indio
27 Apr 2012 4 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Greek, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
The last post looked into the origins of India and some related words. The adjective corresponding to India is indio/Indian, but in perhaps the greatest and most persistent case of ambiguity in linguistic and geographical history, that adjective came to be applied to groups of people on opposite sides of the globe, one set of them in India and the other in the Americas. Blame Columbus if you like, because when he crossed the Atlantic Ocean from Spain in 1492 and landed on an island in the Caribbean, he thought he had sailed far enough westward to have reached India. What could me more natural, then, than to refer to the dark-complexioned people he found as indios/Indians? The truth became clear before too long, but not before the term had become deeply rooted enough for people to resist changing it. In the late 20th century some English-speaking groups tried to switch over to the term Native American, but it never fully caught on, and with some people it smacked and still smacks of political correctness. The term also suffers from the very ambiguity it was intended to avoid, because Anglos and blacks and Asians who are born in Tacoma or Toledo or Tulsa or Tallahassee can rightfully claim to be native Americans.
But let’s move from sociopoliticolinguistics back to etymology. From India came the ancient Greek adjective indikos ‘pertaining to India,’ and then the (neuter-gender) phrase Indikon pharmakon, which referred to ‘a certain dye that came from India.’ The noun eventually got dropped, and the Romans carried the adjective over as indicum, which now functioned as a noun in its own right. That developed to Portuguese endego, which Spanish converted to the índigo that English now uses as well, minus the accent mark, of course. The word refers to the plant from which the dye was made, and to the dye itself, and now even to the color of that dye. Indigo is represented by the I in the physics mnemonic and would-be English name ROY G. BIV.
In 1863 the German chemists Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter used the first part of the word indigo to create indium as a name for the 49th chemical element; they chose it because of the indigo-blue lines in the element’s spectrum that had led them to an awareness of its presence in an ore they were testing. Spanish followed suit and converted the name of the element to indio—yes, spelled the same as the indio discussed in the first paragraph. In addition to being the name of the chemical element, this indio functions as an adjective meaning ‘de color azul.’
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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India
24 Apr 2012 3 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Greek, Indo-European, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
The previous post explained that the element Indo- in words like Indonesia, Indochina, and Indoeuropeo/Indo-European refers to the large country of India. That form of the country’s name, which Spanish and English share, goes back to Latin, which took the name from Greek, where it referred to the region of the Indus River. The Greeks called that river the Indos, a word that they took from Old Persian Hindush, which designated the province of India now called Sind. That name had come from Sanskrit sindhuh ‘river.’ Here’s how the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica summarized the situation:
The natives of India can scarcely be said to have a word of their own by which to express their common country. In Sanskrit, it would be called “Bharata-varsha,” from Bharata, a legendary monarch of the Lunar line; but Sanskrit is no more the vernacular of India than Latin is of Europe. The name ” Hindustan,” which was at one time adopted by European geographers, is of Persian origin, meaning ” the land of the Hindus,” as Afghanistan means ” the land of the Afghans.” According to native usage, however, ” Hindustan ” is limited either to that portion of the peninsula lying north of the Vindhya mountains, or yet more strictly to the upper basin of the Ganges where Hindi is the spoken language. The “East Indies,” as opposed to the “West Indies,” is an old-fashioned and inaccurate phrase, dating from the dawn of maritime discovery, and still lingering in certain parliamentary papers. “India,” the abstract form of a word derived through the Greeks from the Persicized form of the Sanskrit sindhu, a “river,” preeminently the Indus, has become familiar since the British acquired the country, and is now officially recognized in the imperial title of the sovereign.
Notice the reference to Hindi, which Spanish renders without a capital letter: it refers to a group of Indic dialects in northern India that are descended from Sanskrit and that are therefore Indo-European languages. The word Hindi comes from the Hindi name for India, Hind, which we’ve already seen was taken from Old Persian Hindush.
