Their About page says:
Why share untranslatable words?
They’re fun! They shed light on other cultures, reveal different patterns of thought, and spark our curiosity. Sometimes, they influence how we analyze and classify the world around us.
When they compiled their dictionary of Nootka, Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh need not have included šiˑšaˑwiɬtaqyo “powered by a monstrous supernatural porcupine-like creature” because its meaning is predictable from its parts. But we think Sapir and Swadesh knew what they were doing as lexicographers, and that they chose to include this word because its meaning is so comical to westerners, and because it teaches us that “The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached” (Sapir, 1929, The status of linguistics as a science, p209). So, following the example of Sapir and Swadesh, the linguists contributing to this site want to share more of these `untranslatable’ words, and in the process, show why these small languages are distinctive, valuable, and powerful, each one a treasure for all the world.
After a couple of quotes about “Shamelessly exoticising others,” they say: “We walk a fine line: we celebrate popular interest in the exotic and while challenging the racism that lies behind it. This fascination with the exotic is the hook. We go further and invite visitors to this site to learn about real words, and the careful scholarship of the linguists who work so tirelessly to collect them.” The blog itself is here, and it’s very well done. The top entry at the moment is warr! [wa:] ‘an exclamation of surprise, to draw attention to something,’ from palawa kani, “the revived language of Tasmanian Aboriginal people,” and it includes a succinct description of how the language came to be and the history of the word. It’s nice to see someone doing something interesting with the tired concept of untranslatability; thanks, Y!
An astute young woman from Greece in my philosophy tutorial, some years ago:
“What is this bunyip in our text?”
Me:
“Κέρβερος.”
She pronounced bunyip “boonyip” of course. My answered satisified her, but she continued in her belief that the subject we presented was not real philosophy. Nor, she claimed, was the “psychology” she was enrolled in real psychology. I tended to agree.
Wow, sounds interesting. And I’m suprised, I’m used to hearing criticism of untranslatability from you (with which I disagree):)
I do not understand what they mean about celebrating the exotic and racism (apart of well, “I love women, that’s sexist”). Looks like a medieval preface to a collection fo stories about sex. Sinful, but feels good, so maybe we should sin more just to understand sin better?
The Brazilian and Galician word saudade is not quite untranslatable, but a good translation may be paragraphs or pages long.
https://www.npr.org/sections/altlatino/2014/02/28/282552613/saudade-an-untranslatable-undeniably-potent-word
I’m used to hearing criticism of untranslatability from you
I don’t object to discussion of untranslatability, just dumb, ill-informed discussion (which is most of what I see in the press).
LH, yes, it is a genre akin to… I don’t know, beautiful pictures with Muslim quotes over them that young Muslim girls post in VK in Russia.
“Stuff people post on FB.”
If by “untranslatable” one just means “has no straightforward equivalent word or even short phrase in a SAE language, but needs a more elaborate explanation”, which seems to me to be what they do mean, this is a dead-easy game.
For example, almost any ideophone.
(Hausa has hundreds.)
Anything at all relating to traditional “religion” (to use a SAE category), like Kusaal win, siig, kikirig, bʋgʋr, sigir, ba’a, ba’ar …
Hell, even kinship terminology. Kusaal has three basic words for siblings, none of which corresponds to either “brother” or “sister” (and both English words require quite elaborate circumlocutions to be expressed in Kusaal, so from a Kusaasi standpoint, they are “untranslatable.”)
We recently established here that the French word charlatan is also untranslatable …
DE, there are degrees: “how many words you will need to explain it?”
The primeval ill of untranslatable words is forced exoticization, projected by ignorant outsiders. Like glossing (I’m making it up) a word meaning ‘lake’ as ‘a flat expanse of sweet water, serene and mirror-like’ or whatever.
This collection is better than some others (e.g. The Meaning of Tinga) but still suffers some of the usual flaws. When a language has extensive derivational morphology or synthesis, it’s little surprising that it can pack in a word what an analytic language like English needs several words to express. So Murrinhpatha mampemurruwurlmurruwurl is glossed as ‘she’s making (the girl’s) hair beautiful’, but as they explain, it’s mam- ‘3sg, non-future, action performed with hands’ + pe- ‘head/hair’ + murruwurl ‘beautify’, reduplicated for repeated action. It’s distinct from truly idiosyncratic, unanalyzable words like Hunsrik kwadi, glossed ‘The laziness one feels after warming oneself in the sun on cold days.’
there are degrees
Exactly. It’s not a binary thing.
In reality
(a) there are no untranslatable words
(b) except for technical vocabulary (e.g. names of chemical elements) no two words correspond exactly in meaning between any two languages that are not mutually comprehensible (cf Eddyshaw’s Law: No Latin word means exactly the same as any English word derived from it.)
Explaining the meaning of a foreign word will therefore require fewer or more words depending on the degree of relatedness of the languages and cultures in question, and also on the practical necessities of why you need to explain it: precise nuances will be irrelevant in some contexts and crucial in others.
no two words correspond exactly in meaning between any two languages that are not mutually comprehensible
Notoriously, locative prepositions. It would take many paragraphs to outline the semantic field of on in some other language.
Notoriously, locative prepositions
Kusaal zug means “head” as part of a human being or animal, but not of a line or a river or a mountain, and it can’t be used to mean “leader.” It is very commonly used as a postposition: it then means “onto” (but not “on”, which is zugun) but only in reference to place, never time; however, it very frequently appears in the metaphorical sense “on account of, because of.”
Clearly, the Kusaal word zug is untranslatable. In fact, all Kusaal body-part terms seem to be untranslatable.
