Listed as a toponym (and so the same as the Carrick that is in dictionaries).

As for the cabriolet: carrick = curricle?

Interesting! The first is "a long triple-caped dust-coat for women" that "came into fashion about 1877," versus a greatcoat for men that came into fashion almost a century earlier, so one wonders if it's simple coincidence. As for curricle, it's "A light two-wheeled carriage, usually drawn by two horses abreast," from Latin curriculum 'running, course; (race-)chariot,' which certainly seems a likely candidate, and I can imagine the French getting carrick out of it. Well found!

Umm... And I used to translate 'shinel' as 'overcoat'. Now I've got a chance to perplex my readers :). Thanks!

Make sure you update oed3@oup.com (very nice people) with all this.

Not documented but, for what it's worth, on a site named Wisegeek:

[cabriolet] comes from the French cabrioler, “to prance or caper,” a reference to the way the carriage would lightly fly or skim the ground. The ultimate root can be found in the Latin capreolus, the word used to describe a wild goat.

which actually makes visual sense given "cabriole leg" " A gently curving S-shaped leg found on tables and chairs of the late 17th C and 18th C." The comparison to the hind leg of a goat is, at the very least, reasonable.

Fascinating! I had only ever heard "Carrick" before as the middle name of a schoolfriend, who was deeply ashamed of it and NEVER used it. Now I now what to buy him for a present. Thanks!

To me, carrick suggests the Irish word carraig, one of the many Irish words for cliff or rock. In placenames, it is anglicized as Carrick, such as Carraig na Siúire becoming Carrick-on-Suir.

Carrick on Shannon is, though, Cora Droma Rúisc, not the expected "Carraig na Sionainne".

All the Carrick names in the Wikipedia are the Gaelic 'rock' that Panu suggests, as is the personal name Craig.

And carrick is a (completely unrelated) variant of carrack.

Speaking of carricks, I know the word from the carrick bend (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrick_Bend) which is a simple knot.

I've already gotten a response from the OED:
"Our files contain a very few examples of both the 'overcoat' and 'cape' sense of CARRICK, but nothing at all for the 'vehicle' sense, which is not recorded in the standard sources. I shall add your material to our new words file, to ensure that it is considered by our new words team in due course."

I pointed out that the "vehicle" sense was only attested by the French dictionary and might be a mistake for curricle. Thanks for suggesting I contact them, John!

Iago about Othello's marriage to Desdemona [1.2.50]
'Faith he tonight hath boarded a land-carrack.'
Is there a connection?

A convenient interface for looking at the French history is here. Use the bottom-left menu to select the other (coat) sense and the top-left to select an attestations database.

Very nice -- I've added the CNRTL to my Language Resources list of links. Thanks!

All the Carrick names in the Wikipedia are the Gaelic 'rock' that Panu suggests, as is the personal name Craig.

Actually, if the name Craig has a connection, it probably derives from the above all in Ulster common variant creag or creig. I am almost entirely ignorant of Welsh, but I seem to recall carraig is actually the Welsh (or British-Celtic) cognate which was adopted into Old or Primitive Irish, while creag or creig is the original Irish or Gaelic form of the word. I might be wrong, because Celtic etymology has never been my cup of tea - I am almost exclusively interested in the contemporary language.

I just read the Amazon reviews for Nabakov's notes, and I realized that the translation philosophy now dominant in academic Sinology is almost exactly his, though not learned directly from him. The late Edward Schafer at Berkeley was one of the most influential Sinologists of his generation, and he was of the belief that there is a reciprocal relationship between accuracy and poetic value: the more poetic, the less accurate, and vice versa. (Not strict reciprocity, of course, since I'm sure he allows the possibility of ugly inaccurate translations.) Schafer didn't exactly brag about the ugliness of his translations, but he pointedly did let everyone know that it wasn't accidental.

Furthermore, Schafer's school often uses rare English words to translate common Chinese words, on the grounds that there's no exact common equivalent. For example, the famous five holy mountains are translated as "marchmounts" because "holy mountain" is too general -- the five holy mountains have a special geographical meaning which the many other more generic holy mountains do not have. Sometimes the coinages are in Latin. (Schafer's students frequently give themselves away by using his coinages.

