Al-Andalus (الأَنْدَلُس) was the Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula. The term is used by modern historians for the former Islamic states based in modern Portugal and Spain from 711 AD to 1492 AD.
Much of the Arabic influence upon Spanish came through the various Arabized Romance dialects that were spoken in areas under Moorish rule, known today by scholars as Mozarabic. This resulted in Spanish often having both Arabic and Latin derived words with the same meaning.
Examples of Arabic and Latin derived words in Spanish with the same meaning:
aceituna & oliva (olive),
alacrán & escorpión (scorpion),
jaqueca & migraña (migraine),
alcancía & hucha (piggy bank).
The influence of Arabic is more noticeable in the Spanish dialects from regions with a longer history of Muslim rule than those where it was shorter-lived. For this reason, the dialects of the southern half of the country show a higher degree of preference for Arabisms.
Northern Spanish dialects tend to prefer Romance synonyms to terms of Arabic origin. Because Canarian and all Hispanic American dialects are mainly derived from Southern Castilian, Spanish words of Arabic origin are common in most varieties of Modern Spanish.
The Emirate of Sicily (إِمَارَة صِقِلِّيَة) was an Islamic kingdom that ruled the island of Sicily from 831 to 1091. Its capital was Palermo (Bal'harm), which during this period became a major cultural and political center of the Muslim world.
More Spanish words that come from Arabic:
azul (lāzaward, ultimately from Sanskrit)
café (qahwa)
pantalones (bantalon)
camisa (kamis)
alacrán (aqrab)
barrio (barri, from Andalusian Arabic)
cúrcuma (curcum)
jarra (ǧarrah)
fulano (fulan)
rincón (rukn)
almohada (al-makhada)
TheMozarabic/Andalusi Romance language… this is so cool.
Arabic-influenced Romance dialects spoken in the Muslim-controlled areas of Iberia, known as Al-Andalus. It was spoken until around the 13th century when it was displaced, mostly by Spanish, which adopted a lot from it.
Mozarabic vs Spanish:
Mozarabic:
Mío sidi Ibrahim,
ya wemne dolche!
vente mib
de nohte.
non, si non quieres,
iréyme tib:
garreme a ob
legarte
Spanish:
Mi señor Ibrahim,
¡Oh tú, hombre dulce!
Ven a mí
de noche.
Si no, si no quieres,
yo me iré contigo,
dime dónde
encontrarte
“Inshallah” & “Mashallah” around the world & words descended from these terms:
Arabic: إِنْ شَاءَ ٱللَّٰهُ (In sha'Allah)
Spanish: Ojalá
Asturleonese & Galician: Oxalá/Ogallá
Portuguese: Oxalá
Maltese: jekk Alla jrid
Persian/Farsi: انشاءالله
Costa Rican Spanish: Machalá
Cypriot Greek: ίσσαλα (ishalla)
1. “In sha'Allah” or “Inshallah” an Arabic language expression meaning “if God wills” or “God willing”.
2. In Cypriot Greek the word ίσσαλα,ishallais used with the meaning “hopefully”.
3. The word “oxalá” in Asturleonese, Galician, & Portuguese; also present in Spanish as “ojalá” all come from the Arabic لو شاء الله law šā’ l-lāh. It means “we hope” or “I hope”.
4. A similar expression exists in Maltese:jekk Alla jrid (if God wills it). Maltese is descended from Siculo-Arabic, the Arabic dialect that developed in Sicily and later in Malta between the end of the 9th century and the end of the 12th century.
5. The word “Machalá” descended from the Arabic “Mashallah” is used in Costa Rican Spanish.
In Costa Rica, it means the opposite of “ojalá”, so it means “I hope not” instead of hopefully.
You can say something like:
“Machalá,machalá, toco madera"
in order to keep bad luck away.
End of thread:
I hope you enjoyed and learned something neat about these languages
Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate, sīc. That shows that the i is long, so it’s pronounced like “seek” and not like “sick.”
You might recognize this word from Latin sayings like “sic semper tyrannis” or “sic transit gloria mundi.” You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someone’s mistakes when you’re quoting them: “Then he texted me, ‘I want to touch you’re (sic) butt.’”
It means, “thus,” which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning “in this way,” or “just like that.” As in, “just like that, to all tyrants, forever,” an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg. “Everyone should do it this way.”
Anyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes.
Ego: Num edisti totam pitam?
