I don't know for sure. In Polish media protestant priests used to be called "pastors" and orthodox ones "pops" but wikipedia claims that non-catholics in Poland (mainly protestants) also used to call their priest "ksiądz" and the title "pastor" is used by catholics. This is something new for me. I got a friend who was briefly interested with some protestant religion and he mentioned he was talking to pastor. I have no contact with orthodoxes so I don't know how it looks in their church.
Bizzare etymologies of common words in various languages
- Thread starter Petike
- Start date
I don't know for sure. In Polish media protestant priests used to be called "pastors" and orthodox ones "pops" but wikipedia claims that non-catholics in Poland (mainly protestants) also used to call their priest "ksiądz" and the title "pastor" is used by catholics. This is something new for me. I got a friend who was briefly interested with some protestant religion and he mentioned he was talking to pastor. I have no contact with orthodoxes so I don't know how it looks in their church.
Germany - Германия, German (person) - немец,
Land of Fools - страна дураков
Why haven't I seen this thread earlier?
Here's my first two pence/stories.
Looking out for a hero
German and Dutch held, and Swedish hjälte mean "hero".
One potential explanation of this word goes like this:
Its original meaning in Protogermanic was "he who holds" . Huh?
Well, the most basic meaning of "to hold" was "to herd (sheep or cattle)"
(this theory is largely undisputed).
So, for the Germanic tribes, a shepherd must have been the youthful
masculine daredevil that defends the herd against beasts and bandits.
Quite a contrast to the image of a shepherd in the last couple of centuries!
I for one tend to think of them as nice grampas who know the best home
remedies against insomnia.
(However, this derivation of the word 'held' seems to lose support among scholars,
but no other satisfactory explanation is available.)
The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things
I'd rather talk about walruses. Or the word 'walrus'.
The origin of this term can be tracked to Skandinavia (surprise, surprise):
In Old Norse, the beast was originally called rosmhvalr - which probably
means "reddish whale"; the meaning of the first component is not completely
clear, though.
For simplicity of pronunciation, for graviational forces of frequent words, and/or just for the laughs and giggles - this word was altetered to rosshvalr - the "horse whale" !
In the course of time, people may have wondered that as a terrestrial animal, the walrus may rather be a "whale horse" than a "horse whale" -
even if this seems like a somewhat exaggerated compliment.
Anyway, the word was imported as walros/walrus into Dutch, and the Dutch language
distirbuted it to other languages (English, German, even Nordic languages where the word originally came from).
Having written this, I can't help visualizing Don Quijote on his favorite wal-"horse" Rus-inante, accompanied by Sancho Pansa on a seal, slithering into the sunset ...
Here's my first two pence/stories.
Looking out for a hero
German and Dutch held, and Swedish hjälte mean "hero".
One potential explanation of this word goes like this:
Its original meaning in Protogermanic was "he who holds" . Huh?
Well, the most basic meaning of "to hold" was "to herd (sheep or cattle)"
(this theory is largely undisputed).
So, for the Germanic tribes, a shepherd must have been the youthful
masculine daredevil that defends the herd against beasts and bandits.
Quite a contrast to the image of a shepherd in the last couple of centuries!
I for one tend to think of them as nice grampas who know the best home
remedies against insomnia.
(However, this derivation of the word 'held' seems to lose support among scholars,
but no other satisfactory explanation is available.)
The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things
I'd rather talk about walruses. Or the word 'walrus'.
The origin of this term can be tracked to Skandinavia (surprise, surprise):
In Old Norse, the beast was originally called rosmhvalr - which probably
means "reddish whale"; the meaning of the first component is not completely
clear, though.
For simplicity of pronunciation, for graviational forces of frequent words, and/or just for the laughs and giggles - this word was altetered to rosshvalr - the "horse whale" !
In the course of time, people may have wondered that as a terrestrial animal, the walrus may rather be a "whale horse" than a "horse whale" -
even if this seems like a somewhat exaggerated compliment.
Anyway, the word was imported as walros/walrus into Dutch, and the Dutch language
distirbuted it to other languages (English, German, even Nordic languages where the word originally came from).
Having written this, I can't help visualizing Don Quijote on his favorite wal-"horse" Rus-inante, accompanied by Sancho Pansa on a seal, slithering into the sunset ...
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Apparently not - it just derives from "pomp", which originally meant "procession".
On the other hand, Crassus did inspire the construct "craso error" in Spanish, which translates as a maximun, fatal mistake. As you can guess, it's a reference to his Parthian campaign.
We have something like this in Tolosa. "This man is a Capeio" means "A certain stealer", it comes from the mythe of Cursed Gold of Tolosa.
To resume, Tolosates plunder Delphi, take the gold up to Tolosa, giving it to the druids that offer it to the infernal divinities and took by Capeio that lost it during the way and was exiled under the suspicion to have kept it form him.
Mhm, true.
Something similar happened in post-WWI Italy, where Luigi Cadorna's surname actually became a swearword due to all the hate he received for his military failures.
Alex Richards
Donor
And in Ireland where Cromwell became a colloquialism for the Devil/an evil power, 'may the curse of Cromwell be upon ye' and so forth.
And going back to Spanish there is the second meaning of the word 'chorizo', which means thief. The primary meaning, as you might know, refers to a type of sausage. The second owes its existence to loathed-by-all early 19th century PM Manuel Godoy, who was from Extremadura, a region renowned for its chorizos, and was nicknamed as such.
There is a word in quebec "quétaine" meaning something along the lines of kitsh or tacky which some linguisits have tentatively traced back to a Keaton familiy in Saint-Hyacinthe. Apparently their sense of style left something to be desired.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's the linguistic evidence they gave. So long as it wasn't semi-nude, of course.
