I thought sure the headline of Cindy Blanco’s Duolingo post — “Are any words the same in all languages?” — would be another victim of Betteridge’s law, but I have to admit I can’t think of examples that disprove the answers she comes up with. After the obligatory disclaimer (“I wasn’t able to research all 7000+ languages”), she provides a few near misses (tea, pineapple, orange, taxi, tomato), then gives the winners (I’ll put them below the cut in case you want to think about it):
☕️ COFFEE
Like the other food words on this list, there was a time when coffee was unknown in much of the world. 😳 As it was traded and adopted in communities worldwide, the Arabic word قهوة qahwah was adopted along with it—and in the variants of qahwah you can see how languages tweak the sounds of a word to make it their own!
[…]🍫 CHOCOLATE
And alongside that hot cup of joe is the word for chocolate: It’s the same everywhere around the world! If a language has a word for this confection, then it’s based on a Nahuatl word or phrase for a drink made of ceiba and cocoa. The Spanish version of this word (probably quite a bit different from the original Nahuatl word) has been borrowed by communities worldwide.
Of course, I will not be a bit surprised if the conclave of Hatters manages to show that these too fail in universality. (Thanks, Songdog!)
What about the “bun” words for coffee in languages of Ethiopia, the original homeland?
There are actually two Mandarin words for ‘chocolate’, 巧克力 qiǎokèlì (the most common form) and 朱古力 zhūgǔlì. They are simply different renditions of the international word. I’m not sure what the source language is for the two terms, although I assume it’s English.
Re “coffee”: It’s the Turkish word that was borrowed into many European languages, and so you can see an additional change from “v” to another lip sound: the “f” you know from English coffee, Spanish café, Italian caffè, etc.
The “f” in “coffee” has changed to “p” in Malay/Indonesian (“kopi”), and it’s pronounced that way by many Mongolians, too. For some reason, Japanese uses “h” (コーヒー, kōhii).
“Tomato” fares worse than the article suggests. Of course there is помидор (from the Italian), which has been borrowed from Russian into Mongolian. The officially approved term in Mongolia is ulaan lool’, which means “red tomato” (I don’t know where lool’ comes from). In Inner Mongolia it’s called “Tibetan eggplant” (tövd haš) — perhaps influenced by Chinese? Chinese has 西紅柿 xīhóngshì (“Western red persimmon”) and 番茄 fānqié (“foreign eggplant”).
As for “taxi”, the word entered Cantonese as 的士, which has a tenuous existence in Mandarin as dīshì. Apparently 德士 déshì is used in Malaysia and Singapore. Both would be pronounced as something like “teksi” in southern “dialects” of Chinese. But the usual words in Mandarin are 出租車 chūzū-chē “rented out car” and (in Taiwan) 計程車 jìchéng-chē “charge distance car”.
Also, with regard to 番 in my previous comment, it was traditionally used for non-Han peoples to the west, notably Tibet, and later extended to foreign things in general, so tövd haš almost certainly appears to be a calque on Chinese 番茄.
For lool’ in Mongolian, see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C#Mongolian
‘Coffee’ is prïhtjege in South Saami; ‘tea’ is löövje
More recently disseminated terms, like “mango” or “gorilla”, probably retain the name in languages to which they were introduced, but are likely to have diverse names in their area of origin. I would look for terms whose original distribution is restricted to one linguistic territory. Qur’an is arguably not a normal noun, so how about aye-aye?
I imagine few languages have a word for any of the transuranic elements different from the IUPAC recommendation
Cofe and chockolate are great examples.
It’s interesting that, “everyone has the same word for chocolate,” is actually a significant observation, versus “for pad-thai,” or “for spam” (either sense).
Tobacco seemed akin to chocolate and coffee: plant-based staple with mood-altering properties that went worldwide at approximately similar time. And many words for “tobacco” do look like they derive from the ur-word (by which I mean the Spanish one, whatever its own source may be). But there are no doubt New World exceptions as noted above and there are Old World exceptions as well. For example, the word in both Chichewa and Shona is reported to be “fodya,” from Portuguese “folha” (=”leaf” cf. “folio”).
“Hashish” looks promising, though …
transuranic elements
Or even Helium.
Or even Helium.
Navajo níłchʼi ászólí ‘gas’ + ‘light’ (assuming that is an accepted and used term).
In the same way that the word “coffee” spread pretty universally as the beverage became pretty universal, today we are seeing the same thing with various tech terms. For example “website” is used verbatim in some languages; in others there is a closely related term, like “sito web” in Italian, sitio web in Spanish.
For the top prize I nominate “internet” — it seems to be the same no matter what language I try, though I’m sure there are exceptions.
This is a well-worn missionary-linguist joke (which it is my duty to share as the Hattery’s nearest thing to a representative of that demographic.)
The canonical answers are halleluiah, bar and Coca-Cola.
Hebrew מִרְשֶׁתֶת mirshetet ‘internet’ (from רֶשֶׁת reshet ‘net’) is rare but less ignored than other innovations.
Although the One True Answer to this question is surely “no”, the next best thing are perhaps the “mama/papa” words that the more hardcore proto-World enthusiasts are so fond of. (I seem to recall Hat pointing us towards a Ruhlenoid a while back who really did believe that all such words were incontrovertably from proto-Human.)
(Kusaal ma “mother”, undoubtedly cognate with Welsh mam.)
I’m surprised amen isn’t on the list. Isn’t the usual convention in Bible or hymn translations to take it as a loanword, rather than translating it?
Aha, Nick Nicholas wrote this up on Quora:
He mentions Navajo and Tagalog as exceptions.
The Irish for internet is idirlíon, a calque, though idir is cognate with inter
I think “halleluiah, amen, Coca-Cola” is probably the American missionary version of the joke.
I mean, those guys are uptight.
(I speak as one whose objectively greatest single contribution to the eyecare of Burkina Faso was probably inviting a distinctly hostile team from the health minisitry in Ouagadougou to come drinking in town with me and my surgical team. Upaya …)
hi is the closest thing to fi, and the closest native thing to pi.
Boy, does it ever! The whole “paradise (apple)” group is missing. Probably moribund in Austria, but going strong in the Balkans!
Navajo is the fly in the ointment for several examples I looked up on Wiktionary, including gorilla and kiwi (both the bird and the fruit). However, many chemical elements don’t have a Navajo term and a few are English borrowings, including, oddly, carbon.
I left a note in the Multifarious Aubergine the other day that’s still in limbo because two hyperlinks where apparently there are / were different Egyptian Arabic dialects for both tomatoes are red eggplants and eggplants are black tomatoes.
The Vietnamese words for some of these are different.
My immediate thoughts when I saw the headline about universal words were:
– Mama/ mommy/ mamma/ mẹ
– Huh/ hæ/ hả
(English/ Norwegian/ Vietnamese, but I’ve seen examples in lots of languages)
Update: I can’t type Vietnamese diacritics or Norwegian letters on your blog! It messes it all up.
I left a note in the Multifarious Aubergine the other day that’s still in limbo because two hyperlinks where apparently there are / were different Egyptian Arabic dialects for both tomatoes are red eggplants and eggplants are black tomatoes.
It’s not in either spam or moderation; if you’ll e-mail it to me I’ll post it for you.
I can’t type Vietnamese diacritics or Norwegian letters on your blog!
Are you using Unicode? It shouldn’t be a problem.
I’ve had the issue once, and others have had it often, that editing a post with special characters in it displays the characters wrong during the editing. Submitting the edit magically restores everything, including mẹ and hả in this case.
There’s actually a paper showing that hả should be considered a universal word (including that it should be considered a word in the first place).
The French say ainsi soit-il, so be it, for amen. At any rate the French Catholics do.
There’s actually a paper showing that hả should be considered a universal word
Given that many languages lack [h] and some even lack [a], this argues for an ability to abstract away from actual observable data that would put even Chomsky Himself in the shade.
One feels that the authors of such a paper should be gently encouraged into more productive pursuits, possibly outside linguistics altogether.
Is this universal “word” thought to have an identifiable meaning, or does it rise above such sublunar encumbrances?
(Neither Kusaal dialect seems to have any words at all of the form /ha/, but the dictionaries were compiled by mere descriptive linguists and native speakers, so their testimony can scarcely be taken as definitive. However, Dagaare has ha “hire”, haa “open by stretching” and haa “all.” I presume that /ha/ in one of these senses must be universal, and the Kusaasi are deliberately concealing the facts, for reasons we can only guess at.)
Is sneezing also a word? Traditional apotropaic responses to a sneeze seem to imply this …
diné bizaad / navajo is notorious for resisting loan words, so i’m not surprised it’s a frequent sticking point. i think there are a few different kinds of answer to the question, though, depending on what counts as “the same” – a borrowing/adaptation? a calque? any form of traceable historical connection? a coincidental sound-alike?
Kusaal actually shows two distinct levels of borrowing/calquing of the “amen” word, which has been borrowed from Arabic via Hausa as ami.
In the Bible translation it’s used as a drop-in substitute for “amen”, but the word clearly antedates the arrival of Christian missionaries.
Most Kusaasi are not Christians; they seem to use the word exclusively as the conventional response to greetings and formulae couched as statements that God will do something, e.g.
Win na lɛbisif nɛ laafia. “God will make you return in health” (i.e. “Bon voyage.”)
However, most Kusaasi are not Muslims either, and actual prayers to the Creator are not part of traditional culture: cf the proverb
Dim nɛ Win, da tu’as nɛ Winnɛ.
“Eat with God, don’t talk with God.”
So ami, despite being borrowed from the “amen” word, didn’t actually mean “amen” until it was coopted for that purpose by Christian missionaries; it still doesn’t, for most speakers.
The whole “paradise (apple)” group is missing. Probably moribund in Austria, but going strong in the Balkans!
And paradicsom in Hungarian. As for ha, ha! Except when it is short for hat of course (see another thread with discussion of Ulysses).
Curious that Canada appears in Mandarin with “jia” instead of the perfectly available “ka”: 加拿大, jiā ná dà. Similarly with California. No doubt for reasons that are perfectly apparent to students of older Chinese.
Since the Japanese コーヒー has been mentioned, allow me to digress a bit. I have always found it interesting that there is a kanji equivalent still in common use: 珈琲. 珈 carries the primary meaning of “kamikazari”, which is a woman’s hairpin with beads hanging from it, and 琲 carries the primary meaning of a decoration with beads, so the word on the street is that this is a very stylish character combo that reminds people of the red berries of a cofffee tree.
depending on what counts as “the same”
“Tomatoes” in Kusaal is kamantɔɔsi, from Nahuatl via Spanish via English via Mampruli kamantoosi, which iself has been remodelled by analogy with Mampruli kama “garden eggs”; whether this counts as “the same word” seems to depend on what you had for breakfast.
Mooré, boringly, just has tomaato, but it has at least reanalysed it as a plural in -do (with the regular sandhi change dd -> t) of a singular tomaodgo.
Observe how, in the Wiktionary list, Moroccan Arabic: ماطيشة (maṭīša) is yes but Maltese tadam is no (rather < tuffieħa t’Adam), even though the necessary ellipsis / metathesis doesn’t seem (to me) inherently more plausible in either case.
I’m not getting why the duolingo article calls tea/té/cha a ‘near miss’. ‘Chai’ is clearly the same word
Which is as small a variation as in the words for coffee. ‘Tea’ previously at the Hattery.
IIRC from a LanguageLog piece (comments from Chris Button here), in the area (SW China/Myanmar border) where Camellia sinensis originated, there’s several not-obviously-cognate words, but they’ve remained very local.
Talk of “universal words” always reminds me of this passage from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich:
Navajo, besides its apparently natural aversion to loanwords, had a cohort of speakers during the Second World War who were explicitly tasked with developing calques for various terms. There was probably a synergistic interaction between the underlying culture and the national security considerations.
@ Ook
In Chinese it’s 咖啡. Did the Chinese adopt 珈琲 from Japanese but dispense with the 玉 radical on the left? Or did the Japanese adopt 咖啡 and change 口 to 玉? (In many cases there was actually a certain amount of to-and-fro between the two.)
@ Noetica
Curious that Canada appears in Mandarin with “jia” instead of the perfectly available “ka”: 加拿大, jiā ná dà.
Is it possible that it was first created in a non-Mandarin dialect where 加 is pronounced as ka, and then adopted into Mandarin as the standard transliteration of “Canada”?
