Category: Words and phrases

Word of the day – constable

By Simon

In the Roman and Byzantine Empires of the 5th and 6th centuries AD, the comes stabuli (count of the stable) was the person in charge of the stables at the imperial court.

The Franks borrowed the title but changed the position slightly to the head of the royal stud. During the 12th century in France, the comes stabuli became an important commander in the army and the title became conestable in Old French.

Eventually the word was borrowed into English as constable and referred to “an officer of the peace” – this meaning was first recorded in 1596. During the 19th century, a regular police force was established in England and the police officers were given the title constable under a chief constable.

Today constable is the lowest rank in the British police, followed by sargeant, while Chief Constable is the highest rank.

More details of the exciting adventures of this word

Word of the day – lullaby

By Simon

Lullabies, from the Middle English lullen, to lull, + bye, are soothing songs usually sung to babies to lull them to sleep. An alternative name is berceuse, from the French for lullaby or “cradle song”.

According to an article I found today, lullabies are not only a good way to get babies to sleep, but can also help with their language development.

A study at the University of Warwick has found that babies whose parents sing to them regularly tend to develop language and communication skills earlier than babies whose parents don’t sing to them. Lullabies help babies to relax and get them used to hearing vocalisations and verbal sounds. They can also help parents to bond with their babies and to relax.

Word of the day – uśmiechnięta

By Simon

Today’s word, uśmiechnięta, means ‘smiling’ in Polish, and appears in the Polish version of Silent Night:

Cicha noc, święta noc,
pokój niesie ludziom wszem,
A u żłóbka Matka święta
czuwa sama uśmiechnięta,
Nad Dzieciątka snem.
Nad Dzieciątka snem.

The singing group I go to at the Hammersmith Irish Centre in London will be performing (for charity) at Hammersmith tube station a week next Monday. One of the things we’ll be singing will be Silent Night and we’ve decided to try to sing it in Polish and Irish, as well as in English.

We can cope with the Irish version as there are at least five Irish speakers, including myself, in the group, but the Polish version is proving more of a challenge. This week a Polish friend of one of the group members came along to help us with the pronunciation, so we now have a rough idea of what it sounds like. I also found a recording of the Polish version on YouTube.

We’ll probably just sing the first and last lines of the Polish and the rest in English as we’re not sufficiently confident to sing the whole of it.

I found translations of Silent Night in many different languages here, and plan to put some of them on Omniglot in my songs section. Do you have any suggestions for other multilingual songs I could include?

Word of the day – twmpath

By Simon

Today’s word, twmpath (/tʊmpaθ/), is the Welsh word for a tump, hump, hummock, tussock or mound. It is also refers to a type of barn dance, which is sort of the Welsh equivalent of an Irish ceili.

The English word tump (a mound or hillock) might come from twmpath, though the dictionaries I’ve checked give it’s origin as unknown.

According to this site, there was a tradition in Wales for people gather on the twmpath chwarae (lit. “tump for playing”) or village green in the evenings to dance and play various sports, usually starting on May Day. A fiddler or harpist would sit and play on a mound in the middle of the green and people would dance around them.

Other uses of this word include twmpath gwadd, mole hill, and twmpath cyflymder or speed bump, a traffic calming measure sometimes called a ‘sleeping policeman’ in English. What are such things called in your language?

Word of the day – typography

By Simon

Typography is:
1. the art or process of printing from type;
2. the art or process of setting and arranging type for printing;
3. the arrangement, style, or general appearance of printed matter
(from yourdictionary).

It comes via French and Latin from the Greek τύπος (typos), to strike + γραφία (graphia), to write.

I chose this word today because I found an interesting blog about typhography called I Love Typography. As well as discussing typography, the author also gives advice on creating your own fonts, something that quite a few people ask me about. There are also some slightly less-than-serious posts, such as this one about Typoholism, “A disorder characterized by the excessive consumption of and dependence on type…”.

