Category: Words and phrases

Word of the day – knothole

By Simon

The term knothole is used to refer to a block of stacked characters in a text that occurs when you have the same words or phrases repeated several times and the text is laid out in such a way that the words or phrases line up.

This is apparently quite a frequent occurrence in encyclopedias, which tend to have a house style for entries, which leads to quite a lot of repetition, and also in publications that use fairly narrow columns, such as newspapers and magazines.

Here’s an example:

an example of a knothole

Those concerned with page layout are trained to avoid such undesirable alignments of text.

Found via David Crystal’s blog.

Word of the day – 差不多 (chàbuduō)

By Simon

差不多 (chàbuduō)

The phrase 差不多 (chàbuduō) is one of my favourite phrases in Chinese. It literally means “lacking not much” and can be translated as “more or less”, “near enough”, “almost” or “about”. It’s used frequently in Taiwan, and also in China I think, and seems to embody quite a common philosophy, i.e. there’s no need to do everything perfectly, as long as things get finished, so don’t worry too much. That’s my impression anyway.

A longer version of this phrase is 差不多就可以 (chàbuduō jiù kěyǐ), which means “near enough, that’ll do”. Quite good English equivalents are “close enough for government work” and “near enough for jazz”.

You can see a good example of chabuduoism from Taiwan on Pinyin News.

I found an equivalent expression in my big book of Welsh idioms: yn rhywle o’i chwmpas hi (lit: “somewhere around it”).

Do similar phrases exist in other languages?

Brighton

By Simon

I arrived back to a wet and overcast Brighton this evening after a long, long journey from Lampeter (just under 10 hours door to door with a long wait in Swansea). One of the first things I did after getting home was to switch on Radio Cymru to give me a dose of Welsh, which I’m missing already.

Y noswaith hon cyrraeddais i nôl i Frighton, lle mae hi’n gwlyb a chymylog, ar ôl taith hir iawn o Lambed (tipyn bach llai na 10 awr o ddrws i ddrws gyda aros hir yn Abertawe). Ar ôl i mi gyrraedd adre, un o’r pethau cynta a wnes i oedd gwrando ar Radio Cymru – dw i’n methu clywed y Gymraeg yn barod.

There’s no language quiz question today, but I do have a question from an Omniglot visitor: What do you call tongue twisters in your language?

Another question from me: Is the word for tongue twister a tongue twister in any of the languages you know?

Helfa trysor (treasure hunt)

By Simon

We went on a treasure hunt this morning. We were supposed to go yesterday afternoon, but it was raining (surprise, surprise!). Fortunately the sun came out today, at least for a while. I saw bits of Lampeter I hadn’t seen before and learnt a bit about its history. The treasure was some chocolates, which we all shared.

In class this afternoon we played a number of Welsh games, including Gêm yr Eisteddfod and trilingual (Welsh/Breton/Irish) dominoes. The dominoes had pictures of animals on them with their names in the three languages. Some of the names that really caught my eye were gwas y neidr (lit. “snake’s servant”) – dragonfly, glöyn byw (lit. “living coal”) – butterfly, and bilidowcar – cormorant.

Another word for dragonfly is gwachell y neidr (“snake’s knitting-needle”), and there are many words in Welsh for butterfly, including iâr fach yr haf (“little summer hen”), pili-pala and bili-bala. Other words for cormorant are morfran (“sea crow”), mulfran (“sad mule crow”), llanciau Llandudno (“bachelors of Llandudno”) and wil wal waliog.

Word of the day – lol

By Simon

The Welsh word lol means nonsense, and according to the dictionary on the BBC Learn Welsh site, it also means foolery, bosh, bunkum, gammon, moonshine, rigmarole, rot, rubbish, tomfoolery or twaddle. Every time I see it, it reminds me of the abbreviation lol for ‘laugh(ing) out loud’.

Here are some examples of usage:

Dyn ni’n siarad llawer o lol yn y dosbarth weithiau.
We talk a lot of nonsense in class sometimes. (quite true!)

Mae’r newyddiadurwr yn ddymunol iawn ond mae e’n ysgrifennu lol weithiau.
The journalist/reporter is very pleasant, but he writes nonsense sometimes.

Words with a similar meaning to lol include ffiloreg, ffwlbri and dwli.

What words do you use to say that something is nonsense?