Is “huh?” a universal word? Conversational infrastructure and the convergent evolution of linguistic items
In “Moroccan Arabic: ماطيشة (maṭīša)”, the loss of the first syllable is via Berber, where ta- is regularly prefixed to practically all feminine singular nouns.
In “Moroccan Arabic: ماطيشة (maṭīša)”, the loss of the first syllable is via Berber, where ta- is regularly prefixed to practically all feminine singular nouns.
Very nice!
Is the ش š simply from Spanish retracted [s̠]? Cf. شلية from silla?
@Bathrobe
This speculation that Udagawa Yōan came up with 珈琲 makes sense to me, so I guess there’s a good chance that this was a Chinese borrowing of a Japanese compound!
https://www.tsuyamakan.jp/special/coffee/
In fact, I think Udagawa’s kanji was not well-adopted even in Japan for quite some time, as the first coffeehouse in Tokyo used 可否 (as in 可否茶館） in the late 1800s, but Udagawa passed away in 1846.
kamantɔɔsi
t > k also in Tagalog kamatis, but I haven’t found any explanation other than the dissimilation that the Wiktionary offers.
According to this paper by Tanomura Tadaharu, the earliest known attestation of the writing 咖啡 is the dictionary entry here (1819), at the top left of page 383 (no. 5357). But since this is a dictionary entry, the use must have been older—Morrison would not have just made it up. In passing, it’s also interesting that the same character 咖 was used to write the name of Java. (Morrison’s phonetic value kea for 咖 indicates that he was applying the Nanking Mandarin standard current at the time; cf. Morrison’s king for 京 vs. today’s standard jīng) and Morrison’s keang for 江 vs. today’s standard jiāng.)
According to Tanomura, the Japanese writing 珈琲 first appears in a gloss (of Dutch koffij) in the document 宇田川榕庵手控の蘭和字典 (Udagawa Yōan tebikae no ranwa jiten), a notebook containing a Dutch-Japanese glossary considered to have been compiled, at least in part, by the scholar Udagawa Yōan, who is noted for creating many scientific terms in Japanese. The date of this notebook is not known precisely (around 1845?), but since Udagawa lived from 1798 to 1846, this attestation of 珈琲 would seem to be somewhat later than that of 咖啡 from 1819.
On page 46 of his article, Tanomura has a table of attestations of different spellings ( 加非，咖啡，架非，㗎啡，珈琲 ) in different sources in Japanese, along with the dates of these sources.
Is “huh?” a universal word? (is this the one that David M was thinking of?): That sounds familiar, it was featured at Language Log in 2013, with lengthy exchanges between commenters challenging it and author Mark Dingemanse responding. They do not, of course, claim that it sounds like /ha/ universally, but rather a much looser claim: that it has either no consonant or some kind of glottal onset, that the vowel is “non-high non-back non-rounded”, and that there’s only one syllable.
If I understand correctly, their explanation is that the “huh?” word is the minimum sound needed to be recognized as a question, with whatever intonation the language uses for questions. They stress that “a corpus of everyday, informal, face to face interaction” is required to determine whether a language has a “huh?” word or not, which is why they cover so few languages: 10 in the 2013 paper (five Indo-European, one each in five other families), 21 more in a followup.
I can’t sympathize with Dingemanse’s complaint about distorted and overblown media coverage: you use a clickbait title, that’s what you should expect. They could’ve titled the paper “Phonological similarity of conversational repair requests: a minimal effort constraint?”, but that wouldn’t have gotten them in the New York Times.
I see that I even chipped in in the comments. The paper obviously made little long-term impression. I can see why.
The truly irritating thing about it is the way it flings about the word “universal”, combined with the author’s rubbishing of all counterexamples as due to inadequate data collection, because obviously that must be the explanation, because it’s a “human universal” so it must be there whether the data support it or not.
“Our proposal enhances evolutionary models of language change” is pure bunkum.
> I’m not getting why the duolingo article calls tea/té/cha a ‘near miss’
Because of Polish herbata, Lithuanian arbata, Belarussian гарбата. Also see Fred’s comment about South Saami.
I thought the name was familiar: Dingemanse is the r-for-rough chap. We discussed that here.
He did his PhD on ideophones in one of the Togo Mountain languages. (Respect.)
I’m pretty sure 加 is ga in Cantonese. Plenty of odd-sounding loans in Mandarin make sense if you read them in Cantonese.
Yes! I missed the LLog thread, though.
In the last LLog comment, Russian turned out to be just such an example of inadequate data collection.
The wording is flowery, but the paper does show there are selection pressures on this part of language.
Plenty of odd-sounding loans in Mandarin make sense if you read them in Cantonese.
I’d put that more strongly: international words pre-dating the rise of RoC/PRC should be read in Cantonese.
Here gives Cantonese pronunciations. I’m getting Jyutping gaa1 naa4 daai6
I imagine few languages have a word for any of the transuranic elements different from the IUPAC recommendation
Mandarin Chinese, at least in the standard, tries their best to make a single-character (and consequently single-syllable) name for every transuranic; I have no idea whether the pronunciation of those names derives from the IUPAC version.
For “orange” (the fruit), Hebrew has tapuz, which is an abbreviation of tapuakh zahav “golden apple”. I think there’s a separate word for “taxi” too but I forgot what it is!
Meanwhile, “tomato” is agvaniya, whose etymology I don’t recall offhand, but AFAIK it’s not a borrowing.
I agree that “tea” and “chai” should count as ultimately the same word. Can’t think of any counterexamples there either.
I think there’s a separate word for “taxi” [in Hebrew] too but I forgot what it is!
There’s the ubiquitous sign for Egged Transportation Ltd. To my Latin-script eyes, I always read those אֶגֶד initials left-to-right as ‘Taxi’. Because transport.
GTranslate gives מוֹנִית ‘moneet'(?)
Lebanese ‘ahwe (the q became a glottal stop) and Italian caffè derive from the same word but are they still the same word if arguably they are no longer mutually recognizable? I doubt your average Italian can guess what ‘ahwe means out of context. It sounds more like acqua.
I was in just Bahrain last week and I was offered in English qahwa in the sense of Arabic Coffee (the golden colored lightly roasted drink that is nothing like espresso). Gulf Arabs when speaking English differentiate between qahwa and coffee. Can’t be a truly universal word if it has split into two meanings.
@J.W.
There are certainly Old World alternatives for “Tobacco” – Romanian “tutun”, Russian «тютюн», Turkish “tütün” all ultimately derived from an Old Turkish word meaning “smoke.”
Unrecognizable in Polish herbata, from Neo-Latin herba thea.
מוֹנִית monit comes from the root מנה mnh ‘count out’ (whence also ‘mene mene tekel upharsin’). It is used alongside taksi, but is higher register. You never yell monit at a driver, only taksi. I think the former’s final stress has something to do with it. Trochees are somehow easier to yell.
אֶגֶד eged is the ubiquitous inter-city bus company (and also local buses in some places like Jerusalem). The root has a range of meanings along the lines of ‘union’, ‘bundle’, etc., referring to its origin as a cooperative and as a merger of four smaller bus companies. The name was proposed by Bialik.
Navajo is far from being the only indigenous language in the Americas which prefers calquing neologisms using native morphemes instead of borrowing the foreign word. But even when such words ARE borrowed, they can often be unrecognizable today: Plains Cree has “nihtiy” (a single morpheme, synchronically) for tea, and I actually had to explain once to a fellow linguist who had worked on Plains Cree (who, admittedly, was wholly ignorant of French and…well, was not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer either, to put it mildly) that the term is a borrowing (French “le thé”).
Indeed, variation in the source language can play as much of a role as phonological adaptation in making a French loanword in indigenous languages in North America unrecognizable as a foreign word: some languages (like Plains Cree) have a reflex of “le thé”, others have a reflex of “du thé”.
@CuConnacht: French Catholics do indeed say “ainsi soit-il”, but this is certainly not used to the exclusion of “amen”
@AntC @Manứih
> Because of Polish herbata, Lithuanian arbata, Belarussian гарбата. Also see Fred’s comment about South Saami.
That would be a good reason, but the article’s reasoning is that while tea and chai may be etymologically the same word, they’re basically two different (groups of) words today. That feels like special pleading when the same applies to coffee vs qahwah.
Yeah, the tea argument is ridiculous.
Please try again…
“Russian turned out to be just such an example of inadequate data collection.”
а? “what?” is in dictionaries, of course. Which is not a proof that it is still popular… but i think it is (not sure how i would transcribe it).
There is also ась? but now it counts as dated, I think.
Freemasonry uses “So mote it be” as a calque of “Amen.”
Now I wonder if it is a derived form of “a?’…
“So mote it be” was claimed by Aleister Crowley to be an Ancient Thing, but he probably picked it up from the Freemasons. The Wiccans adopted it, after Crowley.
The common terms for ‘tomatoes’ and ‘eggplants’ in Romanian are roșii ‘reds’ and vinete ‘purples’. The omitted noun both adjectives describe is pătlăgele, singular pătlăgea (final stress), from Turkish patlıcan. Another Turkish borrowing with the same singular/plural ending in Romanian is cafea/cafele ‘coffee’. Pijama, pijamale shows a similar singular/plural pattern for singulars ending in final stressed a but the Romanian Dictionary Online says pijama was borrowed via French, who likely borrowed it from further east.
In Russian eggplants are often affectionately referred to as sin-en’k-iye “blue-DIM-nom.pl”
Which used to refer to five-ruble notes. Inflation!
Indirectly, sure, but French got pyjama from English and gave it a spelling-pronunciation.
I am glad that my two speculations (about 珈琲 and 加拿大) have been answered.
@ Xerîb
That is a wonderful paper! Tanomura is scathing about the way that poorly-based scholarship, amplified by an uninformed resonance-chamber effect, has given rise to the widespread popular view that Udagawa Yōan came up with 珈琲 — and the beads of coffee beans thing, too.
Can’t be a truly universal word if it has split into two meanings.
Well, “tea” has split into various different meanings, too. Not to mention the trendy kombucha, which is derived from Japanese (meaning something like “kelp tea”) but is basically a different beverage. Of course, the cha in kombucha is etymologically the same as the English colloquial word char for ‘tea’. Not universal, maybe, but these little off-branches don’t detract from the universality of the word.
That’s what Wiktionary heavily implies: “a formula used in Freemason and Rosicrucian rituals, and now used to conclude spells in Wicca and other Neopagan traditions.”
Mote is not only real, it solves a bunch of historical-comparative problems I had been wondering about for decades: must is its past tense – it used to mean “had to” specifically, and was later reinterpreted as present. (Arguably for the second time since PIE, given that it’s a preterite-present.)
in Wicca and other Neopagan traditions
Peeving Dept.: Should “tradition” be objectively used for a relatively young set of religious/spiritual beliefs and practices? Or is the term merely used to paint them with ancientness?
For “coffee”, Omaha (Umóⁿhoⁿ) has “black medicine”, IIRC… (double checks) yep, moⁿkóⁿ sábe “medicine black”. So it’s not just Ethiopia that has resisted the spread of qahwah. Though the number of speakers is pretty close to zero at this point.
Should “tradition” be objectively used for a relatively young set of religious/spiritual beliefs and practices?
Sure. Why not?
The Wiccan have a venerable tradition of systematically mispronouncing their own self-designation …. it seems appropriate, somehow.
Iolo Morganwg, forger extraordinaire, invented the ancient tradition of Welsh Druids.
Despite the role of Armenians in the generalization of coffee consumption in the world, the general word for ‘coffee’ in Armenian is սուրճ surč (Wiktionary entry here). This is a rather recent word of unknown etymology. (Forms from Turkish قهوه kahve can also be found in Armenian varieties, as listed in the Wiktionary entry.)
Tradita sunt from elders to youngsters, so no etymological objection either.
Edit: ha, caught myself using the barbarous neuter singular!
I had no idea…
Doubtless from Chemical German Schlurz “slimy phase in a liquid”.
moⁿkóⁿ sábe “medicine black”
Cf Farefare sabga, plural sabsɩ “black.”
Yet another word that’s the same in all languages!
@Davids: Sure, let the assorted neopagans call them traditions, even when they acknowledge just having created them. But should Wiktionary and such neutral documents do so?
If I said that surč is cognate with “coffee” through magical Armenian sound laws, I wouldn’t blame anyone if they believed me.
