Xerîb sent me a wonderful word, saying accurately that “It has Hattic interest in two ways.” The OED (entry revised 2002) says s.v. moloker n.:
slang. Now rare. Perhaps Obsolete.
A cheap hat, spec. a renovated silk hat.1890 Molocher, a cheap hat.
A. Barrère & C. G. Leland, Dictionary of Slang vol. II. 60/11893 A good Molocker (Molocker, it appears, is the trade term for renovated old chapeaux).
Westminster Gazette 18 July 3/3
[…]1906 The man who takes your [old silk] hat away from your door sells it to a wholesale dealer in old hats, who promptly converts it into a ‘myloker’, or a hat for the second-hand market.
Tit-Bits 21 April 120/1
There’s also a verb, ‘To renovate (a silk hat),’ qualified as Obsolete. rare, with a single citation:
1863 ‘Tis like an old hat that has been ‘molokered’, or ironed and greased into a simulacrum of its pristine freshness.
G. A. Sala, Breakfast in Bed v. 105
The etymology is “< Yiddish melokhe handicraft, craft, trade < Hebrew mĕlā’ḵāh work, occupation.” Xerîb kindly provided some additional links, including the Jewish English Lexicon entry for melacha ‘Work or actions forbidden on Shabbat or Yom Tov; often refers to creative work or the use of electronics; Work in general,’ with a set of Example Sentences (“I couldn’t start fixing the chair, because that would be melacha”), the Green’s Dictionary of Slang entry, and the Internet Archive copy of Sala’s Breakfast in Bed highlighting the last citation, whose full context is worth quoting here:
The worst of the matter is, that with all your mending, restoring, and preserving labours, things wont keep as they are, and obstinately refuse to return to that which they used to be. ‘Tis like an old hat that has been “molokered,” or ironed and greased into a simulacrum of its pristine freshness; or an old coat that has been black-and-blue revivered. For a day or two all is well, and the daw may strut about in his peacock’s feathers, the envy of the entire farmyard ; but the first shower of rain washes off the fictitious gloss, and scrubs the whitening off the sepulchre, and exposes all the senility and shabbiness of the sham.
Note that “wont” has no apostrophe; I haven’t taken the trouble to figure out if this is a consistent style in the text or just a run-of-the-mill typo. (Thanks, Xerîb!)
It’s even in Ex. 20:9, with the suffix meaning “your”, as many here know.
A long way from there to a refurbished hat.
cf Maloche
Hey, it’s from the root לאך “send” (as in “angel”)!
A send/work polysemy is seen all over Volta-Congo* (and in Hausa, too, where I’ve always assumed, perhaps too readily, that it’s by V-C influence.)
* Among very many others: Kusaal (“Gur”) tʋm, “send, work”, Gbeya (“Ubangian”) tomá “send”, tom “work”, Proto-Bantu *tʊ́m- “send, work.”
Edward Greenstein, “Trans-Semitic idiomatic equivalency and the derivation of Hebrew ml’kh” (Ugarit-Forschungen 11, 329, 1979, here) ingeniously tracks the semantic progression from ‘send’ to ‘work’, based on an older idea of Ben-Ḥayyim. I’m skipping the very interesting details, but he argues that the intermediate step is ‘to send forth the arm’.
Very interesting. Unfortunately, I only get a “limited preview” there, which cuts out before the chase scene.
The *tʊm etymon is straightforwardly reconstructable to proto-Volta-Congo, and the fact that it has both meanings even in Oti-Volta, Gbeya and Bantu suggests that this feature too goes back to proto-V-C.
On the other hand, the Semitic analogue suggests that “send” -> “work” may be a more natural development than it initially seems to be, and there are certainly V-C languages where the reflex only means “send”, e.g. Kasem (Grusi) tʋ̀ŋɩ̀, Samba Leko (“Adamawa”) tùm, Miyobe tù, imperfective tùm̀, Twi (“Kwa”) soma.
So it’s possible that Oti-Volta, Gbeya and Bantu have all independently innovated the “work” sense, though it seems rather a stretch. I think it’s more likely to be an ancient areal thing, given that it turns up with Hausa aika(ta) too, despite the genetic unrelatedness of the actual words.
I wonder if the “send/work” polysemy turns up elsewhere, outside Africa? (And Semitic.)
