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#092 Müller

Müller m /ˈmʏlɐ/

[noun] miller

Collins German Dictionary

Today we’re going to be keeping the World-Cup-inspired theme going as my Word of the Day today is the German Müller (just in case you don’t know why that’s relevant but for some reason care: Thomas Müller).

Müller is the most common surname in Germany (along with its northern equivalent Möller) but as with many surnames in German and English, it dervies from an occupation. That occupation is miller, also a common surname in English.

Müller is cognate with the English “miller” but it is also cognate with the French meunier, Portuguese moleiro, Spanish molinero, Romanian morar Danish møller and even the Finnish myllärii (amongst many others). This is because they share the Latin root molinarius.

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#091 pazo, palacio

pazo m /ˈpaθo, ˈpaso/

[noun] country house

palacio m /paˈlaθjo, paˈlasjo/

[noun] palace

[noun] mansion

Collins Spanish Dictionary

Some languages have doublets (or even triplets). These are words that mean slightly different things but possess a relatively recent common root. This usually occurs when a word in the ancestor language is allowed to run its normal diachronic course and then, at some later stage, this same root word is borrowed back into the language, often being adapted in the process.

Once such example is to be found in the Spanish words pazo and palacio. Both words come from the neuter Latin word palatium. However, pazo has been in Spanish and its ancestors since the days of Rome, whereas palacio was loaned in from Latin in much more recent times.

This phenomenon is incredibly common in the Romance languages as well as English. I have no doubt this also happens elsewhere. For example, Russian has plenty of borrowings from Old Church Slavonic that are cognate to other Russian words, голова and глава to name just one.

P.S. I would usually choose Portuguese over Spanish if it makes no difference to the content (and here there are the words paço and palácio), but this post was inspired by the Argentina striker Rodrigo Palacio and so I decided on Spanish.

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#090 finocchio

finocchio m /fiˈnɔkkjo/

[noun] fennel (Foeniculum vulgare)

[noun] various other plants belonging to other genera

[noun, colloquial] gay, queer, poof

Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti

As we’ve seen before with the Hebrew ג׳וק, words can often have a “usual” or “primary” sense and another separate colloquial, seemingly unconnected sense (even when this is not because two older words happened to have developed into the same modern word).

The word I have chosen today is one such word. The Italian finocchio has the primary meaning of “fennel”. However, it also has the secondary meaning of a slang word for a male homosexual.

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#089 emmotoka

emmotoka /emːotoka/

[noun] car

Luganda, FSI Basic Course

To a new language today, namely Luganda (also known as Ganda). This is a language which has attracted my interest in the past couple of weeks. A Bantu language, Luganda is, as one might expect, spoken in the Republic of Uganda by a total of around 5 million people (including those for whom it is a second or third language).

For those that don’t already know, Uganda used to be a protectorate of the British Empire and so English was widely spoken there. Indeed, it is still widely spoken in Uganda and Africa in general. Needless to say, this had linguistic consequences. One such consequence was the importation of loan words from English. And one such word is featured today: emmotoka. If you read it aloud and look at the photo above, taken in Kampala (I believe), you will probably realise, if you hadn’t already, that it is an assimilated version of the phrase “a motor car”.

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End of "hiatus"

Dear all,

After an unplanned hiatus of around a month (caused by many things) I will be back up and running from this point on!

― Stephen

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My third Word of the Month is saucissonner.

So far that’s one noun, one adjective, and now, one verb.

saucissonner /sɔsisɔˈne/

[verb] to cut into slices

[verb] to tie up tightly

[verb] to eat a cold meal on the go

Dictionnaire Larousse Maxipoche 2013

Click the link in the title to read the original post in full.

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#088 inglenook

inglenook /ˈɪŋgəlnʊk/

[noun] the nook or corner beside the “ingle”; chimney-corner

Oxford English Dictionary

Today I present you with my first ever English Word of the Day (if we don’t count Old English) and it’s been a long time coming!

Presumably, we all know what a “nook” is, but what on Earth is an “ingle”? Well, as far etymologists can work out, it comes from an old Scottish Gaelic word, namely aingeal. 

This word’s primary meaning “angel” but it can also be used metaphorically, euphemistically to mean “fire” or “light”. So, it turns out that the seemingly strange word “inglenook” means exactly what its components mean (sort of).

For what it’s worth, I will also point out that aingeal comes from the Latin angelus, as does the English “angel”. The Latin itself is from Greek ἄγγελος /áŋɡelos/ which meant “messenger” and came to mean a “messenger of the gods”, i.e. “angel”.

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#087 safari

safari IX-X /sɑˈfɑɾi/

[noun] journey

[noun] trip

[noun] travel

[noun] safari

Swahili-English English-Swahili Practical Dictionary

If there’s one Swahili word most people in the world will know, apart from jenga, it’s safari. I hardly need explain that in English “safari” means “an often touristic trip whose purpose is to photograph or hunt wild animals in their own environment, usually the African savannah”.

The word can have the same meaning in Swahili; however, it is also the normal word for any journey, trip or voyage.

Safari, as with many words in Swahili, is of Arabic origin, coming from سفر (safara) which also means “travel”. This can also be found in Persian and Urdu.

