Orkar du?

21 September 2017 By Simon

A useful Swedish expression I learnt recently is Orkar du?, which can mean “Do you have the energy?”, “Can you be bothered?” or similar.

It doesn’t mean “Are you a killer whale (orca)?”, as I thought it did when I first heard it.

Orkar is the present tense of orka [ˈɔrˌka], which means to manage, to be able to, to cope with, or can. It is used in Icelandic and Faroese as well. It comes from the Old Norse orka, from Proto-Germanic *wurkijaną (to work, to make), from Proto-Indo-European *wṛǵ- (to make), which is also the root of the English word work.

Here are a few examples of how it’s used:

– så mycket de orkar bära = as much as they can bear
– ät-så-mycket-du-orkar = all-you-can-eat
– Jag orkar inte = I can’t be bothered
– Jag orkar inte med tanken på att förlora de små skatterna = I can’t stand the thought of losing my little treasures.
– Hur ofta hör vi inte att människor inte orkar bry sig? = How often do we hear that people just don’t care?
– Jag orkar inte med detta längre. = I can’t take this anymore

A related word is ork, which means energy.

Sources: Linguee, bab.la and Wiktionary

Joyful and blessed

16 September 2017 By Simon

I have now been learning Icelandic for a couple of weeks, and am still on Lesson 1 in Colloquial Icelandic. I’m in no hurry, and just want to learn the basics, at least at first, so my lack of progress doesn’t worry me.

There seem to be quite a few ways to greet people in Icelandic. These include:

– Halló
– Góðan dag(inn) = Good day
– Komdu sæll og blessaður (>m) = “Come joyful and blesed”
– Komdu sæl og blessað (>f) = “Come joyful and blessed”
– Komdu sæll (>m), Komdu sæl (>f)
– Sæll (>m), Sæl (>f)
– Sæll vertu (>m), Sæl vertu (>f)
– Blessaður (>m), Blessað (>f)

Goodbyes include:

– Vertu blessaður (>m), Vertu blessuð (>f) = “Be blessed”
– Vertu sæll (>m), Vertu sæl (>f) = “Be joyful”
– Bless á meðan = “Bye as long as”
– Bless bless = Bye bye
– Bless = Bye
– Við sjáumst = “We (will) see each other again”
– Sjáumst síðar = See you later

>m = said to males, >f = said to females

You can hear recordings of some of these on my Icelandic phrases page.

Are these all commonly-used?

Do other languages have gender-specific greetings?

Rochester and the Huguenots

12 September 2017 By Simon

This weekend I visited Rochester in Kent for first time, and had a nice day exploring the town. Among its historic buildings, which include an impressive Norman castle, there is the French Hospital. This was founded in 1718 to provide accommodation for Hugenots (French protestants), fleeing religious persecution in France. It now provides sheltered accommodation for elderly descendents of those Hugenots.

I also visited the nearby Hugenot Museum, which is very interesting.

One question that is apparently often asked, is where does the name Hugenot come from?

There are various answers to this, but nobody knows which is correct.

The Hugenots in fact referred to themselves, at least early on, as members of L’Église Réformée (the Reformed Church).

The most credible theories are:

– It is derived from the Flemish Huisgenooten (House fellows), and/or the Swiss German Eidgenosen (confederate), and also possibly from the name of Hugues Besançon, a leader of the Genevan partisans.

– They are named after King Hugo’s Gate in Tours, which was reputedly haunted by Le Roy Huget.

– They are named after Hugh Capet (941-996), the first King of the Franks of the House of Capet.

Apparently my surname, Ager, is a Huguenot name, though there is no Huguenot connections in the family history, as far as I’m aware.

Sources: Hugenot Museum, Online Etymology Dictionary

Меньше кошек / Fewer cats

7 September 2017 By Simon

Fletcher and Smudge, my sister's cats

The following useful sentence came up in one of the Russian Duolingo lessons I went through today:

У неё меньше кошек, и это хорошо.

This means, “She has fewer cats, and that is good.”

To me this suggests a whole backstory:

There once was a woman who had really liked cats. Her family always had cats when she was growing up, and when she had a place of her own, she got a couple of kittens. When they grew up, one of them had kittens, and the woman liked them so much, she couldn’t bear to part with them, so she kept all four of them. She also took in cats from animal shelters, and before long her house was full of them. Her friends were worried about her as she spent all her money on her cats, and spent most of her time with them. They offered to find alternative homes for the cats, and eventually persuaded her to give some of them away. She has fewer cats now, and that is good. The End.

Now, if I could just write that all in Russian, it would be a very useful exercise.

Does the Russian sentence suggest anything to you?

The cats in the photo are my sister’s, when they were kittens. The ginger one is Fletcher, and the black and white one is Smudge.

Huffkins and Huffles

5 September 2017 By Simon

A pile of huffkins

Last week I learnt a lovely new word – huffkin – which is apparently a traditional type of bread roll from Kent in the southeast of England (see photo).

