Tamlin Magee writes for the Financial Times (archived) about his quest to understand a German descriptor:
Soon after my friend Andreas moved to Berlin, he sent me a picture of some pine nuts on a supermarket shelf. What made them photoworthy? The descriptor milde in big letters on the label.
People have eaten pine nuts since the Paleolithic Age, with evidence of their consumption found in ancient cave dwellings. And I really, really struggled with the thought that, from 10,000BC to any single time since, anyone anywhere would have flinched at their overbearing zest. Surely, if ever there was a naturally mild food, this was it.
As Andreas continued his new life in Germany, a steady drip of other “mild” foodstuffs arrived in my inbox. First, there were carrots, labelled as crunchy and mild. Then came mild orange juice, mild wine, mild olive oil. Mild chickpeas, mild tofu, mild maple syrup, mild yoghurt, mild bread. As a recent transplant, Andreas had no idea what this was all about. “I have BEGGED Germans to explain to me how carrots are not already a ‘mild’ flavour,” he wrote. But they couldn’t, and so began a shared mystery that would sustain our friendship for more than five years. […]
It is said there is a German word for everything. Really, this is a quirk of the scaffolding of the language, where nouns are tied together to create new meanings. There’s sitzpinkler, a man who sits down to urinate. There’s hackenporsche, or “heel Porsche”, the wheeled shopping trolleys beloved of elderly people everywhere. There’s Hasenbrot, literally “rabbit bread”, meaning a mouldy old sandwich destined for the “rabbit hutch”. And there’s Mordshunger, or “murderously hungry”.
But mild, said Stefan Oloffs, a UK-based German-language tutor, was a rare blind spot. It could refer to taste or the effect on digestion or it could mean bland, benign, gentle or light. This was a word that could mean many, many things. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that the explanations that started to trickle in differed so wildly. […]
One obvious explanation was that these “mild” products were a mere mistranslation. Maybe mild referred to natural, low-fat or organic foods. But a flurry of emails to mild-foodstuff manufacturers confirmed these were not mere low-fat alternatives. When quizzed about its mild olive spread, for example, a Bertolli spokesperson said the company designs its products with “the specific preferences, tastes and cooking practices” of different markets in mind. “The mild olive flavour in this spread was to ensure consumers understood the product did not have too strong an olive oil flavour, just a hint,” they explained.
A spokesperson for the Seeberger nut farming company said its “mild” pine nuts — pinus koraiensis, imported from Asia — were “very low” in “resinous taste”. This nutty pinienkernen taxonomy catered for those who “do not like the taste of the Mediterranean”, they added, and was popular “more or less all over Europe”.
There are a great many attempts at explanation, which you can read at the link; I was particularly amused by this one:
Finally, Thiel said, traditional German food is just not that healthy. “We want to be healthy but we have very starchy food, lots of processed meat, lots of Schweinebraten. We trick ourselves: take some of the flavour out and suddenly it’s good for me, and then I can have lots of sausages for breakfast.” And indeed for those unlucky souls among us for whom acidic food leads to an urgent visit to die Keramikabteilung besuchen (the “ceramics department”), there is the idea that die Sprühwurst (“spraying sausage”) can be curtailed by choosing milder options.
And he finishes up thus:
Above all, the perception of healthiness seems to be what’s most at play. Just as Thiel said that a mild breakfast could permit a sausage-fest for dinner, Reimers adds, “Everybody knows what’s meant when something is mild. It’s lighter or purer, but it’s not so specific that you’re forced to follow regulations. “It’s a sign the food industry can use to target groups with problems in nutrition, or other diets, such as pregnant or breastfeeding mums. You might think, OK this is a mild version. This is better for my baby.”
And so I concluded my quest. The answer to my burning question? A familiar confluence of health and wealth that, interesting though it was, possibly did not need the input of a ukulele shop owner. As I reflected on my five-year journey, I realised there was indeed a German word that summed up my time as a food detective. Hirnwichser, that is to say “brain wanker”, one who overthinks a simple problem.
A copyeditor’s note: I was mildly annoyed by the inconsistencies in italicization (“die Keramikabteilung” but “die Sprühwurst”) and capitalization (most nouns get their proper German spellings, but not sitzpinkler and hackenporsche, and the Linnaean term pinus koraiensis should have P). I’ll add the FT to my list of publications that will get coals in their stockings. But it’s an enjoyable little essay; thanks, jack!
May LanguageHat never become mild!
🌶️🌶️🌶️
In former times the adjective “mild” was frequently used in marketing/advertising by various U.S. cigarette brands. This is apparently no longer legal, supposedly because the FDA convinced itself that consumers might interpret it as a health claim meaning “less bad for you than other cigarettes.” I am somewhat skeptical about that, especially because in the context of tobacco smoke the most natural interpretation of “mild” (IMHO) is as an antonym for “harsh.” I guess in other taste contexts “mild” might more plausibly be an antonym for “strong,” perhaps as a euphemism of sorts since the obvious antonym “weak” sounds pejorative. “Mild” is certainly an antonym for “spicy” in culinary contexts in AmEng, although “spicy” seems a somewhat distinct concept from “strong.”
Mild as May. (“Every Marlboro full, firm and round.”)
Here is a purported guide to which sorts of Scotch whisky (plus some Irish whiskeys mentioned in passing) are “mild.” https://www.homeofmalts.com/en/mild-whisky/ I don’t think “mild” is used as much in American* booze discourse, but “smooth” certainly is. I don’t think many drinkers think that “smooth” booze is any healthier than “rough” booze – if of the same proof and consumed in equivalent quantities. Which to my mind casts some doubt on the “mild” = “healthy” assumption that the page hat linked just asserts in a [citation needed] sort of way. Might there have been a sort of folk belief that smoke that doesn’t make you cough so much also doesn’t give you cancer so much? Can’t rule it out, but it hardly seems intuitive/obvious and the straightforward “mildness” of doesn’t-make-you-cough-so-much is sufficiently appealing to many consumers that there is no reason to assume the companies would only make that claim if it was also secret code for something else.
*By “American” I mean the U.S. – you can find Canadian whiskies described as “Mild” including some (not necessarily currently made) that have or had “Mild” as part of the product name, e.g. “Melchers Very Mild Canadian Whisky – A Blend.” Presumably “mild” is a positive descriptor of the same things about the Canadian style of whisky that get it pejoratively called “brown vodka” by those who think it lacks character and distinctiveness.
I have some pine nuts from pine cones harvested a couple of months ago. Certainly some of them got contaminated with pine pitch, which gives them a distinctive spiciness.
a purported guide to which sorts of Scotch whisky (plus some Irish whiskeys mentioned in passing) are “mild.”
In the UK, I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘mild’ applied to whisk(e)y. ‘smooth’, ‘smoky, yes. ‘spicy’ just about. ‘strong’ of a variety of whisky seems silly: all whiskeys are ‘strong drink’.
The most common terms I’ve heard are ‘harsh’ (= a cheap blend, not much matured; of Johnny Walker or those made-up Scottish-ish names) vs ‘mellow’ (Laphroaig, Jameson).
A little bland [throughout, but especially around 2:25]
Is this specifically a German thing? I have lived in Austria for 13 years now and have never noticed any overuse of the word „mild „ for food products. Indeed, looking in my refrigerator and cupboard the word doesn’t appear on any food item in our apartment. Not on the carrots, not on the oils and not on the pine nuts. Although to be fair where there is a genuine choice between „mild“ and „scharf“, like mustard or Liptauer Aufstrich, a beloved Austrian spread made of Topfen (untranslatable but similar to творог), paprika, onions, capers, etc., I choose „scharf“. All this to say I am somewhat dubious about this article’s thesis, sounds to me like the typical English „those weird foreigners and their funny languages“ kind of story. Maybe someone in Berlin can confirm it’s accuracy.
I need to check that when I go to the supermarket next weekend. I am aware of three products for which a “mild” variety usually is available or advertised, cheese (my wife regularly asks me to buy some mild variety of this or that sort), salami (I am not particularly interested in mild salami, but I regularly come across it when browsing) and cigarettes (not smoking, but I remember hearing the assertion JWB mentions from time to time, that calling cigarettes or tobacco mild is a ruse by the tobacco industry to fool smokers into thinking that these products are less harmful). Can’t say that I ever knowingly came across mild olive oil or mild nuts, both of which are products I regularly buy.
On two terms that are mentioned in the article: I see Hackenporsche used much more frequently for the suitcases on two wheels that tourists and corporate road warriors drag behind them than for shopping trolleys. And Hasenbrot normally is not destined for the animals – its sandwiches that were made to be eaten at school or work, but were brought back home and now are peddled under this exotic moniker to anyone who is ready to eat them. I guess someone made a hasty conclusion wrt their meaning based on etymology.
@Vanya
Is this specifically a German thing? Or a Berlin thing? In Bavaria, this excessive usage hasn’t struck me. Perhaps it depends on where you do your shopping: in a Reformhaus maybe they’ll stress the mildness.
It is the case though that spicy-hot food is not liked much Germany. The other day in a restaurant I pointed at the sachets of mustard in a cup on the table, which were “milder Senf” and asked the waiter if they didn’t have hot mustard, and got a dusty, “that’s all there is” back. Fortunately nowadays you’ll sometimes find Colemans in the supermarket, otherwise the mustards on offer are usually very bland.
