ODAMAKI.

It turns out Patrick the etymologist, who has commented here recently, has an excellent blog called odamaki (subtitled 古のしづのをだまき繰り返し昔を今になすよしもがな, which Google translates as “Frost forms on it now and repeat the past and the old Dzunowodamaki”). It’s not updated often, but the entries should appeal to anyone who enjoys LH. Here’s the start of Missing “people”:

One Middle English word that I wish had survived into Mondern English is thede, “people, nation, country, Gentile nation.” Can you imagine how useful hip-hop artists would find it as a rhyme for weed? Scots kept the word theed a bit longer than the southern Anglic languages, the only citations in the Dictionary of the Scots Language being from the text Golagros and Gawane […] and then threw the word away too. Thede is the native reflex of the word from which Middle Dutch dūtsch and German deutsch were built. Just look at this savory list of cognates from the OED:[…]

While I’m here, let me update my Xmas Loot post with a few books that have made a late appearance in my stocking: The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym and Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King (thanks, Sven & Leslie!) and The Archaeology of Anxiety: The Russian Silver Age and its Legacy by Galina Rylkova (thanks, Patricia!). The latter is a Kindle book, and I’d been wondering what would happen if someone gave me one; now I know—you get an e-mail announcing the gift and saying “click here to accept,” and once you click, boom, there it is on your Kindle! What fun!
It remains only to wish you all the very best of new years; I hope 2012 proves to be an improvement. See you after the changeover!

Comments

  1. “Dzunowodamaki” is perhaps actually “shidzu no wodamaki” which is maybe the same as “shitsu no wotamaki” in The Ise Stories
    (Look inside and search for “wotamaki”).

  2. Related. odamaki is a spool for spinning flax / hemp. odamaki mushi is chawan mushi with udon noodles wound in.
    shizu is a sound effect, I believe.

  3. Trond Engen says

    I followed your link. Nice blog, but I sincerely hate Blogspot’s commenting interface.
    For what it’s worth, Bjorvand & Lindeman rejects a connection between their headword tysk “German” and Hitt. tuzzi “army; camp”. Pointing to Melchert (1984), they see tuzzi as derived from Hitt. dai- “put, set”, in IE terms possibly *dhH1-uti-. Still an old IE word, though.

  4. A translation of which is what Alan’s search finds, of course. So that is indeed it and I was somewhat misleading.
    See also Shizuka at Tsurugaoka Hachiman, here.

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    This is a song performed by Shizuka, beloved concubine of Yoshitsune, when compelled to perform before her lover’s brother and enemy Yoritomo.
    Inishie no
    Shizu no odamaki
    kurikaeshi
    mukashi wo ima ni
    nasu yoshi mo ga na
    As of old, softly, the shuttle slides back and forth; would that yesterday became today!
    Odamaki is also the flower “columbine”, which is the flower on the front page of the site, I presume.

  6. Thanks, all; I knew people would elucidate the Japanese for me!
    Nice blog, but I sincerely hate Blogspot’s commenting interface.
    Tell me about it. I’m glad I emigrated from Blogspot back in 2003.

  7. Aha!
    In Icelandic:
    Þjóð (nation)
    Þjóðflokkur (tribe)
    Þýskaland (Germany)
    Þjóðverji (a German)
    Þýska (the German language)
    Þý (the common people, subjects)
    Þýlyndur adj. (subserviant, of slavish disposition)

  8. Happy new year to you, too, Languagehat! And thank you for mentioning the gift books, all of which sound interesting.

  9. Trond Engen says

    þjóð, þýska, þý
    Also note Norwegian utyske n. “ugly or evil being”.
    I imagine that I see an underlying common meaning “be friendly/familiar”, but, apparently, the existence and nature of a relation between the different Germanic words built on *þew- is still debated.

  10. Ditto the awful Blogspot comment interface!
    I suppose that the word “thede” does still exist in English but only hidden in placenames, Thetford in Norfolk, England is one example being a combination of ‘Theod’+’ford’. Not too far away in Northern Cambridgeshire on the borders with Norfolk and Lincolnshire in the Fens are the villages Tydd St. Giles, Tydd Gotes and Tydd St. Mary but I think the Tydd element is a corruption of the word “tide” rather than a surviving relic of “thede”?
    The Celtic cognates for ‘thede’ would be the now obsolete Welsh word ‘tud’ (pr. “tiid”) meaning ‘region’, ‘country’, ‘people’ (modern Welsh: bro, gwlad, pobl) From the same root is Breton ‘tud’ (parents, people) and Cornish ‘tus’ (people).
    Happy New Year everyone!

  11. Others have probably already seen this, but it’s interesting that the first recorded use of “theodice” to refer to a language was in reference to AS.
    “As a language name, first recorded as L. theodice, 786 C.E. in correspondence between Charlemagne’s court and the Pope, in reference to a synodical conference in Mercia; thus it refers to Old English.”

  12. in reference to a synodical conference in Mercia; thus it refers to Old English
    Or, more specifically, Old Brummie.

  13. Trond Engen says
  14. Well, okay, cough up. How does Ugla spell his name (“Ulga”?), and why is Eeyore called Tussi? In Scots they are Hoolet (written “Hootel”; cf. English howlet) and Heehaw.