Tu, pudendus: Sic.
Me: Did you eat all the pizza?
You, shameful: That’s the way it is./Yes.
This was pretty well established by the time Latin evolved into its various bastard children, the Romance languages, and you can see this by the words for yes in these languages.
In Spanish, Italian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Galician, Friulian, and others, you say si for yes. In Portugese, you say sim. In French, you say si to mean yes when you’re contradicting a negative assertion (”You don’t like donkey sausage like all of us, the inhabitants of France, eat all the time?” “Yes, I do!”). In Romanian, you say da, but that’s because they’re on some Slavic shit. P.S. there are possibly more Romance languages than you’re aware of.
But:
There was still influence in some areas by the conquered Gaulish tribes on the language of their conquerors. We don’t really have anything of Gaulish language left, but we can reverse engineer some things from their descendants. You see, the Celts that we think of now as the people of the British Isles were Gaulish, originally (in the sense that anyone’s originally from anywhere, I guess) from central and western Europe. So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tó to mean yes, or Welsh, where they say do to mean yes or indeed, and we can see that they derive from the Proto-Indo-European (the big mother language at whose teat very many languages both modern and ancient did suckle) word *tod, meaning “this” or “that.” (The asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word and we don’t know exactly what it would have been but we have a pretty damn good idea.)
So if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like, “Yo, did you eat all the pizza?” you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say, “This.” Then you would have him surrounded and killed.
Apparently Latin(ish) speakers in the area thought this was a very dope way of expressing themselves. “Why should I say ‘in that way’ like those idiots in Italy and Spain when I could say ‘this’ like all these cool mustache boys in Gaul?” So they started copying the expression, but in their own language. (That’s called a calque, by the way. When you borrow an expression from another language but translate it into your own. If you care about that kind of shit.)
The Latin word for “this” is “hoc,” so a bunch of people started saying “hoc” to mean yes. In the southern parts of what was once Gaul, “hoc” makes the relatively minor adjustment to òc, while in the more northerly areas they think, “Hmm, just saying ‘this’ isn’t cool enough. What if we said ‘this that’ to mean ‘yes.’” (This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already.)
So they combined hoc with ille, which means “that” (but also comes to just mean “he”: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on) to make o-il, which becomes oïl. This difference between the north and south (i.e. saying oc or oil) comes to be so emblematic of the differences between the two languages/dialects that the languages from the north are called langues d’oil and the ones from the south are called langues d’oc. In fact, the latter language is now officially called “Occitan,” which is a made-up word (to a slightly greater degree than that to which all words are made-up words) that basically means “Oc-ish.” They speak Occitan in southern France and Catalonia and Monaco and some other places.
The oil languages include a pretty beefy number of languages and dialects with some pretty amazing names like Walloon, and also one with a much more basic name: French. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, n'est-ce pas?
Yeah, eventually Francophones drop the -l from oil and start saying it as oui. If you’ve ever wondered why French yes is different from other Romance yeses, well, now you know.
I guess what I’m getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with “this,” or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying “Yeah, that”: you’re not new
this is all amazing, but I’m now waiting for people to start reblogging posts with the additional comment “SIC”.
Elves are fun because there are so many vastly different interpretations. Everything from Santa’s toymakers to Elrond and his court qualify into our concept of elven forms.
Generally speaking, we might define elfas being a “spirit, sprite, fairy or goblin; some kind of usually mischievous supernatural creature.” This same definition existed for the Middle English term elf,alternately recorded as alfeorelfe.In Old English, the word was ælf,still retaining its meaning of “sprite, incubus or fairy,” but specifically with a masculine connotation. The feminine version of the word was ælfen, which interestingly is the predecessor to our modern adjectival form elven.
The word branches out of the Germanic family, and we can point to some other connected words in Old High German, like alp which meant “nightmare.” There is actually an Old English cognate which is ælfádl, also meaning “nightmare,” but more literally, “elf-disease.” Another interesting elf-induced sickness was though to be hiccups, which is reflected in the OE translation ælfsogoða.
Beyond this era of the Old English and German there is some debate about where the words originally sprouted from. The trail may be related to albusoralphoúsἀλφούς, the Latin and Ancient Greek terms for “white” respectively. The cultural theory implies that elves were considered beings of light, brightness and beauty, and thus as this concept evolved from those ideas, so did the English form out of the adjectives.
