What does my name mean in Albanian?
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OK, I'm intrigued now. I have always thought Albanian seems like a fascinating language (Indo-European, yet so isolated that it was a hundred years before comparative linguists realized that), and now Arnold Zwicky has discovered that my surname is a word in Albanian. I don't think he's right about it being a given name; here's an instance of it in a poem, apparently on a poetry forum, without an initial capital:
. . .
edlira mi goc e vogel
kur vjen nforum gushen si pullum
i mer temat mare e mare
sle teme dashnie pa e pare
. . .
And it turns up uncapitalized on this page as well (cun cun gush pullum i ka fal zoti cunat, it says). So, lacking an Albanian dictionary, I'm appealing for an Albanian-competent Language Log reader out there in Internetia: Please tell me, what does my name mean in Albanian?
Mark Liberman said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:05 pm
Google Translate is no help here — it renders the four lines given in your post as
My Edlira small goc
when it comes nforum gushen as pullum
The threads get the mare mare
SLE without first topic dashni
And your other quotation is rendered as
lad lad has pullum Aug forgive Mr. cunat
[I did try Google Translate, Mark. But you know how it is with no-linguistics all-statistics-all-the-time machine translation (especially based on only modest amounts of parallel text): the results were so dire that I thought they would embarrass our friends at Google, and I concealed them. But you've really outed them now…—GKP]
Leonardo Boiko said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:06 pm
Well I searched “pullum” in this Albanian dictionary and it returned a result from Wikipedia Deutsch (?): Geoffrey K. Pullum (* 1945 in Irvine (Schottland)) ist ein US-amerikanischer Linguist…
[That's me all right. So one thing "Pullum" can mean in Albanian is "Pullum". But I think there's more…—GKP]
Steve said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:14 pm
Cannot swear to it. but I think it's probably dialect for 'pëllumb', meaning 'dove'. I have a little Albanian and a dictionary, but this looks like archaic stuff and I can't translate it.
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:18 pm
Hi Geoffrey K. Pullum,
I am Albanian and in Albanian language your surname means DOVE and its seems that belongs to the northern Albanian dialect.
http://www.fjalorshqip.com/default.aspx
In the past a lots of Albanian people have left Albanian lands as emigrants, therefore they have been assimilated in the countries when they establish them self, so is no wonder if you will find your family ancient roots in Albania.
Here in Italy when I live at the moment a lot of Italians (north and south) have Albanian surnames and they even know that maybe they have Albanian roots.
[(amz) Getting to the likely source of Pullum Xhani's name doesn't, of course, get us the source of Geoff Pullum's. There's a lot of coincidence in words across languages, and, especially, of names across cultures.]
DLP said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:30 pm
I'm unsure you can consider finding "pullum" uncapitalized in these two locations as proof of anything. After all, the entire poem is in lower case letters (and contains emoticons), and most of the posts in the forum are also completely lower case. I doubt these particular authors would have used a capital letter either way.
Lance said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:38 pm
There's a reference in Google Books to Pullum Kulla, representative (in 1997) to the UN from Albania. Since one gets a lot of hits for "Pellumb Kulla", it wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that "Pullum" is either a dialectal variation or else simply a nickname.
[(amz) Ah, Pullum Kulla is what I'd found. As Steve says, probably a variant of the name Pëllumb, from the common noun meaning 'dove'.]
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:51 pm
Hi Lance,
Pellum or Pullum or Pllum are both used as names or surnames in albanian language. Besides Pullumb Kulla other example of Albanian people with this surname is Zef Pllumi (albanian priest http://www.albanianhistory.net/texts20_1/AH1944_2.html ) that have a crippled form of the word 'Pellumbi'.
Other people with this kind of surname or name you can find a lot on facebook and they are all Albanians.
Pellumbi: http://www.facebook.com/family/Pellumbi/1
Pllumbi: http://www.facebook.com/family/search.php?q=Pllumbi
Pllumi: http://www.facebook.com/family/search.php?q=Pllumi
bulbul said,
July 5, 2010 @ 5:58 pm
That second occurrence appears to be the title of a song "Cun cun gushen si pullum" or variations thereof and of the variations appears all over The Great Republic as "cun … gushen si pellumb" ("boy … ? as a dove"). So Steve called it.
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 5, 2010 @ 6:17 pm
By the way "cun cun gush pullum i ka fal zoti cunat.." is not a poetry but is just a popular song of central Albania, and is translatet like this: "boy, boy dove gill the god has gifted.."
Variations of the word GUSH /gill
» I GUSHËS
* GOITROUS
GUSHË
* GILL
* GILLS
* THROAT
* CRAW
GUSHË (ANAT.)
* GOITRE
GUSHË ZOGU
* BIRD'S CROP
GUSHËBARDHË
* WHITE-NECKED
GUSHËKUQ
* ROBIN
* REDBREAST
GUSHËKUQ (ZOOL.)
