Category: French (français)

Russian mountains

By Simon

Yesterday evening I discovered that the French term for roller coaster is les montagnes russes or Russian mountains. This got me wondering what roller coasters have to do with Russian mountains, and I’ve found that from the 17th Century the Russian were constructing “Russian Mountains” – series of hills and slides of ice reinforced with wooden supports designed for sleighs. They were especially popular during the 18th century in St. Petersburg, and the idea spread to other parts of Europe. A version using wheeled wooden carts on tracks was built in Paris in 1804 and named Les Montagnes Russes.

During the early 19th century a number of mining and railway companies in the USA started offering the public rides on steeply-inclined sections of track at quiet times. These were known as scenic gravity railroads. In 1884 LaMarcus Adna Thompson opened a Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway at Coney Island in 1884, and patented many aspects of the roller coaster, including a patent for a Gravity Switch-back Railway in 1885.

The origins of the name roller coaster are uncertain. One theory is that it comes from the rollers fitted to the slides or ramps on early American roller coasters along which sleds coasted. Another theory is that the name comes from a ride located in a roller skating rink in Haverhill, Massachusetts which consisted of a sled that moved along the rollers that made up the track. The inventors of this ride, Stephen E. Jackman and Byron B. Floyd, claim the first use of the term “roller coaster”.

Russian Mountain is term for roller coaster in Spanish (montaña rusa), Portuguese (montanha russa) and Catalan (muntanya russa), and Russians call them американские горки (amerikanskie gorki) or American Mountains.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roller_coaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mountains

Tweaking

By Simon

Tweak
verb – 1. To pinch, pluck or twist sharply. 2. To adjust; fine-tune. 3. To make fun of; tease.
noun – 1. A sharp, twisting pinch. 2. A teasing remark or action; a joke. [source]

Etymolgoy: From the Old English twiccian (to pluck), from the Proto-Germanic. *twikjonan.

We were discussing tweaking last night in French, and this got me wondering about the English word’s etymology.

French equivalents include modifier légèrement, if you’re talking about make small adjustments; pincer for tweaking the nose; tirer for adjusting hair or a moustache; réglage is used for tuning an engine or adjusting a machine, and tordre means to twist or wring.

The phrase tirer les oreilles à qn means to tweak sb’s ears, and also to give somebody a dressing down.

Often you find that one word in English has a number of possible translations in other languages, and vice versa. If you rely on online dictionaries and machine translation, you don’t necessarily get all those translations. When people write to me requesting translations, they often ask me to translate single words into other languages. Words like love, strength, pride, faith, and so on are popular. The trouble is that they rarely specify what kind of love, pride, etc they mean. However if they just spend a bit of time thinking about this and tweaking their requests, they’re easier to deal with.

Crémaillère

By Simon

Crémaillère / Trammel

Crémaillère [kʀemajɛʀ] nf – trammel (chem.), rack (rail).

Etymology: from the Old French cramail, from Latin cramaculus (rack), from the Greek kremasti (suspend).

The French word crémaillère came up last night when I mentioned that I’m planning to have a housewarming party, the French equivalent of which is pendaison de crémaillère and pendre la crémaillère means “to have a house-warming party”. This word also features in the phrase for a rack or cog railway: chemin de fer à crémaillère, and engranage/direction à crémaillère is rack-and-pinion gear/streering.

The French version of the housewarming party originates in the Middle Ages when people cooked on open fires with pots suspended from a crémaillère (trammel). The crémaillère was usually the last thing to be installed in a new house, and once it was, people held a party to thank family, friends and all those who had helped them with the new house. This was known as a pendaison de crémaillère (hanging of the trammel) [source].

According to Wikipedia, the custom of having a housewarming party dates back to pre-central heating times when guests brought firewood and built fires in all the fireplaces in a new house in order to warm it. This was thought to chase away any evil spirits in the vicinity, which liked to take up residence in unoccupied houses. Apparently there was a custom of bringing gifts of bluebirds, which were thought to bring good luck and happiness to the new house.

Traditional housewarming gifts in countries such as Austria and Russia apparently include bread (to never go hungry), salt (so life is always full of flavour, or for long life), and a broom (to sweep away troubles) [source].

Do you have any housewarming traditions?

Do you have a party, hold a party, throw a party, or use another verb?

Word of the day – plumitif

By Simon

Plumitif [plymitif] nm – penpusher, bureaucrat; scribbler.

I came across today’s word last week at the French conversation group and particularly liked the sound of it. It comes from plume (feather, quill, nib) and is marked as pejorative in the dictionary. Plume comes from the Latin pluma (feather, down), from the Proto-Indo-European *pleus- (to pluck, a feather, fleece), which is also the root of the English word fleece.

Other words and expressions involving plumes include:

  • il y a laissé des plumes (he left some feathers there) – he came off badly, he got his fingers burnt
  • il perd ses plumes (he’s losing his feathers) – he’s going bald
  • elle a la plume facile (she has the easy pen) – writing comes easy to her
  • homme de plume – writer
  • prendre la plume – to write
  • je vis de ma plume – I live by my pen
  • je lui passe la plume – I’ll hand over to him / let him carry on
  • plumeau – feather duster
  • plumer – to pluck; to fleece (a person)
  • déplumer – to pluck
  • se déplumer – to moult, lose one’s feathers; to go bald
  • plumeux – feathery
  • plumier – pencil box/case

A penpusher is defined as an “Un-needed, beaureucratic employee not making any difference and hampering efficiency” [Urban Dictionary] or “someone who has a boring job in an office” [The Free Dictionary]. Are there similar words in other languages?

