In the summer of 1990, I spent a memorable five weeks at the outstanding summer institute on Indo-European linguistics and archeology held by DOALL (at least that's what we jokingly called it — the Department of Oriental and African Languages and Literatures) of the University of Texas (Austin). The temperature was 106º or above for […]
Wondermark for 11/25/2021 — deriving "rappers", from "wrappers" and their "candy shanties" on the Hersey Chocolate assembly line: Mouseover title: "People will claim lots of things to impress some random moron."
[The following is a guest post by John Mock. I am impressed by how much detailed scholarship (although perhaps not always of great precision and rigor) on such an esoteric matter as that discussed herein already existed in the 18th and 19th centuries.] John Biddulph in his book Tribes of the Hindoo Koosh (Calcutta: Office […]
Yesterday's SMBC: Mouseover title: "Chicken etymology is really easy because the word origins AND the words you use to describe them are all 'bock bock bock'."
In "Shampoo salmon" (2/10/14), I called attention to the variety of opinions concerning the origins of the Chinese word bōluó 菠萝 / variant bōluó 波萝 ("pineapple"). Tom Nguyen suggests that another possible source is from Old Vietnamese *bla (> dứa /z̻ɨ̞̠ɜ˧ˀ˦/ with Northern accent – note the process of “turning into sibilant” of initial consonant […]
"Scientist discovers puppy-sized spider in rain forest", ABC 11 Eyewitness News 10/20/2014: For all readers with arachnophobia, take a moment to collect yourself before proceeding further, because this spider will haunt your dreams. Harvard Etymologist Piotr Naskrecki recently posted on his blog about an encounter in Guyana's rainforest with a South American Goliath birdeater, a […]
A few days ago, Larry Horn sent this note to the American Dialect Society's discussion list: On an article lauding the Texas Rangers’ defense in today’s NYT sports section, I did a double-take on reading that The defense—anchored by shortstop Elvis Andrus and the impregnable glove of Adrian Beltre at third base—has saved more runs […]
My previous post was about "dialects" that are often not really dialects, but bona fide languages, and the efforts of the Chinese government to phase them out. In this post, I'll be talking about "etymology" that is not really etymology, but character analysis. The occasion for these ruminations (see especially the last two paragraphs below) […]
Last week, there was an interesting Ask MetaFilter thread about how to find "a list of all the English words that can be traced back to a given root word" ("Word histories and dirt lions") , in which Language Hat helpfully linked to the American Heritage Dictionary's "lists of Indo-European and Semitic roots" as a […]
The "About Us" page for the new search engine Cuil says that Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil. There has been considerable discussion at the Wikipedia discussion page for Cuil about whether this is really true.
By chance, I came across the surname "Gnaizda". Its phonological configuration puzzled me for a while, but then I began to formulate hypotheses about its origin. I briefly thought that it might have been Semitic and considered the possibility that it was cognate with "genesis". It was easy to rule out "genesis", though, because that […]
From Charles Belov: While riding the 22 Fillmore bus through the Mission District in San Francisco today, I overheard a conversation in Cantonese. It was nearly 100% in Cantonese, not the Cantlish* that I rarely also hear. What surprised me, though, was when one of the elderly speakers said "Hong Kong" they used the English […]
Lord knows we've encountered many bizarre translations and explanations of the much maligned Mandarin term, weiji (see "Selected readings") below, but this is one of the weirdest crosslingual definitions that has ever come to my attention: Suicide is usually an attempt to deal with a crisis. The Chinese character for "crisis" translates into "dangerous opportunity." […]