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Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Tue Aug 02, 2022 7:43 am
by Ares Land
It's really interesting to see this unfold.
Navette as 'travelling back and forth' is apparently attested in French before English (according to the TLF and the OED), so who knows where this originated.
I'm sure some uses (navette = airport shuttle) are calqued from English though.
Of course navette spatiale is a calque of Space Shuttle. But it's a suprisingly apt calque, because navette is, etymologically, a 'small ship.'

The use of grue and crane for both the bird and the lifting tool are apparently calqued on Dutch kraan. But Ancient Greek γέρᾰνος already had both meanings, so that might be the ultimate origin. (All of these are cognate, besides. You'd never think of doing something like this in a conlang.)

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2022 4:25 pm
by Linguoboy
Can our Nordic-speakers confirm that pride in their respective languages refers specifically to LGBTQ pride?

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Fri Aug 05, 2022 2:48 pm
by Qwynegold
Linguoboy wrote: Thu Aug 04, 2022 4:25 pm Can our Nordic-speakers confirm that pride in their respective languages refers specifically to LGBTQ pride?
You mean the English word pride? Yes for Swedish.

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2022 2:05 pm
by Raphael
To some extent, that seems to be true in German, too. Although in Germany it seems more common to talk about the Christopher Street Day (using the English term) than about pride marches.

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Wed Dec 14, 2022 9:43 pm
by Kuchigakatai
Talskubilos wrote: Thu Feb 18, 2021 12:47 pm
Kuchigakatai wrote: Wed Feb 10, 2021 9:52 amHell, even for words coming from Latin, their etymologies are largely useless. Don't you love, too, all those words that just say "De orig. inc.", when Coromines & Pascual may even simply entertain two etyma from Latin?
Anoher Spanish etymologist was Vicente García de Diego (1878-1978), whose work is less known than Coromines', although it inspired some of the DRAE etymologies, as he was a member of the RAE. For example, he was right in deriving Spanish colcha 'quilt' from Latin culcita 'matress, cushion', although not as a native word but a loanword from a Mozarabic dialect (e.g. corcho 'cork' from a masculine variant of Latin cortice(m) 'bark'). From this source it also comes Old French colte (modern coutil) 'feather bed', coilte 'printed duvet', in turn borrowed into English quilt.

However, Coromines thought the source was Old French colche (modern couche) 'bed; layer', a deverbal noun from colchier (modern coucher) 'to lay', ultimately from Latin collocāre 'to set'. Pretty bad. :(
I came across the following comment on García de Diego's dictionary.
David Pharies wrote:García de Diego had a long and distinguished career as a linguist, publishing works in such fields as dialectology, Spanish and Latin grammar, Spanish literature, and etymology. He was elected to the Real Academia in 1926, and was a member until his death in 1978.

[...]

Despite the experience and status of García de Diego and the advantageous structure of the DEEH, the work has not enjoyed a great amount of success. A search of the Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico in Google Scholar, for example, returns 297 hits, while a search of “Diccionario crítico etimológico,” which captures both editions of Corominas’ work, returns 4080 hits. The relative obscurity of the DEEH is undoubtedly due in part to the existence of Corominas’ immeasurably more voluminous and more philologically complete dictionary, but there is a more compelling explanation. The DEEH frequently champions etymological equations that can only be described as bizarre, as illustrated by items in our test sequence, cf. bellaco (attributed to Lat. viˉlis ‘contemptible’), chanada ‘trick, fraud’ (< Lat. insānus ‘demented’), chatarra ‘scrap metal’ (< Lat. jactus ‘thrown’), chivo ‘kid’ (< Lat. obsipāre, defined as ‘to separate livestock’), entresijo ‘fatty layer on the front of the abdomen’ (< Lat. *introssiculus < introrsus ‘inwards’), and escamocho ‘meat scraps’ (< Lat. caput mutilāre, defined as ‘to prune’). Clearly, García de Diego’s etymological style mirrors that of Harri Meier (a style called “aberrant” by Malkiel in a 1986 essay in this journal), in that he feels a compunction to find Latin etyma for words that are more likely to be borrowings (chatarra and bellaco are of probable Basque origin) or products of word formation (entresijo is probably a Latin derivative comprising the prefix trans- ‘between’ and the noun ilia ‘side of the body’, cf. Sp. trasijar ‘to gird one’s abdomen’). My impression of the DEEH, in over thirty years of looking up Spanish etymologies, is that it almost always disappoints.
Source: Pharies, David. 2014. "Is There a Need for a New Etymological Dictionary of Spanish?". Romance Philology, vol. 68 (Fall 2014), pp. 369–84. DOI 10.1484/J.RPH.5.107642

Perhaps the relative obscurity of García de Diego's dictionary is kind of deserved.

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Thu Dec 15, 2022 3:52 am
by hwhatting
Those etymologies look really bizarre - like the kind of stuff they did before comparative linguistics were founded in the late 18th / early 19th century.

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Fri Jan 06, 2023 3:25 pm
by Ryusenshi
This isn't really more specific, but it's still weird.

In French, the word charleston, or charley for short, is used to mean "hi-hat cymbals". Apparently the hi-hat was first popularized by drummers playing Charleston dance music.

Re: Loan words with more specific meanings after than before the borrowing

Posted: Fri Mar 03, 2023 2:41 am
by Talskubilos
Kuchigakatai wrote: Wed Dec 14, 2022 9:43 pm I came across the following comment on García de Diego's dictionary.
David Pharies wrote:García de Diego had a long and distinguished career as a linguist, publishing works in such fields as dialectology, Spanish and Latin grammar, Spanish literature, and etymology. He was elected to the Real Academia in 1926, and was a member until his death in 1978.

[...]

Despite the experience and status of García de Diego and the advantageous structure of the DEEH, the work has not enjoyed a great amount of success. A search of the Diccionario etimológico español e hispánico in Google Scholar, for example, returns 297 hits, while a search of “Diccionario crítico etimológico,” which captures both editions of Corominas’ work, returns 4080 hits. The relative obscurity of the DEEH is undoubtedly due in part to the existence of Corominas’ immeasurably more voluminous and more philologically complete dictionary, but there is a more compelling explanation. The DEEH frequently champions etymological equations that can only be described as bizarre, as illustrated by items in our test sequence, cf. bellaco (attributed to Lat. viˉlis ‘contemptible’), chanada ‘trick, fraud’ (< Lat. insānus ‘demented’), chatarra ‘scrap metal’ (< Lat. jactus ‘thrown’), chivo ‘kid’ (< Lat. obsipāre, defined as ‘to separate livestock’), entresijo ‘fatty layer on the front of the abdomen’ (< Lat. *introssiculus < introrsus ‘inwards’), and escamocho ‘meat scraps’ (< Lat. caput mutilāre, defined as ‘to prune’). Clearly, García de Diego’s etymological style mirrors that of Harri Meier (a style called “aberrant” by Malkiel in a 1986 essay in this journal), in that he feels a compunction to find Latin etyma for words that are more likely to be borrowings (chatarra and bellaco are of probable Basque origin) or products of word formation (entresijo is probably a Latin derivative comprising the prefix trans- ‘between’ and the noun ilia ‘side of the body’, cf. Sp. trasijar ‘to gird one’s abdomen’). My impression of the DEEH, in over thirty years of looking up Spanish etymologies, is that it almost always disappoints.
Source: Pharies, David. 2014. "Is There a Need for a New Etymological Dictionary of Spanish?". Romance Philology, vol. 68 (Fall 2014), pp. 369–84. DOI 10.1484/J.RPH.5.107642

Perhaps the relative obscurity of García de Diego's dictionary is kind of deserved.
Sorry, I've been out of business lately. :?

I'd say García de Diego was more of a Latinist than Coromines, because he devised Latin etymologies, even convoluted ones, to explain non-Latin loanwords. But Coromines invented many etymologies himself, often recurring to onomatopoeias, as e.g. Spanish perro 'dog'.