Category: English

Word of the day – fey

By Simon

One of my correspondents asked me today whether I knew of any suitable translations of the English word fey, which has a number of meanings, including:

– Having or displaying an otherworldly, magical, or fairy-like aspect or quality
– Having visionary power; clairvoyant
– Appearing touched or crazy, as if under a spell

In Scots, it also means:

– Fated to die soon.
– Full of the sense of approaching death.

It comes from the Middle English feie, fated to die, from Old English fǣge.

Source: The Free Dictionary

I found some translations in other languages on Answers.com, though none of them mean quite the same thing as the English word.

I also found the lovely Welsh word, mympwyol, which means arbitrary, capricious, faddy, quixotic or whimsical.

Can you think of any equivalent words in other languages for fey?

Peeling the library

By Simon

Today’s word, library, comes from the Old French librairie, a ‘collection of books’, which is a nominal use of adjective librarius, ‘concerning books’, from Latin librarium, ‘chest for books’, from liber (genetive of libri), ‘book, paper, parchment’, originally the ‘inner bark of trees’, probably a derivative of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) base *leub(h) – ‘to strip, to peel’.

In French the word librarie means bookshop. A French library is a bibliothèque, which comes via the Latin bibliothēca, from the Greek βιβλιοθήκη (bibliothêkê), ‘a place to store books’, which breaks down into βίβλος (biblos), ‘book’, and θήκη (thêkê), ‘chest’.

Variations on the theme of bibliothèque are used in a number of other languages, including:

Dutch – bibliotheek
German – Bibliothek
Greek βιβλιοθήκη (bibliothiki)
Italian/Portuguese/Spanish – biblioteca
Russian – библиотека (biblioteka)

In Welsh, a library is a llyfrgell, from llyfr, ‘book’ and cell, ‘cell’, while in Irish it’s leabharlann, from leabhar, ‘book’ and lann (not sure of it’s meaning*). In Chinese, a library is 圖書館 [图书馆] (túshūguăn) = ‘map book house’.

It seems that the word library, or something like it, is not used in it’s English senses in many languages. The only ones I can find are Sesotho and Tswana (laeborari), Tsonga (layiburari) and Venda (laiburari), which appear to be loanwords from English. The Basque word for library, liburutegia, might possibly have Latin or Greek roots.

[Addendum] *lann in Irish is an archaic/obsolete word that means floor, enclosure or church. It comes from the Old Irish lann (building, house, land, plot, plate), from the Proto-Celtic *landā ((open) space, land), from the Proto-Indo-European *lendʰ- (land, heath). It is cognate with the Welsh word llan (church, parish, monastery, yard, enclosure, village), the Spanish landa (plain), and the English words land and lawn [source].

Sources: Online Etymology Dictionary, Wiktionnaire, Yawiktionary

Maintenance v reactivation

By Simon

A post on Tim Ferriss’ blog that I came across the other day, via Confessions of a Language Addict, asks an interesting quesion:

How can you possibly maintain fluency in two foreign languages — let alone five or six — if the opportunities to use them are months or years apart?

He then explains how he reactivated his German before visiting Germany recently by watching German films, reading German manga and a German phrasebook, and also using flashcards. He reckons that once you reach an intermediate to advanced level in a language, trying to maintain it at that level could be a real struggle of you don’t have regular opportunities to use it and you may also develop bad habits. Instead he recommends that you spend 1-3 weeks reactivating and reviving your knowledge of the language before you need to use it.

What do you think? Is it better to keep a language ticking over, or to brush it up only when you really need it?

I’m trying to maintain and improve the languages I’m focusing on at the moment (Czech, Welsh, Irish and Scottish Gaelic), while practising my other languages when I get a chance to keep when ticking over.

Word of the day – proprioception

By Simon

Proprioception [ˈpɹopɹiːoˌsɛpʃən], from Latin proprius (one’s own) and perception = the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body.

I came across the word proprioception while reading Richard Robinson very interesting book, Why the toast always lands butter side down – the Science of Murphy’s Law. Proprioception involves knowing where your limbs are, he explains, vital information that enables us to walk, run and stand upright. Apparently if you proprioception malfunctions, you might believe that one or more of your limbs belongs to someone else rather than you.

The book contains some interesting suggestions about how our brains process information – most of the data we receive from our senses is ignored by our concious minds and we construct our experience of the world largely based on past experience, guess work and emotion. So we generally see what we expect to see, hear what we expect to hear, and so on.

This suggests to me that one reason we may find the foreign languages difficult to understand is that we’re less able to rely on the past experience and guess work, as we would in our native tongue.

Degrammaticalization

By Simon

Degrammaticalization, a word I stumbled across on this blog today, is the process through which grammatical affixes become independent words.

A good example is ish, which started off as a suffix on words like longish, shortish, etc. Then became an enclitic – an affix that can be detached from the words it would normally be attached to, and stuck on to other words – and finally started to be used on its own. More examples of degrammaticalization include esque, ism, pro, con, anti, ette.