@Vanya: that’s parallel to the African languages calling tobacco a [loanword for] “leaf.” Presumably there’s a language out there that has neither a loanword derived from “cannabis” or a loanword derived from “mari[h/j]uana,” but either a calque or loanword originally meaning just “weed.” Or “smoke” for that matter. This is actually why I proposed “hashish” upthread, as a sufficiently specific/non-generic subset/variant of the substance to less susceptible to that sort of nicknaming crowding out the “proper” name.
@Y:
How old does it have to be to be a tradition?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
the general word for ‘coffee’ in Armenian is սուրճ surč
That’s great, and a perfect counterexample to the generalization.
If I said that surč is cognate with “coffee” through magical Armenian sound laws, I wouldn’t blame anyone if they believed me.
Very true.
But seriously, could surč have anything to do with սեւջուր sewǰur ‘black water’, which Wiktionary assigns to a folk etymology?
Should “tradition” be objectively used for a relatively young set of religious/spiritual beliefs and practices? Or is the term merely used to paint them with ancientness?
I don’t really understand this objection. The concept of tradition has nothing to do with ancientness; my wife and I, for example, have a tradition of eating a particular Sunday breakfast that goes back maybe a decade. And people talk all the time about starting a new tradition.
“recent word of unknown etymology”
wow.
“Doubtless from Chemical German” – the suggestion in Wiktionary:
“Perhaps of onomatopoeic origin, from the sound made when sipping coffee.[3][4] Typologically compare Hungarian szürcsöl (“to slurp, sip”), of onomatopoeic origin.”
…is not far from that.
“magical Armenian” – but it is not Albanian (or IPA Danish), it is sometimes even transparent.
“The Proto-Armenian sound changes are varied and eccentric (such as *dw- yielding erk-)…”
Ideally a “tradition” should be uncritically perpetuated by persons other than those who first invented it out of whole cloth. How long a timeframe this requires depends on context. When it comes to institutions with rapid personnel turnover such as university student groups, a “tradition” that was invented out of whole cloth two or three years before this year’s seniors matriculated might as well be a century old – there’s unlikely to be a functional difference. Of course sometimes alumni will come around and say “that’s a tradition now? But we only meant for it to be a running joke.”
Our genial Hattic Host has suggested that the comment I put over in the mote-specific thread about “so mote it be” might flow better here, but rather than cut and paste I will provide a link for the edification of anyone browsing only this thread: https://languagehat.com/mote-empty/#comment-4549624
Oh hell, I’ll put it here so people can more easily respond to it.
I was going to comment on the other thread, but I’ll start here. If we separate the word “mote” in general from the fixed phrase “so mote it be,” it seems of some significance that, on the one hand, the occurrence of the phrase in Anderson’s 1723 “The Constitutions of the Free-Masons. CONTAINING THE History, Charges, Regulations, &c. of that most Ancient and Right Worshipful FRATERNITY. For the Use of the LODGES.” is not the very first instance in the google books database.
OTOH, it’s only the third hit in chronological order, with two prior hits. One is from 1537* where it does appear to gloss “amen” and the other is from a 1687 typeset edition of Chaucer and lo and behold project gutenberg’s original spelling ebook of Troilus and Criseyde does have “Right as your herte ay can, my lady free, / Devyse, I prey to god so mote it be” as one of 18 hits for “mote” in the entire poem. Context is certainly prayer but I’m not sure substituting “amen” would make sense.
So even if 18th-century Masonry did not invent the phrase from whole cloth, it certainly popularized it and made it A Thing for later flim-flam artists like Crowley to work with.
*The printed edition of the “dayly exercyse and experyence of dethe” work that may have been written 20-30 years earlier per this wiki piece on the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Whitford
And people talk all the time about starting a new tradition.
I think there’s a difference here. “Tradition” in a religious/Fiddler on the Roof context means to me something different than “tradition” in the sense of a regular non-religious practice, which usage feels a bit tongue-in-cheek. When I hear a neopagan talking about starting a tradition, meaning a new rite or sub-rite, it’s different to me than starting a tradition of going out to breakfast on Sundays or such.
I mean, it’s the same word and basically the same idea; I’m not sure how you’d draw the line.
In some religious circles (this is true for Anglophone Eastern Orthodoxy and I seriously doubt we’re unique) a rhetorical distinction is drawn between “capital-T Tradition” and “small-t tradition” that is sort of congruent with the distinction Y is trying to articulate – the practical point generally being that the stakes of disregarding/abandoning the latter are not the same as with the former.
ETA: to make the implicit explicit, one of the key distinctions here is varying attitudes as to whether the fact that a practice is in some sense of the word “traditional” is itself a valid basis for considering it normative/binding.
My own internal parser apparently interprets mote in so mote it be as an archaic past participle of moot “to speak, to discuss”.
I know it’s not the actual derivation (and IIRC they’re not even root cognates), but that’s consistently what it feels like to me. Not very sure why.
Per The Invention of Tradition, even the traditionally accepted traditions are always younger than you thought.
@J.W. Brewer
> Of course sometimes alumni will come around and say “that’s a tradition now? But we only meant for it to be a running joke.”
This happened to me last year. Just before I moved out of a student house I shared a tradition from back where I grew up. I visited last year and found out that over the past 14 years, they’ve kept it up. Quite a nice surprise!
As a curiosity, and for completeness… Matthias Fritz (2016) ‘Zur Etymologie von armenisch սուրճ surč „Kaffee” (Silvae armeniacae III)’ offers a Proto-Indo-European *h₂ḱ-u-gʷʰrh₁-s ‘scharf riechend’ as an etymon for Armenian surč. For the element *h₂ḱ-u-, cf. Latin acus, etc., and for *-gʷʰrh₁-, cf. Vedic jíghrati, ‘smell, sniff, perceive’, ghrā́ṇa- ‘sense of smell’, and Greek -φρ- in ὀσφραίνομαι ‘catch scent of, smell’, ὄσφρησις ‘sense of smell’, etc. The treatment of *-gʷʰ- as Armenian ճ č is not paralleled to my knowledge. Fritz suggests dialect borrowing of an original ջ ǰ as č. Still, would *-gʷʰ- become ǰ before r? (However, in this regard, I suggest that one might consider a role played by regular devoicing of ջ ǰ after r /ɾ/ in standard Eastern Armenian. Compare standard Eastern Armenian արջ arǰ [ɑɾt͡ʃʰ] ‘bear’ and վերջին verǰin [vɛɾt͡ʃʰin] ‘last, final’.) The metathesis of *Cr to *rC can be paralleled by Vedic śubhrá- ‘radiant, splendid, stainless’, Khotanese suraa ‘clean’, beside Armenian surb ‘pure, stainless; holy, sacred; a saint’, from a virtual Proto-Indo-European *ḱubʰ-ró-. In Fritz’s account, this word ‘sharp-smelling’ remained underground (or rather, hidden in the mountains) for millennia until suddenly emerging among merchants from New Julfa (speaking an Eastern Armenian variety) in the 18th century as a word for ‘coffee’. I will let you all evaluate for yourselves.
moⁿkóⁿ sábe “medicine black”
Also Lakota pȟežútasápa (pȟežúta ‘herb, medicinal herb’ + sápe ‘black’). The New Lakota Dictionary, 3rd ed. (2022) gives the meaning of this collocation as “coffee grounds, coffee beans”. Prepared coffee as a beverage is apparently wakȟálapi, lit. ‘something boiled, brewed’ (cf. wakȟálye ‘makes coffee’; -pi, nominalizer).
Coffi Sambiéni gamely includes the words for tabac in the comparative wordlist at the back of his Le Proto-Oti-Volta-Oriental.
They are:
Byali tābə̄hũ̄. Ditammari kūtábààkù, Nateni tábàkū, Waama tábá.
I can add Mbelime tɔ̀ɔ̀hṵ̀.
From elsewhere in Oti-Volta we have: Moba tàbl̀ (plural tàbà), Nawdm tábgú (plural tábt́), Buli tàbì (plural taba), Mooré tàbá.
It is straightforward to reconstruct the proto-Oti-Volta *tâb-ɰa, a plurale tantum, as often with mass nouns in Oti-Volta.
Moba, Buli and Mbelime have the expected regular singular, as if from POV *tâb-ɹɪ, but this is clearly a secondary development and cannot be projected back to the protolanguage.
Many languages have reanalysed the plural as a stem and attached further noun class suffixes: this, for example, accounts for the unexpected -b- in the Nawdm, which reflects an earlier geminate *bb < *bɰ. This kind of resegmentation is well-attested in Oti-Volta; for the specific development in Nawdm, cf tóbŕ “ear”, where the b for the expected w reflex of POV *b after a vowel has been introduced into the singular from the plural tóbɦá.
As proto-Oti-Volta cannot be dated later than the second half of the first millennium BCE, it is clear that the account of the mythical Columbus “discovering” America is, like the moon landings, based on an elaborate fake. “America” is a hoax. Wake up, sheeple!
@DM Please try again…
Here comments by Chris Button. (The context — since this was all of 12 hours ago — words for ‘tea’ not obviously cognate with tea/té/cha, from Mon-Khmer languages, on a LLog thread.)
Bathrobe:
I am glad that my two speculations (about 珈琲 and 加拿大) have been answered.
The one concerning Canada (加拿大) is a worthy speculation indeed. David M invokes the Cantonese with its ga for 加 in support. Interesting, but I don’t think the matter is settled. More evidence is needed, for example a list of Chinese names for famous people from history whose European names begin with Ca, Ka, or Ga. Two emperors, on Chinese Wikipedia: Galba gets a jia (加爾巴, Jiā’ěr bā; same characters at Cantonese Wikipedia entry), but Cassiodorus gets a ka (卡西奥多罗斯, Kǎ xī ào duō luósī; no entry on Cantonese Wikipedia).
Ah, thanks.
@J.W. Brewer:
I figured all Christian churches older than Protestantism must have recognized that meaning of Tradition (as I understand some Protestant churches do too). Hence the big Lutheran and Calvinist fuss over sola scriptura. Admittedly, though, the Catholic Church must loom larger than others both for me and, dare I say, for Luther and Calvin.
I don’t think I’m familiar with an uppercase/lowercase distinction, though. I’m positive the Catholic Church has a long list of things it does out of custom but doesn’t consider part of its depositum fidei. However, I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen the two distinguished by capitalization. Then again, I sure don’t do a lot of ecclesiological reading, so what I’m personally familiar with counts for little.
@Noetica:
Dept. of Peevery: Caligula (卡利古拉, Kǎ lì gǔ lā), Caracalla (卡拉卡拉, Kǎ lā kǎ lā), Carus (卡鲁斯, Kǎ lǔ sī) and Carinus (卡里努斯, Kǎ lǐ nǔ sī) were Roman emperors, as were Galba (加尔巴, Jiā ěr bā), Gallienus (加里恩努斯, Jiā lǐ ēn nǔ sī) and Galerius (伽列里乌斯, Jiā liè lǐ wū sī). Not so Cassiodorus, though he was likely the best of this bunch.
I have no idea how long ago any of these names became well known in China, if ever. Even in Italy, past Caligula and Caracalla you’re skating on thin ice. Anyway, I don’t feel one can blame the Chinese for preserving a difference between Ca- and Ga-.
(What peevery?) No one is claiming what you claim they are claiming, GP. And didn’t g and c often alternate in Latin anyway? Gaius or Caius, Gneus or Cneus: take your pick.
The C for /g/ is just an archaising graphic convention, dating from before the invention of G with its nifty disambiguating diacritic stroke.
It’s not an actual sound alternation. The sound was always /g/ in those names.
Blame the Etruscans.
This is disappointing. I had always imagined at least influence from Sarlat-la-Canéda. Where ‘canéda’ is some sort of geographical feature; ? cognate with cañada — Spanish for droveway, drovers’ road; what with the initial French settlement and all.
I can’t find a resource will translate Fr. Canéda, but if I remember from holidaying near there, it was some sort of rocky outcrop.
DE, how do you date proto-Oti-Volta?
(Roses and chocolate. My stab in the dark.)
And as a counterpart to Armenian surč ‘coffee’…
How could I have forgotten Western Armenian տուրմ turm [duɾm] ‘chocolate’? The Wiktionary entry is here. In his etymological dictionary of Armenian, Adjarian says that the first attestation known to him is found in an 1884 French-Armenian dictionary (scroll down here), and similarly, it is attested a German-Armenian dictionary from around the same time (here). Adjarian offers no etymology.
