Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Category: Language
Word of the day – cawl
Today’s word, cawl /kaul/, is a Welsh word meaning soup, broth, gruel or a mess.
Cawl is also a traditional Welsh stew made with meat and vegetables. It’s the kind of dish that’s made from whatever is available so the exact ingredients vary, but it often includes lamb and leeks, and is often served with bread and cheese. There a recipe for cawl and more information here.
The word cawl probably comes from the Latin caulis, which means the stalk of a plant, a cabbage stalk or a cabbage. It is related to the Irish cál, the Scottish Gaelic càl, the Cornish caul, the Breton kaol, the German Kohl, the English cole, as in coleslaw, and the Scots kail, all of which mean cabbage. The Welsh word for cabbage is completely different – bresychen.
The Proto-Indo-European root of caulis is *kaw(ǝ)l, which means tubular bone or pipe.
It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht
I went for a walk with some friends last night and one of the things we were talking about was the moon, which was nearly full and very bright. One of my companions suggested that there should be an adjective similar to sunny to describe such a night. He came up with moony, and I couldn’t think of anything better – can you?
I’ve since discovered that full moons have different names in different months. A December full moon like the one tonight, for example, is known as the oak moon in the medieval English calendar, as the cold moon in the Celtic calendar, as the peach moon by the Choctaw, as the snow moon by the Cherokee, and as the bitter moon by the Chinese. More moon names.
By the way, the title of this post is the Scots for ‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night’ and comes from a song by Sir Harry Lauder called Wee Deoch an Doris, which you can hear here. Deoch an Doris comes from the Scottish Gaelic expression ‘deoch an dorais’ – lit. ‘drink of the door’, which means ‘one for the road’ or ‘the parting glass’.
Puzzle
Language quiz
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Word of the day – gwrthryfel
The Welsh word gwrthryfel means rebellion or mutiny. I heard it while listening to a programme on Radio Cyrmru about the The Chartists. I worked out what it meant from its roots: gwrth (against) and rhyfel (war), and this got me thinking about how Welsh words like this are easier to understand than their English equivalents as they’re made up of Welsh roots rather than borrowing from Latin, Greek or other languages.
Then I thought that maybe the English word rebel has the same structure as the Welsh word -I knew that the bel part had something to do with war in Latin and guessed that re meant against. I checked this and found that it comes from the Latin rebellare, to rebel, wage war against, which is made up of re (opposite, against), and bellare (to wage war), which comes from from bellum (war).
Knowing Latin certainly can help you understand the etymology of many English words, and knowing Welsh can also be useful in unexpected ways.
Canis mea studia domestica devoravit
There are plans to introduce Latin lessons to more than 60 UK primary schools, according to this report. The initiative, which started with a small number of schools in Cambridgeshire and was taken up with enthusiasm by both pupils and teachers, is designed to introduce the children to language learning, language structures, links between languages and cultures, and also history.
A number of organisations are keen for language study to be compulsory for all pupils between 7 and 11 by 2011, and they think that pupils should have opportunities to learn a range for languages, such as French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Punjabi and Latin, and that they should concentrate on one or two of these. Learning Latin helps you understand such things as word order, verb conjugations, agreement and gender, they believe.
The title of this post means ‘the dog ate my homework’, by the way.
Language evolution
Some interesting experiments on language evolution are being undertaken in the University of Edinburgh’s Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, and one thing they’ve found is that some aspects of language can develop in an afternoon.
They believe that language evolves culturally through being learned and used by people. They have demonstrated aspects of this process with computer simulations and with an experiment with real people. For the experiment they used pictures of alien fruit with names in a made up language which the participants were asked to memorise. They were then tested on what they could remember and their answers were used with the second group of participants, and so on.
The first participants found it very difficult to learn and remember the words, but with each subsequent ‘generation’ it became easier to learn them and they developed regularities in their structure, and eventually the participants were able to understand words they’d never seen before.
The researchers believe that many aspects of languages can arise through the evolutionary process of cultural transmission and do not need to be genetically encoded – the brain provides scaffolding for language but not necessarily all the specific details.
Name the language
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Word of the day – lakh
Today’s word, lakh, appears in the description of a online Gujarati dictionary. It means 100,000 and is used in the English of India and in other languages spoken in Bangladesh, India, Maldives, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma and Pakistan. Lakh comes from the Hindi लाख (lākh), which itself comes from the Sanskrit लक्ष (lakṣá).
A related word is crore (करोड़ in Hindi), which means 100 lakh, or 10 million, is often abbreviated to cr, and appears in the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? – Kaun Banega Crorepati? (Who will be a ten-millionaire?).
The Gujarati equivalents of lakh and crore are લાખ (lākh) and કરોડ (karoḍ).
The new dictionary looks really useful, by the way, with monolingual (Gujarati-Gujarati), and bilingual (Gujarati<>English) options, as well as a thesaurus (બંધિયાર સ્થળો), phrases (તાળો), idioms (ચુડેલનો વાંસો), proverbs (સુખનું મૂળ સંતોષ), a spellchecker and other tools and information.