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#086 ditier

ditier m /diˈtjer/

[noun] poem

Vocabulaire d’ancien français

Flicking through my Old French vocab book, I happened to spot the word ditier. This word broadly meant “poem” and it occurred to me that this was probably the origin of the English word “ditty”. Unsurprisingly, this word is of Latin origin and comes from the past participle dictatus, dictāre meaning not only “to dictate” but also “to compose”.

It should be noted that Old French spelling and pronunciation was not fixed and varied from region to region, even town to town and so alternative spellings such as ditié, ditiet, dité or ditee can be found.

P.S. Once again I have had to improvise with the IPA transcription.

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#085 мечта

мечта f /mʲɪ't͡ɕta/

[noun] dream

Collins Russian Dictionary & Grammar

The Russian noun мечта seems to be an ordinary Russian word. It means “dream”, in the sense of a goal or an aspiration. However, it has a particularity for which I have chosen to feature it. For whatever reason, мечта has no genitive plural or rather it has a defective genitive plural. Ordinarily one would expect the genitive plural to be either **мечт or perhaps **мечет. This is not the case. The genitive plural is instead мечтаний, which is also the genitive plural of мечтание, a word which shares much of the same semantic space as мечта. Мечтание means “daydream” and so can мечта.

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#084 kameno

kameno /kaˈmeno/

[noun] fireplace

La Simpla Vortaro

The Esperanto word kameno means “fireplace” in English and when I first came across this word I assumed that it was derived from the Russian for “stone”, камень /ˈkamʲɪnʲ/. However, it is actually derived from the German for fireplace, Kamin. Whence Russian gets камин /ˈkamʲɪnʲ/, “fireplace”. The German term comes from the Latin caminus which means a “furnace” or “forge”. This comes from the Ancient Greek κάμινος, meaning roughly the same thing. The Latin is the source of similar words in many languages, including the modern Greek καμινάδα which means “chimney” and, pleasingly, the English word “chimney” comes via French from the same Graeco-Latin root.

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#083 Ohrwurm

Ohrwurm m /ˈoːɐ̯vʊʁm/

[noun] earwig

[noun, colloquial] catchy song, “earworm”

Collins German Dictionary

This is another word brought to my attention by the BBC’s Why Factor podcast.

The primary meaning of the German word Ohrwurm is “earwig” but that’s not why I’ve chosen it. Its secondary meaning is something along the lines of “a song that won’t get out of your head”. This is sometimes found in English as “earworm” - a literal translation of the German.

It’s been a while since I've provided an example sentenced so here is one taken from the source above:

Der Schlager ist ein richtiger Ohrwurm.

That’s a really catchy record.

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#082 vuslat

vuslat /vusˈɫat/

[noun] union or reunion with one’s beloved

Turkish-English, English-Turkish Dictionary

An extremely short post today: the Turkish word vuslat means a “union or reunion with one’s beloved”.

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#081 cruimh

cruimh f /krˠɪw/

[noun] grub

[noun] maggot

[noun] worm

Irish dictionary online

A first Irish word today and this post has a connection with the previous.

The Irish cruimh can mean “grub”, “maggot” or “worm” and is from the Indo-European root *kʷr̥mis which meant more or less the same thing. As such, it is cognate with many other semantically similar words throughout Europe and Asia. In the Celtic languages there is the Welsh pryf. Further afield there is the Sanskrit कृमि (kṛ́mi). The Lithuanian kirmis is related to cruimh and this brings us closer to our connection.

The Proto-Slavic root that meant “worm” was *čьrvь and this is the source of the Russian червь, Ukrainian черв’як, Bulgarian червей, Polish czerw and Czech červ.

This root also produced the word for “red” in many of these languages. This is because the Polish cochineal (Porphyrophora polonica) produces maggoty, wormy larvae and this insect was used to produce a red dye.

P.S. I couldn’t find a source for the IPA transcription of cruimh so I had improvise.

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#080 krásný

krásný /ˈkraːsniː/

[adjective] beautiful

Czech-English English-Czech Concise Dictionary

The Czech word krásný means “beautiful” and is cognate with the Russian word красный /ˈkrasnɨj/ which means “red”. The Russian for “beautiful” is красивый /krɐˈsʲivɨj/ and this too is cognate with krásný. Once upon a time красный did mean “beautiful” but over time it came to mean red, almost entirely displacing червонный /t͡ɕɪrˈvonːɨj/ which is cognate with the Czech word for “red”, červený. In fact, Red Square (Красная площадь /ˈkrasnəjə ˈploɕːətʲ/) originally meant “Beautiful Square”.

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#079 kælling

kælling c /ˈkεleŋ/

[noun] aggressive, foul-mouth or hysterical woman

Den Danske Ordbog

For my second Danish word I have chosen kælling which means something like “hag”, “cow” or even “bitch”.

It is derived from the Old Norse word kerling meaning “woman”, “wife” or something in that area. Indeed, this is still an Icelandic word. This in turn is derived from karl which simply means “man”.

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#078 ruokahalu

ruokahalu /ˈruo̯kɑhɑlu/

[noun] appetite

[noun] relish

Ilmainen sanakirja

The Finnish for “food” is ruoka and “desire” is halu and when you put them together you get the Finnish word for “appetite”.

It wouldn’t surprise me if there were more than a dozen languages other than Finnish that did the same thing or something very similar, nevertheless it pleases me that the Finnish for “appetite” is “food desire”.