There’s also the consideration that verb words for “work” seem to have a relatively high replacement rate, so one can also imagine an ancient “send/work” verb losing its “work” sense to various different jumped-up innovatory verbs in different V-C branches (as opposed to an ancient “send” verb several times independently acquiring the meaning “work.”)
he argues that the intermediate step is ‘to send forth the arm’
No support for that in V-C: as far as I can tell, the verb always means “send (a person)” (cf Swahili mtume “prophet, apostle.”)
Here is the paragraph on the cross-linguistic typology of the semantic change from the article that Y linked to. One may or may not accept the author’s objections to a straightforward parallel with Latin missio ‘sending’ > French, English mission ‘assigned task’, etc., as cogent.
The author also notes Akkadian šiprum ‘sending; mission; message; work, labor, task; activity, action; piece of work, manufacture’ beside šapārum ‘to send’, which I have always thought simply followed a path similar to that of Latin missio and its reflexes in the modern languages: ‘sending’ > ‘mission’ > ‘assigned task’ > ‘vocation, work in life’. I should think something along those lines might apply to the Hausa aiki ‘work’ beside aika ‘send’, and the other words in the West African area.
About Ugaritic mlảkt… The entry for mlảkt in Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín (2015) A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, 3rd rev. ed., trans. and ed. W.E.G. Watson:
Aha, so how about translating malach (angel) not as angel/messenger, but as a worker. Like, “I will send someone who knows the job before you”…
The entry for the Proto-West Semitic root *lˀk ‘send’ in the SED is here.
Besides Rotwelsch, the Yiddish word also apparently shows up in Bargoens melogem ‘work, tool, instrument’ and melogemen ‘to have sexual relations’ (or better, ‘to fuck’? ‘to screw (around)’?). On the final -m, there is an attempt at an explanation of it here, through something the author calls mematie (‘memation’; not the same as Semitic mimation, but a sporadic change of n to m, and then apparently spread of final -m to a few words originally without it).
There is a handy list of reflexes of the Yiddish word to be found in… Paul Wexler (1983) ‘Hebräische und aramäische Elemente in den slavischen Sprachen: Wege, Chronologien und Diffusionsgebiete’, Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie 43, p. 252, available on JSTOR here (yes, yes, Paul Wexler, I know, I know, but just the list of forms and dates is handy):
The semantics of the form məloochənə ‘künstlich die Zähne des Pferdes verändern, um sein Alter zu verschleiern’ that Wexler gives recalls our original topic molocker.
Thanks, Xerîb!
The dual “send/work” meaning of reflexes of *tʊm is well established in Oti-Volta, but I’m less convinced about the other Volta-Congo branches on looking into it a bit further. (And there are a lot of cases where only the “send” meaning is attested: yet another one is tun in the Senufo language Supyire.)
In Bantu, the “work” sense seems to be attested only for Regions 1 and 2 (which, are, though, probably the most archaic); but more to the point, it is seen in morphologically derived verbs rather than as simply other senses of the “send” verb:
https://www.africamuseum.be/en/research/discover/human_sciences/culture_society/blr/results_any?Index=4154
Looking more carefully at the Gbeya, I see that though the noun tom means “message, errand, work”, the verb tom(á) only means “send”, as in tom tom “send a message”; “to work” is dɛ tom, where dɛ(á) is “do, make” and tom is the noun. So the Gbeya data readily conform to the “missio” pathway.
To make life yet more complex, there is some reason to think that proto-Oti-Volta may have had a derivational suffix which was disobligingly lost as a segment in every modern language, but is sometimes reflected in root-vowel lengthening. Very speculatively, that suffix might have been originally present in “work” but not “send”; cf Kusaal tʋm “send/work” but tʋʋm “deed”, Moba sūn̄ “send/work” but tūōnǹ “work” (noun.)
[The initial s/t alternation in the Moba forms is a weird Gurma thing that I don’t really understand. In Gulimancema it happens even within the paradigm of the “send/work” verb itself: perfective sóání, imperfective tùùni; but tuonli (noun) “work.”]
“The author also notes Akkadian šiprum ‘sending; mission; message; work, labor, task; activity, action; piece of work, manufacture’ beside šapārum ‘to send’”
I imagine the same root as Arabic safar = journey, from which Swahili, and we, get safari.
