Today I came across the wonderful word dardledumdue. It means “daydreamer” in East Anglian dialect (east of England), and its origin is uncertain. Perhaps it’s the type of nonsense words a daydreamer might sing or mumble while daydreaming [source].
It also sounds like the kinds of ‘words’ some Irish singers use when lilting – a way of singing tunes with made-up words.
Here’s an example:
Another example:
Does anything like this exist elsewhere?
The words nix and natch have come up quite a bit in things I’ve read and/or heard recently, so I thought I’d look into their meanings and origins.
Nix as a verb means “to stop, prevent, or refuse to accept something” and as a noun it means “nothing or no”. These usages are apparently mainly informal and used in the US [source].
Accroding to the Online Etymology Dictionary, nix comes from the German nix, a dialectal variant of nichts (nothing), from the Middle High German nihtes, from the genitive of niht/nit (nothing) from the Old High German niwiht, from ni/ne (no) and wiht (thing, creature).
I rarely come across this word in British English.
Natch is an abbreviation of naturally, natch – I didn’t realise this until I looked it up. I thought it was some kind of negative, but wasn’t sure what it meant.
What do you call your smallest finger?
I call it my little finger, but I hear more and more people in the UK calling it their pinkie / pinky, which I thought was exclusively used in North America. Is this name used in some dialects of English in the UK, or is this an example of American influence?
[Addendum] The word pinkie apparently comes from Dutch, via Scots. It was first recorded as meaning little finger in John Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language in 1808. It comes from the Old Dutch phrase pinck ooghen (pink eye = half-shut or peering eye), which is the root of the modern Dutch verb pinkogen (to half close the eyes or squint). The modern Dutch word for little finger is pink, the diminutive of which is pinkje [source]. Other etymologies are available.
Anatomical names for the fingers are:
– 1st finger (thumb)
– 2st finger, digitus secundus or digitus II
– 3rd finger, digitus tertius, digitus III, digitus medius
– 4th finger, digitus quartus, digitus IV, digitus annularis, digitus medicinalis
– 5th finger, digitus quintus, digitus V
Others names for the fingers include:
– Thumb
– Index finger, pointer finger, forefinger, trigger finger
– Middle finger, bird finger, long finger
– Ring finger
– Little finger, baby finger, pinky
Source: http://www.yourdictionary.com/finger
Do you use other names for fingers?
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
Here’s an interesting article on the BBC website about anti-languages, such as Thieves Cant, Polari and Gobbledygook.
They have been around at least since Tudor times, and are used as secret slang by prisoners, escaped slaves, criminal gangs and gay people to keep their activities secret from the police and other authorities.
Any group of people who spend a lot of time together tend to develop their own vocabulary and references which can be mystifying to outsiders, but these anti-languages are deliberately created to prevent outsiders from understanding.
Some anti-language words become part of mainstream language. For example, from Polari, a form of gay slang, we get camp, butch, palaver and naff.
Last weekend I went to see a friend in Newcastle, and while we were exploring the place, I was listening out for languages other than English. The only ones I heard were Mandarin and Spanish, and my friend and I spoken mainly in English and Welsh, with a bit of Czech thrown in for variety.
While I was there we saw The Revenant, which includes dialogue in English, French and Arikara, a Caddoan language closely related to Pawnee, and spoken by a handful of people in North Dakota.
I’m sure other languages are spoken in Newcastle, as it’s a relatively large city with a number of universities and plenty of foreign students, but maybe we were in the wrong parts to hear much foreign talk.
I also heard plenty of Geordie, the local dialect, and didn’t get some of the things people said to me first time, so had to ask them to repeat themselves. It differs from standard English in various ways, and if you’re not used to it can sound almost like a different language.
Are there any regional accents / dialects in your country that you have trouble understanding?
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Can you identify the language, and do you know where it’s spoken?
Did you know that the practice of putting spaces between words was started by Irish monks writing in Latin?
This is what I discovered from an episode of the Allusionist – apparently when Christianity arrived in Ireland in the 6th century and people started writing in Latin, they put spaces between the words to make texts easier to read. Before then writing in Ireland was done in the Ogham alphabet without spaces between words. So when they started using a different alphabet, the Latin or Roman alphabet, and a language that wasn’t their native one, they weren’t so sure where words began and ended and the spaces made this clear.