Xtranormal

By Simon

Today I came across an interesting-looking site called Xtranormal that use text-to-speech and other clever stuff – they call it ‘text-to-movie’ – to make animated films.

You just choose your characters and setting, and then type in the dialogue. You can also play with the cameras, animate the characters, and add other effects.

What interests me particularly about this program is that you can choose voices in a variety of languages, including English, French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese and Dutch, and I think this could be a useful language learning and teaching tool.

Here’s a short bilingual (English and Mandarin) film I put together:

[Update] It didn’t accept quite a few of the Chinese characters I tried to use, so you can only use very simple phrases. Here’s another short film in French and English:

Twndis

By Simon

Twndis [‘tʊmdɪs] (nm, pl: twndisau) = funnel – also twnffat [‘tʊmfat]

I discovered the Welsh words twndis and twnffat last night. I’m not sure why the subject of funnels came up in conversation, but these words particularly appealed to me, especially the latter.

This morning I found out that the word tundish is used for funnel in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and that it originally meant “a funnel made to fit into the bung of a tun”. A tun is a large cask, but I’m sure you knew that [source]. These days a tundish is sort of funnel used in metal casting, and also in plumbing [source].

Tundish appears to be related to the Welsh word twndis, and the word tun is possibly of Celtic origin: – from the Middle Irish tunna, and the Old Irish toun (hide, skin).

Words for funnel in the Modern Celtic languages come from the same root: as well as twndis in Welsh, there’s tunnadair (funnel, filler, tunning-dish, tunner) in Scottish Gaelic, tonnadóir in Irish, tunneyder in Manx and tum in Breton.

I’m not sure of the etymology of twmffat, but ffat on it’s own means slap or pat, and ffatio means to slap.

Weeds

By Simon

Yesterday I finally started work on my garden, and one of the first things I did was a bit of weeding. The large crop of dandelions and other weeds in my lawn will take quite a while to remove, but in the meantime I thought I’d look at the origins of a few garden-related words.

Weed comes from the Old English word wēod (grass, herb, weed), which is related to the Old High German word wiota (fern), and probably comes from the Proto-Germanic word *weud-. The verb to weed comes from the Late Old English weodian [source].

Words for weed in other languages include: chwynnyn (Welsh), fiaile (Irish), 野草 [yěcǎo – “wild grass”] (Mandarin), mauvaise herbe (French – “bad grass”), 雑草 [zassō – “crude/miscellaneous grass”] (Japanese).

Dandelion comes from the Middle French dent de lion (lit. “lion’s tooth”), a calque translation of the Middle Latin dens leonis – the leaves are shaped a bit like lion’s teeth.

Folk names for dandelion include tell-time, which refers the practice of blowing the seeds – the number of breaths needed supposedly being the hour, and the Middle English and French names piss-a-bed and pissenlit, which refer to its diuretic properties [source].

Haddock and Églefin

By Simon

Haddock / Églefin

Last night I discovered that the French word for haddock is églefin or aiglefin, but when smoked it’s called haddock, which is also spelled hadock and hadot. Other French names for the unsmoked fish include aigrefin, Âne, Ânon, Bourricot and Saint-Pierre.

The French églefin/aiglefin comes from the Latin aeglefinus, which in made up of aegle from the Greek αἴγλη (light, radiance, glory), and finus.

Haddock (Melanogrammus aeglefinus), is apparently also known as offshore hake in English, and the word haddock is thought to come from the Middle English haddok, the Anglio-Norman hadoc and the Old French hadot, the origins of which are uncertain.

Another word I learnt last night was houblon [‘ublɔ̃], which is French for hops (humulus lupulus), and I just like the sound of it.

Carpets and harvests

By Simon

I moved into my new house yesterday and am currently having new carpets fitted, which got me wondering about the origins of the word carpet.

Carpet has been traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *kerp- (to pluck, gather, harvest) via the Old French carpite (heavy decorated cloth), the Middle Latin carpita (thick woolen cloth) the past participle of the Latin carpere (to card, pluck).

*kerp- is also the root of the English word harvest, the Greek καρπός (karpos – fruit, grain, produce, harvest, children, poetry [fruit of the mind], profit); and the Irish ciorraigh (to cut, hack, maim).

Sources: Online Etymology Dictionary and Wiktionary.

Winter climber

By Simon

Zimolez (Lonicera periclymenum - Common honeysuckle - Zimolez ovíjivý)

The word zimolez, which is honeysuckle in Czech, came up the other day during a conversation with a Czech friend. It comes from zima (winter) and lézt (to climb, crawl, creep), so could be translated as “winter climber”.

Other interesting words that came up include plšík (doormouse), smršť (tornado) brblat (to grizzle, beef, grouch, mutter) and žbrblat (to mutter to oneself). The root smršť also appears in words related to shrinking and contracting, such as smrštit (to shrink), smrštěný (contracted, shrunk) and smršťovací fólie (shrink wrap).

What delicious consonant clusters!

The English name honeysuckle comes from the Old English hunigsuge (honey-suck). An alternative name is Eglantine, which comes from the Old French aiglent (dog rose), from the Vulgar Latin aquilentus (rich in prickles), from the Latin aculeus (spine, prickle), a diminutive of acus (needle)

Names for honeysuckle in other languages include:

  • German: Geißblatt (goat leaf)
  • French: Chèvrefeuille (goat leaf)
  • Irish: Féithleann (vein ale ?)
  • Italian: Caprifoglio (goat leaf)
  • Latin: Lonicera
  • Spanish: Madreselva (mother jungle)
  • Welsh: Gwyddfid (wild hedge ?) or Llaeth y gaseg (mare’s milk)