Advent Is Coming!

On the eve of Advent, a little exploration of things to come...

A few weeks ago, a friend was wondering what the German word Sonnabend means. The answer is "Saturday", but it's not the normal word for Saturday (that's Samstag). Hence his wonderment.

I started musing on why there's this second word for Saturday, and where that word might have come from.

My departure point is usually to think of other words with one or more of the same roots as my object of investigation. In this case:

• Abend ("evening")
• Feierabend (basically, "the end of the work day")

The latter adds to "evening" the concept of feiern (the verb "to celebrate"), which makes a lot of sense at the end of the work day. But why have a word that literally translates to "celebrate-evening" but designates the part of the day before the evening? Similarly, the Sonnabend designation of Saturday as "Sun-evening" seems to put the cart before the horse.

In both instances, -abend is used to designate a moment now, but before the other part of the word ("celebration" and "Sunday").

Maybe, I thought, I'm thinking of "evening" as too limited, as a specific evening part of the day. Maybe there's some more original idea in the word "evening".

Then it hit me how similar German Abend is to English (and others from Latin) advent! I don't know why it took me so long to get here... Because advent means, loosely, "something coming" (L. ad-venire = "to come to"). And then it also hit me how French avenir ("future", as in "something to come") also comes from the same L. root.

So "evening", Ger. Abend and the Fr. word for "future" are all related, and we can see that in our English use of an expression like "on the eve of..."

With this understanding, it becomes very clear why Germans might say Feierabend or Sonnabend, because they're talking about the thing to come, or in these cases, "celebration" and "Sunday".

And with that, if you hadn't already thought of it, I direct your attention to the first line of this entry.

Happy Holiday Evenings!

Like, Where's That From?

The other day I was thinking about German suffixes, as one does, and their English equivalents. 

For example:

-heit  (E. -ness, as in Blindheit, or "blindness");

-keit (E. -ness, as in Einsamkeit, or "loneliness"); 

-schaft (E. -ness, as in Bereitschaft, or "readiness")*; or even 

-nis (-niß) (which, after all is said and done, also has a ness-ness to it).

I have a particular fondheit for the suffix -lich. It corresponds roughly to the English -ly suffix, and is used in German as a frequent adjectival ending. In English it's evident mostly in adverbs ("mostly", "quickly") and a few adjectives ("friendly", "likely"). 

Thinking about English -ly, it seems clear that it means like, as in "friend-like". Adverbially (which is the adverbial form of "adverbial"), you can see this connection in such a colloquialism as "quick-like" (instead of "quickly").** 

It doesn't seem hard to get from the use of -ly as a suffix — as a grammatical form appended to the end of a noun or adverb — to the stand-alone use of the word like, as in "this whisky is like molten gold". 

I'm not aware of a German word that looks like -lich and is at the same time used like like. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist. But since much of this blog's word play is about "speculative linguistics", I can speculate that we derive our English stand-alone like from the German -lich suffix, by way of our English -ly.

Is my speculation correct? I like to think it's likely.

- o - o -

* Okay, -schaft is more properly E. -ship, but that's a synonym for -ness.

** It's fortunate we have this colloquial form to resort to, because then we can make adverbs out of some awkward adjectives like "friendly". Saying something is "all friendly-like" is nicer than saying friendlily.

- o - o -

Now, where does the verb to like fit into all this? Maybe it began through the use of the above mentioned stand-alone like as a downgrading of to love. According to this theory, the first instance could have gone something like this:

He: Do you love me?
She: Hm, well...
He: Do you not love me?
She: I wouldn't say love, darling, but something very much like it. Not quite love, but like.

Hewing and Gluing

Have you ever been struck by a cleaver? No? Good!

How about by the word cleaver? I have. The verb cleave is something I’ve pondered for quite a few years (okay, not continuously). It can mean one thing, but also pretty much its exact opposite: "to cut apart" and "to hold together".

There are a number of things going on here... First, the cutting, chopping (or chopped) sense is in these words: to cleave, cleaver, cloven, cleft and probably cliff, and of course, cleavage. *

Speculating a little, I wonder if clover is related (with its distinctly separated or cloven leaves). Stretching a bit further afield, there’s also clove, which I believe takes its name from the French word clou, for “nail”, which the little pungent spicey thing resembles almost to a T. (Hint: nails are for pounding.)

