Are the words string, strong, strength, strait, stretch and strict related? Let’s find out.
String comes from Middle English streng (rope, cord, line, thread, string, ribbon, muscle, tendon, ligament, filament), from Old English strenġ (string, rope, cord), from Proto-West Germanic *strangi (string), from Proto-Germanic *strangiz (string), from Proto-Indo-European *strengʰ- (to twist; rope, cord), possibly from *sterh₃- (to spread, extend, stretch out) [source].
English words from the same roots include constrict, constrain, restrict, strong, strength, strain, strait, stress, strict, stricture and stringent.
Words from the same roots in other languages include stringere (to clasp, grasp, squeeze) in Italian, étreindre (to hug, clutch, grip) in French, streng (strict, severe, rigorous, unbending, cruel) in Dutch, sträng (strict, stern, severe) in Swedish, strangs (brave, brisk, fresh) in Latvian, rankka (burdensome, hard, intense, harsh, tough) in Finnish [source].
So, the odd one out in the list above is stretch, which comes from Middle English strecchen (to stretch out, spread, extend), from Old English streċċan (to stretch, extend, spread out, prostrate), from Proto-West Germanic *strakkjan (to stretch, make straight), from *strak (stretched, straight), from Proto-Germanic *strakaz (stretched, straight) from Proto-Indo-European *(s)treg- (stiff, rigid).
Words from the same roots include stark in English, stark (strong) in German, strak (taut, tight) in Dutch, strække (to stretch) in Danish, and shtriqem (to stretch) in Albanian [source].
Here’s a tune from the music session I went to last night called The Bishop of Bangor’s Jig. It’s played on string instruments (fiddle, guitar and banjo), so is sort connected to the theme of this post.
Do you ever walk into a room and forget why you’re there? Or have you ever opened the fridge or a cupboard and couldn’t remember what you were looking for?
This is a common phenomenon known as the Doorway Effect or location updating effect and can occur when you’re thinking about or trying to remember too many things, get distracted, and particularly when you move from one location to another that differs significantly. This apparently primes our minds to receive something new. So if you want to avoid this effect, it’s best to keep whatever you need to remember at front of your mind.
This morning, for example, I put my laundry in the washing machine, then forgot to start it. I did remember later, but before then, I got distracted preparing my breakfast. It’s time to hang up the laundry now. I’ll be right back, unless I get distracted and start doing something else, which is quite likely.
Right, where was I? I did get distracted and did some lessons on Duolingo (2,600 days today, by the way), Anyway, sometimes I put bread in the toaster, or a pan on the cooker, and forget to turn them on. These memory lapses aren’t the result of going through doors into other rooms, or passing through portals, but they involve thinking and doing too many things and getting distracted.
I came up with an alternative name for this effect today – doorgetting, a portmanteau of door and forgetting, inspired by a video on TikTok by Jess Zefarris about Words for Things That Don’t Have names. These are also known as word fugitives, a term coined by Barbara Wallraff, an author and editor at The Atlantic Monthly, or sniglets – any word that doesn’t appear in the dictionary, but should – coined by American comedian Rich Hall. If they don’t enter into common usage, they are also known as occasionalisms, protologisms or nonce words.
An example she gives is serenquipity, for when you accidentally say something witty and quotable, or in other words, come up with a serendipitious quip. Another is pandephonium, for the confusion experienced when a phone rings and no one nearby is sure if it is theirs.
Alliteration is “The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals.” [source]. As in the sentence above. It comes from Modern/New Latin alliterationem, from alliterare (to begin with the same letter), from Latin ad (to, near) and lītera (letter, script) [source].
Other names for this include consonance (the repetition of consonants sounds) [source] and head rhyme. If similar or indentical vowel sounds are being repeated, as in “How now, brown cow?”, it’s called assonance [source] or slant rhyme.
