Hello hello hello good people! It’s Tuesday, and that means the time of Fun Etymologies is come!
Often, when words are borrowed from one language to another, they change meaning, sometimes even dramatically. We’ve already seen it happen in some past Fun Etymologies. However, some kinds of meaning change (or semantic change, as we linguists like to call them) are more frequent than others. Today, we want to introduce you to semantic narrowing: this is when a word which originally had a very broad meaning comes to mean something very specific, and it happens all the time in borrowing.
For example, take the Japanese loanwords “katana”, “kimono” and “sake”. In Japanese, these words mean “sword”, “dress” and “alcoholic drink”, respectively. When they were borrowed in English, however, their meaning became specialised: while for a Japanese speaker beer, wine and whisky are all “sake”, to an English speaker the word only refers to Japanese rice wine, for which they have a number of names depending on the variety; to a Japanese, a European medieval Zweihänder is as much a “katana” as what we call a “katana” in English, whose technical name should be “nihonto” or “daito”.
Another example is “sombrero”, which in Spanish simply means “hat”, but which was borrowed in English to mean a particular kind of wide-brimmed hat used in Mexico.
Narrowing also occurs within a language over time: the ancestor of the modern English word “hound” once simply meant “dog”, but today only refers to a specific set of breeds. An extreme example is the word “deer”, which comes from Old English “deor”, which simply meant “animal”!
It’s Tuesday and, as usual, that means Fun Etymology time!
You know we at the HLC like to point out unlikely links between seemingly unconnected words, and today we’re not going to let you down. Today’s question is what does the salary you receive each year have to do with salt?
Well, apart from the money you earn being useful for buying salt, not much, isn’t it?
But actually, the word “salary” and the word “salt” share the same origin, the IE root *sal- ‘salt’.
Why is this so? At the time of the Romans salt was a very precious commodity: it was difficult to extract from salt water and from mines, and the demand for it was very high, making it even more precious than gold in some circumstances (that’s where the common superstition that spilling salt is bad luck comes from. Imagine spilling over a pot of gold dust!). Due to this, during the Roman Empire very well-payed professions, such as soldiers, received part of their pay in sal, a kind of payment which was called a “salarium”, or “salt-money”, a word derived from “sal”, “salt”. This, like many other words, made its way through Old French, where it became “salarie”, and finally to Modern English “salary”.
Next time you season your food, think about how lucky you are that you live in a time when salt doesn’t cost like actual gold!
Hello, lovely followers! It’s Tuesday, and that means our Fun Etymology is here!
Today, we want to go back to the origins of Fun Etymologies and talk to you once more about surprising foreign influences on the English language.
During the 19th century, an…ummm…ethically problematic period in the history of England, the British Empire had, through subterfuge (as well as instigating an actual war), obtained exclusive mercantile access to the Chinese city of Hong Kong. In the ensuing decades, commerce with China exploded, and interest in that millennia-old isolationist empire bloomed as well.
To communicate with the people they were doing business with, the English and Chinese merchants developed what is called a pidgin, a language that develops whenever speakers of two totally different languages have the need to communicate, and which “mixes” grammar and vocabulary from both its parent languages. The opening of commerce with China was so world-breaking that numerous words made their way from this pidgin to the English language, some of which we still use every day. Here’s a short list:
1. The word “pidgin” itself: probably representing a Cantonese pronunciation of the word “business”. 2. The word “ketchup”, from Min-Nan 鮭汁 (ke-chiap), which originally indicated a kind of fermented fish brine used as a sauce. That’s why Heinz bottles still specify it’s TOMATO ketchup. 3. The expression “long time no see”, a direct translation of Chinese 好久不见 (hǎojiǔbújiàn). 4. The word “chopsticks”, which is a blend of the Cantonese word 速 (approximately pronounced “chuck”, meaning “fast”), with the English word “sticks”, probably influenced from the homophony of the words for “fast” and “chopstick” in Mandarin (both pronounced “kuài”). So basically, a mix of an English word with a Cantonese-Mandarin pun. Talk about complicated!
These are some of the most prominent, but the list is amazingly long. If you look around, you’re bound to find a lot more.
