New Old Words

26 June 2024 By Simon

I spent last week in Donegal in the northwest of Ireland learning some more Irish, and learning about the area where I was, Glencolmcille (Gleann Cholm Cille in Irish). I had a great time, met some interesting people, and saw some beautiful places.

The course I did this time is called Language and Landscape: The Heritage of Gleann Cholm Cille / Teanga agus Timpeallacht: Oidhreacht Ghleann Cholm Cille. It involves Irish language classes in the mornings, and walks, talks, trips and other activities in afternoons and evenings. It’s run by Oideas Gael, an Irish language and culture centre in the southwest of Donegal which is celebrating its 40th year this year. I’ve been there for 16 of those years: every year from 2005 to 2019, and in 2024.

In previous years I’ve done courses there in Irish language, harp and bodhrán playing, and Irish sean-nós singing. I always enjoy my time there, which is why I keep going back. Most of the people there were from Ireland, and there were also people from the USA, UK, France, Canada, Portugal, Austria and Russia.

So, as well as practising my Irish, I got to speak other languages like French, German and Japanese. In class our teacher also taught as a few interesting words in Ulster Scots.

These include:

gollumpus = an ungainly person; a large, loutish, uncoordinated person
gomeral = a fool, simpleton lout
glype, glipe = a stupid and annoying person
clart = mud, mire; a lump or clot of something disagreeable or distasteful; a big, dirty, untidy person

Gomeral is a diminutive of Middle English gōme (man, warrior, husband, male servant), from Old English guma (male, hero), from Proto-Germanic *gumô (man, person), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰmṓ (man, person) [source].

Clart comes from Middle English *clart, from biclarten (to cover or smear with dirt) [source].

I’m not sure where the other words come from.

One thing we did in class was to come up with some new proverbs in Irish. Incidentally, the Irish word for proverb is seanfhocal, which literally means “old word”. So here are a few new old words:

Ní aon maitheas an chomhad a shabháil agus an riomhaire múchta agat.
There’s no good in saving the file when you’ve turned off the computer.
Ní léiríonn solas an scáileáin bealach éinne.
The light of the screen shows no one the way.
Is fearr traein amháin ná míle gluaisteán.
One train is better than 1,000 cars.

Ireland / Éire

14 June 202414 June 2024 By Simon

I’m off to Ireland tomorrow for a week of learning Irish and learning about the landscape of Glencolumcile (Gleann Cholm Cille) in Donegal. I’ve been there many times before – every year from 2005 to 2019, but this is the first since then. I’ll probably see quite a few people I know, and meet some new ones as well, and I’m looking forward to it.

I rarely get to speak much Irish in Bangor. There are a few Irish speakers here, and we conversations in Irish occasionally. Apart from that, I sometimes listen to Irish songs and Irish language radio, and have been brushing up my Irish on Duolingo recently.

While I’m there, I probably won’t have a lot of time to work on Omniglot. Normal service will resume after I get back.

Earthlings and Other Lings

12 June 202412 June 2024 By Simon

Greetings fellow Earthlings and anyone else who might be reading this. Did you know that this word originally meant farmer?

These days in Science Fiction, an Earthling is “an inhabitant of Earth, as opposed to one of another planet; specifically, a sentient member of any species native to Earth.”

In the 17th century is referred to “A person who is materialistic or worldly; a worldling.” and in the 16th century, it referred to “An inhabitant of Earth, as opposed to one of heaven.” [source]

Going back further, it meant one who tills the earth, a farmer, a husbandman or a ploughman. It comes from Middle English erthling (farmer, ploughman), from Old English ierþling, eorþling (farmer, husbandman, ploughman), from eorþe (ground, dirt, planet Earth), from PIE *h₁er- (earth) [source]

