kaberett | Entries tagged with language

I mentioned, recentlyish, being both good and brave.

I have been wondering, on and off, over the about -- well, "brav" is the German for "good" (in the sense of well-behaved), so... cognate???

I was initially plerplexed by poking at etymonline and wiktionary, both of which specify

From Middle French brave, borrowed from Italian bravo, itself of uncertain origin...

... but NOPE that's also where we get brav from!

Bonus: etymonline also encouraged me to look up Old English "modig" ("(now "moody")"), in some startlement, because that sure does look like "mutig" i.e. the German for "brave"! ... yep, they're cognate too. I am charmed by the semantic drift!

A door blows open in your mind when you learn about the suffix -le, it explains so much. People used to add it to verbs to mean 'more than once' or continuously--so originally, to ramble is 'to roam' on, to jostle is to joust repeatedly, and to sparkle is to emit lots of sparks.

-- Wylfcen on ex-Twitter, 10/04/2024

... plus a(n unsourced -- possibly subsequently-modified wiktionary?) screenshot of a definition ("A frequentative suffix of verbs, indicating repetition or continuousness") with examples (crack/crackle, daze/dazzle, draw/drawl, game/gamble, grope/grapple, hand/handle, nest/nestle, nose/nuzzle, prate/prattle, scribe/scribble, sniff/sniffle, wrest/wrestle).

Which I had no idea about and which delighted me. The Wikipedia page on frequentatives and the Wiktionary page give partially but not wholly overlapping lists of examples, with variably robust etymologies. I have been enjoying muttering -le words to myself and giggling for the past several days since this originally crossed my radar, and today I finally managed to find it again for sharing. Enjoy.

Digger, Ursula Vernon, Shadowchild post-sock and [spoiler]-consumption: Shado(w)lescent.

Gastropods, inspection thereof, completed: schnecked. (Schnecke + checked.)

I have for many years now used the Swype keyboard for text input on my auxiliary internet device. Languages I have installed are English (UK), French, German, Irish, and Turkish.

One of these languages is not like the other, not merely in that it's not Indo-European but in specific that it's an agglutinative language.

The way this is handled in predictive text (1) makes a lot of sense and (2) is brilliant.

For four of these languages, if a word isn't in the dictionary (whether because it came pre-entered or because I saved it myself later), predictive text won't ever suggest it. "Stork" can be in the dictionary, but if it's only there in the singular I can swipe that shape + "s" and I'll never get "storks" suggested.

By way of contrast, have a word I used as demonstration to A the other night: duşmanlarımdan. "Duşman" (enemy) is in the pre-loaded dictionary; even duşman+lar (enemy + plural: enemies) might be. But duşman+lar+ım (enemy + plural + first person singular possessive: my enemies) isn't, and duşman+lar+ım+dan (enemy + plural + first person singular possessive + ablative: from my enemies) definitely isn't. The fundamental nature of the language, though, is that you do just Build Words like this, so rather than try (and fail) to preload All Possible Words or even a reasonable subset of them, the Turkish keyboard layout has instead been written to make predictions based on what set of base word plus standard morphemes you've swiped over. It's lovely.

(The target sentence in question is "duşmanlarımdan kaçabilirdin", "you could have escaped from my enemies". "kaçabilirdin" breaks down to kaç-a-bilir-din: "kaçmak" is to flee or escape, and gives "kaç"; "a" is a buffer vowel, which follows vowel harmony; "bilir" is to be able; "din" is the second person singular past tense indicator.)

I decided, a couple of days ago, that the combination of "wanting to play with my pens some more" and "still really struggling to keep several common Irish verbs that go t-[vowel]-[b/g/d/...] correctly associated with their meanings" meant it was time to copy out Irish verb tables.

It transpired that part of the problem with remembering the difference between the verbs for "give" and "take" in their standard English meanings is that they're the same word. So I feel better about not being able to remember which of the t-[vowel]-[consonant???] clusters were which on that front!

And also, I dug out some verb tables, which came along with:

There are eleven irregular verbs in Standard Irish; individual dialects have a few more. Most of them are characterized by suppletion, that is, different roots are used to form different tenses. Analytic forms are indicated by the symbol +. The preterites of many irregular verbs take the nonpreterite forms of preverbal particles, i.e. an (interrogative particle) and ní (negative particle), instead of ar (pret. interrogative particle) and níor (pret. negative particle). Some verbs have different independent and dependent forms in certain tenses; the independent forms are used when no particle precedes the verb, and also after má "if" (open conditional) and the direct relative particle a, while the dependent forms are used after all other particles.