Just another example of how misguided people who want to keep the English language “pure” actually are. See you next time!
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: French is a beautiful, romantic language; Italian sounds like music; Spanish is passionate and primal; Japanese is aggressive; Polish is melancholic; and German is a guttural, ugly, unpronounceable mess (Ha! Tricked you! You couldn’t stop me because I’ve written all of this down way before now. Your cries and frantic gesticulations were for naught.)
We’ve all heard these judgements (and many others) repeated multiple times over the course of our lives; not only in idle conversation, but also in movies, books, comics, and other popular media. There’s even a series of memes dedicated to mocking how German sounds in relation to other European languages:
“Ich liebe dich” is a perfectly fine and non-threatening way of expressing affection towards another human being
What you might not know is that this phenomenon has a technical name in linguistics: phonaesthetics.[1]
Phonaesthetics, in short, is the hypothesis that languages are objectively more or less beautiful or pleasant depending on various parameters, such as vowel to consonant ratio, presence or absence of certain sounds etc., and, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s a gigantic mountain of male bovine excrement.
Pictured: phonaesthetics
Let me explain why:
A bit of history
Like so many other terrible ideas, phonaesthetics goes way back in human history. In fact, it may have been with us since the very beginning.
The ancient Greeks, for example, deemed their language the most perfect and beautiful and thought all other languages ugly and ungainly. To them, these foreign languages all sounded like strings of unpleasant sounds: a mocking imitation of how they sounded to the Greeks, “barbarbarbar”, is where we got our word “barbarian” from.
In the raging (…ly racist) 19th century, phonaesthetics took off as a way to justify the rampant prejudice white Europeans had against all ethnicities different from their own.
The European elite of the time arbitrarily decided that Latin was the most beautiful language that ever existed, and that the aesthetics of all languages would be measured against it. That’s why Romance languages such as Italian or French, which descended from Latin[2], are still considered particularly beautiful.
Thanks to this convenient measuring stick, European languages were painted as euphonious ( ‘pleasant sounding’), splendid monuments of linguistic accomplishment, while extra-European languages were invariably described as cacophonous (‘unpleasant sounding’), barely understandable masses of noise. This period is when the common prejudice that Arabic is a harsh and unpleasant language arose, a prejudice that is easily dispelled once you hear a mu’adhin chant passages from the Qur’an from the top of a minaret.
Another tool in the racist’s toolbox, very similar to phonaesthetics, and invented right around the turn of the 19th century, was phrenology, or racial-biology, the pseudoscience which alleged to be able to discern a person’s intelligence and personality from the shape of their head. To the surprise of no one, intelligence, grace and other positive characteristics were all associated with the typical form of a European white male skull, while all other shapes indicated shortcomings in various neurological functions. What a pleasant surprise that must have been for the European white male inventors of this technique![3] Phrenology was eventually abandoned and widely condemned, but phonaesthetics, unfortunately, wasn’t, and it’s amazingly prevalent even today.
To see how prevalent this century-old model of linguistic beauty is in popular culture, a very good example are Tolkien’s invented languages. For all their amazing virtues, Tolkien’s novels are not exactly known for featuring particularly nuanced moral actors: the good guys might have some (usually redeemable) flaws, but the bad guys are just bad, period.
Here’s a brief passage in Quenya, the noblest of all Elven languages:
Ai! Laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
Yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yéni ve lintë yuldar avánier
Mi oromardi lissë-miruvóreva
[…]
Notice the high vowel-to-consonant ratio, the prevalence of liquid (“l”, “r”), fricative (“s”, “v”) and nasal (“n”, “m”) sounds, all characteristic of Latinate languages.
Now, here’s a passage in the language of the Orcs:
Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul
Ash nazg thrakatulûk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul
See any differences? The vowel-to-consonant ratio is almost reversed, and most syllables end with a consonant. Also, notice the rather un-Latinate consonant combinations (“zg”, “thr”), and the predominance of stops (“d”, “g”, “b”, “k”). It is likely that you never thought about what makes Elvish so “beautiful” and “melodious”, and Orcish (or Klingon, for that matter), so harsh and unpleasant: these prejudices are so deeply ingrained that we don’t even notice they’re present.