The density of Indian restaurants here now exceeds that of England, but the food is almost invariably totally mild, and they seem unable to dose it: if you ask for it a bit hotter, they tip the whole contents of the chilli box in, and it comes inedible.
The whole essay seems an exercise in recherché vocabulary.
Viennese do seem more open to eating „schoaf“ than other Germans. I have seen a lot of American eyes water after trying the local horseradish. Funny thing is for mustards the traditional opposite of „scharf“ is typically „süß“ (sweet), not mild, at least when buying a sausage at an Imbiss or a Würstelstand.
Hans reminds me that „milder Käse“ is certainly widely available. But isn’t „mild“ also used for Cheddar in English? Doesn’t strike me as an odd usage.
But isn’t „mild“ also used for Cheddar in English?
Cheddar is usually described as ‘sharp’. ‘mild’ is used of Cheddar that’s not yet mature. Also used of cheese named as ‘Edam’ (which I hope the Dutch would disavow). In New Zealand there was a long series of TV cheese ads ~20 years ago: ‘You’re not scared of cheese are you?’.
BTW NZ is the largest producer worldwide of cheese named ‘Parmesan’. We’re not allowed to call it ‘Parmigiano’.
What AntC said.
Also the word “seasoning” probably originally applied to the aging or maturing process (which could of course involve the addition of salt and/or other spices), I think stagionato is used this way in Italian.
I believe the EU banned both “mild” and “light” in tobacco descriptions in 2003. IANAS but FWIW I don’t recall seeing “mild” (unlike “light”/”lite”) on packets or marketing in the previous decade in Ireland
@Peter Grubtal: The mustard I normally see in restaurants is labeled mittelscharf, I don’t think I have ever seen it labeled mild. But you’re right, that mustard isn’t really spicy. For an acceptable level of spiciness, you have to buy “extra scharf”; Düsseldorfer Löwensenf is my go-to brand here.
Traditional German cooking is not spicy at all; a bit of salt and black pepper used to be the summit of spiciness. Restaurants with international cuisine in Germany cater to that. But I know many places that dose the spiciness right when you ask for it. (As for Indian food, one thing I learnt from going to Indian places with an Indian colleague is that if Europeans or Americans can eat it, it’s not spicy enough, and I come from a family where the bottle of sambal oelek was a fixture of the dinner table.)
the famous sketch from Goodness Gracious Me
As for Indian food, one thing I learnt from going to Indian places with an Indian colleague is that if Europeans or Americans can eat it, it’s not spicy enough
There are regional differences inside South Asia as well. For a few years I went regularly to Indian restaurants in Bahrain as the only firangi with Pakistani and Indian colleagues, and I never had a dish I couldn’t eat. I can’t swear the spiciness was really at Karachi levels but my colleagues all claimed the food was quite authentic. Sadly I still have not made it to India or Pakistan to test that.
Is this specifically a German thing? I have lived in Austria for 13 years now and have never noticed any overuse of the word „mild „ for food products.
I find this an odd reaction, considering the piece is about Germany, and specifically Berlin. It’s as if I read an article about food in Toronto and checked my refrigerator and said “Fake news, that’s not true of Massachusetts!”
On a recent brief trip through Germany I had currywurst at the main Bahnhof in Friedrichshafen as a quick lunch while waiting for a train and found it somewhat less bland or “mild” than I had expected but I think that was just because my expectations were for extreme blandness.
ETA: nothing suggested that they would have made it more “scharf” if I had asked, but maybe that’s an off-menu thing and if you knew to ask you would have been catered to?
‘mellow’ (Laphroaig, Jameson).
Are you perhaps thinking of some other scotch? I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Laphroaig described as “mellow,” and in fact I find it hard to conceive. I love the stuff, but I’m fond of extreme peatiness. A common descriptor is “harsh.”
Single-malt whiskies are intended to have these earthy or smoky flavours. Jameson is usually a blended whiskey, although I would not be surprised if they also have a single-malt offering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blended_whiskey
Yeah, Jameson makes sense there; I was only objecting to the inclusion of Laphroaig.
Jameson may be mild but one might dispute whether it’s truly mellow.
This piece by Zythophile is mostly lamenting the decline of the good old word “bitter” to describe a style of beer in England, but as a bonus he mentions in the comment thread (and I have seen mention of this elsewhere) that some beers have been historically labeled “mild bitter.” Which might seem an oxymoron but was apparently not so taken in context.
https://zythophile.co.uk/2019/04/09/when-did-bitter-become-the-beer-style-that-dare-not-speak-its-name/
Does Berlin generally have separate food products from the rest of Germany?
Apart from small local producers, I would expect food packaging to look the same if I went to London, and even expect a broad overlap in terms used to describe food if I went to Dublin, although the specific products and packaging might be different.
I agree that Laphraoig is not mellow!
I find this an odd reaction, considering the piece is about Germany, and specifically Berlin
But it’s not. The author makes generalizations about the whole country including talking to people in Munich (which is culinarily not very different to Austria), Osnabrück, Hamburg and the head chef of the German Gymnasium in London. Also, we speak German in Austria so if the author wants to make sweeping assumptions about the German language, I think looking at Austrian and Swiss usage is fair. We buy a lot of the same products in the same packaging, it’s not as if Knorr or Dr Oetker make new labels for Austrian supermarkets (who are also dominated by Rewe, the same company the author cites).
J.W. – they certainly would have thrown more curry powder on if you asked, although that wouldn’t make a huge difference. The curry ketchup itself usually can’t be modified.
In Austria you can usually order a pickled hot pepper on the side with your sausage at a sausage stand, I don’t think that is common in Germany.
But this being the 21st century, naturally there are now German foodstands competing to produce the hottest currywurst in the world. There are plenty of YouTube and Tiktok videos of people in Berlin or Frankfurt crying after eating ridiculously spicy currywurst. The record holder still seems to be this place in Wanne-Eickel.
https://www1.wdr.de/lokalzeit/heimatliebe/wanne-eickel-schaerfste-currywurst-der-welt-100.html. 16 million Scovilles of heat at the upper range, might hospitalize you.
I think the journalist is spot on here. Mild has many nuances, be it taste, content or food tolerances.
@JWB: As Vanya said, Currywurst is not normally a spicy dish, just savory, and at most stands the proprietors would look at you funny if you’d ask for it to be served spicier. But in an age where you get chilies in chocolate, you can have spicy Currywurst in some places.
@Jen: The last time I lived in Berlin is almost 30 years ago, but I didn’t notice any big differences to the rest of Germany back then. Usually, in most German regions there are some local specialties that you’ll only find in specialist shops elsewhere in Germany, like Berliner Weiße, and maybe stuff from regional suppliers (having some local / regional products is currently the in thing in upscale supermarkets), but that should be about all the differences.
16 million Scovilles
So currywurst with crystallized capsaicin? There aren’t any peppers that hot (by a factor of eight).
A mild Parmesan would presumably be a Parmigianino.
Parmigianino, “der Kleine aus Parma”. Not-so-cheesy mannerism.
Well, the product in my fridge is just called “Original Löwensenf”, and that’s not because it was bought here in Düsseldorf. I don’t remember it ever having had another name, wherever I bought it. And it’s extra scharf, of course; what’s the use of mustard if it’s not scharf.
And I don’t believe this alleged over-use of mild. That’s just a journalist exaggerating his own subjective experience, not an objective fact. He needed something to write about so he would get paid.
And I don’t believe this alleged over-use of mild.
I don’t either, apart from that annoying “Joghurt mild” I see everywhere. I think it means low-fat. That’s what it tastes like at any rate. Various joghurt products leave a white deposit on the spoon that’s hard to get off, as if it were chalk.
I expect that kalorienarm will be replaced by kalorienmild.
Leaving “mild” aside: there’s hardly an article of food nowadays that does not tout itself as “Bio” or “Vegan”. Recently I saw Haferflocken Vegan, which is pretty silly – or maybe there’s some kind of “Demeter” process involved. Oatmeal harvested by meatless moonlight !
@Vanya: In America, Italian sausage is usually contrasted as “sweet” versus “hot.” However, the only difference between the two is typically that red pepper is added to hot Italian sausage.
@ulr: Yes, you’re right, I checked in my fridge. WP says that Düsseldorfer Löwensenf GmbH used to be the name of the company producing it (until 2014). I have vague memories that Düsseldorfer Löwensenf also was the name on the jars when I was a lad, but I may be mistaken. In any case, Düsseldorfer Löwensenf is how it always has been referred to in my family…
… that annoying “Joghurt mild” I see everywhere. I think it means low-fat.
Yogurt is unpleasantly sour, so mild could mean unpleasantly bland or unpleasantly sweet.
In America, Italian sausage is usually contrasted as “sweet” versus “hot.” However, the only difference between the two is typically that red pepper is added to hot Italian sausage.
In my experience, hot Italian sausage (which may or may not resemble anything made in Italy) doesn’t contain fennel seed, but sweet Italian sausage might. My experience is very limited, though.
@hans
Maybe they had pots like this in cantines or cafés…
https://www.grelly.de/itm/dusseldorfer-lowensenf-topf-fur-gastronomie-otto-frenzel-metz-lothringen-1903-125460634884
@ AntC – “Cheddar is usually described as ‘sharp’”
Not in the UK, where, as per Wikipedia, “Cheddar is usually sold as mild, medium, mature, extra mature or vintage”. When I was younger the strongest cheddar was sometime called “tasty”, and I see that it is a term that is still used as a part of the branding and naming of cheddar.
https://thebigcheesecompany.co.uk/products/somerset-farmhouse-extra-tasty-cheddar
I also remember “racing” cheddar, so strong it could crawl off your plate, but I think that was just some sort of local joke as I see no evidence of it online. Maybe it was a dream, caused by eating too much cheese late at night.
