Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 July 2

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July 2

Borax

What is the etymology of glurch?Curb Chain (talk) 04:08, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

I'm not finding it in Google or EO, but it sounds like maybe a combination of "glue" and some other word. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:31, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

"EO" is a helluva way to abbreviate Bing, which contains neither the letter e nor the letter o in its spelling... 188.28.104.202 (talk) 04:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Etymology Online. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:50, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

If you follow the link in Borax where glurch is mentioned to Flubber (material), you will find an external reference entitled "Glurch Meets Oobleck". On the linked page, the "recipe" for glurch consists primarily of glue and starch. --LarryMac | Talk 16:17, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

"How do you call yourself ?"

Poirot uses this phrase instead of "What's your name ?" or "Who are you ?". So, is this a common way for Belgians to make this inquiry, or is it unique to Poirot ? StuRat (talk) 06:59, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

According to this list of how to ask “What’s your name?” in many languages, the French in France have 3 options:

* Comment vous appellez-vous? (How do you call yourself?)

* Comment t'appelles tu? (as above, but informal)

* Quel est votre nom? (What is your name?).

There’s no listing of what French-speaking Belgians say, so I assume they follow the French. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 07:55, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

The Romance languages in general seem to use that "How do you call yourself?" construct, e.g. Spanish, Como se llama? Philosophically speaking, the answer to "Who are you?" should be something about your spiritual essence or something. But we use it to mean "What is your name?" (i.e. "How do you call yourself?") Go figure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:51, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Ah, the Vorlon question. It's a pretty good question. The Vorlons themselves are bloody fascists though; not sure I like them any better than the Shadows, all things considered. --Trovatore (talk) 21:01, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

And for those who, like me, don't have the faintest idea to what your red link is referring, here is the question in question. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:10, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

A pity that you missed the show, Jack. Babylon 5 was simply astonishing; there was nothing like it ever before. It was the first ever science-fiction epic for television (or indeed in film, but that's kind of obvious; an epic for the big screen is simply not practical, and please don't tell me Star Wars). That it aligned nicely with my politics of course doesn't affect my critical judgment at all.

It clearly paved the way for the better-known reimagined Battlestar Galactica. --Trovatore (talk) 21:29, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

By comparison, in Russian it's "Kak vas zovut?", literally meaning "How do they call you?", but that's also the general passive construction "How are you called?". -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 20:57, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Subtle point: In Italian, mi chiamo Mike doesn't really mean "I call myself Mike" as that would be interpreted in English. The latter has an overtone of "I go by the name of Mike", which would be mi faccio chiamare Mike ("I have myself called Mike"). --Trovatore (talk) 21:05, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks all. If ever asked that, I will have to suppress my urge to give a smart-ass answer like "I dial my home phone from my cell phone". StuRat (talk) 16:23, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Literalists have trouble with such questions. I remember an incident from my childhood; I was 7 or 8. I travelled with my Dad from our home in the country to my grandparents' place in Sydney, an all-day train trip. My Mum and siblings remained behind. When we got there, Nan asked me how Mum was. Her exact question was "How did you leave your mother?". I answered "Er, by train?" (thinking, surely she knew that already). The question was repeated, as was the answer. Then I was given a severe talking to about being insolent to my elders. Later, Dad explained that Nan was asking how Mum was, and the question had nothing to do with transport arrangements. But how the hell was I, as a 7-year old Australian boy, expected to know the Scottish-influenced language patterns of my notoriously irascible grandmother who I saw about once a year? One wouldn't have to be an aspie to have trouble navigating such treacherous linguistic waters at such an age (no offence to aspies). -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:00, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

My brother had a similar experience. We had recently moved to a new state, Indiana, where they used words a bit differently. After a test, the teacher told everyone to "put your pencils up", instead of "down", so my brother held his pencil up in the air and got in trouble. StuRat (talk) 22:07, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Heh. We could go on all day, but one more. There used to be a grand Australian tradition that, when many people got together for a social occasion, each person would bring a plate of food, rather than the host having to do all the work and spend all their money. When people were asked to "bring a plate", they knew what to do. Well, many, many, many immigrants had experiences of being asked this, and obediently turning up with an empty plate, not sure why anyone would want such a thing, but "they do things differently in this country". They soon learned what it was all about. The "bring a plate" tradition seems to have gone the way of the dinosaurs, unfortunately. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 22:25, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

