Les mots de le semaine

français English Cymraeg Brezhoneg
le mine (de charbon) (coal) mine mwynfa (glofa; pwll glo) poull-glaou
le mine (explosive) mine ffrwydryn min
se venger (de qn) to take one’s revenge (on sb) dial (ar rywun) venjiñ
ingénieux; astucieux clever (device, system) dyfeisgar; medrus ijinek; barrek
à double vitrage double-glazed dwbl-wydrog gweradur doubl
le double vitrage double glazing ffenestri dwbl; gwydro dwbl
le store (window) blind cysgodlen; bleind rideoz
le volet (window) shutter caead stalaf
le rideau curtain llen; cyrten rideoz
le valeurs mobilières; les titres stocks and shares stociau a chyfrannau teulioù
toxicomane; accro addict adict drammgaezhiad
l’ardoisière (f) slate quarry chwarela llechi meinglazeg
la déesse goddess duwies doueez
la lance spear gwaywffon goaf
la hanche hip clun lez
nier; refuser to deny gwadu nac’hañ
creuser; bêcher to dig cloddio; palu kleuzañ; palarat

New server

Currently I’m in the middle of moving Omniglot to a new web server provided by Kualo. This is going smoothly so far, but if you notice any error messages of other strangeness, don’t panic! The new server is managed, so any problems that might occur should be fixed quickly. My current server is ‘managed’ by me, and I’m no expert in running one. I chose Kualo because they offer a good deal, and because they are a green company who run on renewable energy.

My home runs mainly on renewable energy, supplied by Ecotricty, and I am planning to switch to a broadband and phone provider that is run on a co-operative model and uses renewable energy. I support renewable energy because it seems like a sensible thing to do.

Feeling at home in a language and culture

The other day a friend of a friend asked me whether I’d found a language and/or culture in which I felt ‘at home’. She told me about someone she knows who has studied many languages and is always looking for a language community (other than his native one) where he fits in and feels comfortable – he has yet to find one. I hadn’t really thought about language learning in this way before. Have you?

I suppose that whenever I visit other countries and communities I kind of try them on for size and imagine what it would be like to live in them in the medium to long term. Each one has aspects that appeal to me, and others that I’m not so keen on – things like language, food, climate, scenery, music, etc. I’ve felt reasonably at home in various parts of British Isles and Ireland, in Taipei and Hong Kong, and in Australia and New Zealand.

Visitants

In an email I received today the word visitants jumped out at me. The email is from a someone keen to exchange links with Omniglot as apparently their site “could be a helpful resource for your visitants”. The email is from a German speaker, I think, who seems to have coined this word, or got it from somewhere. Have you come across this word before?

I like making up words and am interested in seeing words other people have made up. Recently I’ve been playing with variations on the word uke, an abbreviation of ukulele, and coined a couple of words for ukulele playing – to uke and to ukelise, as in “Will anybody else be ukeing/ukelising tonight?”

Have you coined any new words?

Emergent con-scripts

A while ago I had an idea for trying to construct a script with symbols based on representations of natural phenomena – animals, birds, plants, features of the landscape, etc – which would be linked to the sounds via acrophony. Then to simplify the images a number of times until I have a set of letters, a bit like the Alphabet Synthesis Machine.

Most writing systems currently in use are derived ultimately from Egyptian Hieroglyphs, which developed from pictures of objects, people, animals, etc, and I thought would be interesting to try to simulate that process and see what emerged. I haven’t come up with anything very interesting yet, but am still working on it.

Have any of you tried something like this?

Bouder

I learnt a new word in French today: bouder, which means to sulk; to pout; to avoid; to turn one’s nose up at (sth); to refuse to have anything to do with (sb).

Related expressions include:
– boudant = sulking; pouting
– bouder son plaisir = to deny oneself a good thing; to sulk one’s pleasure (never heard this one before – have you?)
– ne pas bouder son plaisir = to enjoy fully; to enjoy without restraint
– se bouder = not to be on speaking terms
– on ne boudera pas = we shall not complain (about); we shall not avoid

It came up in my Breton course – the Breton equivalent is mouzhat – and appears in the sentence, Perak ‘ta, klañv eo pe o vouzhat emañ? (Why? Is she sick or is she sulking?).

The origins of the English words pout and sulk are unknown, according to the OED.

Are there any interesting expressions featuring the equivalents of these words in other languages?

Royal turkeys and other birds

Pavo real

Last night I discovered the Spanish word pavo real, which means peacock, or literally ‘royal turkey’, and which conjured up an image of a turkey in ermine robes wearing a crown.

It also reminds me of the Mandarin Chinese word for swan, 天鵝 [天鹅] (tiān’é), which could be translated as ‘heavenly/celestial goose’. The Mandarin word for peacock is 孔雀 (kǒngquè) or ‘great sparrow’. [source]

The word pavo comes from the Latin pāvō (peacock), from the Ancient Greek ταώς (taōs), and thought to be ultimately from Tamil தோகை (tōkai).

The words for peacock in many European languages come from the same root: Aromanian: pãun; Breton: paun; Catalan: paó; Cornish: payon; Dutch: pauw; French: paon; Friulian: pavon; Galician: pavo, pavón; German: Pfau; Italian: pavone; Occitan: pavon; Old English: pāwa; Portuguese: pavão; Romanian: păun; Romansch: pavun, pivun; Sardinian: paboni, paone; Serbian: paun; Welsh: paun [source]. However in Manx a peacock is a kellagh aalin (‘beautiful cock(rel)’) or a kellagh eairkagh (‘peaked cock(rel)’) [source].

Are there interesting words for peacocks, or other birds, in other languages?

The word pavo has quite a few other meanings in Spanish, including:

– silly thing, idiot; five peseta coin; sucker (in Spain)
– stowaway (in Chile)
– large kite; big shot; evil-looking person (in the Andes)
– youngster, kid
– cold turkey
– silly – e.g. ¡no seas pavo! = don’t be silly!

From: Reverso

Iban alphabet

I thought that almost all the world’s writing systems were on Omniglot, but today I discovered another one: the Iban alphabet, which was invented in 1947 by Dunging Anak Gunggu.

Iban alphabet

It’s a partly syllabic, partly alphabetic script that never really caught on, mainly because there was no tradition of writing among the Iban-speaking community. During the past few years there have been efforts to revive it mainly by Dr Bromeley Philip at the Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) in Sarawak, Malaysia – I’ve written to him to ask about the current situation.

Iban is a Malayo-Polynesian language spoken in Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, but I’m sure you knew that.

For me it’s always exciting to discover a previously unknown (to me) writing system like this.