I think Calvert Watkins maybe specifically theorised that it came down to the Germanic languages from Proto-Indo-European *albho- (white), rather than being borrowed from a sister language family.
Still not sure how well this light/brightness/beauty theory plays with svartálfar and all the hostile qualities of elves, though. That makes me a little hesitant, idk
I’m actually soing my thesis on elves!
Re: origins, the most accepted theory is the one with *albho- for brightness. There’s another hypothesis (actually the only theory cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, even though it’s more of a stretch) that links them to Vedic deities through the word *rbhu (with a sonant r, but I’m typing from a phone). See Kazanas for a paper on the subject, I believe it was called Indo-european deities and the Rg Veda.
As for svartalfar and such: kee in mind that the main source of that classification is Snorri Sturluson, who was writing from a Christian perspective and trying to make elves more similar to angels and devils. There is no mention of dark elves in earlier Scandinavian sources.
Most early Scandinavian evidence points to elves being seen as minor deities, possibly linked to fertility and prosperity. They received some sort of sacrifice (not much detail on this in Skaldic poetry, but an “alfablót” is mentioned once and Kormaks saga talks about pouring bull’s blood on a mound where elves live) AND were linked to the sun through the poetic metaphor alfrodhull (literally “elf’s wheel” or “elf’s glory”, meaning sun. Again, missing accents here, sorry). Human warriors and kings were also described as metaphorical elves in poetry, most notably Norwegian king Olafr Geirstadhalfr “the Elf of Geirstadhir”, named after his burial site, who was also sacrificed to in order to secure prosperity.
Also, the meaning of alfr (the Old Norse elf) is a lot less clear than it looks. It was probably not a “race” of beings as we might conceptualise today. More likely it had a range of meanings, possibly as wide as “any being capable of giving supernatural blessings” or at least “any semi-divine creature”. Medievam folk did not have a concept of taxonomy and as such did not classify things the way we do.
In the elder Edda, elves are routinely paired with the Aesir in poetic formulae, possibly with the meaning of “all divine creatures, from gods to elves”. In at least a few songs (esp. Lokasenna) they seem to be synonymous with the Vanir (Freya is said to have slept with “all Aesir and elves”, which Loki says is incest, apparently because she’s an elf and her brother is too?). Freyr especially is linked to the elves through Alfheimr, the elf-realm which he is said to have been gifted with. This association is however not present in other songs, where vanir and elves are mentioned side by side as though they were different groups (see for instance Skirnismal and Alvissmal).
The only elf character in the Edda may be Volundr, who is said to be alfa ljodhi (ambiguous, possibly “of the elf-people”) and visi alfa (leader of the elves)in Volundarkvida. This is weird because Volundr is a very popular character with equivalents in Anglo-Saxon Weyland and German Wieland, but this is the only source calling him an elf. Here the term may have been a way to classify him as an ethnic Other (being a Sami prince) and carries implications of dangerous beauty. There’s a very good paper on him, called The extreme emotional life of Volundr the Elf.
The earliest of these sources date back to the Ninth century. Note that nowhere are elves described as being specifically diminutive in size, invisible or whatever. That is likely the product of later shifts in meaning or belief, possibly linked to Christianization and merging with other supernatural beings, such as dwarves (as in the aforementioned svartalfar, which are described as being black as coal and are also apparently dwarves, at least according to Snorri), and landvaettir (nature spirits). Terry Gunnell has done a lot of work on this, check out How Elvish were the Alfar? (2007).
Anoyher good source is the work of Alaric Hall, esp. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (2007). The book focuses on old english but also goes over Scandinavian evidence.
Might share more sources later once I get to my computer if anyone is interested.
Oh my gosh, please please please share sources! I got so excited over this that it literally raised my heart rate. Thank you for sharing all this knowledge!
The tags warm my heart. Thank you for giving me an excuse to write up my bibliography for this chapter, which I was neglecting to do.
So! Be warned, these are all academic studies so they can be a bit dry to sift through if you’re not familiar with the topics discussed.
Books to check out:
R. Simek, 1993. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. (pages 73-74 are about Elves but this is generally a great source to look things up and get a broad overview).
T.A. Shippey et al. The Shadow-Walkers. Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous. (a collection of essays about re-examining Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology, which was a foundational work for modern mythography. The introduction is great to understand why early philological efforts relied on biased assumptions, and the essay about elves, also by Shippey, looks at English and Scandinavian folklore as seen through a Christian light).
