LadyinRetirement wrote:

I can't copy a link over to the dictionary.  It may not be an exact translation but "treading on (someone's) toes may have a similar meaning to "potten breken" even if not exactly the same.  "Potten breken" has an appealing sound to it.  I was going to use another English idiom "has a nice ring to it" which means to have an appealing sound.  "Ring" here being the ring tone of a bell rather than a piece of finger jewellery.

Lady,

as our Spanish translator found out, English is sometimes a difficult language to translate and so is Dutch, especially while you have a difference in "idioms" between Dutch from the Netherlands and Belgian Dutch.
And now I remember that we here on the board had somewhere a discusion with nordmann, who said about a certain expression that it was not an "idiom" and looking to the Dutch and English list of expressions, there seems to be several different ones. The best I found:
https://www.smart-words.org/quotes-sayings/aphorism-proverb-idiom-saying-pun.html
I would tip for "adages" for the following expressions...nordmann?
"geen potten breken" (not breaking pots)
and 
"op zere tenen trappen" (treading on sensitive toes)

But the meaning of "potten breken"?...it is I think rather denigrating and I see just now that the term is used mostly in sport and all that but also in politics...for instance: That guy is not a high flyer, I think that he "niet veel potten zal breken"...will not score that high...he will not do that much wrong, while he is too stupid for it...or: "hij zal geen hoge ogen gooien" (he will not make the most of it)

Kind regards from Paul.

Thinking about attempts to try and make languages develop by means of intervention (which I am not a fan of personally), I came across this article which to me seems completely daft.  It's about wanting to make language more gender-neutral.  I'll link it (sorry Priscilla) because I don't want to run foul of breach of copyright https://www.dictionary.com/e/letter-x-gender-neutral-language/ but one example given is of using "foix" for "folks" because it is deemed to be more inclusive of LBGT and intersex people.  The idea didn't appeal to me but then I don't like the use of "actor" as a standard term for both males and females in the acting profession but when I discussed that with someone else in real life rather than cyberspace he said he thought "actress" was belittling of women.  Where does it all end - do we say that using the word "mare" is demeaning to female horses?

Deleted.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Thinking about attempts to try and make languages develop by means of intervention (which I am not a fan of personally), I came across this article which to me seems completely daft.  It's about wanting to make language more gender-neutral.  I'll link it (sorry Priscilla) because I don't want to run foul of breach of copyright https://www.dictionary.com/e/letter-x-gender-neutral-language/ but one example given is of using "foix" for "folks" because it is deemed to be more inclusive of LBGT and intersex people.  The idea didn't appeal to me but then I don't like the use of "actor" as a standard term for both males and females in the acting profession but when I discussed that with someone else in real life rather than cyberspace he said he thought "actress" was belittling of women.  Where does it all end - do we say that using the word "mare" is demeaning to female horses?

Lady,

yes where does it end...at the end...I have already some difficulties with the word "nurse". For some reason, or perhaps because in the time most nurses were women: infermières (verpleegsters, Pflegerinnen) and if I see in English the word nurse I think at a lady, instead of a male: infermier (verpleger, Pfleger). (perhaps I think always at pretty ladies  ). Not knowing that it in English gender neutral, one has to wait till in the narrative they use the word "she". Not that I don't say nowadays: "the partner", while I intentionally won't discriminate the lesbian and homo partners, as I have explained in the "childhood thread" how discrimination and not able to coop with the homosexuality, can lead to suicide. But that wouldn't say in my humble opinion that they can't behave as most "partners" and not as "special" ones, who want to be seen as "other" than other human beings.

Perhaps instead of a policy from above, wouldn't it be better to let  the culture and behaviour let do its work in an evolution to a more gender neutral society, as I already see with the grandchildren, male and female...quite otherwise than in "our" time of the boys only schools and of course for my sister, the nunschools, only ladies please...

Kind regards, Paul.

I don't understand the objection to folks - it seems as inclusive as 'people' for example. A little old-fashioned perhaps. I found that whole article bemusing. What is wrong with Ms? I sometimes use it and I am married. 

But language is always changing: I remember when there was quite a lot of discussion about what to call people living outside marriage before 'partner' was settled upon. I don't think of partner as being for homosexual couples only, more for anyone not married. After all men married to men refer to their others as 'husbands' and likewise women married to women call each other 'wife'. 

On another part of language change, Maori have adapted a lot of English words or incorporated modern ideas into their language: thus aeroplane is waka rererangi (canoe in the sky) and restaurants are wharekai (whare is house and kai is food). (And some words have just been transliterated: apora is apple, pukapuka is book, hokomaha is supermarket, Wikitoria is Victoria, James is Hemi, William is Wiremu, etc. George became Hori but for some reason that became a derogatory name for Maori so is not used at all now. I would have thought John was a more common name in those days, but Hone is still used by Maori.

Fair number of similar words to be found in modern Welsh, Caro. Mostly for words which have come into use in recent times. Most of the "gender neutral" etc language I can accept.


However
Not - absolutely NOT "herstory" .

A product of ignorance and dogma. "Because it has 'his' it's male dominated". No. It's French, and "his" has absolutely no implication of "masculinity" Indeed the original word is feminine.

Its etymological journey however does unfortunately contain a rather sexist manifestation at a crucial formative stage. Starting off in Proto-Indo-European as the very neutral "-weyd" (to see) it ended up in Proto-Hellenic and Boeotian as the equally unisexually benign "wistor" (seer, wise person). However once into classical Greek, and that language's insistence on sex being reflected in word endings, "istor" unfortunately did indeed end up meaning "wise man" and then "a man who knows law" or "a judge". The Greeks did somehow make up for this however when they developed the verb "ἱστορέω - (h)istorio" from that root, meaning "to learn from research" and which could be done by a man or a woman, and it is this that then made it into Latin as "historia", and of feminine gender to boot.

Personally I reckon both men and women have by now had a fair whack at owning the word in a gender sense, however it's spelt. I'll accept its substitution with "herstory" when its users also present themselves in pharmacies asking for anti-hertamines to combat the allergy they picked up while travelling in herpanic climes. It's all a little hertrionic, isn't it?

I often have to look up the meanings of abbreviations pertinent to the internet age.  "TL;DR" I have recently found out means "too long, didn't read" and I must admit I thought things had come to a pretty pass when people can't be bothered to read something.  Before 2012 my use of the internet was confined to work and going to cybercafes (there don't seem to be any of the latter in my hometown even though it is the county town though one can reserve a period of time to use a computer at the public library).  It's only since I've had the internet in my own home I have come across such expressions as "sock puppet account" (an false internet account) or "troll" (as someone who teases another person on the internet) or "shill" - someone who uses a false internet account sometimes for pay.  Mind you, I've found that sometimes if one comments on forums (fora?) - though not on Res Historia - if one gives an opinion differing from someone else the other person will call one a "troll" or a "shill".

Yesterday I tried to translate a, in my opinion, Dutch expression into English:

"ter mijner ontlasting"
but looking in the dictionary I found only:
"ontlasting": defecation, faeces, excrement, stools
Even on the mighty internet with Google English only four entries for the expression and in Google Dutch some eight
and it was used in writing of the first halve of the 19th century. Perhaps it is due to Google always with it first entries focussed on the English language...?

And I swear that I learned it in the Fifties in a Dutch language Belgian "College"
And yes in that few entries on Google it is used in the sense that I learned it
as in "exonerate": taking away the burden, the onus...(de last: the load)

I wonder if Dirk still understand this expression?

We would in the Dutch dialects rather say: "in mijn voordeel" (in my advantage) (there we use a Germanic word and the English a French/Latin word)

All that to say that in a mere 60 years a lot of words and expressions just "disappeared" in the Dutch language.

PS. And as I didn't find the Dutch word, I couldn't find an English word...and suddenly I came with my French to the expression: être exonéré d'une tâche (being exempt of a task) hence the French: exonération and the English: exoneration

Kind regards, Paul.

I've just starting looking at Einhard's writing about Charlemagne.  The online translation I have found (on Fordham University website) by Samuel Epes Turner and published in 1880 contains a meaning of the word "lent" I don't understand. 
 
"SINCE I have taken upon myself to narrate the public and private life, and no small part of the deeds, of my lord and foster-father, the most lent and most justly renowned King Charles...." (the emboldening is mine).  This doesn't seem to be the past participle of to lend or the 40 days and nights before Easter and googling hasn't helped.  Does anyone know the meaning (archaic?) of lent in this sense?  Having read further, the translation refers to Charlemagne's brother as his "broth" so "lent" could be a fault in typesetting.  I'm sure the original Latin version must be available somewhere.

Einhard was writing in "conversatio", a style that emulated similar biographical tracts from ancient times (he was actually impersonating Suetonius). It's all a little convoluted and something of a literary conceit, in that the impersonation means the text is written in Latin and then later translated for non-academic publication into contemporary tongue, often under the supervision of the author or even by the author himself. What you are reading is the English translation by a guy called Turner.

