Omniglot - the blog

Today’s word, snasail, is Scottish Gaelic for accurate, alright, brave, decent, elegant, lopped, neat or ornamented. When I stumbled upon it in my Gaelic dictionary, I thought at first that it said ’snailsail’, which conjured up an image of sailing snail.

A related words include:
snasmhor - neat, smart or elegant
snas-bhriathrach - eloquent, oratorical, rhetorical (briathrach = eloquent, loquacious, talkative)
snas-chainnt - philology, rhetoric (cainnt = language, speech)
snasachadh - analysis, carving, elegance, make-up, ornamenting, polishing

The root of these words is snas, which means aspect, colour, decency, elegance, gloss, perfectness, polish.

Pigan, verb = to being to rain / to start raining

Etymology: pigan comes from pig, beak, spout, to interfere

Example of usage:
Mae hi’n pigan = Mae hi’n dechrau bwrw glaw = It’s starting to rain

Related word:
piglaw - heavy rain, drizzle

I came across this word the other day while searching for another word in my Welsh dictionary and it just appealed to me. I don’t think it’s a very common word as I’ve never heard it or seen it being used.

In Chinese you can express the same idea using the particle le:

下雨 (xiàyǔ) = it’s raining, 下雨了 (xiàyǔ le) it’s just started raining

Do other languages have words with the same or a similar meaning?

Verbotomy is an interesting site I came across the over day where you’re challenged to come up with words to fit the definitions that are published daily. The definitions usually describe an every day situation and are accompanied by a cartoon. Once you join the site, you can suggest words that match the definitions, and comment and/or vote on the words created by others. The word with the most votes wins.

Today’s definition is:

DEFINITION: n., The shock and embarrassment felt after innocently implying that you are much younger, only to discover that everyone actually knows how old you really are. v. intr., To be embarrassed when caught lying about your age.

Do you know of any similar sites for other languages?

Can you work out which language the following words are in, what they mean, and/or which is the odd one out?

What do you do if you want to discuss scientific matters such as photosynthesis or magnetism in sign language?

Well, most users of British Sign Language have to spell out the such words using finger spelling, which is quite cumbersome and time consuming. Recently however, the Scottish Sensory Centre at Edinburgh University’s School of Education started to develop a collection of new signs for mathematical and scientific terms which will not only be more convenient, but will also help students to understand the scientific concepts with gestures which make intuitive sense.

According to an article in The Herald, the new signs are being developed by a BSL expert from the School of Education with help from teachers and others who help deaf students, and also from deaf scientists at the University of Durham.

A luthier is someone who makes or repairs stringed instruments. The word comes from the French luth (lute). Luthiers are often divided into two categories: those who deal with plucked or strummed instruments, such as guitars, banjos, mandolins, etc, and those who devote themselves to bowed instruments, such as violin, violas and cellos. The latter are also known as archetiers, from the French arch (bow).

Do you know if there are special names for makers or repairers of others kinds of musical instruments?

Arbejdsglæde is a Danish word meaning literally “work gladness/joy”. There are apparently similar words in the other Scandinavian languages, and also in Dutch (arbeidsvreugde) and German (Arbeitszufriedenheit). The closest equivalent I can find in English is job satisfaction, though this doesn’t seem to have quite the same meaning as the Danish one.

I found this word on Alex Kjerulf’s blog, Chief Happiness Officer, in a post where he discusses some of the differences in work cultures between Scandinavia and Japan, where there’s a word meaning ‘death by overwork’ 過労死 (karōshi).

Do you know if there’s an equivalent to arbejdsglæde in other languages?

Transliteration, from the Latin trans, across, and littera, letter, is the practice of transferring a text from one writing system to another. Transliteration can be used to give people who can’t read other alphabets an idea how to pronounce words and names, though without some knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of pronunciation of the original languages, their pronunciation will probably sound only vaguely like the original.

In phrase books you often find transliterations designed to show how to pronounce things based on the mother tongues of the readers. Such guides tend to be confusing as the ‘phonetics’ might not make much sense to you. A few phrase books and language course provide IPA pronunciation guides, which are great, if you’re familiar with the IPA.

In the phrases section on Omniglot, I try to provide transliterations for all languages written with non-Latin writing systems. Many languages have several different transliteration systems and I usually choose the most widely-used. The transliterations may not make sense to everyone, but there are recordings of quite a few of the phrases, so you can at least hear how to pronounce them. Ideally there would be sound files for all the phrases, plus maybe IPA transcriptions, and with your help, maybe that will be the case one day.

I chose this word today because someone suggested that some of the transliterations on my phrases pages are confusing, especially to Americans. The trouble is, if I made the transliterations American-friendly, people from other countries might not find them useful.

There’s a saying in English that goes something like this: “don’t criticise someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes”. A corollary that’s sometimes added is: “If they don’t like your criticism, you’ll be a mile away and you’ll have their shoes”.

Aislinn Thomas, whose blog, In Your shoes, describes how she puts this saying into practice by actually wearing other people’s shoes for a day, is looking for equivalents of this phrase in other languages. Can you help?

I came across today’s word, ariandy, while looking for something else in one of my Welsh dictionaries, Y Geiriadur Mawr. It combines arian, silver / money, with dy, a mutated form of tŷ, house, and is an archaic word for bank, as in a place where money is kept. The normal word for bank is the loanword banc.

Another example of a word made up of native roots being replaced by a foreign loanword is cornmwg, chimney, from corn, horn and mwg smoke - the usual word for chimney is simnai.