(This recent work (1995) suggests a connection to Arabic طرم ṭirm, ṭarm “honey, honeycomb” (also “cream, butter”?). But I wonder about 19th-century Western Armenian [d] from Arabic ط, but OK. And I am not sure what the exact semantic connection would be. In reference to cocoa butter? Or was the form of early chocolate bars like that of modern ones, with separate, somewhat honeycomb-like waffle-like squares to be broken off individually? Or was the reference to bon-bons with a syrupy filling that broke open like a honeycomb cell?)
Dating advice aside, while innumerable close variations on the theme of tulip do not make it universal (Turkish lale leads us to a good number of exceptions; Uzbek lola, Croatian lala, …) it has wide coverage in Europe. Asia and Africa too. I remind Hatters of Gujarati ટ્યૂલિપ. “Ṭyūlipa.” Says it all.
The Navajo eludes me.
In Europe yes. In regions where they grow in the wild (two freinds of mine once took a trip to Kalmykian steppe to look at them) there are, apparently, local terms. In the Persian world it is lala.
Somewhat perplexing beginning of Arabic Wikipedia:
، ويُسمّى في العربية اللَعْلَع (Tulip :بالإنجليزية) التُّولِيب
:/
I also came to mention Armenian սուրճ since I was also interested in this topic at some point and was surprised when I visited Armenia a decade ago to find they didn’t use a recognizable word for coffee. But I obviously arrived too late and it’s now been mentioned several times. Nobody mentioned the Armenian folk etymology that has the word originating from սեւ + ջուր “black water”, but you’ve probably all read that in Wiktionary by now.
I also seemed to recall that some languages, I think in Eastern Europe, called tea some variant of “herbata”, which I suppose would explain why it’s a near miss. Nobody has yet brought this up here but I supposed it’s more common knowledge?
Back to coffee, I was going to mention that years ago I had found that the Arabic word originally referred to a kind of wine and that coffee was regarded as something akin to a wine that not haram. I remember bringing this up in some language forum years ago and nobody believing me, but now the Wiktionary etymology section for قَهْوَة has been quite well fleshed out and does go into that.
I’ve actually been in Malaysia for a couple of months but “taxi” is not a word I’ve seen written in Chinese. I know a couple of local Hokkien speakers so I’ll try to remember to ask them.
Drasvi:
Yes, as you can see I mentioned the lala cluster.
@Noetica:
Someone wrote the following.
The Department of Peevery implicitly claimed and explicitly claims again that this statement is claiming that Cassiodorus was an emperor, which would be news to the four Ostrogothic kings he served. The Department further claims that what the statement is claiming should be construed as being claimed by the statement’s author.
The Department, as befits such an august and authoritative institution, does not speak in the first person, feels nothing, and never claimed anyone in this thread was blaming the Chinese for preserving a difference between Ca- and Ga-.
In a personal capacity, on the other hand, I was and remain puzzled you should seek examples of names that begin with Ca, Ka, or Ga. In English and all the few other European languages I speak, the first two have the same pronunciation, but the third has another. Your linguistic knowledge is far superior to mine, but why shouldn’t Chinese spelling reflect that difference somehow, even though Wikipedia tells me Mandarin does not have [ɡ] in its phonolgy?
I have nothing to add to David Eddyshaw’s comment on Latin spelling. However, Caesar’s is certainly the most famous name. I’m now curious about the history of its reception and transcription in China. I’d have guessed it was introduced by the Jesuits, but I doubt they were using classical pronunciation, humanists though they may have been. Yet Chinese Wikipedia has 盖乌斯·尤利乌斯·恺撒 (Gài wū sī·yóu lì wū sī·kǎi sā). Perhaps more important, both Cantonese and Classical Chinese Wikipedia have 凱撒, which Google Translate detects as Chinese (traditional) and then reads as Kǎi sǎ.
DE, how do you date proto-Oti-Volta
By guessing. However, very soon I shall be doing it by Bayesian guessing, and all shall tremble at my power! Bwahahahahah!
However, I salute your bold implied hypothesis. The facts that I have outlined are also consistent with a dating of proto-Oti-Volta to later than 1492. However, I suspect that such thinking is deliberately encouraged by Qanon and the other tools of the Great America Hoax. Oh yes.
Yes, GP, that was indeed a silly slip. I should have written “two prominent Roman statesman”. But it’s irrelevant to the matter of how Chinese has adopted historical names beginning with Ca, Ka, or Ga – among which I do not (and did not) distinguish for present purposes. Nor, it seems on evidence shown above, does Cantonese draw sharp lines between them. I am not including words like Caesar with a diphthong whose first element is given as an a. It did not occur to me that this needed explicit clarification, but perhaps I was in error there also.
As for what David E says about Etruscans, I am agnostic and indifferent. I don’t see any genuine relevance to the question I raised about Chinese. But I would add that the ancient vicissitudes of c and g seem a good deal more complex than he suggests, on a survey of sources like Vox Latina.
Languagehat and David Marjanović,
Late response: I was typing on my phone and the words hæ, hả, mẹ were messed up then. But now I’m looking on my laptop and everything’s fine.
As for what David E says about Etruscans, I am agnostic and indifferent.
I thought that this was quite uncontroversial and widely accepted that C in words such as CAIVS or CNAEVS is just preservation of older spellings from the times before S. Carvilius Ruga invented the letter G. After all, proper names tend to resist spelling reforms. Think of all the Swedish names ending in -qvist or the Spanish spelling México instead of Méjico. Or even Romanian names stereotypically ending in -escu where the standard adjectival suffix is just -esc nowadays, even in this last example it is not just historical orthography but pronunciation as well.
Or was there a C-G alteration in Classical Latin outside of proper names?
Yes, prase: in some words related to viginti for example. Apparently we see an alternation between vig- and vic-. Can’t check: away from my books, etc.
@Andrew Dunbar
> I also seemed to recall that some languages, I think in Eastern Europe, called tea some variant of “herbata”, which I suppose would explain why it’s a near miss. Nobody has yet brought this up here but I supposed it’s more common knowledge?
But it was? Search for herbata on this page. 😉 Though while I politely called it a good argument above, if one speaks a modicum of English the term “herbal tea” floats around in one’s consciousness not only suggestively but also what would seem to be correctly.
@Noetica
For the vic-/vig- alterations, is it possible to rule out some sort of “lingua latina in bocca celtica” effect? Matasovic has PC *wikantt “twenty”.
The Hebrew for ‘tulip’ is צִבְעוֹנִי tsiv’oni lit. ‘colorful’.
To link a recent theme back to the OP, “coffee” has recently entered the active vocabulary of one of my younger children; however due to the peculiar sound-change principles governing his inchoate idiolect, the initial /k/ has become a /g/.
I don’t see any genuine relevance to the question I raised about Chinese.
The relevance is that your examples of a supposed fluctuation between initial /k/ and /g/ in Latin were both incorrect. It is not the case that “g and c often alternate in Latin anyway”, except by devoicing before voiceless consonants in clusters. Isolated and problematic cases like “viginti” do not amount to “often.”
All this may be indeed of no relevance to your point, but it was introduced as supporting evidence for that point (whatever it is) by yourself.
Vox Latina gives no support to your contention about Latin c and g; you will find, however, that it does explain my point about the spelling of Roman praenomina (and the relevance of Etruscan), about which you airily proclaim yourself “agnostic.”
Michiel de Vaan’s etymological dictionary of Latin says
Numbers are cross-linguistically prone to remodelling by analogy of this sort, unsurprisingly.
(I think we ourselves discussed the tendency for successive numbers to end up alliterating.)
While I’m on the subject, an unexpected Latin g reflex in place of an etymologically expected c, found (as here) consistently in all appearances of the word, is of course not an instance of any kind of “alternation” in Latin at all: this is a confusion of synchronic and diachronic.
(partly following MMcM)
“Tradition” in a religious/Fiddler on the Roof
which seems to me a perfect example, since the practices claimed as Antient Jewish Tradition* in that play are by and large fairly new (i’m not sure anything in there predates institutionalized hasidism, so at most a century), exclusive to yiddish jewry, and far from universal within yiddish jewry – when not blatantly historically inaccurate**. and, most impressively, presented in so anodyne and vague a way that with a few changes to the religious vocabulary and some renaming of characters the play could be presented as set in 1850s ireland. the amazing thing about Fidler Afn Dakh as a translation is that makes a jewish play out of the goyish garbage of the english Fiddler.
herbata
i’ve always understood this cluster as semantically distinct from the “tea/chai” one, because its primary reference is not “C. sinensis”, but “plant-based infusion”, of which “C. sinensis infusion” is a popular case. i don’t know if the languages that use it are consistent in how (or whether) they go about specifying “C. sinensis infusion”, but i wouldn’t be surprised if at least some use the opposite strategy to english’s “herbal tea”.
.
* why, you ask? rabid anticommunism, basically, which is what drove the idea that the sanitized, depoliticized, teleologically zionist/assimilationist fantasies in zborowski & herzog’s Life Is With People were the actual history and “culture of the shtetl”. dovid katz describes the process as it plays out in yiddish literature here; Fiddler is exhibit A for the results in popular culture.
** in particular, the idea that the proper role for a man is breadwinner. this is arrant garbage, in a traditional yiddish jewish context. men who “must / scramble for a living / feed a wife and children” – though the majority – were considered to be blatantly failing in their traditional role, which was to be as removed as possible from the provision of material resources and to focus on study. naturally, meeting this ideal was only possible for the rich; the rest were “ameratsem” [literally ‘men of the land’: peasants/workingmen –> uneducated men –> dunces/stupid men], a category whose jewishness was questionable.
Data point: all the herbata and herbatka I’ve had in Poland was black tea, and fruit tea is sold as herbata owocowa (4.11 Mghits), containing an adjective formed from “fruit”.
@Noetica, of course. What I maybe (or not) meant to add about the lala cluster is purely subjective : depending on your geographical position this lala cluster and tulip cluster may look entirely comparable in size as they do to me (or may be the latter may seem to be an ‘excpetion’:)).
But of course you expect Japanese to borrow from English (and Chinese), not Persian.
But another point which some may miss is that it has quite a reputation as a spring wild flower (becuase I think most think rather about the Tulip mania and Tulip era) – and is indeed impressive as such.
Cf. Bodrogligeti, A Grammar of Chagatay p.39:
_______
Yašunup gul yüzüngdin bāğlarda, cačïp lāla čïqïban tağlarda.
(DN243v:9) ‘The rose hides from your face in the gardens. The tulip escapes and seeks refuge in the mountains.’ [35]
[35] Mountains [tağlar] symbolize wilderness as opposed to gardens [bāğlar).
_______
(DN is Yūsuf Amīrī, Dahnāma)
@rozele
> i’ve always understood this cluster as semantically distinct from the “tea/chai” one, because its primary reference is not “C. sinensis”, but “plant-based infusion”, of which “C. sinensis infusion” is a popular case. i don’t know if the languages that use it are consistent in how (or whether) they go about specifying “C. sinensis infusion”, but i wouldn’t be surprised if at least some use the opposite strategy to english’s “herbal tea”.
I don’t know if that’s true for people in general. If someone offers you tea you’re almost just as likely to end up with a rooibos, mint or blackberry tisane, but presumably that’ll differ by generation and locale. Also compare the common form of green tea and mint mixed together. In French I believe the distinction between thé and tisane is always clear.
When it was stated earlier that herbata would make it a near miss I had assumed it would be either etymologically related to tisane or yet another word like tisane that sounds nearly identical by sheer coincidence. It simply being herb + tea takes away what I saw as the foundation of the argument.
But I have no stake in claiming they’re all the same. I’m perfectly happy saying they’re effectively two or three different words because pronunciation or semantic field shifted beyond some threshold. Within the specific context of internal consistency, however, I object to claiming that’s a near miss while coffee is not.
For an apparently unrelated word for “hashish,” google translate will point you toward Urdu چرس and/or Hindi चरस. But that’s the source of a previously-unknown-to-me loanword that comes out “charas” in English, and wikipedia advises me that it’s a subtly different thingie from hashish due to a different production process, although I take it the two are pretty interchangeable from the smoker’s perspective. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charas
But a better counterexample to the universality-of-hashish proposal is welcomed.
David E:
I knew as I wrote that I was preparing for myself a stern reproof from those who know far more than I do about the phonetics, phonology, and spelling of Old and Classical Latin. If I “airily” proclaim myself agnostic on these issues it is for a good reason: to wit, I don’t know. Given time and interest I might well begin to know, but I have neither at my disposal as things stand.
