Search Results from languagehat.com
The other day my wife asked me about the history of brook in phrases like "brook no opposition." What an excellent question, said I, and repaired to the OED, where I found the following story. The Old English strong verb...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 5, 2010 08:50 PM
More fun from my dictionary editing! To begin with, two pairs of homonyms that one might think had the same Greek origins but that come from words with different vowel lengths: colon 'part of the large intestine' goes back to...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 5, 2010 02:12 PM
Looking up something else in my Merriam-Webster, I ran across ridley, the name of two varieties of sea turtle. What struck me was the conjunction of the etymology and the date, respectively "unknown" and 1926. There are lots of words...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 15, 2009 11:55 AM
A couple of books that have been sitting around patiently waiting for me to write about them: Charles Hodgson, who runs the etymology site podictionary, sent me his new book History of Wine Words: An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology and...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 24, 2009 09:16 PM
Jordan at Macvaysia has been wondering whether the English word cooties, which he defines as "an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids," might come from Malay kudis 'scabies' (Indonesian...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 6, 2009 05:46 PM
One of the sections I was most anticipating in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (previous posts: 1, 2) was the discussion of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, one of the greatest and most controversial landmarks of American lexicography, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 30, 2009 09:40 PM
Continuing my exhilarated exploration of The Oxford History of English Lexicography, I would like to report on chapter 9, "Major American Dictionaries" by Sidney I. Landau. I thought I had a fairly good grasp of the subject, but I had...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 20, 2009 08:27 PM
A few years ago I posted a link to Denis Lepage's Avibase, an amazingly comprehensive bird site ("containing over 4.5 million records about 10,000 species and 22,000 subspecies of birds, including distribution information, taxonomy, synonyms in several languages and more"),...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 18, 2009 07:23 PM
The good people at Oxford UP sent me a review copy of The Oxford History of English Lexicography; they must have been pretty confident I'd like it, because it's an expensive two-volume set, and their confidence was not misplaced. This...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 8, 2009 09:23 PM
Via a NY Times "Lede" post (thanks, Bonnie!), I learned about the Atlas of True Names:The Atlas of True Names reveals the etymological roots, or original meanings, of the familiar terms on today's maps of the World and Europe. For...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 23, 2008 02:36 PM
The latest post by the estimable Conrad, along with the ensuing comment thread, prompts me to share with you all the remarkable life of H. W. Bailey. The Wikipedia entry is a good start:Bailey was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, and...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 21, 2008 02:59 PM
A couple of years ago I wrote about the fact that the American moose is the same as the European elk (the American "elk" being an entirely different creature), citing Mallory and Adams' The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 27, 2008 10:02 AM
I recently ran across a Russian word unknown to me, мухояр [mukhoyár], an obsolete term for a kind of cotton fabric mixed with silk or wool. It looks like a purely Slavic word, perhaps having something to do with муха...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 19, 2008 10:36 AM
I just discovered a very interesting etymology that has apparently been developed only recently. The OED says the origin of calypso (the name of an Afro-Caribbean style of satirical song) is unknown; Webster's Third New International (1961) says "probably after...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 7, 2008 10:37 AM
The Anglo-Norman Dictionary was announced in the late 1940s and began publishing in 1979, the last fascicle coming out in 1994; Glanville Price in his review for The Modern Language Review said it "is likely to have a major impact...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 25, 2008 08:29 PM
I keep forgetting to post the NY Times obit (by Bruce Weber) of lexicographer Laurence Urdang. He was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which is the first dictionary I...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 4, 2008 03:58 PM
I finally remembered to share this tidbit from Middlemarch (we're over two-thirds of the way through the novel, and will soon have to start thinking about what to follow it with for our nightly readings); it's from Chapter 48:But Mr...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 28, 2008 09:49 PM
The creator of Lexicon of Early Indo-European Loanwords Preserved in Finnish has done a splendid job. Mind you, I don't know enough to judge the accuracy of the etymologies, but they're very well presented, and the approach inspires confidence:The data...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 18, 2008 09:02 PM
I don't know how many people are still familiar with the old expression of incredulity "All my eye and Betty Martin" (e.g., from Walter De la Mare's 1930 On Edge: "You might be suggesting that both shape and scarecrow too...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 12, 2008 09:56 AM
Mark Liberman at the Log quotes a message from a correspondent who, after some high-minded insults ("disingenuous … smug … misrepresentations …"), gets down to brass tacks:At the end of the day, Descriptivism appears merely to be another form of...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 10, 2008 10:17 AM
My wife and I unexpectedly finished Proust last night (I'd thought it would last another day) and sat up talking about it for a while, and now I'm going to try to organize my thoughts about the year-and-a-half-long experience and...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 4, 2008 12:31 PM
