tordo
27 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Indo-European, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Tordo is one of the Spanish words (the other being zorzal) for the type of songbird that English calls a thrush. Could the similarity of the Spanish and English words, I wondered, be evidence that they’re related? The tracing back of tordo to its Latin predecessor turdus made that seem more likely. To check further, I looked in my computer’s Dictionary application and found that thrush developed from Old English thrysce and is related to throstle, a word I’d never heard of. Going to the entry for throstle, I learned that it’s an old-fashioned British term for ‘a song thrush.’ More important, though, was the statement in the Origin section of that entry pointing out that throstle came “from an Indo-European root shared by Latin turdus ‘thrush.’” Case closed.
In looking up tordo in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española I found that the word also means, with respect to a horse, ‘que tiene el pelo mezclado de negro y blanco, como el plumaje del tordo.’ In other words, based on the plumage of a thrush, Spanish tordo was extended to a horse whose hair is patterned in black and white. Spanish, of course, is hardly alone in extending the meaning of a word based on some attribute of the thing. In the case of thrush, the American Heritage Dictionary notes that English has used the word as a slang term for ‘a woman who sings popular songs,’ based not on the way the bird looks but on its singing.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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coleóptero
23 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: English language, entomology, etymology, Greek, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Here’s how the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española defines the adjective coleóptero (which also functions as a noun) : ‘Se dice de los insectos que tienen boca dispuesta para masticar, caparazón consistente y dos élitros córneos que cubren dos alas membranosas, plegadas al través cuando el animal no vuela.’ English-speaking entomologists use the equivalent coleopteran, and the rest of us usually say beetle (though some other insects like weevils and fireflies are in this group as well).
Scientists created the technical term coleóptero/coleopteran from the Greek words koleon ‘sheath’ and pteron ‘wing,’ a reference to the fact that a beetle has two sheaths that cover each of its membranous wings when the insect is at rest (and in fact the sheaths evolved as modifications of what were originally forewings).
While coleóptero/coleopteran is hardly a common word, the name of a much larger flying thing is: it’s helicóptero/helicopter, literally ‘[an aircraft with a] helical wing.’ Most English speakers analyze the word as heli + copter, even to the point that copter exists as a colloquial shortening of the compound and heli- serves as a first element in heliport, but etymology thumbs its nose at that division and insists that helicopter is really helico ‘helical’ + pter ‘wing.’
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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prosa
19 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Spanish and English share, with only a last-letter’s difference, the word prosa/prose, which has a history less straightforward than the type of writing it represents. English took prose from Old French, which, like Spanish, got it from Latin, where it was the first part of the phrase prosa oratio. The fact that oratio was a feminine noun meaning ‘speech’ (think of oración/oration) implies that prosa was originally an adjective telling the sort of speech being referred to, and so it was. The adjective prosus (the default masculine form) was a phonetically simplified version of prorsus, which had already been simplified from Old Latin provorsus (remember that Latin v was pronounced like English w). Latin pro, a relative of native English for and forth, meant ‘forward’ and in this case ‘straightforward,’ while vorsus was a past participle of vertere ‘to turn.’ Put all that together, and prosa/prose is ‘speech that is turned out in a straightforward manner.’ Now if we could just get lawyers and politicians (and I would add administrators and professors of education, social scientists, and teenagers) to remember that, the world would be ‘[hence]forth [con]verted’ to a better place.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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agarita
16 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: botany, English language, etymology, Latin language, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Yesterday in my other blog I showed a photograph of some blossoming agarita, a shrub whose name English has taken straight from Spanish. Although the steps in the etymology are vague, agarita seems to be based on Mexican Spanish agrito, the diminutive of agrio ‘bitter.’ People who know that this shrub produces small red fruits that have traditionally been made into a sweet jelly may wonder about the connection, but ‘tart’ may be a better translation of agrio than ‘bitter’ in this case. In Old Spanish the adjective was agro, which developed from Latin acer, with stem acr-, that meant ‘sharp’: think of the related acrimonia/acrimony and agudo/acute, for example. That sharpness is coincidentally appropriate for agarita, which has stiff leaves whose lobes taper to needle-like points.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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explode
13 Feb 2012 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
The last post dealt with the Latin verb plaudere that meant ‘to clap, strike, beat,’ and with the aplaudir/applaud that we’ve taken from the compound that the Romans created by adding the prefix ad ‘to, toward.’ But to every action, as physicists tell us, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and in this case the Romans also created a compound of plaudere using a prefix that had the opposite sense of ad: it was ex, which meant ‘out of, away from.’ The result was explodere, which Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary explains this way:
to drive out or off by clapping; orig. a scenic* word said of a player, to hiss or hoot off, explode him.
