You Can't Always Trust the National Geographic

      It is true, you cannot always trust what you read in magazines, even a magazine like National Geographic. I was sitting at a tire place, getting a nail removed from one of my tires, and reading an old magazine because they featured an article on Greenland. In the article was a tidbit that caught my eye: the expression 'on the lam' comes from the Vikings because it is derived from their verb 'lemja'. Being the word-nerd that I am, I look it up as soon as I get home.
      Whoever authored this is wrong. The Oxford Dictionary states that it is of 20th century coinage and origins are unknown. It follows 'lam' in the dictionary which does mean 'thrash, hit with a stick ' from the ON lemja which means to 'beat so as to lame' but there is an asterisk in front of the colloquialism which makes it seem to follow the 'beating' word. A quick check at the Zoega Old Norse dictionary reveals that lemja means 'beating' and not 'fleeing' or 'running'. A good and knowledgeable proof reader would have caught that. I am offering my services. :-) (for a fee, of course)

Another quick look in the Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable for thoroughness adds nothing because the expression is not even listed, leading me to think 'on the lam' might be an Americanism.

The 'N' Word

     I just heard that Mississippi has finally filed the paperwork to properly ratify the 13th Amendment which abolishes slavery. They ratified the amendment in 1995 but failed to file the proper paperwork making slavery no longer legal. In honour of that, I decided to write a blog entry I had been thinking about for a while.
      As a Latinist, there is no mystery to me where the 'n' word comes from: it comes from the Latin word 'niger' an adjective meaning 'black' but this word has become so powerful that, like the name of Voldemort or cancer, it cannot be spoken aloud. It is curious to me how it came to be used for African slaves when the world was becoming increasingly less fluent in Latin and it must be certain that the men engaged in slavery did not have a university education steeped in the Classics.

      However this is the adjective fully declined:

   singular       masculine           feminine      neuter
                     
  nominative    niger                   nigra           nigrum
  genitive         nigri                    nigrae         nigri
  dative            nigro                   nigrae         nigro
  objective       nigrum                nigram        nigrum
  ablative         nigro                   nigra           nigro

       Although this is an adjective, one did not have to attach a word meaning 'man' because Latin adjectives can stand alone and, because they decline, you can infer what the noun they are modifying is from the context. It is called a 'substantive'. What is fascinating to me is that only the masculine form was adopted, although clearly someone was using a Latin word, and female slaves were called using a feminized masculine word and it seems the nominative forms were preserved as well as the ablative/dative forms. Why not the objective form since it would be the object of the verb? And the masculine, genitive singular is the same form as the masculine nominative plural but it was never used for multiple slaves. Why was that never used? The answer must be that it was not Latin but rather Spanish that was applied to these poor souls.
       A quick glance at the Wikipedia article on Colonial slavery in America reveals that, indeed, the early slavers were Spanish. The article reveals the astonishing fact that only 5% of the slaves taken from Africa were taken to America. The majority went to Spanish colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean, where the mortality was so high, they needed constant replenishing of numbers. The first African slaves were brought to America as early as 1619 to Virginia by the Dutch, who had taken them from a captured Spanish ship. The Spanish had the slaves baptized before being shipped to make the enslavement 'legal' which seems rather odd since one of the good things about the Catholic Church is that it frowned upon slavery and Spain was very Catholic nation. Remember the Spanish Inquisition.
       At least these early slaves were treated as indentured servants in Virginia and were freed after a stated period of time. It appears the difficulty of finding labor to work the fields and plantations made this evil an attractive proposal and it was revisited later.
       One has to wonder why the English adopted the Spanish word rather than use the English words 'black man' but English does not decline and does not commonly substantiate adjectives. If you call someone a 'man' then you have to recognize that what you are doing is wrong by every code of ethics that you profess to believe in. So, you have to dehumanize them and call them something else.
       All this made me wonder where the word 'black' came from since it is clearly not related to the Latin word and the modern German word is 'schwartz'. The French word for black is 'noir' and is supposed to be related to Latin, having lost the 'g' by the 11th century. The Old English word for 'black'  is 'blæc' but I have no etymology for it but all this is an aside and does not solve the conundrum.
       In conclusion, it is always worth taking a look in the dictionary. The Oxford Concise states the nominative form came from the French, which is odd because they dropped the 'g' so long ago, but makes sense because the displaced Acadians in Louisiana were very enthusiastic slave owners. And the  ablative form came from the Spanish. There you have it: that is why there are two forms for the word.

