Mysterious inscription
This mysterious inscription was sent in by an editor at the Arizona Republic newspaper in Phoenix, Arizona. One of their reporters is working on a story about a book that was donated to a local library there. It’s a portfolio of prints apparently related to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad that was compiled for the 1939 World’s Fair.
The inscription below is on the flyleaf, and they’ve been trying to determine what language it’s in in the hopes of getting it translated.
The writing appears to be in a cursive form of the Hebrew script, and the language might be Hebrew or Yiddish.
Noel, genes and genius
When singing the Christmas carol The First Noel the other day I started wondering where the word noel comes from. I knew noël was French for Christmas, but wasn’t sure where that came from.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, noel comes from the Latin natalis (birth) via the Old French noel (the Christmas season), and the Middle English nowel.
Quite a few other words for Christmas probably come from the same root – Natale (Italian), Navidad (Spanish), Natal (Portuguese), Nadal (Catalan/Galician/Occitan/Romansh), Nadolig (Welsh), Nedeleg (Breton), Nadelik (Cornish), Nollaig (Irish/Scottish Gaelic), and Nollick (Manx).
natalis comes from natus, the past participle of nasci (to be born), which comes from the Old Latin gnasci (to be born), which is cognate with the Latin genus (race, stock, kind), and the Greek γένος [genos] (race, kind) and γόνος [gonos] (birth, offspring, stock), the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root of which is *gen-/*gon-/*gn- (to produce, beget, be born).
Other words derived from that PIE root include genius, gene, king and kin in English, gentis (Lithuanian – kinsman), Kind (German – child), geni (Welsh – to be born), and I’m sure there are plenty of others.
Language quiz
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Nolllick
Christmas
The land of rabbits
When adding more animals to the Celtic Connections section on Omniglot the other day, I started wondering about the origins of the Celtic words for rabbit – connín (Irish), coinean (Scottish Gaelic), conning (Manx), cwningen (Welsh), conyn (Cornwell), c’honikl (Breton). They appear to be related to each other, and also to the English word coney, which was used for rabbit until the 18th century, while rabbit was used for the young of the coney from about the 14th century.
Rabbit apparently comes from the Walloon robète, which is a diminutive of the Flemish or Middle Dutch robbe.
Coney comes from the Anglo-Norman conis, the plural of conil “long-eared rabbit” (Lepus cunicula) from the Latin cuniculus, which means burrow and comes from the Greek κύνικλος (kýniklos), which is thought to come from an Iberian word for burrow. Related words in other languages include kanin (Danish), konijn (Dutch), bunny (English), Kaninchen (German), coniglio (Italian).
There’s a popular theory that the Roman name for Spain, Hispania, which became España and Spain, comes from the Phoenician name for Iberia i-shepan-im, the land or coast of rabbits. When the Phoenicians first visited Iberia in around 500 BC they saw lots of rabbits there which they named after a similar animal, the hyrax of North Africa.
Name the language
Here’s a recording in a mystery language.
Do you know or can you guess which language it’s in and where it’s spoken?
Daily food
At a Christmas party this week I was chatting to some Vietnamese people about food and one of them asked whether the meal we were having (chicken, potatoes, veg, etc) was what we have as our “daily food”. I couldn’t work out what she was talking about as the phrase “daily food” was pronounced so quickly and was unusual anyway. At first I thought it was a word or phrase in Vietnamese, so I asked her to repeat it several times and eventually she explained that she was asking about food we eat every day. That was when I realised what she was saying. Even slight differences in pronunciation and novel constructions can throw you like this.
When you’re speaking a foreign language it can be frustrating when people don’t understand what you’re saying, even though you think you’re pronouncing things correctly. When people realise what you’re trying to say and repeat it, you often think, “Isn’t that what I said!?”