Other interesting words suffixed with -ling include:

puffling = a young puffin
princeling = a minor or unimportant prince
sportling = a little person or creature engaged in sports or in play
shaveling = someone with all or part of their head shaved, notably a tonsured clergyman; a priest or monk (often derogatory).
wildling = a wild plant or animal
witling = a person who feigns wit, pretending or aspiring to be witty, a person with very little wit.
godling = a young god, a minor divinity, a local or inferior god, a.k.a. godlet, godkin

There’s also underling (a subordinate or person of lesser rank or authority), and it’s rare antonym overling (a superior, ruler, master) [source]

You can see more of these on: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ling#English

Spreading Sweetness

5 June 2024 By Simon

Foods, and the words that describe them, can travel around the world. For example, tea comes from China, and so do words for tea in many languages. Similarly, avocado, chocolate, tamale, tomato come from Mexico (both the words and the foods).

Those words came to Europe from other continents, and I recently discovered some words that travelled from Europe, or Western Asia, to many other parts of the world.

It started with the Proto-Indo-European word *médʰu (honey, mead), which spread throughout Europe and Asia, and possibly as far as China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam [source].

Descendants of *médʰu include:

մեղու [meʁú] = bee in Armenian
мед (med) = honey in Bulgarian
mõdu [mjøːd] = mead in Estonian
Met [meːt] = mead in German
μέθη (méthi) = drunkenness in Greek
מותק (mótek) = sweetness in Hebrew
मॊदुर / مۆدُر (modur) = sweet, tasty, delicious in Kashmiri
medus [mædus] = honey, mead in Latvian
މީރު [miː.ɾu] = pleasant, sweet, agreeable, savoury in Maldivian
medveď [ˈmɛdvɛc] = bear (“honey-eater”) in Slovak
mjöd [mjøːd] = mead in Swedish
மதுரம் [mɐd̪ʊɾɐm] = sweetness in Tamil
medd [meːð] = mead, and meddw [ˈmɛðu] = drunk in Welsh

The Irish name Méabh (Maeve) also comes from the same roots, via Middle Irish medb (intoxicating) [source]. For more details of related words in Celtic languages, see this Celtiadur post: Honey Wine

It also reached China, where it became mīt (honey) in Tocharian B, and was possibly borrowed into Old Chinese as *mit (honey), which became 蜜 (mì – honey) in Mandarin, 蜜 (mat6 [mɐt˨] – bee, honeybee) in Cantonese, 蜜 (mitsu – honey, nectar, moasses, syrup) in Japanese, 밀 (mil – beeswax) in Korean, and mật (honey, molasses) and mứt (jam) in Vietnamese [source].

Evolution of the Chinese character for honey (蜜)

Evolution of the Chinese character for honey (蜜)

Super Brows

31 May 2024 By Simon

Someone who is supercilious is arrogantly superior, haughty or shows contemptuous indifference.

Supercilious comes from the Latin superciliōsus (haughty, supercilious) from supercilium (eyebrow, will, pride, haughtiness, arrogance, sterness, superciliousness) from super- (above, over) and‎ cilium ( eyelid), from Proto-Italic *keljom, from PIE *ḱel-yo-m, from *ḱel- (to cover) [source].

Equivalents of supercilious in other languages include:

hooghartig (“high-hearted”) = haughty, supercilious in Dutch
hochnäsig (“high-nosed”) = snooty, stuck-up, haughty, supercilious, arrogant in German
kione-ard (“high-head”) = arrogant, chieftain, haughty, presumptuous, supercilious in Manx
ffroenuchel (“high-nostril”) = haughty, disdainful, supercilious in Welsh

The word cilium also exists in English, and means:

A short microscopic hairlike organelle projecting from a eukaryotic cell, which serve either for propulsion by causing currents in the surrounding fluid or as sensors.
One of the fine hairs along an insect’s wing.
Hairs or similar protrusions along the margin of an organ.
An eyelash (plural cilia) [source].

Related words in other languages include: cil (eyelash), and sourcil (eyebrow) in French, ceja (eyebrow, rim, edge) in Spanish, and ciglio (eyelash, eyebrow, border, edge, side) in Italian [source].

