The discussion of pair of stairs got onto the subject of compass(es), and after discovering there were three words in Russian (компас [kómpas] for ‘instrument for determining direction,’ буссоль [bussól’] for ‘surveyor’s compass,’ and циркуль [tsírkul’] for ‘instrument for describing circles,’ the last ultimately from Latin circulus—and why “describing” rather than “drawing,” now that I think of it?), I checked the OED and found the following extraordinarily messy etymology:
[a. F. compas (12th c. in Littré) ‘measure, pair of compasses, circle’; in mod.F. also ‘mariner’s compass’; = Pr. compas, Sp. compas ‘pair of compasses, measure, rule of life, pattern’, Pg. compasso ‘pair of compasses’, It. compasso ‘a compasse, a round, also a paire of compasses’ (Florio); med.L. compassus = circinus pair of compasses (Du Cange). Cf. also Ger. compass, kompass, mariner’s compass, formerly also gnomon, sun-dial, portable dial, Du. kompas, Sw. compass, kompass, Da. compas, Norw. kompas, (all) mariner’s compass. (This is the exclusive sense in the Teutonic langs., as ‘pair of compasses’ is predominant in the Romanic.)
The history of this word and its associated verb in the Romanic langs. has not yet been determined, and it presents many points of uncertainty. It is doubtful whether the n. is Common Romanic (the Sp. being app. from Fr. or Pr.), and as yet uncertain whether the n. is derived from the vb., or the vb. from the n. If the n. was the origin, it would predicate a L. type *compassus, f. com– together or intensive + ? passus step, pace; if the vb. was the earlier, compassare would be ‘to pass or step together’ or ‘completely’ (see Diez passare), and *compassus, compasso, the action of doing so. The early history of the senses of the n. is equally obscure: in OF., ‘measure’, primarily perhaps ‘measure kept in walking together’, ‘artifice, subtilty’, and ‘pair of compasses’, appear all to be early senses; it is at present impossible to say whether the instrument took its name from ‘measuring’ or from ‘equal stepping’. It is probable that the sense ‘circumference, circle, round’ which is slightly exemplified in OF., but has received so great a development in Eng., is derived from the name of the instrument; but the converse is also possible; cf. L. circinus compasses, from circa round, etc.; also Ger. zirkel, (1) circle, (2) compasses. The later application to the Mariner’s Compass, recognized in modern French, but chiefly developed in English and the Teut. langs., is also of obscure origin; it may easily have arisen out of the sense ‘circle’ or ‘circuit’, as showing the circle of the winds; but in German this sense appears to have been preceded by those of ‘gnomon’ and ‘sun-dial’, which may point in another direction. The Greek name of the circinus or compasses was διαβήτης, from διαβαίνειν to stride or walk with the legs apart, to stride, step, or pass over: it is not impossible that compassus and compassare may have been employed to render these words, and as διαβήτης also meant the gnomon of a sun-dial, it is conceivable that this indicates the way in which compassus came to be used for dial, and mariner’s compass.
The OF. senses all appear early in ME. In the uncertainty as to the relations between these, it is impossible to arrange them in any certain order in Eng., and that adopted is merely provisional, and subject to alteration when Romanic scholars shall have ascertained the previous history of the word in their own domain.]
If somebody had asked me the etymology of compass, I would have said confidently “Oh, it’s from Latin compassus” and thought no more about it. This is a good example of why etymology involves a lot more than giving the earlier form of a word. (And I expect the etymology will get even longer and more complicated when they get around to revising this entry for the third edition.)
A few miscellanea:
One of the meanings of L. describere is to make a sketch (as for use in a painting), which is not surprising when we recall that scribere originally = inscribere, ‘to scratch’.
Describe is still in use in geometrical circles (ha!) as a general term, the hypernym of inscribe and circumscribe.
Indeed, English write, though from a different IE source, originally had the same general meaning ‘to cut, tear, scratch’. It’s curious, as AHD4 says,that this word is preserved in English alone of all the modern Western European languages: all the others use descendants of scribere or transparent borrowings of it.
Διαβήτης is etymologically ‘that which straddles’, which certainly applies to the geometer’s compass as well as the gnomon; it also meant a siphon, hence modern diabetes, the disease in which water siphons through the body from mouth to urethra at a distressing rate (as I know all too well).
The archaic future perfect in the last sentence of the OED quotation shows nicely how the language, even the scholarly language, has changed since Murray’s day.
So what is the etymology of буссоль, then?