According to A Dictionary of the Kentish Dialect and Provincialisms, a huffkin, or hufkin, is “A kind of bun or light cake, which is cut open, buttered, and so eaten.” Such rolls were traditionally served at a hopkin, a supper for hop pickers.

Kent is an area of the UK I know quite well, as some of my relatives live there, and my dad grew there. However, I didn’t know anything about the local dialect, until now.

I couldn’t find any etymology for huffkin, but guess that the -kin part is a diminutive. It comes from the Middle Dutch -ken, and is used in words like catkin, bodkin, manikin, munchkin, pumpkin and napkin, and can also used with names – Jenkin(s), Simkin(s), Hopkin(s), Watkin(s) [source].

Other interesting Kentish dialect words I found include:

– joskin = a farm labourer (particularly a driver of horses, or carter’s mate), engaged to work the whole year round for one master
– galligaskins = trousers
– strooch = to drag the feet along the ground in wallking
– hopkin = supper for the work-people, after the hop-picking is over
– huffle = a merry meeting; a feast

Few people speak Kentish dialect anymore. You can hear a sample on the Survey of English Dialects, and on the video below:

The name Kent comes from the Old English Cent, from the Latin Cantium, from the Brythonic *Cantio. In Welsh it is Caint.

Filibustering freebooters!

1 September 2017 By Simon

What’s the connecting between the words filibuster and freebooter?

The answer is, they both come from the same Dutch word vrijbuiter [ˈvrɛi̯bœy̯tər] (plunderer, robber), from vrij (free), buit (booty) and‎ -er (agent suffix).

A freebooter as originally “an adventurer who pillages, plunders or wages ad-hoc war on other nations”, and apparently also means “one who rehosts online media without authorization”. It is a calque translation from Dutch, and was first recorded in English in the 1560s [source].

A filibuster originally meant “a mercenary soldier; specifically, a mercenary who travelled illegally in an organized group from the United States to a country in Central America or the Spanish West Indies in the mid-19th century seeking economic and political benefits through armed force”. Over time it also came to mean, “A tactic (such as giving long, often irrelevant speeches) employed to delay the proceedings of, or the making of a decision by, a legislative body, particularly the United States Senate”.

Filibuster was first recorded in English in the 1580s as flibutor. It was borrowed from the Spanish filibustero (pirate), from French flibustier (pirate), from the Dutch vrijbuiter.

I discovered this from Bill Bryson’s Made In America: An Informal History of American English, which I’m reading at the moment.

Filibustering freebooters! sounds like the kind of curse Captain Haddock uses in the Tintin stories. He does in fact say Filibuster(s)! and Fancy-dress freebooter!, but not Filibustering freebooters!, as far as I can discover.

C’est inouï !

30 August 2017 By Simon

inOUi logo

The French exclamation C’est inouï ! means “It’s incredible!”.

The word inouï [inwi] means unprecedented, incredible, unheard-of, extraordinary, amazing. It is a combination of the negative prefix in- and ouï, which comes from ouïr (to hear, to listen), from the Old French oir (to hear, listen), from Latin audiō (I hear, listen, pay attention), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂ew-is-d-, a compound of *h₂ewis (clearly, manifestly) and *dʰh₁-ye/o- (to render) [source].

A friend told me last week that the TGV (le train à grande vitesse), France’s high-speed rail service, is being rebranded the inOui. In fact, inOui is the new name, introduced in 2017, for certain premium services on the TGV. All premium services will be known as inOUi by 2020. The name Ouigo was introduced for discount TGV services in 2013 [source].

The name inOui has been mocked and criticised by many.

Ouigo works in English as well (We go), but I’m sure English speakers will be joking about inOui, if they aren’t already.

Les noms collectifs

25 August 2017 By Simon

Last night at the French conversation group one of the things we talked about was collective nouns or les noms collectifs.

There are plenty of these in English, like a flamboyance of flamingoes, a charm of goldfinches, a kindle of kittens, a cartload of monkeys, and so on.

We couldn’t think of many in French, so I thought I’d investigate. Here’s what I found:

– un amas de bois = a heap of wood
– un banc de poissons = a shoal of fish
– un banc de baleines = a school/pod of whales
– une bande de copains = a group of friends
– une bande d’idiots = a bunch of idiots
– une brassée de roses = an armful of roses
– un ensemble de dents = a set of teeth
– un essaim d’abeilles = a swarm of bees
– un essaim de beautés = a bevy of beauties
– une horde de lions = a pride of lions
– une horde de barbares = a horde of barbarians
– une meute de chiens = a pack of dogs
– une troupe/horde de babouins = a troop of baboons
– un troupeau de vaches = a herd of cows
– un troupeau de mouton = a flock of sheep
– une volée d’oiseaux = a flock of birds

I’m sure there are more. What about in other languages?

By the way, are there collective nouns for linguists and polyglots? Maybe babble or Babel.

Sources: Grammaire AIDENET, Reverso, Wiktionary

How many roads?

31 July 2017 By Simon