Other (eye)brow-related words include:

highbrow = intellectually stimulating, highly cultured, sophisticated; a cultured or learned person or thing
middlebrow = neither highbrow or lowbrow, but somewhere in between; a person or thing that is neither highbrow nor lowbrow, but in between
lowbrow = unsophisticated, not intended for an audience of intelligence, education or culture; someone or something of low education or culture.

Highbrow first appeared in print in 1875, and originally referred to the ‘science’ of phrenology, which suggested that a person of intelligence and sophistication would possess a higher brow-line than someone of lesser intelligence and sophistication [source]. Lowbrow was also conntected to phrenology and first appeared in about 1902 [source]. Middlebrow first appeared in Punch magazine in 1925 and is based highbrow and lowbrow [source].

If something is completely devoid of cultural or educational value, it could be said to be no-brow / nobrow, a word popularized by John Seabrook in his book Nobrow: the culture of marketing, the marketing of culture (2000) [source].

Incidentally, raising or furrowing your eyebrows is used to show you are asking a question in British Sign Language (BSL). Do other sign languages do this?

Do you know of any other interesting brow-related expressions?

A Little Alliteration

23 May 202425 May 2024 By Simon

I like a little alliteration, don’t you?

A Little Allteration

Alliteration is “The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other, or at short intervals.” [source]. As in the sentence above. It comes from Modern/New Latin alliterationem, from alliterare (to begin with the same letter), from Latin ad (to, near) and lītera (letter, script) [source].

Other names for this include consonance (the repetition of consonants sounds) [source] and head rhyme. If similar or indentical vowel sounds are being repeated, as in “How now, brown cow?”, it’s called assonance [source] or slant rhyme.

Other kinds of rhymes include:

syllabic rhyme: the last syllable of each word sounds the same but does not necessarily contain stressed vowels. E.g. cleaver, silver; pitter, patter.
imperfect (or near) rhyme: a rhyme between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. E.g. wing, caring
weak (or unaccented) rhyme: a rhyme between two sets of one or more unstressed syllables. E.g. hammer, carpenter
semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one word. E.g. bend, ending
forced (or oblique) rhyme: a rhyme with an imperfect match in sound. E.g. green and fiend; one, thumb)
pararhyme: all consonants match. E.g. tick, tock; bing, bong

Other types of rhyme, and other ways of classifying rhymes are available [More details].

I use a variety of rhymes in the songs I write. For example, my latest song was inspired by a phrase from the Irish course in Duolingo “Léann na lachan na nuachtán.” (The ducks read the newspaper). I made a more alliterative version: “Tá lacha ag léamh leabhar sa leabhrlann le leon agus luch.” (A duck is reading a book in the library with a lion and a mouse). The English version is only slightly alliterative, and that’s what often happens with translations, and why songs and poems are difficult to translate.

Here are the words of the song. Parts are quite alliterative, in Irish at least.

Eachtraí na Lacha (The Duck’s Adventures)

Tá an lacha ag léamh sa leabharlann
The duck is reading in the library
Tá an lacha ag léamh sa leabharlann
le leon agus luch (with a lion and a mouse)

Tá an lacha ag siúl go Sligeach
The duck is walking to Sligo
Tá an lacha ag siúl go Sligeach
ag lorg lámhainní (looking for gloves)

Tá an lacha ag canadh amhrán
The duck is singing a song
Tá an lacha ag canadh amhrán
faoi sionach an-sionnachúil (about a very cunning fox)

Tá an lacha ag labhairt Laidin
The duck is speaking Latin
Tá an lacha ag labhairt Laidin
lena lucht leanúna (with its supporters)

Tá an lacha ina coladh ina leabaidh
The duck is sleeping in its bed
Tá an lacha ina coladh ina leabaidh
Agus sin deireadh an scéil
And that’s the end of the tale
Agus sin deireadh an scéil

Here’s a rough recording:

I’ve been thinking of making it trilingual in Irish, English and Welsh, but haven’t got round to it yet.