I am not a cheese expert, though I like it, especially cheddar. I lived in Cheddar once upon a time, and even now I am living only four miles away in Wedmore. When I was in California in about 1997 some American colleagues laughed incredulously when they found out that there was an actual village called Cheddar. It was in the news because of the Cheddar Man story; a schoolteacher in Cheddar named Adrian Targett was found to be related to a 10,000 year old skeleton from one of the caves, half a mile and 300 generations distant.
I had a summer holiday job in 1977 as a cheese turner in a farmhouse cheddar warehouse (Crump Way Cheese Factors in Wells, no longer in existence, levelled and the area turned to housing), where my job was turning over 60lb truckles of cheddar, wrapped in cloth, to distribute its internal structure and moisture evenly. Eight truckles to a shelf. So as not to have too many links in this comment, I’ll say, and you can google for confirmation and pictures, that these days Westcombe cheddar makers have a robotic cheese rotator called Tina (Tina the Turner).
There’s only one place that makes farmhouse cheddar in Cheddar now, the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Co mentioned in the Wikipedia link below. My art college mate Mark used to manage it in the early 1980s. They age some of their cheese in the caves of Cheddar Gorge. (Mark recently returned to Cheddar after decades away to work at Cheddar Gorge and Caves, the Longleat company that owns the south side of the Gorge and its attractions, including the main tourist caves. The National Trust has the north side).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_cheese#United_Kingdom
I understand “Cheddar” (Ceodre / Ceodor) means “ravine”, ie Gorge – so it’s like River Avon or Sahara Desert, where both parts mean essentially the same thing.
@PP: I saw pictures of such pots when I was looking for pictures of jars with “Düsseldorfer Löwensenf”, but I don’t think I ever have seen them in real life; what I remember is the name written on ordinary glass jars, but I cannot find confirmation for that.
@hans
On the jars, “Düsseldorfer” could appear on the lid (2nd jar from left)
https://www.loewensenf.de/de/loewenwelt/unsere-ikone
“Cheddar” (Ceodre / Ceodor) means “ravine”, ie Gorge
Does this speculation originate with Eilert Ekwall? Here is the entry for Cheddar in Ekwall (1947) The Concise Oxford Dictionary Of English Place Names. More on this family of words (OE cēod, OHG kiot) in this LH post on cod from earlier this year. There is an -r- in also in ON koðri ‘scrotum’, another word that somehow fits in this group.
I don’t know if the “ravine” speculation originates in Ekwall or somewhere else.
It’s interesting that according to Ekwall Cheddar was known as Ceoddercumb in 1068. A cumb or combe refers to a “steep, narrow valley, or to a small valley or large hollow on the side of a hill […] often understood simply to mean a small valley through which a watercourse does not run”, according to Wikipedia. So Cheddar, Gorge and Combe seem to mean broadly the same thing, or at least the same geographical feature, with I suppose the old English combe replaced by the French gorge (“throat”).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combe
A road runs down Cheddar Gorge, not a river, though it also floods sometimes – most memorably in 1968 – so there is a temporary watercourse. There is a subterranean watercourse that emerges from a cave in the lower gorge and becomes the River Yeo.
There are plenty of combes around my area, including Burrington Combe, where the Rev. Toplady was purported to have written the hymn “Rock of Ages” while sheltering from a storm, though it is also alleged this is a legend. And Butcombe is nearby, which gives its name to a popular local bitter.
Taking Butcombe as the cue to go back to the mild discussion, mild ale “originated in Britain in the 17th century or earlier, and originally meant a young ale, as opposed to a ‘stale’ aged or old ale”. Some of them were strong, up to 7% abv, though apparently that came to an end with The Great War. I don’t know that I have ever noticed it on sale in my part of the world (SW) but my brother lives in Yorkshire; I remember it there and I think they still drink it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mild_ale
When I was in California in about 1997 some American colleagues laughed incredulously when they found out that there was an actual village called Cheddar.
In my experience, many Californians are only vaguely aware of the existence of Europe. Except for Japan, of course.
Doesn’t Disney California Adventure Park have some kind of European Castle on display ? They have Avengers Headquarters. Maybe people think they’re all Imaginary Places.
Looks like you guys now have another 4 years of cheesy fantasy to get through. Maybe T will crawl off the plate, he’s not in good health, and make room for V.
It’s not all bad. Fewer death threats against election officials, less riots in the Capitol building … looks set to be a golden age.
As symbolized by a golden toilet. I need to be more pragmatic.
According to here and there: “Despite widespread rumors, there is no verified evidence that Trump actually owns a gold toilet”.
News just in on inflation under Biden: “Sally Harris, 77, a retired lab tech from Lee’s Summit, Missouri, said she was in Aldi the other day, and her favorite chocolate peanut butter cookies that were once 99 cents are now $2.09”.
It is premature for European types to be making sweeping predictions about the future of the U.S. based on election results when we still haven’t even had a winner declared yet in the contest to be the next Lieutenant Governor of Vermont.
Who’s a European type ? Wales is not in the EU. I hope the deservingest person wins in Vermont.
Indeed. It’s all still to play for. The Lieutenant Governor of Vermont may yet save us all. (I believe that is how the system works, though, as a quasi-European, I would naturally be guided by USians on such matters.)
And now we return to our Cheddar Special.
Quite so.
On the jars, “Düsseldorfer” could appear on the lid (2nd jar from left)
Thanks for finding that! So my memory didn’t deceive me.
Imagine my surprise to see the state ltgov election up for discussion; it looked over last night and at least some local media called it for Rodgers this morning.
I don’t see how Zuckerman could make up the numbers at this point.
I appreciate earthtopus’ update. I may have failed to hit “refresh” in the Burlington Free Press site I had had open in a window earlier before making my recent-ish comment, because their description of the state of play seems to have now evolved from what I remember.
To get the thread back on track, my cheese of choice these days is Cabot’s 5 Year Cheddar: marvelous crumb, powerful even cold and wonderful at room temperature, the little salt crystals; the whole nine yards.
I have tried the 10 Year, and recommend it heartily for special occasions, but it’s a bit too heady (and expensive) for regular use. If I could only eat one cheese for the rest of my life, it’d be the 5 Year.
Yes, for god’s sake let’s talk about cheese rather than the election. I’ve been saved from the internet’s obsessing about it by a service outage, but now I’m back online and trying to stay sane.
Let’s not talk about the Big Cheese, though.
Weren’t we just talking about the cheese-favoring Artotyrite heresy on another thread recently? I think if I were to follow their example and theologize my liking for cheese I might well disdain cheddar as part of a broader thrust of disdaining all cheeses not made from sheep’s milk, which carries more Scriptural-symbolism oomph than cheese made from the milk of Certain Other Mammals and is also characteristically tasty.
ETA Here’s an allegedly critically-acclaimed Vermont source of sheep-origin cheeses: https://vermontshepherd.com/
sheep’s milk
Well, obviously goat’s milk is heretical. I think we can all agree on that.
Heretical maybe, delectable for sure. Baked camembert de chèvre with honey, garlic and walnuts. An extremely mild challenge for DE.
Well, we read in Leviticus that goats were just as acceptable to the LORD as sacrifices as were various sorts of ovines and bovines, with a lot of fine regulatory detail about exactly which sort of ruminant to sacrifice on which occasion. If their respective sorts of meat and blood were all appropriate for that sacred and ritualistic use, maybe one should take more broad-minded view of their respective sorts of milk and cheese derived therefrom?
Ah, but evidently that was the Old Law, superseded by the New Covenant.
I remember eating some very nice Fulani goat cheese in Ghana, but I repented afterwards, so that’s OK.
And of course the eventually-prevailing mainstream Christian view was that even sheep’s milk cheese is heretical if used in the specific context and fashion that the Artotyrites allegedly did.
I remember eating some very nice Fulani goat cheese in Ghana, but I repented afterwards, so that’s OK.
“Repentance Wipes remove spots of all kinds, even those stubborn moral stains”
even sheep’s milk cheese is heretical if used in the specific context and fashion that the Artotyrites allegedly did
Context is all.
Use new improved Context for all your theological dilemmas!
J.W. Where do you stand on whale milk cheese? Apparently a real thing in Norway.
Whales are not kosher.
Canst thou draw out leviathan of her milk?
@Vanya: I have never as best as I recall been offered the opportunity to sample whale-milk cheese and at my increasingly advanced age have worked with some success on increasing the number of topics on which I have no opinion and feel no social or moral obligation to develop one. It does seem like a careful review of some of the trippier passages in Revelation within the interpretative framework that led some Norwegians to conclude these were prophecies warning against EU membership might also reveal some content touching on the whale-milk topic. But on the other hand there are some sound arguments for discouraging rather than encouraging free-lance exegesis of Revelation.
I have had a very modest idle daydream idea of traveling to Oslo this coming January for the preliminary rounds of the men’s team handball world championship tournament, although it’s obviously not the ideal time of year to sample most of Norway’s other tourist attractions, which I take it mostly consist of very luxurious prisons and whichever medieval wooden churches have not yet been burned down by the local metal musicians.
