I came across an interesting phrase in Scottish Gaelic today: Ith do bhuntàta beag mus dig na Frangaich!, which means “eat your small potatoes before the French come!” and it is apparently said to children picking at their food to encourage them to eat up [source].
Are there similar phrases in other languages, perhaps used in different contexts?
What did your parents say to you to get you to finish your food?
Or if you have kids, what do you say to them, if they need encouragment?
According to the Oxford Dictionaries the word of the year for 2015 is not a word at all but an emoji, specifically the ‘Face with Tears of Joy’:
Do you use emoji(s)?
Is the plural emoji or emojis?
Do you think of them as words?
What’s your word of the year?
When an event is not very successful, you could say that it went off like a damp squib, or even a damp squid, as a friend mistakenly said last night.
A squib is obviously something that does not work properly when it’s wet, and I had an idea that it was some kind of explosive.
According to Reverso, a squib is:
1. a firework
2. a firework that does not explode because of a fault; dud
3. a short witty attack; lampoon
4. an electric device for firing a rocket engine
5. an insignificant person (obsolete)
6. a coward (Aus/NZ slang)
And a damp squib is “something intended but failing to impress”.
Etymology: probably imitative of a quick light explosion.
An unrelated, but similar-sounding word is squab, which is:
1. a young unfledged bird, esp. a pigeon
2. a short fat person
3. a well-stuffed bolster or cushion; a sofa
4. (of birds) recently hatched and still unfledged
5. short and fat
Etymology: probably of Germanic origin; compare Swedish dialect sqvabb (flabby skin), sqvabba (fat woman), German Quabbe (soft mass), Norwegian kvabb (mud)
Source: http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-definition/squab
Squib, squab and squid are all good words for Scrabble.
Are there equivalents of damp squibs in other languages?
The other day I listened to a programme on BBC Radio 4 with an unusual title – Wysinnwyg. When I first saw the title of immediately thought it was a Welsh word, although not one I’d come across before, and I tried to work out what it might mean. I couldn’t find it in any Welsh dictionary, so assumed it was a made-up word. After listening to the programme I realised it was a variation on wysiwyg (what you see is what you get), which also looks Welsh, and means “what you see is not necessarily what you get”.
There aren’t very many Welsh words that start with w, in fact, and many of them are loanwords from English. Here are some examples:
– waldio [ˈʊaldɪɔ] = to beat, to thrash
– wb [ʊb] / wbwb [ˈʊbʊb] = wi! oh! alas!
– wedi[ˈʊɛdɪ] = after
– wedyn [ˈʊɛdɨn] = afterwards
– weithiau [ˈʊɛɪθɪaɨ] = sometimes
– wele [ˈʊɛlɛ] = behold!
– wfft [ʊft] = fie! for shame!
– wfftian [ˈʊftɪan] = to flout
– wit-wat [ˈʊɪtʊat] = fickle
– wtio [ˈʊtɪɔ] = to boo
– wrth [ʊrθ] = by, with, to, compared with, because
– wy [ʊɨ] = egg
– wyneb [ˈʊɨnɛb] = face, surface
– wyth [ʊɨθ] = eight
– wythnos [ˈʊɨθnɔs] = week (eight-night)
Do you ever see acronyms or made-up words and think they are from a particular language? Or see words in one language and think they’re really from another language?
Whenever I see words with w’s and y’s and double l’s I think of Welsh. So Amarillo looks like a Welsh place name to me.
Recently I was sent a link to an infographic containing some apparently untranslatable words for love, and this got me wondering if there really is such a thing as an ‘untranslatable’ word or concept.
The words featured in lists of ‘untranslatable’ words are often given poetic-sounding meanings, and other more ordinary and common meanings they have are ignored.
In some languages a single word might represent a meaning that translates as a phrase in other languages, and there are some culture concepts which can be hard to translate – that is the words themselves can be translated but the meanings they represent might be specific to a particular culture.
The Dutch word gezelligheid (“the warmth of being with loved ones”), is an example from the infographic, which has an equivalent in German: geborgenheit, so it isn’t completely untranslatable.
Are there any words in languages you know that you believe to be untranslatable?
In English, at least the English I speak, the seeds you find in fruit have different names depending on the kind of fruit. Those found in citrus fruit, grapes, apples and pears I would call pips, while those found in peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries and apricots and similar kinds of fruit I would call stones. The seeds found in soft fruit like raspberries, blackberries and strawberries I would call seeds.
What names do you use?
Do you have a counting rhyme for the pips/seeds/stones?