The text Turner was faced with was "Vitam et conversationem et ex parte non modica res gestas domini et nutritoris mei Karoli, excellentissimi et merito famosissimi regis ...", in which Einhard used the classical Latin expression "excellentissimo" before it later came to mean just "very good" and was originally used only about people, and only to mean "of/from lofty thought and/or deed". Turner therefore obviously decided against using "excellent" too and instead opted to use a rather older term that had come into English from Old French and which meant "austere/lofty", the advantage being that it would preserve Einhard's usage of an archaic expression, would steer the reader away from just thinking that the narrator is simply calling Charlemagne "a swell guy", and was even a word that itself could be traced etymologically back to "excellentissimo" as Suetonius would have understood it.

Clever Turner, but all a little over-clever in my opinion on the part of both him and Einhard in that all they ended up achieving between them was use of a word that would lead to more confusion than clarity. However you can take it to mean "excellent - but in a lofty, highbrow and principled way".

Thank you for the help with the meaning of the word, nordmann.  I've been meaning to read up about Charlemagne for about a year (starting when I was wondering about the French/German language divide in Lorraine).  I wasn't sure where to start but I found a video given by a Professor Rosamond McKitterick where she recommended the capileries of Charlemagne and Einhard's work as possible sources for finding out about Charlemagne.  I haven't (so far) through my online searches found a more modern translation that Turner (not an online one at least - there was a more modern  on "Abe Books" and such sites but not internet documents) and I didn't keep up my O level Latin so doubt I could plough through the original.  It's true that unless someone was in the know about Turner basing his style of translation on Einhard using the style of writing of Suetonius it can come across confusing.  Still, I don't think the campaign for plain English had been started in Turner's time.  I've found out that there is an audible version of the Turner text on Libre Vox which is free to listen to so I might use that.  Professor McKitterick mentioned that Einhard of course was very much in the pro-Charlemagne camp as they knew each other well - though she probably expressed the matter more eloquently than I.  "Lent" in that sense does seem a bit of a pompous word to use.

To be fair to Turner, he was writing in the 1880s, a thousand years after the Latin original and probably a little conscious of the fact that up to then it had only ever been translated into German and French (both of which versions also very likely used archaic terms to emulate the style of the source). Though I still wouldn't forgive him his use of "lent" when other better alternatives existed. It was technically correct, but I think something of "showing off" to his own academic contemporaries. But then, he was translating someone who had also written somewhat pretentiously - Einhard could have just written a normal biography in the Latin of his day. He didn't need to go all Suetonius either ...

nordmann wrote:

Einhard was writing in "conversatio", a style that emulated similar biographical tracts from ancient times (he was actually impersonating Suetonius). It's all a little convoluted and something of a literary conceit, in that the impersonation means the text is written in Latin and then later translated for non-academic publication into contemporary tongue, often under the supervision of the author or even by the author himself. What you are reading is the English translation by a guy called Turner.

The text Turner was faced with was "Vitam et conversationem et ex parte non modica res gestas domini et nutritoris mei Karoli, excellentissimi et merito famosissimi regis ...", in which Einhard used the classical Latin expression "excellentissimo" before it later came to mean just "very good" and was originally used only about people, and only to mean "of/from lofty thought and/or deed". Turner therefore obviously decided against using "excellent" too and instead opted to use a rather older term that had come into English from Old French and which meant "austere/lofty", the advantage being that it would preserve Einhard's usage of an archaic expression, would steer the reader away from just thinking that the narrator is simply calling Charlemagne "a swell guy", and was even a word that itself could be traced etymologically back to "excellentissimo" as Suetonius would have understood it.

Clever Turner, but all a little over-clever in my opinion on the part of both him and Einhard in that all they ended up achieving between them was use of a word that would lead to more confusion than clarity. However you can take it to mean "excellent - but in a lofty, highbrow and principled way".

 
nordmann,

I had already difficulties with "lofty" seemingly in Dutch: "verheven"
https://context.reverso.net/vertaling/engels-nederlands/lofty
And then as I saw perhaps ten meanings of "verheven", for my sense it was more about "doorluchtig" in this context:
https://www.vertalen.nu/vertaal/nl/en/doorluchtig
"august, illustrious"?

"and instead opted to use a rather older term that had come into English from Old French and which meant "austere/lofty", the advantage being that it would preserve Einhard's usage of an archaic expression, would steer the reader away from just thinking that the narrator is simply calling Charlemagne "a swell guy""


Do you mean: "lent" from Old French austère? I found only as LiR: lent in the connotation of "lent"
https://www.etymonline.com/word/lent
I sought also at the Old French...did you found something there?

Kind regards from Paul.

edited

According to the OED it appeared in Old French as "cellente", "lente" or "lent", this from the Vulgate Latin "cellenti" (from the Latin "excellenti(missimus)" - the "missimus" being a superlative dropped in vernacular speech).

In Italy the surname "Cellenti" still survives and is translated to correspond with the English "Goodfellow" or "Goodman".

The use of "lent" as "austere" seems to have come from associating the period of Lent (derived from similar words in Germanic languages meaning "longer days" or "Spring") with the austerity involved in observing it. However this would be a very bad translation of Einhard's original "excellentissimi", not least because its use in this manner was very limited and very late in English. Hence the confusion Turner risked - he opted for one obscure use that could easily have been confused for another obscure use, when in fact he had several more popular English words that would have suited much better, even ones with the archaic quality he had tried to preserve.

Given that this is a thread about the development of language it occurred to me that LiR's example is actually quite pertinent and illustrates a common theme in semantics but with a quite untypical word within that theme - the prevalence of homonyms which tend to obfuscate meaning when they occur (especially as loan words enter one language from another) and often lead to whole new usage of a sound as the original confusion they cause creates a standard that everyone now agrees makes semantic sense, even if that sense is quite different from what was originally meant at all.

Apart from the semantic confusion between "austere" and "good man" associated with use of the word "lent" (both of which were not very popular expressions at all in English anyway as far as I can see), the development of the homonym from two distinct sources in other languages also reveals another huge factor in how languages develop and words acquire new meaning. Both sources in this case also contained now obsolete meanings which contributed to, but are distinct from, modern usage.

If the "austere" sense in Old French did indeed arise from an association with the religious period Lent (as the OED also suggests, Paul), then this shows a typical semantic shift in operation as languages develop over time. A term originally intended only to indicate lengthening of days was subsumed into a religious term of reference which then completely monopolised its use thereafter. And then, as this became the accepted usage with all that Lent and its observance now inferred it was a logical (if obscure) jump semantically to employ the term as an adjective for one major aspect to that usage - the austerity it demanded on the part of the individual.

However the other side of the homonym and its source are even more fascinating. What had started in Latin as a euphemism for an aspect to a person's character derived from words originally meaning "from a prominence" (often with a superlative tacked on as it was most frequently used when praising an individual, which in Latin involved quite a lot of such superlative suffixes) entered various European languages as the much less precise "very good", though with its use implying "better than your average very good" - a little like "very good - with knobs on". Once losing its precision it could then be applied to anything, which might lead to many interesting misunderstandings should a classical Latin speaker arrive in our modern world and hear someone describe the meal they'd just eaten as "excellent". The idea that one's dinner could be "high minded" would have at least sparked a debate about animism in the Aurelius household at any rate.

Most words that underwent dramatic semantic shift as they were introduced into developing languages were down to being homonyms or near-homonyms, confused with terms already in use. It is not so common to see a word retain much of its structure, avoid confusion with a vernacular comparison, and still undergo such shift. And it is even more uncommon to see one that originated in Latin - what distinguished words with Latin or Greek roots in most European languages is that they were introduced because of their specifity, were employed in a Lingua Franca on that basis for many centuries, and survived more or less intact semantically as a result.

Samuel Epes Turner doesn't know what he's started here ....

As mentioned previously I never finished the part-time French degree I started (years ago) but I remember a professor saying that sometimes in Old French texts scribes had been known to make mistakes in transcribing (medieval equivalent of a 'typo' and no spellcheck facility available in days of yore).  Later on in the version of Einhard's text I was looking at I came across 

"His first undertaking in a military way was the Aquitanian War, begun by his father but not brought to a close; and because he thought that it could be readily carried through, he took it up while his brother was yet alive, calling upon him to render aid.  The campaign once opened, he conducted it with the greatest vigor, notwithstanding his broth withheld the assistance that he had promised..." (emboldening is mine).

The "broth" for "brother" made me wonder if the "lent" had been the 19th century equivalent of a "typo" that had somehow bypassed the proofreader ore even been entered when the document was prepared for Fordham University website.  Or was it like the modern vernacular "bro" or "buddy" (I think "buddy" was originally a slang word for "brother") But "lent' turns out to be correct (thanks nordmann again for the info).  I might be able to deduce if "broth" is a version of "brother" by finding the Latin text on archive.org.

2nd edit: old French 'texts' not 'tests'.