“Cheddar” (Ceodre / Ceodor) means “ravine”, ie Gorge
Does this speculation originate with Eilert Ekwall?
Google only allows a snippet view, but this appears to be the first publication: “Studies on English Place- and Personal Names” by Ekwall, in Bulletin de la Société Royale des Lettres de Lund, 1930-1931.
The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names (2004) mentions an alternate suggestion:
I was actually wondering about a Brythonic origin. There are apparently English place names with a first element cognate with Welsh coed “wood”, but I couldn’t come up with any very plausible explanation for the second bit. (And “wood” is a bit too easy: you could claim that practically anywhere in Britain must have featured a wood at some point if it isn’t actually a mountaintop or a lake …)
Is this *ċēodor an actually attested Old English word, or made up?
GPC hazards the guess that Welsh cau in the “hollow” sense may be borrowed from Latin cavus. “Hollow door” doesn’t strike me as a terribly plausible toponym. The components are the wrong way round for it to mean “door of a hollow/cave” as far as Welsh goes (or any Brythonic language.) I suppose that might not be the case for some hypothetical earlier form, but it all looks pretty dubious to me.
Second element seems more likely tre if Welsh. Why only cau and not cae?
@DE
Perhaps this is coloured by where I come from and by knowing too little of the rest of England, but chines, in the sense of a gully extending through the cliffs down to the sea, begin at Bournemouth, and are found westwards. This is where celtic would have held out longest. And it has been speculated that the finding of relatively late celtic inscriptions in a church at Warminster suggests that celtic might have survived in the Isle of Purbeck longer than elsewhere.
Would this bolster a celtic origin?
chines … begin at Bournemouth, and are found westwards.
Hmm? There’s a few chines on the Isle of Wight. Firstly, which puts us within hailing distance of the Naval Dockyards at Portsmouth. Etymology 1 has a couple of ‘(nautical)’ senses that seem relevant. At what point in time did the two Etyms’ pronunciation fall together? Has the word been kept alive by seafarers/fisherfolk along the coast?
Secondly,
Does anywhere else in the UK have that particular combination of geology? IOW perhaps the word is very localised because the phenomenon is. (There’s similar steep-sided usually-dry valleys on the Yorkshire East Coast from the Wolds up to Flamborough Head/Bridlington/Filey. But that’s chalk geology, and Viking country.)
In north east England similar gullies are usually called denes – I don’t suppose the geology is identical, but the results are much the same.
There are a few deans – spelt that way – between Eyemouth and Dunbar, but it’s not a common kind of coast in most of the bits of Scotland I know.
@PP:
Cae is certainly a more plausible candidate than cau for the first part of a Brythonic toponym (I was just responding to the Turner suggestion.)
Something like Cae Derw “Oakfield” would do as a placename, I suppose. But it doesn’t seem either verifiable or falsifiable as a conjecture, and doesn’t have any particular connection with the place in question. (Not, of course, that the original name of the place necessarily did have anything to do with the gorge.)
I’ve no idea how plausible (or not) all this would be phonologically.
And there is still the matter of Chitterley, Chederlia, Chiderlie, Chedderlegh and Chudderlegh, which do indeed look like they incorporate this same element. On the other hand, these places are presumably not associated with any famous gorges (or bags), undermining the proposed Old English etymology.
This link
https://www.britishplacenames.uk/cheddar-somerset-st459532
suggests that the Old English name of the place was actually Ceadra, which doesn’t look easily derivable from this (perhaps imaginary?) *ċēodor.
Doesn’t look much like cae or coed plus anything, either … (In fact, if it suggests anything Welsh at all, it would be cad “battle”, but this is just playing lookalikes.)
Aha! The name is (of course) of Japhetic origin:
https://languagehat.com/proto-indo-european-fox/#comment-4166311
AntC –
yes, not only did I neglect the IoW, but I got it wrong with Warminster as well: the church is in Wareham.
This link [britishplacenames.uk] suggests that the Old English name of the place was actually Ceadra
Without giving any references. The sources given by Ekwall (cited by Xerîb above) are:
And the sources cited by the more recent Cambridge dictionary are:
The reading as “Ceadra” apparently comes from a 1939 publication on The English Hundred-names, repeated in one other source, Domesday Gazetteer. Maybe they’re different interpretations of handwriting, or maybe it was a typo in 1939. I’d count the Cambridge dictionary as the more reliable here.
(So Cheddar was spelled Chedder until 1817? I wonder why it changed.)
Fair enough. Scratch Ceadra. No Celtic battles or foxes, then …
Is this *ċēodor an actual attested word, BTW? (You seem to be the most likely to know of anyone.)
Or if not, is this addition of /r/ to a noun stem a common derivational process in Old English? (Might be, for all I know.)
I suppose if one were determined to see a Brythonic origin for the name, the equivalent of Welsh Coed Derw “Oakwood” is actually more plausible semantically than Cae Derw (or Cau anything.)
Again, I have no idea if this is phonologically even possible.
Though Somerset is far enough west that a Celtic-origin name is not as improbable as in East Anglia, say.
I came across a paper about Celtic place names in England a while back, but I can’t remember where, unfortunately. It was by Richard Coates IIRC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_place-names_containing_reflexes_of_Celtic_*kaitos_%22woodland%22
@de
Chadderton is supposedly from Primitive W. cadéir.
Re the O.E. suffix, something like food-fodder?
Good thought.
WP on “Hutton”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutton,_Somerset#Etymology
says
but I have no access to the source it references for this -ern. I suppose it could actually be Old English ærn “building”, rather than anything Celtic. That one is mentioned here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitterne
where the name is given two quite incompatible explanations, of which the Celtic one strikes me as very improbable: no actual Brythonic language puts (the cognate of) tref as the second element in toponyms like that, and the loss of the final consonant is surely a late development, as witness the Welsh spelling even now.
Seems to me that a lot of these proposed etymologies are little more than unconstrained guesswork. While national pride should no doubt make me happy to see Brythonic toponyms all over England, I think that’s fatally easy to concoct Celtic etymologies for practically anything with a bit of imagination, and a lot of the supposed cases in WPs *kaitos list look quite iffy to me. (Moreover, that’s presumably one of the better-evidenced elements.)
Unless you’ve got something like a Roman-era transcription to go on, it seems to me that there is just no way of actually checking any of these speculations.
Case in point: Welsh caer does not derive from any Primitive Welsh “Cader or Cater” as the “Chadderton” WP article states; it’s from *kagro-.
Celtic *t becomes Welsh /d/ in this position – it’s not lost. This is amateur stuff, uninformed by any actual linguistics. Lookalikes. If it really is Brythonic at all, it would presumably be connected with a cognate of cadair “chair.”
So Cheddar was spelled Chedder until 1817?
Google and EEBO show spelling Cheddar well before 1817, including in Defoe, Swift, and Gibson’s 1695 expansion of Camden’s Britannia. OTOH Chedder long prevailed, with “Cheddar or Chedder” or vice versa in some chorographic works 1770–1840. As late as 1893 a journalist wrote
Oops – I see that the WP article on Chadderton actually does invoke cadeir, the Middle Welsh equivalent of cadair.
But it does not identify the actual language (and the Middle Welsh word itself is obviously impossibly anachronistic for the actual origin of the toponym) or recognise that caer cannot be connected with it, or hazard any guess as to why the place might be called “Chairville.” (No cathedrals seem to figure anywhere.) I suppose that there might have been a hill called (the equivalent of Welsh) cadair …
Hopefully they’ve just mangled the source. I wouldn’t like to think that the source itself was so confused.
Several place names in England actually do feature the caer element, of course, though never as “chadder”; my favourite is Carlisle (Caerliwelydd), which, pleasingly, seems to be named in honour of the very same god as Lyon, viz Lugh of the Long Hand/Lleu Llaw Gyffes.
the source it references for this -ern.
Ekwall p99 “The suffix -erno- is well evidenced in Celtic.”
Is the dubious -ern and the even more hedged-around -erno the same place-forming suffix? The Chilterns are Hills/Hundreds, so that wouldn’t be OE ærn “building”
But I’m baffled: “… may possibly be related to the word Celt (OCelt Celtae), if that word [Celt], as is held by many scholars, is related to Lat celsus and meant originally ‘high*. From an OBrit adj. *celto- ‘high* a hill-name might have been formed.” [apologies if I’ve left OCR errors]
I thought the etymology for Celt as the name of a peoples was well established(?) [Greek Keltoi from confusion with Herodotus Gauls] Is this Ekwall just pulling stuff out of thin air?
This is amateur stuff, uninformed by any actual linguistics. Lookalikes.
Again I am in violent agreement with m’learned colleague.
I can’t think of any word for “high” in Welsh derived from anything like *kelt-.
“High” is uchel; there’s also a cognate of Latin altus in allt “hillside, cliff.”
Possibly Breton or Cornish preserved such a form. But I suspect that all this is really more free-association than etymology. I don’t believe in this “OBrit” *celto-. It seems to have been invented for the proposed etymology. Nor do I think that there is any reason to think that the ancient Britons actually called themselves “Celts.”
For all I know this topographic -ern(o) may be perfectly pukka. It would be nice to have some actual examples other than speculative analyses of English toponyms, though. (No doubt several obvious ones will occur to me shortly after I’ve gone to bed.)