(a) there are no untranslatable words
There are, of course. Explaining is not the same as translating. Also explain what is “system” – some things are really difficult to explain (rather than just present numerous contexts from where the meaning can be derived).
“Untranslatable” is a simple accurate name for a common phenomenon. I am surprised by such criticism of soemthing that seems unremarkable to me.
“powered by a monstrous supernatural porcupine-like creature” – reminds (in Russian)
DE, of course there are uninteresting examples of mismatch (or maybe your point is that your examples are actually interesting – and I agree).
But this does not mean there are not others.
Even obvious things like “homeomorphism” – to explain it you’ll have to explain some topology. Oh, yes, it is “scientific vocabulary”. Which means “vocabulary of European science”. Does not mean that Klingons or Khoi-San don’t have anything exactly as fascinating for us as European science is for them. Europeans don’t hold the monopoly for inventing interesting stuff.
Such examples (like homeomorphism) are based on presence of elaborate thought in culture A about something people of B don’t really reflect upon.
But there can be cultural differences of different kind (not more elaborate, just different) and linguistical means that are focal points of those.
And then there is what people often mean by “untranslatable word” – different experience as speakers of another language with the word itself.
Like, this word for me feels like nothing in your language feels to you – and this feeling is interesting. A learner once she develops it may find it interesting too, but to know it you need to learn the language.
Is this posisble? Why not.
Certainly possible for sound of words but what is meant is usually semantics and why not. You can analyse langauges logically but don’t take away their sensual side from them.
Добро as in “good [not evil]” and добрый as in “kind” DO merge for me in one concept. And do I think affect my own concept of good which is not evil.
Also добро as “stuff”. A very useful word. Very untranslatable.
the subject we presented was not real philosophy
Not what’s usually considered under that classification by Socrates or Aristotle, indeed.
I’d say more ‘Mythology’ or ‘Religious studies’ (in a broad sense).
My Philosophy instructors (who I’d put at the ‘hard’ end of Epistemology) regarded it as unfortunate the word in English included all that fluffy metaphysical/fairy-story stuff.
“No
LatinGreek word means exactly the same as any English word derived from it.”Hardly any word means exactly the same as words derived from it. That is the point of derivation.
Indeed. And borrowing is a kind of derivation. (Derivation by theft, instead of good honest morphology or metonymy.)
“Also добро as “stuff”. A very useful word. Very untranslatable.”
A good word. As in “good glass beads from China, 95% spherical, float in [some chemical with -benz- forgot what]”
(from spam in my mailbox)
There ARE untranslatable words. English is lucky in that it is such a heavily, universally trafficked language. But not all languages are. For example, the language of philosophy.
If somebody has already written translations or introductory works about philosophy in (say) Kusaal — although Kusaal is probably one of the lucky ones — then the vocabulary will hopefully be there already. But what about languages that haven’t been blessed with translations about “propositional logic”, for instance? Sure, you could make something up, but if everyone used different words to translate “propositional logic”, chaos would ensue. (I know we’re not talking about vocabulary like this; it’s always about translating cutesy foreign-language expressions into English, but seriously, when you’re dealing with whole skeins of ideas, translation isn’t always about finding something that kind of makes sense, it’s about getting it to make sense as part of a system.)
I suppose when a European speaker translates something like that in European (European langauges are not too different) the result is a partly literal translation (with the hope that once you have read more of them, you become a specialist who can understand what is meant) while the difficulty of the process is explained as difficulty of understanding the original (on the part of the translator).
English is lucky in that it is such a heavily, universally trafficked language. … the language of philosophy.
Hmm? If we take a broad interpretation of ‘philosophy’ to include the metaphysical:
‘Holy Ghost’ to this day strikes me as a bizarre phrase; and all that ‘God is three and God is One’ [Cardinal Newman/Elgar playing in my head].
derives from the Old English gast says wikip. Was that a good semantic fit to translate at the time? If ‘gast’-> ‘ghost’s meaning drifted, why didn’t it stay rooted in the religious sense?
Or is that terminology equally jarring in Hebrew/Gospel Greek?
Also добро as “stuff”. A very useful word. Very untranslatable.
Not a satisfactory example because it seems eminently translatable as “goods”. And almost as Latin “bona” and French “biens”.
“Gavagai,” say I.
@AntC
For Spiritus Sanctus, Wiktionary has
Calque of Ancient Greek Πνεῦμα τὸ Ἅγιον (Pneûma tò Hágion, literally “Holy Ghost, Holy Spirit”), from πνεῦμα (pneûma, “breath, vital force, soul”) + ἅγιος (hágios, “holy”).
Wycliffe has in Acts 19.1-3
“he came to Ephesus, and found some of the disciples (there). 2And he said to them, Whether ye that believe have received the Holy Ghost? And they said to him, But neither have we heard [But neither we have heard], if the Holy Ghost is. (And he said to them, Have ye who believe received the Holy Spirit? And they said to him, None of us have heard that there is a Holy Spirit?) 3”
Ormulum glossary (I cannot find text online) has
gast n. spirit gastess1, gasstess 19723 gen. gastess2 pl. [OE gāst]
gastlic, gastli[g/y] adj. spiritual [ME OE gāstliċ]
gastli[g/y], gastlike adv. spiritually [OE gāstlīċe]
No corresponding sp entry.
Wulfila has in Luke 1.15
ahmins weihis gafulljada
for “filled with the Holy Spirit”, so he is using the “breath word, not the “spirit” word.
If ‘gast’-> ‘ghost’s meaning drifted, why didn’t it stay rooted in the religious sense?