We still occasional do that in the US, where it's called a potluck meal. I rather like those, as you get to try a wide variety of foods, but only have to prepare one. One problem, though, is that you get too many fancy dishes, like desserts, and not enough of the basics, like, say, peas, unless you have people sign up ahead of time under categories, and limit the amount of desserts dishes in this way. StuRat (talk) 22:45, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

StuRat, I first encountered put (something) up when I moved to Texas at the age of 9, but there it didn't mean "put (something) down" but rather "put (something) away". If a teacher had said "Put your pencils up", it would have meant "Put your pencils away" (e.g. in your backpack) rather than "Put your pencils down (on your desk)". And Jack, even now when someone asks me, "How do you find Germany?" I have to bite my tongue not to answer, "I just walk out of my door and there it is." Angr (talk) 22:45, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

In this case "away" and "down" were one in the same, in that the desks had an indentation at the top where pencils were kept, when not in use. StuRat (talk) 22:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Is that like hanging up the phone? – b_jonas 18:16, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

That is an interesting one, isn't it? I suppose that one made literal sense in the days of those vertical phones you see in black-and-white films, with a sort of a horn in front of your mouth and a separate earpiece that you took off the hook and held near your ear. When I were a lad you "hung up" the phone by laying it down on the receiver. These days you mostly "hang up" by pushing a button, but the phrase has not changed. I wonder if it will continue to be used when closing off a remote conversation becomes a pure mental act of will, rather than a physical motion of any sort. --Trovatore (talk) 19:16, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

And we still "dial a number" although we literally press a series of buttons. -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 21:07, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

In German one says "Wie heissen Sie?" --- in effect "How are you called?", except that the verb is in the active voice.

As for "How did you find Germany?", I think Esperanto disambiguates that one nicely:

"Kiel vi trovis Germanujon?" = "How did you succeed in locating Germany?"

"Kia vi trovis Germanujon?" = "What did you find Germany to be like?"

Michael Hardy (talk) 05:48, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Likelyhood that old civilizations pronounced words the way we pronounced them?

I was just thinking about this the other day.

You know how some spoken languages are dead and no longer verbally spoken by anyone, and yet modern linguists and historians derive words (usually place names, or names of deities those people believed in) from preserved, old written texts of those civilizations? I'm specifically referring to languages that did NOT have any tiny "remainder" population of people at all who spoke them for centuries between -- languages whose phoenetic, spoken side hadn't been practiced for centuries or millenia.

I'm wondering this: let's pretend I have a time machine where I can travel back in time to anywhere in the world at any time. For example, say I go into this time machine to Egypt circa 2000BC and listen in on their conversations -- can it be said with certainty that they pronounce Osiris as literally "Osiris", or Ramses as literally "Ramses", or "Punt" as "Punt"? Or are the pronunciations we attribute the written words of extinct languages likely to be even more "filler pronunciations" than even "best guesses"? How does it all work? --66.235.32.202 (talk) 18:03, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

It depends a lot on the language and on how directly the words are transmitted to English. In your example, you can be pretty sure that Osiris and Ramses weren't pronounced the same in 13th century BC Egypt as they are in 21st century English, because those names were transmitted from Ancient Egyptian to Greek and thence to Latin and thence to Middle English, where they underwent the Great Vowel Shift on the way to modern English. Angr (talk) 18:14, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

For these particular examples, we can actually be fairly confident that they were not pronounced in Ancient Egyptian like they are in Modern English. These names have passed through numerous intermediary languages before reaching English, each distorting the pronunciation slightly, and even in these intermediary languages the pronunciations changed over time. For instance, Ramses' name is now typically reconstructed as having been originally something like Riʻmīsisu. Voikya (talk) 18:19, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Names don't even have to be old for there to be confusion. Differing languages seem to be enough even today. Rome/Roma and Paris/"Paareee" are well known examples. In my lifetime Peking has turned into Beijing, and Calcutta has turned into Kolkata. Heck, most Americans mispronounce the name of my city of Melbourne, Australia, and we allegedly speak the same language! (If it helps, we would pronounce it the same way if it was spelt Melbn.) How we can even pretend to know how ancient foreign languages were pronounced is beyond me. HiLo48 (talk) 21:51, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

.....and "lodge wives" is Australian for "large waves". Michael Hardy (talk) 05:50, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

"Hiawatha" was supposedly originally pronounced "hee-uh-waht-hah" and is typically now pronounced "high-uh-wathh-uh". And even within the last century, in American English, the word "record" has evolved from "rec-ord" to "rec-urd". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:56, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

