From Stephanos Upton:
It's very interesting to note that the word for "daddy" in Greek is
μπαμπάς (ba-bás) and also in Arabic, where it is babá. Also very interesting that in Georgian (the language of the Republic of Georgia/Sarkatsvelo), the words for momma and daddy are reversed. In Georgian, mama = daddy...... and memory fails me, but I think papa = momma!
Also, the word ιχθύς (ichthus) is from classical Greek, and only used in Modern Greek as a prefix, such as:
ιχθοτροφείο (literally 'fish feeder', i.e. "aquarium"; while we also use the word ακουάριο
akuário, from Latin); and of course, ιχθολογία i.e. "ichthology". The Modern Greek word for fish is:
ψάρι/ψάρια (psári/psária), singular and plural, respectively.
And even MORE interesting is that Greek for "daddy" is spelled mu pi
alpha mu pi alpha (mpampa)! Thanks for the Greek spellings, Stephanos.
From Birger Drake:
1) As to stepmother in 188:
In Swedish it is styvmoder (or, shorter, styvmor).
Styv..... is said to be a common German prefix with the old meaning
(Swe) "stympad" (= Engl. "maimed, mutilated, truncated") , or (Swe) "berövad" (= Eng. "deprived, bereaved").
Old Swe. stiup, stiuf
Iceland. stjúp, stýp
Norweg. styv, stjuk
The common modern meaning is (Engl.) "stiff" or, in a transferred sense, "clever".
In (Swe) styvmoder, it has a special meaning.
Today's Swedish children often say plastmamma (= Engl., literally, "plastic mom", implying that plastic is a substitute).
A cognate word is (Swe) stuv (= Engl. "textile leftover"; also "stump", "stub", "stem").
(Swe) styver was a coin of low value (i.e., a cut-off piece).
By the way: Viola tricolor (wild pansy) is in Sweden commonly called
styvmorsviol ( = Engl., literally, "stepmother violet"). Why ?? Because the largest (lowest) petal
is felt to be a stepmother sitting on TWO sepals (= chairs) and having, above her, two children with ONE chair each, plus,
on top, two (rather pale) stepchildren sitting TOGETHER on ONE chair. Well found, isn't it ?
Excellent! Thank you for the Swedish perspective!
From J. Lange Winckler:
I just HAVE to comment on California place-names. I have been writing California history for more than 30 years.
Place names there are wonderful, and often mystifying, but the name of California is no mystery. [We
discussed California in last week's e-mail newsletter. Sign up!]
Spanish explorers, who today would be considered gullible fools, in their time solemnly believed in Queen
Califa, Florida, the Isle of Prester John, the Seven Cities of Cibola, and other tales. Their beliefs led the Spanish on
incredible quests - often at the cost of not only their own lives, but also the lives of the Native Americans encountered along the way.
Queen Califa, the mythical ruler of the land of the Amazons, lived in a wonderful country filled with fragrant
flowers, fresh fruits, and other delights. Her nation, in the stories, was called Florida for its abundance of
Today's State of Florida is named for Califa's mythical kingdom. When the Spanish explored the California coastal
regions, they named the area "California" in honor of the queen.
We've not seen any evidence linking the name of California to the
Amazons definitively, nor had any of the etymologists we consulted - let us know if you're aware of such. Keep in mind that without some writing
dating from the time in question (the period when the name California came to be applied to the Pacific coast area)
suggesting that the name had been taken from Queen Califa, it remains pure conjecture, no matter how much circumstantial
evidence exists. The same is true for Florida. Educated guesses. Fascinating nonetheless!
From Wayne P. Thomas:
I loved the piece on Californian city names as I spent some 4 years there in the mid 80s and came across several city names that always intrigued me. One in particular is the city "Coalinga," since it has an interesting ring to it.
From what I learned, the discovery of coal is what inspired the naming of the town, which was laid out by Southern Pacific Railroad engineers in 1891. Legend has it during those days there were three coaling stations; stations A, B and C. The name Coalinga is derived from mixing Coaling with Station A to arrive at the naming of the city.
You may already know all this, but I just thought I'd bring it to your attention anyway.
Great minds like a think: we did indeed consider using that one in
last week's Spotlight, but see our comment below. Thanks!
From Jeff Lichtman:
I liked your piece on California place- names. Here are a couple more.
There used to be a series of stations in central California where trains could load up on coal. They were named
Coaling Station A, Coaling Station B, and so on. A town grew up around the first coaling station and became
There is a town named El Sobrante in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The name translates from Spanish as "the leftover." El Sobrante is made up of the land that was left over after the original
Spanish land grants were given out.
Strangely, our favorite California place-name guru, William Bright,
suggests that the A on the end of Coalinga was an addition to make the name sound Hispanic. Your
explanations sound more logical, but etymology is certainly not always logical.
From Christine Beck:
I loved your piece on California place names. What is the origin of
Yolo as in Yolo County (just west of Sacramento in California)?
Unfortunately, while it is known that Yolo is a Patwin Indian
name for something, no one seems to know exactly what.
From Brad Daniels:
Many people seem to be surprised at how the traditional English names for
places in China are so different from the "real" names of the places. The reason for the difference is actually pretty simple (well, kind of simple):
For much of the history of trade between China and the English-speaking world, Hong Kong was the primary port used by the British East India
company. In Hong Kong, they speak the Cantonese dialect. Peking, Canton, Nanking, etc. are all fairly decent
Romanizations of the
Cantonese pronunciation of the characters representing these place names.