Ogham continued to be used to some extent until the 9th century and was used to write Latin, however the Latin alphabet eventually replaced it.
The version of the Latin alphabet used in Ireland until the mid-20th century was the Irish Uncial alphabet or An Cló Gaelach, which is still used for decorative purposes.
The practice of putting spaces between words spread to the rest of Europe over subsequent centuries.
Some languages, like Chinese and Thai, don’t bother with spaces, which can make them tricky to read.
The title of this post is perhaps an example of litotes [laɪˈtəʊ.tiːz], a figure of speech that uses understatement, particularly double negatives, to make a positive statement [source]. Other examples include:
– I didn’t do too badly in the test
– It’s a bit chilly
– He’s not a bad guitarist
Litotes comes from the Ancient Greek λιτότης (litótēs), from λιτός (litós – simple) via the French litote (litotes, understatement) [source].
The antonym of litotes is hyperbole (overstatement), which comes, via Latin, from the Ancient Greek ὑπερβολή (huperbolḗ – excess, exaggeration), from ὑπέρ (hupér, -above) and βάλλω (bállō – I throw) [source].
I make some use litotes (that’s an example), as do many British people. Is this common in other countries?
This post was inspired by an episode of The Allusionist, a podcast in which Helen Zaltzman discusses language, words and related topics.
Today we have a guest post by Tim Brookes.
As many of you know, February 21st is International Mother Language Day.
The day is especially important to the nation of Bangladesh, where the right to speak their own language was a vital part of their move to gain independence from Pakistan. IMLD was born as a recognition of what are known as “language martyrs” — students who were massacred by the Pakistani Army in 1952 for protesting the right to speak their mother tongue.
The Endangered Alphabets Project is contributing to this global observance by returning to these roots. I’ve carved the phrase “mother language” in the four principal alphabets of Bangladesh: Bangla (the official national language), and Chakma, Marma and Mro, three endangered indigenous languages.
As always, the hardest part was tracking down the text. Bangla was easy; Marma also, thanks to my friend and colleague Maung Nyeu who is an ethnic Marma. Chakma came through Facebook via Suz Moriz (Bivuti Chakma), who created what is now the standard Chakma font.
Mro was the hardest, as it not only has the fewest speakers but they tend to live in more remote areas of the forested, upland Chittagong Hill Tracts. When I’ve worked on collaborative projects over the past three years that involved Mro, getting translations often took weeks, and it took an intermediary heading out to Mro villages on foot.
Facebook, which is in a sense part of the problem by not supporting most indigenous glyphs, was in this case also the solution, as it put me in touch with several members of the Mro community living outside the Hill Tracts, including Rengwan Mro and Elisha Pan Mro.
Facebook also put me in touch with Shanjidul Alam Seban Shaan, a community organizer living in Chittagong, who in turn recommended several art galleries and exhibition spaces in the city, and knew many of the founders and owners personally—a great quality for a community organizer!
The carving and painting took a little under three weeks, and this morning I took a very large, heavy package to the post office, where the clerk balanced it on a very small scale and squinted under it to read the shipping cost on his screen.
If all goes well, the package will reach Chittagong in 10 days or so, and will become part of the country’s celebrations on the 21st, on display at Bistaar, an arts complex in Chittagong.
My hope is that this carving will be my most public work yet, and will become a visual symbol of the diversity of languages and cultures not only in Bangladesh but all over the world. A graphic designer friend is using the image of the carving to create a poster for Mother Tongue Day, which I hope to have available as a free download on my www.endangeredalphabets.com site within a few days.
As I was working on the carving, I set up a Kickstarter to cover the costs of materials and shipping, and support was so great we broke the initial goal of $1,000 in barely 24 hours.
But here’s the thing: it was only at that point I realized what a good and important idea this was. And as donations keep coming in, it strikes me that with every additional dollar we’ll be able to plan follow-up Mother Tongue carvings for 2017.
I’d love to make a Mother Tongue carving for Indonesia and the Philippines, both of which have multiple minority alphabets–and what about the mother tongues of the indigenous peoples of North America! I can just see it, a vast slab of wood tipped up on end, with the phrase “mother tongue” carved in dozens of languages indigenous to North America: Cree, Cherokee, Navajo …
I’d have to start now.
Tim Brookes is founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1496420787/mother-tongues