In German, we still use the same word Geist for “ghost” and “spirit”. In English, one can arguably see it as the same development as in other semantic fields, where the Anglo-Saxon word remained in the popular sphere (here: popular superstition), while in the refined/official sphere it was, at least partially, replaced by a French or Latin word.
although Kusaal is probably one of the lucky ones
Now that there’s a Kusaal Wikipedia, we can reasonably suggest that Kusaal might be in the top 5% luckiest languages, seeing that the number of living languages is more than 20 times the number of languages with a Wikipedia edition.
(I’m not actually sure whether having a Wikipedia edition is a major contributor for philosophy translation. I’m also not sure whether Kusaal is in the top 5% [or at least 10%] of living languages by number of speakers; it probably could be…)
Like glossing (I’m making it up) a word meaning ‘lake’ as ‘a flat expanse of sweet water, serene and mirror-like’ or whatever.
I’m reminded of a comment I’ve seen in a Russian book about translating English literature (I think – maybe it was an English textbook focused on translated literature?) that there’s (supposedly) no good Russian translation of the English word “babysitter” shorter than the six-word (as they counted it) phrase женщина, которая к нам приходит сидеть с ребёнком (literally something like “the woman that comes to us to sit with the child”).
[I’m quoting from memory, unfortunately, and in particular very paraphrasing their comment on the translation quality, though it definitely did sound like they were declaring the word untranslatable-ish. Maybe some day I’ll find the actual book and could give a direct quote.]
.I’m also not sure whether Kusaal is in the top 5% [or at least 10%] of living languages
My first reaction to this was. Surely not, but in fact …
Kusaal has something like 400,000 speakers. If you suppose that there are about 5000 languages still spoken, it seems quite likely that by number 250 you’ve got down to that kind of level.
@AntC:
“Ghost” and “spirit” have basically swapped their meanings with one another since the seventeenth century. This is very well known and documented; indeed, it figures sometimes in the (surprisingly long) list of “false friends” to be found in some copies of the KJV aimed at people who actually intend to read it.
Quite how this can have happened, I’m not clear. It seems to involve the same sort of difficulty as in seeing how Western Oti-Volta managed to swap round the inherited high and low tones: what can the intermediate steps have been?
J1M, няня.
Just to be clear, “untranslatable” does not actually mean “utterly unable to be rendered into another language” as one might suppose if one supposed that words always mean exactly what a logical analysis of their component parts would suggest (i.e., if one knew nothing about how language works). A word is called “untranslatable” when the multiword literal translation provided (cue “Haw haw, they translated it, so it’s clearly not untranslatable!!”) causes the reader to be surprised that the language in question has such a word. This is how it is used, and usage (as we all know) defines meaning.
@PP πνεῦμα (pneûma, “breath, vital force, soul”
Wycliffe “… received the Holy Spirit?”
@DE “Ghost” and “spirit” have basically swapped their meanings with one another since the seventeenth century.
breath/vital force נִשְׁמַת־ר֨וּחַ חַיִּ֜ים (nišmat-rûaḥ ḥayyîm) is what in Genesis God breathed into inanimate matter to give it life? Or snuffed out in the Great Flood? But the disciples (in the Wycliffe quote) are already at least breathing; what is this extra ‘vital force’ that they are to receive?
I agree it’s difficult to envisage what would have been the transitional meanings.
Has there been through that swap a semantic shift from a communal/external-to-the-believer Trinity to a personal breath/vital force inhering within the believer? I don’t get a sense of whether Wycliffe was carrying through a doctrinal point by making the W of G available in the vernacular. Was ‘spirit(us)’ not actually a word of English at the time, but restricted to Church language? Or carrying the censerous fumes of a foreign-ruled priesthood? So ‘spirit’ is what you’re anointed with by an external authority? Could Wycliffe not have used ‘breath’ to be understood metaphorically?
Or … The words were used separately by separate communities of believers; there was nobody until after C17th that used both words and had to contrast their meanings or register?
aimed at people who actually intend to read it.
I’d be reading it with a C20th-dominated vocabulary/semantics. Then I don’t see I’d be any the wiser going to the source documents. (I take the KJV — I think as did Michael Foot — as being in the language of ritual/not intended to be actually read in the sense of understood/to be left untranslated.)
Part of the trouble is that the original sources involve two (at least) really quite different conceptions of “spirit” in the “soul” sense – Hebrew versus Greek. They’re different enough to be not really commensurate. (“At least”, because I suspect that the relevant concepts developed sigificantly over the long period of composition of the various parts of the Tanach.)
It seems to me that the transposition into Greek philosophical/metaphyical categories may have involved much the same problems as the translators of the Kusaal version faced in coming up with “equivalents” for untranslatable words like “spirit” and “soul”, which correspond to nothing at all similar in the traditional Kusaasi scheme.
In the Genesis passage in Kusaal it’s God’s siig which hovers over the waters: this word was coopted to mean “spirit, soul” in Christian works, but really means “life force”, which is probably (ironically) closer to what the Hebrew ruach means in this context. The Hebrew word is etymologically “wind, breath”, and as it happens, one of the “components” of a human being in Kusaal is nyɔvʋr, a transparent compound of “nose” (used metonymically for “breath”) and “alive”, but that Kusaal word simply means “life” as opposed to death. The concepts are entirely distinct in Kusaal (to talk of the nyɔvʋr of a dead person is a contradiction in terms), but they don’t seem always to have been so in Hebrew.