Here’s an alliterative phrase I came up with that seems to translate well into a variety of languages:

English: Singers sing songs
Albanian: Këngëtarët këndojnë këngë
Armenian: Երգիչները երգեր են երգում (Yergich’nery yerger yen yergum)
Aymara: Q’uchunakax q’uchunak q’uchupxi
Bengali: গায়কেরা গান গায় (Gāẏakērā gāna gāẏa)
Bulgarian: Певците пеят песни (Pevtsite peyat pesni)
Catalan: Els cantants canten cançons
Corsican: I cantanti cantanu canti
Croatian: Pjevači pjevaju pjesme
Danish: Sangere synger sange
Dhivehi (Maldivian): (lavakiyuntherin lavakiyaeve) ލަވަކިޔުންތެރިން ލަވަކިޔައެވެ
Esperanto: Kantistoj kantas kantojn
Estonian: Lauljad laulavad laule
Finnish: Laulajat laulavat lauluja
French: Les chanteurs chantent des chansons
Galician: Os cantantes cantan cancións
Greek: Οι τραγουδιστές τραγουδούν τραγούδια (Oi tragoudistés tragoudoún tragoúdia)
Haitian Creole: Chantè chante chante
Hindi: गायक गीत गाते हैं (gaayak geet gaate hain)
Lingala: Bayembi bayembaka banzembo
Mongolian: Дуучид дуу дуулдаг (Duuchid duu duuldag)
Romanian: Cântăreții cântă cântece
Russian: Певцы поют песни (Pevtsy poyut pesni)
Swedish: Sångare sjunger sånger
Turkish: Şarkıcılar şarkılar söylüyor
Welsh: Cantorion yn canu caneuon

Translations by Google Translate. More are available

It’s unusual to find a phrase like this that has alliterative translations into so many different languages.

Are there other kinds of rhymes that you like / use / know?

Buckling Swashes

17 May 202418 May 2024 By Simon

Have you a swashed any buckles or buckled any swashes recently? Do you known the differences between a pirate, a privateer and a buccaneer? What about a freebooter or a corsair?

A swashbuckler is a swordsman or fencer who engages in showy or extravagant swordplay, a daring adventurer or a kind of period adventure story with flashy action and a lighthearted tone [source].

A swashbuckler likes to swashbuckle, that is, take part in exciting romantic adventures [source].

Swash as a noun has a variety of meanings, including:

The water that washes up on shore after an incoming wave has broken.
A narrow sound or channel of water lying within a sand bank, or between a sand bank and the shore, or a bar over which the sea washes.
A wet splashing sound.
A smooth stroke; a swish.
A swishing noise.
A long, protruding ornamental line or pen stroke found in some typefaces and styles of calligraphy.
A streak or patch.

As a verb, to swash means:

To swagger; to act with boldness or bluster (toward).
To dash or flow noisily; to splash.
To swirl through liquid; to swish.
To wade forcefully through liquid.
To swipe.
To fall violently or noisily.
To streak, to color in a swash. [source].

Swash also appears in swash letter (an italic capital letter with top and bottom flourishes, intended to fill an unsightly gap.) [source]; and swish-swash (a repeated swishing action or sound, going back and forth) [source].

A buckler is “a kind of shield, of various shapes and sizes, held in the hand or worn on the arm (usually the left), for protecting the front of the body. In the Middle Ages in England, the buckler was a small shield, used not to cover the body but to stop or parry blows.” [source].

A pirate is “a criminal who plunders at sea; commonly attacking merchant vessels, though often pillaging port towns.” It comes from Old French pirate (pirate), from Latin pīrāta (pirate), from Ancient Greek πειρατής (peiratḗs – brigand, robber), from πεῖρα (peîra – trial, attempt, plot). It replaced the Old English word wīċing, which could refer to a pirate or a viking [source], although vikings were more commonly called Norþmenn (north people), hǣþene (pagans) or Dene (Danes) [source].