Other kinds of rhymes include:
syllabic rhyme: the last syllable of each word sounds the same but does not necessarily contain stressed vowels. E.g. cleaver, silver; pitter, patter.
imperfect (or near) rhyme: a rhyme between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. E.g. wing, caring
weak (or unaccented) rhyme: a rhyme between two sets of one or more unstressed syllables. E.g. hammer, carpenter
semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one word. E.g. bend, ending
forced (or oblique) rhyme: a rhyme with an imperfect match in sound. E.g. green and fiend; one, thumb)
pararhyme: all consonants match. E.g. tick, tock; bing, bong
Other types of rhyme, and other ways of classifying rhymes are available [More details].
I use a variety of rhymes in the songs I write. For example, my latest song was inspired by a phrase from the Irish course in Duolingo “Léann na lachan na nuachtán.” (The ducks read the newspaper). I made a more alliterative version: “Tá lacha ag léamh leabhar sa leabhrlann le leon agus luch.” (A duck is reading a book in the library with a lion and a mouse). The English version is only slightly alliterative, and that’s what often happens with translations, and why songs and poems are difficult to translate.
Here are the words of the song. Parts are quite alliterative, in Irish at least.
Eachtraí na Lacha (The Duck’s Adventures)
Tá an lacha ag léamh sa leabharlann
The duck is reading in the library
Tá an lacha ag léamh sa leabharlann
le leon agus luch (with a lion and a mouse)
Tá an lacha ag siúl go Sligeach
The duck is walking to Sligo
Tá an lacha ag siúl go Sligeach
ag lorg lámhainní (looking for gloves)
Tá an lacha ag canadh amhrán
The duck is singing a song
Tá an lacha ag canadh amhrán
faoi sionach an-sionnachúil (about a very cunning fox)
Tá an lacha ag labhairt Laidin
The duck is speaking Latin
Tá an lacha ag labhairt Laidin
lena lucht leanúna (with its supporters)
Tá an lacha ina coladh ina leabaidh
The duck is sleeping in its bed
Tá an lacha ina coladh ina leabaidh
Agus sin deireadh an scéil
And that’s the end of the tale
Agus sin deireadh an scéil
Here’s a rough recording:
I’ve been thinking of making it trilingual in Irish, English and Welsh, but haven’t got round to it yet.
Here’s an alliterative phrase I came up with that seems to translate well into a variety of languages:
English: Singers sing songs
Albanian: Këngëtarët këndojnë këngë
Armenian: Երգիչները երգեր են երգում (Yergich’nery yerger yen yergum)
Aymara: Q’uchunakax q’uchunak q’uchupxi
Bengali: গায়কেরা গান গায় (Gāẏakērā gāna gāẏa)
Bulgarian: Певците пеят песни (Pevtsite peyat pesni)
Yesterday I added two new language pages to Omniglot Nanggu (an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands) and Uneapa (an Oceanic language spoken in Papua New Guinea). Why do I mention this? Well, Uneapa happens to be the 2,000th language on Omniglot, and I thought that’s something to celebrate.
When I started Omniglot back in 1998, it was just a little site to promote a web design and translation business I tried to set up. I added information about languages I knew and could work with, and then starting adding details of alphabets and other writing systems, and the languages written with them.
Since then, the site has grown a bit and now has some 7,600 pages, with details of 345 writing sytems, 900+ constructed and adapted scripts, 2,000 languages, useful phrases in 362 languages, numbers in 1,081 languages, and much more.
Here are some significant moments from the past 26 years:
1998 – Omniglot begins
1999 – I started working as a web developer specialising in multilingual websites in Brighton (& Hove). I continued to work on Omniglot in my spare time while I was there.
2000 – Omniglot.com registered as a domain
2003 – Revenue from Omniglot starts to trickle in, mainly from commission on Amazon sales
2004 – visitor numbers to Omniglot reached 100,000 per month
2005 – I went to Donegal in the northwest of Ireland to study Irish language and songs for the first time. I went there for a week or two every summer until 2019.
2006 – Omniglot blog launched. My first post, after a welcome one, was about Language and memory. Since then, I have written 3,767 more posts, including this one.