Since that's from an edition of Turner's 1880 translation I'd put that one down to a typo. If you're reading it from an online source then I imagine that's definitely what it is and all ancient scribes can be deemed innocent. These days transcription to online display requires no one as educated as a scribe, and in fact probably now involves not much by way of a human at all.

Which is not to say that scribal errors in antiquity never led to a lot of ancient face-palming, and probably not a few theological dilemmas, in their time. There are a lot of reasons given for such mistakes - homeoteleuton (taking a break and then resuming from the wrong word), homeoarchy (accidentally skipping a bit because two lines start with the same words), haplography (accidentally shortening a word or term because "it just looks wrong to the eye" as one is writing it), dittography (accidentally repeating a word or phrase within one sentence - a great way of introducing a crucial double negative reversal of what had been a simple negative statement), contamination (moving a word or phrase from one area into another where it changes the meaning or removes it completely), and metathesis (reversing letter order and making a new word as a result).

And then there are really serious ones in which the scribe makes a mess of things when he/she attempts to alter what he/she doesn't understand or might disagree with - unwitting (when the scribe doesn't really appreciate the seriousness of the change) and, by far the more frequent, deliberate (when he/she knows full well what they're up to).

The latter is mainly down to what scripture and ancient text scholars call "trivialisation". This was very common - the scribe reckoned the original statement was too high falutin' and tried to simplify it for the reader. Aware of this, study of ancient manuscripts is therefore governed by two directly contradictory doctrines. The first "difficilior lectio potior" (the more difficult the text the more likely it is to be the original author's work) is especially popular in study of ancient philosophy, whereas "brevior lectio potior" (the shorter and easier the language the less likely it is that it has been through several scribes' editorial wringers) applies to most ancient histories (such as Caesar's account of his Gallic campaign). One criticism of religious scripture study is that it tends to switch between the two doctrines all the time, depending on the whether the complexity or brevity of what's in front of them suits the scholars' theological view or not.

Yes, it could be an error if a scanner was used to input the text (rather than have it typed) into the university website.  Once when I was attempting to speed up the time it was taking me to do some Spanish homework (it was reading and understanding a Spanish text and preparing for oral translation and discussion in class) I put some of it into one of the Free online Spanish to English translating tools and it came up with gobbledegook.  It was quicker to do it the old-fashioned way and look the words up in the dictionary in the end.

I know of Suetonius (not in detail) but not much about his style of writing.  As for 'trivialisation' - I've been guilty of altering things myself in my typing work.  I was once sent a tape of someone's file notes which included slang terms such as "gonna" and as per my training* I converted it to "going to" and so forth.  I was then told to leave the slang terms as they were.  I was also once told (where I was working actually in an office and not remotely) I should not have changed "the contents of which has been perused" to "the contents of which have been perused".  Fair enough, I'd leave what he said as he said it but of course if anybody higher up the pecking order pointed out the fault it would get blamed on "the secretary".  If there was any ambiguity and I wasn't sure if the expression was correct I'd usually ask a question (though I might tell a white lie, naughty me, and say that the tape was difficult to hear at that point rather than that I didn't understand what he/she meant).

* When I was learning secretarial skills I was given a rule of thumb of typing speech in the formal way unless one was told otherwise (though obviously if one is typing something like a recording of a conference that doesn't apply) and to make complements agree with subjects (e.g. plural subject should have plural complement and plural form of the verb).  With copy typing I was told to leave as is unless one knew the original to be wrong (a very simple example - a firm might be registered as Bloggs & Son's so even if the "Sons" strictly speaking shouldn't have been in the possessive case if it was the official name of the firm it should be left "as is").

I'd like to have studied Old French (medieval French) in more depth - I barely scratched the surface.  I obviously couldn't look at an extract from Yvain or Aucassin et Nicolette or any similar works now and read the original text.

I didn't know how complicated the "scribal errors of antiquity" were, nordmann.  Well, one can learn something new everyday on Res Hist.

These days it's a combination of spell checking software with character recognition software that leads to the worst errors (and often the funniest).

Scribal errors only sound complicated because they've given them all Latin names. Actually we're all guilty of all of them, and not just when it comes to visually received candidates for transcription - one finds it certainly when people try to interpret song lyrics from uncertain pronunciations and indistinct elocution on the part of the singer ...

Courtesy of the New Musical Express here is a Top 40 of more modern examples of "unwitting trivialisation" -



1. “Money for nothin’ and chips for free”. Correct lyric: “Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free” from Dire Straits’ ‘Money For Nothing’.

2. “Every time you go away, you take a piece of meat with you”. Correct lyric: “Every time you go away take a piece of me with you” from Paul Young’s ‘Every Time You Go Away’.

3. “Sue Lawley”. Correct lyric: “So lonely” from The Police’s ‘So Lonely’.

4. “We built this city on sausage rolls”. Correct lyric: “We built this city on rock ‘n’ roll” from Starship’s ‘We Built This City’.

5. “Saving his life from this warm sausage tea”. Correct lyric: “Spare him his life from this monstrosity” from Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

6. “See that girl, watch her scream, kicking the dancing queen”. Correct lyric: “See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen” from ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’.

7. “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”. Correct lyric: “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” from Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’.

8. “Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tangerine”. Correct lyric: “Dancing queen, feel the beat from the tambourine” from ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’.

9. “Sweet dreams are made of cheese”. Correct lyric: “Sweet dreams are made of these” from The Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams (are made of this)’.

10. “Calling Jamaica”. Correct lyric: “Call me when you try to wake her” from REM’s ‘The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite’.

11. “Or should I just keep chasing penguins”. Correct lyric: “Or should I just keep chasing pavements” from Adele’s ‘Chasing Pavements’.

12. “All the lonely Starbucks lovers”. Correct lyric: “Got a long list of ex-lovers” from Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Space’.

13. “I can see clearly now, Lorraine is gone”. Correct lyric: “I can see clearly now, the rain is gone” from Johnny Nash’s ‘I can see clearly now’.

14. “Gimme Gimme Gimme a man after midnight, take me to the doctors at the break of the day”. Correct lyric: “Take me through the darkness to the break of the day” from ABBA’s ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’.

15. “Poppadom Peach”. Correct lyric: “Papa don’t preach” from Madonna’s ‘Papa don’t preach’.

16. “It doesn’t make a difference if we’re naked or not”. Correct lyric: “It doesn’t make a difference if we make it or not” from Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’.

17. “I’m farting carrots”. Correct lyric: “I’m 14 carat” from Selena Gomez’s ‘Good for you’.

18. “Then I saw her face, now I’m gonna leave her” Correct lyric: “Then I saw her face, now I’m a believer” from The Monkees’ ‘I’m a Believer’.

19. “I want to hold your ham”. Correct lyric: “I want to hold your hand” from The Beatles’ ‘I want to hold your hand’.

20. “Kicking your cat all over the place”. Correct lyric: “Kicking your can all over the place” from Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’.

21. “Blue seal in the sky with diamonds”. Correct lyric: “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” from The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the sky with diamonds’.

22. “Ohh, dyslexics on fire”. Correct lyric: “Ohh, this sex is on fire” from Kings of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’.

23. “Here we are now, in containers”. Correct lyric: “Here we are now, entertain us” from Nirvana’s ‘Smells like teen spirit’.

24. “Poppadom peach”. Correct lyric: “Papa don’t preach” from Madonna’s ‘Papa don’t preach’.

25. “Let’s pee in the corner, let’s pee in the spotlight”. Correct lyric: “That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spotlight” from R.E.M.’s ‘Losing my religion’.

26. “Bald-headed woman… bald-headed woman to me”. Correct lyric: “More than a woman… more than a woman to me” from the Bee Gees’ ‘More than a woman’.

27. “I remove umbilicals”. Correct lyric: “I believe in miracles” from Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’.

28. “We’re caught in a trout”. Correct lyric: “We’re caught in a trap” from Elvis Presley’s ‘Suspicious Minds’

29. “I’m Terry Wogan”. Correct lyric: “I’m every woman” from Chaka Khan’s ‘I’m Every Woman’.

30. “Let me just staple the vicar”. Correct lyric: “Just let me state for the record” from Sister Sledge’s ‘We Are Family’.

31. “This is the dawning of the Age of Asparagus” Correct lyric: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius” from Fifth Dimension’s ‘Aquarius’.

32. “You’re the wobbly one”. Correct lyric: “You’re the one that I want” from John Travolta & Olivia Newton-John’s ‘One that I want’.

33. “Don’t go Jason Waterfalls”. Correct lyric: “Don’t go chasing waterfalls” from TLC’s ‘Waterfalls’.

34. “A year has passed since I broke my nose”. Correct lyric: “A year has passed since I wrote my note” from The Police’s ‘Message In A Bottle’.

35. “Kick a chicken with it”. Correct lyric: “Gettin’ jiggy with it” from Will Smith’s ‘Gettin’ jiggy with it’.

36. “Hold me closer, Tony Danza”. Correct lyric: “Hold me closer, tiny dancer” from Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’.

37. “Take your teeth out, tell me what’s wrong”. Correct lyric: “Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong” from Abba’s ‘Chiquitita’.

38. “I like big butts in a can of limes”. Correct lyric: “I like big butts and I cannot lie” from Sir Mix-A-Lot’s ‘Baby Got Back’.

39. “We’re working for peanuts”. Correct lyric: “We’re heading for Venus” from Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’.

40. “I just died in your barn tonight, mustard no mayonnaise instead”. Correct lyric: “I just died in your arms tonight, It must have been something you said” from Cutting Crew’s ‘I just died in your arms tonight’.

Syd Barrett adopted "The madcap laughs" from Gilmour's mishearing of "mad cat".

nordmann wrote:

Given that this is a thread about the development of language it occurred to me that LiR's example is actually quite pertinent and illustrates a common theme in semantics but with a quite untypical word within that theme - the prevalence of homonyms which tend to obfuscate meaning when they occur (especially as loan words enter one language from another) and often lead to whole new usage of a sound as the original confusion they cause creates a standard that everyone now agrees makes semantic sense, even if that sense is quite different from what was originally meant at all.

Apart from the semantic confusion between "austere" and "good man" associated with use of the word "lent" (both of which were not very popular expressions at all in English anyway as far as I can see), the development of the homonym from two distinct sources in other languages also reveals another huge factor in how languages develop and words acquire new meaning. Both sources in this case also contained now obsolete meanings which contributed to, but are distinct from, modern usage.

If the "austere" sense in Old French did indeed arise from an association with the religious period Lent (as the OED also suggests, Paul), then this shows a typical semantic shift in operation as languages develop over time. A term originally intended only to indicate lengthening of days was subsumed into a religious term of reference which then completely monopolised its use thereafter. And then, as this became the accepted usage with all that Lent and its observance now inferred it was a logical (if obscure) jump semantically to employ the term as an adjective for one major aspect to that usage - the austerity it demanded on the part of the individual.

However the other side of the homonym and its source are even more fascinating. What had started in Latin as a euphemism for an aspect to a person's character derived from words originally meaning "from a prominence" (often with a superlative tacked on as it was most frequently used when praising an individual, which in Latin involved quite a lot of such superlative suffixes) entered various European languages as the much less precise "very good", though with its use implying "better than your average very good" - a little like "very good - with knobs on". Once losing its precision it could then be applied to anything, which might lead to many interesting misunderstandings should a classical Latin speaker arrive in our modern world and hear someone describe the meal they'd just eaten as "excellent". The idea that one's dinner could be "high minded" would have at least sparked a debate about animism in the Aurelius household at any rate.

Most words that underwent dramatic semantic shift as they were introduced into developing languages were down to being homonyms or near-homonyms, confused with terms already in use. It is not so common to see a word retain much of its structure, avoid confusion with a vernacular comparison, and still undergo such shift. And it is even more uncommon to see one that originated in Latin - what distinguished words with Latin or Greek roots in most European languages is that they were introduced because of their specifity, were employed in a Lingua Franca on that basis for many centuries, and survived more or less intact semantically as a result.

Samuel Epes Turner doesn't know what he's started here ....

and
"According to the OED it appeared in Old French as "cellente", "lente" or "lent", this from the Vulgate Latin "cellenti" (from the Latin "excellenti(missimus)" - the "missimus" being a superlative dropped in vernacular speech).

In Italy the surname "Cellenti" still survives and is translated to correspond with the English "Goodfellow" or "Goodman". 

The use of "lent" as "austere" seems to have come from associating the period of Lent (derived from similar words in Germanic languages meaning "longer days" or "Spring") with the austerity involved in observing it. However this would be a very bad translation of Einhard's original "excellentissimi", not least because its use in this manner was very limited and very late in English. Hence the confusion Turner risked - he opted for one obscure use that could easily have been confused for another obscure use, when in fact he had several more popular English words that would have suited much better, even ones with the archaic quality he had tried to present


nordmann,


thank you very much for the extended explanation and even detailing it in depth...I read it all with interest...and am perhaps one of the few, who appreciates such comments  


Kind regards from Paul.

Don't ask me how I saw it but I watched a recent episode of a long-running American cop show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.  For a long time I hadn't realised that Mariska Hartigay who plays one of the female leads (quite a serious part) was the daughter of (well Jayne Mansfield had three daughters I think) Jayne Mansfield who was perhaps more known for lighter and more comedic roles.  Unlike her late mother Ms Hartigay doesn't have her hair bleached.  But to get to the subject of this thread.  In the episode I watched Ian McShane was playing a sleazy director who made use of the casting couch (I suppose inspired by the "metoo" movement.  His character told one of the police characters "Don't get your knickers in a twist" which would be apt for a British character (he was playing with his natural British accent) though I would have expected it to have been adapted for an American audience to "Don't get your panties in a bunch" (which I have heard in an American film on TV).  The meaning of the expression is along the lines of to get flustered or anxious or even somewhat annoyed.

The man behind the Apostrophe Protection Society is closing the society (he's 96) but he says on the website he is leaving the site up for the time being.  http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/

This thread began some years ago with me correcting a common misconception that all "primitive" language must, through simplistic evaluation of how English especially has grown in vocabulary in recent centuries, therefore have automatically started with a limited vocabulary in terms of the number of available words. This is not only a common misconception very popular among English speakers in particular, but it is one that rather ignores all semantic interpretations of language use which, rather alarmingly for those who might mistakenly equate a large vocabulary with intelligence or progress, tend to place a higher value on mutual intelligibility for speaker and listener than on nuanced delivery by the former. In other words, semantically speaking (no joke intended), reliance on an artificially extended vocabulary can indicate failure rather than success when it comes to a language being "fit for purpose" and the acid test for any language's vocabulary is not its quantity of official words from which selection can be made but the number of words, whether endorsed by a dictionary or not, actually used. Those used, it is invariably found, are those which are both concise in meaning at point of expression and whose meaning can also be adjusted through context and intonation so that they are guaranteed to retain a relevance and appropriate meaning over a long period of time, even in those cases when this longevity leads to them actually changing their fundamental semantic meaning over that time (the word "nice" often being cited as a perfect example of this in English).

In many ways the conventions that accompany written language, which run parallel to linguistic development but do not quite share the same purpose semantically, can still also be assessed using the same basic semantic criteria - namely whether or not they contribute to or detract from intelligibility, especially if current conventions include a myriad rules and symbols used to express these conventions. English, in fact, has surprisingly few rules and symbols when judged in the context of the complexity of its vocabulary, and indeed employs fewer than many other languages even with considerably smaller vocabularies. Given that many of those punctuation conventions employed were originally agreed upon by humble typesetters within a nascent printing industry intent on establishing simple standards and rules on which everyone in the trade could agree, it is still worth remembering that these conventions originally included many that were inherited from older scribal practices, understandably since it was the original aim of printing to emulate as closely as possible the previous hand-written norm. However it was in fact these conventions which fared least well over the years and have since been dropped. In fact were one to resurrect their use now it would more likely destroy the intelligibility of a document rather than enhance it at all.

A typical example of how English has dropped punctuation which once was quite important is in the capitalization of nouns within a sentence. At the beginning of industrial-scale printing both English and German adopted very similar logic when it came to where and why one should capitalize a noun. In very simple terms the rule was that all nouns deserved to be capitalized, and therefore starting a noun in lower case carried its own semantic message - normally to show a nuanced comparison of importance between the noun thus written, pointing out a quality of inferiority, and others within the same text that preserved the upper case start and were superior by default. If, for example, one reads within Knox's "First Blast ..." book the sentence "Of His People in the World it is women who God created as an Afterthought" then the use of capitalization, as you can see, reinforces the point of the sentiment being expressed in graphic form on the printed page - people are "superior" though it is questionable (according to Knox as well as his printer) if "women" merit being described as "People" at all. In German this convention persisted, and still persists, though over the centuries it has resisted several brave attempts by famous linguists such as Johann Adelung and Konrad Duden to try to establish a concrete grammatical rule to cover all instances of use. Even as late as 1996 an international meeting of German speaking nations held in Vienna tried to have the final word (again no joke intended) in the matter when it agreed that all official and academic German would now capitalize all nouns in written form - a convention that, as any look at a German magazine, book, website or newspaper etc issued in the meantime will confirm, has been largely ignored by the great "unacademically washed".

Perhaps anticipating these centuries of "capital offences" (joke intended this time), English printers chose through trial and error to adopt the opposite solution - abandon capitalization unless it denotes the start of a sentence or a "proper noun", a term which itself acquired much more lucidity once every other previously "improper" noun then became simply "normal",  and therefore what had once been a very pointed and intentional indication of inferiority when used in rare cases became a norm, and the emphasis switched from pointing out that which was "inferior" to instead highlighting very specific examples of that which should retain a "superior" status semantically. God got to retain even "His" possessive pronouns in capitalized form, but for everyone else we had to make do with only our particular name or title holding on to such a distinction reflected in the written word.