Vomitrocious

I can't let the entire month of August go by without one post so here it is:

I was watching old Seinfeld episodes and, in one of these, the question was asked 'Where does the word 'puke' come from?' Clearly I am not the only one who has idle wonderings about such things. The word appears in print as a verb at the earliest in 1601 in P. Holland's translation of Pliny's World History but the noun appears in print in 1612. Judging by the numerous 17th century citations, it was in common use. So the question is - What is the Middle English or Old English, Norman French or even Old Norse word that preceded it? Or is it a loanword from some other language? The OED conjectures that it may be related to the Dutch verb spugen or to spit or vomit or possibly German spucken to spew.

Other etymologies list Shakespeare as the inventor of the word since it appears in As You Like It and I like the idea since he did invent many words. (Rather like Dr. Seuss) However, it is uncertain when he wrote the play (estimated circa 1600) and it made its way into too many diverse publications around that for it to have been his recent coinage.

There is a supposedly unrelated other noun 'puke' (now obsolete) for a type of cloth and is related to a Middle Dutch word puuc, puyc, puc. It is also a color used on woollen goods- a very deep bluish black or dark brown color. It is not related to puce. I am not a PhD so my opinion probably means nothing to the sort of people who have one but I am thinking the color may be where the name for vomit came from. I have seen some dark brown stuff and bluish black. Puke comes in many colors and textures but I think the bumpiness of woolens rather suits it for texture. Just a thought.

The Honey Moon

I was watching a television show called "Museum Secrets" that showed some of the permanent collection from the Neues Museum in Berlin. My interest was piqued by the 'Berlin Gold Hat' pictured here, courtesy of Wiki Commons. The commentator stated that the hat was a solar/lunar calendar and was used in honey production to know when the solstice in June was near. It was stated that bees were affected by the full moon in June, this was when the hive would have maximum honey and this is why marriages are followed by the 'honey-moon' - maximum sweetness.

This put several questions in my mind which are challenging to resolve in a few hours of casual research.

Is the June full moon actually called the 'honey moon'? In some cultures, yes.

The solstice celebration is also the feast of St. John the Baptist. In spite of what some websites say, he is not the patron saint of bees. St. Ambrose is because of a story in the Legenda Aurea about a swarm of bees and that he also compared the church to a hive of bees.

When did people start having honeymoon trips? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of 'honeymoon' as the post marriage bliss was in 1546 in J. Heywood's book on proverbs in the English tongue and refers to the moon that is full but it doomed to wane like people's affections. The honeymoon did not come into style until the late 18th or early 19th century. Wikipedia is my source for saying that, as the British moved into India, the Indian custom of a post-marriage bridal tour became the fashion. There are no references to a honeymoon tour before 1821 in the OED.

The word 'honey' comes from the Germanic languages and is hunig or hunæg in Old English. There is no honey-month or honey-moon in the Anglo Saxon dictionaries. June was called Liða by the Venerable Bede.

From Bulletin 489, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, "It is possible that the custom of killing the bees and taking the honey in the full moon in June may result in a smaller amount being secured that if the killing were left until gathering had ceased in the fall."

When did it become the custom to have marriages in June? I am not sure. It is likely a modern invention because people got married any old time although, in the Middle Ages, high feasts seemed like a favorite time. As well, many people did not actually get formally married by a priest because many of the small villages lacked priests.

So you see, it is complicated. And so, I shall leave this with a quote from Brewer's Guide to Phrase and Fable: "a holiday spent together by a newly married couple. The word was originally used for the first month of marriage, although 'moon' does not mean the 'month' here, as sometimes supposed. The reference is to the moon as sweetness and is ironic, for no sooner is it full than it begins to wane." Indeed.