I think I ‘suffer’ from typoholism, and a related condition for which I can’t think of a word at the moment. Can you think of a word for my love of languages and writing systems? Perhaps ‘panglotophilia’.

Language change

By Simon

According to a New Scientist article I came across the other day, frequently-used words tend to be more resistant to change then words that are used less often.

A team at the University of Reading lead by Mark Pagel, an Evolutionary Biologist, compared the words used to express 200 different meanings in 87 different Indo-European languages. They found that the more frequently a word is used in speech, the less likely it is to change over time. They also found the conjunctions and prepositions tend to change more readily than numbers, pronouns and question words like who, what, where, etc. The team calculated a ‘mutation rate’ for each of the words the studied and predicted that frequently-used words are likely to resist change for over 10,000 years.

Another study at Harvard University demonstrated that the most frequently-used English irregular verbs have tended to remain stable over time, while most of the least frequently-used ones have become regular.

Word of the day – Lloegr

By Simon

The Welsh name for England is Lloegr (/ɬɔigr/). The etymology of this name is a mystery. According to this site, it first appeared as Lloegyr in an early 10th century prophetic poem called Armes Prydain. A variant of the name, Lloegrwys, or “men of Lloegr”, was in use before then and more common. In early poetry, the names used for the English included Eingl (Angles) and Iwys (Wessex-men) – they are called Saeson (Saxons) in modern Welsh. Some scholars believe that Lloegr originally referred to the kingdom of Mercia, and eventually came to mean the whole of England.

There’s a thread on this forum in which a number of possible etymologies of Lloegr are discussed. Here are some of them:

  • it comes from the Middle English name for England, Loegres
  • it comes from Legorencis Civitas, the Roman name for Leicester, which was probably derived from a local Celtic name
  • it means the “lost land(s)”
  • it’s named after Locrinus, the son of Brutus (from Geoffrey of Monmouth)

More details: http://www.old-north.co.uk/Holding/celt_lloegr.html

Word of the day – Samhain

By Simon

Today’s word, Samhain (/ˈsˠaunʲ/) is the Irish word for November, and also refers to the ancient Celtic festival which was traditional celebrated at this time of year to mark the end of the harvest and the start of the ‘Celtic New Year’. The word samhain comes from the Old Irish samain, which possibly means ‘summer’s end’, though that etymology is uncertain.

The last day of October is known as Oíche Shamhna in Irish and Oidhche Shamhna in Scottish Gaelic, both of which mean the ‘night of Samhain’. It was a time for feasting and to for taking stock of livestock and stores of crops, a custom still observed in some areas.

Word of the day – holistic

By Simon

I’ve just been listening to a very good radio adaptation of Douglas Adam’s novel, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and that got me wondering about the word holistic. In the novel, Dirk Gently explains that holistic refers to his belief in “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”, a belief he applies in his work. He endeavours “to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person” or cat.

The word holistic was coined in 1926 by Gen. J.C. Smuts (1870-1950) and is based on the Greek root holos, which means ‘whole’. The theory of holism refers to the theory that regards nature as consisting of wholes.

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

I’ve found equivalents of holistic in a couple of other languages: Welsh – cyfannol and German – ganzheitlich. Do you know of any others?

Word of the day – fey

By Simon

One of my correspondents asked me today whether I knew of any suitable translations of the English word fey, which has a number of meanings, including:

– Having or displaying an otherworldly, magical, or fairy-like aspect or quality
– Having visionary power; clairvoyant
– Appearing touched or crazy, as if under a spell

In Scots, it also means:

– Fated to die soon.
– Full of the sense of approaching death.

It comes from the Middle English feie, fated to die, from Old English fǣge.

Source: The Free Dictionary

I found some translations in other languages on Answers.com, though none of them mean quite the same thing as the English word.

I also found the lovely Welsh word, mympwyol, which means arbitrary, capricious, faddy, quixotic or whimsical.

Can you think of any equivalent words in other languages for fey?