* BULLFINCH
GUSHËKUQ DETI
* GURNARD
PALË NË GUSHË
* JOWL
JLR said,
July 5, 2010 @ 6:20 pm
I think it's probably dialect for 'pëllumb', meaning 'dove'
I believe that 'palumbo' or something similar is a Southern Italian word for dove, otherwise 'colombo'. So that makes me wonder if we are dealing with a cognate or a loanword here in 'pëllumb'.
Jac said,
July 5, 2010 @ 6:26 pm
'Pellumb…' is used for the dove in Genesis 8 (or Zanafilla 8) in the Albanian Bible: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Zanafilla+8&version=ALB.
I believe there is a long-settled Albanian community in Southern Italy.
Dhananjay said,
July 5, 2010 @ 6:39 pm
Following up on JLR's point, [palumbes] means 'wood-pigeon' or 'ring dove' in classical Latin, so I'd hazard it's a borrowing.
bulbul said,
July 5, 2010 @ 6:40 pm
JLR,
Cortelazzo's / Marcato's Dizionario etimologico dei dialetti italiani only has "palombìno" from central Italy (Umbria) meaning "a fascist-era 50-lira banknote" and notes that elsewhere the note was referred to as "colombina". Nothing on the subject in Orel's Albanian Etymological Dictionary.
Russell said,
July 5, 2010 @ 6:43 pm
Another song, by Albanian Pop star Gjyste Vulaj, is called "Pendohu O Pëllumb" Video here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nYaB373-9k
I kinda like it.
R said,
July 5, 2010 @ 7:33 pm
bulbul and JLR –
JLR is correct, in Neapolitan there is a word 'palombo' or 'palomm' meaning pigeon or dove. I am surprised Cortelazzo doesn't have anything of the sort!
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 5, 2010 @ 7:34 pm
Quote from the author of this post:"[(amz) Getting to the likely source of Pullum Xhani's name doesn't, of course, get us the source of Geoff Pullum's. There's a lot of coincidence in words across languages, and, especially, of names across cultures.]"
Well, if according to the author of the post, the word PULLUMI doesn't have sense in the Albanian language, in which language then has sense (while there are plenty of proofs that are saying that is Albanian and none for another language)?
Albanian language is the oldest language of the Balkans, that's for sure; even the Austrian scholars have discovered this: "(Old) Albanian – Living legacy of a dead language?"
http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/public_relations/press/pv200805-en.html
Also even the Italian scholar prof. Alberto G. Areddu (that I have interviewed) have translated the Sardinian language using Albanian, …he even wrotte a book called "Albanian Origins of Civilization in Sardinia”:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/30093229/Interview-with-Professor-Alberto-G-Areddu-author-of-the-book-Albanian-Origins-of-Civilization-in-Sardinia%E2%80%9D
[Brunilda: AMZ was merely pointing out that the accident of the word for "dove" coming out spelled "pullum" in central or northern dialects of Albanian is not good evidence that I can claim to have a name descended from the ancient Albanians. My surname is much more likely to have come from Latin via French (some people say the Pullums of the South London area are Huguenots — Protestant refugees driven out of France.—GKP]
Rembrandt Q. Einstein said,
July 5, 2010 @ 7:49 pm
And, of course, the Spanish 'paloma'.
John Cowan said,
July 5, 2010 @ 8:55 pm
Indo-European, yet so isolated that it was a hundred years before comparative linguists realized that.
I don't understand where the hundred years comes in. The timeline:
1788: William Jones publishes his famous address to the Asiatick Society proposing a common origin for Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, probably Germanic and Celtic, and possibly Iranian.
1813: Thomas Young (the same who worked on the wave theory of light, capillary action, the three-color theory of vision, the contact angle of liquid drops, and deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs) coins the term Indo-European
1833: Franz Bopp publishes the first part of the the first edition of his Comparative Grammar, which discusses Indic, Iranian, Greek, Latin, Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages, but not Armenian
1852: Bopp publishes the sixth and last part of the first edition
1854: One of Bopp's monograph series establishes Armenian as an Indo-European language
1861: Bopp completes the second edition of Comparative Grammar, which covers Armenian for the first time
I'm not sure when it was decided for good and all that Albanian formed its own branch of I-E. There are so many loans from Latin and Romanian, Greek, Slavic, and even Turkish that the matter was obscure for a long time.
[So like I say, speaking very roughly (sort of rounding up to the nearest half-century), it took about a century, from the late 18th to the late 19th, before people really understood that Albanian is a relative of Greek, Latin, Russian, German, etc.—GKP]
JLR said,
July 5, 2010 @ 9:53 pm
…establishes Armenian as an Indo-European language
I'm not sure when it was decided for good and all that Albanian formed its own branch of I-E.
