I wasn’t planning to do a separate Christmas post this year — I got a bunch of movies in foreign languages (Three Times by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Fantômas and Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade, Lost Illusions by Xavier Giannoli, etc.), but that didn’t seem to justify a post. But then Songdog and family came over, and they got me something I’ve been drooling over and that is eminently Hattic: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition. I used Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate for my entire working life, and every time a new edition came out the bosses would provide us proofreaders and editors with a copy each, and I would spend some time comparing it with the old one, checking the additions and omissions. I think I must have had the Seventh New Collegiate, which was around when I was in college, but I’ve definitely got the 8th (which I used at my first proofreading job) and every one since. I thought there would never be a 12th, since everyone kept saying the print dictionary was dead, but lo and behold, they put it out, and now I’ve got one. An impressively expanded etymology is that for abide; the 11th had simply
[ME, fr. OE ābīdan, fr. ā-, perfective prefix + bīdan to bide; akin to OHD ir-, perfective prefix — more at bide]
Look what it is now:
{ME abiden, going back to OE abīdan, from a-, perfective prefix + bīdan “to bide, wait”; a- (also ā-, ǣ- under stress in nominal derivatives) akin to OFris a-, perfective prefix, OS ā-, ō- (unstressed a-) and probably to OE or- “outward, extreme, lacking (in nominal compounds),” OFris & OS ur-, or-, OHG ar-, ir-, er- unstressed inchoative verb prefix, ur “out of, away from,” ON ūr-, ör-, “out of, from,” ør-, privative prefix, Gothic us- “out of,” us-, privative and perfective prefix; if from pre-Gmc *ud-s- akin to OE ūt “out” — more at out entry 1, bide}
(For some reason they’ve started using curly brackets with etymologies.) You’d think you’d wandered into the OED!
And Slavo/bulbul gave me Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight, which I devoured over a decade ago and have not ceased thinking about since; I can’t wait to dig in.
You’ll love Echopraxia. Peter is a chill guy, we were supposed to meet, but he got Covid. I don’t remember when I read Blindsight, but probably more than fifteen years ago.
As an avid achiever, I sure am glad to hear about that extended etymology.
…er… I don’t think ör- and ør- are different things…
Even while suffering blows from the internet, the hard-copy publishing industry still provides a wide range of titles in a wide range of genres aimed at a wide range of audiences. So our household’s youngest member (age 4) received for Christmas a copy of _Pete the Cat’s Wacky Taco Tuesday_ (by Kimberly & James Dean), which seems unlikely to be nominated for a Hugo. (Or even a Caldecott or Newbury, to be sure.)
OK, I’ve found my first typo/error: on p. 1179 s.v. pereopod it says “NL perion + Eng -pod.” But as far as I can tell there is no “NL perion” (which in any case wouldn’t give pereo-) — the New Latin word is pereon (per M-W s.v.) or pereion (per OED).
Were I still employed at PW (latterly PwC), I would have marched straight down the hall to the boss who acted like it was the end of the world if the proofreaders missed a typo and said “You see? Like I keep telling you, everything has typos!”
I am pleased to hear of the arrival of the 12th edition, warts and all. This reminds me that I’ve seen reviews of (but not actually myself yet inspected) a new book titled _Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary_ by Stefan Fatsis, whose previous work has from time to time been covered here. During the writing process Fatsis spent some time “embedded” as a participant-observer at Merriam-Webster HQ, writing some definitions of newly-lexicalized items. Here’s an interview with Fatsis which IMHO suffers from the ill-advised stunt of the interviewer trying to craft an introduction for the guest that’s overstuffed with “dictionary words” that are clearly not part of the interviewer’s actual lexicon. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2025/12/12/modern-dictionary-stefan-fatsis-unabridged
Yes, I am of course interested in the Fatsis book myself and hope to investigate it at some later date.
And that’s an interesting interview despite the annoying interviewer — thanks.
_Pete the Cat’s Wacky Taco Tuesday_ (by Kimberly & James Dean), which seems unlikely to be nominated for a Hugo
But maybe we can interest Peter Jackson in turning it into a nine-hour trilogy.