You still pronounce it the old way if you are going to record a video rather then set a world record. Googlemeister (talk) 18:35, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

With Ancient Egyptian, it's even trickier, since they did not usually write vowels. Hebrew doesn't either -- the optional vowel marks weren't even invented until the Middle Ages -- so we don't know how the Tetragrammaton was pronounced. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 03:49, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

The only way (so far as I can see) that we would pronounce those words exactly the same way today as they did then is if by some random twist of fate, we had the exact same sounds in our language as they did back then, which I find to be very unlikely. Certainly, some of the sounds we make would be in common, but other things would be very different. I can tell you from studying [modern] French that the phonetics are very different, even with so many common roots (a large portion of our vocabulary is French in origin). There are sounds that exist in French that we do not have at all in standard English, and vice versa. For example, the 'r' sound in English is miles apart from the French 'r'; they have no 'h' or 'th' sound (théatre would be pronounced kind of like tay-otr, but the vowels are quite different too). Even "excusez-moi" (ex-coo-zay-mwa) has been corrupted in English to the point that I have heard "ex-cyuse-me-wa" and "boo-coop" instead of "beaucoup" (boe-coo). All of those are approximations, as each of those two words have several sounds that don't really exist in English. In short, if French and English are so different even now, I very highly doubt that English speakers could properly pronounce most words from Latin, Sanskrit, Ancient Chinese, or Ancient Mayan, even if they heard them spoken by native speakers (guess you need your time machine) without A LOT of coaching.

Answering the OP's question on how it all works, i.e. how people know or guess how languages no longer spoken were pronounced. Very generally, one can say that people ultimately rely on connections with languages still spoken - through shared scripts, borrowings, transliterations and relatedness, plus knowledge about how languages tend to work and change, plus, in a few cases, contemporary linguistic descriptions. For Ancient Egyptian, for example, you have renditions into Ancient Greek, Akkadian and Hebrew, reflexes in Coptic and cognates in other Afro-Asiatic languages. In turn those ancient languages are known from connections with modern ones and/or contemporary descriptions (plus the actual preserved traditional pronunciations of Coptic and Hebrew, though these are far from identical to the pronunciations used at the time). Similarly, for Shakespeare's dialect of English, you have reflexes in contemporary English, the Old and Middle English predecessors, the Latin alphabet, internal evidence from rhymes, etc.. However, as others have pointed out, the conventional pronunciations of words used by people when they are speaking their modern mother tongues such as English will almost never be identical to the reconstructed ones. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 22:59, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

There is a book called Vox Latina, which is reputed to explain in some detail how it is known how the ancient Romans pronounced Latin words. Michael Hardy (talk) 05:51, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I believe that some of the ways that pronunciations are reconstructed are by phonetic renderings in other languages and rhymes/meter in poetry. The extent to which this is possible will depend on the language, how long since it was spoken, how it was passed down to us etc. I think that our guesses are probably at least educated guesses. 90.214.166.169 (talk) 10:16, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Arabic الكعبة kaʕbah, English cube

Are these two words etymologically related? 149.169.123.127 (talk) 21:39, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Unlikely. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 21:50, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

The word "ka'bah" is thought to be derived from ka'b, which means "cube",[1] but despite the similarity with Greek kubos, the existence of an etymological relationship between the two is apparently contested. Iblardi (talk) 22:48, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Yes, cube is a borrowing from the Arabic. μηδείς (talk) 00:27, 3 July 2011 (UTC) see below μηδείς (talk) 17:46, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Medeis, what is your source for that? Arabic as such did not yet exist at the time of the ancient Greeks, nor did the ancient Greeks have much contact with speakers of Ancient North Arabian or other dialects ancestral to Classical Arabic. Conceivably, the Greeks could have borrowed a cognate term from the closely related Phoenician language, though it would be good to have a citation for that, too. Marco polo (talk) 03:01, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

I should have said possibly Semitic, and based only on vague memory. I remember reading the comparison at some point--but yes, that's not very helpful--and it may have just been speculation where I read it. The supposed Proto-Indo-European root *keu(b)- erected on the basis of kybos is not attested in Pokorny or Watkins or Mallory and Adams. The term is an obvious candidate as a wanderwort. Chance resemblance is possible--I haven't been able to find any cognates for kybos in Indo-European or for ka'ba in Semitic--although my resources in Semitic are limited. Maybe it is a fossilized greco-arabian Nostratic isogloss. μηδείς (talk) 18:28, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

LSJ has attestations for "kubos" all the way back to Herodotus, so it's certainly not borrowed from Arabic. Maybe Arabic borrowed it from Greek instead. Adam Bishop (talk) 19:33, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

My saying Arabic was sloppy and wrong, I was thinking Phoenician and remembering something I read 20 years ago. Any direct borrowing can be ruled out as geographically and phonetically unlikely. If there is a connection it must be from some older borrowing. That the word meaning a gaming die would be borrowed seems likely. But the lack of attestation in other languages makes random chance resemblance look likely. But even then, if neither form has relatives in closely related tongues we are left with the even more unlikely case of two strikingly similar neologisms.