Are we talking about Armenian or Albanian here?
nbm said,
July 5, 2010 @ 11:19 pm
Two things: can any local phoneticist shed light on the p/c alternatives (palomb/colomb)? Perhaps it is so well-known a connection as to be beneath mention.
And, Brunilda, thanks for the Albanian. Might I suggest that your line of verse would be better in English if the boy has the throat, rather than the gills, of a dove? It's a bit surprising that your dictionary gives "gill," used for fish, as the first choice while so many of the uses below are bird-specific.
Shqiptar said,
July 6, 2010 @ 12:46 am
Just confirmation from another Albanian native speaker that 'pullum' is a dialect (central Albania) rendering of 'pëllumb' which means 'dove/ pigeon ' and probably derives from the Italian 'palomba' . It is more often a first name but can also be a last name.
That this is probably a loan word is not surprising, as Albanian has borrowed heavily from Latin/Turkish and the languages of other neighbors/invaders that stopped by for a few centuries here and there.
And Geoffrey, although I don't think the evidence is strong enough to draw any conclusions as to the origins of your last name, at least 'pëllumb' is always used metaphorically to indicate something good looking or pleasing, as in the verses above, or 'je bërë si pëllumb' literally 'you have become like a dove' meaning that you have become very good looking as in when dressing up or when getting a haircut. It could have been worse, something like say Schweinsteiger since Germany is still in the running for the World Cup.
[This is something to be proud of, I think — maybe even vain about. We could render the Albanian "You have become like a dove", meaning "You have become beautiful", as "You have become like a Pullum." Thank you, Shqiptar!—GKP]
Richard M Buck said,
July 6, 2010 @ 3:04 am
nbm said…can any local phoneticist shed light on the p/c alternatives (palomb/colomb)?
Proabably talking through my hat, but: it's making me think of different reflexes of Indo-European labiovelars. Oscan and Umbrian had p where Latin tended to have c/q (Umbrian pisi pumpe for Latin quicumque), which might explain Neapolitan, but not the Albanian; that'd probably still have to be a loanword…
George said,
July 6, 2010 @ 4:54 am
And the whole p/c thing is all over the place. In school in Ireland we were told about 'P Celts' (Bretons, Welsh, Cornish) and 'Q Celts' (us, Scots, Manx, although why the letter 'q' was used rather than 'c' always puzzled me). So my head is my 'ceann' while a Breton's head is his 'penn'; I count 'aon, do, trí, ceathar, cúig…' while a Welsh person counts 'un, dau, tri, pedwar, pump…', etc. It isn't systematic: I would ride a 'capall' and a Welsh person would ride a 'ceffyl' (and both words are clearly cognates of the words for 'horse' in many other European languages).
As an aside on numbers, one thing I find interseting in Farsi is that they go 'yek, doe, seh, chahar, panj…', with a 'c' for the 4 and a 'p' for the 5 (forgive me for not knowing how to do the phonetic alphabet on my PC but you know what I mean).
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 6, 2010 @ 5:13 am
To nbm,
You right, but in my dictionary it says only ‘gill’ without specifying if it belongs to a fish or to a pigeon.
To Shqiptar:
I do not know what kind of studies you have done but your knowledge of linguistics matter is not enough.
1) How can Albanian language has borrowed heavily from Latin/Turkish or other neighbors/invaders while is well known that Latin and Greek were both Artificial Languages created for religious and commercial proposes? Do I have to remind you that Ptolemy II (309 BC-246 BC) wanted an universal language to be used only for diplomatic , literature, science and religious purposes and for that reason he assigned Aristeas, an Athenian scholar, to create the grammar of the new language (Koine) that was very different from the spoken one? Greek it was an written language, created on paper without the means to be spoken. Native people and non-native encountered difficulties reading it since there was no way to separate words, sentences and paragraphs and especially because they encountered too many made-up words and grammatical rules.
The modern Greek language called Katharevousa “the purified one” was adopted by the new “Greek” State as the official language of “Greece” and was renamed “Greek Koine” but it was an invented new form of language created during the 19th century by pseudo-Greek nationalist leader Adamantios Korais (1748–1833), trying to make the modern “greeks” more “greek”. Its use was finally terminated in 1976 when the “Greek” parliament voted to make the bastardized Dimotiki the official language.
The fact that both Latin and Greek are DEAD languages do not make you think of the fact that it wasn’t spoken from no one?
2) About borrowings from the Turkish language your statement make me smile ironically; every scholar and professor – who have a good knowledge of Balkan history – knows that the Turkic invaders and later Ottoman Empire has stolen/ copied many things from countries occupied included language, clothing, traditions, culture, music, and even combative military strategies!! After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the establishment of Ottoman rule (that was a multi-linguistic Empire) in the Balkans, Koine was resurfaced and found its way into the Ottoman administration. It was spoken by a rich multi-ethnic Christian educated middle class people called Phanariotes based in Istanbul.