A. Hall. 2007. Elves in Anglo-Saxon England. (As I mentioned above, a very in-depth look at the meaning shift of the Elf-word in English. The book is an update and expansion of Hall’s PhD dissertation, which is free online if you can’t find the published version.)
Papers and articles (links are all open access, except maybe the one to JSTOR, but I can access it with a student account ay my uni):
On the alternate etymology of “elf”, ṛbhu: N.D. Kazanas. 2001. Indo-European deities and the Rgveda. Journal of IndoEuropean Studies. (x)
On the shifts in meaning of “alfar” in Norse folklore: T. Gunnell, 2007. How Elvish were the Álfar? in A. Wawn et al., Constructing Nations, Reconstructing Myth. Essays in Honour of T.A. Shippey. (No link, but I mailed Dr. Gunnell and he was very happy to share the material with me. Here’s his website with all his articles)
On Volundr and elves in the Edda in general: Á. Jakobsson. 2006. The Extreme Emotional Life of Vǫlundr the Elf. Scandinavian Studies.(x)
On why it’s a bad idea to categorise medieval supernatural creatures with modern taxonomy: Á. Jakobsson. 2013. The Taxonomy of the Non-existent: Some Medieval Icelandic Concepts of the Paranormal (x)
Go forth and read about elves!
This is incredible, thank you so much!
Oh my goodness, I love you all so so incredibly much, this is so amazing and absolutely fascinating!!!!
Elves are fun because there are so many vastly different interpretations. Everything from Santa’s toymakers to Elrond and his court qualify into our concept of elven forms.
Generally speaking, we might define elfas being a “spirit, sprite, fairy or goblin; some kind of usually mischievous supernatural creature.” This same definition existed for the Middle English term elf,alternately recorded as alfeorelfe.In Old English, the word was ælf,still retaining its meaning of “sprite, incubus or fairy,” but specifically with a masculine connotation. The feminine version of the word was ælfen, which interestingly is the predecessor to our modern adjectival form elven.
The word branches out of the Germanic family, and we can point to some other connected words in Old High German, like alp which meant “nightmare.” There is actually an Old English cognate which is ælfádl, also meaning “nightmare,” but more literally, “elf-disease.” Another interesting elf-induced sickness was though to be hiccups, which is reflected in the OE translation ælfsogoða.
Beyond this era of the Old English and German there is some debate about where the words originally sprouted from. The trail may be related to albusoralphoúsἀλφούς, the Latin and Ancient Greek terms for “white” respectively. The cultural theory implies that elves were considered beings of light, brightness and beauty, and thus as this concept evolved from those ideas, so did the English form out of the adjectives.
Somethingromanticis “marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized,” noted “by expressions of love or affection,” or else is possibly “impractical in conception and plan.” I still somehow find even the less “charming” definitions to be oddly “adventurous;” it reminds me of Bilbo setting off on a grand, romantic adventure with little preparation or readiness for what he was about to find out across the mountains.
The English is a cognate to the French romantique,and although there is some debate about which of the modern variants came first, the Middle English rommantdefinitely came from the Old French romaunt.
Interestingly, a less evolved linguistic descendent is still present in English as romaunt,which is an archaic term meaning “a romantic story told in verse,” or more simply, “a romance.” The Old French romanzis at the root of these words, referring to “stories, songs” and the Old French language itself, which at that time was an emerging variety of the Latin spoken in the region. This makes it even easier to tie the French to the Latin romanus,meaning “Roman” more broadly.
This word is actually very funny to me, because it did not remotely go where I expected.
The word this week is mizzle, which is a rather lovely way of describing a light, drizzly rainfall. This comes from the Middle English misellen, of the same meaning, “to rain gently.” The question of borrowing is a little fuzzy, but it likely was adopted from either an Old Dutch or Low German variation, both meaning something more akin to “mist.” At this point, though, any inquiry further back relates to words meaning “urine, or to urinate.” This root exists in a lot of Germanic languages, and they are likely additionally connected to the Latin mēiō, which means, quoted from the 1890 Charlton T Lewis, An Elementary Latin Dictionary entry: “to make water.”