So this told me one thing that I knew (eleven irregular verbs, tables for which I wanted to copy out), one I didn't know and didn't know I wanted to know (suppletion), and one I didn't know and definitely did want to know but had not got around to looking up independently (independent and dependent forms).

It occurred to me, this afternoon, while I was in the process of making Very Easy Paella for dinner, that paella as a dish bears at least a passing resemblance to pila[f|u|v].

Apparently it's not a cognate, though! Pilaf is from Sanskrit, via Turkish, with a meaning along the lines of "cooked rice", whereas paella is from Latin via Spanish and refers to the shape of the cooking dish -- with patella i.e. the kneecap as a doublet, again because of the shape.

Grumble the first: the introduction of exercises where you get to hear a whole sentence spoken, and then have to pick one of two audio snippets to fill in the word that's missing from the written sentence. I have audio processing disorder! I use the context to work out what the word I just heard was! Trying to tell the difference between two brief audio snippets in isolation could not have been better designed to Oppress Me Personally! I am grouchy.

Grumble the second: I am so extremely annoyed with the website having switched to offering the Word Bank by default, rather than letting me just type things in. It seemed to be the case that after stubbornly typing rather than clicking on the word bank for 2-3 exercises I'd start being offered the option to switch to keyboard input again? But either that was a pineapple or the whole set-up has been tweaked again, because this is no longer happening and I Would Like To Scream About It, Thanks. (Partly because keyboard input demands more by way of active recall; partly because I type way faster than I'm able to scan a sodding word bank; partly because I have at this point made multiple "mistakes" because the Word Bank decided I'd chosen words I absolutely had not intended to and I wasn't double-checking sufficiently closely to make sure obviously incorrect words that I did not type had not been selected.)

Grumble the third: I swear I am at about my third go-through this year with turning the animations and the Motivational Messages off in settings, only to swap device and discover that this somehow? reenables them?

I am at least as prone as the next person to This Is Change And Change Is Bad, but also! I am infuriated! it is very vexing! so I am howling into this particular void because I'll only get even more cross if I howl into the void of Duolingo Support and hear not even my own echo.

This morning, while idly pottering, it suddenly occurred to me that I knew two facts I had never previously put together (or at least, if I had I'd promptly forgotten):

peanuts are called pea nuts; and
peanuts are a legume: which is to say, speaking imprecisely, a kind of pea.

This abruptly recontextualised for me recipes in which peanuts are boiled (e.g.), and also their general shape (including their shells! but also what they do when you split them!).

I did, of course, go and double-check the etymology -- which led me on to:

a false singular from Middle English pease (plural pesen), which was both single and collective (as wheat, corn) but the "s" sound was mistaken for the plural inflection. [etymonline]

... and that is why I am daydreaming happily of asking someone sputtering in outrage about singular they Their Thoughts On Peas. Thank you and goodnight.

I am currently attempting to Cook Things With Blood Oranges, for reasons, which means that I've gone back through my scrapbook of recipes torn out of magazines, and one of the things I've found is a recipe for "blood orange and cardamom jam".

I wondered a little about this, because by default I'd say "if it's made with citrus then, in English, it's marmalade, not jam", but it wasn't until I was prompted in conversation that I actually went hunting.

(In German, "Marmelade" is the English "jam" and the English "marmalade" is "Orangenmarmelade", lit. "oranges jam", so the distinction this Waitrose Food magazine recipe is making is... harder to express. The reason for this apparent confusion is that it all comes from the Galician-Portuguese "marmelade" i.e. quince paste/membrillo, from the Greek for quince "honey apple". Apparently.)

Which led me, inexorably, to Council Directive 2001/113/EC of 20 December 2001 relating to fruit jams, jellies and marmalades and sweetened chestnut purée intended for human consumption, and particularly:

‘Marmalade’ is a mixture, brought to a suitable gelled consistency, of water, sugars and one or more of the following products obtained from citrus fruit: pulp, purée, juice, aqueous extracts and peel.

The quantity of citrus fruit used in the manufacture of 1 000 g of finished product must not be less than 200 g of which at least 75 g must be obtained from the endocarp.

... which is to say it's gotta have orange-pulp-from-orange-segments in, but skin is optional. So now I know! At least as far as the EU is concerned.