Greek Squirrels

I took a trip to the library and found that the entries in the Dictionary of Old English do not contain etymologies. Darn and double darn. But, I spoke to someone from the project who said that Cleasby and Vigfusson were wrong about the Germanic squirrel being a corruption of the Greek term.

Then I decided to see if the Oxford English Dictionary has an entry for the Middle English 'aquerne', which it does. It was last used in print in 1200 C.E.. The entry also states that the first element of the word is identified with 'oak' but that the origin of the word is uncertain. So that is that - our best guess is Anatoly Liberman's - and there were no Greek squirrels running around in migration period Germany.

More on Squirrel

The Germanic name for squirrel is annoying me. Is it a corruption of the Greek term? Everyone who says so is quoting Cleasby-Vigfusson but were they correct? I tried to look up the Old English term 'acwern'. The 'ac' in front looks like 'oak' and, since so many OE words are compounds and this is supposed to mean 'shade-tail', then wern or weorn should mean tail but I cannot find an entry in the Bosworth Toller dictionary or the Clark-Hall. I have not been able to access the Dictionary of Old English at the University of Toronto, although I should. They are definitely past the a's but the entry might not include an etymology of the word or break down the compound into its separate elements. Next week, I will try one more time and then I will give it a rest but in the meanwhile I found some other information.

In a book called Old Names - New Growth: Proceedings of the 2nd Aspens Conference (lovely title) there is this entry by Hans Sauer and Ulrike Krischke on quercus, oak, eiche : acweorna 'squirrel', 'eichhörnchen' should probably be placed here, too: according to Pokorny (p. 13F) its etymological root is not *aig- 'oak', 'Eiche' but *aig - 'swinging (violently)', '(sich heftig) bewegen, schwingen.' Still, secondary motivation in OE might have ben ac. Cf. Kluge s.v. 'Eichhörnchen' who connects the word to germ. *aik-'oak'".

Plus, Anatoly Liberman, who is a professor of Humanities at the University of Michigan, writes a word origin blog for the Oxford University Press and has a book out for laymen that is probably worth buying if you are interested in this sort of topic. Word Origins.... And How We Know Them. He wrote that the first German name for the squirrel was eihhurno and the first part of the word, the 'eih', meant 'oak' or was just 'eih'. In other words, it perhaps had two meanings and associating it with 'oak' does not "militate against good sense". The second part of the compound, he wrote was 'hurn' "coinciding with the word for 'horn' by chance." So the modern German word for squirrel would be 'little oak-horn'. He also pointed out that, although it sounds like an odd name for the wee beastie, the Russian name for squirrel is belka, which the first syllable 'bel' meaning white. I have not seen a lot of white squirrels.

If Liberman is correct, then the comment by Cleasby and Vigfusson is questionable. We shall have to wait until I get a chance to see what the entry in the DOE is. Meanwhile, here is a link to Liberman's blog. There are some choice words discussed in the recent past.

Chipmunks

How sad for anyone living in Europe. As amusing as the antics of squirrels can be, the chipmunk is far, far cuter than he. I looked up the etymology of the word 'chipmunk' in the OED and they do not know. There is a suggestion from someone or thing called Bartlett that it is a aborigine word but the OED writers thought it was an English compound.

So I went to Wikipedia because, as a resource, it is far better than it is given credit for. They state that the chipmunk is a type of North American squirrel. They quote a Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe by John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm. (How interesting that such a thing exists and I don't have one!) Their etymology is that it came from the Ottawa word jidmoonh, meaning 'red squirrel. (Ojibwe, ajidamoo) Chalk one up for Wikipedia!

Because they are so adorable, I am going to post a picture of one taken from Wikipedia.

