Amusing etymologies and etymological mysteries

[Ares Land]

The discussion of wrens made me think of something, and I thought we could have a topic for odd, strange or perplexing etymology.

I learned yesterday that the etymology of French escargot 'snail' is fairly unclear.
It's really a borrowing from a dialect of Occitan which had escargol, because, my dictionary tells me, the practice of eating snails originated in Southern France. (It's not clear what Oïl speakers called escargots, but possibly they just called them limaces or limaçons and didn't bother distinguishing them from slugs).

Except the etymology of escargol is unclear. Dictionaries basically give up, but it seems to be from Lat. cochlea, and later influenced by scarabaeus, 'beetle', because both have horns, you see.

The funny thing is, in Picard (the dialect historically spoken in Northern French), it's caracol. This looks a lot like a Spanish borrowing, except why on Earth did they borrow the word from Spanish in the first place?
Well, technically, parts of the Picard-speaking area were in the Spanish Netherlands, but the emphasis is firmly on the 'Netherlands' part. Spanish left no linguistic traces.

Wait, there's more. My grandparents spoke Picard, but a very divergent variety of it(*), and they called a snail un caramuchambole and frankly, if you did that in a conlang, people would just tell you to stop being silly.


(*) Sadly, the dialect is dying out and I don't think it ever was properly recorded or studied, which is a shame. It wasn't mutually intelligible with other varieties of Picard, and in fact it was sharply different from the dialect spoken in the next village over.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, to cite a well-worn platitude.

Not distinguishing snails from slugs, or calling snails something like limaçon à coquille; the word also meaning apparently "spiral staircase", which feels more snail than slug to me, would make both organisms given the same name also sound plausible.

Carcol is also clearly connected with the monster Lou Carcolh, whence the Pokémon Goodra (which is a slug dragon with a curly tail that looks like a snail shell, and is Dragon-type rather than Water, Poison, or Bug, because it is).

Also, all the definitions of check/checque seem to derive from the sense in chess, making them all a doublet of shah, albeit via Latin via Old French.

I initially thought flower/flour was a coincidence, like hour/our (some pronunciations), but no, I later learnt that the flour is parallel to fleur de farine.

Sinitic and Sinoxenic 蜜 (Mandarin mì, whence Japanese mitsu, bitsu) appears to have been borrowed from an Indo-European source, meaning there's a cognate to English "mead" in both Mandarin in Japanese that sounds quite similar to it; Middle Chinese */miɪt̚/, Korean apparently 밀 mil.

[Raphael]

German "Keks" "something a bit like a cracker, but sweet" goes back to a late-19th-century German entrepreneur who manufactured small, hard, sweet bakery products for which he used the English word "cakes". Now, late-19th-century Germans usually knew very little about English phonology, but many of them had heard somewhere that the pronunciation of the letter "a" in English is closer to German "e" than "a"...

[Ares Land]

Also, all the definitions of check/checque seem to derive from the sense in chess, making them all a doublet of shah, albeit via Latin via Old French.

I never would've thought pf that!

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Also, all the definitions of check/checque seem to derive from the sense in chess, making them all a doublet of shah, albeit via Latin via Old French.

I never would've thought pf that!

I'd originally assumed that "check in/check out", "cheque/check" (in banking), and "check (something, for something), were all unrelated forms that happened to have convergent pronunciations. I could see such words descending from a hypothetical Old English ceac, cyc, ceoc (in the sense of "check in, check out" especially), or a dialectal doublet of search (which is what I'd long assumed it was; I could see Old French chercher, cherchier having a dialectal form cherquer, and you can easily lose an "r" somewhere in the Norman Conquest), since "checking" and "searching" for something aren't that different, in some senses; in the banking sense, I was assuming "cheque" was an unrelated French word that sounded coincidentally similar, too.

Language is very odd sometimes.

(I feel as if I might end up being mistaken on this one, but Wiktionary at least doesn't contradict me.)

[Ares Land]

The TLIF (my go-to reference for French etymology) agrees with you. I thought échec 'failure' was a coincidental resemblance, but nope: it's borrowed from chess.

[Vijay]

Also, all the definitions of check/checque seem to derive from the sense in chess, making them all a doublet of shah, albeit via Latin via Old French.

I never would've thought pf that!

Oh, this one doesn't surprise me much. I mean, "give a damn" is folk-etymologized Hindi and ultimately goes back to drachmas.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Also, all the definitions of check/checque seem to derive from the sense in chess, making them all a doublet of shah, albeit via Latin via Old French.

I never would've thought pf that!

Oh, this one doesn't surprise me much. I mean, "give a damn" is folk-etymologized Hindi and ultimately goes back to drachmas.

Wait, what?

[Vijay]

I never would've thought pf that!

Oh, this one doesn't surprise me much. I mean, "give a damn" is folk-etymologized Hindi and ultimately goes back to drachmas.

Wait, what?

