{"id":23227,"date":"2024-01-05T16:13:39","date_gmt":"2024-01-05T16:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=23227"},"modified":"2024-01-05T16:13:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-05T16:13:40","slug":"lost-in-the-geese","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=23227","title":{"rendered":"Lost in the Geese"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The French word <strong>oie<\/strong> means goose, but how do you pronounce it? <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/images\/blog\/geese2.jpg\" width=\"630\" height=\"234\" alt=\"Geese\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Last night at the French Conversation Group, we were talking about geese, as you do, and while I could remember how to write the word for goose in French, I wasn\u2019t sure how to pronounce it. Then one of my friends suggested it was <strong>foie<\/strong> as in <strong>foie gras<\/strong> [fwa \u0261\u0281a]. I knew this means \u201cfat liver\u201d, so <strong>foie<\/strong> must mean liver, and that <strong>oie<\/strong> probably sounds similar to <strong>foie<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>My guess was right, <strong>oie<\/strong> is pronounced [wa] and rhymes with <strong>foie<\/strong> [fwa]. It comes from the Old French <em>oie<\/em> (goose), from Vulgar Latin <em>auca<\/em> (goose), a contraction of <em>*avica<\/em>, from Latin <em>avis<\/em> (bird), from Proto-Italic <em>*awis<\/em> (bird), from Proto-Indo-European <em>*h\u2082\u00e9wis<\/em> (bird). The Old French word was originally written <em>oe<\/em> or <em>oue<\/em>. The <strong>i<\/strong> was added by the end of the 12th century as analogy to <em>oisel\/oiseau<\/em> (bird) [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/oie#French\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>Words from the same roots include <strong>\u0570\u0561\u057e<\/strong> [h\u0251v] (hen, chicken) in Armenian, <strong>ave<\/strong> (bird) in Galician, Spanish and Portuguese, <strong>vista<\/strong> (chicken, hen) in Latvian, <strong>hwyad<\/strong> (duck) in Welsh, <strong>\u03bf\u1f30\u03c9\u03bd\u03cc\u03c2<\/strong> [i.o\u02c8nos] (large bird, bird of prey, omen) in Greek [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European\/h%E2%82%82%C3%A9wis\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>The French word <strong>oiseau<\/strong> (bird) also comes from the same roots, via the Late Latin <em>aucellus<\/em> (little bird), as do <strong>uccello<\/strong> (bird) in Italian, and <strong>ocell<\/strong> (bird) in Catalan [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/aucellus#Latin\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, <strong>goose<\/strong> comes from Middle English <em>go(o)s<\/em> (goose, fool, idiot), from Old English <em>g\u014ds<\/em> (goose), from Proto-West Germanic <em>*gans<\/em> (goose), from Proto-Germanic <em>*gans<\/em> (goose), from Proto-Indo-European <em>*\u01f5\u02b0h\u2082\u00e9ns<\/em> (goose), which is likely of imitative origin [<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/goose#English\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>A French equivalent of <strong>to loose one\u2019s marble<\/strong> (become crazy, loose one\u2019s mind) is <strong>se perdre les oies<\/strong> (\u201cto get lost in the geese\u201d) [<a href=\"https:\/\/fr.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/se_perdre_les_oies\">source<\/a>].<\/p>\n<p>Are there any interesting goose-related expressions in other languages?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The French word oie means goose, but how do you pronounce it? Last night at the French Conversation Group, we were talking about geese, as you do, and while I could remember how to write the word for goose in French, I wasn\u2019t sure how to pronounce it. Then one of my friends suggested it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[205,94,104,107,113,118,15,16,26,34,41,44,45,46,202,64,216,77],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-armenian-","category-catalan","category-english","category-etymology","category-galician","category-greek","category-latin","category-latvian","category-middle-english","category-old-french","category-portuguese","category-proto-germanic","category-proto-indo-european","category-proto-italic","category-proto-west-germanic","category-spanish","category-vulgar-latin-sermo-vulgaris","category-welsh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23227"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23229,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23227\/revisions\/23229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}