  15. Trond Engen says

    There’s a schism in Norwegian Winniethepology. The canonical translation is Thorbjørn Egner‘s, which lost much of the wordplay of the original and at times simplified the stories. Tussi is a name evoking adjectives for “sad”, Ugla writes UGL (meaning nothing in itself), and Roo is named Kengubarnet “the Canga child”. 20 years ago or so, there came an ad fontes translation by Tor Åge Bringsverd. This was meant to be more faithful to nuances in the stories (but this is rejected by proponents of Egner) but couldn’t break with established onomastics (except for Ru, whose namechange had been helped along by Disney).

  16. I’m going to be boring! In the paragraph in which three books are listed, the third of them is in the following sentence referred to as ‘The latter’. Surely it’s ‘The last’. I see this sort of thing so often that I guess I’m a pedant, or just plain wrong, and that perhaps ‘the latter’ these days refers to the nearest in a list just mentioned – but note I just used ‘the nearest’. Should I get a life? LH is life-enhancing, indispensable, and I’ll comment more usefully soon. The Strugatskys’ Трудно быть богом, by the way, is wonderful, especially the голый вепрь “Ы”.

  17. perhaps ‘the latter’ these days refers to the nearest in a list just mentioned
    I think that’s the case, by and large. After I wrote that sentence I thought “Should I change that to ‘the last’?” But then I thought “No, if that’s the way I wrote it that means it’s a natural part of my dialect now, though once upon a time it wasn’t.” So I left it. In any case, your point is not boring in the least, and the голый вепрь “Ы” is indeed wonderful.

  18. This reminds me of a question, pretty boring and very much off-topic: I don’t understand the grammatical structure of the name of the Mormon church: “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints”. Am I supposed to think “Church of {Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints}” (I don’t think so), or is the second “of” parallel to the first (in which case I want to change the second “of” to “and”).

  19. It’s “{Church of [i.e. belonging to] Jesus Christ} [consisting]} of Latter-Day Saints.” “Latter-Day Saints” is what the members are called, because the LDS Church considers itself a restoration of the primitive Church.

  20. “One Middle English word that I wish had survived into Mondern English is thede,”
    How did it end up being “thede”? I would have expected “thewd”.
    “The Celtic cognates for ‘thede’ would be the now obsolete Welsh word ‘tud’ (pr. “tiid”) meaning ‘region’, ‘country’, ‘people’ (modern Welsh: bro, gwlad, pobl)”
    And there is Irish “tuath” still very much alive and still carrying the original meaning, and likewise carrying the meniang of “region, countryside”. BTW, “gwlad” means “people”? Did it originally have to do with a ruler, like “flaith” and maybe even “vlad”?

  21. David Eddyshaw says

    Gwlad means “country.”
    Gwlad, gwlad! Pleidiol wyf i’m gwlad …
    I believe it is indeed cognate with “flaith.”
    I don’t think ‘vlad’ is the same (both the Welsh and the Irish forms derive from -t- not -d-); I think that goes rather with English “wield” (as in power.)

  22. David Eddyshaw says

    On gwlad/flaith, I’ve just remembered the obsolete word “gwledig”, which means “ruler.” It’s not exactly the same formation as “flaith” but I suppose it might show a similar association of ideas, presumably “relating to a country” -> “ruler (of a country).”

  23. Gwlad (pl. gwledydd) does indeed mean “country”, “nation”, “countryside” but not “people” that’s ‘pobl’ or ‘pobol’. In Old Welsh it was ‘gulat’ from Proto-Celtic *wlati- ‘sovereignty’ and is related to Irish ‘flaith’ (ruler, prince).

  24. In Welsh *Gwledig is an obsolete word meaning ‘lord’, ‘king’ it was also a title but the modern meaning of gwledig is ‘rural’, ‘rustic’, ‘boorish’ bit of a semantic demotion?!
    Other derived words from ‘gwlad’ obsolete words marked with an * :
    gwladaidd – countryfied, rustic, boorish
    *gwledych – reign, government
    *gwledychiad – ruler
    *gwleidiad – countryman
    gwleidydd – politician, stateman
    gwleidyddiaeth – politics.

  25. “I don’t think ‘vlad’ is the same (both the Welsh and the Irish forms derive from -t- not -d-); I think that goes rather with English “wield” (as in power.)”
    That makes sense to me, at least more sense than seeing words so seaprated in time looking so similar.
    The gwlad = country looks like the same semantic shift as yielded Reich in German and rike in Swedish.

  26. Trond Engen says

    Eel: Thetford in Norfolk, England is one example being a combination of ‘Theod’+’ford’.

    John Cowan in the other thread: (Actually, the Thet is named for the nearby thetford ‘public ford’ in the town of that name. Thetford is the former capital of the East Anglian kings; it’s on the Little Ouse (< the Celtic reflex of *wed-), the border between Norfolk and Suffolk. Presumably the ford was so called because it was freely open to all.)

    Old Norse, ‘þjóð-‘ meant “people, public”, but it was also used in compounds to mean “big, common, important” more generally. I’d suggest that for Thetford as well.

    Jim: How did it end up being “thede”? I would have expected “thewd”.

    <-eo-> > -e:- is regular in (most of?) English. Compound shortening prevented it from being vowel shifted > [i:]. But the final -t is strange.

  27. It’s not so much a standard sound change as a pre-OE sound change (vowel breaking) that didn’t happen in the ancestor of the modern standard.

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