Latin spiritus is transparently related to spirare too, of course. These things are really a lot clearer in Kusaal …
FWIW, throughout the entire KJV the lexeme “ghost” really only appears in specific references to the Holy Ghost and in (fairly frequent!) uses of the idiom “to give up the ghost” or variations thereon. “Spirit” occurs more frequently and in a wider variety of contexts.
cf previously, re Bergson’s \’Elan Vitale :
https://languagehat.com/bergsons-elan-vital/#comment-4536325
cf previously, re the semantic range of spirit, soul, etc. in English, Kusaal and elsewhere:
https://languagehat.com/the-romantic-theory-of-language-origin/
How old is “ghost” in the modern “spectre” sense in English?
If that is a relatively new usage, it will have skunked the use of “ghost” in “Holy Ghost”, which as JWB very pertinently points out, is already in the KJV effectively confined to that one locution and to the giving-up-the-ghost idiom (where it still survives, at least insofar as the actual idiom itself does.)
At any rate, JWB’s observation seems to be the key to the intermediate-stages problem. The semantic range of “ghost” was already a lot narrower than modern “spirit”; and as AntC in turn points out, the semantic range of “spirit” was significantly wider than modern “ghost.” So there was plenty of room in the semantic space for a switchover without an unseemly traffic jam: it was never a simple exchange of spaces at all.
More likely, the availability of spirit allowed skunking. Its lack in German would explain why Geist still has the whole range there (including den Geist aufgeben, which is rare but occasionally also used of machines that eventually break down).
And of course the German language is adorned by Hegel’s important work titled Phänomenologie des Geistes, which as I have no doubt mentioned before was important in my own intellectual development for being the book that convinced me to major in linguistics in college (as a side effect of being convinced not to major in philosophy).
Ghastly Phenomenology.
Oh yeah, that’s yet another meaning, “mind”, which is not shared with English and probably never was.
Conflating “spirit” and “mind” appears to have done lasting damage.
How old is “ghost” in the modern “spectre” sense in English?
The OED entry (revised 2021) has all supernatural and theological senses of ghost from Old English on; all the oldest quotations for those senses are in Christian contexts and often translating spiritus. The sense you’re asking about is:
Seems to me that Old English gast had already absorbed the Christian influence from spiritus by the time there were any written records, so we don’t really know if the concept was different before.
The semantic range of “ghost” was already a lot narrower than modern “spirit”
That is, by the time of the KJV it was, but it was broader in Old English, including branches under “An animating or vital principle; a person’s spirit or soul.” Most of these are marked rare or obsolete, except for the Holy Ghost, and this:
This is actually a movie review of Ghost in the Shell (2017 live-action film). The reviewer felt that it needed quotation marks and an explanation, underlining that this is not how “ghost” is usually used today. The original manga was famously titled in homage to Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine; see previous discussion at Language Hat.
Conflating “spirit” and “mind” appears to have done lasting damage
Another one that Kusaal is wholly free from.
“Mind” is pʋtɛn’ɛr, yet another compound, where the first component is pʋʋg “inside, belly” and the second is a gerund form from the same root as in tɛn’ɛs “think” (derived with pluractional *s.) And in fact, although the word is consistently used for “mind” in the Bible translation, it really means “thought, idea.”
And it doesn’t mean “intelligence”, which is ya’am (conflated with the word for “gall, gall bladder”, though this probably arose via an accidental homophony due to historical sound changes.)
Kusaal actually does have kʋk “apparition of a dead person”, but it seems to have nothing at all to do with a person’s own spirit or soul or whatever. It seems to be fairly marginal thing. (Naden’s dictionary doesn’t list the word at all.)
The Witch of Endor in the Kusaal Bible says she sees Samuel as a kpɩ’ɩm “dead person/corpse” rather than a kʋk.
@ktschwartz:
Thanks!
Basically, what seems to have been going on is that the loanword “spirit” has been steadily expanding its semantic range at the expense of the homegrown “ghost”, which itself (to confuse the issue) had previously absorbed pretty much all the non-physical* senses of spiritus as a sort of calquing thing, It would be natural for a religious technical usage like “Holy Ghost” to remain for a while as an archaism.
The only oddity is that the use of “spirit” to mean “apparition of a dead person” seems to have got rolled back after a while. A resurgence of “ghost.”
Come to think of it, does spiritus ever actually mean “ghost” in Latin? It can be “spirit” as in “demon”, sure, but is it ever “ghost”?
* Pity it didn’t go further. We could have had hard and soft ghosts word-initially in Greek, for example.
Perhaps more to the point: ésprit doesn’t mean “ghost” in French, and presumably didn’t in (Norman) Old French either.
Come to that, ysbryd “spirit” in Welsh can mean a ghost, but it’s not the usual word (that’s bwg.) I’ve a feeling we discussed this before somewhere.
So maybe, in the “apparition of a dead person” sense, “ghost” never really got truly ousted by “spirit” in the first place.
There aren’t any (unequivocal) ghosts in the Bible, and Banquo (IIRC) has a ghost rather than a spirit.
A Ghost Named Ghoti.
Talking of the Witch of Endor in the Kusaal Bible, I notice that she is not a sɔen (traditional Western Oti-Volta “witch”, actually more like a vampire) but a ba’akɔlʋg sɔb “divination-equipment person.” While this, perhaps understandably, doesn’t show a very tolerant attitude to traditional Kusaasi culture, it’s not a bad rendering of the concept, considering.
Mind you, the witch who is not even to be allowed to live in Exodus 22:18 is rendered pu’a kanɛ an teŋgban-kpɛn’ɛd “woman who is a habitual enterer into sacred groves”, which is even more hardcore in its intolerance of the Old Ways. I suppose you could argue that it reflects the spirit (so to speak) of the original in that respect, at least, but it strikes me as a pretty poor translation of “sorceress.”