Cantonese is not, however, the official language of China. In the Mandarin
dialect (the official language of the Beijing-based government), the same characters are pronounced differently, yielding the "correct" names of
Beijing, Guangdong, Nanjing, etc.
I've oversimplified a bit here. The dominant Romanization of Chinese in the
19th century was the Wade-Giles system, which is normally applied to Mandarin, but which can be stretched to mostly work for Cantonese.
Peking, Canton, and Nanking are all Wade-Giles attempts at Cantonese words (phonetically, they sound to me more like
"buh-ging", "gan-dong", and
"num-ging", but the "g" is a hard sound only slightly closer to "g" than "k" to my ear).
The Chinese government supports only one Romanization, called pin
which provides very precise transliteration of the pronunciation of Mandarin words. The current place names are all
pin yin (without the diacritical
marks to indicate tones, of course).
It is interesting to note that the people in Guangdong still primarily speak
Cantonese, so Canton is really a more accurate reflection of the name used by the people who live there. The central government likes to downplay such
regional differences, however, and they call the shots as far as maps are concerned, which is why all the city names have changed of late... The
Chinese characters involved have stayed the same, though. You can see a similar effect with food names. Mandarin speakers often
assume it's pure ignorance that caused lo mian to be called lo mein, for example, when it's really just that we got the name for the dish from
After reading Brad's letter, you can see why we oversimplified the issue! Thanks
Brad (and others who wrote on this topic).
From Gene Fellner
There is a grotesque type of doll called a golliwog. It is pitch black with what you described as "goggle eyes," oversized with free-floating black pupils. I wonder if
golliwog is derived from "goggle eyed". These are quite out of fashion in the politically correct USA, but I see newly crafted ones advertised in foreign doll magazines.
Golliwog is actually said to come from pollywog with the polly replaced by
golly, as if the doll were saying, "Golly!" with its eyes wide in surprise.
From Ken Hardy:
Concerning Mark Daetwyler's comment about Russian borrowing many words from French, that was particularly true back when French was "the" international language. (I was always quite annoyed when characters in 19th century novels I was reading for Russian class started speaking French to each other!) As you might suspect there is now heavy borrowing from English. I am surprised, though, at just how much English is being employed in colloquial use on the computer-oriented web forums that I sometimes browse.
What is surprising is that they're using English words not just for the technology, as you'd expect, but are replacing ordinary, every-day Russian words with English equivalents. E.g., I recently came across the sentence "Pokazhite primer pliz kak ego juzat'," which means, "Please show an example of how to use it." What I've transliterated as "pliz" is "please", and "juzat'" is "use" mogrified into a Russian infinitive. In the Russian I learned in high school, those would have been "pozhalujsta" and
The English is certainly easier to type, even in Cyrillic. This phenomenon must be greatly facilitated by the fact that foreign language study is mandatory in Russia, English being far and away the most popular, and the fact that many of these techies probably spend a lot of time with English-language technical material day after day.
As jarring as I find these unexpected English words rendered in Cyrillic, those of us who occasionally read Russian technical material should rejoice that there is no Russian equivalent of the Académie Française -- the word "kompjuter" has been universally adopted in lieu of "electronaja tsifrovnaja vichislitel'naja
From Anson Young:
I share Sally's distress about the vanishing of the past subjunctive, if that's the term, from English. As an example, I heard (or read) that 'if Columbus sailed farther North, he may have landed in Virginia.' (It was a discussion of the problem of measuring longitude.) The change in English has happened so fast that it makes me feel very ancient (I'm in my early sixties.)
I would point out that both French and Spanish have suffered a similar loss. When I studied those languages in the late 1950's and early 1960's, we learned the various subjunctive tenses, but were advised against using most of them in conversation, lest we be thought pretentious.
That's probably true here, too, in spoken language. The
still be used in formal writing, however.
From Rivka Weinberg:
"acetylated spiraeic acid". That's what they used to call what we now
know as "salicylic acid" or aspirin.
Well... actually, it's "acetyl salicylic acid." That is, salicylic acid that has had an acetyl group added.
It's one of the reasons why modern aspirin tablets are safer than chewing willow bark (which contains plain old salicylic acid). The added acetyl group makes the
acid slightly less damaging to the human stomach. (And adds an extra step to the lab I had to do in college! <g>)
Love your columns and emails!
Ack! You are correct! We left off the acetyl group! Thank you, Rivka!
bit that Rivka quoted above (in black) is from last week's e-mail newsletter, in which we provided an etymology
that you won't see here on the website. Well, you'll see the discussion that arises as a result of it here,
at least! Sign up for the e-mail newsletter here and get a NOE
(newsletter-only etymology) in your in-box every week.
From Zayd Abdulla:
*There should be an umlaut over the "a" in "spiraure".
There's also an 's' missing in 'säure'.
Ack part two! You're right. It should be spirsäure!
(And we have trouble getting what Americans consider unusual symbols into our e-mail newsletter, even with MS
Character Map. No problem using them here on the website in HTML.)
From Greg Umberson:
You discussed the origins of aspirin in your last NOE. I thought I would point out that although
aspirin has lost its trademark in the US, it is still a trademark of Bayer in most countries (and should have the ® sign). You only have to cross the border to Canada to find that only Bayer can use
aspirin for acetylsalicylic acid (although there are a lot of 'grey market' goods that make it across from the US). If you're interested, you might check out
www.aspirin.com for a bit of aspirin's history.
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