to rent your flat” for the former and “you need to rent a flat” for the latter are just as clear in English…).
When I need to discuss it in English, I try to remember an unique, dedicated English verb for “to rent from” and fail. Or so it used to be. I learned most of my English from books and those books mostly aren’t novels. Discussing practical matters demands familiarity with vocabulary which I either know passively or don’t know at all. Eventually I consulted a dictionary and remembered “rent to” and “rent from”, but I keep suspecting that I’m missing something, that normal people say it differently, etc.
As for lending/borrowing, here it is just odolzhit’ and then either locative preposition “at” for the sourse or dative of the recipient.
PS I think English “I’m renting a ….” is confusing, but maybe “a” hints on the intended meaning here.
it just occured to me that I can say:
I odolzhil book* from Vasya to Masha.
Or in English,
I rent[ed] a flat from Jack to Mary.
Of course normal people use “for” here, but that is not what I mean.
* though normally in Russian we “take to read” or “give to read” books instead, using the word for lending and borrowing with book above is an English calque. And there is nothing remarkable at all about taking to read a book from Vasya and giving it to read to Masha. It happens to books all the time.
I rent[ed] a flat from Jack to Mary.
Of course normal people use “for” here, but that is not what I mean.
“I rented a flat from Jack to Mary” makes no sense off the bat. “I rented a flat for Jack to Mary” also makes no sense. So what do you mean ? Tip: it doesn’t make any difference what you mean when you string words together in such way that they make no sense.
“I rented a flat from Jack for Mary” makes sense – I rented the flat for Mary to live in, not for myself. Maybe “normal people” are easier to understand. They shall inherit the earth, after all.
Note that in English you do not lend or borrow immovables, normally. “Can I borrow your flat/apartment?” is not ungrammatical, but it is weird. I’d normally say “Can I use your flat/apartment?”
“You need to rent a flat” is clear in English, meaning you’re going to be the one paying money and living in it. Well, conceivably I could be saying that you own many flats and you need to rent one of them to somebody, but it wouldn’t normally be interpreted that way.
“You need to rent your flat” is more ambiguous. I might say “You need to rent out your flat” (actually I would say “apartment”, being American).
“I rented a flat from Jack to Mary” makes no sense off the bat
Yes, that’s what I meant:-)
@Keith, yes, it just occured to me, that in English “a” carries the information expressed with the root in Russian.
We normally say
“you need to-[verb for renting from] flat”
“I now am-trying to-[verb for renting to] flat”
I don’t know what English speakers say in the same situations – but it seems if I add “a” and “my”, they become clear (though usually* people who rent out flats have more than one).
“rent out”
Thank you!
* actually some move
to the jungle and live in a tentto Montenegro or Goa and rent a villa for a fraction of what they get for their flat in Moscow….Flats aside, car rental companies juggle the giving and the receiving senses of the verb “to rent” with little confusion, and without the use of prepositions. “If you need to rent a car, Acme will rent you the latest models at the lowest rates” or such, where the difference is between transitive and ditransitive constructions.
pastrami (another word I once in a while come across in English texts, maybe “virtually unknown” as well:))
No, pastrami is quite familiar. “Pastrami on rye” is a standard sandwich order.
Pragmatically, if I encounter, “You need to rent a flat,” somehow the phrasing suggests that the (possibly unstated) second half should be something like: “… if you’re going to keep on shagging that growler from Bristol and don’t want your missus to find out.”
But don’t the British hire cars rather than renting them? Also, instead of renting out a flat you can let it, but that’s also fairly British (signs say “to let” in the UK but “for rent” in the US).
In the US (at least in New York and San Francisco), a flat is an apartment which takes up a whole floor of a building, common in some styles of architecture (i.e. not necessarily luxurious).
Fenugreek is unknown over here – I only know of Bockshornklee* because I read the ingredients lists when I buy curry powder in supermarkets.
That’s fascinating about the American meaning of flat.
* Klee “clover”
That’s fascinating about the American meaning of flat.