But Schafer's practice really traces back to Peter Budberg / Boodberg, a Russian emigre who taught at Berkeley. Around 1960 Kenneth Rexroth, one of the best of the literary translators of Chinese into English, made a barbed remark about the literary theories taught in St. Petersburg military schools, and Boodberg did indeed attend a St. Petersburg military school. One hypothesizes a nasty encounter at a social gathering.

Boodberg was especially interested in the Turkish influence on Chinese culture. His collected papers are still available, and cheap, and I would recommend them to anyone who's curious.

I have very mixed feelings about the Boodberg-Schafer philosophy, but both of them produced scholarly works of enormous interest. Schafer in particular succeeded in digging very deep into the Chinese world view and the Chinese technical and symbolic understandings of astrology, geography, reincarnation, etc. "Mirages on the Sea of Time" successfully (though not poetically) translates one of the obscurest, most bizarre occult poets I have ever read.

I might add that Russian military schools did make a considerable contribution to world culture: for example, Borodin, Musorgsky, Cui, and Rimsky-Korsakoff all had military educations and all but Musorgsky had considerable military careers (Cui retired as a general). It's not impossible that Boodberg's and Nabokov's theories of translation do trace back to some third person (an early Formalist?) who taught in a Russian military school.

Boodberg sounds like an interesting guy—thanks for bringing him up. This review of his Selected Works (by Albert E. Dien) says "Boodberg's insistence on high standards of scholarship did not descend to pedantry; rather he was warmly accepting of the accomplishments of the amateur and of the non-specialist, but fiercely intolerant of the inadequacies of the professional." Apparently he "published" a lot of his work only in handouts: "Receipt of the 'cedules,' each a one-page, highly crammed analysis of a specific problem, depended on the happy circumstance of being in the neighborhood of the library when Boodberg appeared handing out his latest product."

Good god, and in this review Sarah Allan says "He was also widely believed to have completed several translations and other works, but before his death, which came not unexpectedly after a long illness, he destroyed his manuscripts leaving only the text of a lecture which he delivered in 1942 entitled 'Turk, Aryan and Chinese in Ancient Asia', a two-page 'philologist's creed', and parts of the book on binomial expressions [in Old Chinese, submitted to Harvard UP around 1940 and withdrawn before publication] which he instructed should not be published." What makes some authors get all self-destructive towards the end?

The cedule “Philology in Translation Land” is rather more interesting (at just over a page) than the summary it gets in the Postscript to Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei, where people may have got a taste of Boodberg's strong opinions on translation theory, but none of his way of expressing them.

Man, you weren't kidding about the translations. Boodberg's Lao Tzu starts:

Lodehead lodehead-brooking : no forwonted lodehead;
Namecall namecall-brooking : no forwonted namecall.
      Having-naught namecalling : Heaven-Earth's fetation,
      Having-aught namecalling : Myriad Mottlings' mother.
Affirmably,
Forewont
Have-naught
Desired—for to descry in view the minikin-subliminaria,
Forewont
Have-aught
Desired—for to descry in view the circuit-luminaria...

And I thought Nabokov was nuts—at least he stuck to real words!

The above comments remind me of A. C. Graham's translation of 仙妾 ('fairy maiden') as 'houri' in Li Ho's poetry. The word 'houri' lends a strong sense of Middle Eastern exoticism that may or may not be appropriate to the word 仙妾.

I discovered there wasn't a Wikipedia article for Boodberg, so I created one. It's pretty bare-bones (I swiped the publications and references from the German one), so I encourage anyone who knows more about the man to add to it.

The word "carrick" appears in Balzac's "Le Colonel Chabert," where the character is introduced with "Allons, encore notre vieux carrick!" - the Colonel's coat (old-fashioned, out of date, ridiculous) reflects something about his character.

Balzac uses the word again in a contribution to the Jan. 1831 issue of "La Caricature" called "Charges" in which he makes fun of an Englishman's French:
"Goddem! meusier le baussu, you avoir pris mon carrick que you salissez beaucoup en le traînant par terre."

I withdraw the comment about the carrick reflecting something about the colonel's character. Upon further thought, that misrepresents how it works in the narrative. Sorry!

