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June 1st, 2008
April 6th, 2008
08:15 pm - Tiny things that bother me #23532
Part of me really wishes that the naming of the tracks on Laibach's Volk had been more consistent. Track 2 is titled America, but to be consistent with Germania, Anglia and Francia, it probably should have been titled Columbia. I can see that that may cause problems of confusion with the South American nation of Colombia, which is a shame, because now it's inconsistent. Similarly, Italia arguably should have been called Romania, but Romania is, of course, a completely different country in modernity.
Speaking of country names, for a long time I've wondered whether the Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba, was related to Albania. This is apparently unclear, although Scotland was called Albania in the High Medieval period. I do also know that the ancient name for the Alps was Albia. This, apparently, is related to the name of Albania.
There are conflicting views about this relationship. Etymonline says that the romantic name for England 'Albion' is:- sometimes said to be from the non-I.E. base *alb "mountain," which may have produced L. Alpes "Alps" and Alba, an Ir. name for "Scotland." But more likely from L. albus "white", which would be an apt description of the chalk cliffs of the island's southern coast. This is of course inaccurate: Alba is not the Irish name for Scotland — that would be Albain, while Alba is the Scottish name for Scotland (though the two are obviously related). However, despite that, it does suggest that the word Alba is related to the name of the Alps, which in turn is, according to the Wikipedia article on Albania possibly related to the name of Albania. Another Wikipedia article, however, suggests that the name Alba (or rather, Albania in the High Medieval sense of referring to Scotland) is not related to the name of the Alps, and in fact means 'Land of the Rising Sun' (which is also what the kanji used to denote Japan literally means, but I won't go to suggesting they might be related :P)
One aspect of the confusion is that etymonline says that the root *alb- ("mountain") is not Indo-European, and the root *albho- (or at least the Latin albus, which came from *albho- "white") is. Other sources, however, including the Wikipedia article on Albion, claim that that name came from a proto-Indo-European root denoting both "white" and "mountain". Furthermore, this page on the Ligurian region of Italy in fact suggests that the name of the Alps is not from the root *alb-:- The oronym [of Alpes] has a good etymology if a Liguro-Sicanian language stratum is assumed. In fact, it may derived from the IE root *albho- 'white', in the specific meaning of 'clear', i.e., 'not covered by woods', referred to the higher parts of the mountains. Still today the Italian appellative alpe refers to the pasture lands in the highlands. Notice that for Strabo, the ancient name of the Alpes was Albia, i.e., a name preserving the original *bh>b. Even assuming that 'Albania' is related to 'Alps', there is already plenty of confusion. Albania, may, however, be named for the Illyrian tribe of the Albani, who lived in what is now known as Albania. That's fair enough, and all seems very likely, although why they were called the Albani might in fact be related to the root of 'Alps' after all.
So, no answer today, but it's certainly an interesting thing to look into.
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October 29th, 2007
06:44 am - My name.
This week's Word Nerds is on the subject of nicknames, and "Goose King" is chosen as the example of a nickname as an Internet identity. Go me.
In other news, I haven't slept. Power-nap time!
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October 8th, 2007
12:55 am - Is 'man' chauvinistic?
A lot has been made by shrill political-correctness groups over the use of 'man' to mean 'human'. The idea is that the term 'man' excludes women from the group of humanity, the implication being that the female is unimportant.
The English word 'man' comes from the Old English man or mann, from Germanic roots, which mean exactly the same as the contemporary words 'human' (from the Latin humanus) or 'person'. There is no gender distinction in the Old English man - it was applied to both sexes. In Old English, the words for 'man' (i.e. adult male) and 'woman' were wer (as in 'werewolf') and wif (as in 'wife') respectively. The modern word 'woman' is derived from wifman: I'm unclear whether this literally means 'wife-human' or 'woman-person'.