2007 – I launched the Omniglot YouTube channel. My first video was a silly little conversation in French and English about flying monkeys and other strange things. Since then, I’ve posted another 239 videos.
2008 – I was made redundant from my job in Brighton and started working on Omniglot full-time, while doing a bit of freelance work for other websites. I also registered Omniglot as a limited company.
2008-2009 – I moved to Bangor in north Wales to do an MA in Linguistics at Bangor University. I’ve been here ever since.
2010 – I bought a house in Bangor after renting for a couple of years.
2011 – visitor numbers to Omniglot reached 1 million per month.
2012 – I started writing songs, inspired by a poetry writing workshop I went to in Bangor, and by a singing class I started attending in 2010. Since January 2019, I’ve written at least one new song every month. Here’s the first song I wrote:
2014 – I went to the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin, and to the Polyglot Conference in Novi Sad, Serbia. They were my first large polyglot events I’d attended, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Since then, I’ve been to quite a few others in Europe and North America.
2015 – visitor numbers reached 2 million per month. I also started writing tunes this year. I think this is the first tune I wrote, played by me on the harp:
2016 – peak year so far in terms of visitor numbers and revenue from Omniglot. Thanks to my frugal habits, savings and income from my site, I was able to pay off my mortgage in full this year.
2017 – I started studying languages on Duolingo every day while recovering from a little ice skating accident involving a broken ankle, and have continued to do so ever since. My current streak is at 2,481 days today. So far I’ve studied Russian, Romanian, Czech, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic and Irish. I had some knowledge of most of them before, but Romanian, Danish and Finnish were completely new to me. I wouldn’t claim to speak any of them fluently or flawlessly, but I can at least have conversations in them.
2018 – I started Celtiadur, a blog where I explore connections between Celtic languages. My first post was about words for Big, Large & Great and related things. Since then, I have written 419 more posts, and have been working to improve the earlier posts, which tended to be quite basic.
This blog, under a different name, had previously been about my language learning efforts and travels, but I moved the old posts to my main Omniglot blog, decided to focus on Celtic languages instead.
2021 – I added the 1,500th language (Akawaio) to Omniglot.
2021 / 2022 – I had a home office / studio built in my garden. Since then, it’s been the place where I do most of my work, and make podcasts and other recordings.
2024 – I added the 2,000th language (Uneapa) to Omniglot.
I have some news – I’ve had enough of learning languages and am giving up, throwing in the towel, putting the fiddle in the roof, throwing a spoon, and throwing the axe in the lake.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I like speaking other languages, at least sometimes, but the process of learning them can be a bit tedious. I already speak some languages reasonably well and don’t currently need to learn any more, so maybe my time would be better spent doing other things.
My other main passion is music – I like to sing, to play instruments, and to write songs and tunes. I’ll be spending more time doing this, and will maybe even focus on one instrument, at least for a while, and learn to play it better.
The question is, which instrument? I have a house full of them, including a piano, harps, guitars, ukuleles, recorders, whistles, ocarinas, harmonicas, melodicas, a mandolin, a bodhrán and a cavaquinho.
The instrument I play most often at the moment is the mandolin, so maybe I should focus on that.
If you’ve noticed the date, you may realise that this post is in fact an April Fool. I’m not giving up on learning languages, and actually do enjoy the process, most of the time, and while I do want to improve my mandolin playing, I also want to improve my playing of other instruments.
Incidentally, let’s look at some ways to say that you’re giving up.
In English you might say you quit, you’re calling it a day, you’re calling it quits you’re throwing in the towel or the sponge or the cards, or you’re throwing up your hands.