I'm just reading Hofstadter's "Le Ton Beau de Marot". It's better than I had expected -- Hofstadter has a pretty good language background and is fond of the poem, whereas I had been led to expect that he was winging it the way a lot of high tech geniuses do. ("Let's show these humanist imbeciles how it's really done!") But he goes on a bit too much about the old dilemma, "Literal/accurate vs. formal/poetic".

Celtic etymology

MacBain
Pokorny
eDIL carrac crec

I'm not myself 100% sure what difference in sense among 'stone' / 'rock' / 'cliff' / 'crag' there is for all these pairs at various times: Old Welsh carrecc / creik, Old Irish carrac / crec, Welsh carreg / craig, and Irish/Gaelic carraig / creig.

Persephonia, the derogatory allusion to vieux carrick does not describe the colonel's own character (which we discover later) , but the colonel as a character at the beginning of the story, since his decrepit appearance and outdated, threadbare clothing make him look ridiculous in the eyes of others, especially the young clerks who try to bully him. The lawyer, on the other hand, will see through his miserable appearance and try to help the old man, who is neither as old nor as dimwitted as he seems but has gone through incredible hardships.

After getting deeper into Hofstadter's Marot, I'm liking him less. Much of the book is in Language Hat territory, but he develops ideas at enormous length which are fairly commonplace to most people here, and he frequently reinvents the wheel.

He also doesn't seem to recognize that some of what he says about translating light, graceful occasional poem wouldn't be true about translations of something denser.

I find these etymology threads utterly fascinating and simply wanted to add that neither French CURRICLE nor CABRIOLER can stem directly from the Latin etyma, CURRICULUM and CAPREOLUS respectively (neither Latin intervocalic /k/ nor initial /ka/ remain unscathed in the evolution from Latin to French). The former must be a learned borrowing from Latin: as for the latter, the voicing of /p/ to /b/ makes me suspect a loan from Provencal. So both words are indeed "from Latin", but in neither case did French directly inherit the word: in one case the word was directly borrowed from Latin, in the other it borrowed a Provencal word that was itself inherited from Latin.

Just to spread Dada confusion: I once asked myself whether coracle / carrack / cog in European lnguages (ships and boats) had any connection with the Eskimo / Turkish kayak.

It's not quite as fanciful as it seems, because the word kayak in some form was found in most Turkish languages and their neighboring languages (at the link), and could have reached the British Isles via Finland and Scandinavia during prehistoric times.

But pretty darn fanciful nonetheless.

Etienne, by Provençal you mean Occitan (Provençal being only one of the varieties of Occitan).

Not only the p >b (not v) but the initial ca- show that cabriole (like cabri 'goat kid') is a borrowing from Occitan. However, the word cabriolet for the vehicle is a French derivation.

But curricle as a French word ??????

Marie-Lucie, is there an ethnic slur for the Occitan people? I need a critical terminology for those occasions when I find Bernart de Ventadorn tedious.

I have more than once thought there should be a database of ethnic/national slurs to and from every group for which such exist. Sure, if you run across the slur you can find the definition, but how do you know the proper way to insult a Luxembourgeois or Monegasque who has offended you? Or, in this case, an Occitan. (Though I personally have always found Bernart de Ventadorn an enjoyable companion.)

There's a diachronic dimension too: while today "Provencal" only refers to a dialect of a greater whole (Occitan), the prestigious literary language of the Middle Ages is called Old Provencal (Ancien Provencal), never "Old Occitan".

Well, just so we know what we're talking about, there's a nice picture of a Carrick coat here: http://www.mediastorehouse.com/pictures_602665/CARRICK-COAT-1810.html.

My theory is that it was first made in one of the places called Carrick (e.g., the one in Donegal, Ireland). A lot of names for clothes come from the places where they were first made. There was also a coat called an Ulster, 'as every schoolboy knows'.

I guess "Occitan motherfucker" will have to be it next time Bernart rankles my ass. I'd really like something a bit classier though.

Well, Swearasaurus has a very limited selection of Occitan curses (yet another sign of the low estate of the once-proud langue d'oc!), but it says viech d'ase is 'donkey cock,' so you might try that.