Part two of random dinosaur names I’m not sure why I know, but I do? Titanophoneusis a mouthful, but it very specifically means “giant murderer…”
So, in the first half of this compound we have titan,which in our modern English means “large, grand,” but with the connotation of “something or someone gigantic in power or size, greatness of achievement.” This is from the Ancient Greek Τιτάν titan,which refers to the race of mythical, pre-Olympian giants. There is no real consensus I could find on pre-Greek roots for the word, but some possible origins include Ancient Greek τίτο tito,meaning “sun, day,” τίσις tisis “retribution,” or the Ionic Greek τίτης títēs, “avenger, punisher.”
In the second half we have phoneus,from the Greek φονεύς phoneus which is literally just “murderer.” This is a derivative of the term θείνω theínō, “to strike or wound,” itself from the PIE root gʷhen, “to hit.”
What makes this whole thing funny is that apparently when the fossils of titanophoneusare compared with other dinosaurs, they were not exactly the biggest or fiercest which have been discovered. Tyrannasaurus Rex fossils are supposedly much more intimidating, though admittedly these and other competitors for scariest dino lived at different periods. Still, I like the fact that an archaeologist felt the need to spice up their findings by describing some bones as belonging to a “giant murderer,” like they’d uncovered an ancient crime scene, but it was just a fairly average dinosaur trying to make its way in the world.
Ferrets are very cute. This is a scientific fact. They are a long, furry, domesticated subtype of the European polecat. They have a look on their face like they are ever so slightly irritated at having been recently woke up, and I love them very dearly.
Anyways, the Middle English feret (also documented as fyrette), was borrowed from the Old French firet, which is a derivative of the Latin fūr,meaning “thief.” This is also a cognate to the Ancient Greek φώρ phṓr,also “thief.”
What I find fun about the Ancient Greek, is that it also can be used to refer to a bee, specifically a “robber bee.” I absolutely love the fact that both the Latin and Greek chose to refer to tiny animals as being the perpetrators of some thievery, namely that they “carry things away,” from the Proto-Indo-European bher- meaning “carry.”
I also particularly enjoy the fact that this Latin also gave us furtive, “done in a sneaking, secretive way,”more specifically from fūrtīvus,“stolen.”
I found this word in a YA fantasy book I was reading recently (because… yeah), and it took me a bit by surprise; it sounded a little out of place. So, I thought I’d find out what place it occupies exactly and tell you all about it.
Copseis actually a contraction of an older word coppice, meaning “a thicket of small trees or shrubs,” which emerged probably in the late 1500s. The English is a borrowing from the French copeiz, which has the same definition, but an additional connotation of “an overcut forest,” relating to a commercial, farming idea. This is present in some readings of the English.
Admittedly I had some trouble tracking down the Old French version, and there were hints of it existing as possibly copeiz,coupizin the 1770s, and either couppeizorcopeisin some other places.
Nevertheless, the French was the bridge between the modern English and it’s Latin predecessor, colaphus, a noun meaning a “blow or cuff, perhaps a smack on the ear.” Although the “forest” meaning is lost here, this is where we can pick up the submeaning of “cutting down trees” which died out as the word evolved. This particular Latin word is also related to others in the language meaning “cutting,” or “being cut,” a nod to the Ancient Greek cognate κόλαφος kolaphos, which is “a blow or buffet.”
Syzygy is a funky looking word for sure, but I quite like it. There are a lot of definitions for it depending on what sort of academic interests you have, ranging from mathematics and science to philosophy and psychology, but the thing they typically have in common is a pairing of opposites of some kind. The traditional definition comes from astronomy, where it refers to three celestial bodies aligning into a straight line. In our solar system, we might observe this during either a solar or lunar eclipse, where the three bodies in question are the earth, sun and moon.
The word is likely an English adoption from about 1847, coming through Latin from the Greek term συζυγία suzugia, or “paired, yoked together, union.” This is a form of the noun σύζυγος suzugos which is defined with “yokefellow” (an interesting word by itself) and “spouse, couple (as in married pair as a couple)."
The credited Proto-Indo-European root is yewgori̯eu alternately, both meaning "to tie together or yoke." One source I looked at remarked upon this being similar to a few other roots including "to keep separate” and “right or justice,” both of which are interesting to think about.
This has always been one of my favorite words in Spanish; sonrisa, meaning “smile.” I particularly liked it because it reminded me of the English word sunrise, purely I think due to the phonetic similarities but the analogy was still very nice: a smile like a sunrise, which lights up a face in the way the sun lends light to the horizon.
The Spanish is actually a derivation of the Latin term subrisa, a conjugation of the word subrideo. This comes from two parts, the first being sub, or “under,” and the second being rideo, which is “to laugh.” The verb encompasses both the nicer meanings of “a happy chuckle,” and the more perjorative “ridicule or mock.”
Interestingly, the Latin rideois also the root for another Spanish word, reír, meaning “to laugh.” Thus, although risaandreírare not quite the same words in Spanish, they come from the same place in Latin.
Apparently this is a more dialectally isolated term, but in some dialects of Scottish English (among others), this means “a song or poem, a strain of a song or a repeated verse,” which I quite like.
Anyways, there is an Old English term for “poems or song” which is alternately recorded as either leoþorléoð.Within the language at that point, there were several nice compounds such as léoðcræft,“poetry, the craft of song” andléoðorún“wise counsel or advice sent through song or poems” (which was apparently a thing they needed a word for?)
This is most often attributed to the PIE root leu-, an onomatopoeic root for expressives and interjections. Interestingly, this is also the base for the Latin term laudāre, which through a separate linguistic thread gives us the modern English term laud, “praise, glory, reknown, etc.”
I’m not a dinosaur person, but for some reason I know a lot about etymologies of dinosaur names. I don’t really know how this happened, but I like sharing tidbits of it whenever it comes up. Regardless, one I find particularly interesting, is brontosaurus, which comes from the Ancient Greek βροντή bronte, meaning “thunder.” It’s other related words have additional senses of “shouting, rumbling.” So basically, a brontosaurusis really just a thunder lizard.
I looked this word up a few years ago to use in an essay, and it has since become one of my favorite words. It has a lovely meaning (”to improve, perfect or enhance”), and it just feels nice to say.
It arrived in English around the 1650s as a backformation of the French améliorer, from the Old French meillor, which you might recognize as being related to the modern French meilleur “better.”
The Latin root melior,of the same meaning, was influenced by the Ancient Greek term μάλα mala, a term imparting an adverbial meaning of “very much, exceedingly.” Ultimately, it likely came from the reconstructed PIE mel-, “big and strong.”
I absolutely never noticed this, but now that I’ve seen it, I cannot believe it never occurred to me. Dandelion, the flower of my childhood, is a borrowing from the French name dent de lion, which is literally “lion’s teeth.”
I think this is the most adorable thing and I love it very much.
The French came through the Middle English, spelled alternately as dantdelyonordendelyoun.This phrase has also popped up in related languages, such as the Welsh dant y llew, and the Spanish diente de léon.
At the very base of it is the Latin dens leonis, which translates pretty much the same as its linguistic descendants.
Interestingly, in looking around some dictionaries, I found this entry from an anthology of plants written in 1578:
The great Groundlwel, hath rough whitish leaves, deeply jagged and knawen upo both sides, like to the leaves of the white Mustard or lenuie. The stalke is two foote high or more: at the top where-of growe smal knoppes, which do open into smal yellow flowers the which are lodenly gone, changed into downie blowbawles like to the heades of Dantdelyon, and are blowen away with the winde.
I’m not sure I transcribed that right, but I really like the last bit: “changed into downie blowbawles like to the heades of Dantdelyon, and are blowen away with the winde.”
Before I explain some of the really cool history of this word, I’ll divvy it up into its etymological parts:
Firstly,disasteras a whole was borrowed from the Italian diasastro,a compound of two halves: the prefix diswhich is similar to its English cognate and simply means “not, undo, against,” while astromeans “star,” from the Latin astrumof the same meaning. The Greek basis for the Latin, ᾰ̓́στρον astron,had a broader definition coming from the synonymous ᾰ̓στήρ aster,and could refer to the stars or planets, constellations, the sun and celestial bodies more generally.
ᾰ̓στήρ is also interesting because it is also noted as being able to mean “songbirds, starfish, flame or light, honorable persons” and possibly “blue daisies.”
At the root of all this is the Proto-Indo-European reconstructed root for star, ster, which is also connected to the Greek term for “lightning.”
Hopefully with this background, the semantics might make a little more sense. Although we tend to use the modern dictionary definition, which is “a sudden calamity or misfortune,” the older sense the word is derived from is “an unfavorable aspect of the planets or stars” in the astrological sense. Before the advent of astronomy as a science, the purpose of the practice of astrology was more so focused on looking for guidance and predictions regarding human life and activities. If the stars appeared to point to a negative outcome, it could be called a disaster, a dis- (negative, poor, undone) aster(position of the stars).