In my opinion, a biased one admittedly as an English speaker, this and other such punctuation simplifications (or "intelligent refinements") over the centuries have only served to enhance the intelligibility of a language already challenged through its own bloated vocabulary as much as this vocabulary has ever aided exactitude of meaning in certain contexts (especially legal contexts). So when one looks at those conventions in punctuation which remain it is difficult to point out any whose loss would now further enhance this intelligibility at all. This job in fact has already largely been completed, and rather thoroughly, over the last half millennium. That punctuation which remains does so because it serves a valuable purpose, and the apostrophe is a case in point, especially when it denotes possession when followed by the sibilant "s". What people may not realise is that this use of "s" long precedes its general use to denote a plural where, even as late as Shakespeare's time, the suffix "s" was simply one of several options that could be used to indicate a quantity greater than one, and was in fact generally regarded as an unfortunate but necessary compromise when and if the application of the original and therefore much older English umlaut plural (typified by a nasal "n" or "r" just as in the original Germanic) could not sensibly be used any longer. The introduction of a huge number of French words which resisted use of the traditional plural form had simply increased this challenge to intelligibility, though it still really wasn't until the 18th century that "s" as a standard plural finally won out. Unlike Shakespeare, we no longer sit in our housen and use our eyen to read how children and brethren stubbornly resisted the "s" plural because they were both in fact double umlaut plurals to start with and the imposition of the alien "s" would hardly have helped them anyway (unless they had become "brethses" and "childses", as Gollum might have said).

However as "s" became more and more a standard indication of the plural it became even more necessary therefore to indicate symbolically in written text where it was being used in its much older sense of indicating possession, and as far as I can see this requirement has never gone away. The apostrophe was a simple and economic method that was devised by typesetters to meet this need, and one can only imagine (dyslexics and others with clinical justification for failing to meet this convention aside) that anyone who misapplies or fails to apply an apostrophe simply does not really understand a requirement to communicate through text at all.

John Richards recently ascribed this failure to "laziness" while he explained why he had now decided to step down from his campaign to "protect" the apostrophe. I'm more inclined to believe that it's more indicative of a failure on the part of the punctuation abuser to realise that he or she is employing a medium designed to communicate with an unquantifiable audience. We are familiar nowadays with the idea of "echo chambers" and "bubbles" indicating that individuals are content to communicate only with a select few others, but in reality regionality and employment of local dialect and slang has always led to such phenomena in the past, and it is those who lack the imagination to realise that they are in communication with a wider world (especially in writing) who are also most apt to ignore or fail to understand the importance of any punctuation convention. Just take a look at social media these days - a medium in which such imagination failure is seemingly de rigueur - to see how the poor little apostrophe is hardly the only such convention being massacred by so-called "English speakers" whose enthusiasm to communicate exceeds their ability to do so, and whose ability to appreciate or respect their audience in terms of quantity and intelligence does not extend beyond the abject few equally grammatically challenged imbeciles with whom they have honed whatever limited communication skills they have managed to acquire and with whom, based on the evidence, mutually intelligible discourse is as easy to achieve through grunts and belches as through speaking actual words found in a dictionary at all.

nordmann,

as Vizzer said, it is for "essais" as this one, that one is attracted to this forum.
I read it all and learned from it. It pushes me also to consider why in other languages as Dutch, French and German it is sometimes different.
BTW. Why is there an "e" in "pushes"? Because of the "s"?...brings, puts, stands...

And while reading your example of "housen and eyen" together with "children and brethern" it remembered me that there are still Germanic words in English. In Dutch it is still "kinderen" (and not "kinds", which is quite something others:childish, demented), but "broederen", "broeders" don't exist anymore and became "broers".

Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

... Why is there an "e" in "pushes"? Because of the "s"?...brings, puts, stands...

I was talking about nouns - you're asking about verbs. But it's a good question - the "s" to denote third person activity in the simple present tense is also a latecomer to English.

Prior to the Scandinavian invasions Saxon English took a very simple attitude towards third person stuff - "hi", "hie", "hiera" and "hem" did a lot of work, all of them basically using the same form of a verb, normally ending in a sort of "th" sound that one finds in "high" English right up to the 18th century (hell hath no fury ... etc). The Vikings however added a "t" to the beginning of the last two to denote a third person plural concept which Saxons hadn't much needed before, so that they became "he", "her/she" ("her" started life as a noun), "their/they" ("their" also was used as a noun), and "them". They retained the old Saxon verb form for the last two, but for some reason decided to further distinguish the first two by adding a sibilant to the simple present tense verb when it was invoked. The sibilant is a short form of "seg" (pronounced like the English word "sigh") and denotes a reflexive verb emphasising a connection between the action and the originator. Norwegians and Danes today don't do this much anymore (though still like their little refelexives now and again just to keep their hand in), but Icelanders are almost addicted to it, and since Icelandic retains a form most closely related to Scandinavian from a thousand years ago, one can see how this enthusiasm for reflexiveness was imported into England around the same time too. Or at least in Northumbria this practise developed - it would be another 500 years before it eventually arrived in London, again just in time for the first printing presses, so what might have been a temporary fad suddenly got itself written down and disseminated as standard throughout the whole country. Shakespeare, another century later, seems to have been still quite confused about it in fact - he uses both the sibilant and the "th" version for the same verb quite often, and it seems that he associated the former with people speaking plainly, using the latter often therefore to denote someone of high birth or speaking very profoundly.

Why such a quirky introduction gained popularity and was completely confined only to third person verb use in the present indefinite (admittedly the most used verb form in normal speech) is anyone's guess. The same Vikings introduced quite a few extra grammatical rules and usages at the same time but for some unknown reason the Northumbrians just didn't take to these as much and so they never made it south to meet the printing presses either.

PS: Just noticed it was the "e" in "pushes" and not the "s" you were really asking about. That's a simple one - the "s" just doesn't sit well after a homophone made up of certain consonant combinations. It's impossible to pronounce "pushs" for example without adding a vowel to separate the reflexive "s" from the end of the word, so it makes sense to represent that vowel when writing the word too. "E" is also the best candidate - in almost all cases where it sits alone it retains the same sound (not true for other vowels in English) and also even helps hint that the following "s" will be a hard sibilant, just as it's spoken.

Thank you for your informative comment, nordmann.  I think some time ago there was a bit of discussion of why oxen were oxen but foxes weren't foxen and mice were mice but houses weren't hice.  I looked at the Wikipedia entry about plurals in English and see that at one time the plural of 'bee' used to be 'been'.   I guess that change could have come about to avoid confusion with "been" the past participle of to be.

nordmann wrote:

PS: Just noticed it was the "e" in "pushes" and not the "s" you were really asking about. That's a simple one - the "s" just doesn't sit well after a homophone made up of certain consonant combinations. It's impossible to pronounce "pushs" for example without adding a vowel to separate the reflexive "s" from the end of the word, so it makes sense to represent that vowel when writing the word too. "E" is also the best candidate - in almost all cases where it sits alone it retains the same sound (not true for other vowels in English) and also even helps hint that the following "s" will be a hard sibilant, just as it's spoken.

nordmann, thank you very much for your essay about the "s" in the third person of the Present Tense.

And about the "e" in "pushes".

About the "e". I see ressemblance with the French "euphony letters"
https://www.espacefrancais.com/leuphonie-et-les-lettres-euphoniques/
For instance: 

the "t" in:
"dira-t-on" instead of "dira on" for euphony reasons (do they say)
"joue-t-elle" instead of "joue elle" (does she play)

the "masculin" before a female word
"mon amie" instead of "ma amie" (my female friend)

I wanted also to expand about something I read before and what I think to recognize in your essay:
namely: the written language was in the first time an attempt to reconstitute as similar as possible the spoken language, but later with the mass distribution of the printed press, there came an adaptation of the spoken language to the more standardized language of the written one?
But that will be for tomorrow.

Kind regards, Paul.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

 I think some time ago there was a bit of discussion of why oxen were oxen but foxes weren't foxen and mice were mice but houses weren't hice.  

But surely 'foxen' does still exist in the form 'vixen' ie a specifically a female fox (and, while you can say vixens, the singluar, vixen, like the names of many animals; deer, boar, trout, carp, sheep, buffalo, hare, is also a generic plural).

The word fox comes from Middle English fox, from Old English fox, with the specific Old English feminine form being voxa, from which comes the modern vixen for a female fox . Cognate forms of Old English fox include Old Norse fóa;  Old Saxon fuhs, Middle High German voha, and vuhs; Old High German foha and fuhs; and Gothic faúhó.

The word ox comes from Middle English ox, from Old English oxa. Cognate are Old Norse uxi, Old Saxon ohso, Middle High German ohse, Old High German ohso, Gothic aúhsa, and also the Welsh ych (pl. ychen).  

The difference between plural forms, ie oxen but foxes, is that in the Old English forms ox, as oxa, ends in a vowel (as does voxa a female fox) while the Old English (male) fox doesn't. The modern ox (as in the Modern Dutch os) has lost its terminal vowel, but fox had its terminal consonant from the beginning. Old English fox 'fox' is a strong noun, hence its plural form is foxas; but Old English oxa 'ox' is a weak noun, hence its plural was oxan. I think that is essentially the reason for the different Modern English plurals: oxen, but foxes.

Looking at similar words in English: pox (pocks) is already a plural so that doesn't count, neither does tax which comes, not from an Old English root but from Latin via Old French, taxe). Box, like ox and fox, is a direct survivor from the Old English, box, but this word is a feminine noun, so its original plural, buxa, is different again, and buxa rather than becoming boxan was standardized by force into boxes. (Oxen may well someday also become standardized as oxes, and indeed oxes is already widely attested in the Middle English period).

The word for a salmon comes from the Old French saumoun, but in Old English the fish was known as lex, leax, læx. This was a strong noun (like fox), so its plural was leaxas. But the Old English word has been completely lost and replaced by salmon - which is itself already a generic plural so 'salmons' doesn't or only rarely exists in modern English. The modern English ax(e) is from Old English æx, æcs(e); its a feminine noun and so its correct plural is like box, ie æxa, and so it has similarly been standardized' into the form, axes. And wax is from Old English weax, wæx; a strong noun like fox, so its plural is weaxas, hence straight to the Modern English waxes.

With regard to what nordmann said about "he" and "she/her", I have heard in some midlands dialects "her" used as the subject of a sentence.  "Her went" or "Her'll be disappointed" for example.

I borrowed "Teach Yourself Anglo-Saxon" from the library many years ago but didn't persist with it.  I didn't know about "voxa" being the Old English origin word for vixen, MM.  I have heard occasionally "b*tch fox" for the female fox but I suppose vixen is the more usual way of saying it

Looking at my Old English dictionary, vox or voxa (with a feminine ending so implying a feminine fox), is strictly a southern dialect form only, more generally the OE is fyxen, as a feminine form of fox, so the OE plural would be fyxenas, I think.

Another similar noun to fox and ox, is flax, from OE fleax, ending in a consonant so the plural would be fleaxas, but as it is an uncountable noun the plural is the same and the singular, (though in Modern English one might say flaxes if one were taking about different varieties of flax), and besides flaxen is now the adjective, flax-like; ie the pale yellow-brown colour of dried flax stalks.

Meles meles wrote:

The word for a salmon comes from the Old French saumoun, but in Old English the fish was known as lex, leax, læx. This was a strong noun (like fox), so its plural was leaxas. But the Old English word has been completely lost and replaced by salmon - which is itself already a generic plural so 'salmons' doesn't or only rarely exists in modern English.

 
MM, the word "laex", rang a bell and suddenly I knew why. In German it is "lachs". In Dutch, English and French we stick to the Latin word "salmo"

http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/zalm

On this site I learned
Ontleend aan Latijn salmo; verdere herkomst onbekend. Het woord verschijnt allereerst bij Plinius als Latijn salmo en verder alleen in West-Europa, aanvankelijk ongeveer in het gebied waarin de rivieren liggen die uitmonden in de Atlantische Oceaan of de Noordzee: Oudfrans salmun (Nieuwfrans saumon), Spaans salmón, Portugees salmão (later ook Catalaans salmó, Italiaans salmone, Engels salmon); Oudsaksisch en Oudhoogduits salmo, Duits Salm.
Het oorspr. Germaanse woord voor deze inheemse vis was wrsch. *lahsa-, waaruit: os. lahs; ohd. lahs (nhd. Lachs, ontleend als Amerikaans-Engels lox ‘gerookte zalm’); oe. leax; on. lax (nzw. lax). In het Nederlands zou het woord nu *las hebben geluid. Dit woord is Indo-Europees: ; Litouws lãšis ‘zalm’; Russisch losós' ‘id.’; Armeens losdi ‘zalmforel’ en Tochaars B laks ‘vis’ en misschien Ossetisch læsæg ‘zalmforel’ (het kan ook een Germaans leenwoord zijn); < pie. *loḱs- (IEW 653).

From Latin "salmo" First used by Plinius. and further alone in Western Europe, in the beginning in the area of the rivers debouching (tiens: déboucher) in the Atlantic Ocean.Old French "salmun", German "salm". But the original Germanic word was indeed as in Old English. and it is a word with Indo European roots as in Ltuaninan, Russian, Armenian, Tocharic...

zalm  {salme, zalme in de persoonsnaam Jan Zalm 1270} < latijn salmo; betekent waarschijnlijk ‘springende vis’, vgl. latijn salire, grieks hallesthai < ∗saljesthai springen

Latin "salmo" probably "springing fish from latin "salire" (spring) and Greek "saljesthai"

Kind regards, Paul.

For the French conversation group I attend on a Tuesday afternoon I had printed off (some while back) something about the machines (not vending as the items are free) that dispense short stories.  Of course I couldn't find my papers so I ran off some copies (the steaming ones) of something about a kitten that was rescued on a French motorway. [url=Il y a un petit chat au milieu de l'autoroute]Il y a un petit chat au milieu de l'autoroute[/url]  - on a website called micetto.com.  The rescue of the kitten was videotaped and a phrase used was "la video qui fait un malheur" for which a dictionary translation seemed to be 'the video which was a smash hit' (like 'going viral').  'Faire un malheur' for a smash hit is a new (to me) expression.  The kitten which turned out to be a ginger female was described as a "boule rouquine" and the online dictionary translation for 'rouquine'  was 'horny redhead' but given the kitten's colour I assume it meant ginger here.  Sorry to bring in a language other than English but have any Res Historians who live in continental Europe come across those expressions?

Alas, LiR, even when living in continental Europe, French has not been a main language where and when I grew up, these expressions are unknown to me.

The expression 'faire un malheur' does indeed mean to be a big hit or a sensation, eg elle a fait un malheur avec son dernier roman- she was a big hit with her last novel  (as well as meaning literally to be a misfortune, eg il a fait le malheur de ses parents - he brought sorrow/trouble to his parents), as always context is everything. And a rouquin/rouquine is a redhead/ginger person ... or in slang a glass of cheap red wine/plonk.

Meles meles wrote:

The expression 'faire un malheur' does indeed mean to be a big hit or a sensation, eg elle a fait un malheur avec son dernier roman- she was a big hit with her last novel  (as well as meaning literally to be a misfortune, eg il a fait le malheur de ses parents - he brought sorrow/trouble to his parents), as always context is everything. And a rouquin/rouquine is a redhead/ginger person ... or in slang a glass of cheap red wine/plonk.

 
MM, for me, that embedded in French since my childhood and the last 12 years writing on French fora, have never heard about that expression.
What one learns here everyday...

Kind regards from Paul.

I came across the expression faire un malheur - to be a big hit or sensation, quite recently in an article on-line, and had to look it up in my big Robert et Collins dictionary, as intuitively it's almost opposite to the usual meaning of un malheur , as a misfortune/mishap/calamity/ordeal/hardship etc. Somewhere I've got a dictionary/phrase book entirely devoted to modern French slang and common idiomatic expressions - it might have more to say about it. Also I think I've got my conjugation wrong in those examples, but you get the gist.

Thinking of "faire un malheur" in the sense of something being a hit/sensation in a good way (almost opposite to its literal meaning) reminds me of the saying "it went like a bomb" in British vernacular English to mean that something went well whereas in the USA if something "bombed" it goes badly.  When we talk about people who get on well "getting on like a house on fire" I suppose that is something of a contradiction in terms because a house being on fire is not a good thing.

I posted the above in the "diaries" thread by mistake...and I don't have the excuse of having imbibed either a refined top of the range wine or a cheap and cheerful one.

Deleted as I'm moving the post to the etymology thread which is more apt.

And to make the English  language more interesting these:

https://a.msn.com/r/2/BB10dytL?m=en-gb&referrerID=InAppShare&ocid=News

 are words which will blow your mind.


Dirk

I didn't know if it had to be a new subject. But reading nordmann's essays in this thread, I hope that he comes in for this question too, as he did for the former ones.

Not that much of a development I think, but more about the "building" of a language.

As I understand and especially can read some West-European languages, I always wonder why it is so easy to understand them, as is it only one common European language (especially the Romance-Germanic languages) and even the Slavic ones because once you know the basic words (the bricks with which you can construct a lot of compound words and even more connotations by adding prefixes and or suffixes...

I give an example: 

Dutch: vliegtuig (a craft that flies) the same in German: "Flugzeug".
Romance languages and English: aéroplane/aeroplano (Romanian: aeroplan) English: "aeroplane". 
EDITED because of the information of Green George, who said that what I first mentioned "airplane" was American English

From Greek "wandering in the air"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/a%C3%A9roplane#French
And I was wondering for the term "avion" and I see now that it was imposed by the French state to honor Clément Ader
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/avion#French
So it is an exeption in the normal flow of etymology?
Yes and even the Russian for airplane is so easy to understand for a Russian speaking one: 
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%91%D1%82
само- (samo-) +‎ лета́ть (letátʹ),
"self flyer, auto flyer"...

And I mentioned also the prefix and suffix as bricks to built a language
https://www.enchantedlearning.com/grammar/prefixsuffix/index.shtml

Is it therefore that I feel so familiar in all the European languages that I can read and understand or partly understand, even the Slavic ones...?

Because they are all built along the same pattern...and with the same "bricks"?

Paul.

I suspect many of the words you can understand have common roots - particularly scientific words which have Greek or Romanorigins.

btw - "airplane" is NOT English.
It's American.
The English version is "aeroplane".

Yes, I was offended when one of our announcers used airplane instead of aeroplane the other day. And the word defence in sport is now pronounced in NZ as DE-fence from American basketball. It makes me cringe.

Green George wrote:

I suspect many of the words you can understand have common roots - particularly scientific words which have Greek or Romanorigins.

btw - "airplane" is NOT English.
It's American.
The English version is "aeroplane".

 
Thank you Gil for the correction about the English word "aeroplane" (I have edited my message of yesterday)

You said:
"I suspect many of the words you can understand have common roots - particularly scientific words which have Greek or Roman origins"

I completely agree with you, but I had it not so much about the etymology of a word, but more about the construction of languages along the same pattern allover Europe (and perhaps in the rest of the world too)
 
I said:
"Is it therefore that I feel so familiar in all the European languages that I can read and understand or partly understand, even the Slavic ones...?
Because they are all built along the same pattern...and with the same "bricks"?"

And with "bricks" I mean as in my example of the Russian  самолёт (samoljót, “aeroplane”).
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%91%D1%82
само- (samo-) +‎ лета́ть (letátʹ),
"self flyer, auto flyer"...
I know that "letát" is "fly" in Russian, but I didn't remember what ""samo" was...
But what I mean "samo" is a core word, and if it is now "self, selb, soi, zelf" and if one know this "coreword in the several languages he will feel familiar with every compound word of these "core" words. In my former messages I mentioned them as "bricks"

For instance also my example of "Flugzeug, vliegtuig" if one knows what is "fly" in whatever language: "fliegen, vliegen, voler, volare, лета́ть
and one knows what is "Zeug, tuig, gear, machin, útiles, инструмент "
than one can easily visualize I suppose what a Flugzeug is? Especially if he/she can vizualize it in their own language, for instance the English "aeroplane"

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul, you are suggesting you can fast-track your comprehension of foreign language words because they often combine the same two or three concepts into one portmanteau as in other languages' words for the same thing. If you happen to be proficient in one of these other languages then recognition of one of the composite elements in the foreign word is enough to allow you to be reasonably sure you immediately understand the entire word without having to verify each individual component first.

I suggest that this is a reasonable way to begin to acquire understanding of a foreign language, but in fact one prone to more "misses" than "hits", especially if the tongue in question is one in which you have no proficiency at all. You are happy to congratulate yourself for the instances in which you guessed correctly using this method, but conveniently forget all those times you made such a guess but were incorrect in your assumption. This is reasonable too - the only such instances of "failure" you may be inclined to remember at all are those in which your guess led you to presume something so ridiculous or so embarrassing that it stuck in the mind. The many thousand cases where it was simply wrong but only proven wrong so long after the guess was made and your proficiency had grown to the point that you learnt the word's actual meaning that you had forgotten you made an initial guess at all, I suggest, far outnumber those "successful" instances you choose to remember in which a guess, made on what you understand regarding etymology and portmanteau-words ahead even of the context in which you encountered the new word, proved to be correct.

However I am not criticising this bias to remember when your guess was correct. It is proof that your linguistic acquisition techniques are not too far removed from those of a very young child, techniques that we often laugh at or find "cute" when the child's speech betrays incomplete comprehension of the words they are using but which we cannot deny are still by far the most effective language acquisition skills we are aware of - largely independent of IQ or reason but adopted by every child in the world in every native language with a remarkably uniform and impressive success rate. The "hit and miss" approach accompanied by an extreme bias in choosing to immediately discount and forget the "misses", together with cognitive conceptualisation of context whereby the brain separates words in a sentence while simultaneously ascribing meaning to the separated components, are the two fundamental building blocks of language acquisition as practised by the world's most expert linguists (children).

As we get older we become more inhibited regarding our perceived "failures" and are even less inclined to remember them, let alone admit them. Worse, we may even forget and dismiss attempts which in fact were very close to successful but not "perfect", something a child would never do. This interferes with language acquisition. But it also leads to exactly the misconception in retrospectively assessing one's own acquisition methods and their occasional "successes" as you have also displayed above. You are far more likely to have recognised, for example, the Russian word for an aeroplane based on the context in which you first encountered it than on any great or instinctive knowledge of the etymology of the word's individual components, however much truth is later to be found in your assumption that there was a common etymological process between that word's historical evolution and the one with which you are more familiar in your own tongue.

nordmann wrote:

However I am not criticising this bias to remember when your guess was correct. It is proof that your linguistic acquisition techniques are not too far removed from those of a very young child, techniques that we often laugh at or find "cute" when the child's speech betrays incomplete comprehension of the words they are using but which we cannot deny are still by far the most effective language acquisition skills we are aware of - largely independent of IQ or reason but adopted by every child in the world in every native language with a remarkably uniform and impressive success rate. The "hit and miss" approach accompanied by an extreme bias in choosing to immediately discount and forget the "misses", together with cognitive conceptualisation of context whereby the brain separates words in a sentence while simultaneously ascribing meaning to the separated components, are the two fundamental building blocks of language acquisition as practised by the world's most expert linguists (children).

As we get older we become more inhibited regarding our perceived "failures" and are even less inclined to remember them, let alone admit them. Worse, we may even forget and dismiss attempts which in fact were very close to successful but not "perfect", something a child would never do. This interferes with language acquisition. But it also leads to exactly the misconception in retrospectively assessing one's own acquisition methods and their occasional "successes" as you have also displayed above.
You are far more likely to have recognised, for example, the Russian word for an aeroplane based on the context in which you first encountered it than on any great or instinctive knowledge of the etymology of the word's individual components, however much truth is later to be found in your assumption that there was a common etymological process between that word's historical evolution and the one with which you are more familiar in your own tongue.

nordmann, thank you again for ("the trouble you made" I comment later, but as access for translation is easier on the computer than in a dictionary, I saw now in just some seconds that the following expression is more correct) the effort you made to explain it all in that detail.

And I see now that we discussed already a lot in this thread:
https://reshistorica.forumotion.com/t1338-understanding-a-foreign-language#52042

You mentioned the learning of a child of his native language...
But don't do we unconsciously the same as grown ups? At least it was the fact in my case and I heard the same from others too...after a while we have built up a certain basic vocabulary...and many said they had the same experience...in any case you may not to be ashamed (a bit like a child) to utter a word that you think is the correct foreign one...and when  I hesitated my standard sentence was immediately: "or how do you say it in your language". In the case of a kid, the parents or older ones would say: that's wrong you have to say:...So through everyday repetition one learned the correct word in the correct context...
That is the problem with my English I think, as I had never a long time spoken experience with English as for instance with German and French...
So I have no feeling, when I wrote in the beginning of this message, what was the colloquial English? "The trouble you made, the effort you made, you did?"
As such I have no feeling how strange my English shows up on this board too ...


You wrote:
You are far more likely to have recognised, for example, the Russian word for an aeroplane based on the context in which you first encountered it than on any great or instinctive knowledge of the etymology of the word's individual components, however much truth is later to be found in your assumption that there was a common etymological process between that word's historical evolution and the one with which you are more familiar in your own tongue.

nordmann, I fully agree and see now my misconception with my theory of the "bricks" I would be familiar with.

Indeed when I first learned the word "самолет" 
I didn't think about constituting words, I only saw the concept in my native language of that word

and so kept that Russian word for that entity...
In fact we studied the first Russian words with a picture album as we indeed did with French and as kids in the kindergarten (tiens, that's German) with the same method but then with Dutch words...it is perhaps the best method...

Thinking now about your rectification and the familiarity that I mentioned to think to have with all European languages, I think it can have to do with the structure of all these languages, which follow a same logical model as a sentence with a verb, a subject and an object and all that, the prefixes and suffixes that I also mentioned and which have in all these languages the same function? And this familiarity comes perhaps because they are grown from the origin by the same logic? Because the people, who started with it were thinking along the same logical reasoning?

Kind regards, Paul.

Well, yes. The way we absorb vocabulary and the way we acquire new language skills in particular do not fundamentally change as we get older. However what does change is the level of self-consciousness which can inhibit our willingness to develop linguistic acquisition. And though there are several reasons why this is so and the level subjectively changes anyway from person to person, there are very few of us who escape the effect, even if - as is apparently the case with yourself - one is aware of this effect and consciously takes steps to avoid it.