As for the adjective Indic, it refers in English to India or its people or cultures; it is also the name of the Indo-European language family that included Sanskrit, the Prakrits, and their descendants. The Spanish adjective índico, on the other hand, is defined in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española as ‘perteneciente o relativo a las Indias Orientales.’ That raises the question of what las Indias Orientales means, which the Spanish-language Wikipedia answers:
Indias Orientales es el antiguo nombre que se le dio a las Indias de Asia, en oposición a las Indias Occidentales que eran una referencia al nuevo continente de América. Fue muy usado desde el s.XVI al XIX y comprendía todo el Sudeste y Sur de Asia, desde Indonesia a la región del Indostán. Sin embargo otras acepciones daban una equivalencia con el Sureste Asiático y otras restringían más aún su uso equiparándolas al archipiélago malayo como un sinónimo de Insulindia.
So now you’re probably wondering about Insulindia, which Wikipedia explains in this way:
Insulindia (del latín insula, “isla”, e India) es el antiguo nombre con el cual se conoce el archipiélago ubicado entre la península de Malaca y Australia, ocupado hoy en día por los países de Indonesia, Filipinas, Brunéi, la zona insular de Malasia, Timor Oriental y Papúa Nueva Guinea; se le denomina también archipiélago malayo. Antes de la llegada de los europeos a Insulindia y desde la prehistoria, existieron en ella varias civilizaciones e imperios, como el Imperio Srivijaya y el Imperio Majapahit, sultanatos como el sultanato de Ternate, de Mataram o de Malaca, o civilizaciones neolíticas como el complejo cultural lapita.
En la actualidad el topónimo Insulindia, al igual que “archipiélago malayo”, está en desuso, a cambio a veces por el de Indonesia, que en estricto rigor, identifica sólo a uno de los Estados que existen en dicho territorio. El archipiélago también recibió la denominación de Indias Orientales, bajo la dominación holandesa.
And lest we get etymological and geographical India-gestion, we’ll end this meaty post here.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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Indo-
21 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
The Wordsmyth online dictionary gives this definition of Indonesia: “an island country south of Indochina and the Philippines.” Indonesia and Indochina: is there a connection in the first part of the names of those two regions? (Indonesia is a country, of course, but it’s so large and spread out that I can justify calling it a region.)
The answer is yes, and it involves another huge country large enough to be considered a region. From a European vantage point—and that’s the one that the Spanish and English languages have inherited—India dominated a large part of the known world, and so other places came to be named with reference to it. What we now call Indonesia we used to call the (Dutch) East Indies, islands formerly controlled by the Dutch and located to the east of India. Indochina, now an increasingly outmoded word, refers to a group of countries bounded by India to their west and China to their north: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
And an etymologist would be remiss in not pointing out that Indoeuropeo/Indo-European is the conventional name given to the language whose descendant languages before the Age of Exploration had spread as far west as the Icelandic of western Europe and as far east as Sanskrit and its descendants in India.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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hosco
18 Apr 2012 4 Comments
in Uncategorized Tags: English language, etymology, Latin language, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
In Amado Nervo’s story “La yaqui hermosa,” mentioned a couple of posts back, I found the words “… callaban horas enteras, inmóviles como las hoscas piedras de su tierra,” which we might translate into English as “they would remain silent for hours on end, immobile like the dark rocks of their land.” While hosco means literally ‘dark brown,’ enough people find that color unattractive for hosco to have taken on the extended meanings ‘gruff, rough, sullen, unwelcoming, gloomy, menacing.’
One of the peculiarities of Spanish is that what started out in Latin as a word-initial f followed by a vowel often ended up as an h in modern Spanish. It’s hardly surprising, then, to learn that the Latin original of hosco was fuscus (yes, the vowels have shifted as well), which meant ‘dark, swarthy, tawny.’ I couldn’t think of an English word beginning with fusc- that might have been borrowed from the Latin original, but one advantage of certain online dictionaries is the ability to do wildcat searches. At onelook.com I searched for the string fusc*, where the asterisk can be replaced by any character or characters. I learned that English has indeed turned to Latin fuscus, changing it only slightly to create the adjective fuscous. The 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary defined fuscous as ‘brown or grayish black; darkish,’ and the word is in many current dictionaries as well (although WordPress insists on underlining it in red dots each time I type it).