I think the basic problem is that there really isn’t a concept of “witch” in the Western sense of “malevolent sorcerer” in traditional Kusaasi culture. In fact, there isn’t anything truly corresponding to the SAE concept of “magic.”
So the presumably fairly specific condemnation in the Hebrew text of practices which (if you believed that they were actually possible at all) would imdeed be horrific, has been mistranslated into a blanket condemnation of traditional practices which have nothing whatever with seeking to harm people by supernatural means. I may have to write and complain.
To my horror, the Mooré version is actually worse: the hapless witch in that version is simply a tɩɩm soaba “traditional healer.” Now that really is a bad translation.
I do read from time to time in the US/European press stories about people in Africa getting killed on suspicion of malevolent witching. Those stories seem to come more from the eastern side of Sub-Saharan Africa.
David E, do you have a reference for “swapped their meanings”? Because that doesn’t jibe with the OED’s entries. According to them, both ghost and spirit started out with the whole range of meanings we’re talking about in English, for ghost since the earliest written records and for spirit since it qualified as an English word (sometime in the 1300s). They’ve just narrowed in different directions since then, with ghost losing the range “life force, vital principle, soul, personality, essential nature…” except for the fossilized “Holy Ghost” and “give up the ghost”, and also losing all supernatural senses (angels, demons, miscellaneous incorporeal beings) except for “apparition of a dead person”. (I’ve read that Ryle coined “ghost in the machine” as mockery, making use of the now-primary connotations of ghost as “superstition, kid’s Halloween costume”.)
does spiritus ever actually mean “ghost” in Latin?
The OED’s etymology for spirit has “soul of a dead person, ghost, angel, incorporeal or immaterial being” listed among the meanings of spiritus in post-classical Latin, but not classical. And isn’t “(probably hostile) apparition of a dead person” exactly what it means in the Vulgate at Luke 24:37, where the disciples are afraid that the returned Jesus is a spiritus (KJV: spirit, NIV: ghost)? To which he replies, touch me, I have flesh and bones, and then he eats a piece of broiled fish.
ésprit doesn’t mean “ghost” in French, and presumably didn’t in (Norman) Old French either.
Not in modern French, but the OED does have “imaginary being, fairy (mid 12th cent.), incorporeal or immaterial being, soul of a dead person, ghost, demon (all late 12th cent.), angel (13th cent.)” listed among the meanings of Anglo-Norman espirite (although I can’t find “ghost” in the definitions at the Anglo-Norman Dictionary).
I wonder if your source for “swapped their meanings” was actually discussing some specific Bible passages where they should be swapped from the KJV? Like “Holy Spirit” vs. “Holy Ghost”, and “ghost” vs. “spirit” in the post-resurrection scene. But that’s by no means all of them, as JWB indicated; in Genesis, “the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters” is just as good now as it was in the KJV.
@ktschwarz
Yes thank you indeed.
The Witch of Endor …
I’d vaguely heard of this personage, and assumed it was from Tolkien — who I’m deliberately ignorant of, whereas my ignorance of the O.T. is more accidental: Sunday School covered only the nice stories.
(although I can’t find “ghost” in the definitions at the Anglo-Norman Dictionary)
AND does include ‘fantosme’/modern ‘fantôme’, which seems to serve the same purpose.
What puzzles me about the Normans qua Vikings is how much of their vocab they left behind up in the frozen North (unlike the lot that set up the Danegeld), even after being re-exposed to it in Grande Bretagne.
@JWB convinced not to major in philosophy
Good grief you were much put-upon! Russell’s History of W. Phil barely even tries to hide his contempt for Hegel. My Philosophy major dismissed him in a sentence as intro to Marx/thesis and antithesis; we never went near the Geistes woo-woo.
people in Africa getting killed on suspicion of malevolent witching
Yes, it’s a quite different concept of “witch”, concealed by the fsct that the same English word is used. Though as I said, the Oti-Volta and Bantu words do look like cognates. Dunno which group (if either) preserved the original meaning best, if so. Probably Bantu: I’m sure of the vampire-like sense for Western Oti-Volta, but the glosses of the cognates elsewhere in Oti-Volta suggest the sorcerer sense. But I don’t have anything much about the relevant cultures to go on, and it’s very much an area where short glosses can mislead.
David E, do you have a reference for “swapped their meanings”?
No. I didn’t make it up myself, but it’s clearly wrong anyhow.
Added note on German: The word Spiritus “spirit” exists, but it only denotes the chemical product.
Added note on German: The word Spiritus “spirit” exists, but it only denotes the chemical product. In another very specialized usage, German Grammars of Ancient Greek also employ Spiritus asper / lenis as technical terms.
Come to think of it, Kusaal ya’am does have
quite an overlap with “mind”, e.g.
M ya’am iankya.
my intelligence jump.Perfective
“I’m terrified.”
M ya’am kpɛn’ o.
my intelligence enter her
“I’ve taken a liking to her/fallen in love with her.”
Presumably the Bible translators preferred pʋtɛn’ɛr “thought” as their default rendering of “mind” because ya’am didn’t seem to have the right air of pondering about it to represent the SAE concept. Still, the way to say that someone is clever in Kusaal is to say that they have ya’am.
(Same in Mooré: in the excellent Burkinabe film Yaaba, in which all the characters conveniently have perfectly possible personal names which also happen to have appropriate meanings for those characters, there is a traditional healer called a Taryam “Has Intelligence/Wisdom.”)
Anyhow, “mind” is evidently yet another “untranslatable” word.
“mind” is evidently yet another “untranslatable” word.