A similar thing can be seen in non-German languages. The French for 'man', for example, is homme which is derived from the Latin homo, which in literary Latin again meant 'human' (in Vulgar Latin it meant both 'human' and 'man', but literary Latin had the word vir for 'man'). The French word for 'woman' (femme, derived from the Latin femina, meaning precisely 'woman') has come to mean 'wife': exactly as the Old English wif, meaning 'woman', has become 'wife'.
To further confuse the issue, 'human' in the sense of a person without specifying gender is OE man, but 'human' in the sense of literary Latin homo appears to be cognate with OE guma. Guma survives today only in the form 'bridegroom' (brydguma, literally 'man of a woman being married') which appears to imply a male meaning to the word. This may be explained (although I admit I'm stretching here) by the idea that although the word is technically non-gender-specific, male chauvinism in that time was even more of an accepted fact than it is today: while brydguma was common throughout Germanic languages, Gothic took a different tack and went with bruþsfaþs - 'bride's lord' (for interest, compare faþs with 'father': 'father' comes from Old English fæder and transformed the d to a th in Middle English, but this is similar to how bryd meant the same as the Gothic bruþ...). Perhaps in a world where the woman was to all intents and purposes considered unimportant it made sense for a technically non-gender-specific word to be functionally male.
That confusion aside, I'd contend that this casts aspersions on the idea that the use of the word 'man' to describe issues that affect humans as a whole is discriminatory. This does, however, come with the usual disclaimer that I'm a complete amateur at this stuff ;)
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September 13th, 2007
04:54 am - Continuing with words
Back in 2003, the editors of the American Heritage Dictionary published 100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know.
The book demands payment, but the list is online, and reproduced beneath the cut.
( 100 Words That All High School Graduates - And Their Parents - Should Know )
I've added comments about which ones I know and about which ones I have no clue. Apparently I knew 84/100.
How many did you know?
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04:25 am - A new favourite word.
Do you know the difference between asinine and anserine? A lot of people might say I'm the former, but I think I'm probably more the latter. Both words do mean stupid, but I think asinine means more stubborn stupidity and anserine means more silly stupidity.
I'm definitely going to carefully consider which word would be more appropriate in future.
It's probably appropriate that I think of myself as more fitting into the latter category, since while asinine also has the meaning of resembling an ass, anserine also has the meaning of resembling a goose!
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August 28th, 2007
04:57 am - A question.
Are there any grammatical errors which you know are wrong, but continue to (ab)use anyway?
For example, I tend to use things like "Mark and I" as object phrases, which I know is wrong (it should be "Mark and me", clearly). It came from when I was young, and would tell my mum things like: "Me and Mark are going to the shop." She would just reply with "Mark and I..." She did once explain that the first-person pronoun should come last, but she never explained that I should use 'I' rather than 'me' because it was a subject phrase, so, once she had managed to get it into my head, I tended to correct it in every part of speech, and still do.
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May 15th, 2007
10:00 am
My words have been absent for a while. There's a very good reason for this. Well, there was the reason that everything I wanted to talk about ended up going off in a very boring direction, but the reason I mean is that for the past few days I've had a bitch of a toothache. I'm going to a dentist today to see if I can get an emergency appointment or something, since it's not good to be distracted by a toothache when I'm meant to be studying. I'll buy some whiskey on the way home, too. I hate whiskey, but it literally is for medicinal purposes. Maybe I can get away with buying only a half-bottle.
I've come upon something in the language that makes me feel uneasy. I can't explain why it makes me feel uneasy, but it does. I really want the word individuate to be a synonym of differentiate but it just will not comply.
Speaking of language, I have been once again listening to The Word Nerds. It's a fairly diverting podcast, if a little (but not too much!) Americocentric, and perhaps doesn't go quite as deep as I would like. But they cover the subject adequately and (bonus points!) are far from irritating, unlike some of the, ahem, less professional users of the medium.
That's all from me for now. I need to go find this dentist and then get back here for some hardcore studying.
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