I decided to look up the surname Wigglesworth (which I’ve always found amusing), and this site said:
English (Yorkshire): habitational name from Wigglesworth in North Yorkshire recorded in Domesday Book as Winchelesuuorde. It is derived from the genitive case of the Old English byname Wincel meaning ‘child’. Additionally, it incorporates Old English worth which translates to ‘enclosure’.
I wasn’t familiar with that worth, so I checked the OED and was pleased to find they had revised the entry in 2017:
An enclosed place; spec. (a) a place surrounded by buildings, as a courtyard, court, or street; (b) a homestead surrounded by land.
Frequently as a place name or as the second element in place names (cf. discussion in etymology). […]OE [Northumbrian dialect] Neque audiet aliquis in plateis uocem eius : ne geheres ænig mon in worðum stefn his.
Lindisfarne Gospels: Matthew xii. 19
[…]1557 Elizabeth Lyde widdowe holdeth oon mesuage withe a curtillage and all landes tenementes medowes fedinges and pastures to the sayde mesuage lying called the Woorth of olde astre and a cotage conteyning fyve acres withe the appurtenances lying in the Worthe of the same astre.
in J. Hasler, Wookey Manor & Parish 1544–1841 (1995) 20
[…]1898 Bosworth, a worth or ‘small estate’ on which stood a boose..a dialect word meaning a ‘cow-stall’ or ‘ox-stall’.
I. Taylor, Names & their History (ed. 2) 72/2
[…]1917 Probably the ‘worths’ were farms on clearings made later than the original settlements.
Quarterly Review October 3382011 Tūns, worths and throps may..have been settlements too small and insignificant to attract mention.
P. Cullen et al., Thorps in Changing Landscape vii. 144
And the etymology is one of those expansive ones the online setting now allows them:
Apparently cognate with Old Frisian wurth, worth raised ground (for protection from flooding) which forms the plot of a homestead, terp, Old Dutch wurth, wirth (in place names) inhabited mound (Middle Dutch woert plot of a homestead, Dutch woerd enclosed piece of land, area of raised ground used as a refuge from flooding, terp), Old Saxon wurth raised ground which forms the plot of a homestead (Middle Low German wurt, wort raised ground which forms the plot of a homestead, terp, enclosed plot of a dwelling and associated buildings), Old Icelandic urð heap of stones, probably < an extended form of the Germanic base of were v [“To check or restrain; to ward off, repel”].
Compare worthine n. [“In early use: a small close or enclosure; a homestead surrounded by land, a farm; (also) a street; = worth n.²”] and see discussion at that entry.
Notes
Some aspects of the early English evidence are uncertain and disputed. Old English (Anglian) worþ perhaps shows the zero-grade of the Germanic base (apparently also reflected by the Germanic cognates), with regular lowering of u to o. However, it could alternatively show a different ablaut grade of the base, an original e-grade, with retraction due to initial w. This seems less likely, in view of the early attestation of the stem form worþ- in the derivatives (West Saxon) worðig and (Mercian) worðign- (see worthine n.), but the possibility is suggested by the attestation of a variety of related forms, especially in compounds and derivatives and particularly in place-name evidence. Some of these are more difficult to explain as the reflex of an original stem form with zero-grade.
The most frequent by-form is Old English wyrþe, which is apparently attested only in charters in the sense ‘homestead surrounded by land’ and chiefly as a place-name element. It evidently represents a suffixed form with i-mutation. Beside this, the stem form weorþ, weorþe is attested in derivatives and compounds, as weorðig (variant of worðig) and weorþapeldre farm apple tree, weorþehege farm hedge (both in an early Middle English copy of an Anglo-Saxon charter), and as a place-name element, e.g. in tunles weorþ, Surrey (947; now Tollsworth), Gyxeweorðe, Suffolk (first half of 11th cent.; now Ixworth); additionally (although the evidence is late and of doubtful interpretation) the stem form wierðe is apparently attested as a place-name element in æscmeres wierðe (956). While wyrþe could show the i-mutation of u, the zero-grade of the stem, the other less common forms, despite some problems with the evidence, suggest that wyrþe may at least partly show a reflex of early Old English *wirþe (from the e-grade of the base, with Germanic raising of e to i), which would regularly develop to early West Saxon wierþe, late West Saxon wyrþe. Thus, it seems possible that more than one ablaut grade is represented in the English evidence.
The later English evidence perhaps continues only the Old English stem form worþ-, but some spellings of the Middle English place-name evidence suggest that reflexes of wyrþe also persist.
For a recent discussion of the implications of Old English worþ, wyrþe, and the synonymous derivative worþig when used to denote a landholding or homestead in Anglo-Saxon England, see J. English in Landscape Hist. vol. 24 (2002) 45-51.
That word terp they use in the definitions of the Frisian and Dutch cognates is interesting in its own right; it means:
An artificial mound or hillock, the site of a prehistoric village, and still in many cases occupied by a village or church, in parts of Friesland below sea-level or liable to inundation. Also applied to similar mounds outside Friesland itself.
These terpen, like the Italian terremare or terramares, have in modern times been excavated for the sake of the fertilizing soil which they yield, and more recently for the prehistoric remains found in them; the name has thus passed into archæological use.
The etymology:
West Frisian terp village mound, plural terpen, = East Frisian terp (Saterland), North Frisian têrp (Sylt), sarp (Amrum) village < Old Frisian therp, umlaut variant of Old Frisian thorp village: compare thorp n.
And the book quoted in the last of the worth citations, Thorps in a Changing Landscape, is definitely one of those you want to leave lying around to impress visitors.
Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Words_Worth%3F
“Thorp” is presumably cognate with Welsh tref “town” too.
That’s fascinating, and suggests that the traditional derivation of the English name Jobsworth, for someone who obstructs others by petty officiousness, is mistaken. In fact, such a person is saying that the requested task falls outside their defined area of responsibility.
I’m curious how the Northumbrian dialect citation of in worðum relates to Latin in plateis / Greek en tais plateiais and the nearly universal English translation “in the streets”. I might have thought “in the enclosures” would be nearly the opposite of “out in public”, making me wonder whether worðum might have been cognate without meaning the same thing. Or whether I’m misunderstanding the point of the phrase. Or maybe monks in a rural area with no streets weren’t sure what to make of plateis, and in worðum was a decent free translation meaning “out among the common folk”?
J.W. Brewer, I’m hoping you might have something to say here.
From the 1557 citation, I went chasing mesuage, and the supposed development from Latin mansio via “late Latin” mesuagium also leaves me scratching my head.
@Ryan: it’s just used in the meaning “(a) a place surrounded by buildings, as a courtyard, court, or street”, which corresponds well enough to plateis.
I think an enclosure in this case is just a place which is cleared fields and buildings and so on rather than forest – people places as opposed to wild places, not private courtyards as opposed to public streets
Note that the Russian phrase на дворе, literally ‘in the (court)yard,’ is used to mean ‘outside (the house), in the fresh air.’
en la calle, на улице
@Ryan: The Vulgate’s “platea” (in nominative) apparently got borrowed into Old English (esp. Northumbrian) as plæċe. Wiktionary claims that plæċe could mean either “place, open space” or “street” and that worþ was, in Northumbrian, an available synonym for both of those senses. Our modern English “place” descends at least in part from plæċe, although it supposedly got hopelessly muddled/conflated in the Middle Ages with the also-borrowed Old French daughter of the same Latin etymon.
In English translations of the relevant Bible verse, “in the streets” seems the overwhelming favorite although two idiosyncratic translators have gone for what they may think a more “literal” translation of the Greek (even though they are perhaps confusing a gloss of the Greek etymology with a better account of the actual Greek meaning), viz. “in the broad places” (Robert Young, 1862) and “in the broadways” (Richard Francis Weymouth, published posthumously after his death in 1902). One modern translation that no one would accuse of being overliteral just has “in public,” which is plausibly a fair paraphrase of the gist if you like the “dynamic-equivalence” ideology. NB that in modern English singular “in the street” is usually boringly literal in reference while plural “in the streets” can more easily be loose-to-metaphorical.
Note also the following from some online (and presumably public domain) version of Strong’s, although maybe not Strong’s own original text, and ponder how to translate the basic concept from the urbanized Greco-Roman Mediterranean to the wilder frontiers of Anglo-Saxon Northumbia:
‘Usage: The term “plateia” refers to a broad street or public square, often a central place in a city where people gather. In the context of the New Testament, it is used to describe locations where public life and interactions occur, such as marketplaces or main thoroughfares.
‘Cultural and Historical Background: In ancient Greek and Roman cities, the “plateia” was a significant part of urban life. These broad streets or squares were not only thoroughfares but also places for social interaction, commerce, and public discourse. They were often lined with shops and were central to the community’s daily activities. The “plateia” served as a hub for news, trade, and social gatherings, reflecting the vibrant public life of ancient cities.’
By partial contrast, note that the OT Hebrew word said to be roughly equivalent is רְחֹב. That comes out in e.g. Ezra 10:9 as “[in the] street” in the King James and other early English versions, but in more recent versions is typically “in the square” or “in the open square” or “in the public square” or even “in the plaza.”* The LXX has ἐν πλατείᾳ and the Vulgate in platea. I don’t know if the shift in English translations reflects a change in the conventional wisdom regarding the best understanding of the Hebrew or if the English word “street” may itself have had a broader semantic scope four hundred years ago than it does now.
*You get three guesses for the Latin etymon from which Spanish “plaza” descended and the first two don’t count.
I read the etymology, trying to come up with a Norw. cognate, and this took me completely by surprise. The conjured image of a Norwegian ur(d) f. “” is so far off that it didn’t strike me at all.
The semantic path must be “enclosure” > “enclosed farmstead” -> “ground of farmstead” -> “ground built up by stones and debris” -> “ground covered in rocks” > “scree, talus”. But I don’t think there’s any trace of any sense but the latter in Norwegian toponymics.
The most common word for “(place between the buildings of a) farmstead” is tun n., cognate of Eng. town etc., also etymologically “fenced-in area”,
Back to worþ, the path may have been “enclosure” > “enclosed farmstead” -> “ground of farmstead” -> “village ground” > “common ground, street”. No shade of “enclosure” left.
I mean, Dutch tuin is still “garden”, but German Zaun has drifted all the way to “fence”, and I’m not aware of any trace of another meaning.
Talking of words for enclosures: a shameless plea for the pooled wisdom of LH … (it’s worked in the past, what with experts like Lameen and Xerîb about.)
Niggli’s Mooré dictionary, under zàká “compound” (the sort you live in, a walled enclosure containing huts) says “emprunt: arabe.” Niggli is often wrong about things like that, and it did occur to me that the comment might have migrated from the entry for zaka “tithe” (which doesn’t identify its obvious Arabic origin.)
Zàká “compound” has got what looks like an unproblematic cognate in Kusaal zak “compound”, but once I started looking, I noticed that the etymon seems to be attested nowhere else at all in Western Oti-Volta, except that Dagaare may or may not have a cognate in zàgɪ́ “enclosure for animals, pen, corral.” Which is weird, for something that really ought to be core vocabulary.
So it’s actually not as far-fetched as I initially thought that the word might be a loan from somewhere. But I can’t think of any likely source in Arabic at all. Or find anything at all like it in any likely intermediary language.
@de
Zauruka (entrance halls) in Hausa by metonymy? I could see why plural would be borrowed, because the borrower might be thinking there is usually more than one hut, but what happened to the middle bit?
I don’t think that’s plausible phonologically: there’s no real precedent for thd loss of the -ru-, and the tones are wrong too, (Adoption of original plurals as singulars – and vice versa – is not uncommon, though: that side is not a difficulty.)
Moreover, it would be unusual for a Hausa loan to be confined to Mooré and Kusaal. Hausa loans have usualy got to Kusaal via Mampruli or Dagbani or have come directly from Ghanaian Hausa.
Also, Hausa loans tend to belong to a later borrowing stratum than Dyula and Songhay, and you would expect the Kusaal form to have kept the final vowel, as in e.g. daka “box” from Hausa adaka. The relationship of Mooré zàká to Kusaal zàk would be regular for cognates, but could just as well be a case of “etymological nativisation”, as wiith e.g. Kusaal maliak “angel”, which is from (Arabic via) Dyula mɛlɛkɛ via Mooré màlɛ́kà. Kusaal loans from Mooré consistently drop the final vowel, as with e.g. Mɔr “Muslim”, from Mooré Mórè.
The Kusaal word for “entrance hut” (Hausa zaure) is zɔŋ, cognate with Mampruli zɔŋŋu. As in the cynical proverb
Ya’a pɛsig Kambuŋ zɔŋo, o faandnɛ dɔɔg.
“If you hand over your entrance hut to an Ashanti, he’ll take the whole house.”
Hausa gida, usually translated “house”, really means the same as Mooré zàká and Kusaal zak; the Hausa word is actually an old plural formation reanalysed as a singular. The Hausa for an individual hut is ɗaki, = Kusaal dɔɔg.
Wow, what an answer. I will leave the field to the experts but am very grateful.
[For the sake of posterity, I should say that the very few Kusaal verbs borrowed from Hausa do drop their final vowels, but that’s because permitted Kusaal verb shapes are very constrained, and loans of any origin have to be adapted to fit the allowed patterns.]
[Also, final vowels in Hausa nouns – unlike Mooré nouns – are nearly always long, and in native vocabulary Kusaal does in fact preserve original final long vowels (as short) rather than deleting them. So my theory re timing of loans and final vowel loss is not all that robust.]
David E.: Zàká “compound” has got what looks like an unproblematic cognate in Kusaal zak “compound”, but once I started looking, I noticed that the etymon seems to be attested nowhere else at all in Western Oti-Volta, except that Dagaare may or may not have a cognate in zàgɪ́ “enclosure for animals, pen, corral.” Which is weird, for something that really ought to be core vocabulary.
You’d think so, but worth, Eng. (farm)yard and Norw. (gårds)tun tell a different story.
German is different again: Hof (also “courtyard” and “court”).
German is different again: Hof (also “courtyard” and “court”).
This apparently in response to Trond, who wrote: “worth, Eng. (farm)yard and Norw. (gårds)tun tell a different story”. But Ger. Hof can refer to an Innenhof or a Bauernhof, or to a solar/lunar corona etc. Isn’t that the same different story ?
Unfortunately, Hoffart is not a hopeful drive around the yard.
Not much of linguistic interest for me to report, but I thought it would be fun to note I drove through Worth today, the same Woorth as in the OED entry of 1557: “called the Woorth of olde astre and a cotage conteyning fyve acres withe the appurtenances lying in the Worthe of the same astre. in J. Hasler, Wookey Manor & Parish 1544–1841 (1995)”. It’s a small place.
I live in Wedmore and went shopping eight miles away in Wells (the City of Wells, as it has famous ancient wells in it); the intermediate place names are Latcham, Theale, Panborough, Bleadney, Henton, Yarley, Worth and Wookey. Wookey Hole, famous for having caves and regularly hiring a witch, is a little north of Wookey. All in the county of Somerset.
No doubt they’re all pretty old places; Wells dates back at least to Roman times, and Wedmore has Iron Age remains, according to Wikipedia. Wedmore’s village sign contains a graphic with an image of a mediaeval king with sword raised and the words “878 Alfred The King At Wedmore Made Peace”; I understand he used to own the village in his time, and is said to have brought the Danish Viking leader Guthrum here and had him baptised.
https://www.cross-croscombe.co.uk/blog/historic-wedmore/ for a pic of the sign.
Yes. 🙂
That word (meaning “arrogant attitude”) was mystifying me since I was little. Wiktionary says it is hoch + Fahrt, at first meaning “living the high life”.
@stu: I think what Trond wanted to say that the three Germanic languages have words from unrelated roots for a similar concept, in response to DE’s wondering why there was no common word in Western Oti-Volta for a basic concept like this.
Exactly.
And then there’s the House of Worth.
Pretty old indeed, narmitaj. Just a few miles north of all those villages is the Stone Courtyard of the Druids!
Except Stanton Drew is actually a neolithic site. I love that the misconception about the origin of the site is embedded in the Saxon name and itself dates back more than 1,000 years.
My surname may come from a river or town near there, and on that basis my wife and once made a lovely walk through sheep pastures to ponder the ancient stones.
I think what Trond wanted to say that the three Germanic languages have words from unrelated roots for a similar concept, in response to DE’s wondering why there was no common word in Western Oti-Volta for a basic concept like this
Yes – and it’s a good point. Though it still seems odd that zàká/zak occurs in only two of the dozen or more Western Oti-Volta languages, and those two not closely related within the group – and Kusaal is prone to borrowing from Mooré.
There are no likely cognate stems within WOV either, apart from the possible Dagaare zàgɪ́: a homophonous root only turns up in words for “itch”, which doesn’t seem very promising semantically … (I was quite taken with the Mooré zagdẽ “garden” for the thirty seconds before the penny dropped.)
But then, Kusaal dɔɔg “hut, house”, which has cognates all over Oti-Volta and even in Miyobe, Grusi and Kulango, making it actually a reconstruction candidate for “proto-Gur”, has AFAIK no related forms anywhere beside the nouns for “hut” themselves. I suppose words like that just don’t lend themselves to forming derivatives. “I hut, thou huttest …”
Oti-Volta is like PIE or Semitic in being a lot keener on deriving nouns from verbs than vice versa, anyway.
Niggli’s Mooré dictionary, under zàká “compound” (the sort you live in, a walled enclosure containing huts) says “emprunt: arabe.”…
So it’s actually not as far-fetched as I initially thought that the word might be a loan from somewhere. But I can’t think of any likely source in Arabic at all.
A speculation… Patrice Jullien de Pommerol, Dictionnaire arabe tchadien-français (1999), gives the following entries:
The zâgiye 2 referred to the entry zâgiye 1 is ‘drawing (of water)’ (puisage). All these are derivatives of the root of the verb zaga ‘he irrigated’ (Classical سقى saqā). I suppose the Chadian -z- is the result of voicing of s when directly before Chadian g (ق ) in the prefix conjugation (yasqī > yazgi), the imperative, etc. But note also Chadian zaʔaf ‘palm frond’ beside Classical سعف saʿaf.
In light of this, it is interesting to note that John Tees Edgar The Assimilation of Loan Words in Masalit (1988), p. 121, proposes that Masalit zage ‘garden’ is a borrowing of a colloquial Arabic zaga (which he glosses as ‘irrigation’, it seems). I interpret this zaga as a cover term for words in the family of Chadian Arabic zâgiye ‘irrigated garden’, zagi ‘irrigation’, but perhaps I am incorrect in this. Or perhaps pidgin Arabic was involved in the mediation of a word of this family to Masalit.
Building on this… Could the forms in the Gur languages be reflexes of similar borrowings—either direct or through intermediaries—from an appropriate Arabic source like Chadian zâgiye? We would see a shift from ‘(cultivated) garden’ to ‘yard, enclosure’, rather than the typical from ‘enclosure, yard’ to ‘(cultivated) garden’ (jardin, hortus, огород, etc.). I wonder if there are any exact parallels to a semantic shift in this direction.
John R. Rennison, Lorom Koromfe – English / French / German Dictionary (2025), gives a zaka, pl. a zagədʋ (with borrowed plural noun class suffix -dʋ, it seems!) ‘compound, yard; home, family’ as a borrowing from Mooré. I suppose the borrowed noun class suffix clinches Mooré as the proximate source.
I should note that I don’t believe the etymology I presented above. It’s just an attempt at finding what might be behind Niggli’s note emprunt: arabe if it is not misplaced.
Thanks, Xerîb!
I don’t believe in that etymology either! But I’m glad to discover that I’m at least not missing anything obvious.
“Cultivated garden” in Kusaal is itself quite an interesting word: lɔmbɔn’ɔg, which comes (probably via Hausa lambu) from Songhay (e.g. Humburi Senni làmbò “enclosed vegetable garden”), adapted by analogy with Kusaal bɔn’ɔg “swamp, ricefeld.” (And leaving the lɔm- part as a cranberry morph.)
I’m sure Rennison is right that Koromfe zaka is from Mooré; the language has quite a lot of Mooré loanwords.* The plural is rather odd, though: the Mooré plural is actually zagse (= Kusaal za’as), not zagdo (which is the plural of zaoko “head cold.”) But -dʋ is not a Koromfe class suffix. Maybe it’s from a different Mooré dialect. (I remember that the dialogue in the excellent film Yaaba differed quite a bit from the Mooré I’m familiar with.)
One of the semantic groups in the Mooré -go/-do class pairing (“gender”) is “places”, so a reassignment from the -ga/-se “gender” wouldn’t be too strange. Odd that it’s just in the plural though. I wonder if Koromfe has actually borrowed the Mooré plural class suffix -do and generalised it, so that zagədʋ is formed rather like English “octopi”?
* Koromfe is only quite remotely related to Oti-Volta. One of the disappointments in looking through the dictionary for potential cognates is all the times you spot one that looks really close to Western Oti-Volta, and then have to go “Ah. Too close. Again.”
Ah. Zàká is not quite as isolated as I thought. Farefare doesn’t have the word itself, but it does have zẽnzaka “small courtyard” and also zanõrɛ, glossed “outer courtyard” by Niggli, but which looks like it might be parallel in formation to Kusaal za’anɔɔr “gate” (“courtyard-mouth”); prompted by that, I see that “gate” in Mampruli is za’anɔri, even though Mampruli doesn’t have the corresponding word zakka “courtyard” itself. (In Dagbani “gate” is dunoli, instead: “house-mouth”, where the first element is the combining form of duu = Kusaal dɔɔg “hut, house.”)
And although I’ve always understood Kusaal zak as “compound” (which seems to be the primary sense of Mooré zàká too), in the Bible translation I see that it’s consistently used for “courtyard” specifically.
Bolstered by that, I think it’s reasonable to take Dagaare zàgɪ́ “pen, enclosure, corral” as being indeed the same stem, but in the -re/-a “gender” instead of -ga/-se. Oti-Volta languages do that kind of thing a lot.
The etymon still seems to be confined to Western Oti-Volta, but it’s not unique in that. So are e.g. the words for “water”, “sit” and “horse” …
So yeah: Niggli’s “emprunt: arabe” is just wrong, and very likely transposed from the entry for zaka “tithe”, where it belongs (and is missing.)
Chadian Arabic zâgiye ‘irrigated garden’
Mooré does, obligingly, have a verb zãgse “irrigate” (where -s- is a common causative suffix) …
It’s completely homophonous with zãgse “refuse, deny”, which is cognate with Kusaal zan’as, which has no “irrigate” homophone …
It can’t be related to the “compound/courtyard” word, alas. Vowel nasalisation in contrastive in these languages. (The tones match, though. Pity.)
It’s been decades since I watched it, I don’t think I remember what’s in it, I have no idea what languages other than French there are in it… but, yes, excellent.
It’s entirely in Mooré, though in a far-northern (Ouahigouya) dialect which differs noticeably from the Ouagadougou-and-points-South dialects I was used to hearing in Burkina.
It’s been decades since I watched it, I don’t think I remember what’s in it […] but, yes, excellent.
I have that experience more and more these days.
@hat: the key is to also seek out new experiences in ones old age. Why, I just today listened to a youtube transcription of a 1972 album by a Swiss heavy-rock power trio that is so historically-obscure in Anglophone circles that I had never heard of them as of yesterday. (A reissue is apparently imminent from a Spanish hipster/collector label.)
Oh, I do, I do! Thus giving myself the ability to forget them as well. Why, just the other day I read a story I’m sure I’ll hazily remember next year! (“Did I like it, or am I thinking of another story?”)