Equivalent phrases in other languages include:
hodit flintu do žita = to throw a flint into the rye (Czech)
jeter le manche après la cognée = to throw the handle after the axe (French)
leggja árar í bát = to put oars in a boat (Icelandic)
do hata a chaitheamh leis = to throw your hat in (Irish)
gettare le armi = to throw away your weapons (Italian)
匙を投げる (saji o nageru) = to throw a spoon (Japanese)
подня́ть бе́лый флаг (podnjat’ belyj flag) = to raise the white flag (Russian)
leig an saoghal leis an t-sruth = to let the world flow (Scottish Gaelic)
baciti pušku u šaš = to throw a gun into the sedge (Serbian)
kasta yxan i sjön = to throw the axe into the lake (Swedish)
rhoi’r ffidl yn y to = to put the fiddle in the roof (Welsh)
More details of these phrases can be found on Wiktionary.
The Japanese word 曲 (kyoku) means a composition, piece of music, song, track (on a record), a tune, melody or air, or enjoyment, fun, interest or pleasure. Which is quite appropriate as music is enjoyable and fun for many people. It also often appears in the comments of the videos I watch that feature Japanese bands [source].
The same kanji when pronounced kuse means wrong, improper or indecent, or a long segment of a noh play forming its musical highlight. In the verb 曲がる (magaru) it means to bend, curve, warp, wind, twist, turn, be crooked and various other things, and as 曲げる (mageru) it means to bend, crook, bow, curve, curl, lean, tilt, yield and various other things.
曲 also appears in words like:
曲線 (kyokusen) = curve
曲がり角 (magarikado) = street corner, bend in the road, turning point, watershed
曲目 (kyokumoku) = name of a piece of music, (musical) number, (musical) program(me), list of songs
曲がりくねる (magrikuneru) = to bend many times, twist and turn, zigzag
曲芸 (kyokugei) = acrobatics
曲がりなりにも (magari nimo) = though imperfect, somehow (or other)
曲面 (kyokumen) = curved surface
曲目 (kyokumoku) sounds really nice to me, and something I struggle with is remembering the names of pieces of music. I can play quite a lot of tunes, but only know the names of some of them. I even forget the names of tunes I have written myself.
Here’s a little tune I wrote the other day called The Tower of Cats / Tŵr y Cathod.
In Chinese the character 曲 has several meanings: when pronounced qū it means bent, bend, crooked or wrong, and can also be a surname. When pronounced qǔ it means tune or song [source].
You might be wondering what twankling involves, and whether you go do it without realising. Here are some possible definitions. Can be guess which one is the real one?
twankle = to shine with a bright, blinding light
twankle = to play idly on a musical instrument
twankle = to dance in a wild and uncoordinated way
According to Wiktionary, twankle means “to twang with the fingers on a music instrument”. Another definition is “to play idly on a musical instrument”.
So, if you have a musical instrument lying around, and who doesn’t*, you may have twankled on it without knowing. Although maybe you would say that you were jamming, noodling, improvising, ad-libbing or composing. Do you have any other words for this?
*As I write this, I currently have several instruments lying around in easy reach – a cavaquinho, ocarinas, tin whistles, recorders, a roll-up piano, a melodica, a guitar, a bodhrán and a ukulele – and I have been known to twankle on them. Until I learnt this word though, I noodled on them. Other instruments are available elsewhere in my house.
Or if you prefer, Happy Holidays, Jolly Yuletide, Seasons Greetings, Happy Friday, 行憲紀念日快樂! (Happy Constitution Day – for readers in Taiwan).
Here’s a version of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ I wrote yesterday. I was inspired by a friend who re-wrote of ‘We Three Kings’. It references other songs written by me and my friends.
‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ is a traditional English carol from the south west of England that has been around is various guises at least since the 19th century. More details.
Here are a few other Christmasy songs I found recently on YouTube that I thought I’d share with you:
The Carol of the Bells has been popping up in my feed quite a bit. It is based on the Ukrainian song Щедрик (Shchedryk):
Here’s a rather different version:
This is not exactly a Christmas song, but does have a Christmasy theme, and is a lot of fun to watch and listen to. It is by Nanowar of Steel, an Italian band, and was inspired by the IKEA catalogue. How many languages can you spot in it?
A couple of other Christmasy songs that I quite like:
