We have mentioned the Dungan people and their unique language many times on Language Log. How did it happen that we at Penn have a connection with the Dungans, a small group (less than a hundred thousand) of Sinitic speakers who have lived in the center of Asia (Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) since the latter part of the 19th century? They fled there from northwest China, many of them dying along the way, after revolting against the Manchu Qing government.
Following upon our enthusiastic, productive discussions on the main East Asian word for "slave" (奴隷 J. ドレイ M. núlì) a few weeks ago and Chau Wu's drawing of parallels with the corresponding Greek word for a person of that status several days after that, I've become deeply interested in Greek δούλος ("slave"). (See the first three items in "Selected readings".)
The word 奴隷 Jpn dorei (ドレイ) / Tw lô·-lē ‘slave’ is of great interest to me. My study of West-to-East lexical loans suggests that the origin of this word is Ancient Greek δοȗλos (doȗlos, m.) and δοȗλα (doȗla, f.), which mean ‘slave’. The figure below is a funerary stele of Mnesarete, daughter of Socrates (not the philosopher), showing a female servant facing her deceased mistress. There are some other terms for slave in Ancient Greek, depending on the context, but doȗlos and doȗla are historically the most commonly used, from Mycenean, Homer, Classical, Koine, down to Modern Greek.
In his remarks on "Stay hyDRAEted", Alec Strange noted that you can't avoid reading dorei no remonēdo ドレイのレモネーど (intended to be "Drae's Lemonade") as "slave lemonade" (dorei / ドレイ / 奴隷 ["slave"]). Coming at 奴隷 from the Sinitic side, my instinct is to read 奴隷 as beginning with an n- (or in a few cases l-), so it would have nothing to do with "Drae's".
Kim Jong-Un has a mission to eliminate bourgeois, foreign, and southern terminology. This story in the Daily Mail by Sabrina Penty, citing the Daily NK, is hardly scholarly, but it gives some examples, and there are other stories online. The Metro in the UK reported that "I love you" (discovered in a love letter during a routine Big-Brother check by the Socialist Patriotic Youth League) was subject to severe state criticism. "Hamburger" has to be called something else (dajin-gogi gyeopppang [double bread with ground beef]) in Korean. "Karaoke" is too Japanese (try "on-screen accompaniment machines" instead). But the most interesting ban was on the phrase "ice cream" ("aiseukeurim 아이스크림). Kim wants it replaced by eseukimo. But doesn't this show that the dear leader is weak on etymology? Isn't it transparently a Koreanized borrowing of English eskimo?
I probably learn at least one or two new foreign words per day, and they always delight me no end.
The first new foreign word I learned today is Turkish kahvalti (lit., "before coffee) which means "breakfast".
Inherited from Ottoman Turkishقهوه آلتی(ḳahve altı, “food taken before coffee; especially breakfast or lunch”), from قهوه(ḳahve) and آلت(alt), equivalent to kahve(“coffee”) + alt(“under, lower, below”) + -ı(possessive suffix), literally “under coffee”. (Wiktionary)
This tells us how important coffee is in Turkish life.
This word caught my attention on the news this morning. It was said to be a gigantic dust/sandstorm that was passing through the central Arizona area. As soon as I heard the sound of the word, with a probable triliteral Semitic root and the fact that it was some sort of sandstorm, I thought that it was most likely Arabic. And indeed it is.
I want to thank Jonathan Silk (comment here) for pushing Popeye to further heights and deeper depths in our understanding of his favorite vegetable. We're not "finiched" with spinach yet.
Now it's getting very interesting and confusing (Armenian is creeping in):
Building on observations of Andras Rona-Tas (Tibeto-Mongolica, pp. 213-14), one can observe a basic division in Mongolian words for cultivated plants. They divide into two types: 1) words for grains and grain cultivation; and 2) words for fruits and vegetables.
Words in the first category (tariya "grain" buudai "wheat," arbai "barley," shish "sorghum," am "millet," budaa "grain," anjisu "plow" mill "teerem" etc) are consistent throughout the Mongolic family, and have great time depth — most of them are not obviously loan words from any other language (some have Turkic cognates, but at a considerable time depth).