05 October 2019

Closing the circle on a series of revelations


Riding along the Neckar river the other weekend, we came upon some navigational locks. I couldn't think of the German word. I asked Anne for the French word to see if that would jog anything. While it didn't jog my memory for the German word (I had to ask a passerby), it did jog something else... Here are the links in my chain of thought:
  1. How do you say river/canal lock in French? L'écluse
  2. Well that's like English close and all those other latinate words with the -cl- root, such as exclude and French clef (key)
  3. Makes sense because locking and closing are thematically and linguistically close, shall we say
  4. German for this kind of lock is Schleuse
  5. Well that's like English sluice
  6. And sluice is like German schliessen which is to close.
And thus, the circle is closed.

Let's look more closely at some Germanic, Latinate, and other Indo-European words for a river lock. In addition to above, we have the following:
  • la chiusa (Italian)
  • l'esclusa (Spanish)
  • Sluis (Dutch)
  • šliuzas (Lithuanian)
  • ecluză (Romanian)
  • shlyuz (шлюз, Russian and Ukrainian. All the Slavic languages I sampled save Croatian have some variation of this, but I think it's probably a borrowing from the sea-faring Dutch, where Peter the Great got most of the Russian empire's maritime terminology) 
  • sluse (Danish)
  • kliewi (Maltese)
  • etc.
It's no surprise why this river/canal navigational aid has these names: they require water to be closed in and sluiced out. But it's fun when one word knocks a whole bunch of other words into place in my brain.  


(Photo reposted from Popular Mechanics online article, "7 of the World's Most Impressive Canal Locks," by Tim Newcomb, 13 Dec 2016, accessed 5 Oct 2019)

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