I am reminded of the etymology of the word dog. The Basque word txakur doesn't look very much like dog, but in the context of the Georgian dzaghli and various dialect words for dog in the Mediterranean a substratum influence doesn't look unlikely.μηδείς (talk) 21:41, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Etymonline says 'dog' comes from a word that already existed in the O.E. period, 'docga', which was the name of a specific breed of dog. Was this breed prominent in the Basque region? Or perhaps the Caucasus? --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:29, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

That's not a very good source. Dogca is a variant of dog, just as frocga and picga are varieants of frog and pig. That docga is attested in OE doesn't say where it comes from - which is not PIE. But words similar to tzakur are attested throughought the western mediterranean. The point is that the source of dog is probably related to the source of txakur and dzaghli, not that any one comes from the other. See also cachorro. μηδείς (talk) 00:40, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I think I should just point out that 'docga' is not a variant of 'dog' - 'docga' is Old English (with Middle English descendant 'dogge'), and 'dog' is the Modern English version. They are not variants of each other, and not interchangeable. As for sources, I would consider Etymonline, as a source that consistently quotes reliable sources (such as the OED), to be reliable, and many of us here on Wikipedia use it. Do you have any reliable sources for your statements about 'dog' above? I would like to see them, especially considering the majority of sources I have seen in 20+ years of studying comparative historical linguistics have all been consistent in not being able to say definitively where the word 'dog' comes from, and the ones that have offered explanations have tended to been isolated in their theories. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 09:52, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

I am not sure what your point is about docga/dog. I did not mean to imply that the OE form developed from the NE form. The OED says :"The word belongs to a set of words of uncertain or phonologically problematic etymology with a stem-final geminated g in Old English which is not due to West Germanic consonant gemination and therefore does not undergo assibilation. These words form both a morphological and a semantic group, as they are usually Old English weak masculine nouns and denote animals; compare frog n.1, hog n.1, pig n.1, stag n.1, Old English sugga (see haysugge n.), Old English wicga (see earwig n.), and perhaps teg n. It has been suggested that these words show expressive gemination, perhaps due to their being originally hypocoristic forms." I am confused by your quoting etymology on line, since there was no question of the word being present in Old English. The question was, where did the Old English word come from?

I am not sure what claim you are looking for a source for. I remember reading that certain western romance dialects have words that seem to be reflexes of the Basque zakur, and I know that Sp. cachorro has been attributed to it with metathesis. If I can find where I read of the romance dialect reflexes of zakur I will post them.

Interestingly, Trask says that zakur is an innovation in Basque, and that the older word for dog is or.

And obviously, one cannot derive dog with a voiced stop initial directly from zakur with a voiceless fricative. But I offered no such derivation--the point was that as with kybos/ka'bah above, the resemblance is tantalizing enough to make you wonder if there might be some sort of substrate/wanderwort influence. μηδείς (talk) 17:52, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

My apologies - I misunderstood your 'influence doesn't look unlikely' to mean 'influence looks likely', as opposed to 'tantalizing to make you wonder if....'. After all, you later say 'the source of dog is probably related to the source of txakur and dzaghli', which really does mean how I misunderstood, and not at all what you are saying now, as you also deny you offered such a derivation. All cleared up, now. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 20:09, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

Well, I didn't say an "influence" doesn't look unlikely. I said a substratum influence doesn't look unlikely. There's obviously a huge difference between a direct influence and a common substrate influence. I am very annoyed that I cannot find my reference to the romance reflexes of zakur/txakur which I remember reading about a year ago. Unfortunately, the hard drive on my Mac crashed twice, and then my external hard drive crashed as well, before I could back up my pdf format journal articles. I specifically remember reading that there were forms (perhaps in Catalan, Sardinian or Corsican?) that had voiced affricate onsets, something like dzag- or diag-. I shall keep looking. μηδείς (talk) 20:45, 4 July 2011 (UTC)