In a spirit of enquiry, I looked at the WP for Tintern and found
No Idea where “rocks” comes from. Din Teyrn means “Prince’s Fort.” Tin Teyrn means “Prince’s Arsehole” …
As it happens, “Tintern” is Welsh. But the Welsh form is Tyndyrn. As one can discover from WP:
https://cy.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyndyrn
I’m getting the impression that there’s a whole damn cottage industry of junk Celtic etymologies of English place names out there …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvern,_Worcestershire
actually looks legit and Celtic. But not a case of any -ern toponymic suffix.
@DE I came across a paper about Celtic place names in England a while back, but I can’t remember where, unfortunately. It was by Richard Coates
Coates (and collaborators) has published heaps on placenames [too much to link here, see his wiki page, which links to his biog at UWE, previously at Sussex U]. I can’t access any of the actual articles/they’re behind academic/paywalls. Maybe:
The significances of Celtic place-names in England (2023 paper/chapter from a 2001 conference)
No Idea where “rocks” comes from.
Could this be some confusion around Bishop Ussher‘s St. Tewdrig, who having abdicated to Meurig, “vitam eremitalem in rupibus Dindyrn coepit ducere?”
For all I know this topographic -ern(o) may be perfectly pukka.
LMFHO, this Ekwall gets everywhere and Google is banjaxed. Ekwall 1928 ‘English River Names’ is abbreviated “ERN” in a bazillion publications covering hydronyms.
Severn. Wikip barely gives the direct Celtic proposal the time of day. wikti: ” from Old English Sæfern, ultimately from Proto-Celtic *Sabrinā (compare Welsh Hafren), perhaps from *samaros (“summer fallow”).”
The -n in (Forest of) Arden? “Believed to be derived from a Brythonic word ardu- “high” (cf. Welsh: ardd), by extension “highland”, …” [wikti], but that doesn’t explain the -n.
There’s ME suffix -ern denoting direction as in (ossified) ‘Northern’ < northron . Was that ever productive as a suffix? Was it ever Celtic?
There's a Latin-ish diminutive as in postern, bittern, pastern, cavern(?). -rnus suffix forming adjectives: tavern, (sub)altern. Or ablative as in modern.
The -n in wyvern is unetymological opines etymonline, from ME wyver < Latin vipera.
"There are 82 words ending with ERN ." a scrabble search site tells me. I've trawled out above where it might be a suffix.
https://gazetteer.org.uk/search?type=ew&place=Ern
88 Settlements
0 Civil Parishes/Communities
62 Geographical Features
7 Heritage Sites
Google is banjaxed
#
OED’s earliest evidence for banjax is from 1956, in the writing of Samuel Beckett, author.
#
Then OED is seriously out of date. We’ve ref’d Flann O’Brien recently, Journalism/humorous writings started late 1940.
OED presumably aren’t suggesting Beckett invented the word(?)
Green’s dictionary of slang cites 1925 — that appears to be in English dialogue, but nobody’s denying it’s originally Irish.
Sean O’Casey was Irish by nationality, writing in the English language – but I don’t think anyone is suggesting that ‘banjax’ originates in the Irish language, rather than in Irish English.
Thanks @mollymolly, but we’re specifically looking for where -ern is a suffix to a Celtic/Brythonic word. I see a lot of ‘cavern’s in those listings. And (coed(-y-))(g)wern doesn’t leave room for a prefix to the -ern. (m’learned colleague will correct me if that doesn’t mean wood of elders.)
I haven’t gone through all the ‘Settlements’ but a few I tried seemed to be from Old English ærn “building”, rather than anything Celtic., to quote from up-thread.
‘Morvern’ might fit the pattern, but all examples seem to be in Scotland.
(coed(-y-))(g)wern
Alders rather than elders (not that I could tell you the difference.) But Yes.
It’s hard to tell without seeing the actual books, but Ekwall seems to me to be a completely unreliable source as far as anything Brythonic goes.
In particular, he seems to have ignored the order of components. Evidently Common British did at one time have compound place names with the generic “fort” or “town” element (or whatever) at the end (e.g. Camulodunum) but all of the actual Brythonic languages have noun phrases with the reverse order instead, and this must surely have already happened at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions. The earliest Welsh poetry probably goes back to the sixth century, and has this order; the Battle of Dyrham, which cut off Celtic Wales and the Old North from the Celtic West Country, took place in 577, but Cornish and Breton have the same component order in toponyms as Welsh. Ekwall seems to imply that the invaders took the placenames from a form of language which had been extinct for centuries by the time they arrived.
OED presumably aren’t suggesting Beckett invented the word(?)
That was a quote from Wiktionary. I don’t know what OED version was being referred to.
I just thought the sort-of implication strange that Beckett “invented” the word.
banjax … Then OED is seriously out of date.
You don’t need a subscription to check that their entry for banjax, v. is unrevised from 1989, when they didn’t have search engines and entered whatever words were found in Great 20th-Century Authors without making an effort to antedate them. (What Stu quoted was that factsheet page, not Wiktionary.)
At some point since 1989 they’ve separated banjaxed, adj. and banjax, v. into different entries, with earliest citation for the adjective from Flann O’Brien in 1939. But I see no justification for classifying Beckett’s “Then we’d be banjaxed” as a verb use, rather than adjective. They’ll need to sort that out in the revision.
OED presumably aren’t suggesting Beckett invented the word(?)
Of course not, they’re not that stupid and they’ve always assumed their readers aren’t either, though unfortunately many of them are. Even David-Antoine Williams — who of all people should know better, considering how much he’s ridiculed others for the same mistake! — assumed from the OED2 quotations that T.S. Eliot created the slang sense of “pneumatic” (= curvy, busty), and ignored evidence to the contrary.
Stan Carey has a nice survey of “banjax” and its origins, from earlier this year. As a commenter points out, another version of Waiting for Godot had “ballocksed”, so “banjaxed” may be a revision to pass censorship.
Actually, I may have been unfair to Ekwall. The more spectacularly silly supposedly-Brythonic etymologies seem to be other people’s fault (as far as I can make out.)
I shall pour a libation to his manes in restitution tonight.
Separately, I’m struck by this putative British *cēto- “wood” that keeps turning up. GPC has under the etymology of coed
The Old Cornish cuit (Cornish coys) and Breton koat suggest that the actual latest Common Brythonic form was *koyt-, not *ke:t-. This would indeed be the expected outcome of *kaito-, I think; cf Welsh oes “age, timespan” and Old Irish áes. (The outcome of *e: in Welsh is actually wy, as in swydd “office”, borrowed from Latin sedes.) Presumably the Latinised forms represent Roman mishearing or just later Latin monophthongisation.
So *cēto- never existed (and why *c-, not *k-?); and at the relevant period the form had probably already become *koyt- in still-Common Brythonic.
(Incidentally, Letocetum, Welsh Llwytgoed is not a counterexample to what I said about element order: the first element is an adjective, “grey”, and adjective-noun compounds like this remain a thing in Welsh, with soft mutation of the second element regardless of gender.)
(Presumably adjective-noun compounds in Welsh reflect a Sámi substrate, as in Elfdalian.)
Ekwall seems to imply that the invaders took the placenames from a form of language which had been extinct for centuries by the time they arrived.
Is it possible that these were placenames where the order of constituents was already frozen when the Saxons arrived? Or is there evidence that Brythonic revised all nominal compound place names to the new order? Are there any old toponyms in Wales that show the common Indo-European head-final order for noun-noun compounds?
All good questions.
Not many, I think. But yes, it did happen.
Caerfyrddin “Carmarthen” is one. The Welsh form looks like “Merlin’s Fort” and is actually usually taken as such, but in actuality Merlin seems to have been retconned from the place name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moridunum_(Carmarthen)
As far as town names go in general, I think the problem is compounded by the fact that there aren’t all that many old British settlements which actually survived the period intact. Not sure that there ever were all that many in what is now Wales.
There also don’t seem to have been all that many Roman-era British place names that actually were of the “Camulodunum” type.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cities_in_Britain
The etymology of “London” seems to be basically unknown. “York” is either Efrog or Caerefrog in Welsh; the -og bit is an old placename suffix (seen in all those French -ac names, too) but the word is not a compound. “Chester” is just plain Caer. Camulodunum itself, Colchester, hasn’t got its own Welsh name now AFAIK, but was Caer Colun previously. The second bit is probably just from “colonia.”
the -og bit is an old placename suffix (seen in all those French -ac names, too)
Such as Bergerac, Cadillac ? TIL that Cyrano de Bergerac was a real 17C guy who wrote sci-fi.
Yep. Not forgetting Dirac. (Or Dyrog, as he is known in Welsh.)
Alders rather than elders
Thank you, d’uh. In my head I wrote ‘Alders’. Blame auto-correct. (Elder is really no more than a large bush, wouldn’t form a wood.)
T. F. O’Rahilly ‘Ériu’, Vol. 14 (1946) “On the Origin of the Names Érainn and Ériu” p. 24 fn. 4 references
Alfred Holder, Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz vol. 1 p. 1465 sv “-(e)rno-“
and
Holger Pedersen, Vergleichende Grammatik der keltischen Sprachen vol. 2 p. 53 § 396.2 “Das Suffix -rno-“
(O’Rahilly also deprecates [p. 23] a proposal by Podorny that he blames on Ekwall.)
Pedersen in turn cites Zeuss Grammatica Celtica pp. 778, 827.
