Category: Words and phrases

Súilíní

By Simon

Súilíní

I discovered an interesting word in Irish yesterday – súilíní [ˈsˠuːl̪ʲiːn̪ʲiː] – which is a diminutive form of súil [sˠuːl̪ʲ] (eye) and means literally “small eyes”, and actually means eyelets, an aperture-sight, or bubbles. For example, uisce gan súilíní is still water (“water without bubbles”) [source].

More common Irish words for bubbles are bolgán and boilgeog.

The word súilíní is also used in Hiberno-English to mean “bubbles of fat floating on top of a stew or clear soup”, and is also written sooleens [source].

The word súil (eye) comes from *sūli, an alteration of the Proto-Celtic *sūle (suns), the dual of *sūlos, which is the genitive of *sāwol (sun), from the Proto-Indo-European *sóh₂wl̥ (sun). Apparently in Irish mythology the sun was seen as the “eye of the sky”, and the word for sun came to mean eye [source].

The words for sun in other European languages come from the same root, and most start with s, e.g. saũle (Latvian), sol (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese), Sonne (German), etc. There are some exceptions though, including haul (Welsh) heol (Breton), howl (Cornish) and ήλιος (ḗlios – Greek) [source].

The Bold Step

By Simon

In Hiberno-English (the English spoken in Ireland), children who misbehave are told not to be bold and might be sent to the bold step. I heard this expression being used the other day and it stuck in my mind as I hadn’t heard it before.

In the UK the equivalents are usually naughty and naughty step, which are defined as,

1. A place where a child is sent after misbehaving in order to reflect on their actions: whenever I did something bad, my uncle would make me sit in the naughty corner

2. A situation of public disgrace: the bosses of the unions found themselves on the naughty step

according to the Oxford Dictionaries

Have you heard bold being used in this sense?

Do you have other words to refer to misbehaviour or disobedience (especially in children)?

Manywhere

By Simon

много где

In the Russian lesson I worked on today there was an interesting expression – много где (mnogo gde) – which is a colloquial way of saying “many places” or “lots of places”, and literally means “many where”.

It’s used in the following context:

– где ты был, кроме России?
(gde ty byl, krome Rossii?)
where have you been besides Russia?

– Я много где был, в Европе и Азии.
(Ya mnogo gde byl, v Yevrope i Azii.)
I’ve been to lots of places in Europe and Asia.

Related Russian words include:
– где-то (gde-to) = somewhere
– где-нибудь (gde-nibyd’) = anywhere / somewhere
– нигде (nigde) – nowhere

In English we have somewhere, nowhere and anywhere, but not manywhere, which seems like it could be a useful word. Do any other languages have a word like this?

Coasts and competitors

By Simon

Arfordir

Sometimes when I see new words in English or other languages I can immediately break them down into their component parts and work out their roots, but other times I just accept words as whole entities without trying to work out their derivation.

One such word in Welsh is arfordir, which I hadn’t tried to analyse before. Last weekend, however, I was explaining some Welsh words to a friend who recently moved to Cardiff and who wants to learn Welsh, so I was in the right frame of mind, and the probable etymology of that word jumped out at me – ar (on, by) + môr (sea) + tir (land), so it’s “land by the sea” or the coast. This is correct, according to the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.

Another etymology I discovered today is the word competitor, which comes from the Middle French compétiteur (rival, competitor), from the Latin competītor (rival, competitor, adversary, opponent; plaintiff), from con (with) and petītor (seeker, striver, applicant, candidate, claimant, plaintiff, suitor, wooer).

Petītor comes from petere (to make, seek, aim at, desire, beg, beseech), from the Proto-Indo-European *peth₂- (to fall, fly), which is also the root of the English word petition, and the Spanish word pedir (to ask for) [source]

Hmyz and Hums

By Simon

Hymz

I came across an interesting Czech word today – hmyz, which means “insect, ant, bug, creepy-crawly”.

It appears in my Czech phrasebook in the sentence, “V našem pokoji je hmyz” (There are insects in our room).

It sounds like the sounds insects make, but there are other words for hum in Czech – bzučet, vrčet, hučet (verbs); bzukot, šum, hukot (nouns).

Related words include:

– hmyzožravec = insectivore
– hmyzožravý = insectivorous
– repelent proti hmyzu = insect repellent

Sources: Wordbook.cz, Slovnik.cz, Slovniky.lingea.cz

Fosses and Sextons

By Simon

At the French Conversation Group last night one of the people had an old French language textbook from the 1950s which contains lots of stories in French. One of them contains the word “Le Fossoyeur” in the title, which is translated as “The Sexton”. As this wasn’t a word I’d come across before, I thought I’d find out more about it.

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, a sexton is:

A person who looks after a church and churchyard, typically acting as bell-ringer and gravedigger.

Sexton is a Middle English word that comes from the Anglo-Norman French segrestein, from medieval Latin sacristānus (sacristan), which comes from the Latin sacer/sacr- (sacred).