There’s possibly even more. If, as a certain eminent linguist of my acquaintance likes to point out, “b” = “v”, then what about clobber, and from that a club? A club, in addition to being a weapon, is also what English speakers call the suit of cards that looks like a clover but the French call trefle, from trefoil or “three leaves”).

Is it just a coincidence that all of these words have some apparent kinship revolving around the concept of cutting, chopping, or hitting? Read on...

This cutting/chopping/separating idea is what most people today get from these words. But there’s another conceptual use of cleave that survives in older English and modern poetical or oratorical styles. There are phrases such as to cleave to your partner and cleaving to a path, for instance. Both of these phrases mean “to stick to...”, which is decidedly not akin to cutting, chopping, or hitting. **

I have fewer related words to show for this meaning of cleave, but that doesn’t diminish the puzzle for me. (Hint: that was foreshadowing.)

I think it’s pretty clear that this older “stick to” concept of cleave is related to the modern German verb kleben, which means “to stick, affix, glue”. I don’t know enough German to know whether there are kleb- words that also mean “to cut, chop, separate”.

But I do know another German word that somehow brings us back to the “cut apart–stick together” dichotomy: hauen. This verb means “to chop, cut, strike”. In fact, it resembles in no small measure our English hew, meaning the same thing. Again, it’s not part of the conversational lexicon for today’s English speakers, but it exists in phrases like rough-hewn or even to hew a path through a thicket or whatever.

Here’s where the puzzle, or “coincidence” gets most interesting. *** Because in the same sense that we have cleave to a path or cleave to your partner, we ALSO have hew to a path or hew to a line (“stay the course”)!

Huh? On one hand we have a word, cleave, that seems to come into English through German (though undoubtedly it’s an IE root) and can mean both “chop” and “stick together”. On the other hand we have an apparently very different word, hew, that seems to come into English though German and can mean both “chop” and “stick together” -- not just literally, but in the poetically idiomatic expressions: cleave/hew to a path.

How can two apparently unrelated words mean, on the one hand, one thing, and on the other, the exact opposite, in a poetical, figurative sense?

I suspect the answer is that cleave and hew are not as unrelated as they at first appear.

That still leaves the question of meaning one thing and its opposite... But, since this post has already clobbered you over the head with a lot of words, I think I’ll save the obligatory, revelatory trip to my OED for another time and just leave you with this thought:

Instead of asking at the start of this blog post whether you’d ever been struck by a cleaver, it seems I could have also asked if you’d ever been STUCK by a cleaver.

- o - o - 

* For readers who may remember that this blog is about words and pictures, I'm sorry to disappoint you on this one. (Oh, alright. Look here.)

** Unless you have to chop down trees to clear a path, beat up rival suitors to claim a spouse, or cut in on someone to dance with a desired partner.

** Cue daughter’s sigh: “Actually interesting? Or merely Dad interesting?”

Beer and the Bible, sort of...

Back to the wonderful topic of beer, I was thinking about two words that crop up sometimes in beer styles here in Germany: Urtyp (“original type”) and Urquell (“original source”, as in “source of water”, like a spring). The ur- prefix means “original”. Then I remembered another German word, Ursprung (“origin”) and its adverb, Ursprünglich (“originally”).*

You can’t help but notice the similarities between ur- and or- in English “original”. Easy to imagine they come from the same source (pun intended).

So that got me thinking about the origin of origin. It struck me that the three major monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) trace their roots to Abraham. And Abraham traces his roots to... Ur, as in Ur of the Chaldees or Chaldeans. (Check your Genesis, 11:31.)

Could Ur (which seems to be a common prefix in Mesopotamian place names) be the origin of our word origin? Time for a trip to my OED.

Results? Not as clear-cut as I’d like. I’ll spare you the details**, but essentially origin (“rise, beginning, source”) led me to originate (“bring into existence”) led me to original (“from L. oriri, to rise”) before something interesting cropped up with orchestra, which comes through Greek from the PIE *ergh- “to set in motion, stir up, raise”, from root *er-/*or-.   Er...in other words, the PIE root *er-/*or- has to do with starting up, beginning, or rising up (like a spring) from the earth.

Seems like my attempt to link beer with the Bible are coming to nought. Ergh! Unless we can somehow delve into Sumerian place names and figure out whether their ur- prefix is related to the PIE root *er/*or. Which I can’t.