Shane is the Anglicized form of the Irish Sean. Sean is itself the Irish form of the English John. And if you think it's ridiculous that English incorporated a name from another language it already had a word for, you should check out all the other forms of John that exist in English: Jean, Jane, Jenny, Shavonne, Evan, Ivan, Ian, Ewan, Han.
Here is someting from romanian historian Neagu Djuvara (although he credits someone else for the ideea, but I can't remember whom):
He points out that the romanian words plecare/a pleca (to leave) is realated to the spanish word llegar (to arive). He claims that both these words are derived from the latin plicare (to fold) which has allso given in romanian the word a apleca (to lower, to bow). Apparently, "Plicare!" was an order in the Roman army for folding the tents and breaking camp, and allso an order in the Roman navy for folding the sails and stopping the ship in a port. So a legion dispatched from Rome to Iberia could, upon meeting a native, tell him that they had "plicated"
This is by far the most fascinating item among all the interesting things I learned in this thread. Thank you for sharing!
That's also a nice aspect.
This sharpens the attention that different languages often have different borders of categories; this is especially surprising with colours.
Another Latin example:
sanguinis is blood in a living organism, while
cruor and aser mean shed (clotted, incrusted) blood. Enjoy your tea.
(This distinction seems to be a Latin novelty: The Slavonic languages use a cousin of "cruor" for blood in general.)
Remark: In the Romance languages, "sanguinis" has taken over the whole domain of meanings, while "cruor" has also led to words like 'crude' and 'cruel'.
Perhaps less exciting, another example of Latin diligence of distinction:
Hannibal may have appeared ante portas (in front of the gates, looking to the city) - but guards were always standing pro portis - in front of the gates, but looking away!
Redefining the domains for prepositions tweaks my mind even more than the same for colors. Different languages draw completely different pictures of the world - close to being parallel worlds themselves.
It turns out that I can't stop from adding more examples:
One of the hardest aspects to understand about the alleged Indoeuropean mentality is the attitude towards fire and water.
According to the established opinion, there were two words for either one: One describing it as a material, and one as a living being!
Accordingly, the material words are neuter in grammatical gender, while living water is female and living fire male.
Representative words:
water-material: English water, Greek hydor, Russian voda
water-being: Latin aqua
fire-material: English fire, Greek pyr
fire-being: Latin ignis, Sanskrit agnih, Russian ogon'
Yes, I like that story very much. As it turns out, Old English (=Anglo-Saxon) had both words: blæk meaning 'black', and blak meaning 'white'! Both are related to the same root. I can understand that only one of them could stay.
As I recently learned, this also works for the most decisive contrast of all, death and life:
The word to die seems to be related to a Indoeuropean root also meaning "live". The shift may have worked like this:
Basic meaning "to breathe"
1) --> "to live".
2) --> "to exhale" --> "to exhale one's life" = "to die".
The first branch is represented in English by the word deer: The originally meaning in Protogermanic was "living being > aninmal > wild animal, beast".
While English specialized the meaning extremely, the German cousing of this word, Tier, has generalized back to the meaning "animal" (including domestic ones).
(I think the Swedish djur went the same path; while I'm not sure how much the Dutch dier and Icelandic d'yr still stick to the "wild" aspect.)
This is also an interesting aspect for me as a German speaker: Many languages still distinguish "domestic animal" and "wild animal". English at least has a remainder of this in the form of the word "beast"; in German the distinction is largely eliminated.
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Alex Richards
Donor
Perhaps this has something to do with the origin of the notion that one 'proves that black is white' as the preferred statement rather than other applicable ones (day is night, hot is cold etc.)
That's actually a good question.
I don't know for sure, but I would suspect that that saying appeared later and may have been used in French or Medieval Latin first. So I wonder whether the English word doublet of the first millennium plays a role there.
Does anybody know early examples of this phrase? I'd throw in Jonathan Swift (in Guliver's travels, about what lawyers usually do), but earlier than him, Cyrano de Bergerac for a start.
Anyone earlier?
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Nitpick,but Jenny doesn't belong in that list. It's the short form of Jennifer which is the Cornish form of the Welsh Gwenhwyfar which means something like White Witch or Enchantress. Gwenhwyfar is better known in it's other anglicised form, Guinevere.
Heres something I've always wanted to know, where does the word fag come from? Because its not short for Tobacco.
Might be related to "faggot" (as in the bundle of sticks).
According to this site:
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=fag&allowed_in_frame=0
it could be related to the verb "to fag" meaning to droop
Thande
Donor
Tolkien had a fondness for that as well, which you may or may not already know, judging by your username. He was rather upset that the derivative term "Gnome" in English had come to mean those twee little things with red hats and fishing rods rather than its original meaning of 'those with the knowledge', usually applied to grand and noble conceptions of Elves. He eventually abandoned the idea because he thought that "Gnome"'s new meaning was now too ingrained, but it does survive as the root of the name "Noldor" for the second race of the Elves in the Silmarillion--which should actually be pronounced more like "Ngoldor", and at one point he spelled it with a Spanish-style tilde over the N.
from the ever-popular "Online Etymological Dictionary":
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=fag&searchmode=none said:fag (v.)"to droop, decline, tire," 1520s, apparently an alteration of flag in its verbal sense of "droop." Transitive sense of "to make (someone or something) fatigued" is first attested 1826. Related: Fagged; fagging.fag (n.)
Edit: ninja'd by Marc while (I was) at supper.