It’s very specialized — I think the vast majority of Americans consider the ‘apartment’ meaning purely UK. I don’t recall anybody using it when I lived in NYC.
“Lend (to)” and “borrow (from)” are inconfusable.
I recall that in the deepest, darkest parts of Oxfordshire of my youth, you would sometimes hear “can you borrow me sixpence for a Mars Bar?”
I don’t know if Brits hire cars anymore. My sense is that renting has taken over, perhaps because of the American car rental chains that abound at airports.
Similarly learn is used in some dialects to mean teach. “That’ll learn you.”
That’s how I use borgen in German; in the other direction it’s sich ausborgen.
That occurs in German, too.
That occurs in German, too.
No doubt we all get it from Welsh (dysgu can be both learn and teach).
apartment which takes up a whole floor of a building
i’ve never encountered this, but it does make sense of the “flat that would flatten the Taj Mahal” in the title song of Guys and Dolls, which always sounded like an incongruous britishism to me.
That sense of flat began life as a Scotticism, per the OED; the first quotation is from 1759, whereas the first quotation from an English author is not until 1887 (and even then we don’t know if the context is England or Scotland).
Maybe I just imagined the New York thing (G&D notwithstanding)? Anyway, in San Francisco, back when you had classified ads for rentals in the papers, apartments, flats, and houses were listed in separate sections. Flats are typically bigger and more expensive, but probably not per square foot. They usually imply older (± Victorian) buildings, though many of those have two or more apartments per floor. I get the feeling that there was some social significance attached to flats, but maybe that was a relic of a time before mine.
A Brit flat doesn’t have to occupy a whole floor. Maybe the American sort was just trying to sound posh by going all fake-Brit.
Hmm, it seems that teach < *taikijaną only survived in English. Danish te = ‘behave’ is a near cognate (‘show behaviour’ to explain the sense).
ATIL that Es dedo is cognate with Da tå, not finger.
“British (signs say “to let” in the UK but “for rent” in the US).”
I have seen “to let” in older photographs of New York City and maybe of other American cities too.
====
Possibly off topic, but if so, not way off topic: how about the virtual disappearance of the verb “reserve” and its widespread replacement by “book” in connection with cruises, airplane flights, and hotel accommodations?
I only know American flat in elevator flat, which like elevator loft refers to a kind of apartment that a building elevator serves directly. No other units are accessible from that elevator at that floor. You may need to use a key in the elevator car control panel to go to the floor and/or there may be a tiny foyer between the elevator and the locked apartment door.
P. S. And “let” in the sense of ‘rent’ survives in American English in the verb “sublet.”
how about the virtual disappearance of the verb “reserve” and its widespread replacement by “book”
Hasn’t disappeared round these parts. And (“do you have a”) “reservation” is more appropriate than “booking” in some contexts.
Maybe the American sort was just trying to sound posh by going all fake-Brit.
On the other hand, it appears that in the UK some posh flats are called “apartments”.
I don’t know if Brits hire cars anymore.
I just ran across a reference to hiring a bouncy castle in a 2015 book by an English writer (The Trouble With Goats and Sheep), but it was in dialogue set in 1976. Americans don’t use hire except with reference to people.
‘On the other hand, it appears that in the UK some posh flats are called “apartments”.‘
Yes, one reason why I use “flat” is that it was simply the English word Soviet students learned and used.
The other is that apartaménty is somewhat pretentious in Russian. E.g. in 90s and 00s when colourful magazines advertising self-employed girls were distributed in residential neighbourhoods at night, those would have something like “[Name], [photo], anal, classics, apartamenty, vyjezd“.
“Classics” is vaginal sex, vyjezd refers to work “on site/in the field”. And “aparments” means the fay is ready to receive her patrons at her own place. Kvartira would sound too simple, apartamenty are foreign and imply she has some cozy boudoir there or something.