> there were three words in Russian (компас [kómpas] for ‘instrument for
> determining direction,’ буссоль [bussól’] for ‘surveyor’s compass,’
Just a comment regarding the Russian words (“компас”, “буссоль”,
“циркуль”): it is even more varied than that, because, as regards the
Mariner’s compass, the Russian seamen, especially military, make a point
of putting the stress on the last syllable, unlike everybody else. There
are, by the way, several other words in Russian that are supposed to be
pronounced or used differently by “real seamen”, as opposed to the rest
of us, like “рапорт”, “ходить”, etc.
> ‘instrument for describing circles,’ the last ultimately from Latin
> circulus — and why “describing” rather than “drawing,” now that I
> think of it?),
“Describing” a circle is actually quite explainable: the root of
the word also has a well-established meaning of “follow” in Russian. Nor
are Russians alone in this: the French “décriver”, “to describe”,
can also mean following a trajectory, as in “l’avion
décrivait une courbe”. Sorry if you knew it all along and the “why”
above was for something else that I have missed 🙂
Incidentally, the French allso have a word “boussole”:
http://nouveau-dictionnaire.la-connaissance.net/definition-nouveau-dictionnaire_mot-boussole_3_b_o_5404.html
that means a compass of any kind, and is supposed to be of Italian
origin; I wonder if the Russian “буссоль” has been borrowed from French
at some point, something that would explain it only having a specialized
meaning in Russian.
— Maxim
If anything, I’d think that the revised etymology for “compass” in the third edition will be significantly pared down. Keep in mind that this entry is early in the alphabet, so when it was written the editorial style was still in flux. You can find some pretty entertaining commentary in those early entries, often scornfully dismissing etymological speculation. This note for “coil” is a classic:
The conjectures that coil may be ‘related’ to Gael. coileid ‘stir, movement, noise’, or to goilim ‘I boil’, goileadh, ‘boiling’, or to goill ‘shield, war, fight’, are mere random ‘shots’, without any justification, phonetic or historical. Coil is unknown in Scotland, and no evidence connects it with Ireland. Gaelic or Irish words do not enter English through the air, with phonetic change on the way!
You can find similar comments by doing an advance search for “guess” in the etymology field (as in “bad guess”, “gratuitous guess”, “desperate guess”, “ludicrous guess”, etc.).
And now I realize that I first read that “classic” right here on Languagehat.
Sorry if you knew it all along and the “why” above was for something else that I have missed
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I am aware of the technical sense of describe, but I find it odd that it should be used in the definition of a Russian word in a bilingual dictionary. Lexicographers seem to delight in using arcane terminology rather than focusing on what would be of most use to the nonspecialist user.
Thanks very much for your excursus on the use of stress as a sailors’ shibboleth! And yes, буссоль was borrowed from French boussole, itself from Italian bussola, from Medieval Latin buxola ‘little box,’ a diminutive of Latin buxum ‘boxwood’ (from which Late Latin had all sorts of derivatives like buxis, buxida, buxta, boxta, bosta, bossida, giving French words like buis, boîte, boiter).
Well, the other thing about “describe” is that many compasses don’t come equipped with a pencil attachment. They can be used to describe a circle but *not* to draw one. If I recall correctly, the point is to use them to measure radii and segmental arcs (but it’s been a long time since geometry, as my high-school alumni association keeps reminding me).
Ah, good point. OK, I withdraw my objection.
> Sorry, I should have been clearer. I am aware of the technical sense
> of describe, but I find it odd that it should be used in the
> definition of a Russian word in a bilingual dictionary. Lexicographers
> seem to delight in using arcane terminology rather than focusing on
> what would be of most use to the nonspecialist user.
I have missed the point even farther than I had initially suspected,
then; I must confess I thought the “why” was about the — supposedly
unknown — _Russian_ use of a word meaning “describe” to, well, describe
the drawing of, or following, a trajectory, overlooking the fact that
English has it, too, or that the initial remark was about a by-lingual
dictionary. This makes my mistake more stupid, but somewhat less rash,
I suppose — at least I didn’t try to teach the proper English usage.
🙂
> Thanks very much for your excursus on the use of stress as a sailors’
> shibboleth!
As for the Russian sailor’s shibboleth, it’s not just the stress in some
words, but also usage: a ship is supposed to “walk”, not “sail”, to a
destination, for example.