I did and do suspect however, with some foundation, that issues concerning c and g in Latin are not as straightforward as “blame the Etruscans”. Could it be that from inscriptional confusions involving virco and virgo we are to draw simple, long-settled, and uncontestable conclusions, for example? Good. I am as agnostic and as indifferent as before, just as I am – for purposes here, I stress – concerning the final truth about Latin gn in various contexts (much discussed in Vox L).
I simply posed a question about Chinese jia- for ka- or ca-. I did not seek to distinguish these in any way from ga-, which I note incidentally as an old spelling variant (at least) when we turn to firmly Latin-based European examples as opposed to Canada.
I’ll still like to see more European–Chinese evidence, and get more of a lead on that question. Bathrobe’s conjecture concerning Cantonese with its ga- is helpful. But there’s a lot further to go. (Whether it will be progressed here is another question; but if not here, where?)
I did and do suspect however, with some foundation, that issues concerning c and g in Latin are not as straightforward as “blame the Etruscans”.
I would really let this argument go if I were you. There is no confusion, fluctuation, or alternation between g and c in Latin. Stick to the Chinese, where things are more productively messy.
Letting it go is exactly what I was explicitly intent on doing, Hat. It’s not relevant to the question I raised. Still, I recorded my suspicions. That’s all.
There is no confusion, fluctuation, or alternation between g and c in Latin.
Nor hesitation, repetition or deviation, I should hope.
Wait, ameratsem? Is that `am-eretz with the Hebrew plural -im added on at the end? If so, it seems like unusually clear evidence that -im had become a productive plural ending in Yiddish…
I noticed that too. The Biblical Hebrew is sg. עַם הָאָרֶץ ʽam hāʼāreṣ, pl. עַמֵּי הָאֲרָצוֹת ʽammēi hāʼărāṣôṯ ‘nation(s) of the land(s)’. In context, the singular usually means ‘people (collective sg.) of (this) land’, i.e. some number of Israelites, whereas the plural, derogatorily, means ‘people of other lands’, equivalent to גּוֹיִּים gôyyîm ‘nations’. In later usage, it looks like ʽam hāʼāreṣ, like gôy, is back-formed from the plural to mean ‘a non-Jew’, and by extension ‘an ignorant, non-observant Jew’. The Yiddish must be a folk pluralization on top of that. I think there are examples of the same kind of pluralization in substandard Israeli Hebrew, but I can’t come up with any.
ʽam is better translated ‘people’ (a collective noun), not ‘nation’. A commonality is implied, but not a common polity.
Nor hesitation, repetition or deviation, I should hope.
How have I missed learning about that show until now? (Well, I don’t remember learning about it…)
Kenneth Williams was the best.
charas
On the track of the origin of this word: *carassa in Turner and an account of its production (middle of page 277).
hashish
I can’t recall ever hearing a word of this type being used to designate cannabis products in colloquial Turkish conversation, and I live with a posse of university-age young men who have Kurdish and Turkish rap playing all the time and whose cousins all grow cannabis in their mountain villages. What I do hear is esrar, and also kubar. This latter word is an alteration of Arabic غبار ġubār ‘dust’. The Turkish Dialect Dictionary says kubar is attested simply in the meaning “dust from sifted straw” in the region of Antep. Newspaper accounts of police busts just use the words esrar and kubar too.
(Haşhaş is the everyday word for “poppy seeds”, as used in pastries and breads.)
The fun part is that Etruscan, Cantonese and Mandarin had/have an aspiration contrast, while Latin had a voice contrast instead…
That’s amazing.
And people talk all the time about starting a new tradition.
Indeed. When the man said “This do in remembrance of me”, he certainly did not know (qua man) that the tradition he clearly intended to start would still be persisting two millennia later across a world far larger than he knew anything of (qua man). Per contra, people do consciously intend to form traditions that in the end don’t outlast the year.
@DM: useful!
@Lameen @Y: -im/-em certainly has been productive in yiddish, and certainly not only with loshn-koydesh stems that originally used it – i don’t quite know the parameters for what kinds of stems or semantic areas. i’m not certain whether it still is, either, except for sarcastic nonce coinages (i’m trying to think of ones i’ve heard, but can’t bring one to mind – i think they’ve tended to use the -onem version, borrowed from “rabonem”* for extra sarcasm).
.
* which is understood as more respectful than the alternative, “rabeyem”
How have I missed learning about that show until now?
Whaaa???? I rather assumed knowing it was ‘table stakes’ for commenting here.
Kenneth Williams was the best.
Absolutely. (Clement Freud was the most annoying: sneaking in at the last few seconds of the minute.)
rabonem comes from רַבָּנִים rabānîm, pl. of Aramaic רַבָּן rabān, lit. ‘our master’, but rabānîm ended up as the suppletive plural of Hebrew רַב raḇ ‘master’ and of רַבִּי rabî ‘my master’. The three titles were used in different circumstances: raḇ was Babylonian, rabî was Palestinian, rabān was a president of the Sanhedrin.
These days rav is a religious authority, but can be any kaker with pretensions (and optionally a criminal record), while rabi / rebbe is reserved for the heads of Hasidic courts, AFAIK.
Ed.: I didn’t know about rabeyem! It has no Hebrew equivalent.
I quoted a long comment by Xerîb that has disappeared.
…not all of us had an opportunity to grow up with the BBC. I watched my first Dr Who episode when I was over 25, maybe 30.
Thanks for the heads-up — I’ve restored it.
a category whose jewishness was questionable
An attitude which it was one of the Besht’s purposes to eradicate. He was not to know that the world-old plague of aristocracy would revive in his own movement after his death.
In later usage, it looks like ʽam hāʼāreṣ, like gôy, is back-formed from the plural to mean ‘a non-Jew’, and by extension ‘an ignorant, non-observant Jew’.
Goy, yes; amhoretz, not so much. I don’t see any evidence that it went through a period of meaning ‘non-Jew’; the semantic shift is more easily explained as ‘Israelite’ > ‘rural Israelite/Jew’ > ‘ignorant Jew’, the same basic development as hick, which began life as a rhyming nickname for Richard.
my understanding of the “non-jew” part of the meaning – i hasten to say: without the languages to read the relevant sources properly – is that it’s about the open hostility between the supposed-“returnee” elite lineages and the rural people they found in the littoral, who were not necessarily thrilled at their self- or imperially-appointed rule. that’s clear in all layers (if i understand the scholarship right) of the tanakh, with the rural wrongdoers depicted in all kinds of ways. from the people who put up asherahs on the high places to the ones targeted by ezra & nehemiah’s purges to the assimilated idumeans and such to the divinely-murderable parts of the erev rav on the way across the sinai. whoever they are in the situation, they’re doing israelite/judean Wrong, and the rabbinic canon makes certain the association between that and rural stubbornness persists.
Similar development to “heathen”/”pagan.”
What those countryfolk get up to is scandalous. I think it’s something to do with all those maypoles.
Yes, DE. Like thede also, never to be confused with thead: a brewer’s tap-hose, as OED informs us. “a1825 thead, the tall wicker strainer placed in the mash-tub over the hole in the bottom, that the wort may run off clear. R. Forby, Vocabulary of East Anglia (1830)”. Forms of thede were anciently used as an alternative to biblical nations meaning “gentiles” (OED, †thede 1b).
Meanwhile on the other matter (on which I am firmly – nay, militantly – agnostic): The entity denoted by qu alternates with [k] just like [g] does, and much that follows in that same section (“2.2.2.8 Alternations”) of Cser’s Phonology of Classical Latin. (Bold substituted here for angle brackets.) Or have I got my thedes and theads crossed? Very likely! Alternation¹, alternation², … Let’s use sign language instead for the rest of this thread.
In Waama, proto-Oti-Volta *g has become /k/, and *g͡b has become /k͡p/.
It is thus clear that Latin loans in Chinese have largely been transmitted via Waama; they must have been adopted into Waama during the period of Roman rule in the Atakora (or Atagora, as it is known in Latin: older inscriptions spell this Atacora, but the difference is purely orthographic.)
There are some difficulties with the timescale, however, as recent scholarship has revealed that the proto-Oti-Volta unity lasted at least until the last decade of the fifteenth century CE (drasvi et al, 2023.)
Jesuits were probably involved in some way. I mean, what aren’t they involved with? (Brown, 2003. Or was that Opus Dei? Either way, it stinks.)
Well DE, I just take the latter as a Faliscan [p]–[k] alternation corruption of iocus dei and move on. Time to drop the stick! But you’re obviously right about Waama (Osc. Bama[m], according to C Darling Buck, in The Quest for Proto-Cartesian Certainty in Ancient Italy, ed. Y et al.). May your wort ever run clear.
In defense of my interpretation, AFAIK עָם ʽām is never used in a singular meaning, except in this compound, and in the OT ʽam hāʼāreṣ always clearly refers to people of a territory, not farmers in particular. In Ezekiel 12:19 it refers to the Jews of Babylon, whom Ezekiel is ordered to address. As late as Ben Sira 50:19 we have, “and all ʽam hāʼāreṣ sang, praying before the Merciful”, describing an event at the Temple.
In defense of the ‘man of the earth’ interpretation, the prayer עָלֵינוּ לְשַׁבֵּחַ ʽālēinû lǝšabēaḥ ‘We Must Praise’ contains the doublet, “…that did not make us like the nations of the lands [גּוֹיֵי הָאֲרָצוֹת gōyēy hāʼărāṣôṯ, and did not set us as the families of the earth [מִשְׁפְּחוֹת הָאֲדָמָה mišpǝḥôṯ hāʼăḏāmâ].” ʼăḏāmâ is ‘soil’, often in an agricultural sense, not in the sense of ‘territory’. The prayer was probably written in the early centuries CE.
@Noetica:
Clarity would be aided by completing the quotation to a full sentence:
And much that follows in that same section, such as:
Your firmly—nay, militantly—agnostic motion to transfer this case from the Dept. of Peevery to the Dept. for the Complication of Simple Affairs is on the record. The Dept. of Peevery shall not fail to appeal in the appropriate administrative fora.
… to the Dept. for the Complication of Simple Affairs is on the record.
LoL.
When I briefly learned Italian, I got to rote-learn the contexts where ci became cce; and they were the same contexts where gi became je. It all seemed perfectly natural even for an English speaker. ‘We just talk’, as one of the class put it.
Y: There is of course no complete or Masorete-approved Hebrew text of Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, since it is excluded from the rabbinical canon of the Tanakh. I understand that enough different pieces have turned up in old MSS in Hebrew to have some Hebrew version of more than half of the whole work, so I’m guessing that’s your 50:19 source, although whether that depends on a single (and thus possibly idiosyncratic) MS or more evidence is not known to me.
The canonical Greek text is “καὶ ἐδεήθη ὁ λαὸς Κυρίου ῾Υψίστου ἐν προσευχῇ κατέναντι ἐλεήμονος” (“The people also prayed to the Lord Most High / In prayer before the Merciful One” in the first translation reachable from my chair and “And the people petitioned the Lord Most High / with prayer before the Merciful One” in the second*). The word λαὸς for “people” is about the most boringly obvious and unpoetic Greek lexical choice one could make …
*Brenton has it as “And the people besought the Lord, the most High, by prayer before him that is merciful,” which is word for word identical (modulo some spelling/punctuation variation) with the KJV.
I think there is also a Syriac version…
motion to transfer this case from the Dept. of Peevery to the Dept. for the Complication of Simple Affairs
Gosh, that’s what Trump is trying to do ! Such behavior (I’ve seen it called “doubling down”) may be one of them there anthropological constants:
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Anthropological constants (sameness and self-transcendence) enable to consider “the world of a man” and “a man in the world” in their indissoluble unity and mutual penetration as main ontological differences of a single anthropological integrity.
#
I have my doubts about the propriety of “mutual penetration”, but honesty is the best policy.
JWB: The quote from Ben Sira is ultimately from MS. B, one of the Hebrew sources found in the Cairo Genizah.
@drasvi: near as I can tell from <10 minutes poking around, many, though perhaps not all, current specialists think at least one of the extant Syriac versions of Sirach does not derive from the Greek but comes via some complicated path (possibly with a now-lost intermediate version in some other dialect of Aramaic) from the Hebrew original (or a Hebrew original – this was the days before Masoretic uniformity when there may have been considerable manuscript variation) back when Hebrew versions still existed in complete form. That Syriac is like Hebrew a Semitic language does not necessarily make it consistently easier to reverse-engineer the most likely original Hebrew text from the Syriac we have than from the Greek we have.
