Category: English

Rheithgor

By Simon

I heard the word rheithgor (/ˈr̩əiθgɔr/) on Radio Cymru this morning in the context of a report on a trial, and guessed that it meant ‘jury’. The second element, gor, comes from côr (/koːr/) (choir, circle), and the first element, rheith, appears in such words as rheithfawr (greatly just), rheithiad (regulation), rheithio (to fix a law), rheithiol (established as law), and also in rheitheg (rhetoric) and rheithegydd (rhetorician). So rheith seems to have something to do with justice and law and a rheithgor could be a ‘law choir’.

Another Welsh word that includes the element côr is pwyllgor /ˈpʊɨɬgɔr/ (committee) – the pwyll part means ‘discretion; steadiness’, and a related word, pwyllo, means ‘to steady, consider, reason, reflect’ – things that committees might do.

The English word jury comes from the Anglo-Norman jure(e), from the Old French jurée (oath, juridical inquiry, inquest), from the medieval Latin jūrāta, from iūrāre (to swear), from iūs (law, duty), from the Proto-Indo-European *yAus- (ritual purity; supreme justice), which is also the root of just and justice.

The English word choir comes from the Middle English quer(e), from the Old French cuer (church choir), from the Latin chorus (a company of dancers, dance; company, band) from the Greek χορός (dance, company of dancers or singers). Chorus comes from the same root.

Sources: Y Geiriadur Mawr, A Pocket Dictionary (Welsh-English), Oxford English Dictionary, Wiktionary

Tuyau

By Simon

Last night I discovered the French word tuyau when looking for drain pipe (tuyau d’écoulement). I hadn’t come across the word before and wasn’t at all sure how to pronounce it. According to my French dictionary it’s pronounced /tɥijo/ – the second symbol represents a voiced labial-palatal approximant, a semi-vowel made with the tongue close to the hard palate and rounded at the lips. Apart from French, it is only used in Mandarin Chinese and Abkhaz, at least according to Wikipedia. Do you know if it is used in any other languages?

tuyau means pipe; a length of piping; a length of rubber tubing; stem (of pipe); flute; (insider) tip. It appears in such expressions as:

– tuyau d’alimentation – feeder pipe
– tuyau d’arrosage – hosepipe; garden hose
– tuyau de cheminée – chimney pipe
– tuyau de descente – downpipe; fall pipe
– tuyau d’échappement – exhaust (pipe)
– tuyau d’orgue – organ pipe
– (chapeau) tuyau de poêle – stovepipe (hat)
– tuyautage – fluting (grooves or furrows, as in cloth); goffering (an ornamental frill made by pressing pleats); giving of a tip; putting in the know
– tuyauter – to flute; to goffer*; to give sb a tip
– tuyauterie – piping; (organ) pipes
– un tuyauteur – informant
– J’ai quelques tuyaux pour toi – I have a few tips for you
– un tuyau crevé – a bad tip
– avoir des tuyaux – to be in the know
– c’est un tuyau increvable – straight from the horse’s mout

Tuyau comes from the Old French tuel (tube, pipe), from Proto-Romance *þûta, from Old High German tûda.

* goffer means to press pleats into (a frill) ; to decorate (the gilt edges of a book) with a repeating pattern; an ornamental frill made by pressing pleats; the decoration formed by goffering books; the iron or tool used in making goffers, and isn’t a word I’ve come across before. It comes from the French gaufrer (to impress a pattern), from gaufre, from the Middle Low German wafel, the root of waffle and wafer.

Sources: About.com, Wiktionary, French Word-A-Day, Reverso, Dicocitations

Do you speak Courier?

By Simon

In the book I’m reading at the moment (Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde), the author makes interesting use of typefaces to show the characters are talking different languages. For example, some characters speak in Courier Bold, while others speak Old English in an Old English style typeface:

Example of 'Old English' using an Old English typeface

The seventh revealment of St. Zvlkx

I’ve come across authors using fonts designed to look like foreign alphabets to show that their characters are speaking in a foreign language without having to write in that language, but don’t know of any other authors who use fonts in quite the same way as Jasper Fforde. Here are some examples of faux foreign fonts:

Examples of faux foreign fonts

Sources: http://www.haroldsfonts.com/fauxforeign.html & http://www.fontriver.com/foreign_look/

A way to indicate that characters are speaking in different dialects or varieties of a language is to use non-standard spellings – an eye dialect. Using non-standard spellings suggests that a particular dialect is being used, but doesn’t usually represent the pronunciation precisely. Here’s an example:

`Hush! Don’t `ee sing so loud, my good man,’said the landlady; in case any member of the Government should be passing, and take away my license.’
`He’s told `ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?’ asked Mrs Durbeyfield.
`Yes – in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?’

From Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Some authors try to represent the pronunciation of dialects more faithfully, for example:

`Whet are ye for?’ he shouted. `T’ maister’s dahn i’ t’ fowld. Go rahnd by th’ end ut’ laith, if yah went tuh spake tull him.’
`Is there nobody inside to open the door?’ I hallooed, responsively.
`They’s nobbut t’ missis; and shoo’ll nut oppen’t an ye mak yer flaysome dins till neeght.’
`Why? Cannot you tell her who I am, eh, Joseph?’
`Nor-ne me! Aw’ll hae noa hend wi’t,’ muttered the head, vanishing.

From Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

What do you think of eye dialects and dialect writing?

The worm that turned

By Simon

cartoon worm

While working in my garden this afternoon I dug up lots of worms, so I thought it might be interesting to find out more about the word worm.

Meanings of worm (/wɜːm/ /wɝm/) include:

– a member of the genus Lumbricus; a slender, creeping, naked, limbless animal, usually brown or reddish, with a soft body divided into a series of segments; an earthworm. More widely, any annelid, terrestrial, aquatic, or marine;
– any animal that creeps or crawls; a reptile; an insect;
– serpent, snake, dragon;
– four-footed animals considered noxious or objectionable.

Some of these meanings are archaic or obsolete.

There have been many variant spellings, including wirm, wrim, wyrme, weorm, werm, werme, wurm, wurem, orm, wrm, wourme, woirme, woorme, worme, and it finally settled on worm.

Worm comes from the Old English wyrm (a serpent, snake, dragon), from the Proto-Germanic *wurmiz (serpent, worm), from the Proto-Indo-European *wrmi-/*wrmo- (worm), possibly from *wer- (to turn). *wrmi-/*wrmo- is also the root of the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word gorm (blue/black), the Welsh gwrm (dusky), the Danish/Norwegian/Swedish orm (snake), the Latin vermis, which is the root of the English words vermilion and vermin, and quite a few other words in various languages.

Some interesting worm factoids

– there are some 2,700 different types of worms
– an acre of land can contain over a million worms
– Cleopatra VII made the export of worms from Egypt a capital crime as she realized the important roll they play in keeping soil fertile
– Charles Darwin studied worms for many years and concluded that they are one of the most important creatures on earth.

Sources: Oxford English Dictionary, Online Etymology Dictionary, Wikipedia, Word-Origins.com, Eartworm Farming, Worm Facts

Noce

By Simon

Noce /nɔs/ is a French word I learnt last night meaning “wedding” (ceremony) or wedding party. Here are some examples of usage:

– être de la noce – to be (a member) of the wedding party, to be among the wedding guests
– être de noce – to be invited to a wedding
– aller à la noce de quelqun – to go to somebody’s wedding
– repas/robe/nuit de noce – wedding banquet/dress/night
– noce d’argent / d’or etc – silver/golden wedding
– fare la noce – to live it up / have a wild time
– il n’était pas à la noce – he wasn’t enjoying himself / was have an uncomfortable time
– il n’avait jamais été à pareille noce – he’d never been so happy / he was having the time of his life

Noce, sounds like the Welsh word for night nos, so when I first heard it I thought nights and not weddings were being discussed. It comes from the Latin word nuptiae (wedding/marriage), which is derived from nubere (to veil/hide) – this goes back to a Roman custom that married women wore veils. Nuptiae is also the root of the English word nuptial (to marry; to speak of a wedding; wedding), and of the French word nuage (cloud).

An alternative to noce is mariage, which can refer both to the institution of marriage and the marriage/wedding ceremony. The English word wedding comes from the Old English węddian (to wed), while marriage comes from the French mariage.

Ductus

By Simon

I came across the word ductus today in an interesting article about the origins of the writing. The articles focuses particularly on the development of the Latin/Roman alphabet and traces it’s origins back to ancient Egypt.

Ductus /ˈdʌktəs/ means:

1. the number of strokes that make up a written letter, and the direction, sequence and speed in which they are written
2. a subtle reduction of weight towards the middle of the stroke of the letter
3. (medicine) a duct, tube or canal in the body

Etymology: from Latin, perfect passive participle of dūcō (to lead), from the Proto-Indo-European root *deuk- (to lead), which is also the root of duct, and duke, via the Old French duc and the Latin dux

[Sources: wiktionary and myEtymology.com]

The article uses it in the second sense when talking about how letters shapes have changed and been simplified over time.

The first sense could be used when talking about Chinese Hanzi / Japanese Kanji / Korean Hanja, as the direction and sequence of strokes used to write such characters is fixed and has to be memorised when learning them, and the number of strokes is used to order them in dictionaries and indices.