Albanian society of the 15-16-17 century already possessed the main quality that should have a community to build a nation and a state: the awareness of those who they were, aware of their ancient Pelasgian- Illyrian roots and hence the connection with their past. Do I have to remind you that the first Albanian state (almost modern) in history belongs to the Lezha League in 1444 founded by Scanderbeg?
So according to your logic Albanians have borrowed from the Turks their own language stolen/copied before from them?? Are you kidding??
[Let's keep three things in mind: first, that a language is not merely a bag of words, so borrowing a few lexical items is not the same as borrowing a whole language; second, that it is perfectly possible for a language to borrow words from a language that has borrowed words in the other direction; and third, that on Language Log we don't let commenters be rude to each other. Pay attention especially to the third point, Brunilda.—GKP]
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 6, 2010 @ 5:20 am
Quote from the author of this post: "[Brunilda: AMZ was merely pointing out that the accident of the word for "dove" coming out spelled "pullum" in central or northern dialects of Albanian is not good evidence that I can claim to have a name descended from the ancient Albanians. My surname is much more likely to have come from Latin via French (some people say the Pullums of the South London area are Huguenots — Protestant refugees driven out of France. —GKP]"
Well I invite you to think again because the Albanian language has much in common even with the Celtic languages.
Take a look and enjoy reading: "Albanian Language and the connection with the Q-Celtic /Keltoi languages !!"
http://www.albanian.com/v4/showthread.php?t=26911
[Yes, it is certainly true that Albanian shares origins with Celtic languages as well as other subgroups of Indo-European. Everyone agrees on that. My point was merely that the origin of the word "pullum" seems to lie in the Romance languages (ultimately Latin), and the word is most unlikely to have come to the Pullum family through Albania. The word probably travelled from Latin to France with the Roman army and then to England via immigration; and quite separately it was borrowed into Albanian (probably at a different period, and probably through Italian). The etymology goes back to Latin in each case, but it is just a matter of common origin, not a sign of a direct connection between my family and Albania. I think that is the only thing Arnold Zwicky was trying to point out: in etymology, "same as in Albanian" doesn't mean "came from Albania".—GKP]
George said,
July 6, 2010 @ 5:24 am
Ah, Brunilda, God bless you! I was half hoping for a couple of Brunildas to turn up on the Scots thread (we get some great fights about that in Ireland) but it didn't happen…
Paul said,
July 6, 2010 @ 7:07 am
@nbm: Yes, there are quite a few cases of cognates varying between [p] and [k]. Another famous group are found in Celtic languages, which are often analysed as two separate groups (Irish, Scottish Gaelic and Manx on the one hand; Welsh, Breton and Cornish on the other). Those groups are even referred to sometimes as P-Celtic (note, for example, the initial consonant in Welsh pedwar 'four' – [p]) and Q-Celtic (note the initial consonant in Scottish Gaelic ceithir 'four' – [k]).
Acoustically there are similarities between labials and velars which alveolars don't share, and consequently labials & velars have often been grouped together in feature theory as [grave], or something equivalent. These acoustic similarities can be enhanced with secondary articulations such as a labialized velar [kʷ]. See the Latin word for 'four', quattuor, for example. (English has a labial at the beginning of four, of course).
A couple more examples: in (at least some dialects of) Scots you'll find "wh" words beginning with [f]; and there are intriguing bits of orthography in English such as cough, where two velar consonants might be expected from the spelling but what we observe in modern English is a velar at the beginning and a labial at the end. My examples are all Indo-European (my knowledge is embarrassingly restricted) but the acoustic facts mean that it wouldn't surprise me to find many more of these sorts of instances elsewhere. Indeed, the last time I observed someone completely mishearing a word in a conversation it was a confusion between a labial and a velar consonant which caused the mishearing.
Brunilda Ternova said,
July 6, 2010 @ 7:38 am
Quote from the author of this post: "[Yes, it is certainly true that Albanian shares origins with Celtic languages as well as other subgroups of Indo-European. Everyone agrees on that. My point was merely that the origin of the word "pullum" seems to lie in the Romance languages (ultimately Latin), and the word is most unlikely to have come to the Pullum family through Albania. The word probably travelled from Latin to France with the Roman army and then to England via immigration; and quite separately it was borrowed into Albanian (probably at a different period, and probably through Italian). The etymology goes back to Latin in each case, but it is just a matter of common origin, not a sign of a direct connection between my family and Albania. I think that is the only thing Arnold Zwicky was trying to point out: in etymology, "same as in Albanian" doesn't mean "came from Albania". —GKP]"
Sorry but again you are deeply wrong!!
So you are saying that “The word probably travelled from Latin to France with the Roman army and then to England via immigration; and quite separately it was borrowed into Albanian (probably at a different period, and probably through Italian).”
Wow, I accepts more from an expert like you!!