That certainly sounds strange to us, because, as bad as an actor may be, we’d rarely resort to blowing him up. But listen to what Noah Webster wrote in his dictionary in 1828 for explode used transitively:
EXPLO’DE, v.t. To decry or reject with noise; to express disapprobation of, with noise or marks of contempt; as, to explode a play on the stage. Hence,
1. To reject with any marks of disapprobation or disdain; to treat with contempt, and drive from notice; to drive into disrepute; or in general, to condemn; to reject; to cry down. Astrology is now exploded.
That sense is still with us when we speak (in English) of exploding a myth, which is to say driving it out of believability in the same way that ancient Romans would drive a bad actor off the stage by making noise, booing, hissing, clapping, etc. Because of that, explode became associated with making noise, regardless of the purpose of the noise. In particular, explode came to be associated with certain types of physical reactions that make a loud noise, namely those of devices or objects that blow up and wreak destruction. That sense of explode is now the primary one, and any connections to the theater have long since exploded and vanished.
Corresponding to the verb explotar/explode is the noun explosión/explosion, and from the noun Spanish has made the new verb explosionar, which avoids the ambiguity of explotar, which can also mean ‘to exploit.’ (Spanish explotar is really two unrelated verbs that happened to end up looking alike; the one that means ‘to exploit’ was borrowed from French exploiter, as was English exploit.)
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* The old sense of scenic was ‘having to do with a scene,’ i.e. with a theatrical stage.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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plaudit
10 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
I was listening to British prime minister David Cameron sometime last year and noticed that he used the word plaudit. This English noun is an imperative in disguise, and a Latin imperative at that: plaudit is a shortening of the three-syllable plaudite, a second-person plural command meaning “applaud [, you guys].” The infinitive of that Latin verb was applaudere, a compound of ad, the forerunner of Spanish a, and the plaudere that meant ‘to clap, strike, beat.’ Spanish and English have turned to that compound verb for aplaudir/applaud, and to its past participle for aplauso/applause.
But before you applaud, there’s more. From Latin plaudere English has the uncommon adjective plausive, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as ‘Showing or expressing praise or approbation; applauding.’ Much more common is a word that Spanish and English share, plausible, which originally meant ‘worthy of being applauded.’ Later the sense expanded to ‘worthy [until contradicted] of being considered true; conceivably true.’ It’s unfortunately the case that with deception in mind, some people say things that sound plausible but that they know aren’t true. As a result, the English plausible has added a few senses (which Spanish doesn’t share): ‘Giving a deceptive impression of truth or reliability; disingenuously smooth; fast-talking.’
The corresponding abstract noun is plausibilidad/plausibility, and English also has a version with one of its native noun-forming suffixes, plausibleness.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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Au naturale isn’t natural
07 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, French language, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary
I’ve increasingly run across occurrences of the phrase au naturale, but while that form may have started appearing in English, it’s unknown in French, the language that people who use au naturale probably think they’re quoting. The correct French expression is au naturel, and it corresponds word-by-word to Spanish al natural, which the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española defines as meaning “Sin artificio ni mezcla o elaboración.” We might loosely translate that translation into English by saying “in a natural rather than artificial or crafted state.” Similarly, when I turn to my largest French dictionary, I find that au naturel means ‘according to nature, in a natural state, not artificial.’