Add: After logging off I decided to check this dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe. It exists but it lists agongos as the word for 'chipmunk'. Looks like they called Scandinavian people 'chipmunks' too. There is an Eastern Ojibwa-Chippewa-Ottawa Dictionary by Richard A. Rhodes that gives gwiingsenh as the word for chipmunk. Well, whoever wrote the Wiki entry did not properly cite that reference and searching google books as well as a general search does not reveal any book where that may have come from; everyone just quotes the Wikipedia article. That does not mean it is wrong but cannot be viewed as gospel without more information.

One more time: It started to annoy me. Why did they say that? So I did a bit more searching. Whatever I could do from home. I found an article on "The Significations of Certain Algonquian Animal Names" in American Anthropologist from 1901 by Alexander F. Chamberlain which give the Algonquin name for chipmunk as lênâpé pochwapiith or "he who sits upright on something". Appropriate and in the Cambridge History of the English Language, John Algeo ed., 1991, I found an article on Canadian English (did not know there was such a thing) by Laurel J. Brinton and Margery Fee and they wrote that the word chipmunk came from the Ojibwe. From here the trail runs cold, unless I want to go to the university library and I am not feeling that energetic.

Squirrel

Squirrel the word is just as interesting as the little beastie that wears it for a species name. The Greeks had the honour of naming the squirrel and they called it (without using the actual Greek lettering) skia+oura or 'shade tail'. It made its way into Latin as sciurus and from there into Old French as esquireul and, after the Norman Conquest, Anglo-Norman as esquirel.

It is interesting to me that the German and Old Icelandic names for squirrel are eichhorn and ikorni which seems like the Germanic peoples developed an entirely different name for the species but the Cleasby-Vigfusson Icelandic-English Dictionary states that it is a corruption of the Greek name which all European languages borrowed. They list acvern as the Anglo-Saxon version but 'ac' is 'oak' and eiche in Modern High German is 'oak'. Maybe 'oak' equals 'shade'? Cleasby and Vigfusson speculated that 'ikorni' in the heathen poem Grimnismal 32 was a later addition and spoiled the meter. As well, that Rata-tösker might have not just been the squirrel's name but also the species name for rati (the climber?( sic.)) and tösker for 'tusk' or 'sharp teeth'. Then the squirrel's name was "Climber the squirrel" but this is speculation on their part.

So, if few Normans came over with the Conquest and England remained essentially Anglo-Saxon, why did acvern not survive? It seems like we kept much of the old Anglo-Saxon words but really we kept only a few hundred common nouns. Most words were replaced by the French terms and squirrel was one of them but it is interesting that the Greeks got to name them because I do not imagine forests when I think of Greece nor do I imagine they have squirrels. Goats, lots of goats, but no squirrels.

The Sword of Roland

If you do not have a copy of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, you should buy one. It might be a little expensive but it is worth the price. It is one of the best reference books out there and I look in it all the time.

While looking up something else, my eye was caught by an entry on Roland's sword, which according to Brewer's is fabled to have once belonged to Hector, the prince of Troy. He acquired this fantastic sword from a Icelandic giant called Jutmundus from whom he also won his horn Oliphant which may have belonged to Alexander the Great but I do not know how Jutmundus acquired these treasures. The ogres from The Hobbit are now dancing around in the back of my mind. Inspiration? Probably.

This addition to the myth does not occur in The Song of Roland; it is probably from Orlando Furioso, a 16th century poem by Ludovico Ariosto. I do not own a copy of this book or its predecessor Orlando Innamorato but I do own a copy of The Illiad and I could not see what happened to Hector's sword when Achilles killed him. Presumably Achilles took it and Hector's armor since Hector's body was wrapped in cloth to be given back to his father. It could also have been the sword that Hector gave to Ajax and with which Ajax killed himself but Homer does not name this sword.

Brewer's also states that Durendal had been hurled into a poisonous stream to prevent it from falling in to unworthy hands but this differs from the account in The Song of Roland. There, Roland lays down to die with his sword underneath him and, when Charlemagne finds Roland's body, he gives the sword and the Oliphant to his men Rabel or Guineman but does not state who received which item.

Brewer's does offer a meaning for the name of Durendal: it states that the name probably comes from the Latin word "durare", that is "to last" or "endure". I like it.