Incidentally, I’ve just added a page about the Proto-Sinaitic / Proto-Canaanite script , one of the earliest alphabetic scripts, and one of the scripts mentioned in the article.

Hen’s nests and potholes

By Simon

Nid de poule

One French expression that came up last night was nid-de-poule (hen’s nest), which sounds much more interesting than it’s English equivalent, pothole.

The English word pothole can refer to a number of things, including:

– a hole formed in rock by stones in water or glacial erosion;
– underground passages, shafts and chambers formed by water erosion;
– a pond formed by water collecting in a natural hollow (mainly in North American English)
– a shallow hole dug in the ground while prospecting (mainly in Australia)
– a depression or hollow in a road or track
[source]

Another French word for the kind of pothole that occurs in road is fondrière, from fondre (to melt), while the kind of pothole found underground is a caverne, grotte or gouffre. The French equivalent of potholing is spéléologie and a spéléleogue / spéléo (potholer) is said to faire de la spéléologie (to go potholing), an activity known as spelunking or caving in American English. The word speleology is also used to some extent in English and comes, via the French spéléleogue and Latin spēlæum, from the Greek σπήλαιον (spí̱laion – cave) plus λογία (logia). The adjective spelaean means ‘cave-dwelling’.

The word potholing apparently originated in the north of England and refers to the act of exploring potholes, which in this case refers to vertical caves.

Do any of you go caving / potholing / spelunking? If you do, what do you call it?

Are there interesting words for potholes (in roads) in other languages?

Batter

By Simon

In the recipe I used today to make some cacen siocled (chocolate cake), the word used to describe the result of mixing all the ingredients together is batter, at least in the English translation of the recipe. This is something I would call mixture – for me batter is a mixture of flour, water and a bit of salt that is used to coat fish before deep frying it. It sounds a bit strange to call cake mixture batter, though I have come across this usage from time to time, often in American recipes.

The word batter was first recorded in the late 14th century and comes from the Old French word batteure (a beating), from the Latin battuere (to beat, strike), and via Gaulish from Proto-Indo-European base *bhau- (to strike), which is also the root of buttock, butter, butt in English, via the Frankish *bōtan, the French word bouter (end, tip, butt, nub), and the Spanish botar (to bounce).

What does batter mean to you?

Shotgun, dibs and bagsy

By Simon

An expression I noticed recently was “Shotgun!“, as used as an exclamation to claim the front passenger seat of a car. According to the Urban Dictionary, back in the days of the wild west in America when people travelled by stagecoach, the seat next to the driver was usually occupied by a man with a shotgun who was there to protect the travellers and their valuables. He was said to be ‘riding shotgun’, the word shotgun became associated with the seat next to the driver.

According to The Straight Dope, the term ‘riding shotgun’ was first used in stories about the wild west rather than in the wild west itself – the term ‘shotgun guard’ was used though. The earliest usage of the expression in relation to stage coaches appears in an issue of the Washington Post’s “Magazine of Fiction” from 27th March 27 1921 in a story called “The Fighting Fool” by Dane Coolidge, and it was first used to refer to the front passenger seat in cars in the 1950s.

Shotgun is used mainly in American English, as far as I’m aware. If I wanted to lay claim in a similar way I might say “bagsy the front seat”. Bagsy (/ˈbagzi/) can also be used to unofficially reserve many other things for oneself, e.g. “Bagsy the sofa/chair/remote control/etc.” Variations on bagsy include bags, bagsie, begsie, bugsy and dibs, and I’m sure you’ll tell me about others. You might also say things like, “I’ll bag the best seats”.

The origins of bagsy and dibs are uncertain, but a number of theories are discussed on Wikipedia.

Language teaching in schools

By Simon

According to an article I found today, the majority of business managers in the Czech Republic who were surveyed by Czech Position think that at least two foreign languages (English plus one or more others) should be compulsory in Czech schools.

This came in reaction to a proposal from the National Economic Council (NERV) that the only compulsory language in schools should be English, as Czechs who speak English can manage without other languages and would do better to concentrate on such subjects as as law, finance or IT. Currently English plus German, Spanish or French are compulsory in schools and the Education Minister supports the NERV proposal. Many managers in large companies do not agree however, and think that knowledge of a foreign language or two in addition to English is necessary, especially as more than half of the Czech Republic’s foreign trade is with German-speaking countries.

Not all of those surveyed were in favour of the study of more than one foreign language (English) in schools. One comment, for example, was that “for butchers, joiners or chimney sweeps, I consider teaching foreign languages on top of the rudiments of English to be a waste of money”, and another comment was that “not every child is talented enough to manage two or more languages as part of compulsory education.”

This makes interesting reading from the UK, where the study of one foreign language is compulsory only up to the age of 14, and it’s relatively few pupils continue their language studies after that.