“Ireland” is Iwerddon in Welsh, matching Old Irish Ériu pretty well.
Basically *iweryon- (with the Welsh from the oblique cases.)
I see no *-erno here …
[Huh. Comment I was responding to has evaporated. Pity. It was a good one with some interesting links. Maybe it will rise again.]
… invented the word(?)
Of course not, they’re not that stupid and they’ve always assumed their readers aren’t either,
When it comes to Anglo-Irish, Joyce invented plenty of words, so it’s not an entirely stupid question.
Similarly Dame Edna with Australianisms. (Though plenty of those turn out to be Irish-ish.)
I can’t remember where we were discussing Dumbarton recently, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caer lists it as Cair Brithon, which is interesting – possibly not newly named by later Gaels, then.
I didn’t know that caer and cadair were unrelated – Carlisle in Gaelic is Cathair Luail.
Cadair is a loanword from Latin cathedra, as, presumably, is Gaelic cathair. Caer is echt Celtic.
FWIW, WP says the capital of Strathclyde was called (the equivalent of modern Welsh) Allt Clud in British. “Clydebank”, effectively.
However,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumbarton_Castle
says that Nennius lists a Cair Brithon as one of the 28 cities of Britain, and that David Nash Ford thought that must mean “Dumbarton.” More detail is not provided, and the linked reference doesn’t work for me.
On Nennius himself, WP has
The Kingdom of Strathclyde would still have been a going concern in his day, though, so he presumably would have known whereof he spoke on that point, ar any rate. It’s really more of a question why Ford supposed he meant Allt Clud by “Cair Brithon.” I’ll poke around to see if there is a text of N online (must be, surely?)
This English translation
https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/basis/nennius-full.asp
has only a Cair Britoc, which the translator guesses as meaning “Bristol.” It also has 33 cities. There is nothing to tell you where the places might be: it’s just a list of names. Some of them are known from elsewhere; otherwise, pick you own identification.
Project Gutenberg has the same version.
If there is nothing more than that, Ford has just been exercising his imagination.
Ah. Latin:
http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/histbrit.html
Only 28 this time, and Cair Brithon. So that’s the source. But again, it’s just a list of bare names.
Theodore Mommsen ipse edidit. No critical notes that might explain the variants, though.
is my quintessential FO’B quote.
Fair enough, I just saw it and was curious.
There’s no reason why Carlisle *shouldn’t* be a cathair, I suppose, it has a cathedral…
It is on Scotrail’s network, but the name *probably* predates their production of Gaelic names for all sorts of odd places!
Thank you for all your hunting, I posted first before I saw how far it had gone!
Eleven manuscripts, according to WP. Reasonably enough, it doesn’t go into any detail on their relationships, and there doesn’t seem to be anything relevant which is freely accessible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Brittonum
I feel it should be my patriotic duty to actually know something about Nennius, but …
(At least Nennius is not such an old misery as Gildas. Another Clydesdaler, though. Son of the king of Allt Clud himself, no less. Allegedly.)
David Nash Ford thought that must mean “Dumbarton.” More detail is not provided, and the linked reference doesn’t work for me.
Google’s AI Overview sez:
Who knows if that’s true, but there it is.
Wikipedia gives the reference for Caer Brithon as ‘Ford, David Nash. “The 28 Cities of Britain Archived 2016-04-15 at the Wayback Machine” at Britannia. 2000.’, the link being https://web.archive.org/web/20160415120312/http://www.britannia.com/history/ebk/articles/nenniuscities.html
So I think ‘at Britannia’ is a website rather than a place or an event, but who knows.
There you go: AI is full of crap as usual. Thanks for the link!
It occurs to me that in the posher bits of what is now England, the invaders may have been oppressing speakers of British Latin rather than Brythonic. (Personally, I am sceptical about those who make broad claims about unattested languages with no descendants, but there seen to be some scholars who frankly know a lot more about it than I do who disagree.)
Anyhow, if so, that would mean that my moans about attempting to derive English place names from anachronistic (or non-existent) Brythonic forms would be moot as far as southeast England is concerned, And hypothetical British Latin speakers might very well preserve obsolete Brythonic place-name forms in their speech.
(I also doubt whether this has never occurred to anyone before. I imagine there are entire theses exploring the idea.)
Link is spot-on, Jen. Thanks!
However, “Caer-Brithon is known from other sources to be Dumbarton Rock” strikes me as one of those things that WP editors attach snarky “citation needed” tags too …
I wonder if it is in fact an over-hasty assumption based on the Gaels’ name for the place? In which case, this does not amount to evidence that Allt Clud was ever actually called Caer Brython by the aborigines themselves. (I mean, they may well have done, but it would be nice to see some actual direct evidence.)
Ford appears to be reachable at nashfordpublishing AT googlemail.com, if anyone wants to try.
Huh. Comment I was responding to has evaporated. Pity. It was a good one with some interesting links. Maybe it will rise again
Yeah that was mine. There were three links, then I pushed my luck and added two more
I have rescued it.
I haven’t noticed it here in Berlin either, in almost 13 years; I’ll check at the Lidl next door tomorrow. The local supermarkets don’t carry pine nuts, though. I agree on antonym of “🌶️🌶️🌶️” (scharf).
Liptauer, BTW, is more Viennese than Austrian; I didn’t know it from Linz. Horseradish is all over the country, however.
…um.
No, but the Aldi Nord in walking distance is a gigantic disappointment if you’re used to Hofer, i.e. Aldi Süd, from Austria. And good luck finding affordable polenta anywhere in Berlin, Turkish supermarkets included. I import it from Austria in all seriousness.
I suppose it’s for people who don’t want to be seen drinking vinegar out of the bottle. (The vinegar is the reason I don’t eat mustard.)
What is this, California?
To make Celtic look more like the way Caesar wrote it, and also like modern Welsh and Irish and Scottish Gaelic. It’s pretty common.
Apparently not. The main sources on British Latin, which we discussed most recently here, have nothing about word order in them.
Pedeir keinc y Mabinogi …
Apparently the k-lessness of modern Welsh orthography is purely a consequence of the Saeson printers not having enough k’s to print y Beibl.
Time to reclaim our k’s, Kymry! Rise up against Saxon orthographic oppression!
I had vaguely remembered that toponyms were part of the evidence for a supposed widespread use of Latin as everyday speech in sub-Roman Britain, but forgotten the details. Thanks for the retrolink.
Incidentally, Sapir, in his wonderful Language, says in Chapter 10, in the course of his excellent takedown of the unthinking equation of “race” and language (or language family) [with apologies for some supposed “racial” labels that looked less stupid in 1921]:
DM is, accordingly, the Celtickest of us all (and certainly Celticker than me.) If he wants to spell proto-Celtic with c’s instead of k’s I have no title to stand in his way.
Thank god I read that book at an impressionable age — that and Robert Hall’s Linguistics and Your Language did much to shape my brain.
Re “what these people [such as the “Highland Scotch”] spoke before they were Celticized nobody knows”: is that a relic of the days when it was widely assumed that Pictish was non-IE (and perhaps related to Basque because why not?), or something else?
The Lidl Report!
– Maardamer cheese is mild & nussig;
– vegan non-cheese comes in mild and würzig;
– every yoghurt that isn’t “Greek-style” is mild. That’s easy to overlook, though; I bet not many people would notice if it vanished overnight. It is after all meaningless in that there is no alternative.
– No pine nuts and no mild nuts, though cashew, macadamia and Brazil nuts are available.
I don’t eat cheese or yoghurt or any other kind of rotten milk, so I hadn’t noticed before.
Heh. I prefer the IPA (once you have a standard, what’s the point of continuing to use the other 14…!), so no, no palatal plosives for me there.
(Also, the Celtic expansion east of France-or-so may not even be older than that into the British Isles…)
Doesn’t matter; if (as it now looks like) Pictish was just what British Celtic without Latin influence looked like, it must still have gotten there at some point.
It “matters” only insofar as the Pictish-isn’t-IE theory assumed the survival of a living non-IE language for, I dunno a thousand or two thousand or more years longer than the “there were people in Britain before any IE language got there and they musta spoken something” theory does. That may not directly affect the language-doesn’t-necessarily-follow-blood-ancestry point, but is of independent interest, plus the more historically recent the language-shift-without-DNA-shift event can be claimed to be the more powerful an example it is to those who hadn’t been thinking about the question with much nuance.
I must say that for well over a thousand years we have been trying to make Welsh “as remote from any known Indo-European idiom” as possible.
(This individuation effort has been partly undermined by the way that the Gaels have been copying us, what with VSO constituent order, initial consonant mutations, conjugated prepositions … even the English have been getting in on the act, with their highly successful drive to make English the Weirdest Germanic Language Evah.)
We played Uno Flip last night with some German friends, a variant of Uno where you can “flip” the deck, and play continues with the reverse face of the card. I noted the traditional side of the card is the “milde Seite”, as opposed to the more electric colored “wilde Seite”.
Letocetum, Welsh Llwytgoed
It occurs to me that the different outcomes of the two long vowels represented by e in the Latin don’t necessarily mean that the vowel of the “wood” stem was still a diphthong in the Roman period: the contemporary Brythonic form may have been *Le:tokɛ:ton. There would be a pleasing symmetry in the ultimate Welsh outcomes: e: > uy, ɛ: > oy. That also avoids handwaving away the Latin spelling as due to subsequent intra-Latin monophthongisation or poor Roman transcription skills. Proto-Celtic *ai might already have become ɛ: in Gaulish at the time the Romans became interested in it, too.
