Plains, pianos and floors

Flat piano on a wooden floor

The Welsh word llawr [ɬau̯r] means floor, deck, gallery, stage, platform, cellar, basement, ground, face, and a few other things. I discovered today that it has cognates in all the other Celtic languages:

leur (Cornish) = floor, ground
leur (Breton) = area, ground, floor, soil
lár (Irish) = ground, floor, middle, centre
làr (Scottish Gaelic) = floor, ground, storey
laare (Manx) = storey, deck, floor, bottom, flat, set, sill, level

These words all come from the Proto-Celtic *ɸlārom (floor), which comes from the Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂rom or *ploh₂rom, from *pleh₂- ‎(to be flat).

THe PIE word *pleh₂- is the root of many other words, including:

– The English piano, plain, plan, floor and flake
– The Dutch vloer (floor, ground, surface)
– The German Flur (hall, hallway, corridor, stairwell)
– The Italian piano (flat, level, smooth, plane, softly, quietly)
– The Spanish llano (even, flat, level, plain) and plano (plain, level, flat)
– The Latvian: plats, plašs ‎(wide, broad)
– The Lithuanian: platus ‎(wide, broas)
– The Russian плоский (flat, plain, level)

Sources: Wiktionary, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, Maga Cornish Dictionary / Gerlyver Kernewek, Dictionnaires bilingues de Francis Favereau, teanglann.ie, Am Faclair Beag, On-Line Manx Dictionary, Reverso

Cold Wintry Wind

凩 (kogarashi) cold wintry wind

I learnt an interesting Japanese word and kanji today – 凩 (こがらし / kogarashi), which means ‘cold wintry wind’ or ‘the cold wind that reminds us winter is coming’. It is also written 木枯し or 木枯, and is considered ‘untranslatable‘ by some.

The character 凩 is a 国字 (こくじ / kokuji), that is one that was made in Japan rather than being borrowed from Chinese. It combines 几 (ki – armrest, desk, table, screen), which can also mean ‘to envelope; to wrap around’, with 木 (ki / moku – tree, shrub, bush, wood).

Other kokuji include:

– 凧 (いかのぼり; たこ – ikanobori; tako) = kite
– 凪 (なぎ; な.ぐ / nagi; nagu) = lull; calm
– 働く (はたらく / hataraku) = work
– 峠 (とうげ / tōge) = mountain peak; mountain pass; climax; crest
– 杢 (モク / moku) = woodworker
– 杣 (そま / soma) = timber; lumber; woodcutter

In Welsh there is a word that is similar to 凩: rhewynt, meaning an ‘ice-cold wind’, from rhew (frost, ice) and gwynt (wind, breath). There are also a number of other interesting wind-related expressions:

gwynt carthen = breeze created by shaking a blanket (said comtemptuously of a preacher’s artificial eloquence)
gwynt coch Amwythig = the east wind (“the red / sorching wind of Shrewsbury”)
gwynt y creigiau = north-west wind (“wind of the [Snowdonian] rocks”)
gwynt ffroen yr ych = the east wind (“the wind the ox’s nostril”)
gwynt pilyn = breeze created by shaking a sack in order to separate the chaff from the grain when wwinnowing (“wind of a garment”)
gwynt traed y meirw = the east wind (“the wind of dead men’s feet” – refers to the custom of burying people with their feet to the east)

Sources: http://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/kokuji-list.html, Geiriadur yr Academi, Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru

Are there equivalents of 凩 (kogarashi) in other languages?

Or other interesting wind-related expressions?

Wheels with teeth

An illustration of cog(wheels)

I discovered last night that in French a cog is a une dent, which also means a tooth, or une dent d’engrenage (“tooth gear”), and a cog wheel is une roue dentée (a toothed wheel), which is kind of a cog looks like.

The English word cog, meaning a tooth on a gear, or a gear or a cogwheel, comes from the Middle English cogge, from the Old Norse kugg (notch), from the Proto-Germanic *kuggō (cog, notch), from the Proto-Indo-European *gugā ‎(hump, ball), from *gēu- ‎(to bend, arch).