Easy:
Or even, at most, only one’s mind is sure to exist.
I’m with the Gilbert Ryle* crowd on this. Solipsism is an incoherent concept which only arises because of misconceptions about what “mind” actually means.
* Though not too taken with the way he puts it in the famous book. He keeps saying he’s not adopting a behaviourist position, but then he basically does just that. I think it’s partly a rhetorical épater-les-idéalistes thing, but it tends to make his arguments less plausible when he keeps treating the existence of private mental events as a sort of unimportant side issue. You keep wanting to say: “Hey, just hold on a minute there, Gil!”
Incidentally, the eponymous lead character in Yaaba is in fact accused of being a witch. It turns out that this is why the other villagers have been shunning her for most of her life.
Western Oti-Volta witches aren’t usually killed, but they are at risk of being thrown out of their communities. And (surprise) the accused do tend to be older women who are already marginalised (though anybody can be a witch. So can trees.)
I’ve previously mentioned the “witches’ village” in the Mamprussi territory. The Mamprussi king is immune to witches ex officio, and exploits this to take them as legal wives, which doesn’t stop them being driven out of their communities but does protect them from further molestation. The witch-wives have their own village, supported by the king. My Ghanaian colleagues organised a trip to the village to do cataract surgery on those who needed it, unfortunately while I was on furlough in Europe.
In all this talk of ghosts, spectres, and assorted ill-named ectoplasmata let’s not forget the humble sprite. Wiktionary collects many meanings for this versatile lexeme, including “spayed female ferret” (so relieved we have a word for that, untranslatable – I presume – into Kusaal). But it is essentially a transformation of spirit, and can mean “ghost”. 👻 Cf spit.
@ Noetica
? as in `spit and image’
Yes. Some give “spirit and image” as the origin, and others give different accounts. If it were the origin, that would be a reduction comparable to sprite.
I’ve always taken it to be a reference to voodoo dolls (for sticking needles in).
The gummint sez: An intact female ferret is a jill, and a spayed female is a sprite. An intact male is a hob, and a neutered male is a gib. Baby ferrets (less than 1 year) are kits. A group of ferrets is a business or fesnyng (fez-ning).
voodoo dolls (for sticking needles in)
#
The practice has been denounced and declared irrelevant to Voodoo religion by those in High Priesthood of Louisiana Voodoo.[3]
…
The link between this magical practice and Voodoo was established through the presentation of the latter in Western popular culture, enduring the first half of the 20th century.[1] In this, the myth of this magical practice being closely linked to Voodoo and Vodou was promoted as part of the wider negative depictions of blacks and Afro-Caribbean religious practices in the United States.[4]
# WiPe
“Sprite” had a now-archaic spelling variant “spright,” which was apparently favored by Edmund Spenser but these days primarily survives only via the derived “sprightly.”
Called “obsolete” in the en.wiktionary etymology of bogey…
Vehicle fuels have also sometimes been called Sprit, derived from the use of alcohol as such a fuel (maybe during WWI). No direct connection to sprites, though one wonders about Sprite®.
Spengler would have had a field day with it. (…Maybe he did, but I don’t think this would have been kept out of the abridged version I read.)
…What a stunningly optimistic view of how the universe works. If Western culture were like this, the last 1500 years would have been quite different.
The only oddity is that the use of “spirit” to mean “apparition of a dead person” seems to have got rolled back after a while. A resurgence of “ghost.”
this has me wondering whether/how the rise and then discrediting of Spiritualism affected these semantic shifts (and also whether kardecian Espiritismo has had effects on the semantics of “espíritu” and “espírito” in spanish and portuguese).
The practice has been denounced and declared irrelevant to Voodoo religion
Pity. Strikes me as a USP.
What a stunningly optimistic view of how the universe works
WOV-style animism actually does seem to be pretty upbeat, by and large.
All this reminds me of the obsolete use in Algerian Arabic of ṛuḥani, originally “spiritual”, to mean “ghost”.
group of ferrets
English has a hundred words for groups of animals. Its speakers must be a rural people close to nature.
Now we all know that Business Administration means herding ferrets.
That goes well with the fact that English has a hundred words for “lavatory.” Essentially an earthy people, in contact with their roots.
I know a woman who, with delightful delicacy, refers to walking her dog as “taking him for his ablutions”.
On a similar note, I need to peeve about the inaccuracy of “take a pee” when clearly “leave a pee” is meant.
Ha.
More embarrassing than ginkgo!
We should popularise the term Fesnyng English; indeed “fesnyng languages” in general.
Yes, that’s a wonderful find.
On a similar note, I need to peeve about the inaccuracy of “take a pee” when clearly “leave a pee” is meant.
George Carlin said this about “shit.”
The OED’s entries for ghost (2021) and spirit (2020) are both open access, no subscription required. Some interesting points:
Proto-West-Germanic had a word *gaist — we don’t really know what it meant before Christianity, but it wasn’t etymologically connected with either breath or wind. Its cognates all sound like bad things: “Old Icelandic *geiski fear (implied in geiskafullr full of fear), Gothic usgaisjan to terrify, usgaisnan to be terrified”, and outside Germanic, “Avestan zōiš- (in zōišnu shivering, trembling), and (with dental suffix) Sanskrit hīḍ- to be angry, heḍa anger, and (with additional superlative suffix) Avestan zōiždišta most terrible.” Something like these meanings persisted in the related English ghastly, originally meaning ‘terrifying’, and the obsolete verb gast ‘frighten’.
In Old English (and I guess other West Germanic languages?) Christians used this word to translate Latin spiritus, which had already developed a wide range of metaphorical meanings. Maybe they were pressing a native word into service, and importing new meanings into it?
