Category: Etymology

The land of rabbits

By Simon

Photo of a rabbit

When adding more animals to the Celtic Connections section on Omniglot the other day, I started wondering about the origins of the Celtic words for rabbit – connín (Irish), coinean (Scottish Gaelic), conning (Manx), cwningen (Welsh), conyn (Cornwell), c’honikl (Breton). They appear to be related to each other, and also to the English word coney, which was used for rabbit until the 18th century, while rabbit was used for the young of the coney from about the 14th century.

Rabbit apparently comes from the Walloon robète, which is a diminutive of the Flemish or Middle Dutch robbe.

Coney comes from the Anglo-Norman conis, the plural of conil “long-eared rabbit” (Lepus cunicula) from the Latin cuniculus, which means burrow and comes from the Greek κύνικλος (kýniklos), which is thought to come from an Iberian word for burrow. Related words in other languages include kanin (Danish), konijn (Dutch), bunny (English), Kaninchen (German), coniglio (Italian).

There’s a popular theory that the Roman name for Spain, Hispania, which became España and Spain, comes from the Phoenician name for Iberia i-shepan-im, the land or coast of rabbits. When the Phoenicians first visited Iberia in around 500 BC they saw lots of rabbits there which they named after a similar animal, the hyrax of North Africa.

Word of the day – cawl

By Simon

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.

Word of the day – gwrthryfel

By Simon

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.

Word of the day – gliniadur

By Simon

Gliniadur / laptop computer

Gliniadur is a Welsh word for laptop computer. It combines (pen-)glin, knee, with iadur from cyfrifiadur, computer, and could be translated as “kneeputer”. It is similar to the Irish for laptop, ríomhaire glúine (knee computer).

Other Welsh words for laptop include cyfrifiadur côl (lap computer), sgrin-ar-lin (screen on the knees) and cyfrifiadur cludadwy (portable computer).

The suffix adur denotes a tool or thing and also appears in geiriadur (dictionary, “word tool”), gwniadur (thimble, “sewing tool”), teipiadur (typewriter, “type tool”), and termiadur (a dictionary of terminology).

This word came up last night at the French conversation group when we were discussing how to say laptop in French (ordinateur portable) – are there any other words for laptop in French?

Do any other languages have interesting words for laptop?

Chinese etymology

By Simon

Yesterday I found a useful looking website about Chinese Etymology which shows variant forms of characters including Oracle Bone characters (甲骨文 jiăgŭwén), Bronze characters (金文 jīnwén) and Grass script characters (草書 căoshū). Some characters have many forms in the older versions of the Chinese script – up to 50 or so in some cases.

It also has information about the etymology and history of characters and written Chinese.

Another useful website I came across recently is a Chinese text annotation tool, which adds pop-up annotations containing pinyin transcriptions and English translations when you move your cursor over the characters in a Chinese text. The annotations can be applied to web pages or to Chinese texts pasted in the box on that site.

Going to the ball

By Simon

This evening I’ll be going to the office Christmas party. This year it’s called “the Ice Ball”, which got me thinking about the names of such events.

A ball, as in a formal party involving dancing, comes from the Greek, ballizein, to dance, jump about, via the Latin ballare, to dance, and the Old French baller, to dance. The words ballet and ballad share the same root, as does bailar (to dance) in Spanish and Portuguese.

The word dance comes from the Old French dancier, which possibly came from Frankish.

Other dance names include:
waltz, from the German walzen, to roll, dance
polka, from the Czech polka, Polish woman, or from pulka, half, for the half-steps of Bohemian peasant dances
tango, from Argentine Spanish tango, which was originally the name of an African-American drum dance, and possibly came from a Niger-Congo language.
jig, from the Middle French giguer, to dance; or from the German Geige, violin, meaning a piece of sport or trick.

More information about the etymology of the names of dances

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