Category: Etymology

Knowledge and seeing

By Simon

I discovered today that there is a connection between the Gaelic word for knowledge, information, news – fios in Irish and Scottish Gaelic, fys in Manx – and the English words video and wit.

Their roots can all be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root woid-/wid- (to see/to know), which, according to the OED, is also the root of words such as the Sanskrit वेदा (veda – knowledge); the Latin vidēre to see); the Welsh gwybod (to know); the Lithuanian véidas (face); and the Greek ἰνδάλλεσθαι (to appear).

The Irish and Scottish Gaelic word fios is also related to the word fionn (white, fair, pale; sincere, true, certain; small; fine, pleasant), which is how I discovered this while putting together a new page of Scottish Gaelic colours – you can see how easily I get distracted. This doesn’t worry me as it’s all very interesting.

La gueule enfarinée

By Simon

I discovered an interesting French expression yesterday while ferreting around in the dictionary – la gueule enfarinée, which literally means ‘the floured mouth’, but actually refers to someone who is ‘wet behind the ears’, i.e. new, untrained, inexperienced, immature, innocent, callow or naive (synonyms from The Chambers Thesaurus).

The word gueule usually refers to the mouth of an animal, and is also a slang word for the human mouth, which is normally bouche. Equivalent words in English include gob, mug, snout, cakehole, kisser, trap, etc – do you have any others? It comes from the Old French gole, from the Latin gula (gullet, throat, gluttony, palate), which is also the root of the English word gullet.

Why having a floury mouth is a sign of being inexperienced is a mystery to me. Does anyone know the origins of this expression?

Docent

By Simon

I came across an unfamiliar word today in a book I’m reading – docent. From the context I guessed it referred to someone who leads guided tours, but according to my English dictionary it means ‘(in the U.S.) a lecturer in some colleges and universities’, and it comes from the German word Dozent (associate professor, tutor, academic, lecturer), from the Latin docēns, from docēre (to teach).

According to Wikipedia, ‘Docent is a title at some European universities to denote a specific academic appointment within a set structure of academic ranks below professor (i.e. professor ordinarius). Docent is also used at some universities generically for a person who has the right to teach.’ It is used as an academic title in universities in a number of European countries.

There are also museum docents, who guide and educate visitors to museums and other institutions, usually voluntarily.

Have you come across the word docent before? What are such people called, if they exist, in your country?

In the UK they are known as guides.

Water lilies, nymphs and blue lotuses

By Simon

A nymphaea / water lily

There was talk of ponds and water lilies last night at the French conversation group and I discovered that one French word for water lily is nymphéa [nɛ̃.fe.a], which comes from nymphaea the Latin name for this genus of plants. The Latin word comes from the Ancient Greek word νύμφη (nymphe), which means girl, and also refers to a low ranking female deity who haunts rivers, springs, forests and other places [source].

Nymphéa refers specifially to the white water lily, or nymphaea alba, which also known as the European White Waterlily, White Lotus, or Nenuphar, a name that is also found in French: nénuphar [ne.ny.faʁ], and which comes via the Persian نيلوفر (ninufar) or the Arabic نلوفر (nilufar), from the Sanskrit नीलोतपल (nīlotpala – blue lotus), from नील (nīla – blue-black) and उतपल (utpala – lotus) [source].

Many names for plants in French come directly from Latin, whereas in English many plants have common names and Latin names. In other languages do plants have both common and Latin-derived names, or just one or the other?

Orientating oneself

By Simon

When visiting an unfamiliar place in order to find you way around it helps if you work out where you are in relation to particular landmarks and in which direction you’re facing. In order to use a map you need to know where north is so that you can hold the map the right way round. This process is known as getting ones bearings or orientating / orienting oneself. The verb orient(ate) means to to face or arrange things to face the east (orient) and comes, via French, from the Latin word orient (the eastern part of the world, the part of the sky in which the sun rises, the east, the rising sun, daybreak, dawn). These days we usually orientate ourselves by finding out where north is, so why do we use orient(ate)?

Recently I discovered, in On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does by Simon Garfield, that the use of orient(ate) comes from the the medieval practice of placing Jerusalem in the centre of maps, so lining them up involved making them face towards Jerusalem in the east.

The northern equivalent of orient is boreal (from the Greek βορέας – god of the north wind), so to ‘orientate’ oneself towards the north might be borealate – this word doesn’t exist, but the word borealize (to adopt northern manners or pronunciation) does.

There is also a verb occident, which means “to turn or direct towards the west; to place (a church) with the chancel at the western end.” The southern equivalent of orient is austral, and the verb to australize (to point southward) was once used in English, though no longer.