The one I know is “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief” – whichever one you end on is what you’re going to be. Do such rhymes exist in other languages?
Apparently peaches, plums and similar fruit are known as drupe or stone fruit, which have fleshy part consisting of skin (exocarp) and flesh (mesocarp) surrounding a hard shell (a.k.a. pit, stone, pyrene) which contains a seed or kernel. Raspberries and blackberries are made up of multiple small drupes, or drupelets [source].
The Welsh word for sandwich is brechdan [ˈbrɛxdan], which comes from the Irish word brechtán (butter, fat), according to the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.
However according to MacBain’s Dictionary, is related to the Scottish Gaelic word for pancake, breacag, which is related to breachdan (custard), which comes from the Middle Irish breachtán (a roll), which is related to the Welsh words brithog (mottled, variegated, multi-coloured, speckled, fine) and brith (marked with different colours, variegated, coloured, chequered, mottled, pied, spotted, speckled, brindled, grey), which are related to the word word breac (speckled) in Irish and Scottish Gaelic.
According to the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, brechdan is a sandwich, and also a slice of bread and butter; sandwich; cake or shortbread.
There are also a number of interesting types of sandwich in Welsh:
– brechdan fawd / gorddi = slice of bread on which butter is spread with the thumb
– brechdan gaerog / ddwbl / linsi / fetal / deiliwr = an oatcake on a slice of buttered white bread or between two slices of white bread
– brechdan grasu = toast, toasted sandwich
– brechdan i aros pryd = slice of bread and butter to carry on with until the next meal, snack
– brechdan doddion = slice of bread spread with dripping
– brechdan driagl / driog = slice of bread spread with treacle
For details of the origins of the word sandwich, see Sandwiches and Portsmouths
I learnt an interesting word today – retronym – a new name for something that already existings that distinguishes the original from a more recent version. For example, ebooks are becoming increasingly popular, so there’s a need for a new word for non-ebooks. On the program I heard the word retronym, Word of Mouth, they suggested pbooks, paper books or printed books for the non-electronic version. Do you have any other suggestions?
They also discussed phones – since the default phone for most people these days is a mobile/cell phone, there’s a need to a different word for a non-mobile phone. Home phone or landline were suggested. Do you have other words?
For more information about retronyms, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retronym and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_retronyms
One Hawaiian word that is used in English is a’a, which is defined as “a kind of rough-surface volcanic rock” [source].
However in Hawaiian it is written ʻaʻā, pronounced [ʔəˈʔaː] and means:
1. to burn, blaze, glow; fire; staring (eyes)
2. lava; stony, abounding with ʻaʻā lava
3. Sirius (the star)
4. young stage of damselfish
The word aʻa [əˈʔa] means:
1. small root, rootlet, vein, artery, nerve, tendon, muscle
2. to send greetings or love; joyous hospitality; joy at greeting a loved one
There is also ʻaʻa [ʔəˈʔa], which means:
1. to brave, dare, challenge, defy, check, venture; to accept a challenge; to volunteer; to act wickedly or presumptuously; bold, venturesome, valiant, intrepid
2. belt, girdle, waist; to gird, to tie on
3. bag, pocket, caul, envelope for a foetus, scrip; fiber from coconut husk; clothlike sheath at base of coconut frond; cloth; chaff, hull
4. a wind
5. booby bird
And ʻā.ʻā [ʔaː.ʔaː], which means:
1. dumbness, inability to speak intelligibly, a dumb person; dumb, silent, still; to stutter and stammer, as a dumb person
2. dwarf, small person; dwarfish, small
3. demented, panic-stricken
4. booby bird.
5. male ʻōʻō bird
Source: Hawaiian Dictionaries
This shows the importance of the ʻokina (“cutting”) and kahakō (“long mark”) in Hawaiian. The former represents a glottal stop [ʔ] and is a letter in Hawaiian, and the latter indicates a long vowel.
In the Bangor Community Choir last night we started learning a new song entitled Jenga by Juliet Russell. We were told that the song uses made-up words that don’t mean anything in particular, and it has no connection to the game of Jenga.
One of my friends thought the word jenga might mean something like ‘to build’ in Swahili, so I thought I’d investigate.
Jenga does indeed mean to construct or build in Swahili [source], and the as the inventor of the game, Leslie Scott, grew up in East Africa speaking English and Swahili, it is likely that the name of the game comes from that Swahili word.
Related words include:
– jengo = building
– mjenzi = builder
– ujenzi = architecture; construction, installation