Ah, I almost certainly saw it dubbed, then.
In Dagbani “gate” is dunoli, instead: “house-mouth”
Very nice! This metaphor pops up all around the world (Latin ōstium) and seems to be especially common in West Africa. I did a quick search and found it in Ga, Yoruba, and Chadic languages too. (I was once working on an etymology that involves the metaphor. Maybe it will take form one day. So I am grateful for more of this semantic typological data.)
While on Ghanaian topics…
The splash page of the OED has a list of recently added words at the bottom of the page, and Ghanaian English galamsey is featured today (or this week, or whatever their turnover period is). For a while, the whole entry should be accessible to everyone here (at least, it is now). The OED etymology says:
Other sources give Get ’em and sell, Get and sell.
(Mary Esther Kropp Dakubu (1997) Korle Meets the Sea: A Sociolinguistic History of Accra, has a different etymology (endnote 15 on page 181):
However, the Portuguese noun is garimpeiro with r (I gather this word is also in current use in Angola in the context of diamonds). From garimpa, the place where such a prospector sets up his operation, from grimpa, ‘hilltop, peak’, referring to the hills and valleys of Minas Gerais where prospectors would set up their operations and avoid the authorities. So I don’t know how much weight to give her comments about a possible relationship with galampear, which seems quite obscure.)
Individually, both components of dunoli are of impressive venerability:
Duu “hut, house” is cognate with Kusaal dɔɔg, Farefare dèegò; Mooré ròogó. Buli dòk, Konni jùòkú, Yom deɣo, Nawdm dúgú, Gulmancema dīegū, Moba dēēùg, Akaselem kúdīī, Ncam kídīī, Waama deeka. The proto-Oti-Volta form was *dè-kʊ; all those forms with a rounded stem vowel are due to the rounding effect of the class suffix. There are Gur cognates even outside Oti-Volta: Kassem dìgə̄, Miyobe kùlè, Kulango dekò. Nothing outside Gur AFAIK, though.
Noli “mouth”, on the other hand, goes right back to proto-Volta-Congo: cognate with Nõotre nòoré; Kusaal nɔɔr, Mooré nóorè, Buli nóai, Konni nʊ́árɪ́, Yom nôr, Nawdm nóóŕ, Ncam kɩ̄ɲɔ̀kɔ̄, Byali nūī, Ditammari dìnùù, Nateni nùdī, Mbelime nùɔ̀dè, Waama nɔɔre, proto-Oti-Volta *nô-dɪ́; and further cognate with Kassem ní, Miyobe tinɔ́ɔ, Baatonum nɔɔ, Gbeya nú, Twi anom, Ewe nu, Yoruba ẹnu, Logba ànú. proto-Bantu *-nùà.
galamsey
I agree that the OED version looks a lot more likely.
There really are quite a few old Portuguese loans in West Africa, though. Even Kusaal has some words ultimately of that origin: saafi “key”, daka “box”, and probably even (unlikely as it looks) kukur “pig.”
Prof Kropp Dakubu was an expert on this (and on much else), but she seems to have got a bit carried away in this particular case.
What does ”gold winning” mean. I would have thought it was a typo for mining if it didn’t show up twice.
That’s interesting; it looks like it’s literally translated from German, where gewinnen can mean “obtain from raw material”, e.g. mining, refining etc. of metals. Goldgewinnung would be unremarkable here.
Is the gold mined or washed?
Is the gold mined or washed?
If it’s washed in the sense of panned from a stream-bed, there could be a sense of ‘winnow’.
“Win” has a specialized sense in mining: To extract from a mine or from mined ore (or slightly different or more specific senses in other references) — and it goes all the way back to the 1400s in English. “Gold winning” + Ghana gets lots of Google hits, but I can’t tell if it means anything more specific than “gold mining”.
Wikipedia says: “Galamseyers dig small working pits, tunnels, and sluices by hand.”
Norw. utvinne. It’s one of those prefixed verbs I have learned to expect are calqued from German.