After a few more centuries, English went ahead and took spirit as a loanword, in pretty much all the senses it had in French and Latin. The Wycliffite Bible was on the leading edge of this trend: it’s quoted a whopping 29 times in the OED’s entry, plus 2 more from Wyclif’s other works, mostly as the first citation for a sense, and if not first, then second or third. Not all of these senses survived, e.g. spirit could mean breath or wind in a literal sense. That sense is in the Wycliffite and KJV, 2 Thessalonians 2:8, “then shall that Wicked be revealed, whom the Lord shall consume with the spirit of his mouth”; modern translations make it “the breath of his mouth”. (The Lord blows them away, or breathes fire?)
The first time I read “he gave up the ghost” at the crucifixion of Jesus (Latin expiravit), I was astonished to see what I thought was a silly, slangy idiom in such an elevated context! Most recent translations also think “gave up the ghost” no longer works there, and make it “he breathed his last.”
unanalyzable words like Hunsrik kwadi, glossed ‘The laziness one feels after warming oneself in the sun on cold days.’
I tried to think of a Germanic word that Hunsrik kwadi might possibly represent before I actually looked the word up on the site. The etymology they give was unexpected:
I think the site should mention that this is the same Tupi word seen in English coati and coatimundi (in New Mexico and Arizona chulo, cholugo or loosely tejón (that is, ‘badger’), etc.; in Texas, cholugo, I think).
A slightly different etymology for coati appeared in the 1893 volume for the letter C of the NED (see here). This remains untouched in the OED3 still. And for quá, for instance, Silveira Bueno (1982) Vocabulário Tupi-Guarani – Português, p. 273 gives:
So, ‘belt nose, strap nose’? Sources like Antônio Geraldo da Cunha (1998) Dicionário histórico das palavras portuguesas de origem tupi don’t offer a morphological breakdown, just an Old Tupi form ku̯a′ti, and no evidence for any forms with initial a- in early Portuguese texts. Elsewhere da Cunha gives morphological breakdowns (for example capoeira from Tupi ko′pu̯era : ′ko ‘roça’ + ′pu̯era ‘que já foi’). I wonder if someone trying to etymologize coati may at some point have conflated it at some point with agouti, Portuguese cutia, from Old Tupi aku′ti. A note from Baptista Caetano d’Almeida Nogueira (1876) Apontamentos sobre o abañeẽnga, p. 108–109:
The Tesoro mentioned here is Antonio Ruiz de Montoya (1639) Tesoro de la lengua guaraní. Azara is Félix de Azara. Azara’s discussion of the coati begins here. I couldn’t find any forms beginning with a- in it. I wonder if anyone else can figure out the exact details of the derivation.
I also wonder if the Portuguese form cutia, cotia ‘agouti’ results from segmenting off of the a- of as the definite article, and then femininization of *a cuti as a cutia.
Proto-West-Germanic had a word *gaist — we don’t really know what it meant before Christianity, but it wasn’t etymologically connected with either breath or wind. Its cognates all sound like bad things: “Old Icelandic *geiski fear (implied in geiskafullr full of fear), Gothic usgaisjan to terrify, usgaisnan to be terrified”, and outside Germanic, “Avestan zōiš- (in zōišnu shivering, trembling), and (with dental suffix) Sanskrit hīḍ- to be angry, heḍa anger, and (with additional superlative suffix) Avestan zōiždišta most terrible.” Something like these meanings persisted in the related English ghastly, originally meaning ‘terrifying’, and the obsolete verb gast ‘frighten’.
For similar semantic slipperiness (ghost beside Geist ‘mind, etc.’), compare within the Germanic languages, Old English mōd, usual for ‘mind’, Old Norse móðr ‘wrath’, present day German Mut, most often ‘courage’, etc.
Cobos’ Dictionary of New Mexico and Southern Colorado Spanish gives for chulo only ‘cur, mongrel, mutt; dog’, and speculates that it comes from chucho (I doubt it.)
naȟléčA
In the video linked to at the entry for naȟléčA on the Untranslatable site, the speaker uses naȟléča as the citation form. This was interesting to me.
The entry on the Untranslatable site uses the orthography promoted by the Lakota Language Consortium (LLC). The uppercase -A in the form naȟléčA that Untranslatable cites is not really part of the orthography of the language—it is just the technical notation used in LLC’s dictionary and language learning materials to indicate that the final vowel of the word is not an invariant -a but instead participates in the pervasive Lakota ablaut series -a, -e, -iŋ [ĩ], -i. Similar ablaut series, differing in details, also characterize Dakota varieties.
The vowel of the ablauting word in Lakota is determined by the particle or words that follow the ablauting word. To use naȟléče ‘he tears/splits (something membranous) with his foot’ as an example (I hope the forms I produce are correct—I’m just a dilettante in Lakota…):
Compare nabláska ‘he flattens (something) with his feet, flattens by running over (something, as in a car)’:
nabláska ‘he flattens (something) with his feet, flattens by running over (something, as in a car)’
Which shares its root with “Nebraska” – Omaha ní bdháshka “flat water”.
PlasticPaddy said, above:
No, ahmins (dictionary form ahma, glossed as Geist in the German-Gothic-Greek dictionary) doesn’t mean “breath”, not even etymologically. Wiktionary cites A Gothic Etymological Dictionary by Lehmann (1986), which relates it to aha ‘mind, reason’, of unknown origin and with no cognates outside Germanic. There is a related entry in the OED, aught n.1 “Obsolete. Estimation, value; opinion; reputation. Also: deliberation, council.”, with etymology:
(That’s -t as in flight, noun-forming suffix.) This was a new entry in the OED in 2017. I’m guessing it was excluded from the old editions because they must have thought that it hadn’t survived past Old English; it’s now eligible for the OED because it has Middle English citations, from manuscripts that were edited and published in the 20th century.