But look up au naturel in English dictionaries like the American Heritage or vocabulary.com, and you’ll find that the first definition is ‘nude, completely unclothed,’ while ‘in a natural state’ gets listed only second. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the ‘nude’ sense arose from the use in English of au naturel to mean ‘uncooked.’ I’m not sure about that, because in the 1822 book The French Cook we find this recipe for Artichokes au Naturel:
According to the size of your dish, boil a certain quantity of artichokes in salt and water only, after having washed them in several waters; remove all the insects that swarm about the leaves, and trim them of all the bad leaves; ascertain whether they are done enough, either with the point of a knife, or by tearing off one of the leaves. If the knife penetrates, or the leaf comes off with facility, then you may be certain that the artichoke is done. Shift it instantly into cold water, that you may take out all the inside; first take off the top all of a lump, then empty the choke, set the top on again, and send up as hot as possible, with a sauce blanche, or French melted butter in a sauce-boat.
Based on that description, it seems the culinary sense of au naturel was ‘cooked by itself, without additional seasoning,’ though a separately prepared sauce could be added at the end. From conveying the notion of ‘bare food,’ au naturel would then have become a euphemism for ‘having a bare body.’ According to a couple of dictionaries, the first known use of au naturel in English was in 1817. Akin to that expression in its ‘bare body’ meaning, English has naturism and naturist as synonyms for nudism and nudist, respectively. In Spanish, however, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española defines naturismo only as ‘Doctrina que preconiza el empleo de los agentes naturales para la conservación de la salud y el tratamiento de las enfermedades.’ English also gives that sense to naturism.
The word natural comes from Latin naturalis, the adjective corresponding to natura, etymologically ‘the way [the world] is born.’ It’s interesting, then, in light of the ‘naked’ sense of au naturel and naturist, that English also has the colloquial expression in your birthday suit, meaning ‘wearing no clothes.’
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For two Spanish words that are surprisingly—some would say unnaturally—related to natural, see the early posts in this blog about nada and nadie.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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propinquity
04 Feb 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
On the morning of January 26 I awoke and remembered a dream I’d been having: in it, a little girl used the word propinquity, and my dream self was impressed that someone so young would know such a fancy word. (Well, that’s the sort of dream you’d expect from someone who writes about words, right?) Spanish has the similar propincuidad, but that language does English one better by also having the one-syllable-shorter propincuo, an adjective that means ‘close’ and that was taken from the synonymous Latin propinquus. Even in Latin that adjective might have been a bit on the fancy side, especially when the simpler adverb prope ‘near’ already existed. And if we keep whittling off endings, we find ourselves at the Latin pro that meant ‘for, forward, in front of,’ and is the cognate of native English for. The underlying Indo-European root is the highly prolific *per-, which had the same senses as Latin pro. Running forward in time, the trail in Spanish is Indo-European *per- > Latin prope > Latin propinquus > Spanish propincuo. As for the word that started this post, propincuidad/propinquity, it comes straight from propinquitas, the noun that the Romans based on propinquus.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
Gamelion
01 Feb 2012 5 Comments
in language Tags: biology, English language, etymology, Greek, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
No, not chameleon, but Gamelion. That was the name of one of the months in the calendar used in ancient Attica, the Greek region whose most prominent city-state was Athens. It so happens that we’re now in the month of Gamelion, which included the latter part of January and the first part of February. The month’s name was based on the Greek verb gamein ‘to marry,’ so presumably that cold part of the year struck the ancient Greeks as a good time to get married and snuggle down.
With the same root as the one found in the verb gamein, Greek had the similar nouns gamete ‘wife’ and gametes ‘husband.’ Not coincidentally, the first of those matches the gamete that in scientific English means, as does scientific Spanish gameto, ‘a mature sexual reproductive cell, either male or female, that can unite with one of the opposite gender to form the first stage in a new organism.’ Metaphorically speaking, gametes are cells that “get married.” According to Douglas Harper, it was the Austrian monk and biologist Gregor Mendel who coined the term gamete, which first appeared in English in 1886.
From Greek gamos ‘marriage’ we have the suffix -gamia/-gamy that appears in compounds indicating various types of marriage. The two most common words in that group are monogamia/monogamy ‘the state of being married to only one person’ and poligamia/polygamy ‘the state of being married to two or more people.’ I who am writing this have for some time now been in the states of monogamy and Texas.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