I've recently become aware of these language-oriented blogs: Cognition and Language Lab focuses on "experiments through the Web testing human reasoning, particularly in the domain of language": "Long-time readers know that the major focus of my research is on how...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 10, 2008 09:04 PM
The other night, in our Long March through Proust (begun last November), my wife and I finally finished Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe)—it certainly ends with a bang!—and I now have a question and a complaint. The complaint...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 8, 2007 06:07 PM
I used the verb maffick (OED: "To celebrate uproariously, rejoice extravagantly") last night, and my wife asked where it was from. I said "That's one of my favorite etymologies," and when I told her she agreed it was pretty damn...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 14, 2007 08:07 PM
The comment thread on this post quickly mutated into a discussion of the etymology of the word shark; commenter dearieme quoted Michael D. Coe as saying "Tom Jones has recently proved that 'xoc' [in Maya] is the origin of the...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2007 08:27 PM
I'm reading an interesting articla (single-page printable version) by Ian Parker in the latest New Yorker ("Swingers: Bonobos are celebrated as peace-loving, matriarchal, and sexually liberated. Are they?"), and I've just come across an etymological tidbit:For decades, “pygmy chimpanzee” remained...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 28, 2007 12:55 PM
1. Inspired by this LH post, Joel of Far Outliers has posted a very useful summary of the history and uses of the Japanese kana syllabaries. 2. It turns out the word ramen does not have a firm etymology. Wikipedia:Though...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 1, 2007 10:07 AM
There's an extremely interesting discussion going on over at Jabal al-Lughat. Lameen starts by pointing out that "in all dialects of Arabic, adjectives normally follow the noun" but quotes T. M. Johnstone (Eastern Arabian Dialect Studies, Oxford UP 1967):The (Persian)...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 29, 2007 01:48 PM
There's something romantic about language isolates. The most famous is Basque (subject of much crackpottery); others are Ainu and the Siberian languages Ket and Nivkh (also known as Gilyak). In and around the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan, almost 90,000...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 22, 2007 09:02 AM
Polyglot Vegetarian has another superb post, this one on the linguistic history of Persian پنیر panir 'cheese,' which like many Persian words has spread throughout Western Asia (it will be familiar to many as the "paneer" of Indian restaurants). I...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 19, 2007 09:15 AM
Random finds while looking up other words in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate: capoeira 'a Brazilian dance of African origin': Brazilian Portuguese, kind of martial art, ruffian skilled in this art, fugitive slave living in the forest, from capão island of forest in...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 27, 2006 10:12 AM
An occasional feature here at LH is Family Names With Surprising Etymologies (e.g., Janeway), and today's is Pancoast. When my nonagenarian mother-in-law mentioned that somebody she'd known seventy years ago was called that, I thought she might be misremembering, but...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 30, 2006 10:51 AM
I'm as aware as anyone of the high percentage of words that don't have known etymologies (boy and dog, for instance), but every once in a while an example strikes me with particular force. Just now it was griot, in...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 13, 2006 02:27 PM
Etymologies are usually staid affairs; whether they are long lists of preforms and cognates or simple statements that the origin is unknown, they are devoid of passion, humor, and exclamation marks. Not so that of the OED's coil2 "Noisy disturbance,...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 27, 2006 06:57 PM
Looking up something else, I happened to notice that English has two words lemma: lemma 'auxiliary proposition; glossed word or phrase' and lemma 'the lower of the two bracts enclosing the flower in the spikelet of grasses.' Not particularly noteworthy...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 26, 2006 08:05 PM
We here at Casa Languagehat believe in fairness to the point of gritted teeth, yea, unto the uttering of small yips of pain. Having twice this month (1, 2) spifflicated William Safire, the oft-erring language columnist of the New York...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2006 01:44 PM
As part of his online Grammar of the Polish Language, Grzegorz Jagodziński has a list of Polish etymologies, a table of numerals in some of the main IE languages, and a detailed discussion of the etymology of the Polish (and...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 1, 2005 04:07 PM
So I've been reading a book by James G. Cowan called The Elements of the Aborigine Tradition, and I've been putting up with balderdash like "This suggests that science has no way of answering problems posed by the spirit, however...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 4, 2005 07:01 PM
The Academia Mexicana de la Lengua maintains on its website the Diccionario breve de mexicanismos, containing Spanish definitions of words peculiar to Mexico, and the Diccionario geográfico universal, whose entries often give "local pronunciation" and the Spanish adjective derived from...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 29, 2005 06:01 PM
Over at après moi, le déluge, silmarillion has posted a list of all the Spanish words borrowed from Arabic, using the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (both printed and online editions), the Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), the American...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 24, 2005 10:44 PM
In an effort to find out something about the Isaurians and their language (a vain effort, and if anybody knows anything beyond "warlike" and "unknown" I'd appreciate hearing about it) I ran across Vassil Karloukovski's Page, with its many Bulgarian-related...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 28, 2005 06:19 PM
Matt of No-Sword has posted about the new Nihongogen Daijiten, the 'Big Dictionary of Japanese Etymology.' If I knew Japanese, I would definitely want this book, but I'm disappointed by Matt's description:The Nihongogen Daijiten is an attempt to solve or...