I explained before that LATIN LANGUAGE WAS AN ARTIFICIAL/WRITTEN LANGUAGE NEVER SPOKEN FROM NO ONE , including the Roman elite let alone the roman solders!!
Ahh by the way have you forgotten that the Roman elite and solders were of Illyrian stock?
And what we must say about the genetic evidence that connects the modern Albanians with the modern British people?
"Haplogroup E3b1a2 as a Possible Indicator of Settlement in Roman Britain by Soldiers of Balkan Origin" Steven C. Bird : http://www.jogg.info/32/bird.htm
Have a nice day Mr GKP, and is nothing to be ashamed to find out to have Albanian ancestors!
[Sigh. I'd be delighted to have Albanian ancestors; and indeed, it seems that Roman Britain did get immigrants from the Balkans who left genetic traces in the population. Fine with me. And yes, Classical Latin is to some extent a construct by purists. But let's not get confused. There really was a Roman empire, and there really were Roman soldiers who settled in Gaul, and they really did sow the seeds of what eventually became the French language, and it really is more likely that the Pullum name travelled to Britain from France in the 17th or 18th century, not by any route that goes near the Adriatic. (Unless, as Mark Liberman suggests, the name comes from the Dorset place name Pulham, which is another possibility.)—GKP]
J.W. Brewer said,
July 6, 2010 @ 7:50 am
There's also of course Albany/Albania as an archaic/poetic synonym for the land of Prof. Pullum's birth and current residence, although even if the names are etymologically related rather than pure coincidence that doesn't mean the peoples in question are any more closely related than, say, the Welsh and the Wallachians.
language hat said,
July 6, 2010 @ 8:07 am
So Steve called it.
No offense to the "Steve" upthread, but I, language hat, whose given name is also Steve, called it yesterday in the earlier thread. Ahem, sir, I say; ahem.
Bill Walderman said,
July 6, 2010 @ 8:20 am
According to Servius (on Aeneid 5.213), palumbes are wild pigeons or doves, while columbae are domestic. I found this in Ernout & Meillet's Dictionaire etymologique de la langue latine. As I understand them, they connect palumbis with Gk. peleia, 'wild pigeon' and with Lat. palleo; and columba with the old Slavic reflexes of Russ. golub (dove) and goluboj (dark blue) and Gk kelainos (black), suggesting that the pal-/col- opposition is a color contrast and not attributable to a mutation of the initial consonant.
Ellen K. said,
July 6, 2010 @ 8:20 am
Brunilda, I find your point about Latin and Greek being artificial languages rather beside the point.
Not that I concede the point, but, even so, surely they aren't wholly separate from spoken language. And furthermore, a language being artificial doesn't mean words can't be borrowed from it.
bulbul said,
July 6, 2010 @ 8:59 am
language hat,
Ahem, sir, I say; ahem.
My ignorance of the previous thread is inexcusable*. Deepest apologies to you, most learned sir.
*But then again, comments here have been acting strangely for some time now. For example, I didn't see Brunilda's comment of July 5, 2010 @ 5:18 pm until an hour after I posted mine and language hat's comment on the previous thread until now. Is it just me or has anybody experience anything similar?
George said,
July 6, 2010 @ 10:17 am
@ bulbul: Well I noticed that Paul's comment at 7:07 am seems to have been posted without his having seen mine of 4.54 am ( which covered much of the same ground) but maybe that's just vanity on my part… Fancy assuming that you're being read!!!!!
Nick Z said,
July 6, 2010 @ 10:40 am
Since we haven't yet been told off for being off-topic with columba vs palumbes, here is my two-penn'orth.
@Bill Walderman: de Vaan (2008:126-7 s.v. columba, 442 s.v. palumbes) says the same thing as E & M, though somewhat doubtfully. He suggests that palumbes started out as *pales, and then got remade to palumbes by analogy with columba.
The connection of palumbes with Greek peleia 'wild pigeon' and Old Prussian poalis 'pigeon' seems pretty likely (if it is Indo-European, we would want to reconstruct a root *peh1l-). The connection of columba with Russian golub 'pigeon, dove' is more problematic, because Slavic g- ought not to correspond to Latin c-. A connection with Greek kolumbos 'small diver' is unimpeachable phonologically, though, if semantically further apart.
If one were determined to connect columba and palumbes etymologically by assuming that palumbes was a borrowing from Osco-Umbrian into Latin, it would be necessary to disassociate palumbes from poalis, since the Osco-Umbrian/Latin p/c difference only applies to an original labiovelar stop *kw rather than the *p- which poalis shows. It would also be necessary to explain the difference in vocalism in the initial syllable, since the a/o variation is not regular in Osco-Umbrian and Latin.
Animal names are often rather difficult to etymologise, perhaps because they tend to be borrowed, or be prone to onomatopoeia or folk etymology (and perhaps, at least in some cultures, their names are subject to tabuistic deformation/replacement).
de Vaan, Michiel (2008). Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages. Brill: Leiden & Boston.