A sacristan is person in charge of a sacristy and its contents, and a sacristy is a “room in a church where a priest prepares for a service, and where vestments and articles of worship are kept.”

The French word fossoyeur can also mean “personne ou chose qui ruine, détruit” (sb or sth that ruins or destroys) [source], and comes from the word fosse (pit, grave), from the Latin fossa (ditch, trench), from fodiō (dig out, excavate) from the Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European *bʰedʰ- (to pierce, dig) [source].

The word fosse / foss also exists in English and means a ditch or moat, but is rarely used, except by archaeologist, for whom it means “a long, narrow trench or excavation, especially in a fortification.” [source]. Fosse also appears in the name of the old Roman road from Lincoln to Exeter – the Fosse Way.

How to you?

By Simon

An interesting structure that came up in the Russian lesson I worked on today is Как тебе …? (Kak tebe …) or literally “How to you …”), which means “What do you think of …?”. The example in the lesson is Ну, как тебе пельмени? (Nu, kak tebe pel’meni?), which means “So, what do you think of pelmeni*?”. The reply is Очень вкусно! (Ochen’ vkusno!) = “Very tasty!”.

This illustrates the fact that you often use fewer words in Russian sentences than in other languages like English. In some ways this makes Russian easier as there are fewer words to worry about in sentences like this. Although if you’re trying to translate from English to Russian you have to remember to leave half the words out.

Do any other languages use a similar structure?

*Pelmeni are a kind of dumpling, usually filled with meat, or sometimes with vegetables or fish.

Suo Gân

By Simon

We are learning the traditional Welsh lullaby Suo Gân [sɨɔ ɡɑːn] in one of the choirs I sing in at the moment. It’s a lovely song that was first written down in 1800, but was probably composed around before then.

When I first saw the words Suo Gân I thought they might be Mandarin Chinese – I knew that gân is mutated version of the Welsh word for song, cân, but suo doesn’t look like Welsh. In fact suo is a variant spelling of sïo, which means “to hum, whizz or murmur”, so suo gân could be translated as “humming / murmured song”.

Here’s a recording of Bryn Terfel singing this song:

The words suo [suɔ] and gan [kan] have many meanings in Chinese, but there are only a couple of expressions I can find that combine both of them:

– 锁杆 [鎖桿] (suǒgǎn) = locking bar
– 所感 (suǒgǎn) = one’s impression of something

In the cold light of day

By Simon

An interesting expression I noticed recently is in the cold light of day. It is used to indicate that you are thinking about something calmly and clearly, and you might feel foolish, sorry or ashamed for thinking or doing that something. For example “The next morning, in the cold light of day, Sam realized that his ideas, which seemed so brilliant the night before, were complete nonsense.”

I hadn’t thought about it much before, but when I came across it today it struck me as slightly odd – can light be cold?

According to Dictionary.com, “This expression transfers the illumination of daylight to rational understanding and uses cold to emphasize the lack of passion.”

On AnswerBag it’s suggested that this phrase originates in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, published in 1894-5. A similar phrase certainly does appear in that book in the following extract, from the beginning of chapter 5:

“Oh, I don’t want any! I fear I ought not to have run away from that school! Things seem so different in the cold light of morning, don’t they? What Mr. Phillotson will say I don’t know! It was quite by his wish that I went there. He is the only man in the world for whom I have any respect or fear. I hope he’ll forgive me; but he’ll scold me dreadfully, I expect!”

Do you know of any earlier uses of this phrase?

Are there equivalents of this phrase in other languages?

Dobbing in

By Simon

If you heard or read that someone had been dobbed in, would you know what that meant?

It’s an expression used mainly in the UK, Australian and New Zealand that means to inform on someone to the authorities – i.e. the police, parents, teachers, etc. For example, if a member of a criminal gang told the police about the illegal activities of the gang, perhaps in the hope of a reduced sentence, or of escaping prosecution altogether, he or she could be said to be dobbing in the other members of the gang.

Other expressions with similar meanings are to grass someone up, and to grass on someone, both of which mean to inform on someone. You could also tell on someone, turn someone in, or report someone. Are there other ways to say the same thing?

According to the Oxford Dictionaries, you can also dob something in, that is “to contribute money to a common cause” (everyone dobbed in a few dollars), and to dob someone in can mean “to impose on someone to do something” (I dobbed him in to do the cleaning). I haven’t heard either of these uses before, have you? Wiktionary states that they are mainly used in Australia, and that to dob someone in can also mean “To nominate a person, often in their absence, for an unpleasant task.” Moreover, a dobber is someone who dobs people in.

The word dob is apparently a dialect word meaning “to put down abruptly” or “to throw something at a target”. The Phrase Finder says that dob might come from the dialects of Kent and/or Nottinghamshire in England, and first appeared in writing in the 1950s. There are also examples of dob in the dialects of Cornwall, Northamptonshire and Cheshire.

A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms (1888), defines dob as “to put down [something]”.