They added yage ‘ayahuasca’ to the new edition; I had seen it before, but now I learn it is pronounced /ˈyaheɪ/ and not the way I was saying it (with /g/); it’s “borrowed from American Spanish yagé, yajé, yahé, perhaps borrowed from a language in the Tukanoan family (spoken by Indigenous peoples of southeastern Colombia and adjacent parts of Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil).”
(The OED has it as yagé, pronounced /ˈjɑːʒeɪ/ [!] or /jaˈxɛ/, and just says it’s “A borrowing from Spanish.”)
I think that’s the way William Burroughs pronounced it; I have heard it on one of his recordings.
WAry says it’s from Cofán = Aʼingae, a language isolate. No source quoted.
JW Brewer mentioned an interview with Stefan Fatsis. I like his work, so I read the transcript. I wasn’t deliberately looking for errors, but a few jumped out at me, such as ‘ad’ for ‘add’, and ‘scraped’ for ‘scrapped’. Although avoidable, these errors didn’t significantly impede my understanding of the transcript nor my perceptions of its accuracy. However, other errors did.
When discussing the buzz-phrase ‘6-7’, Fatsis said: ‘There are like classrooms of bandits use for obvious reasons.’ More likely, he said (approximately): ‘There are, like, classrooms that have banned its use for obvious reasons.’
The interviewer referred to a Scrabble game: ‘[I] got obliterated when my opponent used the word ads. Which I didn’t know at the time, and I think it means like a small axe or something.’ That word would be ‘adz’ (or possibly ‘adze’).
Because Fatsis embedded himself at Merriam-Webster, the American dictionary publisher, the hyphenated name or the simpler ‘Merriam’ appears about 50 times in the transcript. However, four times it is rendered as ‘Miriam’.
But the most awkward error I spotted (again, remember that I was not actively looking for errors and I was reading fast to get through the waffly, albeit pleasant-enough, bits) was in a passage where Fatsis talks about embedding himself in various places as part of his book research. He says: ‘I became a expert gravel player.’ Even if he did say ‘a expert’, I’d be inclined to correct to ‘an expert’, but, more importantly, what exactly is a ‘gravel player’? Eventually, I twigged that it should be ‘Scrabble player’, because Fatsis did indeed become a fairly high-level Scrabble player as part of his research for ‘Word Freak’.
At note at the end of the transcript says:
‘The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.’
The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
I had to read this three times to understand it. Surely only a human bad writer could create such a sentence?
yagé, pronounced /ˈjɑːʒeɪ/ [!]
The Brazilian pronunciation? (This would make the OED’s “A borrowing from Spanish” not only lazy but outright erroneous.)
Burroughs was in South-Eastern Colombia (Putumayo) when he was looking for yage.
Btw, the Collins English Dictionary has [‘jɑːgeɪ] (14th edition, 2023 – another dictionary still issued in a print edition).
adz(e). Only English and Hittite, but plausibly cognate between the two nonetheless!
es.WP gives a list of names for yagé in a number of indigenous languages, and assigns the origin of yagé to Cofán, based on the 2006 Diccionario de Colombia. SIL’s Vocabulario cofán confirms it as the term in that language, but it is not necessarily either its proximal or distal origin. Reinburg (J. Soc. américanistes, NS 13, 197, 1921, here, p. 210) records a similar word from languages of seven different language families. It’s generally hard if not impossible to find the ultimate source of a Wanderwort, and it may have entered Spanish from different sources more or less simultaneously.
(I have heard an American once pronounce it yaydge. A fallen world and all that.)
“adz(e). Only English and Hittite, but plausibly cognate” — Kroonen buys this, and so do Mallory/Adams, but Anatoly Liberman doesn’t; in his entry on the word in Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, he finds fault with all explanations and points out that names of tools are often borrowed and altered in borrowing, and also that the Hittite word’s “exact meaning has not been established. J. Friedrich (HW, 38) glosses it as ‘dish; metal plate,’ with a question mark.” The OED’s revision (2011) cites Liberman and agrees that proposed etymologies are “all problematic”.
To me it just sounds far-fetched that such an ancient tool has cognates surviving only in English and Hittite, with no relatives even in Germanic, let alone any other European branches.
There’s another English word for ‘adze’ that does have Germanic cognates, and probably even further ones, but it’s obscure: thixel, marked “now dialect” by the OED (1912), cognate with German Dechsel. (See here for a brief comment by Piotr Gąsiorowski on the PIE etymon.)