Word of the day – treiglad

By Simon

Today’s word, treiglad (pl. treigladau) is the Welsh word for mutation, the process of changing the initial consonants of words – something we were practising in class today. This is a characteristic of all the Celtic languages and takes quite a bit of getting used to.

The most common mutation in Welsh is the soft mutation or treiglad meddal, which changes t to d, p to b, c to g, and so on. It’s quite hard to keep track of all the occasions when this mutation is needed, but I think I’m getting better at it. I haven’t tried to memorise all the rules because there are so many of them. Instead I notice where mutations are used in the Welsh texts I read and when I hear Welsh spoken. This gives me a good feel for when to use them.

If you practise reading and listening to a language as much as possible, you get a lot of exposure to grammatical patterns like mutations. This helps you to develop instincts for the grammar and seems to me to be the best way to learn it. I think this method works better than trying to memorise all the grammatical rules first. Once you have developed a feel for how a language works, then learning the rules might be helpful and certainly will be easier.

Word of the day – 衛星

By Simon

weixing/eisei - satellite in Chinese and Japanese

The Chinese word for satellite, 衛星 [卫星] (wèixīng) means literally ‘guard(ing)/defend(ing) star’. When I came across this word the other day while working on a Chinese version of a website, it took me a few moments to work out what it meant. Eventually I deciphered it from the context and the second character, which I knew meant star. The same characters, 衛星, are used in Japanese, but they’re pronounced eisei.

One of the things I like about Chinese is that when you encounter an unfamiliar word, you can often guess its meaning from the meanings of the individual characters.

According to this Online Etymology Dictionary, the English word satellite first appeared in writing in 1548, when it meant “follower or attendant of a superior person”. It comes from, via French, from the Latin satellitem (nom. satelles) “attendant”. It was first used to mean “man-made machinery orbiting the Earth” in 1936, when such things were theoretical. The first artificial satellite, a name used to distinguish them from natural satellites like the moon, was Sputnik 1, which was launched in 1957.

The Welsh word for satellite is lloeren, which comes from lloer, moon. In most of the other languages I’ve checked, the word is satellite or something similar.

Word of the day – moron

By Simon

The Welsh word moron, which means carrots, is an example of a false friend (cyfaill anwir?). The word for carrot is moronen, one of a small group of Welsh words that become shorter in the plural. Confusingly, the English word moron, which comes from the Greek for ‘foolish, dull’, has been borrowed into Welsh and has the same meaning.

Here are a few more Welsh/English false friends that I’ve noticed recently. Some look the same as English words, but are pronounced differently, so are only false friends in writing.

pan = when (pan is padell)
pant = hollow (to pant is dyhefod)
dim = nothing (dim is pŵl or aneglur)
mud = mute (mud is mwd)
hurt = silly (hurt is dolur (n) or dolurio (vb))
hen = old (hen is iâr)
brain = crows (brain is ymennydd)
nod = aim (nod is amnaid (n) or amneidio (vb))

Word of the day – mac tíre

By Simon

mac tíre, noun = wolf (literally ‘son of the country(side)’). The tíre sounds roughly like cheer-uh.

I came across this Irish word while searching for the Scottish Gaelic for word for wolf, which someone asked me today. Another Irish word for wolf is faolchú, while the equivalent in Scottish Gaelic is faol or madadh allaidh (wild dog). In Manx a wolf is a filliu or moddey oaldey (wild dog).

Here are some wolf-related proverbs:

O wilku mowa, a wilk tuż (Polish)
Talk of a wolf and the wolf is here = Speak of the Devil (and he will appear).

La fame caccia il lupo dal bosco (Italian)
Hunger drives the wolf out of the woods

There are many more here, though few of them are in their original languages, unfortunately.

Word of the day – isogram

By Simon

isogram, noun – a word in which the letters turn up an equal number of times.

There are different types of isograms depending on how many times each letter appears:

In a first-order isogram, each letter appears just once, as in dialogue, lexicography, ambidextrously and uncopyrightable.

In a second-order isogram, each letter appears twice, as in deed, Vivienne, Caucasus and intestines.

In a third-order isogram, each letter appears three times. These are rare, unusual words such as deeded (“conveyed by deed”) and geggee (“victim of a hoax”).

I came across this term in an article by David Crystal about his new book By Hook or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English.