A privateer was historically a privately owned warship that acted under a letter of marque to attack enemy merchant ships and take possession of their cargo. An officer or any other member of the crew of such a ship, or in other words, a government-sanctioned pirate [source].

Buccaneer is another word for pirate, and specifically refers to pirates who preyed on the ships of other nations on the Spanish Main and in the Pacific in the 17th century. It comes from French boucanier (buccaneer), from boucaner (to smoke or broil meat and fish, to hunt wild beasts for their skins), from boucan ([Tupi-style] grill), from Old Tupi m(b)oka’ẽ (wooden grill) [source].

A freebooter refers to an adventurer who pillages, plunders or wages ad-hoc war on other nations. It comes from Dutch vrijbuiter (freebooter, pirate), from vrijbuit (plunder, spoils) [source]. The old word flibustier (a French pirate in the Americas) comes from the same roots [source], as does filibuster [source].

Incidentally, the Dutch word buit (spoil, booty, loot, prey, gains), and the English word booty, might ultimately come from the Proto-Celtic word *boudi (victory, booty, spoils), as does the name Boudica [source].

A corsair refers specifically to French privateers, especially from the port of Saint-Malo, and the ships they sail. It can also refer to privateers and pirates in general.

It comes from French corsaire (privateer, corsair, pirate), from Italian corsaro (privateer, corsair, pirate), from Medieval Latin cursārius (pirate, sea-raider), from Latin cursus (course, running, race, way, passage, journey, voyage) [source].

Are there any other words for pirate that I’ve missed?

For more seafaring-related words, see this podcast, which inspired this post:

Language Quiz

12 May 202411 May 2024 By Simon

Language quiz image

Here’s a recording in a mystery language.

Do you know, or can you guess, the language?

2,000 Languages!

7 May 2024 By Simon

Yesterday I added two new language pages to Omniglot Nanggu (an Oceanic language spoken in the Solomon Islands) and Uneapa (an Oceanic language spoken in Papua New Guinea). Why do I mention this? Well, Uneapa happens to be the 2,000th language on Omniglot, and I thought that’s something to celebrate.

2,000 days

When I started Omniglot back in 1998, it was just a little site to promote a web design and translation business I tried to set up. I added information about languages I knew and could work with, and then starting adding details of alphabets and other writing systems, and the languages written with them.

Since then, the site has grown a bit and now has some 7,600 pages, with details of 345 writing sytems, 900+ constructed and adapted scripts, 2,000 languages, useful phrases in 362 languages, numbers in 1,081 languages, and much more.

Here are some significant moments from the past 26 years:

1998 – Omniglot begins

1999 – I started working as a web developer specialising in multilingual websites in Brighton (& Hove). I continued to work on Omniglot in my spare time while I was there.

2000 – Omniglot.com registered as a domain

2003 – Revenue from Omniglot starts to trickle in, mainly from commission on Amazon sales

2004 – visitor numbers to Omniglot reached 100,000 per month

2005 – I went to Donegal in the northwest of Ireland to study Irish language and songs for the first time. I went there for a week or two every summer until 2019.

Omniglot blog

2006 – Omniglot blog launched. My first post, after a welcome one, was about Language and memory. Since then, I have written 3,767 more posts, including this one.

2007 – I launched the Omniglot YouTube channel. My first video was a silly little conversation in French and English about flying monkeys and other strange things. Since then, I’ve posted another 239 videos.

2008 – I was made redundant from my job in Brighton and started working on Omniglot full-time, while doing a bit of freelance work for other websites. I also registered Omniglot as a limited company.

2008-2009 – I moved to Bangor in north Wales to do an MA in Linguistics at Bangor University. I’ve been here ever since.

2010 – I bought a house in Bangor after renting for a couple of years.