I am ready to accept it from Westerners, but in Montenegro where people offer sobe “rooms” or apartmani, I kept feeling they’re showing off… ( Or may be their do? Wiktionary informs me that stan is the normal FYLOSC word. FYLOSC apartman appears only in English, with a definition “apartment (usually for vacation)” and in Cyrillic for Makedonian “apartment (where one is staying temporarily, e.g. in a hotel)”. Serbian WP page is стан, but it does mention апартмани in descriptions of photos, e.g. “апартмани на Руе де Монсоу, у Паризу “appartments on rue de Monceau in Paris”.)
The usual Russian word kvartíra may in turn sound pretentious to you. Obviously it is “quarters”, though I’m not sure what was the trajectory of this meaning (“accomodation”) across languages….
“flat” entered Russian at least twice.
Second, in the slang of hippies (and adjacent lovers of rock’n’roll).
hard dark /l/, locative na fletú.
First it mysteriously appears in a song by Vertinsky.
“…to wake up alone, v (“in”) your merry bachelor’s fléte“, soft /l’/ fronted /e/ and locative coincides with the prepositional case.
It seems it entered pre-revolutionary Russian slang as well…
PS, wait, no. culture.ru dates it to 1940.
Then it is complicated. In 1940 he lived in Shanghai (with many other Russians):-/
the fay is ready to receive her patrons
Very nice, drasvi. I’m too immersed in English to have ever come up with this euphemism.
“Colourful magazines advertising self-employed girls” is good, too.
The minivets are known in Japanese as サンショウクイ 山椒喰 sanshō-kui, ‘prickly-ash eater’, not because they actually eat prickly ash (Zanthoxylum piperitum), but apparently because the Ashy Minivet’s cry was perceived as sounding like hiri hiri. This was close enough to piri piri, meaning “hot, prickly, spicy” that Japanese speakers imagined that the bird had been eating prickly ash and named it accordingly.
The name was taken over into ornithological Chinese as straight 山椒鳥 / 山椒鸟 shānjiāo-niǎo, ‘prickly-ash bird’, losing the reference to the bird’s cry in the process. (This is fairly typical of the way in which many ornithological names have been created in Chinese by simply borrowing or adapting the Japanese term.)
In ornithological usage, minivets are known in Thai as นกพญาไฟ nók pʰa-yaa fay ‘fire king bird’, Vietnamese as Chim phường chèo (not immediately able to confirm the meaning), Malaysian as burung matahari ‘sun bird’ or burung mas ‘gold bird’, Indonesian as burung sepah ‘scarlet bird’.
Y, if you mean “fay”, it is in use in Russian (as I know from… professional forums of prostitutes:)).
A ‘prostitute’ in Russia used to be a girl by the side of the road. Predictably, their lives are… rough. Now it is still a girl by the side of the road, but there is a class of so-called individualki, sg. -ka (this is why I used the word “self-employed”, with full awareness that it will be read somewhat differnetly).
All sorts of accompanying services grew up around them, so it is they who drive cars and their lives are definitely less rough.
Those magazines advertised individualki.
Vietnamese chim phường chèo ( 𫚳坊嘲 ? 𪀄坊嘲 ?) looks like it literally means something like “actor bird”: chim ‘bird’ + phường chèo ‘troupe of actors/comedians in traditional hát chèo musical theatre’ (as here, for example), itself a compound of phường 坊 in the meaning ‘guild’ and chèo 嘲 ‘deride, jeer, ridicule’. I reckon this name for the birds would be in reference to their chirpy songs and to the flamboyant colors of some species (or perhaps even to some head markings resembling theatrical cosmetics?), and perhaps also to their habit of foraging in groups (likened to a theatrical troupe?).
Proto-Dravidian *c [ts] is lost or weakened in variously in different languages, in ways that apparently are not yet completely figured out. So if the Tamil c is a retention, whence the /v/ [w]?
Thanks to Y for the interesting comments on possible etymologies for minivet. My random and rankly speculative comment on the possibility of a Burmese origin (မင်းသား maṅʹʹsāʹʹ /mɪ́ɰ̃ðá/ in Burmese ငှက်မင်းသား ṅhak maṅʹʹsāʹʹ /ŋ̊ɛʔ mɪ́ɰ̃ðá/, lit. ‘prince bird’), posted before these on Thursday, seems to have disappeared—perhaps for the better. (Maybe WordPress or Akismet just did not like the Burmese text?)
