{"id":5608,"date":"2011-08-05T17:10:53","date_gmt":"2011-08-05T17:10:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=5608"},"modified":"2011-08-05T17:10:53","modified_gmt":"2011-08-05T17:10:53","slug":"peu-profond","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=5608","title":{"rendered":"Peu profond"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I discovered that there doesn&#8217;t appear to be a separate French word for shallow, at least when you&#8217;re talking about shallow water, dishes or graves &#8211; the term <em>peu profond<\/em> (&#8216;not very deep&#8217;) is used in these cases. If you&#8217;re talking about a shallow person, mind, writing, novel, film or conversation though, the word to use is <em>superficiel(le)<\/em>, or you can say that they <em>manque de profondeur<\/em> (lack depth).<\/p>\n<p>This got me wondering whether there is a Latin word for shallow, when referring to water, etc, which didn&#8217;t end up in French. According to my Latin dictionary, shallow is <em>brevis<\/em>, <em>vad\u014dsus<\/em> or <em>levis<\/em>. Another Latin dictionary I checked defines <em>brevis<\/em> as short, <em>vad\u014dsus<\/em> as &#8220;full of shallows, shallow, shoal&#8221; and <em>levis<\/em> as &#8220;light, not heavy&#8221; or &#8220;smooth, not rough&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>The English word <strong>shallow<\/strong> first appeared in writing in the early 15th century <em>schalowe<\/em>, and is possibly related to <em>schald<\/em> (Old English sceald) &#8211; shoal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last night I discovered that there doesn&#8217;t appear to be a separate French word for shallow, at least when you&#8217;re talking about shallow water, dishes or graves &#8211; the term peu profond (&#8216;not very deep&#8217;) is used in these cases. If you&#8217;re talking about a shallow person, mind, writing, novel, film or conversation though, the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,107,111,10,15,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-etymology","category-french","category-language","category-latin","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5608","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=5608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5608\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}