All Things Linguistic

estifi replied to your post: Can you suggest your favorite Etymological Dictionary?

I also use the etymology section on Wiktionary and occassionally the same section on Wikipedia (if there is one)… But of course all of these are fairly limited to English and other widely-spoken languages.

Oh good point, yeah, wikitionary has stuff sometimes too. And the one thing that I would wish about Etymonline is for it to have etymologies of all the words in all the languages, but obviously that would be a massive undertaking so I’m not holding my breath. 

Easy question: There is only one etymological dictionary that I know, and it’s fantastic. Etymonline is free, it’s online, it’s comprehensive, it’s authoritative, it’s searchable, and I don’t know what else one could want. I use it all the time and have been doing so for years. If you haven’t heard of it, go check it out now.

Also hard question: Is it possible for something to be a “favourite” if you’re not comparing it to anything? Not really.

For example, given that I have only one mother, it’s weird for me to say to her “You’re my favourite mother!” because this suggests something like “Of all the many mothers that I have, you’re my favourite!” and there is no plural group of mothers that I have. 

(If you can get the interpretation “Of all the mothers that anyone has…” then that would be okay. If you have more than one mother, you will probably get the intuition in these sentences better by substituting someone you only have one of.)

This is similar to what happens with superlatives in general. It’s also weird for me to say “you’re my tallest mother” or “you’re my most intelligent mother”. This is probably a case of presupposition failure because saying “you’re not my tallest mother”, “you’re not my favourite mother”, or “you’re not my most intelligent mother” still suggests that I have more than one mother. And the main characteristic of presuppositions is that they stay even when the sentence is negated. 

So technically, etymonline is both my favourite and my least favourite etymology dictionary, because I don’t use any others, but I definitely do recommend it. 

awesomenessjunkie:

Since it is snowing today, I’m going to teach you the etymology of the word “snow”, free of charge. I know, what a great deal. In Modern English, we have one word “snow” that can act as a noun or a verb. You can say “let it snow” or “there’s snow on the ground” with the same word. This is not the case in most other Germanic languages, and it was not the case Old English. Old English had a noun “snaw” and a verb “sniwan”. Most of the inflectional endings on nouns and verbs were lost between Old English and Middle English, turning both “snaw” and “sniwan” into “snow” around the year 1300. It should be noted however that an alternate verb form “snew/snews/snewing/snewed” was used alongside “snow/snows/snowing/snowed” until the 1600’s, this is not to be confused with the regional alternative “snew” that is used as a past tense to replace “snowed” in some dialects today. Anyway, “snaw” and “sniwan” came from the Proto-Germanic (P.Gmc.) root *snaiwaz which in turn came from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *(s)neigwh-. Those roots have asterisks because we have no record of either P.Gmc. or PIE, so they have been reconstructed from the languages that descended from them. The s in the PIE root is in parentheses because it shows up in some derivatives, such as the Germanic languages, but not in others, like Latin and Greek. Since Latin drops the initial s sound before n, m, and l, the Latin word from this root is “nix”, and from it we get the French “neige”, the Spanish “nieve”, and the Italian “neve”.

Obligatory shoutout to etymonline. 

One of the oft-cited illogical things of the English language is why we say “redhead” to describe people who look like this: 

Any logical comparison of colours would conclude that their hair is much closer in colour to the second of these two boxes.

So why don’t we say “orangehead”? Etymology to the rescue! 

The word “red” in English dates straight back to Proto-Indo-European, via Proto-Germanic. This is consistent with what we know about colour terms cross-linguistically: after black and white, “red” is generally the next earliest colour term that a language is likely to have.  

“Orange”, on the other hand, only appears in English after the arrival of the fruits in England. The term for the fruit shows up around 1300 A.D, and doesn’t start being used for the colour until the 1540s. 

What about “redhead”? It started being said in the mid-1200s, about a hundred years before English speakers were even talking about oranges, let alone the colour. 

We don’t say orangehead because when the term was coined, English didn’t differentiate between “red” and “orange”. (Kind of like the way today we don’t have different terms for light blue and dark blue, even though other languages like Russian do have separate words for these.)

So the next question is, why did it take until the arrival of oranges in England for people to have a handy orange object to name the colour after? Surely they could have named this colour “pumpkin” or “carrot” instead, right? 

Actually, no. 

Pumpkins were first grown in North America, which means that Europeans had never heard of them until there started to be lots of contact between these two continents. So that’s 1492 at the very earliest, but Columbus was mostly between the Caribbean and Spain, so the word “pumpkin” doesn’t show up in English until the 1640s (from the 1540s “pumpion” was used for melons and pumpkins, but these come in several colours so probably not good sources for unambiguous colour terms). 

This also explains why “melon” wasn’t chosen, since there are several colours of melon. “Cantaloupe” isn’t used in English until 1739…much too late.

What about “carrot”? This word is pretty old, coming into English in the 1530s. But there are two problems: firstly, “orange” as a food had been around for about 200 years already, and second, carrots originally looked like this: 

Not very orange, huh. Carrots were also available in red and yellow, and the orange carrot wasn’t very common until the Dutch started cultivating them in the 1600s. Rumour has it that this was in honour of William of Orange, but at any rate, when people started saying “orange” for the colour in the 1540s, carrots were still this weird purple vegetable and pumpkins and melons were still the same category of food. So “orange” seemed like the best option. 

However, there’s another old food term that managed to do quite well for itself as a pretty illogical hair colour name. 

Ginger is goldy-yellow! Why aren’t we using this to mean “blonde”? There are some questions that even etymology cannot answer. 

ieithoedd:

It’s become fairly common to clip the word “awkward” to just “awk”…

But, “awk” was at one point a word that meant essentially the same thing as “awkward” and over time had “-ward” added to it, which led to “awk” becoming obsolete.

It’s a circle!

This is fantastic. But I tend to clip “awkward” to “awks”, not “awk”. There must be a name for the phenomenon of adding s or z to a word to make it more colloquial - I do this all the time: awks, lols, omgz, adorbs, hilars, ridics…

(Source: estifi)