> Posted by: xiaolongnu at September 7, 2007 01:30 PM:
>
> …Well, the other thing about “describe” is that many compasses don’t
> come equipped with a pencil attachment. They can be used to describe a
> circle but *not* to draw one. If I recall correctly, the point is to
> use them to measure radii and segmental arcs (but it’s been a long
> time since geometry, as my high-school alumni association keeps
> reminding me).
As for the drawing instrument that looks like a compass without a
pencil, mentioned above, I believe it is often confused with a compass,
but actually has a different name — at least, in Russian, the language
this discussion started from. Draftsmen call it “measurer”
(“измеритель”);
I strongly suspect it is not _really_ called a compass in English,
either, but I don’t have a suitable dictionary at hand. If I am correct
about that, the use of “describe” can not be attributed to “compasses
without pencils”. Or do I miss something again? 🙂
— Maxim
“It’s curious, as AHD4 says,that this word is preserved in English alone of all the modern Western European languages.”
Swedish has ‘rita’ – to draw a picture.
Incidentally, Japanese also has this scratch-write pair (written/scratched in different kanji, which are all Chinese in origin):
kaku
書く for writing letters/characters
kaku/egaku
http://www.nisk.jp/search/digitalkanji.asp?code=8F91
描く for drawing pictures, etc
http://www.nisk.jp/search/digitalkanji.asp?code=9560
kaku
掻く for scratching
I believe that in English sailors use the term “divider”–to google an example, http://www.clipperlight.com/dividers.html –for an instrument like a compass that is used to mark out distances on charts. Mathematicians, on the other hand, use the term “compass” to refer to a similar notional instrument used to construct points, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compass_and_straightedge .
As long as we’re on compassish vocabulary I wonder what the Russian for ‘scribe’ is/was.
A scribe in English was/is (among other things) a compass like contraption used to trace circles on the ice. Figure skaters used to use them in practicing compulsory figures.
You can see Midori Ito using one at the beginning of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbGJlHfv5U0
The thing to draw circles with is called “compass” in English? Bizarre. ~:-|
The word is present in German, and evidently in its original sense: ritzen “to scratch lines”. Imagine using a knife to write runes on wood…
Then maybe German already counts as “Central European”. After all, what’s called Naher Osten “Near East” in German is “Middle East” in English…
Maxim, the French word for ‘to describe’ is décrire not décriver, which does not exist. This verb, like écrire ‘to write’, has a -v- in some of its forms, including those of the imperfect tense, hence décrivait.
David, it seems that hardly anyone refers to the Near East any more, at least on the American side of the Atlantic. The whole area is referred to as the Middle East, which should properly be located East of the Mediterranean without including any part of it.
I meant, of course, preserved in the sense of ‘write’; the other senses continue to appear, as you all have kindly shown. But e.g. in German reissen ‘write’ has been completely replaced by schreiben, leaving reissen ‘tear’ untouched.
Oh, so reißen is the cognate, not ritzen… that makes sense regarding the vowel length. Vowel length is, however, often not cognate between English and German (…or within German).
It is truly amazing that for thousands of years, mainstream academics have never understood geometry, in particular the Elements of Euclid and what was being claimed.
1. The words διαβήτης (compass) and ruler (χάρακας) appear nowhere in the Elements.
2. The constructions are mentioned as being possible in order to facilitate the expounding of more advanced propositions that followed.
3. A compass and ruler are merely tools that were developed much later in order to communicate or teach the perfect ideas.
4. There are no axioms in Euclid’s Elements – this is perhaps the most misguided conclusion by academics because the 5 requirements can be systematically derived from nothing, using only one’s brain of course.
The constructions are not needed in geometry. These are not part of the original ideas of the Ancient Greeks. To say that geometry is built on compass and ruler is like saying clocks were built before the concept of time was realised. Absurd.
Even the mainstream formulation of calculus was never rigorous:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1peL7lzXsmZ4AVsgAwDLvn8QIZbWy8Ebm
There are many flaws in the formulation of mainstream mathematics. Perhaps one of the most serious, is the misconception of number:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hasWyQCZyRN3RkdvIB6bnGIVV2Rabz8w
And I expect the etymology will get even longer and more complicated when they get around to revising this entry for the third edition.
Still not revised all these years later!