We also have a few other English and Latin terms which pull on these same ideas, but appeared through other layers of morphological construction. Namely, we have “lucky star,” “ill-starred,” and “star-crossed” as well as “astrum sinistrum,” which literally means “unfortunate star or misfortune.”
Old English term for the week: bócastréon,meaning “library, a place for books.”
Bócais a form of the Old English for “book,” and it actually combines into a lot of other interesting compounds which I really like (I did an old post a while ago on bóccræft, “literature, science or learning”).
Streónmeant “wealth, accumulation, treasure,” and the like, making for the entire word to imply a “treasured trove of books.”
“Library” could also be referred to by the word bocchord, which I think is equally cute: hordis whence comes our modern English hoard,which makes a library sound like a dragon’s treasure, hidden under some misty mountains on the other side of the world.
This is an interesting doublet because it is a great example of how English absorbs all sorts of lexical items from other languages even when it basically already has one in the same color. Also, it’s been barely a week and I miss Halloween.
Spirit: “The soul of a person or another creature.” We can trace this back to the Middle English spirit, of several different additional meanings, including “vital breath, animation, divine, indescribable, immaterial creature.” English borrowed this from the Old French espirit,from the Latin spiritus.This Latin term was a derivative of another Latin word, spiro,meaning “I breathe, respire, live or blow.”
Ultimately, the word is probably from the Proto-Indo-European root peisorspeis, “to blow.”
Ghost: “The spirit, soul or animation of a man, the shadowy mirror image.” The modern English evolved from the Old English term gast, “breath, good or bad spirits, angels, demons.” Interestingly, in older translations of the Bible, since the English language had yet to adopt the Latin derived term spirit,any instances of spiritus were translated asgast,which is why most old Christian writing uses Holy Ghost.
The Old English also has an additional meaning branch as well, which is “afraid, terrified,” related to the verb gaestan, “to frighten, afflict or torment.” We likely pulled this through Proto-Germanic from the Proto-Indo-European term gheis,meaning “shocked, agitated.”
Spiritand ghostare now somewhat interchangeable, and we usually use them to refer to both the “souls of the deceased,” and “supernatural creatures.” I also find other languages’ ways of describing souls or spirits interesting: French revenant(literally “returning (from another world)”), Old English scinn(related to scinan, “to shine, illuminate”), Greek φάντασμα phantasma,(related to words for “light, sight, vision”), and French spectre (from the Latin spectrum,which is related to other Latin terms for “to see, appearance”).
I am the first to admit I know next to nothing about German, but I keep stumbling into fascinating words and etymologies within it. Hence, this post for waldeinsamkeit,a German word meaning “woodland solitude, the feeling of being alone in a forest.”
Waldeinsamkeitis primarily a compound of two halves, being waldandeinsamkeit. Wald comes from the Old High German wald,which is related to the Old English weald,both meaning “a forest, wood, grove, foliage.” Ultimately, possible from a Proto-Indo-European root u̯el,being “wool, grass, forest.”
Einsamkeitis broadly translated as “loneliness, solitude,” but it can be broken into three smaller chunks:
Ein: meaning one.
Sam: a suffix which is added to other lexical items to create adjectives, describing something as being of the quality of the attached word. In this case, creating the word “lonely, lone, solitary, single” out of its attachment to the word one, having the sense of “oneness, being of one.”
Keit: an alternative form of the suffix -heit, which makes an adjective into a noun or a concrete noun into an abstract one, thus transforming our previous word of “lonely,” into “loneliness.” “Solitary,” into “solitude.” You can see it is similar to the English suffix -hood, we create childhoodthe same way German uses it to create Kindheit.
Vespertineis a beautiful word meaning “of or related to the evening.” It is an old word, from the Middle English vespertyne,which is “belonging to evening, evening dew.”
The Latin form from whence the English comes, was vespertinus,meaning strictly “evening.” This is an adjective version of the noun vesper,which was used to either describe “evening” or “the evening star,” an entity we now recognize as the planet Venus. The Latin was a cognate to the Ancient Greek ἕσπερος hesperos,of the same definition, which is visually a little closer to the Indo-European root, u̯esperos, “evening.”
Interestingly,vesperwas also adopted into English apart from it’s descriptive form, and has been used to refer to the “evening star” as well as “church services held during the evening.”