From fuscus came the Latin verb fuscare ‘to darken, blacken.’ The addition of the intensifying prefix ob- created the verb obfuscare, from whose past participle English has borrowed the verb obfuscate. Latin obfuscare also existed in the assimilated version offuscare, and that’s the one that Spanish borrowed as ofuscar. As for semantics, ofuscar/obfuscate means ‘to darken’ in the sense ‘to obscure [there's that ob- again], to make unclear, to confuse.’
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
Existing is standing out
15 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in language Tags: English language, etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Spanish and English share the verb existir/exist, which came from the similar Latin existere. That verb did mean ‘to exist,’ but only as an extended sense; the original meanings—and the ones listed first in Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary—were ‘to step out or forth, to come forth, emerge, appear,’ with the notion of ‘out’ being conveyed by the familiar prefix ex-. For the rest of the word, we need to be aware that the simplified pronunciation existere developed from what was originally exsistere. So that brings us to sistere, which meant ‘to cause to stand’ and therefore ‘to place.’ Sistere was a partly duplicated form of stare ‘to stand,’ the predecessor of Spanish estar and a cognate of English stand. (Note that English stand retains the original sense, while Spanish estar has shifted to represent where or how something stands, literally or figuratively.) So to existir/exist is to be made to stand out… from the void, from nothingness. May we all stand out, be outstanding, in this existencia/existence of ours.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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antelación
12 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Reading Amado Nervo’s story “La yaqui hermosa” a while back, I encountered this sentence:
“Con antelación, a manos de los yaquis habían perecido Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y sus compañeros, quienes desembarcaron osadamente en la costa de Sonora.”
The word antelación was new to me, so I looked it up in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española: ‘Anticipación con que, en orden al tiempo, sucede algo respecto a otra cosa.’ Hmmm. Looking further, at Span¡shD!ict I found the phrase con antelación translated as ‘in advance; beforehand,’ and the stronger con mucha antelación as ‘long in advance; long beforehand.’
Joan Corominas reports that antelación is first attested in 1607, when it was borrowed with little change from antelation-, the stem of the Late Latin noun antelatio that meant ‘the action of putting something before [something else].’ The second part of that Latin compound was based on Latin latus ‘carried, brought,’ while the first part is obviously ante- ‘before.’ That’s the same ante- that appeared in the anticipación of the DRAE definition, and whose second element is from Latin capere ‘to take, seize.’ So Latin anticipare was ‘to take before,’ and Spanish anticipación means literally ‘a taking before.’ That makes the Spanish phrase con anticipación a synonym of con antelación.
But perhaps you anticipated me and were about to point out that English anticipation has acquired psychological and emotional connotations: it now means ‘a looking forward to, an expectation,’ which Spanish anticipación can also mean.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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vilano
09 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, French language, language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
For English speakers, Spanish vilano is an example of what is called a false friend, a word in one language that coincidentally resembles a word in another, and that people may therefore make the mistake of misinterpreting. In this case, Spanish vilano does not mean ‘villain.’ I bring this up because I learned vilano only a few days ago, when I was putting together the post about diente de león/dandelion. Here’s how the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española defines diente de león:
Hierba de la familia de las Compuestas, con hojas radicales, lampiñas, de lóbulos lanceolados y triangulares, y jugo lechoso, flores amarillas de largo pedúnculo hueco, y semilla menuda con vilano abundante y blanquecino.
Plant in the Composite family, with basal leaves, hairless, with lanceolate triangular lobes, and milky juice, flowers yellow on a long, hollow stalk, and tiny seeds with abundant, whitish vilano.
People who know the dandelion—which is just about everyone—know that its flowers turn into puffballs of seeds, with each seed attached to a little “parachute” to help it blow away and take root elsewhere. By context, then, vilano must be that little “parachute.” Sure enough, here’s how the DRAE defines the word:
Apéndice de pelos o filamentos que corona el fruto de muchas plantas compuestas y le sirve para ser transportado por el aire.
An appendage made of hairs or filaments that crowns the fruit of many Composite plants and lets it get carried through the air.
Ah, I thought, I’ll bet vilano is connected to vello ‘down,’ which developed from Latin villus. But no, that would be another case of false friends. I was surprised to find that vilano is an altered form of milano, which is the kind of bird that in English is ‘a kite.’ As best I can make out, the extended Spanish usage of milano to mean what English-speaking botanists call ‘a pappus’ was by analogy with the way a kite flies through the air—and compare how English likewise extended the meaning of kite, though in a different way, from ‘a type of bird’ to ‘a type of flying toy.’