Tamil மின்சிட்டு miṉciṭṭu ‘minivet’ looks like a compound of மின் miṉ ‘flash; glittering (as of gold); lightning’ and சிட்டு ciṭṭu ‘anything small; small bird’. (For the semantics of the formation, compare Malayalam തീക്കുരുവി tīkkuruvi ‘orange minivet (Pericrocotus flammeus)’, cited by Y above. For the use of Tamil ciṭṭu in bird names, compare for example Tamil மாம்பழச்சிட்டு māmpaḻacciṭṭu ‘common iora (Aegithina tiphia)’, apparently from மாம்பழம் māmpaḻam ‘mango’, I suppose in reference to the yellow and green coloring of the females and nonbreeding males, as perhaps here, and the bright yellow coloring and puffed up display stance of the breeding males, as perhaps here.) Such a compound as Tamil miṉciṭṭu can be a recent formation with no exact correspondences in other Dravidian languages. Interestingly, the Tamil Wikipedia page for ஆரஞ்சு மின்சிட்டு ārañcu miṉciṭṭu ‘orange minivet (P. flammeus)’ twice spells it மினிசிட்டு miṉiciṭṭu ! (Now I am even wondering if the Tamil compound miṉciṭṭu was inspired by English minivet.) Next time I meet a speaker of Tamil, I will try to ask about this word.
seems to have disappeared
Yeah, I found it in moderation this morning and restored it. I have no idea how or why that happens long after a comment is posted and accepted!
A Brit flat doesn’t have to occupy a whole floor. Maybe the American sort was just trying to sound posh by going all fake-Brit.
Maybe I misunderstand you, but “flat” seems to me a transparent word for a unit that covers an entire floor. A building of them would essentially be a stack of one-story houses.
“flat” seems to me a transparent word for a unit that covers an entire floor.
Not to me.
OED:
A building of them would essentially be a stack of one-story houses.
One of the OED’s quotations, from Scott’s Redgauntlet, alludes to this very point. I give the context in full here (emphasis added). Alan Fairford is speaking to his father (and narrating the incident in a letter to his friend Darsie Latimer): “What business has he [Herries of Birrenswork, the Fairfords’ self-invited dinner guest, now departed] to upbraid us,” I said, “with the change of our dwelling from a more inconvenient to a better quarter of the town? What was it to him if we chose to imitate some of the conveniences or luxuries of an English dwelling-house, instead of living piled up above each other in flats? Have his patrician birth and aristocratic fortunes given him any right to censure those who dispose of the fruits of their own industry, according to their own pleasure?”
Since I am on this page of Redgauntlet, namely volume I, letter VI, I will quote a passage that appears just before this one, not only for truth, but in hopes that someone can give the proper Scottish Gaelic for Scott’s furinish:
Thanks, Xerîb. And the cognates of ciṭṭu all maintain the *c.
Fuirich a-nis, stay now. Although a local form with fuir for the imperative might be plausible, on the model of e.g. seas! ‘stand’, and a’ seasamh, ‘standing’.
It has just occurred to me that Gaelic, like Scots, talks about residence as ‘staying’ in a place, rather than ‘living’ in it as in English. I wonder which took it from which…
living piled up above each other in flats
This doesn’t necessarily imply that every floor is a single flat.
PP seems to have deleted a comment with Irish equivalents, which I always find kind of interesting!
‘Fan’ for ‘stay’ exists in Gàidhlig (possibly more in the south, if faclair.com’s maps are to be believed) but ‘fuirich’ is the more usual word.
‘Thoir an aire’ for ‘watch out’, but there is a word ‘faire’ for a more organised kind of watch.
Sorry for deletion. Your comment was more relevant. And I am also sort of embarrassed, because the right word in Irish is fuirigh, one I am not used to hearing, meaning more delay than stay.