@kts
Thanks. Do you think the reflex of the WGer (poss. also NGer) word was absent in Gothic or it just meant something else (maybe “fury”) ?
Hard to guess if it’s not in the Bible fragments we have.
Another dialect word for a sprite is spriggan. I don’t know why it’s spelled as if it had a geminate /gg/ in the middle. The actual pronunciation is typically something like SPRID-yan, with the first syllable being a fairly transparent variant of sprite.
All I know is what the OED etymology above says: relatives of ghost in Gothic are “usgaisjan to terrify, usgaisnan to be terrified”. However, from looking at other sources (the Lehmann dictionary and the Project Wulfila site linked above) I think the second one should be usgeisnan (usgaisjan is its causative). Also, I wonder if ‘to be terrified’ is the best English equivalent, since usgeisnan is glossed sich entsetzen, erstaunen in the Gothic-German dictionary, and appears several times in the New Testament, where English translators have mostly used “astonished”, “amazed”, etc., but usually not “terrified”. For example, Luke 2:47:
usgeisnodedun þan allai þai hausjandans is ana frodein jah andawaurdjam is.
ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες οἱ ἀκούοντες αὐτοῦ ἐπὶ τῇ συνέσει καὶ ταῖς ἀποκρίσεσιν αὐτοῦ.
And all that heard him were astonished at his understanding and answers.
Per OED, the -ggan in spriggan comes from the Cornish plural spyryjion, reanalyzed as a singular in English. The first written reference in English was spelled “Spriggian”, probably representing pronunciation with /dʒ/.
Wondering about Kusaal kʋk “apparition” of a dead person”, I notice that the Farefare dictionary says of its cognate kʋ̀kɔ̀ “fantôme (seul le sorcier peut le voir.)” So it’s Witch-of-Endor stuff, presumably, rather than quite the same thing as our “ghost.” But by “sorcier” they seem to mean (Western Oti-Volta-style) “witch.” Not sure what to make of that.
Entsetzt is what you are if you’re witnessing a scandal – “shocked”, I’d say, with a lasting aftertaste of horror. I don’t think the Greek original is all about the fear of God, though…?
Da gejst is spirit as in fighting spirit (kampgejst). Also gejstlig ~ “priestly,” de gejstlige = “the clergy.”
agte ~ “hold in esteem,” archaic salutation med højagtelse ~ “with best regards”. Noun agt also ~ “intention.”
All of these just as in German, or nearly so: Kampfgeist, geistlich, die Geistlichen, achten, hochachtungsvoll.
Except that Acht is extinct: in Acht und Bann was a way to say “outlawed”. (The other was vogelfrei; “free as a bird in a world full of cats” I guess…)
Geistige Getränke is an old-fashioned term (possibly always jocular) for alcoholic drinks because they contain spiritus vini – indeed, -geist is a synonym of -schnaps, with usage determined geographically as usual.
“Spirituous liquor”.
The Acht of in Acht und Bann is a homophone, it’s not the same Acht as in achten and hochachtungsvoll, according to DWDS.
The number 8 is not related either, although DeepL thinks Acht und Bann is “eight and ban” 🙂
“All of these just as in German” — in fact Danish gejst and agt are both borrowed from German.
kʋ̀kɔ̀ “fantôme (seul le sorcier peut le voir.)”
Rattray’s wonderfully-titled Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland says that a Farefare witch actually becomes a kʋ̀kɔ̀ when they die.
Bad idea to let one touch you, apparently: Rattray’s footnote says
Not sure how you avoid them touching you if you can’t see them. Seems like the game is fixed to me.
The thing about the feet is what the Kusaasi say about the malevolent kind of kikiris “fairies”, which like to mislead wanderers in the bush. Dunno if that means you turn into a kikirig when you die if you’re a witch. Probably not: the foot thing seems to be a fairly common trope for hostile humanoid whatevers in West Africa.
But it’s soothsayers/diviners that can actually see kikiris, generally. I suspect that Niggli’s dictionary has just wrongly labelled them “sorciers.” It doesn’t make the mistake of translating baga “soothsayer” as “sorcier” though (it has “devin, charlatan.”)
[Prof Kropp Dakubu, who had a sensitive and informative, if short, account of traditional Farefare beliefs in her Parlons farefari, quite properly just glossed it “devin.” Actually, looking at her account, it does look as if Farefare witches are the sorcerer kind, not like Kusaasi ones.]
Ah. Well, Achtung does mean “respect” sometimes.
Except that Acht is extinct
It is still used in the fixed expressions sich in Acht nehmen “be careful, take care, beware”, Acht geben “pay attention, attend to”, außer Acht lassen “disregard”. These are frequently used, so one could almost fail to notice that the word isn’t used outside of them.
Achtung and Ächtung don’t mix.
…in writing, yes. I’ve used außer Acht lassen myself, thanks for the reminder. The other two I only know from reading, though, and I haven’t read a lot in German in recent years; what I say instead is aufpassen.
Giv agt! is Danish military for ‘Attention!’ To stand at attention is stå ret, though.
Die Rehlein beten zur Nacht,
hab acht!
Sie falten die kleinen Zehlein,
die Rehlein.
[already seen here many years ago]
That’s habt Acht and Habtachtstellung – the kind of archaism the military is excellently suited to preserve.