A cog can also refer to an unimportant individual in a greater system, e.g. He’s just a cog in the machine, which in French would be Il n’est pas qu’un rouage de la machinerouage is another word for cog or gearwheel, and also means part. Les rouages means machinery, as in les rouages de l’État (the machinery of state) or les rouages de l’administration (the wheels of government).

In German a cog is Zahn (tooth) and a cogwheel is Zahnrad (toothwheel). He is only a cog in a machine is Er ist nur ein Rädchen im Getriebe (“He is only a little wheel in the works/gears/gearbox”), or Er ist nur eine Nummer unter vielen (“He is only a number among many”).

Are there similar expressions in other languages about being a cog in a machine?

Sources: Reverso, Wiktionary, WordReference.com and giantbomb.com

Polyglot Pub

Polyglots polyglotting at the Polyglot Pub

Last week I went to the Polyglot Pub in London. I’ve been to similar events in Manchester and Liverpool, but this is the first one I’ve been to in London. It takes place once a month, usually at Penderel’s Oak, a pub in Holborn, and this month there were about 16 people there.

The conversation was mainly in English, but I also spoke Mandarin and French, and odd bits of Russian, Czech, Slovak, Swedish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic and Dutch. Other languages were avaiable.

The next Polyglot Pub will be in the same place on the 16th February.

Do you go to, or know of, similar events elsewhere?

Tell me all about it

According to an article on Science Daily, a good way to remember something you’re learnt is to tell someone else about it, or to test yourself on it.

A study got students to watch films, then asked them to describe what they’d seen afterwards. Those who told someone about the films just after watching them remembered the core and peripheral details, whereas others only remember some of the core details.

I use this technique quite often, without realising it – I like to talk about books I’ve read, films I’ve seen, and events I’ve been to, and find that if I do this not long afterwards, I tend to remember more details, and retain those memories longer.

When learning languages I sometimes test myself on what I’ve learnt, and try to put the words and structures into new sentences to make little conversations. When I try to explain things to other people I find that there are often gaps in my knowledge, maybe because I leave it too long before doing this.

Do you use these techniques at all?

Do they work for you?

A Wayzgoose Chase

Bertie & Gertie - the white geese that live pn Hirael Bay in Bangor

What do you call a printer that doesn’t work?

A wayzgoose [ˈweɪzɡuːs].

A wayzgoose‽ What’s that?

According to the Oxford Living Dictionaries, a wayzgoose is “An annual summer dinner or outing held by a printing house for its employees.”

The Oxford Dictionaries blog says that:

the wayzgoose was originally an entertainment given by a master-printer to his workmen to mark the beginning of the season of working by candlelight. In later use, it meant an annual festivity held in summer by the employees of a printing establishment, consisting of a dinner and (usually) an excursion into the country.

Traditionally the wayzgoose happened on 24th August, which is St Bartholomew’s Day, and St Bartholomew is the patron saint of bookbinders, and also of butchers, plasterers, cobblers, shoemakers and other leather workers [source].

The origin of the word wayzgoose is uncertain. It was usually written waygoose in earlier sources (the earliest known use is 1683). The z was added in the late 19th century, however in the 1731 Universal Etymological English Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey, it is written with the z, and Bailey thought that the word wayz meant a bundle of straw or stubble, that a wayz-goose or stubble-goose was a goose fattened on the stubble left in fields after they were harvested, and that the wayz-goose was served at the wayzgoose feast.

This word was discussed on the Museum of Curiosity on BBC Radio 4 last night, which is where I got the idea for this post.

Going spooning

Welsh love spoons (llwyau caru)

There’s a tradition in Wales of men carving spoons out of wood and presenting them to the ladies they love. If a lady accepts a spoon, then she and the man are considered a couple – engagements and weddings were apparently not common in rural Wales until the 18th century [source]. The websites that discuss the love spoon (llwyau caru) tradition usually mention that it’s the origin of the English expression “to go spooning”, which is one I haven’t come across before.

A quick search on Google finds a number of books that include the phrase “to go spooning”, and from the context it appears to mean to go courting, but it’s not always clear. Are you familiar with this phrase at all?

Spooning has another meaning – “To lie down behind and against (another person) so that both bodies face the same direction with the knees drawn up slightly like nested spoons” [source], but I don’t think that’s what “to go spooning” is about.