Perhaps “thixel” should be revived. It does have the possibly advantageous quality of rhyming with “pixel” (first attested 60 years ago and then rising to considerable prominence in recent decades), which doesn’t have too many other prospects in that department.
too many other prospects in that department
The pricks’ll get kicked against that claim. The kicks’ll hurt. There’s doubtless some plainchant about it in mix’lydian mode.
Words for ancient tools do get replaced pretty often. I didn’t even know Dechsel; the word I’m used to is… well, dialectal /hɛɪ̯l̩/ is probably *Häuel, from hauen “hew”.
There’s also азда in Bulgarian, with the same meaning, but I can’t find any references. Internet search is basically useless now.
It means adze.
Words for ancient tools do get replaced pretty often
Greek πέλεκυς “axe” seems to be a Wanderwort, for instance:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%80%CE%AD%CE%BB%CE%B5%CE%BA%CF%85%CF%82
And Latin securis seems to have been borrowed into Aramaic, why not:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/securis
Welsh bywall “axe” doesn’t seem reconstructable beyond Celtic.
The various Oti-Volta branches have words for “axe/adze” reconstructable to either proto-Oti-Volta *yâd-ká or *lâd-ká: it’s hard to believe that these roots are unconnected with each other, but an initial *y ~ *l correspondence is not regular at all.
Hauen and hew are more cognates of the hedge words.
Hew is not cognate with hedge according to every reference I have to hand: AHD, Mallory/Adams, Kroonen, OED (etymologies from 1898, but more recent references haven’t contradicted them). The verb hew goes back to a PIE verb with descendants meaning ‘strike’ and ‘forge’; hedge goes back to a Germanic noun for an enclosed area (Kroonen: “the word originally denoted an enclosure created by shrubs or briars”) that has relatives in Latin and Celtic, but not farther.
Hew *is* cognate with hay as in ‘cut dried grass’, but not with the hay that’s an archaic synonym of ‘hedge’.
Hew is also cognate with hoe, but that doesn’t mean hoe is an ancient and stable tool word, since English didn’t inherit it directly — it borrowed it from French, which got it from Germanic.
hoe
Scandi-Congo, once again: Kusaal kʋʋnr, Mooré kũ̀urí, Buli kùi, Gulimancema kūūlī, proto-Oti-Volta *kũ̀-dɪ́.
@ktschwarz: You seem to be right, but there then appears to be something wrong with some of the OED‘s listed cognates of the hew words then. The long online etymology for hew says:
I misread that line, because it is misformed. I don’t see how they can cite hag n.² II, and hag n.² as separate cognates.
Nope! That means “hoe” (of which it must then be a root cognate), not a tool for woodworking. The illustrations in the Wiktionary article confused me.
The point nonetheless stands. For “ax”, German has Axt* f., Beil n., Hacke f. and Hackebeil n. to offer, and I’m pretty sure the distinctions have more to do with region and register than with differences in referents.
* -/t/ from the bizarre process that “strengthened” the ends of phonological words; also Saft “sap, juice”, jemand “someone” (je- + Mann), and the -s- in many compounds.
I think it’s debris left over from revising all the hag words without fully revising hew. The old edition had cross-references from hew to two different noun entries, then numbered hag n.3, n.4, but in the revision they decided that those were the same word and combined them (and the old n.2 as well) into one entry under hag n.2. So the two cross-references should have been combined into one.
The revised entry is much longer and more inclusive than the old one, drawing on the Scottish National Dictionary.
Re axt/hacke, I believe the English cognates have at least come to have different form and function.
https://ancientsmithy.com/blogs/news/axe-vs-hatchet-understanding-the-key-differences?srsltid=AfmBOopvIxvJE0MgVlBec1zVeaVch1upzrb5vreDmOXXBjMvcgHC5H0i
Re Beil, I believe this like English axe is a larger tool optimised for two-handed use, since it was used by executioners, who need a forceful blow that severs the victim’s head with one stroke.
If you (as the victim) were lucky; or rich enough to bribe the executioner. Still, it apparently often went wrong, and that was the reason the guillotine was introduced in the French Revolution as a more humane method.