Though it still looks to me as if the change to *oy must have already happened in Latest Common Brythonic (or whatever one calls it.)
And the t’s must already have differed from utterance-initial /t/ in some way, although not necessarily by being voiced.
If the lenition had not yet led to voicing, it would explain why Old Welsh orthography still uses c t p for later /g d b/ in this position. The alternative, that it represents a Latin-influenced spelling of loanwords which was generalised to native vocabulary, seems implausible now I think about it. Even Welsh surely doesn’t have enough Latin loans to attribute the orthography of the whole language to the etymological spelling of loanwords. On the other other hand, that might be explained by the fact that g d b were unavailable for the purpose because they were read as /ɣ ð β/ after vowels within words, I suppose. And there was no contrast between voiced and unvoiced plosives in this position in Brythonic at this point, so the choice of which Latin letters to use could easily have been driven by factors other than simple phonetics.
If lenited /k t p/ actually were still voiceless in early Old Welsh, voicing must have happened pretty early, as it’s there even in Old Irish loans from Brythonic. I wonder if Gaelic cathair, cited by Jen above, was borrowed via Brythonic or direct from Latin? (There’s the further complication that early loans into Irish from Brythonic subsequently became models for how Irish treated direct loans from Latin …)
In WP’s list of English placenames supposedly incorporating the Brythonic “wood”, /t/ seems to predominate, thought there are some /d/’s.
I looked for “mild” olive oil at my EDEKA market yesterday and didn’t find any (nor any other “mild” vegetable oils). But near them on the shelves were several varieties of vinegar that were labeled “mild”, and I guess for vinegar that distinction makes sense.
When I lived in Barcelona, I found that cans/bottles of olive oil in stores all had an “acidity” percentage on the label. I think it was between 2% and 6%. I have never seen that on olive oil available in German stores.
I liked the kinds with higher values because they had a “stronger taste”. I noticed in these a mild burning sensation at the back of my tongue when tasted as-is.
¿Qué significa acidez en el aceite de oliva?. This talks about a max acidity of 2%. Now I don’t know what to think. What I remember as “6%” now seems like an inverosimilitudinously high percentage of acidity (like vinegar) in an oil.
Olive oil is one of the products where this actually makes sense: the free fatty acids that result from the refining process increase acidity. The higher the proportion of virgin oil, the milder the flavour.
In Spain lots of brands will sell both a mild (suave) and a stronger (intenso) version.
Edit: ninja’ed! The acidity Stu mentions is the proportion of FFA by weight, which can’t be higher than 0.8% in virgin oil. Mild refined oils are about 0.4%, intense ones a bit over 1%.
Aha. The unit was º (the same as % for by-weight here, it seems), but my memory had multiplied by 10. Here at El Corte Inglés you see 0.4º and 1º in the descriptions. The Carbonell websites I looked at don’t specify the acidity.
Fond as I am of higher acidity for some platos, I don’t remember anything higher than 0,6º on offer at the nearby supermarket in Barcelona. 1º seems like a lot. But no soy cocinero as the song goes.
Yo no soy cocinero, soy capitán
It’s my impression that the food product most commonly praised as “mild” is coffee – a food not yet mentioned in this thread. Coffee is described as mild, smooth, delicate, light, sweet, or floral; or alternatively as strong, sharp, dark, burnt, acidic, bitter, or harsh.
@Stu Clayton:
That’s still true up to a point, but it must be read through the confusing lens of legal categories for olive oil.
Most of the Spanish market by value (perhaps not by volume) consists of virgin olive oil and extra virgin olive oil. That is legally defined as extracted through mechanical means only, having sufficiently few defects (whose precise definition I ignore), and having sufficiently low acidity: no more than 0.8% for the extra grade, and no more than 2% for sale to final consumers.
Current regulations prevent disclosing the precise acidity of each bottle of virgin olive oil without accompanying it with other measurements. In practice I’ve never seen those figures, at least on the front of the bottle. They aren’t at the back of the one currently in my kitchen, either. However, the second-largest brand (Coosur) promises online their non-extra virgin bottling is below 1%.
The bottom of the market is non-virgin olive oil, which is a blend of legal-for-consumption virgin oil with flavorless refined oil that was too acidic or too defective to be legally sold without refining. The main labeling on these blends is nowadays suave or intenso, but they also retain traditional acidity numbers: typically 0.4º for mild and 1º for intense.
E.g., those are the numbers used by the two largest brands (Carbonell and Coosur), though Carbonell prints 0,4 without either º or % on its mild bottling, thereby skipping all the other legally mandated information that you can see instead as fine print on the front label of the other three bottles in question.
The consensus view is that these acidity numbers are misleading because the intense blends aren’t tastier because they’re more acidic: on the contrary, they’re more acidic because they’re tastier. That’s because flavorful virgin olive oil is much more acidic (possibly between 1% and 2% since it wasn’t sold without blending) than flavorless refined oil (whose acidity is between 0.2% and 0.3%). Coosur states online that the difference between its intense and mild bottling is precisely that the former has a greater share of virgin oil than the latter.
@Giacomo: I was working there 27 years ago. when the Estadi Sarrià was demolished. I can well believe that regulation creep has changed things.
27 years ago is before I first visited Spain, but the regulations are not that new. I’m not particularly knowledgeable about them, but I find that EEC Regulation 2568/91 already had the same grades with similar definitions, though laxer acidity limits: 1% instead of the current 0.8% for extra virgin, 0.5% instead of 0.3% for refined, 1.5% instead of 1% for non-virgin.
It would be of some interest to study the history of acidity labeling on olive-oil bottles, but I am reasonably confident it only ever applied to non-virgin oils. I admit I also have considerable sympathy for the idea it always was a marketing conspiracy to mislead the consumer.
Someone more knowledgeable about olive-oil chemistry can correct my misguided notions, but as (English) Wikipedia puts it:
Free acidity is a defect of olive oil that is tasteless and odorless, thus can not be detected by sensory analysis
Wonderful Wipe detective work there, from “is tasteless and odorless” to deduce “can not be detected by sensory analysis” !
If people can’t taste or smell the acidity, why bother with measuring it ??
I’m going to stick with my ability to taste the differences, whatever may be their causes.
Wait – the article is about “free acidity”, not free fatass acids FFA !
Today I have discovered that the the Speaker of the House of Lords is Baron McFall of Alcluith, of Dumbarton in Dunbartonshire, which is a nice assortment of names for the same place.
@Stu Clayton:
Italian snobs admittedly tend to express a preference for greener-looking olive oils, but I don’t know what evidence, if any, underpins the assumption that the color of olive oil should correlate with its smell and taste. My own snobbery extends to the color of wine, but not oil. Then again, I’m from a rather butter-loving part of Italy.
The potential for distinguishing olive oils by hearing or touch is untapped as far as I know. If you can perfect it, I’m certain you have a bright future as an online influencer, and I suspect various TV channels would also be interested in your talents..
I’m aware of two theories for the assignment of quality grades to virgin olive oils based on measurable characteristics like low acidity.
One theory is that those characteristics make the oil healthier, rather than tastier. The theory pleases farmers, governments and doctors in Mediterranean countries, who are all quite invested in the claim that extra virgin olive oil is the least unhealthy fat.
The other theory is that those characteristics are objectively measurable but correlate with good taste and smell, so they are an appropriate way of assigning quality grades without giving too much power to official tasting panels.
The former theory has been an unobjectionable ground for government regulation of food quality since medieval times at the latest. The latter looks like a poster child for regulatory overreach — just let every customer taste and buy whatever they enjoy! Unfortunately, I lack the knowledge to say which theory, if any, is more accurate.
There’s no other sensible way of choosing within oils of the same kind.
Across kinds, several doctors I trust have enjoined me to consume extra virgin olive oil, or at the very least virgin olive oil, rather than non-virgin olive oils, on alleged health grounds. Then again, they’re all Italians and Spaniards, so I cannot rule out that we’re all victims of Mediterranean delusions. At least they aren’t costly delusions. I can buy white-brand extra virgin olive oil for a lower price than the name-brand non-virgin variety.
Note as a purely linguistic matter the occasional tendency of prescriptivist types to tut-tut about “extra virgin.” In its literal core human-hymen sense, “virgin” is one of those non-scalar things – a given human either is a virgin or isn’t, just as s/he is currently pregnant or isn’t. The mistake, of course, is thinking that the same characteristic of the word must automatically carry over to all of its extended/metaphorical senses, which in the context of olive oil it manifestly doesn’t.
The potential for distinguishing olive oils by hearing or touch is untapped as far as I know
Differences in texture or “mouth feel” might be noticeable, and Stu mentioned a burning sensation on the back of his tongue.
“White-brand” is new to me, though I see it’s used. Something like “generic”?
In America, many people have a lot of doubt about whether what’s labeled “olive oil” is really all olive oil, let alone how chaste it is. (@J.W. Brewer: I think it’s more laughing than tut-tutting.)
One theory is that those characteristics make the oil healthier, rather than tastier.
(The following might be equally a delusion.) If you’re using the oil for frying (esp. deep) rather than making salad dressing, the reason to prefer olive oil is it tolerates higher temperatures than (say) corn oil. By ‘tolerate’ I mean the molecules don’t break down into harmful compounds. And (alleged there) healthier because more antioxidants [**] are preserved.