עם הארץ in Cairo Genizah MS B 19v, line 13: image here (with עם הארץ in the first half-line of the sixth line up from the bottom of the page) and transcription here. According to the index of passages on the website, the passage is not preserved in Hebrew in any other Cairo or Qumran document. B is in a careful hand and has the look of very fine manuscript, with marginal notations of alternative readings in some places.
Thanks, Xerîb. Whether or not MS B is a correct copy of the original, the point remains that someone used the expression to as the general collective ‘people of the country’, not far removed in time from when the pejorative singular עם הארץ ‘ignorant of the law’ started to be used.
Ed.: I stand corrected. MS B is 10th century CE (per Cambridge). The pejorative is used from Mishnaic times onward. That said, because of the pejorative meaning established around then, I don’t think a later copyist would have changed another expression to עם הארץ in this context.
Xerîb, thank you! I remember, I once spent some time browsing this site, but was not able to find it today (reasonably quickly at least).
Enough about Scripture, back to dope lingo. I lack Xerîb’s familiarity with the actual usage of young Turkish dope-smokers, but the (not necessarily reliable) internet tells me that haşiş [https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ha%C5%9Fi%C5%9F#Turkish] is at least *a* Turkish word for “hashish.” Of course, it’s an Arabic loanword, so maybe the young Turkish dope-smokers and rappers are all loyal Kemalists trying to purge the Sun Language of such borrowings?
Kemalism would be a relatively safe way to annoy The Man… so perhaps…
The online dictionary of the Türk Dil Kurumu (Turkish Language Association) founded by Kemal Atatürk and still funded I believe from out of his personal fortune (although Erdoğan was trying to take over the administration of that money, I recall), says the following for ḥaşiş:
The label eskimiş “old, obsolescent, old-fashioned, antiquated, superannuated, outdated, archaic” is the label the TDK uses for Ottoman words that are still sometimes encountered. The Kemalists themselves say that this words is outdated.
Note that all these words (esrar, kubar, ḥaşīş) are ultimately Arabic (see my comment above).
Giacomo P:
… Dept. for the Complication of Simple Affairs …
You offer a bouquet of florid conceits, not unpleasing; but perhaps it would be helpful for you to state your point, plainly and concisely.
Myself, I have already confessed to an entrenched unconcern (for present purposes) and lack of expertise on the topic of Latin phonology. Add Faliscan, Umbrian, Oscan … and crypto-Etruscan. I’ll confess to it all. I did however, let me once more spell out for any who have preferred merely to skim, evince curiosity over the sources of Mandarin jia- as a rendering of “foreign” ca-, broadened to words spelt ca-, ka-, or ga-.
If you find no value in my quote, which included the string “qu alternates with [k] just like [g] does” (with a clear invitation to read the rest of the relevant subsection), I remind you that I had simply posed a broad unqualified truth-seeking question: “And didn’t g and c often alternate in Latin anyway?” And I later wrote of likely different understandings of the term alternation.
I don’t know! David E and Hat sought to enlighten me. Like other old-hand Hatters, I welcome correction. But my quote was intended to support healthy doubt, when they asseverate for example that “there is no confusion, fluctuation, or alternation between g and c in Latin.” (Hat).
They claim to know, I claim not to know. But I do find evidence for such alternation and indeed confusion. “Colloquial Latin is characterised by the interchange of voiced and voiceless consonants in intervocalic positions”, writes Michael Lapidge in 2010; but for c ~ g he gives even non-intervocalic examples from De aliquibus raris fabulis: “fracmenta [for fragmenta] … gremium [for cremium]” (his brackets). In other sources are attested macestratos, necotia, acna, lece, pucnando, and, as I have already adduced, virco.
I don’t know what to make of all that. Right now I don’t care much! But by nature and training I prefer not to accept to categorical statements at face value. Good luck to anyone who might. Que les seves tulipes floreixin per sempre. I’m all for difference.
(= “not to accept categorical statements”, bien entendu)
Fair enough, fair enough. I doubtless spoke too absolutely, as is my unfortunate but inveterate wont.
@ Noetica:
I had a simple peeving point: Cassiodorus was no emperor.
I then had a pair of observations which prompted a pair of questions.
In English, in Italian, and by all accounts in Latin, the names of Caligula, Caracalla, Carus and Carinus start with /k/ while the names of Galba, Gallienus and Galerius start with /g/. Likewise, In Chinese the former four emperors start with 卡 and the latter three emperors start with 加.
Why shouldn’t Chinese preserve the distinction European languages make? Why did you lump Ga together with Ca and Ka to begin with?
As I already averred above, this was and remains a plain, non-rhetorical question. I know no Chinese. Maybe the overly consistent correspondence Ca = 卡 and Ga = 加 in the names of Roman emperors is suspicious? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and all that. But I definitely expected the answer to come from the Chinese side of the equation.
I’ve been bemused that your reaction should instead be to question the European distinction between Caligula, Caracalla, Carus and Carinus on the /k/ side, and Galba, Gallienus and Galerius on the /g/ side. I’ve been further bemused that this questioning should set you off on increasingly complicated tangents about Latin phonology.
I couldn’t see what was gained, other than confusion, by introducing different understandings of the term alternation. I’m now equally lost as to the relevance of ancient Roman mistakes and colloquialisms.
In present-day Italy too, dialectal pronunciations can voice capocollo into gabagool. Needless to say we still have alternation² such as agire, un’azione, un atto (“to act, an action, an act”), or more narrowly io cossi, tu cocesti (“I cooked, you cooked”). The dictionary even grants that in standard Italian a fig and someone (or something) cool can be equally correctly spelled and pronounced fico or figo, which is more than can be said for Latin viginti.
And yet Caligula, Caracalla, Carus and Carinus have /ka/ while Galba, Gallienus and Galerius have /ga/. Do we have any evidence Latin didn’t already make the same distinction? In this thread we still don’t, complicated tangents notwithstanding.
I remain unconvinced that the proper response is to maintain a militant Socratic agnosticism and conclude we cannot possibly tell how ancient Romans pronounced these names. Not to mention that the Chinese surely didn’t hear them from ancient Romans, but rather from modern Europeans whose pronunciation I’m even less inclined to be agnostic about.
Good luck to me! Il faut cultiver notre jardin. My own flowering plants are hoya, passiflora and wisteria. I hope everyone’s chosen flora flourishes.
Ah, well if that’s all it is we can safely move on now. Gaudeix de la vida, amb tots els seus colors variats.
Why shouldn’t Chinese …
Well there’s your problem straight away. There’s no such language ‘Chinese’. There’s Pǔtōnghuà previously known as Mandarin (approximately) by Europeans. There’s Cantonese, there’s Shanghainese — all three mutually unintelligible, but the latter two more closely related than to Pǔtōnghuà.
C and S were the more likely contact languages with the shaky Chinese ex-Empire through the C19th when Europeans were busy raping and pillaging there, so are the more likely sources of pronunciations both for ‘international’ words the Westerners were bringing and for names of stuff the pillagers were taking away.
I doubt any of the raping and pillaging included much discussion of Roman Emperors — however they were pronounced by Europeans at the time.
Furthermore neither C nor S have secure writing systems. (The writing system was developed to represent Mandarin.) Any written forms of Roman Emperors would have used more-or-less random soundalikes. We’ve then had sound pattern shifts since C19th layered on top. So however those written renderings might have sounded at the time of European contact is not how they sound now; neither does how they sound now in Pǔtōnghuà bear strong relationship to how they sound in C nor S — if you can find anybody who’ll admit to speaking those these days.
So to make any sense of the issue, you need to know when did each Emperor’s name enter the Sinosphere, and where — as well as how did the introducing Westerner pronounce them.
(And none of the above should be news to Noetica.)
Maybe the overly consistent correspondence Ca = 卡 and Ga = 加 in the names of Roman emperors is suspicious?
Yes. And good luck with finding any explanation, but I suspect the Jesuits would be behind much of it.
i am thrilled to be able to hang out in a place where that last sentence can be written, and my response on reading it is: “well, that certainly makes a lot of sense!”
i feel like my 12-year old self, having just finished Foucault’s Pendulum, would be very proud of me.
I suspect the Jesuits would be behind much of it.
I blame it on the boogie.
Why are people confused that Chinese would map the voiceless-voiced pair of /k/ and /ɡ/ to the aspirated-unaspirated pair of /kʰ/ and /k/ respectively? The latter palatalized to /tɕ/ in Mandarin jia, but that’s basically what’s happening.
Most English speakers wouldn’t think twice about pronouncing Icelandic kalli with a /k/ and galli with a /ɡ/ even though the distinction in Icelandic is one of aspiration, between /kʰ/ and /k/, just as in Chinese. Not to mention in pinyin spellings of Mandarin words that use k and g.
And why wouldn’t Chinese speakers try to capture something of /ɡ/ in the original language even though they don’t use the sound in their own language (except as occasional allophones)? We go through the trouble of writing /ɣ/ in loanwords as ‘gh’ even though English doesn’t have the sound itself. English speakers might imitate the /y/ in French as /juː/ and thereby preserve the distinction between /u/ and /y/ even if the latter doesn’t occur in English.
The approximate mapping of phonetic categories even where the phonetic match is imperfect is common in borrowings. I think the weirdness introduced by the Mandarin palatalization might be throwing people off.
Giacomo Ponzetto conjectured this: he was evidently right.
Of course, one question related to the “universal-word” thing is do all languages even *have* a word for X. Not only may some languages be spoken in cultures unfamiliar with X and thus not needing a word for it, some languages may operate (in a given area) at a higher level of generality than others and thus not draw fine distinctions that another language’s lexicon does. This came up a bit up-thread w/r/t “tea” words, which do not apparently all have the same scope of reference in all languages.
So it may well be the case that modern Turkish does not actually have a word for “hashish” in the AmEng sense of that word (at least as it stood by my own Seventies adolescent years …) where it specifically contrasts with “mari[h/j]uana,” with each referring to a distinct product derived from cannabis plants and neither having a scope encompassing the other. “Esrar” seems to be a hypernym covering both. Indeed, while I know relying on google translate can be hazardous, when I asked it what Turkish “esrar” meant in various other Turkic languages extant in formerly Soviet regions I got: “marixuana” (Azerbaijani and Uzbek), “марихуана” (Kazakh & Kyrgyz), and “mariuana” (Turkmen). But when I asked it what English “hashish” meant in the same languages I got: “həşiş” (Azerbaijani), “гашиш” (Kazakh & Kyrgyz), “hashish” (Turkmen), and “gashish” (Uzbek).
OTOH, it does appear that there are multiple languages out there (especially in or near the Middle East) where the word with the same etymon as English “hashish” does have wider scope and encompasses English “mari[h/j]uana.”
‘Most English speakers wouldn’t think twice about pronouncing Icelandic kalli with a /k/ and galli with a /ɡ/ even though the distinction in Icelandic is one of aspiration’
Based on the phonetics exercises I did in my masters, I, along with a number of my classmates, distinguish English initial stops based on aspiration, not voicing, making this mapping even less surprising.
‘Why are people confused that Chinese would map the voiceless-voiced pair of /k/ and /ɡ/ to the aspirated-unaspirated pair of /kʰ/ and /k/ respectively?’
Isn’t Canada confusing because it’s /k/ (granting that the source is a dialect with voicing, rather than aspiration, as the key distinction) being mapped to *k rather than *kʰ? It’s a phonetic equivalence in defiance of phonological expectation. That sort of thing isn’t surprising in isolation (I have occasionally misheard Dutch words because I understood a [t] as a [d], or a [p] as a [b]), but it is a little surprising in an established loan. That said, I’m often very confused by what is accounted a satisfying adaptation into Chinese, and Canada doesn’t seem more than normally weird to me.
1) The whole list of Roman emperors seems to have been transcribed into Chinese (early written Mandarin or 19th-century Classical Chinese) in one go, probably later than Canada and definitely not in the same circumstances.
2) Yes, English and Sinitic both have aspirated plosives… but the Sinitic ones are much louder. Even apart from most non-Pinyin transcription systems, I’m not surprised European fortes, even aspirated initial ones as in English, were borrowed as voiceless lenes on a few occasions. Navajo, which takes aspiration very seriously, too, even seems to borrow English aspirates as unaspirated consistently.
