Category: Language

Pozo

By Simon

Last night I learnt a song, En el pozo María Luisa (In the Maria Lusia mine), from a Spanish friend. This song, which is also known as Nel Pozu Maria Luisa or Santa Bárbara Bendita, comes from Asturias in north west Spain and is usually sung in Asturian, Spanish or a mixture of the two. It is the story of a mining accident in the Pozu Maria Luisa coal mine, in the town of Ciaño in the municipality of Langreo.

While I was able to understand most of the words after hearing them a few times, some of them puzzled me. For example, when I heard the word pozo (mine) it sounded to me more like porzo, which I couldn’t find in my Spanish dictionaries when I looked. Eventually I found pozo when looking in the English-Spanish section for the word mine. Another word for mine is mina.

Pozo /’poθo/ is a well; a deep pool, the deep part of a river; a shaft, pit or mine; or the hold (of a ship). It comes from the Latin word puteus (pit, dungeon, well, cistern).

Expressions containing pozo include:

– pozo artesiano = artesian well
– pozo de petróleo = oil well
– pozo ciego/negro = cesspool
– caer en el pozo = to fall into oblivion
– pozo de aire = air shaft
– pozo de registro/visita = manhole / inspection hatch
– ser un pozo de ciencia = to be immensely learned
– es un pozo de maldad = he is utterly wicked

I assumed that the song was in Spanish, and that the words that puzzled me they were just ones I hadn’t heard before, like pozo. Now I realise that some of the words might have been Asturian – the Spanish friend who taught me the song is from Asturias.

Cleaning up Russian

By Simon

According to an article I found today, the Russian Ministry of Education and Science plans to ‘clean up’ Russian by removing foreign loanwords and replacing them with native words. They plan to revise dictionaries, school textbooks, and to set up a website to explain the changes. The website will give Russian speakers a chance to check Russian usage with experts. Examples of foreign words give in the article are policymakeri and trendsetteri

This is the kind of thing that organisations like L’Académie française have been trying to do for years, without much success. While the new words might be adopted in formal usage, the chances of this happening in everyday speech and writing don’t seem very high. People tend to stick with the words they’re used to, unless new words become trendy.

Have there been efforts to ‘clean up’ other languages that you know of and that have succeeded?

Kumzari

By Simon

The other day I came across an article about the Kumzari language and people. It reports that:

Iran’s threat of closing Straits of Hormuz, advent of TV, Internet to tiny village located on northernmost tip of Oman’s Musandam peninsula threaten survival of thousand year-old Kumzari language.

It describes Kumzari as:

the ancient Kumzari language, a mix of Indo-European languages and Arabic, remarkable in that it is the only non-Semitic language spoken on the Arabian peninsula in the past 1,400 years.

I thought it would be interesting to find out a bit more about this ‘ancient’ language – the use of the terms like ‘ancient’ and ‘thousand-year-old’ when talking about a language are common in reports of this nature. In linguistic terms it is fairly meaningless to give a language a specific age as languages don’t have specific start dates. Instead they are constantly changing and evolving and it’s very difficult to say when a particular language came into existence. What you can say is when a language was first written down, or at least when evidence of writing first appeared.

According to Wikipedia, Kumzari (کمزاری‎) is a Western Iranian language spoken by about 10,000 people in northern Oman. It is closely related to the Minabi dialect of southern Balochstan and is thought to be mutually intelligible with Luri, which is spoken in parts of Iran. So there are some other people out there who can potentially understand Kumzari, even though the artile claims that, “no one else on earth understands” it.

It is the only Iranian language spoken in the Arabian Peninsula and most of its vocabulary is Iranian, with also a lot of Arabic loanwords – so it’s possible to see how it might be described as ‘a mix of Indo-European languages and Arabic’.

I find that when reading articles like this it’s best to check their statements and claims, and not to take them at face value. The information on Wikipedia isn’t always completely reliable either, but sometimes it’s the only source. Inspite of this, it’s always interesting to find out about a language that I didn’t know about. If I can find more information, I’ll put together a page about it.

[Addendum] There is now a page about Kumzari on Omniglot.

Les giboulées de mars

By Simon

April showers (from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/england/looknorthnecumbria/weather/calendar_competition/april/april_gallery_75.shtml)

The other day I discovered that the French equivalent of April Showers is Les giboulées de mars, or ‘March showers’. April showers sound soft and light to me, whereas Les giboulées de mars sound unpleasantly wet.

April showers are showers, often heavy, that fall in Spring, especially in March and April, in the northern hemisphere, particularly in the UK and Ireland, and also in France. They occur when the jet stream starts to move north in early spring letting strong winds and rain, and sometimes sleet and snow, sweep in from the Atlantic [source].

The word giboulée /ʒi.bu.le/ means sudden, short shower often mixed with snow or sleet, or in French ‘Pluie soudaine et brève souvent mêlée de neige ou de grésil.‘ [source]. It’s etymology is uncertain and is possibly related to the Langue d’Oc words giboulado (shower), gibourna (to sizzle) and/or gibournado (shower) [source]. Another French word for shower is averse.

Honchos

By Simon

I thought that the word honcho as in head honcho (big leader / big cheese) came from Japanese. The OED and the Online Etymology Dictionary both say that it comes from the Japanese word 班長 (hanchō) or squad / team leader, and that it was borrowed by American servicemen in Japan and Korea in 1947-1953.

However, according to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky, which I’m reading at the moment, the word honcho is a version of the Basque word jauntxo /xaunʧo/, a wealthy. powerful, rural landowner – a word with a ironic, negative undertone. From jaun (sir / lord / god). This sounds kind of plausible, though I haven’t found any other sources which make the same claim.

The book is interesting and includes quite a few bits of Basque language, and even some recipes. It is also somewhat biased in favour of the Basques.

Irish

By Simon

According to the 2011 Irish census, the number of people who use Irish in Ireland as their everyday language outside school is 82,600. Many more speak it, but only in school, or rarely, This compares with 119,526 people who speak Polish at home and 56,430 who speak French. The census also found that just 35% of people in the Gaeltacht areas use Irish on a daily basis outside the education system. These are areas where Irish is the main language, in theory.

Source: BBC News

According to the Irish Times:

… there was a 7.1 per cent increase in the number of people who said they could speak Irish from 2006, giving a total of 1.77 million people in the Republic who indicated they speak Irish. Of those, 77,185 people speak the language daily outside the education system; 110,642 say they speak it weekly, while 613,236 said they spoke it less often. One out of every four say they never speak the language.

The census returns give no indication of the proficiency of these Irish speakers – some might only speak a few words, while others are fluent. It’s interesting that a quarter of people who can speak Irish never do so. I wonder why.

Squeegee

By Simon

A squeegee

The other day I discovered that the thing I clean my windows with is a squeegee – I was familiar with the name, and knew it had something to do with cleaning, but wasn’t sure exactly what a squeegee was. From the sound of the name I guessed that it was a soft, squeezy kind of thing, which doesn’t quite match a window cleaning squeegee.

According to Wikipedia:

A squeegee, squilgee or sometimes squimjim, is a tool with a flat, smooth rubber blade, used to remove or control the flow of liquid on a flat surface. It is used for cleaning and in printing.

The original squilgee was a long-handled, wooden-bladed tool fishermen used to scrape fish blood and scales from their boat deck, and to push water off the deck after it had been washed.

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word squeegee come perhaps from the nautical word squeege (to press), a strengthened form of squeeze, which the OED suggests is a strengthened form or quease (to press, squeeze).

Are there any tools of other implements you use that you don’t know the names of?