Posted in languagehat.com on March 15, 2005 08:27 PM
I got a number of excellent things for Christmas (including a Boris Barnet double feature I can't wait to see), but the one I want to babble about here is a gift from my lovely and generous wife: Nart Sagas...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 25, 2004 06:24 PM
The magnificent Lexilogos site links to all manner of reference works involving language: family names, etymology, place names, slang, and much else, usually starting with French and continuing with a scattering of other languages. To give just one example, check...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 18, 2004 08:19 AM
I had always understood (as the etymologies in dictionaries told me) that the word kamikaze means 'divine wind' in Japanese, originally referred to the storms that hit the Mongol fleet in 1281 and saved Japan from invasion, and was later...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 22, 2004 11:44 AM
To quote Andrew Zangrilli, from whose Blogbook post I took this list:Do you have a good vocabulary? Prove it, smarty. Test your knowledge against the vocab champ, Judge Selya of the First Circuit. The following word list was gathered from...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 5, 2004 04:33 PM
Once again the NY Times has increased my vocabulary. A story about a small New Mexico town describes its current state of decay: "And these days, more animals than people can be found wandering the streets. Quail, javelinas and the...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 26, 2004 06:21 PM
John Koontz, a linguist at the University of Colorado, has a website full of information about Siouan and Other Native American Languages, with a particularly interesting page about etymologies (including Kemosabe and Tonto, an entry that manages to cite both...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 16, 2004 02:21 PM
The creators of Etymologic! call it "the toughest word game on the web," and for all I know they may be right.In this etymology game you'll be presented with 10 randomly selected etymology (word origin) or word definition puzzles to...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 19, 2004 10:08 PM
Or, to give the site its full name, Etymologie, Étymologie, Etymology / __ Welt, World, Le Monde / Sprachen der Länder. It's a collection of language links, with descriptions in German or English, followed by a (very incomplete) list of...
Posted in languagehat.com on July 2, 2004 10:26 PM
No, that's not a multicultural dinner menu, it's a couple of interesting etymologies I ran across in my research for my last post. Fajita is an American Spanish diminutive of faja 'band, strip,' from Latin fascia 'band, bandage,' which is...
Posted in languagehat.com on June 26, 2004 10:08 PM
The most comprehensive interspecies dictionary available in paperback!Over 5,000 references, 80,000 translations and hundreds of new expressions! Contains usage notes to avoid being bitten, and slang signals on a wide variety of subjects. Contains examples to show how sounds are...
Posted in languagehat.com on May 23, 2004 02:06 PM
The Omnia online dictionary defines [non-]Polish words [and expressions] in Polish, and thus is not of much use to those who do not know that language—except that it also includes etymologies, so if you have even a basic acquaintance with...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 21, 2004 05:02 PM
This fascinating site gives the origins of all sorts of company names. Who knew that Apache got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon, resulting in "a patchy" server, or...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 14, 2004 02:00 PM
Via the newly active riley dog (now relocated to the Yukon), I got to a clever three-part poem, "A Lesson" by Jeanne Marie Beaumont, whose first part, "Vocabulary," contains the lines:Sty and style are not related; neither are braid and...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 3, 2004 04:17 PM
As I make my way through Dalby's Dictionary of Languages, I run across all sorts of fascinating tidbits in the sidebars. In the entry for Sukuma, an important language of northern Tanzania, there is also information about its sister language...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 23, 2004 10:20 PM
Curiosities of Biological Nomenclature gives some of the weirder etymologies of species names: Aegrotocatellus Adrian and Edgecombe, 1995 (trilobite) Latin for "sick puppy". Brachyanax thelestrephones Evenhuis, 1981 (fly) The name translates from Greek to "little chief nipple twister". Campsicnemius charliechaplini...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 19, 2004 10:45 PM
Via Nick J. comes a Vancouver Sun story by Nick Miliokas about a new book, The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through the Language of Love and Sex, by Mark Morton. I don't know how qualified Morton is to judge...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 16, 2003 12:28 PM
YiLing Chen-Josephson gives a spin around the block to "seven of the relatively affordable and frequently updated college dictionaries" and rates them on a point system (for stock, definitions, usage guidance, etymologies, and enjoyment) in a Slate article. It's an...