But it is a bit of fun imagining Urians playing pick-up football in the hot sun against the visiting Babylonians, chilling with a brewsky afterwards. I imagine one of them scratching his head, looking at the bottle, and asking “What are we gonna call this?”

- o - o -

*Interestingly -- to me, at least -- the German quelle and spring/sprung root both relate to our English spring as a source of water.

** The Details:

origin: early 15c., from M.Fr. origine, from L. originem (nom. origo) "rise, beginning, source," from stem of oriri "to rise, become visible, appear". [Let’s try originate.]

originate: yadda yadda (see original).

original: early 14c., from L. originalis, from originem (nom. origo) "beginning, source, birth," from oriri "to rise" (see orchestra).

orchestra: c.1600, "area in an ancient theater," from L. orchestra, from Gk. orkhestra, semicircular space where the chorus of dancers performed, with suffix -tra denoting place + orkheisthai "to dance," intens. of erkhesthai "to go, come," from PIE *ergh- "to set in motion, stir up, raise" (cf. Skt. rghayati "trembles, rages, raves," L. oriri "to rise"), from root *er-/*or- (cf. L. origo "a beginning;" Skt. rnoti "rises, moves," arnah "welling stream;" O.Pers. rasatiy "he comes;" Gk. ornynai "to rouse, start;" Goth. rinnan, O.E. irnan "to flow, run").

Thinking of Beer and Bread

I live in Germany, so I think a lot about bread and beer. Okay, I do more than think about them. In my view, these two food groups form the basis for all human progress.

Perusing a recent Biergarten menu, I started musing on one of the beer options: Weizen. I know that Weizen = “wheat” in English. (You've heard of wheat beer, right?) I also know another way to order the same thing is to ask for a Weissbier. Weiss, or weiß, means “white” in English.

So, do “white” and “wheat” share the same root? Seems like they should, if you think about it.

Here’s what my OED reveals (I’ve truncated the entries, which in full reveal interesting Indo-European cognates, but you can click on the words to go straight to the full OED entries):

Wheat: O.E. hwæte "wheat," from P.Gmc. *khwaitijaz, lit. "that which is white," from *khwitaz-, the source of O.E. hwit, whence English “white”.

White: O.E. hwit, from P.Gmc. *khwitaz, from PIE *kwintos/*kwindos "bright".

What do we learn from this? The next time the Denny’s waitress asks if you want “white or wheat”, you can answer “yes”.

You’ll still be a smart-ass, but you’ll be a smarter one knowing the close linguistic kinship of these two words.

You’re welcome.

- o - o -

PS. Reminder: Etymological abbreviations here.

Strategazing: New Word of the Day Feature!

This post inaugurates an aperiodic Word of the Day feature. Don’t be fooled by the title. It’s more “Word of the day on the day that I post it”. If you actually got a word a day it might get boring.

Our inaugural word is strategazing.*

Strategazing /strætəgezɪŋ/ (noun). A portmanteau word formed from bases strategy and star-gazing (some lexicologists hold the origin of the latter base to be navel-gazing -- either way, the effect is the same). Of or pertaining to the process of thinking big thoughts, purportedly with the aim of implementing them...some day...somehow. (In its purest form, strategazing leaves implementation to someone else.) Often accompanied by blind optimism and a total disregard for resources or timelines required for someone else to implement that big thought some day...somehow. (See also the related Good idea fairy.)

Now go forth and use this word! Impress your friends! Strategaze something up for someone else to make happen and then tell them there's a word for that!

-o-o-o-

* A Little Light Writing would like to thank the kind sponsors of today’s Word of the Day:

Strategazing is brought to you by the Purveyors of Fine-Ideas-Just-for-the-Sake-of-Purveying-Fine-Ideas.

On My Soap Box

Here's one of the reasons I love living in Europe: a product label with 24 languages. In this case, a box of soap labeled in each language: "Liquid soap / Mini / Mild".

I see connections among 23 of these items. (My Arabic, however, is a little rusty, well a lot rusty, well, okay, non-existent.) But concerning the rest of them, I began to write down some observations for this blog. Unfortunately, it kept getting longer and longer as I noticed exciting! new! things! Opting instead for brevity, I'll let the connections speak for themselves. (For anyone who wants more explicitude, I've got a 1-slide quick guide here.)

(I had to handwrite in some because the tape unstuck some of the words when I took it off the box. I think I got the languages right, but don't hold me to the claim.)