Also Hausa safara, which means “long-distance travelling for the purpose of trading”, this being an activity much more in keeping with traditional Hausa culture than frivolous pursuits like safaris.
Greenstein’s main point is that it’s part of (what looks to me like) a regional network of calques. Ben-Ḥayyim’s original idea was based on the Hebrew root šlḥ ‘send’ + ‘hand’, also in the sense of practicing a craft.
I got the reference to Greenstein from the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, which has detailed articles on both malʾāḵ and mĕlāʾḵâ (here).
@DE: The “preview only” message goes away if you check out the book (in the archive.org sense).
(Thank you, Hat, for correcting the italic tag.)
(My pleasure. Gotta keep my editorial hand in!)
a regional network of calques
That could well be the explanation for the Hausa aika “send”, aikata “perform, act”, aiki “work” thing.
It’s commonly accepted that Hausa has been significantly affected by Volta-Congo languages, but people seem to be rather hand-wavy about just which branch or branches of Volta-Congo. Benue-Congo usually gets nominated, but I suspect that’s just because it’s much better documented than “Adamawa-Ubangi”, which seems geographically more plausible.
Aikata has the verbalising suffix -(a)ta, and is actually based on the noun aiki “work, job, duty”, so “send” is again primary, and the cognate noun is the form that also means “work”, so the overall derivation relationships are similar to those in Gbeya.
Samba Leko tùm “send” and tùʔ “work” (verb) look as if they ought to be cognates, but Samba Leko is one of those languages which has scrunched most of its words into monosyllables, and AFAIK nobody has ever tried to set up proper sound correspondences between Samba Leko and other Volta-Congo languages. On the other hand, if tùm “send” and tùʔ “work” actually are related, given that the final *m in proto-Volta-Congo *tʊm “send” looks pretty certain, the -ʔ would presumably be the reflex of some old derivational suffix, so in that language, too, “send” would be primary and “work” derived morphologically.
Do these West African languages also use ‘send’ to mean ‘stretch out’ (referring to a hand/arm), as in Greenstein’s proposed semantic path?
How hats were renovated and resold in London in 1877, although without any word for the result:
Do these West African languages also use ‘send’ to mean ‘stretch out’ (referring to a hand/arm), as in Greenstein’s proposed semantic path?
No.
“Stretch out” (as of a hand) in Kusaal, for example, is tiɛn /tīē/, cognate with Mooré tẽege “spread out, unfurl.”
(Kusaal actually has quite a few verbs for “extend a body part”, but none of them is tʋm.)
All the reflexes of *tʊm that I can find in Volta-Congo involve sending either a messenger (most often) or a message.
Hausa aika is the same (though it can also mean “ordain that” with a following subjunctive.)
In fact, were it not for this Semitic parallel, I’d be tempted to wonder if the Volta-Congo case might not even just be an accidental homophony.
There actually may be something odd going on with Volta-Congo initial *t.
In some of the more westerly languages it seems to have two distinct outcomes, with no obvious conditioning factors. Thus the cognates of Kusaal tʋbʋr “ear” and tɔn “shoot with a bow” turn up with initial t, whereas the cognates of (a)tan’ “three” and tʋm “send” turn up with initial s.
The late John Stewart had a whole elaborate theory in which his version of proto-Niger-Congo distinguished fortis from lenis stops of all kinds throughout. Unfortunately, only his own pet language Ebrié actually seems to have anything like that at present, and his comparative work is really not very convincing. There’s no trace at all of such an opposition for the great majority of stops in most branches, and in the cases where there does appear to be an opposition there’s unfortunately not really any consistent pattern between languages.* You do get the feeling that there is something along those lines going on, at least in some cases, though, even if Stewart’s own analyses don’t bear much scrutiny.
Anyhoo, it’s conceivable that a (say) *θʊm “send” has mostly fallen together with a *tʊm “work” somewhere along the line sometimes.
* In particular, the fairly frequent apparently-sporadic alternations between initial c/s/t in Oti-Volta don’t line up with any consistent differences in reflexes outside the subgroup. (Bummer.) In fact, they don’t line up in any consistent way even within Oti-Volta – the variation cuts across subgroupings. Levelling! Widespread borrowing! Dialect mixture! Sheer human perversity! Who knows?
Perversity always gets my vote. They are out to get you, David. (Nobody ever: I like those Alpha Centauri guys).