So why is phonaesthetics “wrong”?
Well, the reason is actually very simple: beauty is subjective and cannot be scientifically defined. As they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Not this beholder. Image copyright: Wizards of the Coast
What one finds “beautiful” is subject to change both in space and in time. If you think German’s relatively low vowel-to-consonant ratio is “harsh”, then you have yet to meet Nuxálk.
Welcome to phonaesthetic hell.
Speaking of German, it is actually a very good example of how these supposedly “objective” and “common sense” criteria of phonetic beauty can change with time, sometimes even abruptly. You see, in the 19th century, German was considered a very beautiful language, on par with Italian or French. A wealth of amazing prose and poetry was written in it: it was probably the main language of Romantic literature. It was also the second language of opera, after Italian, and was routinely described as melodious, elegant and logical.
Then the Nazis came.
Nazis: always ruining everything.
Suddenly, Germans were the bad guys. No longer the pillars of European intellectual culture, their language became painted as harsh, aggressive, unfriendly and cold, and suddenly every Hollywood villain and mad scientist acquired a German accent.
So, what’s the takeaway from this long and rambling rant?
No language is more, or less, beautiful than any other language. All languages have literature, poetry, song and various other ways to beautifully use their sounds for artistic purposes, and the idea that some are better at this than others is a relic from a prejudiced era better left behind. So next time you feel tempted to mock German for how harsh and unpleasant it sounds, stop and think that maybe this is not actually what you think, and that you’ve been programmed by a century of social prejudice into thinking so.
And read some Goethe, you’ll like it.
Stay tuned for next week, when the amazing Rebekah will bring you on the third leg of our lightning trip through Phonphon!
Phonaesthetics also has a different meaning, which is the study of how certain combinations of sounds evoke specific meanings in a given language. Although this form of phonaesthetics has its problems, too, it is not what I’m talking about in this post, so keep that in mind as we go forward. ↑
First the men assumed that the female skull was smaller than the male, and this was obviously a sign of their inferior intelligence. Later, however, they found that the female skull was larger, so they came up with the idea that this meant females were closer to children, and thus the male was still more intelligent! – Lisa
And now for something completely different: It’s… Monty Python’s Fun Etymology!
You probably all know the comedy troupe Monty Python. Their revolutionary brand of absurdist and deconstructionist comedy has been deemed as influential for the comedic art as the Beatles’ songs have been for rock music. Heck, all of us could probably recite the entire script of Monty Python and the Holy Grail by heart. Don’t try to deny it.
As with many other influential personages in literature and art in general, Monty Python have influenced the English language to a surprising degree. The most obvious word originating from them is “pythonesque”, an adjective used to describe particulary absurd or surreal comedic situations, but there are a couple of others which are far more surprising.
The most famous and by far most prevalent contribution to the English language Monty Python made is the modern meaning of the word “spam”. The origin of the word, as most of you will know, is the name of an American brand of tinned meat produced by the Hormel Food Corporation. Nobody knows where its name ultimately comes from, and Hormel insists its origin is known only to a select few within the company. The most popular theory is that it’s an abbreviation of “spiced ham”. However, the word “spam” today has another meaning which is far more frequent than its original one, and that is “unwanted or unsolicited messages”, especially in reference to e-mail advertising. This surprising usage doesn’t come from any particular tendency Spam had to be advertised via e-mail, but from a Monty Python sketch filmed for their series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In it, a couple walks (or rather descends) in what looks like a sordid cafè entirely patronised by Vikings and asks the waitress for the day’s menu, which she obediently lists. Every single dish in this menu contains bewildering amounts of Spam, with the word “spam” often repeated multiple times within the same dish. Trouble is, one half of the couple doesn’t like Spam, and repeatedly asks for it to be removed from some of the dishes, a request which is invariably met with disgust by the waitress and her husband, who both love Spam and want to have as much as possible. This intrusion of the word Spam in every other sentence persists until the end of the episode, and even during the credits, where the names of various people are frequently interrupted by this annoying canned product. When e-mail was invented, the tendency of some unscrupulous advertisers to program bots to send thousands of unsolicited e-mails reminded people of this sketch, and the rest is history.
Fun fact: the same episode containing the Spam sketch also contains a sketch about a Hungarian tourist with a comically inaccurate phrasebook trying to buy cigarettes. This sketch originated a common running joke among translators, which is including the sentence “my hovercraft is full of eels” in phrasebooks, even though the circumstances in which one might use it are, to put it mildly, very unlikely to occur.
Here you can find a page with the sentence translated in an enormous number of languages!
Hello, fellow users of the World Wide Web. It’s Tuesday, and it’s time for our usual appointment with Fun Etymologies. Today we continue our little series of words which have acquired a new meaning with the rise of computers with an exploration of the word “patch”.
This word, like many other words, comes from Old French, but what its original form was exactly is a bit of a mystery. The most common conjecture is that it comes from Northern Old French “pieche”, a dialectal variation of the Old French word “piece”, which was imported into English unchanged, another example of words splitting in two during their history. The ultimate root of the word is the Indo-European root *kwezd- “division, piece”, which evolved into Gaulish *pettsi, which was then borrowed into Vulgar Latin as *pettia (pronounced “pettsia”) and finally evolved into the form we all know and love today.
As far as computers are concerned, a patch is a change applied to a program’s code in order to correct bugs (see last week’s Fun Etymology for the history of this one!), and its name once again goes back to the earliest computers. Back in the day, computer programs were stored on punch cards: pieces of cardboard with patterns of holes punched into them which told the computer which circuits to switch on or off and when. Writing a program in this format was tedious work, not to mention that these programs were often huge (thousands of cards long). This meant that mistakes often crept in. When the mistake consisted of a lack of a hole where one should have been, the solution was simply punching in the missing hole; but when the mistake was a hole where no hole should have been, how would one go about solving it? The solution was quite literally applying a patch to the extra holes, so that the machine would not be able to read them, as seen in the photo below.
So next time your Xbox starts downloading a patch for your favourite game and you have to wait for it to finish, take solace in the fact that at least you don’t have to physically patch thousands of holes on a mile-long strip of paper.
print “Hello faithful followers!” run (FunEtymology.exe)
return TRUE
Hello faithful followers!
On today’s Fun Etymology, we’ll start a miniseries of maybe five episodes or so dedicated to computers (as you might have guessed from the horrific imitation of code used as a greeting today). Computers are a relatively new phenomenon, having really taken off only in the latter part of the 1960s, but they already have an extensive, intriguing, and sometimes funny terminology associated with them. Today we’re going to explore the history of the word “bug”.
The root meaning of the word “bug”, as you all know, is “insect”, but the origin of the word is shrouded in mystery. It only appeared in English in the 1620s, with no indication of where it could have come from. The most common hypothesis is that it might be a descendant of the Middle English word “bugge”, meaning “monster” or “something frightening”, a meaning which only survived in the modern word “bugbear”, which is NOT a plantigrade with arthropodal characteristics, but a kind of goblin.
The origin of the word “bugge” are hypothesised to lie either in Welsh “bwg” meaning “goblin” or “monster”, or in the same Indo-European root that gave English the word “buck”, a male goat.
We all know what computer bugs are, and we’ve probably met many in our dealings with these friendly (for now) machines: it’s when some fault in a programme causes errors and malfunctioning, which in extreme cases can shut it down. The term as applied to computers can be traced back to the 1940s and 50s, when the very first computers were operated through electromechanical switches, little iron switches which could flick open and closed dozens of times per second, thanks to magnetic actuators. Unfortunately, the electromagnetic fields needed to operate these switches attracted certain species of moths, which use them to orient themselves in space, and from time to time one would get caught in a switch, blocking it and crashing the computer. That’s why we say that a malfunctioning programme has a “bug”.
大家好！ How’s life, faithful readers? If you’ve been paying attention the past few months, you’ll have noticed a pattern in what we publish each week on Tuesday. That’s right: it’s Fun Etymology time!