Which is why your previous claim to be able to quickly acquire comprehension of portmanteau words in a foreign tongue based on recognition of their structure and instinctive comprehension of one element within them only rings partly true, and indeed smacks of retrospective attribution of technique to a process that in fact was much more simple, much more instinctive, and much more in common with language acquisition as performed by a toddler than your claim allows.

The same applies to your "observation" that European languages share a common structure and that this also facilitates the process. The structural parallels are certainly there, and of course they play a role in how quickly one can acquire comprehension of language other than your native tongue. But comprehension, as any educator will know, is not achieved simply through exposure to the material to be absorbed by the pupil. By far the greatest facilitator of comprehension is a pupil's own enthusiasm to learn, and when this enthusiasm is promoted by the pupil also identifying and appreciating an actual and urgent requirement to learn, then the teacher's job is that much easier and the pupil's ability to absorb and retain information that much more pronounced. Material that lends itself to more rapid comprehension helps of course, but it is an insignificant factor compared to the child's own ability to maintain motivation to absorb it.

The initial drive to acquire language by young children is partly related to understanding the world around them, but by far the greater motivation is in their own absolute requirement to be understood - to become initiators of communication and not just participants in the exercise. In other words the very young child quite naturally and instinctively has internalised the process and requires practically no assistance whatsoever from outside in maintaining motivation, developing rules of acquisition, and even developing a consistent regime of self-analysis that allows the whole process to evolve and improve over time. However the latter is also a completely instinctive thing that the child does without even being aware they are doing it, and in fact this is why it works so well. You, as with almost every adult in the world, have grown self-aware enough to be more than conscious of this aspect to learning and now place so much importance on it that it actually inhibits those parts of the process which in fact are the ones that do all the work. This is the problem with too much emphasis on post-event analysis of any process - no matter how much truth and accuracy the analysis contains the work and time used to arrive at any conclusion is work and time a natural linguist (young child) would have devoted to actually acquiring language in the first place. When that analysis contains dodgy conclusions (such as your portmanteau theory) then the waste of effort is even more pronounced.

With my U3A Spanish, I find doing practice of Spanish little and often helps me.  I hate learning lists of words but sometimes it's necessary.  With the internet it's possible to hear Spanish spoken even if not in a Spanish-speaking country or speaking with someone in person whose mother tongue is Spanish.

At my primary school there were some Polish children whose parents  had been displaced during World War II.  They seemed to absorb English words like a sponge.  I never thought to ask them about it at the time.  I know liking or disliking a teacher shouldn't really impinge on one's ability to learn but it did with me at secondary school  In my first year of learning Latin I got on okay with the teacher and got good marks - the next year I found the teacher really annoying (her methods were annoying - she would waste time in class and then pile on the homework).  I did less well with her.  With French I could never say the 'u' in 'tu' properly.  Maybe children who are natural mimics excel at foreign accents.

nordmann wrote:

Well, yes. The way we absorb vocabulary and the way we acquire new language skills in particular do not fundamentally change as we get older. However what does change is the level of self-consciousness which can inhibit our willingness to develop linguistic acquisition. And though there are several reasons why this is so and the level subjectively changes anyway from person to person, there are very few of us who escape the effect, even if - as is apparently the case with yourself - one is aware of this effect and consciously takes steps to avoid it.

Which is why your previous claim to be able to quickly acquire comprehension of portmanteau words in a foreign tongue based on recognition of their structure and instinctive comprehension of one element within them only rings partly true, and indeed smacks of retrospective attribution of technique to a process that in fact was much more simple, much more instinctive, and much more in common with language acquisition as performed by a toddler than your claim allows.

The same applies to your "observation" that European languages share a common structure and that this also facilitates the process. The structural parallels are certainly there, and of course they play a role in how quickly one can acquire comprehension of language other than your native tongue. But comprehension, as any educator will know, is not achieved simply through exposure to the material to be absorbed by the pupil. By far the greatest facilitator of comprehension is a pupil's own enthusiasm to learn, and when this enthusiasm is promoted by the pupil also identifying and appreciating an actual and urgent requirement to learn, then the teacher's job is that much easier and the pupil's ability to absorb and retain information that much more pronounced. Material that lends itself to more rapid comprehension helps of course, but it is an insignificant factor compared to the child's own ability to maintain motivation to absorb it.

The initial drive to acquire language by young children is partly related to understanding the world around them, but by far the greater motivation is in their own absolute requirement to be understood - to become initiators of communication and not just participants in the exercise. In other words the very young child quite naturally and instinctively has internalised the process and requires practically no assistance whatsoever from outside in maintaining motivation, developing rules of acquisition, and even developing a consistent regime of self-analysis that allows the whole process to evolve and improve over time. However the latter is also a completely instinctive thing that the child does without even being aware they are doing it, and in fact this is why it works so well. You, as with almost every adult in the world, have grown self-aware enough to be more than conscious of this aspect to learning and now place so much importance on it that it actually inhibits those parts of the process which in fact are the ones that do all the work. This is the problem with too much emphasis on post-event analysis of any process - no matter how much truth and accuracy the analysis contains the work and time used to arrive at any conclusion is work and time a natural linguist (young child) would have devoted to actually acquiring language in the first place. When that analysis contains dodgy conclusions (such as your portmanteau theory) then the waste of effort is even more pronounced.

nordmann, thank you very much for your reply as a whole and I learned a lot from each paragraph in particular.

Comments on your first paragraph:

I completely agree with what you say. I suppose that you in this paragraph also hint to our subjective reasons for the willingness to acquire a language. Perhaps in the same vein as LiR mentioned about her "latin", I had perhaps the same experience about my French and already 15 years old (French was a "main?" course, major? in our school)...
My father's family due to the Belgian language struggle was a bit denigrating for French and as such one has an influence from that from childhood on (my mother was more neutral)...
That said, a bit the same way, as I understand LiR too, the French language teacher (native speaker) (and although he was the scapegoat of the whole class) was able to enthuse me in the French language and culture and from then on I have a lifelong willingness to learn the French language and about French culture...and in the next three years I made an enormous progression in the acquirment of the language, helped by my intentional buying French paperbacks and listening to one of the two TV channels in French that we had access to: "Brussel Vlaams" in Dutch and "Lille" (northern France), in French. The possibility to speak wasn't there yet...even not in class...

Comments on your second paragraph:

Yes, again I completely follow your reasoning and thanks to you in your previous message I became aware, where the fault in my reasoning lay

Comments on your third paragraph:

I already commented in the first paragraph. And yes these common constructions and same words, which most times have also a same meaning, are an aid to acquire a language, but are certainly not the core action of the process of acquiring a language (as you say).

Comments to your fourth paragraph:

nordmann, even in the BBC messageboard time I came in contact with the problems of this question. Even learning for the first time about a certain Noam Chomsky. In that time (the internet of that time: focused on English language words and items) the first entries about Chomsky were not about "language", but more about his politcal views...the first entries painting him as a socialist, nearly a communist ...and only on the second or third page I became aware that he had also something to do with language...
There I learned about the controversy about the learning of a language by children...innate or not innate and everything in between...and perhaps professor Chomsky was a hype in that time...
Seeking again on the internet I found I thought an "essay"...as I understand it, you can now let make an essay for you if you pay money for it...the lazy stupid student...as it is all new to me...nordmann, you, who knows nearly everything...

But nevertheless this "essay" summarizes the problems that I had with the Chomsky affair...
https://ivypanda.com/essays/language-acquisition-a-critical-discussion-of-innate-and-learning-approaches-introduction/
As I understand it, you are also, as I, a "more or less" (we say: min of meer ) adept of the "learning approach"?...

And I understand your analysis of a child that wants primordially to communicate with the outer world, especially the narrow world around it and that that is the greatest incentive to start to learn the language that it hears around...?

And you are also right that for the adult there are many inhibitions to acquire a new language, inhibitions that a child doesn't have, as it in its innocence, without preconditions, "rolls" into the situation? Or it has to be that his parents or inner circle make preconditions?

But I still want to warn, as I already said,  (and even admitted that one as an adult learns the language in the same behaviour as a child) that without a long "exposure" to the native environment, one can never learn another language in all its aspects and intonations, as I already explained to MM for the Flemish dialects...and I suppose it is the case for all languages...
I mean and think that without being a relatively long time into a community and communicate thoroughly with that environment, one is not able even with all good intentions to learn in depth another language.

And yes the "openness" for foreign languages is perhaps stimulated by living in a small language community as the Dutch one or for instance the Danish one of Nielsen at the crossroads of big entities as the French, German, English language groups? Big language communities due to history as for instance Spanish spoken allover the world and due to that fact, as I already experienced (especially the older ones) not wanting to speak another language as they are that conviced of the value of their own mothertongue.

Paul.