Posted in languagehat.com on December 8, 2003 07:04 PM
I was looking at the book Caviar by the delightfully named Inga Saffron when I was stopped cold by an excursus on the etymology of the word caviar. She found the OED's etymology boring and confusing:Of uncertain origin, found in...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 29, 2003 12:58 PM
Pat tells me about an offshoot of Wikipedia called the Wiktionary, "a collaborative project to produce a free multilingual dictionary in every language, with meanings, etymologies and pronunciations... We started on December 12, 2002 and already have 22143 entries in...
Posted in languagehat.com on November 10, 2003 08:53 PM
An Idler's Glossary: an annotated lexicon of words for the theory and practice of non-working. As usual with such things, distrust the etymologies ("Laggard is how the Norwegians say it"—no it's not) but enjoy the brio.apathetic: Because of his supine...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 29, 2003 12:17 PM
The mail section of the latest New Yorker is entirely taken up with responses to the recent Erofeyev article on mat. I will reproduce here what is, hands down, the best letter-to-the-editor I have ever read (from a Languagehat standpoint,...
Posted in languagehat.com on October 16, 2003 06:43 PM
Marc Miyake over at Abode of Amritas has a post that goes into obsessive detail (just what I like) about the history and connections of the four characters that make up the Chinese name, Yingxiong shidai, of the forthcoming comic...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 19, 2003 11:57 AM
A few obscure words I've come across recently, with unexpected meanings or etymologies (cited here from the OED): adversaria 'A commonplace-book, a place in which to note things as they occur; collections of miscellaneous remarks or observations; also commentaries or...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 16, 2003 09:32 PM
A detailed abstract of a book (Riho Grünthal, Livvistä liiviin. Itämerensuomalaiset etnonyymit [= Finnic ethnonyms], 1997) on "names referring to Finnic groups either linguistically or geographically." The basic breakdown:...
Posted in languagehat.com on September 3, 2003 12:18 PM
I tried to resist, I really did—I know I have a book problem—but I couldn't resist at least looking at a book with the title Error and the Academic Self, and the table of contents was irresistible: Introduction: The Pursuit...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 26, 2003 08:28 PM
The Encyclopedia of North American Indians has entries on many facets of Native American life and civilization, including languages; there are separate articles on Algonquian, Cherokee, and half a dozen other languages and families. From the Cherokee page:Cherokee has a...
Posted in languagehat.com on August 1, 2003 08:07 PM
"Word Map is mapping Australian regionalisms—words, phrases or expressions used by particular language groups." Click on "Map search" at the left and you'll get a map divided into regions; click on one to find words and phrases peculiar to it....
Posted in languagehat.com on July 31, 2003 10:12 PM
I don't even know how to start telling you about Carl Masthay and his obsessively compiled and self-published Kaskaskia Illinois-to-French Dictionary. Just go read the Riverfront Times article (by Matthew Everett); you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wonder how he finds...
Posted in languagehat.com on April 12, 2003 10:46 PM
William Safire's column in today's NY Times Magazine has a useful discussion of the well-known bynames of the late Kim Il Song and his son and heir Kim Jong Il:In 1994, Kim Il Sung (Great Kim) died and was succeeded...
Posted in languagehat.com on February 2, 2003 04:18 PM
I'm used to seeing dubious or just plain wrong etymologies, both online and off-, and usually I just ignore them. This site, however, is so bad that I feel the need to give it a public thrashing. It purports to...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 23, 2003 10:50 AM
I recently bought Youssou N'Dour's new album Nothing's in Vain (Coono du reer), and having opened and played it today I am doubly delighted—not just by the music, which is wonderful, but by the booklet. For once, an African language...
Posted in languagehat.com on January 18, 2003 11:21 PM