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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dandelion
06 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, French language, language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
In my nature photography blog the other day I posted a picture of a Texas dandelion, a species that surprised some readers by its existence. That plant, Pyrrhopappus pauciflorus, is called a Texas dandelion to distinguish it from what is almost universally known in English simply as a dandelion, Taraxacum officinale, which has yellow flowers and turns into a greyish-white puffball of seeds that have a predilection for finding their way into people’s lawns.
Although the common dandelion has spread to most parts of the world, it originated in Europe. Speakers of Middle English called it dent-de-lioun, a term taken from Old French dentdelion. Spanish speakers have an advantage in being able to recognize the components as diente de león, which is in fact their name for the flower, and one that I assume was either copied from French or directly modeled on the Medieval Latin original, dens leonis ‘lion’s tooth.’
But does a dandelion really look like a lion’s tooth? The flower certainly does not, but the Medieval European imagination saw the plant’s jagged, indented leaves as resembling lion’s teeth—and note that English indent and Spanish endentar have the same Latin root for ‘tooth’ in them.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
03 Apr 2012 2 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, Greek, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
Shakespeare had Hamlet say “… it is a custom / More honored in the breach than the observance.” Ironically, that could be said of the way some of Shakespeare’s other lines are “quoted,” which is to say misquoted. Where many people “remember” the phrase “gild the lily,” the words Shakespeare actually wrote in King John were “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily….” And the line that serves as the title for today’s post often gets misremembered in the simplified form “There’s method in his madness.”
But etymologists aren’t mad, and they have their own method for getting at the truth, which in this case leads to the origin of método/method. Spanish and English borrowed the word from Latin methodus, which meant ‘a way of teaching, mode of proceeding,’ and ultimately ‘a method.’ The ‘mode of proceeding’ sense takes us back to the Greek original, methodos, which arose as a phonetically altered compound of meta- ‘beyond’ and hodos ‘a way, journey,’ so a method is etymologically ‘a way of going onward.’
This blog deals primarily with word origins, but let’s add something about pronunciation. The Latin spelling reflects the Greek original, but the Romans didn’t have a th sound (or even an h sound, for that matter), so they pronounced their borrowed methodus as if it were *metodus. French has méthode, where the h is likewise silent, and Spanish no longer even preserves a silent h in the modern spelling método. English, however, long ago found the method for pronouncing both a voiceless and a voiced th sound, and therefore does pronounce the th in method. To most speakers of a Romance language, pronouncing that sound is maddening, yet Spanish speakers in Spain, who have found the method to pronounce at least a voiceless th, nevertheless don’t insert that sound into método.
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
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ludicrous
31 Mar 2012 2 Comments
in language Tags: English language, etymology, language, Latin language, linguistics, Spanish language, vocabulary, words
The previous post traced ilusión/illusion—which can be “false friends”—back to the basic Latin verb ludere ‘to play.’ French turned to ludere to create the adjective ludique, which has become the non-so-common English ludic that means ‘having to do with or characterized by play or playfulness’; Spanish played along and carried the French word over as the synonymous lúdico. To see one way the word is used, we can turn to a Wikipedia article entitled “Black swan theory,” which points out that “One problem, labeled the ludic fallacy by Taleb, is the belief that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games. This stems from the assumption that the unexpected may be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations, especially when these statistics are presumed to represent samples from a bell-shaped curve.”
Using the word lúdico/ludic outside of technical or academic discussions would probably be ludicrous, an obviously related adjective, but one that Spanish doesn’t share; it comes from Latin ludicrus, which meant ‘done for sport, sportive.’ The 1913 Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary gave this statement by Thomas de Quincey as an example of usage: “A chapter upon German rhetoric would be in the same ludicrous predicament as Van Troil’s chapter on the snakes of Iceland, which delivers its business in one summary sentence, announcing, that snakes in Iceland — there are none.” And who, even among detractors of Germany, wouldn’t find that claim about rhetoric a ludicrous illusion?
© 2012 Steven Schwartzman