In Esperanto, quite a few affixes can be used as independent words. The suffix -ig, for example, indicates the cause or bringing about of action or state, e.g. blankigi, to whiten, from blanka, white. When used on its own as the verb igi, it means ‘to cause’. This appears to be a kind of deliberate, planned degrammaticalization.

Can you think of any other examples of degrammaticalization in English or other languages?

Free the bound morphemes!

Word of the day – moustache

By Simon

Moustache

Today’s word, moustache, (mustache in American English) comes via the French moustache, the Italian mostaccio or the Spanish mostacho, from the Medieval Greek moustakion, a diminutive of mystax, “upper lip, moustache”, which is related to mastax, “jaws, mouth”, lit. “that with which one chews”.

This week there have been quite a lot of blokes with huge beards or impressive moustaches wandering round town. I’ve been wondering why – ZZ Top aren’t performing here, as far as I know. Today I discovered the reason – the World Beard and Moustache Championship is currently being held at the Brighton Centre (I kid you not). I saw some impressive beards and moustaches (attached to their owners, of course) when I went past earlier.

Here are a couple of facial hair-related factoids for you: shaving become general among the Romans in 450 BC, partly to avoid being held by the beard during close combat, and ever since Pope Leo III shaved off his beard in 795 AD, most Roman Catholic clergy have been clean shaven.

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

Found fiction

By Simon

There’s a genre of poetry known as ‘found poetry’ which involves take words, phrases and sometimes longer chunks of text from various sources and arranging them in a poetical way. Here’s a blog called simply ‘found poetry‘ with the subtitle ‘pulling poetry from pages of prosaic piffle’ which features many examples.

There’s a short story called Useful Phrases by Gene Wolfe based on the phrases found in a phrasebook, including such gems as Pava pacch, tîsh ùtra. Neéve sort dufji. (How like a ghost are the fountain’s waters! The flood carries away my riches), and Semphonississima techsodeliphindera lafiondalindu tuk yiscav kriishhalôné! (How delightful to discover in the shrinking sea a crystal blossom of home!”) – I suspect these phrases come from an imaginary phrasebook in a made-up language, but could be wrong. The story appears in Wolfe’s collection of short stories: Strange Travellers.

After discovering this today on this blog, I started thinking whether it would be possible to construct a story entirely or mainly from the phrases in a phrasebook, or maybe using a language textbook or grammar book as your source. Stories put together in this way might be called ‘found fiction’. Phrasebooks and other language books would probably be a good source of found poetry as well.

Winged words and chocolate interrobangs

By Simon

I came across a couple of interesting-looking linguablogs today: Epea pteroenta, which discusses language, linguistics, literature, and film; and The Chocolate Interrobang, where the numerous contributors “savor discussions about language & grammar & syntax, and sometimes reminisce about diagramming sentences…”.

The phrase Epea Pteroenta (Επεα Πτεροεντα) comes from Homer’s Odyssey and means “winged words”. When I first saw it, I realised is was Greek and thought it had something to do with birds – ptero as in pterodactyl – until discovering it’s real meaning. My Greek obviously needs more work.

The titles of both these blogs appeal to me, especially the latter. I think titles are important and often spend a while trying to come up with good titles for blog posts and web pages, and even good subjects for emails. I like punning titles and those containing combinations of words not normally seen together, like chocolate and interrobang.

Books with unusual or amusing titles also tend to catch my attention, and my choice of reading material is sometimes based mainly on a quirky title. Here are a few examples: The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, the first of Louis De Bernieres’ triology or novels set in an unnamed country in South America; The Bank Manager and the Holy Grail, a travel book in which Byron Rogers explores the “wilder reaches of Wales”, and The Sprouts of Wrath, the forth book in Robert Rankins’ Brentford trilogy.

Before the 20th century, many books had very long titles which tried to explain the contents of the book in detail. Here, for example, is the title of Dr Johnson’s famous dictionary:

A
DICTIONARY
of the
English Language:
in which
The WORDS are deduced from their ORIGINALS,
and
ILLUSTRATED in their DIFFERENT SIGNIFICATIONS
by
EXAMPLES from the best WRITERS.
To which are prefixed
and AN ENGLISH GRAMMAR.
By SAMUEL JOHNSON, A.M.
In TWO Volumes

Crocodiling

By Simon

To crocodile, or krokodili, means to speak one’s native language at a gathering of Esperantists, a practice generally frowned on by Esperantists, according to an article I found today.

The article gives an interesting account of the history of Esperanto and the life of it’s inventor, Ludwig Lazarus Zamenhof. For a while Zamenhof apparently considered trying to make Hebrew and/or Yiddish into international languages, but later changed his mind as he considered a revival of Hebrew futile. He also urged Yiddish speakers to adopt the Cyrillic alphabet.

The article also mentions two other interesting Esperanto words: aligatori (to alligator), which means to speak one’s native language with someone speaking it as a second language, and kajmani (to cayman), which means to converse in a language that’s native to neither speaker.