@ jg
I think that Euclidean geometry, including “Euclid”‘s approach in the Elements as it has come down to us, has a constructive flavour, even if the tools for construction are not specified. From Wikipedia:
—
His constructive approach appears even in his geometry’s postulates, as the first and third postulates stating the existence of a line and circle are constructive. Instead of stating that lines and circles exist per his prior definitions, he states that it is possible to ‘construct’ a line and circle. It also appears that, for him to use a figure in one of his proofs, he needs to construct it in an earlier proposition. For example, he proves the Pythagorean theorem by first inscribing a square on the sides of a right triangle, but only after constructing a square on a given line one proposition earlier.
—
I would say that the constructive bias is such that projective approaches were suppressed by it, as was the “shorter” proof that the base angles of the isosceles triangle are equal (i.e., flip the triangle over on to itself).
Clocks seems to be working just fine, while the concept of time is still a major source of befuddlement. My undergradute textbook claimed that “time is a thing that is measured by clocks”.
Zeit ist, was die Uhr anzeigt – Einstein: “time is what the clock/watch displays”.
“The mind is what the brain does.” —Marvin Minsky
Since no one else seems to have taken this up, I would say that the notion of time is only a source of befuddlement in systems where there are non-negligible (special, but I suppose you might also include general) relativistic effects. For other systems there are agreed and agreeing operational definitions for measuring time, e.g., set a rigid fixed-length pendulum in motion in a vacuum and count the oscillations. There is a similar “befuddlement” around the concept of force, which can be handwaved away as “a given function, which enters into calculations of kinematics and dynamics via Newton’s laws as corrected when necessary by general relativity” or something similar, although there are adequate operational definitions for making ordinary measurements, which do not need values for the local spacetime metric tensor or mass distribution (here atmospheric pressure, humidity, temperature, irregularities in the Earth’s gravity, whether the technician slept the previous night, etc., make more of a contribution to measurement accuracy).
PlasticPaddy, the concept of time is something over which even well-grounded theoretical physicists tend into philosophy. But operationally time is understood very well; it is indeed what the clock shows. But that presupposes some understanding of mechanics (say, that initial position and velocity determines future, but can we understand “future” before understanding time and what is velocity before time is defined) or maybe some different physical set up for measuring it. The concept of force is not important for modern theoretical physics and as far as I know no one is sweating about it.
Among the best tests of relativity (and something I have worked on a little) are experiments that basically consist of running two clocks side by side. This can mean two different atomic clocks, or an atomic clock and a quartz oscillator. The idea is to look for differences in the running rates as the Earth rotates or revolves around the sun. Nobody has ever found a significant signal for Lorentz symmetry violation, although people are always pushing the errors down (understanding the errors can actually be highly nontrivial, and error underestimation is something I worry about; last night, I had a dream connected with the subject, in which I tried and failed to explain Allan deviation) and finding more sensitive clock designs.
There are plenty of problems with time besides the relativity one . Is time “reversible” inthe sense that it would be possible to return to a previous stat? Many philosophies assume that it is. but there is reason to think that it’s not.
(2007) Oh, so reißen is the cognate, not ritzen…
That brought Reißbrett, Reißzeug, Aufriß usw to mind. DWDS sez:
# reißen bedeutet ursprünglich ‘ritzen’, speziell ‘(Runen)zeichen auf Buchenstäbchen einritzen’, dann ‘schreiben, zeichnen’ und (an ‘ritzen, einschneiden’ anschließend) ‘gewaltsam trennen’. #
I’m guessing dann means “many many years later”, not “in order of decreasing frequency of use according to the Ngram of the day”.
Another question is what human perceived time has to do with astronomical/physical time. See Brian Aldiss’s Cryptozoic. Or to put it otherwise:
An old man reads about Einstein’s theory of relativity in the newspaper and asks his scientist grandson to explain it to him.
“Well, zayda, it’s sort of like this. Einstein says that if you’re having your teeth drilled without Novocain, a minute seems like an hour. But if you’re sitting with a beautiful woman on your lap, an hour seems like a minute.”
The old man considers this profound bit of thinking for a moment and says, “And from this he makes a living?”
Good catch! Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me how all those Reiß- and -riss words must be related.
It means “next”, “as the next stage”.
…in the “not” mode. It’s more like “if you zoom around at pretty close to the speed of light, a minute for you is an hour for the people back home”…
@brett, do
Thanks for the expert view. What I suppose I am reacting to is what for me is a disproportionate emphasis on foundational questions in popular science publications, which then can lead to an impression that such considerations are central or required in order to “do” or “understand” science (esp. everyday applications for which these considerations are, in a practical sense, irrelevant). I am not saying that I think such work is unimportant or will not lead to new insights or results.