Is anyone else amazed that of the 23, fully 16 of these languages, across multiple language families, use the sap root for "soap"? The fact that they do suggests a borrowing somewhere in the mists of time, and in fact it appears wild Germanic warriors are to blame (see below). That said, it's also clear from below that the root is Indo-European.

soap (n.), O.E. sape "soap" (originally a reddish hair dye used by Germanic warriors to give a frightening appearance), from W.Gmc. *saipo- "dripping thing, resin" (cf. M.L.G. sepe, W.Fris. sjippe, Du. zeep, O.H.G. seiffa, Ger. seife "soap," O.H.G. seifar "foam," O.E. sipian "to drip"), from PIE base *seib- "to pour out, drip, trickle" (cf. L. sebum "tallow, suet, grease"). Romans and Greeks used oil to clean skin; the Romance language words for "soap" (cf. It. sapone, Fr. savon, Sp. jabon) are from L.L. sapo (first mentioned in Pliny), which [itself] is a Germanic loan-word, as is Finnish saippua. [My OED]

But wait, there's more: If the West Germanic root *saipo- means "resin" and the PIE base *seib- means "drip, trickle", I think we just found the origins of tree sap, and maybe even of some Germanic words for "juice", such as Dutch zap and German Saft.

So when parents tell their kids they'll wash their filthy mouths out with soap, maybe what they're really saying is they'll get them a glass of O.J.


[Again, I've updated the Abbreviations list with the new ones from this entry.]

Thinking About Girls...

...Their Names, That Is

The other day, a Dutch acquaintance was describing an area where she walks her dog and also takes many nice pictures (the two in this post belong to her). She lives in Alexanderlaan, and the dog-walking area is called Laapersheide. She noted that Dutch heide is English “heather”. And...

And of course it is! It makes perfect sense. I should have seen that connection before. German has Heide, too. I’ve always thought of it as meaning “meadow”, without connecting it with any English cognates like “heather”.

But now my Dutch friend pointed it out, and that set me to thinking. Heather is also a girl’s name in English. Are there names in German that correspond? And then — Can anyone say “Grandfather! Grandfather!”? Yes, I’d put money on Heidi being the German equivalent of English Heather as a girl’s name. (Remember, I’m speculating here... It’s no fun looking it up straight away.)

Heidi = Heather may not be news to anyone else, but I found it sufficiently fascinating to keep me awake a little longer as I floated off to sleep last night to a Frank Zappa guitar solo.* I started to reflect on girls’ names in general, because, when you think about it, there are some interesting trends. Off the top of my head, I’ve come up with the following observations.

We seem to associate girls and women with the springtime of the year — or at least the nicest part in the northern hemisphere: March, April, May, June, Julie. It’s true we have at least one January (Jones), but I don’t think that counts as a trend.**

Aside from thinking of them seasonally, we tend to think girls are virtuous (or maybe we engage in magical thinking by naming them so): Hope (and Esperanza), Faith, Charity, Chastity, Patience, Prudence, Grace, Clementine, Justine.

They can be musical: Melody, Harmony, Carol, Viola.

One thing is certain: Girls are both loved (Amy) and glorious (Gloria). But what are we to think of parents who saddle their little girl-babe with pain and suffering (Dolores)?

Back to Heather. Are there other similar features we like to use in christening the wee lasses? I’m going through geo- words like river, woods, valley, ridge, hills, falls, cascade, butte (oh no!), torrent, crag, peak, summit, grass, pond, hay, barley, yucca, dune, brook (hey! Brooke!), stream, field, meadow, cliff, mud-slide... Not hitting anything besides Brooke here. And maybe Dale. Oh, and Lake (Bell, but I think she's more a one-off like January Jones).

Maybe Heather led me astray, toward topographical features. I should have been looking to botany for her compadres (commadres?): Lily, Violet, Rose, Petunia, Daisy, Dahlia, Camille, Iris... Flowers rein supreme in naming our little blossoms. And Heather is, I suppose, a sort of flower.

Time to look her up. My OED gives us this:

heather (n.), early 14c., hathir, from O.E. *hæddre, Scottish or northern England dialect name for Calluna vulgaris, probably altered by heath, but real connection to that word is unlikely [Liberman]. Perhaps originally Celtic.