Today, we want to talk about hidden words. Sometimes words hide inside other words, camouflaging their forms so that you have to know where to look to find them. Such words are like the fairies of old: mischevious and adept at hiding from the mortals’ prying eyes. One such word is today’s word: “elf”.
Readers of Tolkien (and of fantasy in general) will surely be familiar with the image of the Nordic Elf, the elf as imagined by the people of ancient Scandinavia: beautiful, ethereal, and dangerous in some subtle way. In English and Celtic folklore, however, elves were a different beast altogether: short, ugly, and terribly mischevious if not even malicious.
The word “elf” goes back a long time: it comes unchanged from Old English, and has cousins in many other Germanic languages (such as German “Alp” and Old Norse “alfr”). Ultimately, it can be traced back to Proto-Germanic *albiz, but beyond that its origins are mysterious. One hypothesis is that it could come from Proto-Indo-European “*albho-“, meaning “white”.
Where does this word hide, you ask? Well, if any of you is called Alfred, Alvin, or (less likely) Eldridge, it’s right in your name! In the Middle Ages, people believed that fairies and elves lay hidden around the world ready to snatch children and waylay adults, and had a fearful respect for such creatures. Many names still used today contain the word “elf”. The three names I’ve just cited, for example, come from Old English “Ælfræd”, meaning “Elf-counsel”, “Ælfwine”, meaning “Elf-friend”, and “Ælfric”, meaning “Elf-ruler”, respectively.
Who knows what other mischevious words hide within our names? Can you find out?
Up until now, we at the HLC have mainly written about languages that evolved naturally out in the vast and scary place we call the real world, descending from parent languages, which descended from even older parent languages, which presumably descended from the grunts and shrieks our simian ancestors used to brag to each other about their poo-flinging prowess.
However, not all languages have evolved naturally. Some, believe it or not, have been partly or wholly created out of whole cloth by people such as hobbyists, writers, philosophers or logicians. These are called artificial languages, or conlangs (short for constructed languages), and they go waaaaay back.
Now you might be objecting: “but aren’t all languages human-created?”
Well, yes, they are. But there’s a difference between natural languages (or natlangs) and conlangs: while natural languages evolve more or less spontaneously over a span of millennia through their use in a wide community, conlangs are wholly and deliberately manufactured (and sometimes evolved) by one or more people over the course of months, or at most decades.
No hominid sat at a table (or a rock formation resembling a table) in prehistoric times and deliberately decided to create a communication system which went beyond simple mating calls and poo-flinging calls; language evolved naturally out of whatever was before it through means that are still not very clear.
Or maybe they did, and we’re all speaking the descendants of some genius hominid’s conlang. Who knows?
2. The First Age of Conlangs: 12th to 17th Centuries
Anyway, nobody knows how far back the history of language invention goes, but it’s pretty probable that the first such artificial languages were created for religiousor ritual purposes, to have a secret language only the priests knew with which they could communicate with the gods. Why do we think that? Because the first artificial language ever passed down to us is just such a language: it was called Lingua Ignota, and was invented in the 12th century by St. Hildegard of Bingen, an abbess and Christian mystic. Very little of her creation has trickled down through the centuries, but we know that she used this language to pray and to talk to the other nuns in her abbey. Her being the first known conlanger, as well as an actual Catholic Saint, earned her the moniker of Patron Saint of Conlanging.
Other mystical or magical conlangs came into existence during the 15th and 17th centuries, such as Enochian, created by the famous English occultist John Dee, who claimed it was the language of the angels. Very few actual complete conlangs have reached us from this very early period, and no one actually knows whether St. Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota truly was the first conlang or, as it’s more likely, others existed before hers which simply didn’t survive the ages.
3. The Second Age of Conlangs: 18th to 19th Centuries
The second chapter in the history of conlanging began in the 18th century, when a guy named John Wilkins published his book entitled Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. In this book, he proposed a language which would divide all of human thought in discrete categories, each represented by a different sound, which could be combined to form words. His ultimate goal was to create a maximally efficient and understandable language which could be used to communicate with all of humankind. It was the first auxiliary language, or auxlang, a conlang whose noble goal is facilitating communication between different cultures, as well as being culturally and linguistically neutral. In an era of unceasing nationalistic struggle, these utopic goals attracted the attention of numerous scholars of the Age of Enlightenment.