2011 – visitor numbers to Omniglot reached 1 million per month.

2012 – I started writing songs, inspired by a poetry writing workshop I went to in Bangor, and by a singing class I started attending in 2010. Since January 2019, I’ve written at least one new song every month. Here’s the first song I wrote:

2014 – I went to the Polyglot Gathering in Berlin, and to the Polyglot Conference in Novi Sad, Serbia. They were my first large polyglot events I’d attended, and I thoroughly enjoyed them. Since then, I’ve been to quite a few others in Europe and North America.

2015 – visitor numbers reached 2 million per month. I also started writing tunes this year. I think this is the first tune I wrote, played by me on the harp:

Simon Ager · Climbing the Stairs / Dringo’r Grisiau

2016 – peak year so far in terms of visitor numbers and revenue from Omniglot. Thanks to my frugal habits, savings and income from my site, I was able to pay off my mortgage in full this year.

2017 – I started studying languages on Duolingo every day while recovering from a little ice skating accident involving a broken ankle, and have continued to do so ever since. My current streak is at 2,481 days today. So far I’ve studied Russian, Romanian, Czech, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish, Japanese, Scottish Gaelic and Irish. I had some knowledge of most of them before, but Romanian, Danish and Finnish were completely new to me. I wouldn’t claim to speak any of them fluently or flawlessly, but I can at least have conversations in them.

2018 – I started Celtiadur, a blog where I explore connections between Celtic languages. My first post was about words for Big, Large & Great and related things. Since then, I have written 419 more posts, and have been working to improve the earlier posts, which tended to be quite basic.

This blog, under a different name, had previously been about my language learning efforts and travels, but I moved the old posts to my main Omniglot blog, decided to focus on Celtic languages instead.

I also started the Radio Omniglot blog and podcast. Episode 1 was about My Language Learning Adventures. Since then, I have written and recorded 381 more posts and podcasts.

2021 – I added the 1,500th language (Akawaio) to Omniglot.

2021 / 2022 – I had a home office / studio built in my garden. Since then, it’s been the place where I do most of my work, and make podcasts and other recordings.

2024 – I added the 2,000th language (Uneapa) to Omniglot.

Chocolate Peanuts

3 May 2024 By Simon

What’s the connection between chocolate and peanuts?

Well, peanuts covered with chocolate taste good, and they are both native to the Americas, but apart from that, a French word for peanut, cacahuète [ka.ka.ɥɛt / ka.ka.wɛt], was borrowed from Spanish cacahuate / cacahuete [ka.kaˈwa.t̪e / kakaˈwete] (peanut), which comes from the Classical Nahuatl cacahuatl (cocoa bean), from Proto-Nahuan *kakawatl, from Proto-Mixe-Zoque *kakawa (cacao) [source]. This is also the root of words for cacao, the main ingredient in chocolate (at least good chocolate), in many languages [source].

In Spanish, cacahuate is used in Honduras and Mexico, while cacahuete is used in Spain and El Salvador. Another word for peanut in Spanish is maní, which is used in most other Spanish-speaking countries. It was borrowed from Taíno [source].

The origins of the word chocolate are not entirely clear. The English word was borrowed from the Spanish chocolate, and it’s thought that the Spanish word came from Classical Nahuatl. Possibly from *xocolātl (to make sour) and ātl (water), or from a combination of the Yucatec Maya word chocol (hot) and the Classical Nahuatl ātl (water) [source].

Other English words that come from Classical Nahuatl include avocado, chia, chili, guacamole, haricot and tomato, as well as names such as Aztec, Guatemala and Mexico [source].

Incidentally, in the southern USA peanuts are/were known as goobers, and this word used to refer to people from Georgia and North Carolina, and to foolish, simple or amusingly silly people. Goober comes from Gullah, from the Kongo word ngubá (peanut) [source].

Omniglot Blog

Adventures in the world of words and language

Category: English