3) Dutch is in the aspiration-free belt across West Germanic.
‘but the Sinitic ones are much louder.’
I’m not sure that’s meaningfully true for my idiolect. I don’t mean that I normally aspirate stops quite as much (though for the dentals, I suspect Mandarin [tʰ] and [t] are very close indeed to what I normally do), but I don’t think it’s far off. I can’t imagine the difference causing any mapping issues. But since my own variety is obviously not the source, so this is admittedly entirely beside the point.
(Point 3 was a premise for my comment about Dutch, which I maybe should have made explicit — that might not be as much in the common knowledge pool as I’d assumed.)
some languages may operate (in a given area) at a higher level of generality than others and thus not draw fine distinctions that another language’s lexicon does
I was just thinking about this, recalling Lucretius’ complaint about his patrii sermonis egestas compared with Greek, and then reading Ashton’s introduction to her Swahili grammar, where she makes some percipient remarks about how individual Swahili words often correspond to a wide range of English words, which she characterises as “flexibility” (not “poverty”, honour to her memory), going on to contrast the “precision” evident in Swahili’s multiple fine tense distinctions, elaborate productive verbal derivation system and subtle marking of focus distinctions (though she doesn’t call it that, this being only 1944.)
Lucretius was just moaning about how Latin didn’t “have a word” for homoeomeria, though it doesn’t actually slow him up any. But there is often an implication that languages with more distinct lexical items are more “complex” (and thus better and more civilised, by implication.)
It occurred to me that this is just the lexical equivalent of the grammatical synthetic-versus-agglutinating dimension: and in fact, a language like classical Greek (or English) which famously has a “large vocabulary” is here the equivalent of agglutinating: it spells out piecemeal and explicitly in the lexicon itself what languages with “small” vocabularies do with context, usually every bit as unambiguously (if necessary.)
I thought I had responded to David E.’s 11:57, but there was some sort of temporary internet connectivity failure here so maybe that got eaten/obliterated.
To restate one part of that lost comment, I am highly confident that even if Turkish “esrar” indifferently covers two distinct cannabis-based products that each has own name in English, Turkish consumers have adequate lexical resources (whether by fixed phrases or by ad hoc phrases that will in context be understood) of distinguishing between the two when they find it useful to do so.
David E:
Giacomo Ponzetto conjectured this [concerning ga- and ka- differentially into “Chinese”]: he was evidently right.
Depends on which way we take “evidently”.
Snippets from Crowdly Wisdom:
Then there’s the transcription table – from that same Wikipedia article “Transcription into Chinese characters”, which begins with “Transcription into Chinese characters is the use of traditional or simplified Chinese characters to phonetically transcribe the sound of terms and names of foreign words to the Chinese language.” In the table we find:
And so on and on. The whole table is worth close study. Heh, and this: “… 衣 (clothes) was added to other characters to permit 袈裟 jiāshā, the Chinese version of Sanskrit kasaya.”
I don’t think we’ve arrived at anything resembling the certainty Descartes thought he’d achieved at the end of his Meditations.
Now this:
Lucretius was just moaning about how Latin didn’t “have a word” for homoeomeria, though it doesn’t actually slow him up any.
As you might easily have already known with a little thought on the matter, David, at the mere reading of the word homoeomeria like FL Lucas and like Chaucer’s cook I could claw myself with pleasure. Yes, I’m that kind of philosopher. But this would be unseemingly in so public a forum (eh Stu?). I’ll just record my delight at the Lucretian invocation of this notion as a salient mereological error, and at any mention of it in the Hattery. Anecdotes could be told.
= useemly
(I was thinking in Bulgarian.)
= unseemly
(I wasn’t thinking at all.)
By the way, Trask (honour to his memory) distinguishes an alternation 1 and an alternation 2, in his dictionary concerning phonetics and phonology whose name escapes me for the moment.
That’s a borrowing into Old Chinese, of no relevance for 19th- and 20th-century transcriptions into Mandarin or Cantonese.
China has “phonosemantic matching” down to a fine art now. After experimenting with transcriptions of Coca Cola that contained an actual la, such as “bite the wax tadpole”, it settled on one with le that means “Taste and Enjoy™”.
That’s a borrowing into Old Chinese, of no relevance for 19th- and 20th-century transcriptions into Mandarin or Cantonese.
Completely irrelevant? Maybe. Then someone should go and fix it in the Wikipedia article. Same with those Old Chinese renderings of IKEA and Ithaca, while they’re at it.
“Taste and Enjoy™”
Yes, they do strive to be kind and positive in the meanings associated with the sounds they assign. Certainly in naming countries they do.
Homoeomeria (philosophy):
Fleeming Jenkin!!
Fleeming Jenkin
On reading yet another blast from the past such as the following, I ask myself: what exactly did this “Charles Darwin” accomplish ?
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In June 1867, Jenkin reviewed Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), in The North British Review.[17] Jenkin criticized Darwin’s evolutionary theory by suggesting that Darwin’s interpretation of natural selection couldn’t possibly work, as described, if the reigning hypothesis of inheritance, blending inheritance, was also valid.
…
Jenkin also referred to Lord Kelvin’s recent (incorrect) estimation of the age of the earth. Kelvin had calculated that Fourier’s theory of heat and the actions of tides on the earth’s rotation allowed for an earth no more than 100 million years old and doubted in so far the case for evolution based on the chronology.[20] Criticism by Jenkin and A.W. Bennett, in fact, led Darwin to investigate and discuss the mechanism of inheritance more thoroughly. Darwin avoided a direct confrontation (as well in the case of chronology), but confessed that some of Jenkin’s arguments were troubling—so troubling, in fact, that Darwin largely abandoned blending inheritance as the potential mechanism for his own inheritance model, pangenesis, in favor of a competing model of inheritance that derived from Lamarckism.[21]
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I don’t expect historical knowledge to jump into my lap. But I do expect there are explanations of why this image of “Charles Darwin” as the Madonna of biology has been built up over the decades.
As you might easily have already known with a little thought on the matter
Sometimes you slip my mind altogether, Noetica. Irresponsible of me, I admit.
Now that’s a relief.
Uh… Darwin’s theory of heredity is in fact wrong, heredity is not blending, and that is why natural selection works.
Neat, eh?
explanations of why this image of “Charles Darwin” as the Madonna of biology
if memory serves, the introduction or first chapter of stephen jay gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory deals in some detail with both why the theory of evolution through natural selection came to be and has continued to be called “darwinism” and why he – as someone (co-)responsible for some significant advancements and modifications to the contemporary forms of that theory – believes that it still makes sense to attach darwin’s name to it.
Fleeming Jenkin is good. Probably would be drinking buddies with Wynkyn de Worde if they lived in the same century.
Yes indeed!
David M:
On “jiāng (江), originally krong” and all that, the matter seems enormously complex. Good luck if it’s within your expertise; it’s certainly beyond mine.
This supposed connexion with krong (note the similarity to Thai klong or khlong, and much more) is exhaustively examined, and the evidence found wanting, in Zhang, Hongming, and 张洪明. “CHINESE ETYMA FOR RIVER / 汉语河流词源考.” Journal of Chinese Linguistics 26, no. 1 (1998): 1–47. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23756701.
I can’t pore through all that. But a general hypothesis arising would be that in older Chinese many elements now systematically pronounced with something like /jia/ were pronounced something like /ka/, and that when new words came along (Canada, California) there was a learnèd tendency to adopt them as if they had existed in the older language with /ka/ and should therefore now be taken as beginning with /jia/.
Y and Hat:
Fleeming Jenkin is good.
Good he may be, but he misses the main point of homeomeria in Lucretius (say nothing here about Aristtole): “the doctrine of homoeomeria, which taught that all things contained the materials of everything else in a latent state …”. No. The more natural reading of Lucretius is that the homeomeria theory he ascribes to Anaxagoras says: The minute parts of a whole body are of just the same material nature as the whole body. Bones are made of minute bone-like items, all the say down.
In ridiculing this notion Lucretius went on to say the sorts of things Jenkin says; but they are not essential to the idea of homeomeria itself. The confusion is at least as old as the Renaissance return of De rerum natura.
Another confusion (tending exactly the other way) that I have encountered: Homeomeria has it that all the minute constituents of a body are of the same nature as each other. No, that should better be called homogeneity.
Damn, missed the editing deadline. A revision (which I hope Hat will substitute for my scrawling about Jenkin, above):
Good he may be, but he misses the main point of homeomeria in Lucretius (I say nothing here about Aristotle): “the doctrine of homoeomeria, which taught that all things contained the materials of everything else in a latent state …”. No. The more natural reading of the homeomeria theory that Lucretius ascribes to Anaxagoras: The minute parts of a whole body (excluding bodies that are manifestly variegated in gross appearance, we might add) are of just the same material nature as the whole body. Bone is made of minute bone-like items for example, all the way down.
In ridiculing this notion Lucretius went on to toss around the sorts of things Jenkin says; but they are not essential to the idea of homeomeria itself. The confusion is at least as old as the Renaissance return of De rerum natura.
Another confusion (tending exactly the other way) that I have encountered: Homeomeria has it that all the minute constituents of a body (excluding bodies that are manifestly variegated in gross appearance) are of the same nature as each other. No, that should better be called homogeneity.
The Duolingo blogger has posted a followup covering many of the points brought up in the comments here. She’s withdrawn the claim for “coffee” because of the exceptions as mentioned above in Armenian, Ethiopian languages, and Siouan languages, and a few others; there’s also a fuller discussion of words for oranges and tomatoes. No exceptions yet found for “chocolate”.
Norwegian, she says, has drosje for taxi, from a Russian word for a type of carriage, also borrowed into English as droshky.
Yes, I thought of mentioning it, but we also have the international taxi, and drosje is probably fading (very) slowly out of use.
No exceptions yet found for “chocolate”.
I’m miffed that the Duolingo blogger ignores Western Armenian տուրմ durm ‘chocolate’ (also occasionally referenced in marketing and branding in Eastern Armenian in modern Armenia), which I mentioned in a comment above.
In addition to this, Louis-Jacques Dorais (2010) The Language of the Inuit: Syntax, Semantics, and Society in the Arctic, p. 154, offers Inuit aukuluk “chocolate”:
To be broken down auk “blood”, -uluk, dimunitive suffix, I gather.
For “chocolate” in Lakota, the New Lakota Dictionary (2022) of the Lakota Language Consortium gives čhaŋmháŋska ǧí, literally “brown candy”, made up of čhaŋmháŋska “candy” (which the dictionary derives from čhaŋháŋpi “sugar” [originally in reference to maple sugar: čháŋ “tree” + haŋpí “sap”] + háŋske “is long”) and ǧí “brown”>. Also, for “hot chocolate”, asáŋpiǧí kȟályapi, literally, “a boiling of brown milk [i.e. chocolate milk]”.
Drosche/droske had fallen out of use in Copenhagen before I had occasion to use it. It’s taxa now. Whereas hyrevogn was something I heard my grandparents use seriously, even though ODS (edited 1921) calls it even older.
(Yes, taxa, claimed to be directly from LL taxa through taksameter and Taksamotorkompagniet. Somebody decided that the French were wrong, it seems. Or somebody took out a sufficiently distinct trademark and cornered the market. Taksameterbil may also have been cromulent WIWAL. ODS edited 1946 has Taksi and Taksa as “little used” and explains them as taksameterdrosker).
Come to think of it, la’ os ta’ en bil = ‘let’s take a taxi,” while la’ os ta’ bilen = ‘let’s take the car’. If you ask a Dane if a taxi is called en bil, however, they will deny it. But taksameterbil does live on in this guise. (Bil, of course, is a shortening of automobil).
German has Taxi n., but regionally also Taxe f….
Oh, it’s way beyond mine; I’m just saying 江 is definitely too old to be relevant for modern Mandarin borrowing practices.
Noooooooooooo! Don’t boil milk for drinks, that ruins the flavor!
Reminds me of one of KIngsley Amis’ novels in which he writes of taxis in Wales labelled TACSI “for the benefit of Welsh people who had never seen a letter X.”
Actually, some of our famous bilingual road signs are a bit like that: the usual names of many places in Wales in English are, by a curious coincidence, remarkably similar to the Welsh names. Personally, I’d just leave out the English versions, but no doubt that would be too Woke (as the English call it.)