Browsing r/fountainpens today, as one does, I observed the following:

I have been writing out my Morning Prayer as part of my journal prompts and thought it would be fun to have a dedicated "Prayer Pen". Thinking something somewhat decorative/festive with a broad nib and a gold/bronze ink? Something unique, A way to quickly identify the posts when I look back on my journal. Thank you

I am pretty sure I have never before seen "post" used to refer to a physical entry in a physical journal. I am fascinated to know if this is idiosyncratic individual usage or a more general linguistic shift in process.

On Wednesday, shortly before heading out for my booster vaccine, I flung my newest (and oldest[1]) fountain pen across... a room... with gay abandon...

... the details of which are vague because I reconstructed them after the fact at the point at which I realised my tiny metal pen was missing, probably in the middle of a fever, having finally worked out what The Thing That Went Perplexingly Donk was in this instance.

Anyway. I spent Wednesday night and most of Thursday morning having a fever, and most of Thursday afternoon through to Friday evening seriously considering having another fever and generally feeling pretty sorry for myself, but today -- today -- we actually did a bunch of tidying! In the process of which I Found My Wee Metal Pen!

... down the side of the bed. in my washbag. which I had not yet unpacked from Cornwall.

I have still not quite stopped keeping an eye out for it everywhere else in the house that I go, but I sincerely hope that my brain will Remember It Has Been Found at some point in the nearish future.

(Photos almost certainly to follow -- I am contemplating the merits of making a series of posts about this special interest & my related acquisitions before they stop being quite such a burning special interest. :-p)

[1] Turkish handles this very nicely, in that it has different adjectives for old-as-opposed-to-young and old-as-opposed-to-new!

-- to wit, writing a letter to the DWP telling them that I Have Migraines Now (and also that if they can't consistently call me "Mx" they can damn well call me "Dr"); writing a README to hand to medical professionals with a potted summary of Who I Am, How I Present, And How To Talk To Me; and rewriting the migraine summary.

On the upside, this means that all I have to do to prepare for my January appointment -- UCH phoned me up about my e-mail yesterday, by the way, and the referral to general neurology to let them do their own triage is in fact correct and what they want to have happen! which is very reassuring to hear -- is, the weekend beforehand, add information about the meds changes and migraines I have over the next seven weeks. And in the meantime I get to not think about it.

As a result I am currently a tired and emotional (lit. not fig.) Alex of very little brain, and thus I present to you today's most spectacular English-as-a-second-language fuckup, in discussion of problems I'm having with French:

so in theory I'm fine with reflexive ferbs

You see. The way German handles f/v/w as compared to English? Results in a fairly common hypercorrection in speech, by German speakers, of "verb" to "werb" (German "w" is like English "v", so sometimes in speech people are trying so hard not to pronounce written-w as spoken-v that they instead pronounce written-v as spoken-w). "ferb" is, a, uh, related problem -- German-"v" can also sometimes be pronounced like English-"f", and apparently I am sufficiently tired and emotional (see above) that my English has started slipping...

So! As we know, I fell down the bullet journal rabbit hole getting on for a year ago! And a few months ago, in one of my special-interest Make The Internet Tell Me Things phases, I found Flexible and Mindful Self-Tracking: Design Implications from Paper Bullet Journals (Ayobi et al. 2018). On the face of it, this sort of thing should be right up my street, and yet somehow I kept glazing over every time I tried to read it.

Well, today I made a bit more of an effort, and promptly bounced hard off the statement that "Self-tracking is not a new phenomenon: it probably began with one of the oldest toolsets: pencil and paper."

Pencils are actually a pretty recent invention, friends! But in the course of grousing about this and also reminding myself just how recent, looked up "pencil" on Wikipedia and was delighted to learn why we refer to them as "pencil leads" when they're made of graphite! Specifically (with reference indicators omitted):

As a technique for drawing, the closest predecessor to the pencil was silverpoint or leadpoint until in 1565 (some sources say as early as 1500), a large deposit of graphite was discovered on the approach to Grey Knotts from the hamlet of Seathwaite in Borrowdale parish, Cumbria, England. This particular deposit of graphite was extremely pure and solid, and it could easily be sawn into sticks. It remains the only large-scale deposit of graphite ever found in this solid form. Chemistry was in its infancy and the substance was thought to be a form of lead. Consequently, it was called plumbago (Latin for "lead ore"). Because the pencil core is still referred to as "lead", or "a lead", many people have the misconception that the graphite in the pencil is lead, and the black core of pencils is still referred to as lead, even though it never contained the element lead. The words for pencil in German (Bleistift), Irish (peann luaidhe), Arabic (قلم رصاص qalam raṣāṣ), and some other languages literally mean lead pen.