His efforts didn’t lead to much, but his ideas exploded in the 19th century, giving birth to what can only be called an auxiliary language craze, which saw the creation of numerous languages aimed at facilitating communication between different cultures, such as Volapük (a strange mishmash of various European languages), Solresol (a language meant to be sung or played on an instrument as well as spoken), and what is arguably the most famous conlang of all, Esperanto, created by Polish optician L. Zamenhof in 1887, and which holds the distinction of being the only conlang so far to have acquired native speakers. Esperanto spawned innumerable variants and imitators, some of which are still being created today.
Ultimately, though, the great auxiliary language experiment did not succeed. Unfortunately, the very concept of an auxiliary language presents some insurmountable difficulties which make its successful application all but impossible.
Another kind of conlang which originated in this period was the engineered language, or engelang. Engelangs are conlangs created by linguists or philosophers with the goal of exploring aspects of language or human thought, sort of like “linguistic labs”, so to speak. Some of the most famous engelangs include Lojban, whose goal is creating a language which obeys the rules of formal logic; Ithkuil, a monument of engelanging created by John Quijada, whose goal was creating a language which could convey the most information with the greatest degree of clarity and economy of space (it has 92 cases!!); and Toki Pona, created by Sonja Lang, a cuddly language which tries to encapsulate human thought in just 120 words.
4. The Golden Age of Conlangs: mid-20th Century to Present
The third and ongoing chapter in the history of language invention began in the 20th century, with the rise of artistic languages, or artlangs. For the first time in history, conlangs were created with no particular goal in mind, but as a means of artistic expression. The most famous creator of such languages was English linguist and novelist J.R.R. Tolkien, the Mozart of conlanging, who I hope needs no introduction. He started conlanging as a child, and called creating artificial languages his “secret vice”. His conlanging work is monumental: he created multiple languages, which he then artificially evolved to create numerous language families, each comprised of a dozen languages or so. This magnificent handiwork is so complex that there are actual linguists specialising in the study of his languages, and scholarly periodicals published regularly about them.
Another famous artistic language is Klingon, created for the Star Trek television series by Mark Okrand, probably the second best known conlang after Esperanto.
But it’s with the premiere of the TV series and cultural phenomenon Game of Thrones in 2011, which prominently features conlangs created by professional conlanger David J. Peterson, that the conlanging world truly exploded. Where once conlangers were numbered in the dozens, now they are hundreds, with forums and Facebook groups dedicated to this peculiar hobby.
This explosion of interest, together with the publication of conlanging manuals and the spread of conlanging websites on the Internet, has given the current period the name of Golden Age of Conlanging.
So, boys and girls, this is the history of conlanging. Unlike the history of natural language, this is a history of human invention and ingenuity.
Maybe the next chapter of the history of conlanging could be written by some of you guys.
Stay tuned for next week, when the astonishing Lisa will bring tae ye the historie o the Scots Leid.
It’s Tuesday, and it’s time for our usual appointment with etymologies and fun!
Today’s word is one of the most interesting words in all European languages: “bear”. I bet you’ve never thought about “bear” as a particularly interesting word, but I assure you that by the end of this post you’ll think differently.
In Europe, the original Indo-European root for “bear”, *rtko, survived in the Romance and Greek languages (as the descendants of Latin “ursus” and Greek “arktos”, respectively) as well as some of the Celtic branch, but was completely lost in the Germanic and Slavic branches. Why? Because the bear was a sacred animal to the Germanic and Slavic people, and uttering its true name was considered an affront to the gods, so workarounds were devised to refer to the bear without offending the powers. The solution the Germanic people came up with was calling the bear “the Brown One”, and that’s where the modern word “bear” comes from: the Indo-European root *bher-, from which also comes the word “brown”. Russians call the bear “the Honey Thief”, “medved'”.
As for the original name of the bear? It came back into English through Greek as the word “Arctic”, the place where bears are, and Antarctic, the place away from where the bears are. That’s right: which of the two poles of Earth you are in is defined by whether or not there are bears in it.
