This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation: link is embedded here. As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of all that it was saying. Moreover, it was written in romanization, not Devanagri or Perso-Arabic. I had studied a summer of Hindi-Urdu about 60 years ago, but that was in the two native scripts, and I had become quite proficient in Nepali from having lived in the eastern Himalayas from 1965-67. Nepali was also written in Devanagari and was full of Indic cognates, but also had plenty of Persian and Arabic borrowings.
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):