Dhananjay said,
July 6, 2010 @ 11:30 am
@Nick Z,
L. columba seems like a straightforward borrowing from Gk. kolymbos/kolymbis, on the latter of which LSJ report:
κολυμβ-ίς, ίδος, ἡ,
diver, name of a bird, prob. grebe, Podiceps minor, Ar.Av.304, Arist.HA593b17, Alex.Mynd. ap. Ath.9.395d; cf. κολυμβάς 11.1: as Adj., κ. αἴθυιαι Arat.296.
No semantic distance there.
Mark Liberman said,
July 6, 2010 @ 1:08 pm
Leaving the circum-Adriatic area for a bit, some of you may be wondering at this point whether Geoff's ancestors include some wandering Albanian merchant or mercenary. Probably not: the entry for "Pullum" in Patrick Hanks' Dictionary of American Family Names is
English: habitational name from any of the places called Pulham, in Dorset, Norfolk, or Devon. The first two are named with Old English pōl or pull ‘pool’ + hām ‘homestead’, ‘settlement’ or hamm ‘river meadow’, ‘land surrounded by water’.
I don't have online access to Patrick's comparable UK-oriented dictionary, but presumably the same information can be found there.
HoweverI now see that Geoff himself wrote, in response to an earlier comment, that
David Eddyshaw said,
July 6, 2010 @ 2:04 pm
@George:
The p/q Celtic thing:
By Old Irish times the q had already become k (written c) but Ogham still had a separate letter, eg in MAQQI, genitive of "son", which turns up a lot in inscriptions.
I think the ceffyl/capall thing is actually a loan. Welsh especially has a large number of Latin loanwords, though often hard to spot because they've undergone the same sound changes as the indigenous vocabulary over the past 2000 years.
Welsh 'pump' for 'five' is the result of an old irregular assimilation of p-q to q-q; same thing has happened in Latin 'quinque', and the opposite way round in Germanic, 'five' going back to 'pempe' in place of the original 'penqe'. Germanic messed up 'four' too; 'petwores' instead of 'qetwores'. Math is hard.
I'm in no way an expert, but I believe the idea that the idea that the p/q divide in Celtic is very fundamental is obsolete, still more so the old idea that it is in any way connected with the Latin/Oscan q/p correspondence. The big divide in Celtic seems to be between Continental ([p-], as it happens and long since all extinct) and Insular (Goidelic [q-] and Brythonic [p-]) which are very odd in many ways for Indoeuropean, unlike the Continental part, giving rise to all sorts of fanciful theories about influence from pre-Celtic languages of the British Isles. Albanian is a lot more typical for an Indoeuropean language than Welsh or Irish.
Bobbie said,
July 6, 2010 @ 2:47 pm
The Polish word for pigeon is "gołąb", which is pronounced gah-wum (sorry but I cannot access my phonetic symbols… ) I suppose the word was imported by the Italians who intermarried with the Polish royalty. I can easily see how it was modified from columba.
(And the Polish version of stuffed cabbage is known as gołąbki which supposedly look like little pigeon breasts….)
sjt said,
July 6, 2010 @ 3:28 pm
Paul: Acoustically there are similarities between labials and velars which alveolars don't share, and consequently labials & velars have often been grouped together in feature theory as [grave], or something equivalent.
Can you suggest references on this topic? I've often wondered about the example of "-ough" which you mention (and things like ModE "bow" < ME "bowe" < OE "boga").
wally said,
July 6, 2010 @ 3:43 pm
"But you know how it is with no-linguistics all-statistics-all-the-time machine translation…"
I came to Language Log today looking for sympathy for my frustration with google translate, and I struck gold on the very first comment.
I tried to run some Turkish thru, and it didn't do very well. It seems that's because it doesn't know or care about suffixes. Even with my very modest Turkish skills, I could see where it was missing easy stuff. For instance, it failed on halalarim, which is just hala "paternal aunt" + lar "plural" + im "first person possessive"
Googling the phrase "my father's sisters" gives a relatively low number of hits, so maybe this exact word is not common enough to be recognized by Google translate yet. But that is a pretty easy construction.
Also, Google suggested the correction "my mother's sisters". Hmmm.
[There are no constructions with this kind of machine translation. What Google Translate does (and it's amazing that it works even as well as it does) is simply to compile statistics on how often abc in language L1 occurs just where xyz occurs in the same text translated into language L2, and then guess on the basis of the statistics what might be the translation of some new sequence of words and phrases. When it has seen halalarIm occur often enough in Turkish texts with my paternal aunts in the corresponding position in an English translation, then it will start offering that as a plausible translation in new texts. But it needs tens of millions of words to get even moderately close to accuracy.—GKP]
Wimbrel said,
July 6, 2010 @ 3:50 pm
Here is a preliminary attempt at translating the entire poem into English:
How can you just leave me standing
Alone in a world that's so cold?