Then perhaps when heated to smoke point, the difference will smack you on the nose. Or after you’ve finished frying and the oil has cooled, you can detect the nasties in the taste.
[**] Speaking of delusions, there’s plenty of commentary that this obsession with ‘antioxidants’ is new-age claptrap. Everything organic is going to oxidise sooner rather than later on account of all that oxygen floating around (and dissolved in water).
by … touch is untapped
Coincidentally, playing in the bar I was just sipping coffee in
@J.W. Brewer:
The Italian linguistic history of “extra virgin olive oil” is mildly interesting.
The first Italian regulation that defined virginity as a legal property of olive oil seems to have been R.D.L. 1986/1936, which defined the following grades.
Olio sopraffino vergine di oliva (mechanical extraction, ≤ 1.2% acidity)
Olio fino di oliva (≤ 2.5% acidity)
Olio di oliva (≤ 4% acidity)
Something like the current grading scheme was introduced by L. 1407/1960, which further refined the grades to yield the following classification.
Olio extra vergine di oliva (mechanical extraction, ≤ 1% acidity)
Olio sopraffino vergine di oliva (mechanical extraction, ≤ 1.5% acidity)
Olio fino vergine di oliva (mechanical extraction, ≤ 3.3% acidity)
Olio vergine di oliva (mechanical extraction, ≤ 4% acidity)
Olio di oliva (≤ 2% acidity)
Virginity was clearly meant as a binary quality, just as for people. An olive oil is virgin if it is obtained only by mechanical extraction, while it is non-virgin if it is blended with refined oil.
Also clearly, the intended parsing was (extra (virgin olive oil)) and not ((extra virgin) (olive oil)). That’s clear by analogy with fino and sopraffino. Those are adjectives that can only accompany but not modify the additional adjective vergine. Sure enough, extra can be an adjective too. Unfortunately it can also be an adverb that intensifies a subsequent adjective.
The EEC took over the definitions with Reg. 136/66. Well-meaning European bureaucrats or translators saw the problem and tried to fix it by defining the grades as:
Olio d’oliva vergine extra (mechanical extraction, ≤ 1% acidity)
Olio d’oliva vergine fino (mechanical extraction, ≤ 1.5% acidity)
Olio d’oliva vergine corrente (mechanical extraction, ≤ 3.3% acidity)
Olio d’oliva vergine di oliva (mechanical extraction, >3.3% acidity)
Olio puro d’oliva
So it transpires that, for olive oil, virginity is defined lack of shameful mixing with refined oil, while purity is defined by lack of even more shameful mixing with refined oil derived from olive residues rather than olives. Hence virginity implies purity but not vice-versa.
This would all have been perfectly consistent, for the joy of European bureaucrats and prescriptivist peevers alike. Unfortunately it was too late for Italy. Italian labels have remained olio extra vergine di oliva and by now some have even adopted extravergine as a single word. Funnily enough, the Treccani dictionary gives both olio extra as an example of the adjectival use of the word and olio e. vergine as an example of its adverbial usage, with no acknowledgement of the inherent tension.
The Iberian peninsula was spared this Italian misunderstanding and consumes aceite de oliva virgen extra, azeite virgem extra, oli d’oliva verge extra and oliba-olio birjina estra just like Brussels intended.
I submit that English-speaking pedants should be invited to rediscover the history of extra as an English adjective meaning, as the OED puts it, “of superior or unusual quality.”
@Jerry Friedman:
Wikipedia calls them white-label products, so white-brand may be merely my unidiomatic calque of Italian and Spanish. Wikipedia has different entries for white-label product, generic brand and private label, but I cannot claim to grasp the fine points that are supposed to distinguish the three.
In the first half of the 1980s, (some) American supermarkets carried generic products with black-and-white packaging, in an effort to further lower costs. I stopped seeing them when we moved across the country in 1984 and ended up shopping at different supermarket chains, but that seems to have been around when they stopped appearing anyway.
My assumption was the same as Brett’s in terms of what “white-label” referred to, although I did not immediately have a reliable sense of when they had faded from the U.S. market. You can see them in the great 1984-released move _Repo Man_, which may not have known it was catching the phenomenon at what was in hindsight its peak. Obviously the timeline of the rise/fall (if there has indeed been a fall?) may have been significantly different in other countries.
Repo Man: Pik n’ Pay generic brand beer; n.b.: “those of us living in Southern California in the 1980’s recognized the blue stripe and product name as Ralph’s brand generic food.” (It is indeed a great movie.)
…speaking of defining movies of a cohort that star Emilio Estevez.
Back to the subject, in the U.S. those black-on-white generics have, as far as I can tell, been replaced by “generic brands” that have a brand identity and some decoration on the package, and by “store brands” ditto, but which of those do “white-label” and “white-brand” mean? Just wondering.
I remember, in 1979-80, sitting with a friend and drinking beer from cans with white labels inscribed BEER in black, and saying, “I feel like I’m in a cartoon.”
In Germany, the range goes from REWE’s “JA!” brand (simple white package with big, dark blue letters JA! “yes”) to EDEKA’s Gut und Günstig “Good and Low-priced” house brand, which is in packaging that is as elaborate as that of big brands.
REWE’s “JA!” brand
I have seen many claims (in the ‘net) that “sometimes/often” a well-known brand is hiding behind the “JA!”. I’ll get to that in a moment.
Rewe is extremely aggressive in promoting its “JA!” brand. Over the past few years many products from various manufacturers (such as sugar, joghurt, flour …) have been replaced by “JA!” stuff. What’s on the shelves changes so often that there’s no time to compare “quality”.
Rewe seems to want to take over the entire food market in Germany. It is continually fighting with manufacturers over prices – when Rewe can’t get its way, it simply removes the products from the shelves. Last year there was a sign on the shelves where the products (Mars etc) of some giant candy enterprise had been standing, announcing that these products would no longer be offered by Rewe (it was in the news as well). In these announcements Rewe presents itself as fighting for customers’ interests by cutting prices.
About the well-known manufacturers supposedly behind “JA!” – if it’s true, I imagine that Rewe threatens to discontinue those products unless the manufacturers agree to hide behind “JA!” for a slightly lower price. In return (so I imagine), Rewe might argue that the turnover will be larger and thus counteract the lower profit margin for the manufacturers compared with the margin they previously wanted.
Rewe presents itself as fighting for customers’ interests by cutting prices
Ask any UK farmer about the major supermarket chains – and stand well back (though the farmer may find it cathartic.)
The farmer has been getting the short end of the stick in the U.K. ever since the Peelites teamed up with the Whigs to repeal the Corn Laws.
How is Rewe pronounced?
Ray-vuh. But not in the American English slack-jawed way. Keep your jaw up, and speak with your lips taut and close together in front.
Keep that jaw up, I said ! So the “vuh” is closer to a “v + /e/” than to “v+uuuh”. You do /e/ inside the mouth, but the drawn lips make it sound a bit like “vuh”.
Full disclosure: I have no idea how to describe this in a clearer way.
@de
Selber schuld. In Ireland, individual farmers left the coops because they got “better offers” from supermarket buyers, and groups of farmers liquidated their coops for a short term profit. Did this happen in UK, or did they never have rural coops?
I’m far from a expert in this, but as I understand it, England and Wales have lagged well behind other European countries in this ever since the war (Scotland, not so much), and things are getting worse rather than better. Although about half of UK farmers actually are part of cooperatives, that half collectively account for only a very small proportion of farming revenue – totally different from France or even Germany.
The basic problem is that the supermarkets are a de facto monopsony cartel. They explain this away as competition among themselves to get the best deal for supermarket shoppers, and politicians of all stripes have either swallowed this piece of sophistry or just see no political gain in challenging it. Farmers don’t have anything like the political clout in the UK that they do in the EU, and Brexit has only benefitted the usual extractive-rentier suspects, while decoupling UK farmers from EU farmer-power.
@LH: If you prefer IPA, it’s [‘ʁe:və] (DM will now step in with a lecture how German schwa isn’t schwa. I’ll leave him to that.)
@stu: Aldi and Lidl are known to be even more hard-nosed than REWE in their negotiations with suppliers; it just attracts less attention because it fits with their low-price image, while REWE tries to brand itself as more upmarket.
@Hans: I didn’t know that about Aldi and Lidl, but now that I think about it Aldi is no surprise there. I buy at Rewe only because there’s one right around the corner. 7 years ago it was an Edeka, so I bought there.
Eh, close enough in places where it’s actually called Rewe. In Austria it’s called Billa.
And yes, the supermarkets are rather obviously a cartel. They routinely change their prices all on the same day.
REWE = Revisionsverband der Westkaufgenossenschaften ! Who knew ?
Both Aldi and Lidl have been expanding their U.S. presence. I don’t think either my wife or I has actually visited the Aldi maybe 4 or 5 miles from our house (although some price-conscious neighbors have) but now Lidl is opening a new location later this week less than a mile from our house so perhaps we will learn what the fuss is about. I think one of them currently owns Trader Joe’s (where we do sometimes shop) and the other doesn’t, but I haven’t tried to remember which is which.
We occasionally go to Aldi, which has some great bargains, and we specifically go for their Hellmann’s-mayonnaise equivalent, which is (blasphemy, I know) just as good as Hellmann’s and something like half the price. But we always find goodies that make the trip worthwhile.