The discussion then moves on to trade embargoes during the Napoleonic wars and their relevance to the Modern Pencil. I am charmed and also now actually more or less understand why there exists the Derwent Pencil Museum feat. a giant pencil. So there you go! That's my nerdery for the day.

The screenshot above is from a Duolingo "Complete the chat" exercise, with a prompt sentence and two possible responses to choose between. It goes as follows:

Prompt:	C'était d'habitude une petite rue très sûre, très calme.	It was usually a very safe, very quiet little road.
Option 1:	Oui, il y avait souvent des accidents mystérieux.	Yes, there were often mysterious accidents.
Option 2 (selected):	Oui, on ne se sentait jamais en danger.	Yes, one never felt oneself to be in danger.

Earlier this week, Adam was Baffled and Perplexed by me remarking, ruefully, that something-or-other "wasn't getting me grand place".

I thought this was a perfectly normal phrase, and on slightly more reflection decided it was probably from the Irish side of the family given how I say it, but I have just (for reasons) given the internet a cursory poke and... it? isn't? trivially attested?

I will also ask my mother about this in tomorrow's phonecall, because heaven knows we're a family that makes up linguistic oddities at the drop of a hat, but: what. Are you familiar with this? Are you happy interpreting it as "wasn't getting me anywhere"? Is this like my family's dialect word for delayed-onset muscle soreness[0] that, short of writing Arnold Schwarzenegger some very confusing fanmail[1], I have absolutely no idea how to go about substantiating as a usage?

[0] Spatzen, lit. sparrows
[1] he's from the same village as my grandmother

When I finally peeled myself off the sofa last night, and made it through to the bathroom to brush my teeth and ~~be a flamingo~~ do my balance work and so on, I expected this to be routine and normal and uneventful.

I did not expect the bathroom ceiling to yell at me.

I especially did not expect it to yell at me in French.

( Read more... )

German nun, Latin nunc, English now: all apparently from PIE *nu (etymonline, to be going on with).

(With thanks to

simont for setting me wondering!)

Erdapfel is not, in fact, universally accepted as a synonym for Kartoffel. It has been manually added to some but not all relevant exercises.

... I am back on my "aggressively reporting Errors" hobby horse.

Duolingo just finally for the first time in the entire time I've been using it accepted my Correct Potatoes Word!

-- okay let me back up.

German Duolingo is very... well, it's very Germany-flavoured. It's deeply dubious about perfectly reasonable terms from Austrian-flavoured German (I will grudgingly grant that it's just-about reasonable not to accept "vélo" as the German word for bicycle on the grounds that Swiss German Doesn't Count). On the one hand, they're frequently pretty responsive (e.g. the word I use for priest -- Pfarrer -- is now accepted as well as their default Priester, about which all I really have to say is ???) but apparently someone there has at least as much of a grudge about my potatoes word as I do about theirs, because, well.

Literal years! I have spent literally years typing in Erdapfel mulishly and then reporting that my answer should have been accepted before finally resentfully typing in Kartoffel! (Austrian German, like most of the rest of continental Europe and environs, had an extended You Know What's Sexy? French moment, so, yes, our potato-word is a calque of pomme de terre.)

So I did that again this evening, expecting to go through my usual sulky routine, and instead it just worked.

VICTORY IS MINE.

snew is to snowed as...:

blew is to blowed
flew is to flowed
slew is to slowed
glue is to glowed...

M	T	W	T	F	S	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

who only by moving can balance

only by balancing move

very good and VERY brave (or, etymological redundancy)

[language] frequentative verbs!

some recent portmanteaux

[language, technology] small delight

[languages] oh is THAT why--

cognates that aren't

duolingo grumbling

today's adventure in etymology

a brief etymological diversion

oh goodness I feel very old all of a sudden

lost & found!

today I have mostly been upsetting myself by engaging with medical bureaucracy

Today I learned!

Duolingo, I'm going to need you to tell me what genre we're in

[language] ... seeking reassurance

misadventures in cohabitation

quick adventure in etymology

[language] ... deferred success

VICTORY

[the weather] things my brain does when sleepy

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