OK aka okay
the usual names of many places in Wales in English are, by a curious coincidence, remarkably similar to the Welsh names.
New Zealand’s major cities/towns have Anglo names; but many of the smaller settlements only ever got a Māori name. How that got spelled in earlier colonial times was rather random. (And in some regions, the lengthening the macron represents is shown by doubling the vowel: Maaori.)
So the denizens (stirred up by a ‘troublesome priest’ of a mayor) had a huge debate about an ‘h’: at the Whangarei River’s mouth is a town to be spelled Wangarei.
(All stupidly academic, because the German phonologists put ‘Wh-‘ to represent something like Old English ‘hw-‘; only purists even try to pronounce it that way these days. Usually it’s realised as ‘f-‘.)
DE:
I’m just saying 江 is definitely too old to be relevant for modern Mandarin borrowing practices.
But I went on to suggest just how such characters, along with changes in the associated pronunciations, might indeed be relevant in modern times. Similarly to a checkered history of revisionist ideas about “original” sound values represented in Latin and Greek writing ultimately affecting the pronunciations of words in modern European languages.
DE
Another member of the Dave Conspiracy:
https://www.elsewhere.org/narbonic/52837.html
Oops! Sorry to DE, DM, and all the other notoriously (dangerously) erudite Davids out there. Among Australian philosophers a similar issue famously arises with Bruce [content warning].
I tend to keep quiet about being a notorious David.
what exactly did this “Charles Darwin” accomplish?
Exactly the same thing that Sir William Jones did: despite any number of adumbrators, they were the first to found a sustained research tradition that persists to this day.
Fleeming Jenkin
As I suppose every Hattic knows, Fleeming is pronounced with the DRESS vowel.
But a general hypothesis arising would be that in older Chinese many elements now systematically pronounced with something like /jia/ were pronounced something like /ka/, and that when new words came along (Canada, California) there was a learnèd tendency to adopt them as if they had existed in the older language with /ka/ and should therefore now be taken as beginning with /jia/.
This seems unnecessary. The Mandarin palatalization began around 1700 and ended around 1800, during which time both Canada and California were known to the Sinitic world. Consequently, Canada was written 加拿大 and pronounced Kānádà in Mandarin, gaa1 naa4 daai6 in Cantonese, Kâ-nâ-thai / Khà-na-tá in Hakka, Ka-ná-tāi / Kee-ná-tāi in Hokkien, etc. etc. The first of these palatalized to Jiānádà, its pronunciation today, whereas the others kept the original velar stop. (Note that some of these differences are in romanization conventions rather than in actual pronunciation.)
Yes, taxa, claimed to be directly from LL taxa through taksameter and Taksamotorkompagniet.
More likely from German Taxameter, which became taximètre in French (probably a classicizing spelling).
Personally, I’d just leave out the English versions
That would hardly be just to your Fellow-Countrymen who through no fault of their own speak only English.
That would hardly be just to your Fellow-Countrymen who only speak English
I have a high opinion of the di-Gymraeg. They can adapt: after all, if they can manage a difficult language like Saesneg, I’m sure they can manage Welsh. Even little children can speak that.
I believe you made the same remark about Ffrangeg, but surely one must stop somewhere. Buryat, like Welsh, is official in its subnational polity, and yet children do not seem to be managing with it.
I tend to keep quiet about being a notorious David.
Me, too. All through school/Uni/work there were far too many Davids. So I kept to my other name.
I have a high opinion of the di-Gymraeg.
Speaking as a Dafydd?
More likely from German Taxameter, which became taximètre in French […]
Most likely, yes, but the ODS seems to have missed that. TLFI even names the French peever (sorry, classicist) who argued for patterning the word after τάξις. (But the point about a hypothetical CL form probably using -i- is a good one. L metrum is postclassical, however, so we will never know–and it only refers to verse metre, so we may have to hand it to Théodore Reinach that taxamétre is a Latin-Greek horror).
Duden only has Taxa as the plural of Taxon, so taxa for a taxi still seems to be a Danish specialty. (Sw has taxi, and Nw drosje which is where we started).
Also Duden now wants me to click to accept ads or pay for access. It doesn’t complain about my adblocker yet.
Here in particular.
Now that’s just mean.
With è, because mètre counts as a single closed syllable.
In all such cases, interrupt the loading of the page before the paywall/cookie notice/adblock detector comes up. If you happen not to press Esc at the right time, reload and try again. Even in this year 73 After Present, very few websites load their paywalls first.
With è — if God had intended for languages to have more than one accent, she’d have made them easier to tell apart.
Also, I’m effectively ad-blind. I don’t know if my adblocker helped, but I didn’t _notice_ any ads while there. And as I said, they aren’t detecting adblockers yet. (I’m actually more interested in blocking cookies and more annoyed at sites that want me to accept tracking by US megacorps if I don’t want to subscribe. I don’t think it helps with that to interrupt loading…)
Firefox’ “Reader View” helps in a lot of cases, too. My strategy currently is to try that, and if I still see the nag page, I find the info somewhere else. Or ask here.
It almost always does. Just shiver on the Esc key till nothing moves anymore.
What is that: “shiver on” a key ? I use a traditional keyboard, where for every key it’s clack! or nothing.
Perhaps you use a touchscreen keyboard ?
if God had intended for languages to have more than one accent, she’d have made them easier to tell apart
Therefore God ordered her son to hire apostles to write her word in polytonic Greek. (I guess niqqud and harakat don’t count as accents, otherwise she’d do it repeatedly.)
I wonder why the French did introduce the é/è distinction since the acute and grave are in a complementary distribution (alloaccents? allotones?). Perhaps the purpose was to provide the language nerds with something easy to learn. “Hey, I cannot hold but the simplest conversation, but I know this is spelled wrong” sort of stuff.
No. Just press again and again as fast as you can for two or three seconds.
In the more conservative accents, /e/ and /ɛ/ are separate phonemes – but the exceptions to the rule “[e] in open, [ɛ] in closed syllables” are all spelled ai, aî or ê unless you go all the way to burkinabè…
In the more conservative accents, /e/ and /ɛ/ are separate phonemes
Are you saying that even /e/ and /ɛ/ are merging in the less conservative dialects? O tempora, o mores! Another part of the precious phoneme heritage of our fathers is being lost. Blame the progressivists!
I am sorry to report that the same thing has happened in Lingala. I blame the globalists.
The Frɛmɛsəns are probably behind it all.
Ça m’est ègal.
The phonemes have indeed merged by eliminating the exceptions to the complementary distribution; the two sounds still exist and show no sign of converging, only their distribution has changed. Likewise for /o/ and /ɔ/, though there the exceptions that Young People Today have lost have /o/ in closed syllables and are spelled au or ô.
Even in Liége?
Liège remains a closed syllable.
Ah, now I seem to remember that they changed the spelling since I acquired my atlases as a young sprout.
Wikipedia: “Until 17 September 1946, the city’s name was written Liége, with the acute accent instead of a grave accent.”
French Wikipedia:
An impressive array of forms, but that second “prononcé” would have been better omitted.
The things I learn…
Why? The local pronunciation seems to have had /e/ until a conscious effort to impose the “proper” /ɛ/. Or at least that’s what I get from the longer telling of the story by liégeois journalist Philippe Miest: Faut-il dire LiÈge ou LiÉge ?.
That was probably an effort to impose all of Standard French as a package. And that was wildly successful. Bureaucratic terms aside, the Belgian French I’ve heard is indistinguishable from the Swiss French I’ve heard, and both differ from the Parisian I’ve heard only in septante, huitante, nonante and in being spoken only half as fast (like French in the rest of France).
Edit: oh, and hebdomadaire (“weekly”, “for a whole week”) is unknown in Brussels. Don’t know about the rest of Belgium or Switzerland.
If WP is to be believed, there are some significant phonological differences, though not of a kind likely to impede mutual comprehension:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_French#Phonology
Why?
Because it’s followed by both written and phonetic forms.
I read it as followed by phonetic forms only: each given first as a French spelling pronunciation, then as IPA. As in, minus the IPA: “Liège (anciennement écrit Liége ; aussi prononcé Liége ou Lièche en liégeois)”. I may be misreading, needless to say.
…and wouldn’t you know it, those are exactly the ones you’re least likely to notice if all you’re used to is Paris. Except /ɔ/ in pot, but I probably simply didn’t come across such a word, and the loss of /ɥ/, except that most people in Paris pronounce juin as *jouin nowadays, too.
Interesting that vowel length is preserved; so it’s not just marie-lucie and dialects of Burgundy.
It turns out “huh” in Wiktionary has a panel which reads:
Also I recently heard it in Russian, and it was uttered with closed mouth, I think.
I read it as followed by phonetic forms only: each given first as a French spelling pronunciation, then as IPA
Ah, you may well be right.
les édiles liégeois
This is the first I hear of a modern city with ædiles. I wonder if this is a survival from late Roman times (Liège was already with us in 558 by the name of Vicus Leudicus) or a piece of Revolutionary pseudo-Romanism like liberty caps. Liège was both pro- and anti-revolutionary. It was the capital of a Prince-Bishopric dating from 985 that had a series of rebellions and finally broke away from the Habsburgs in 1789 (thanks to the previous Prince-Bishop, an Encylopédiste who died in 1784) to form the Republic of Liège. Unfortunately for them, they were conquered by the French in 1794, who considered anti-clericalism more important than republicanism. However, France lost its grip on the city in 1815, when the Congress of Vienna turned it over to the United Netherlands, who in turn lost their grip when it became Belgian.
@John Cowan:
In Spain it’s common for the media to call municipal councillors ediles. A quick search for “los ediles” on Google News returns 4,100 articles, such as the following from La Opinión de Zamora:
As this example shows, the legal term nowadays is concejal, with edil as a synonym that helps journalists avoid repetition. Likewise, when they feel they have mentioned mayors too much, they can throw in regidor instead of the legal (and standard) alcalde. From the 3,200 hundred Google News results for “los regidores”, Diario Sur:
I presume the same is happening across the Pyrenees. French Wikipedia has a disambiguation page to distinguish ædiles from:
On the other hand, it appears that some Latin American countries do have elected local officials whose legal title is edile. I couldn’t positively rule out Liège falling into that category at some point.
In any case, I would bet with considerable confidence thst all these latter-day ædiles are neoclassical. I like your idea that they’re an attempt by 18th revolutionaries (or why not 19th century liberals?) to feel suitably Ciceronian, but I have no data about it either way.
All I can add is that Italy has gone in a completely different way: gli edili are exclusively construction workers. Possibly from operai edili since construction firms are imprese edili and the construction sector is edilizia.
In any case, I would bet with considerable confidence that all these latter-day ædiles are neoclassical.
I think you are right, and thanks for all the research.
All I can add is that Italy has gone in a completely different way: gli edili are exclusively construction workers.
Per Wiktionary (both en and it), edile also means ‘ancient Roman ædile’: the actual Italian definition is “(storia) antico magistrato romano che sovraintendeva alle attività urbanistiche pubbliche e private, e nel contempo al mantenimento dell’ordine”. But since public (and later private) buildings were the chief responsibility of the ædiles (beginning with the aedes ‘temples’), the principal Italian meaning “che riguarda la costruzione delle abitazioni e dei centri direzionali” is quite understandable. Old titles often lose prestige like this.
Hadrian built a wall to protect Britannia from those nasty Caledonians.
Amazing piece of work for one man.
The Hongwu Emperor built much of the Great Wall, but he had the advantage that he started out as a peasant farmer. Toughens you up.
@JWB, post-Soviet Turkic langauges with /g/ in “hashish” definitely borrowed it from East Slavic, because it is ES that provides an interface between h and g (having laryngeal and velar fricatives in south-west and a stop in the north). I guess you knew that… but just in case.
___
In Maltese the word can be applied to honest vegetables.
And why I remembered it: youtube just dropped me here
This brief popularising article on Why Jesus never ate a banana concerns a 2016 paper (Origins of food crops connect countries worldwide) revealing that 69 percent of the global diet has a “foreign” origin. The article is not really news, merely pointing out something that we all know if we give any thought to it, but does highlight the eclectic origins of many foods we eat. One of the heroes of the drive to diversify food sources (in case crops fail) was a Russian, Nikolai Vavilov, who built up the world’s greatest global seedbank but died as a result of Stalin’s belief in Lysenko’s pseudoscience.