Note the highlighted text above. Liberman must have been smoking something botanical. Read on:

heath (n.), O.E. hæð "tract of wasteland," earlier "heather," influenced by O.N. heiðr "field," from P.Gmc. *khaithijo (cf. O.S. hetha, O.H.G. heida "heather," Du. heide "heath," Goth. haiþi "field"), from PIE *kait- "open, unplowed country" (cf. O.Ir. ciad, Welsh coed, Breton coet "wood, forest").

I know naming trends follow waves that might be inexplicable (though Steven Pinker makes some good stabs at explicking them in The Stuff of Thought). But what's interesting about these girl-name tendencies is that the name classes cross different generational waves; the flowers, say, are not all in vogue at the same time. And there doesn't seem to be an equivalent number of name classes for boys. That is, classes of nouns (flowers, virtues, car models or whatever) that serve as names for boys. 

I haven’t found any deep-seated sociological meanings to the girl-naming trends, but I do I think it’s pretty clear that Heidi probably is Heather.

And on that note, here's another Dutch heather picture to enjoy:

---

* It was either “Watermelon in Easter Hay” or “Things That Look Like Meat”

** Month-wise, August is an exception that proves the rule. August is a man’s name but it doesn’t invalidate this train of thought, because the name of the month comes from the name of the emperor, who took his name from a Latin adjective meaning “venerable”.

[Abbreviations page updated.]

Thnkg abt abbrv's

In thinking about writing about thinking about words, it occurs to me it might be useful to readers of this blog to have a permanently available, running list of abbreviations used in describing word origins and histories. I’ve already used some of these in copy/pasting from the Online Etymology Dictionary, and will continue to do so.

So here it is... I’ll update this document as I use or paste in more abbreviations in subsequent entries. This abbreviation list will live permanently as the second link in the “About This Blog” section.

Speculating on Words

I've come up with a name for one of my favorite little hobbies:

Speculative linguistics, (n., sometimes used with the modifier "moderately-informed"), characterized by taking stabs at explaining etymologies, grammatical, and other linguistic features before looking up the answer. Sometimes confused with knowing just enough to invent connections where they don't exist (about which there may be a separate entry).

I’ve been doing this for many years. I should note that I grew up surrounded by people who spoke different languages and enjoyed language issues. My dad, doing post-grad linguistics work, sort of used us kids as research subjects in children’s language acquisition. My course was set very early.*

The thing is, if you love and are curious about words, you’ll start to notice connections everywhere (a process that explodes once once you’ve got a foreign language under your belt). And what you learn becomes just more clues for finding future connections. I’ve reached a point where I see or hear or imagine connections all the time. It’s now second nature to make a game of trying to find plausible links between what I know and what I suspect. Once I’ve come up with a notional relationship, I can’t rest until I know if I’m correct or not. These days, I regularly finish each round of my nerdy game with a trip to “my OED”.

I hope to show some surprising connections — some obscure, but others are hiding in plain sight of anyone curious enough to look. For example, the next entry to this blog will be very brief, but it will be Thinking about Thanking.


* I should note also that I married another word-nerd. Before we got too busy raising kids, my wife and I would sometimes spend entire evenings tossing ideas back and forth and reading etymological dictionaries. (I don’t expect everyone to get a frisson of pleasure from the prospect of reading dictionaries — but the thing about etymologies is that one entry will lead you to many other ideas, questions, and searches of other entries. This was something like reading Wikipedia. Once you’re in, you can’t get out until the sun rises.)

Thinking about words and light

I started this blog as a place to write about words and language, and also to write about my photography.

There's the old adage that "a picture is worth a thousand words," which sort of suggests an opposition between the two. It's true that an exceptional image can tell a story or evoke countless thoughts and reactions all on its own. 

But I find there can also be a kind of symbiotic connection between words and images that brings them together or adds a new dimension to both. (This can be as simple as the photographer's choice of an image title.)

So in this space you'll find me posting some images, musing on words, and sometimes exploring the intersection between the two.

It makes sense, then, that this first post should be about the word photograph. The word combines two Greek roots meaning "light" and "to write".* So photography is, both literally and figuratively, "writing with light" - a metaphor others have explored.

A Little Light Writing, then, offers a little light reading about words and images.

o - o - o

* One of my favorite websites is the Online Etymology Dictionary, which will pop up again and again here. While it's not the real OED, I'll use that abbreviation informally to refer to it. Accordingly, my "OED" gives the following information: the Greek root photo-, comes from phos "light," while -graph comes from graphein “to write, express by written characters".