When Alexander the Great invaded India, Old Indo-Aryan(?) borrowed drachma as dramma, which became damma in Prakrit and dām in Hindi and a number of other New/Modern Indo-Aryan (NIA) languages. Dām came to refer to a certain kind of coin that was apparently obsolete by the time the British showed up. When it was still in circulation, FWIU, at least in some regions, its value was very low. There was another similarly (worthless-and-then-)obsolete coin called damri. British people in India would often say things like "no, I won't give a damri!" or "I don't care a dām." This last expression was brought back to "less reputable" social circles in Britain according to Hobson-Jobson, and dām was misinterpreted as damn, which in turn gave rise to give a fuck, give a shit, etc. Meanwhile, today, dām just means 'price' in Hindi (and some other NIA languages).

Give a curse has an older and similar though perhaps slightly less interesting/surprising etymology. Chaucer has the expression "ne raught he not a kers" in the Canterbury Tales, which meant 'nor did he care a cress' (a cress being a similarly obsolete unit of currency) but was folk-etymologized as curse.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I'd looked some of that up already, and wonders never cease. I can't find a source on cress being a kind of coin (do you have a citation for it?), I'm used to it either being a plant, Nasturtium officinale (there are some others using this as a common name, too); a Google search of "cress coin" also brings up Cress Albane (a fictitious character, from a game sitting on the table next to me oddly enough). "Kers" seems to be the Dutch name of this plant.

[Vijay]

I can't find a source on cress being a kind of coin (do you have a citation for it?)

Oh, sorry, that was me just confusing things! That's what I thought Hobson-Jobson says. What it actually says is:

Damrī is a common enough expression for the infinitesimal in coin, and one has often heard a Briton in India say: "No, I won't give a dumree!" with but a vague notion of what a damrī meant, as in Scotland we have heard, "I won't give a plack," though certainly the speaker could not have stated the value of that ancient coin. And this leads to the suggestion that a like expression, often heard from coarse talkers in England as well as in India, originated in the latter country, and that whatever profanity there may be in the animus, there is none in the etymology, when such an one blurts out "I don't care a dām!" i.e. in other words, "I don't care a brass farthing!"

If the Gentle Reader deems this a far-fetched suggestion, let us back it by a second. We find in Chaucer (The Miller's Tale):
"—ne raught he not a kers,"
which means, "he recked not a cress" (ne flocci quidem); an expression which is also found in Piers Plowman:
"Wisdom and witte is nowe not worthe a kerse."
And this we doubt not has given rise to that other vulgar expression, "I don't care a curse";—curiously parallel in its corruption to that in illustration of which we quote it.

So I probably confused cress with plack.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Well, cress is a PLANT, so...

Either way, it's more interesting information, so we all win!

[bradrn]

I can’t believe no-one has mentioned musa yet, which is a loan into Latin from Trans-New Guinea, of all things, thus making it possibly the most impressive Wanderwört on Earth. Details here: https://www.academia.edu/25619010/Thing ... into_Latin

[Vijay]

Well, cress is a PLANT, so...

Either way, it's more interesting information, so we all win!

I guess Chaucer basically meant 'he didn't even care as much as he would about this stupid random vegetable/herb'.

[Linguoboy]

Despite the fact that I know Catalan has borrowed heavily from Arabic, I still get surprised by examples sometimes. The other day it was matafaluga which means "anise". Superficially, this fits the pattern of a verb-noun compound like rentaplats "dishwasher" or estellallenya "splitting wedge". Moreover, many common plants have names of this form with a first element mata "it kills", e.g. matallops "aconite", mataaranyes "holly", matajaia "hairy willowherb", etc. and--as this last example shows--these may incorporate obsolete or dialectal nouns. So I just assumed faluga was some dialect term I didn't know.

In fact, the name is a folk etymology of earlier abatafalua from Arabic al-ḥabbat al-ḥulwa "the sweet grain". And though mata "kills" may be involved, an equally likely culprit is mata "bush" (whose origins in turn are somewhat obscure--the leading theory is Late Latin matta "rush mat" [a Semitic borrowing] > "mat of vegetation" > "bush, shrub").

In Spanish, an initial a (representing the prefixed Arabic article) is a common indication that a word may be borrowed from Arabic, but Catalan tended (as in this case) not to adopt the article. This recently faked me out in the case of albelló "drain" which looks 100% Romance but is actually an adaptation of al-ballūʿa "the sewer".

[Vijay]

Jeseri has some weird loanwords from English: [ˈboːʈɯkiɭi] apparently from boat cleavance(???) and [ˈkaːttɯ] from heart. Meanwhile, in Malayalam, while [boːʈ] is common enough that even the 19^th-century poem I've been trying to memorize that uses no other English loanwords repeatedly uses that one, [kiˈɭi] is a native Dravidian word meaning 'bird', and [ˈkaːttɯ] is another native Dravidian word meaning 'wind'.