The new Fatsis book has now been reviewed by Louis Menand in the New Yorker. My expectations of Menand on language have been rock bottom since he made a fool of himself in the Great Toni Morrison’s Genius Affair of 2003, but nevertheless this piece seems pretty OK. Menand even dares a parenthetical remark:
Copyediting note: apparently New Yorker style is to put book titles in quotation marks and magazine names in italics, but dictionary names get neither.
Scandi-Congo, once again
I would bet that Songhay kuumu / kumbu “hoe” actually is related to the Gur forms – but maybe borrowed into Gur, given the apparent absence of any class suffix in the Songhay word?
Also: Happy New Year everyone!
but maybe borrowed into Gur
Very interesting!
The Oti-Volta etymon is attested in Western Oti-Volta, Buli/Konni and Gurma, and the sound correspondences (including the tonal ones) are unproblematic, which I usually take as good enough evidence to reconstruct a word to proto-Oti-Volta. If it really is of that vintage, I think it would be unlikely to be a loan from Songhay: you’re probably talking about the first millennium BCE.)
However, it’s pretty simple and generally well-conserved stem shape (*kũ̀-), the loss of nasalisation in Buli/Konni and Gurma is automatic, as those branches lack contrastive vowel nasalisation, and there are no cognates in those Eastern Oti-Volta languages which do weird things with POV initial *k. So there’s nothing much to prove that this couldn’t just be a widespread loanword.
(But the tone correspondence, WOV and Buli low to Gurma mid tone, is regular for inherited words, and thus seems more consistent with common inheritance from POV than separate independent borrowing: you’d expect the tones to match in the latter case.)
The word belongs to the same noun class in all the languages where it turns up, but it’s the commonest non-human noun class anyway, so that probably doesn’t signify a whole lot when it comes to dating.
There’s no sign of any stem-final -m(b)u in Oti-Volta, though. Is that a meaningful morpheme in the Songhay forms? Are the stems segmentable? (Otherwise, you’d have expected the -m- to be retained in Oti-Volta borrowings, resulting in something more like Kusaal *kʋmmir or *kʋm, Mooré *kũ̀mbrí or kũ̀mdí.)
I can’t find any cognates of my supposed proto-Oti-Volta *kũ̀-dɪ́ elsewhere in “Gur”, but that’s par for the course even for “Central Gur”: it’s a pretty diverse group internally.
Turning it around, and speculating about an Oti-Volta loan into Songhay: there are Oti-Volta -mʊ and -bʊ noun-class suffixes, which would give you *kũ̀-mʊ or *kũ̀-bʊ, but there are no such actual forms in any OV language AFAIK, and the class suffixes in question have quite strong semantic associations, with “mass/liquid” and “trees” respectively, which doesn’t seem very promising.
The “long thin things” singular noun class suffix *-ɦʊ would make sense with “hoe”: a putative *kũ̀ɦʊ might well end up looking as if it had no class suffix if borrowed into Songhay. But again, there is no such formation actually extant in any current Oti-Volta language as far as I know, and it still wouldn’t account for the Songhay -m{b)u.
I just found this entry in my new Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition:
The note reads “The AAE use to convey both completion and strong emotion, in which done is unstressed in pronunciation, is sometimes called dən or unstressed done.” It’s startling to see a schwa in an entry as opposed to a pronunciation, and I can’t help but wonder if the word dən is actually used frequently enough to justify a separate entry. (It’s between donator and done in my print copy, which is odd in itself — how many people would think to look for it there?)
Wow, it is crazy to see it spelled that way in an entry.
Is there really a consistent difference in pronunciation in AAVE between ‘dən’ and ‘done’?
I’m not a native user of AAVE perfective done, but I’ve heard it regularly my whole life and never noticed a consistent difference – and I would have said that AAVE perfective done could be stressed (when emphasis is required) and that other uses of words spelled ‘done’ can be unstressed in some situations (not sure of a good example – maybe “Are you finished with dinner?” / “I’m done eating but I’m still working on my drink”, stressing “eating” not “done”, or something, but I’m not sure of that).
ETA: I’m also very curious if ‘dən’ (in that spelling) is used widely at all. A quick web search pulls up mostly lexicography and false positives.
I can’t help but wonder if they were basically just showing off. And I join you in your question about pronunciation.
Yeah, showing off doesn’t seem unlikely. Or just “wouldn’t it be cool…”
Is this “perfective done” actually a distinctively AA[V]E use that differs from the more general Southern vernacular seen in, e.g.,
“So Big Jim commence to fightin’
I wouldn’t tell you no lie
Big Jim done pulled his pistol
Shot his friend right between the eyes”?
Some AA[?]E features are largely identical to white Southern dialect, holding social-class and register constant. Others aren’t. Those that aren’t are perhaps particularly interesting, but you need to know which ones they are which means you need some familiarity with white Southern vernacular speech.
Yeah, I’m not sure if it’s distinctive either.
The main reason I specified AAVE in my comment above is that I thought that the pronunciation/stress patterns might (or might not) differ between AAVE and white Southern dialect (which I also grew up around, though I’m not a native speaker of “Big Jim done pulled his pistol” either), but, now that I think about it, I think there might be a grammatical difference as well.
In “Big Jim done pulled his pistol”, I’m not sure that the purpose of “done” is to show that the action of pulling the pistol has been completed.
In “He done already paid for the trip”, though, I think it clearly means exactly that the action of paying is complete.
I’m not quite sure how to analyze “done” in “Big Jim done pulled his pistol” – could it mean something like “and then” or “it was the case that” or something? I dunno, but it feels different to me. I’m sure there’s plenty of research on this somewhere, but I haven’t read it.
Well, Big Jim couldn’t have shot his friend right between the eyes without having first completed the pistol-pulling process. But the “done” always seemed to me to make that more emphatic. Unless of course you take the cynical view that another syllable in the line was necessary to fit the meter and “done” was just a filler to accomplish that. But the other “aesthetic” angle is that “done VERBed” is a stereotypically non-prestige redneck sort of construction, and the lyricist very deliberately filled out the lyrics of that particular song with as many marked-as-redneck syntactic forms as he could think of and did so as part of a deliberate aesthetic strategy. Having the narrator proceed in an unmarked regionless or classless register would not have resulted in the same overall aesthetic effect.
Some earlier relevant discussions done happened here.
In the English-lexifier Atlantic creoles. dɔn is specifically a perfect marker: with dynamic verbs it expresses the combination of completion with present relevance, as in e.g. Pichi
Di aráta dɔ́n kɔmɔ́t ínsay di hól.
“The rat has come out of the hole [it is outside now.]”
(From Kofi Yakpo’s grammar, p163.)
[The corresponding negative particle is nɛ́a (= Nigerian Pidgin nɛ́va), which thus does not have the meaning “never”, despite its origin from that English word.]
I don’t know whether this perfect meaning is also what is conveyed by AAVE dɔn, or by the white Southern “done.”
A relevant link from the prior discussion Bret mentioned (noting some possible differences between AAE usage and white-Southern usage). https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/perfective-done
Interesting. It looks like AAVE matches the Atlantic creoles fairly well here, but Southern white English doesn’t.
Interesting, and relevant indeed.
It looks like AAVE matches the Atlantic creoles fairly well here, but Southern white English doesn’t.
(No doubt the latter is merely calquing the Cracker Brythonic still spoken by feral backwoodsmen in those parts. Yma o hyd …)
The Cracker Brythonics of the Southern Appalachians maintain a deliberately low profile so that the romanticizers get distracted by misplaced focus on the Cracker Goidelics.
In “Big Jim done pulled his pistol”, I think the “done” is just emphasis/dramatic (could be surprise or horror, as in “Big Jim done pulled his pistol and shot the thieving varmint / his Pappy dead.”). Ain’t yo’ Mama done tell you that?
David Marjanović:
The most common dictionary definition for Hacke is ‘hoe’, but Duden has definition #3 Beil, Axt, labeled österreichisch; I guess that illustrates again how these names slip around.
PlasticPaddy:
Perhaps surprisingly, Hacke is *not* cognate with “hatchet”. English gets “hatchet” from French (obvious from the ‑et), which in turn got hache by borrowing (into Old French or Vulgar Latin depending who you ask) from a Germanic source reconstructed as *happjā: the sound change from Vulgar Latin */pʲ/ to French /ʃ/ is regular, and there are other Gallo-Romance languages with forms in hap‑ (see Wiktionary at happia and reference from there to FEW). The German descendant of this word is Hippe, billhook or pruning knife.
@kts
Thanks. I think I saw that afterwards, I was confused by haché and Hackfleisch.
I would not have guessed.