Source: Oxford English Dictionary

Le Grand-Bi

By Simon

Penny-farthing bicycle / Le Grand-Bi

I discovered today the French term for a penny-farthing bicycle (pictured right) is le grand-bi. It is also known as a bicycle, and that was what they were usually called in English when they were popular in the 1880s. The name penny-farthing only came to be used in around 1891.

The penny-farthing, which is also known as a high wheel or high wheeler, was developed by James Starley in England and Eugene Meyer in France in about 1870. They were based on the French boneshaker or vélocipède, a term from Latin meaning “fast feet” and coined by Nicéphore Niépce in 1818. The large front wheel enabled higher speeds as with each turn of the pedals you could go further, however sudden stops would often send a rider flying over the handle bars, so penny-farthings lost out to safety bicycles, which were introduced in the 1890s, and were the ancestors of modern bicycles.

I think the French name is short for le grand bicycle, and the name penny-farthing comes from the fact that front wheel was a lot larger than the back one, like an old penny coin and a farthing (1/4 of a penny).

In Welsh such bicycles are known as beic peni-ffardding or ceffyl haearn (“iron horse”).

Do you have other names from them? Are or were such bikes used in your country? Have you ever ridden one?

I once rode a small, modern version of a penny-farthing at a bike show in Taipei. It was interesting, and I soon learnt that you have get off by stepping down to the rear as trying to dismount like on a normal bicycle doesn’t work and can leave you sprawling on the floor.

One of the guys at the circus on Wednesday night was riding a penny-farthing, which is why it came up in conversation.

It’s very sticky

By Simon

Major Walter Clopton Wingfield

I discovered (via Inky Fool) an alternative word for tennis today – sphairistike [sfɛəˈrɪstɪkɪ], which sounds a bit like the phrase ‘it’s very sticky’. This was the name coined by Major Walter Clopton Wingfield (pictured right), who invented (lawn) tennis in 1873, and it comes from the Greek σϕαιριστική (sfairistiké), or ‘(skill) in playing at ball’ or ‘sphere-tech’.

Before then the word tennis, which comes from the French word tenez (hold), referred to a game played in an enclosed court – a game now known as Real Tennis.

Strangely the word sphairistike never really caught on, and everyone began referring to the game a tennis or lawn tennis.

A related word is sphairistic (adj) = tennis playing.

Do you know of any other obscure or obsolete terms for popular sports?

Apocope

By Simon

I learned a new word today – apocope [əˈpɒkəpiː], which is the loss of phonemes from the ends of words, particularly unstressed vowels.

It comes from the Greek word ἀποκόπτω (apokoptein), which means ‘cutting off’ and comes from ἀπό (apo-), ‘away’ and κόπτω (koptein), ‘to cut’.

Apocope is a mechanism which erodes some inflections and other word endings, and creates new ones, when words that were once separate become bound together. It also refers to the process of abbreviating words by dropping their endings.

Here are some examples:
– pānis (Latin for bread) > pan(em) (Vulgar Latin)> pan (Spanish), pane (Italian), pain (French), paõ (Portuguese)
– advertisement > advert > ad
– photographh > photo
– credibility > cred
– barbecue > barbie
– fanatic > fan

The term for phonemes being dropped from the beginning of a word is apheresis (/əˈfɛrɨsɪs/), Here are some examples:

– esquire > squire
– knife (/ˈknaɪf/) > /ˈnaɪf/ – the k was pronounced in Middle English
– telephone > phone
– ysbwriel > sbwriel (Welsh for rubbish, litter)
– ysgrifennu > sgrifennu (Welsh for to write), which has become sgwennu in some dialects of Welsh.

When a word loses internal phonemes, the process is known as syncope (/ˈsɪŋkəpiː/). Examples include:

– forecastle > fo’c’s’le
– never > n’er (poetic)
– over > o’er (poetic)

Source: Wikipedia, World Wide Words and About.com

Quockerwodger

By Simon

A quockerwodger

I came across the wonderful word quockerwodger on the BBC Radio 4 programme Wordaholics. Surprisingly it doesn’t appear in the OED, but on World Wide Words it is defined as “a wooden toy figure which jerks its limbs about when pulled by a string”, and also a politician whose strings are pulled by someone else.

It’s origin is uncertain and it doesn’t appear to be related to the dialect words quocken (to vomit/choke), or quocker (a man who goes harvesting at some distance from home).

Write

By Simon

Last night a friend asked me why the word write begins with a silent w, so I thought I’d investigate.

According to the OED, the word write comes from the Old English wrítan (to incise, engrave, write, draw; bestow by writing). It is related to the Old Frisian wrîta (to score, write) and the Old Saxon wrîtan (to cut, write), which all come from the from Proto-Germanic *writanan (to tear, scratch).

So it seems that the w goes back to Proto-Germanic, a reconstructed ancestor of all Germanic languages which is thought to have been spoken between about 500 BC and 500 AD.

Does anyone know if the w in write used to be pronounced?