So cold Maybe I'm just too demanding
Maybe I'm just like my father too bold
Maybe you're just like my mother
She's never satisfied
Why do we scream at each other?
This is what it sounds like
When doves cry…
[(amz) (I've taken the liberty of introducing spaces between the lines.) How extraordinary that your translation from the Albanian matches perfectly, word for word, the (English) lyrics to Prince's "When Doves Cry", from Purple Rain. Except of course that Prince's printed lyrics have u instead of you, and 2 instead of two. Prince maintained that the lyrics were entirely his own (indeed, written overnight). But now we can see that he was merely tapping the rich vein of Black Albanian songs in Minneapolis.]
Bill Walderman said,
July 6, 2010 @ 4:07 pm
'The Polish word for pigeon is "gołąb" . . . I suppose the word was imported by the Italians who intermarried with the Polish royalty.'
I think it's a legacy of Common Slavic, a loan-word in CS most likely directly from Latin, not a more recent medieval or Renaissance loan-word from Italian into Polish. The Russian equivalent is 'golub', where the 'u' is a reflex of CS nasalized o, which is preserved more or less intact in Polish.
Theodore said,
July 6, 2010 @ 4:49 pm
I always wondered whether all those "dove" words were loans or cognates: Paloma, Palumbo, Colombo, Balandis, Gołąb, Голуб. I'm surprised I didn't see it coming in pullum/pëllumb.
Most interestingly, the diminutive plural of any of the Balto-Slavic variants is a delicious stuffed cabbage dish (Gołąbki, Balandėlai, Голубци).
This search reminds me of the time (back when the internet was smaller and online machine translation nonexistent), I encountered a webpage about the Torupill (Estonian Bagpipie) claiming that my surname was a wooden part of a bagpipe. The site's owner didn't know the history of the word outside the bagpipe context. I still don't know the answer.
language hat said,
July 6, 2010 @ 5:00 pm
I think it's a legacy of Common Slavic, a loan-word in CS most likely directly from Latin
Not according to Vasmer, who says CS *golǫbь is cognate with Lithuanian gulbė 'swan' and with Russian zheltyi 'yellow.'
Brunilda, I find your point about Latin and Greek being artificial languages rather beside the point.
It's not beside the point, it's pure crackpottery.
David Eddyshaw said,
July 6, 2010 @ 5:37 pm
@Jerry Friedman:
According to Thurneysen's Old Irish grammar, p567
The form capall "workhorse" … does not correspond to Continental caballus [source of the Latin loan] … together with Welsh ceffyl, it points to a modified form such as *cappillus.
This is in the section on Latin loanwords in Old Irish, but it all seems pretty confusing.
I think he is saying that the word is indeed a loan into both Welsh and Irish from Latin, but to make it more interesting, the Latin word is of course itself a loan from continental Celtic, as you point out.
Scriptor Ignotior said,
July 6, 2010 @ 7:49 pm
Add Hungarian galamb. And DRAE derives paloma from Vulgar Latin palumba, to set beside Nick Z's and others' mentions of third-declension palumbis (-es), above.
Bill Walderman said,
July 6, 2010 @ 10:52 pm
@hat
"Not according to Vasmer, who says CS *golǫbь is cognate with Lithuanian gulbė 'swan' and with Russian zheltyi 'yellow.'"
I don't know anything about Baltic, but what happened to the nasal element in gulbe and in Rus. zheltyi, ? Shevelov (A prehistory of Slavic, p. 365) links OCS golǫbь to Latin columba.
John Walden said,
July 7, 2010 @ 3:50 am
So someone called Callum Pullum might be Dove Dove. If he were really tautologically blessed he'd live near The La Brea Tar Pits or by the River Avon.
army1987 said,
July 7, 2010 @ 4:17 am
@Paul:
On the other hand, the labiovelars in both qetores and penqe turned to /t/ in Ancient Greek…
language hat said,
July 7, 2010 @ 9:04 am
what happened to the nasal element
I think you've got it turned around — the nasal element in the 'dove' word would be considered a suffix (nasal suffixes of course being a standard feature of IE). But I haven't investigated any further and don't know the details of the theory Vasmer is working from.
John Cowan said,
July 9, 2010 @ 12:33 am
JLR: All my references to Armenian should be to Albanian, except for the 1861 one which should be omitted from my timeline. Sorry about that, and thanks for the heads-up.
SSK said,
July 11, 2010 @ 2:51 am
And going by George's post, someone named Ken Penn could be mistaken as a trans-Celtic head head.
SSK said,
July 11, 2010 @ 2:44 pm
(I know nothing about the field and I'm just thinking out aloud here – I apologise for any stupidity in advance.)
Interesting. And, all this time, I thought that Google Translate painstakingly analyses my grammatical structure and then transposes into into another language. Why isn't this done? I can tell that is more programatically complex; but, how is it in terms of quality of translation? I'm gleaning from your answer that above a certain threshold of sources, machine translation would be better. Is this correct?
I've had an idea brewing in my head for translation for some time: instead of directly translating between two distant languages A to B, translate through intermediate languages (just for translation grammatical structure though; translating vocabulary through cognates would be silly, or should I say holy! [referring to LL post about Icelandic]). There are so many challenges in this that I can now see why machine translation is used.
However, I think that the idea of going through intermediate languages makes sense and even seems trivial in machine translation. Here, intermediate means languages between which many translated texts exist. i.e. if we want to translate from Urdu to Portuguese; urd-por have only 200 common texts, urd-eng have 1000 common text, por-eng have 1000 common texts, translation will proceed from Urdu to English to Portuguese. Is this done in any machine translation? Does Google do this?
Also, another related queston — how does Google recognize language? I used to think that it uses programmed rules, but does that also use machine translation statistics?
J said,
July 18, 2010 @ 5:55 am
@SSK, probably too late for you to read, but I may as well answer anyways. My knowledge of this is only a masters-level stats course, so I could be wrong, but:
Getting machines to analyse grammatical structure is a great way to fail expensively. You have to hire hundreds of people to program the grammatical rules, then the language changes and it's all worthless. It's also very fragile – it often can't analyse a spoken sentence, where someone says "like, y'know, whatever" in the middle of the sentence. Machine translations also fail at translating idioms and slang.
By contrast, statistical translations tend to get idioms right, because they don't usually change much. They also cope with broken sentences very well, because they can skip over the bad parts of the sentence and give you an idea of the rest of the meaning. And finally, when the language changes, you don't have to re-hire a hundred linguists to add the new translation rules, you just stuff more data into the translation program.
As to why people don't use intermediate languages, well, you can try it for yourself with google translate, perhaps by trying Chinese->Spanish->English and seeing if it's better than Chinese->English :)
Brunilda Ternova said,
August 7, 2010 @ 8:18 am
Dear mr. Pllumi, I want to clarify and explain my position to you and other readers-writers:
My comments were not in the context of an expert, but simply as an reader of this blog.
As you know very well, Science is not a unchangeable, hermetic and closed Dogma, but is a continuous evolution that requires a flexible and analytical mind. Scientific is that what work which leads to conclusions via demonstrations and evidences, therefore, a certain work remains scientific till the moment when someone manages to prove otherwise by clear evidence. The authors as Alberto G. Areddu, or the geneticist Steve C. Bird and many others, are already proving that what it was known until now and was taken as ‘scientific’ should be reviewed with a different approach and framework.
I hope not to have been any kind of misunderstanding in my comments.
All the best.
Atmir Ilias said,
August 9, 2010 @ 1:00 am
Pigeons make lots of different sounds. The call they make from their nest is oh-oo-oor. A pigeon call of alarm is oorhh.
Or better:Oh-uu-uuhr
Colombo=_o_o_o_o
Pullum=_u_u_
Cammon Wood-Pigeon:
u_uuh_u_u
Can somebody verifies that the Latin word/Colombo/ was born before the Albanian word /pullum/?
hana said,
August 20, 2010 @ 5:54 pm
im albanian from kosovo firstly don't try to translate this poem from internet cause this is written in old albanian and yes pullum is dove however pullum is not wrong but if you want to say it correctly pëllumb is dove…
p.s sory for my english
Atmir Ilias said,
August 22, 2010 @ 7:41 pm
1.Sarcophagus, from Greek. Sarkophago " lit. "flesh-eating, from sarx (gen. sarkos) "flesh" + phagein "to eat".S’arc’o-phagus
2.Ark,from Latin. arca "large box, chest".
Herodotus believed, erroneously, that sarcophagi (the Latin plural) were carved from a special kind of rock that consumed the flesh of the corpse inside.
Finally, we found out and we believed what we found out, not erroneously, that sarcophagus is a flesh eating stone and not an ark.
The end of the etymology is here.
Pullum does not come from Latin, Greek, …, but from the sound that a pigeon makes.
What does the word thunder mean in Albanian?
“Bubullimë” ….bu buu bum.
Thunder is the sound made by lightning, but In Albanian language it is really the sound made by lighting.
Curiosity is an important trait of a genius.
The Ainu language:
カムイフム, Kamuyhum, Thunder. (kamuy "bear, god" + hum "sound")
What exactly is “Folk Etymology”?
Milena said,
September 6, 2010 @ 4:50 pm
Pellumb means dove in albanian. i am an albanian so i would know..but its spelled differently it has a b at the end, but im pretty sure this is still the same meaning
Besa said,
December 8, 2011 @ 10:19 pm
http://www.fwf.ac.at/en/public_relations/press/pv200805-en.html
A little bit about Albanian language