11 posts tagged “dutch”

Recently I've been doing a class on fieldwork, in this class we have an informant who speaks Minangkabau, a Malay dialect spoken by about 5 million people around Padang (which was recently hit by quite a severe earthquake).

Last week it was my turn to elicit some words and sentences from the informant, and one of the things that was elicited was the word for 'leg' kaki. This word struck me as odd, but I had no idea why.

Just now my mom came in, it's a cold evening, and she had cold feet.

I tell her wow, wat heb je kouwe kakkies ' wow you have cold feet'. And then it struck me why the word had seemed so familiar: kakkies is a bargoens word for 'feet'. And yes this is indeed a loanword from Indonesian!

Hey guys! Long time no see. My Bachelor thesis was eating a lot of time, combined with work on the Greek Etymological Dictionary and me just simply enjoying my holiday. But I'm back, with this word that has been bothering me for some time now.

The word Skt. sthā- 'to stand', is besides its double representation of the Laryngeal quite straightforward. Now if we look at its causative though, something really funny happens. Usually a causative is formed by giving the root lengthened grade (from PIE *o in open syllables) and adding the suffix -aya-. Words ending in vowels though would get the situation where we'd have **sthā-aya-. which is a rather unfortunate cluster of vowels. To remedy this, Sanskrit puts a -p- between the root and the suffix resulting in sthāpaya- 'to cause to stand; to stop'.

Why a p? This is not at all a natural transitional consonant you'd put there. A y would be a lot more likely (and quite common practice in Sanskrit). Since it can not be readily understood by phonetic reasons, there's two more examples. The Vedic people were feeling funny, and thought it'd be nice to come up with a completely nonsensical transition sound, or it is archaic.

As a historical linguist, I feel compelled to further research the archaic option. Indo-European has certain elements behind certain stems called 'stem-extension'. These are always simple consonants like *k, *p or *u. The function of these stem-extensions have always been a bit mysterious. A nice example is the root *(s)ker- ''to cut' as found in Dutch scheren 'to shave' beside *(s)ker-p- which we find in Old English sceorfan 'to bite'.

I believe that this p that shows up in Sanskrit might give us an indication of the original function of the *p-stem-extension. Maybe originally this was a way to form causatives from verbal stems, which was later replaced by the common textbook causative formation. A nice note to put with this is, that Anatolian indeed is unfamiliar with the textbook causative formation, so there's some indication that it's recent.

While most p-causatives in Vedic Sanskrit occur after Laryngeal final roots, there are a few verbs that show this p even without them ending in a vowel/laryngeal. These are r̥- 'to go'; ar-p-áya- 'cause to go' and kṣi- 'to dwell' kṣe-p-áya- 'cause to dwell'.

All in old, Sanskrit seems to give a strong indication that the *p-stem extension is an old causative formation. Now we must look to see if there's any other words out there in other languages that seem to support this idea. Germanic *(s)ker- 'to shave/cut'' ~ *(s)ker-p- 'to bite' might be seen as a reflex of this, though the difference is rather more intensive than causative.

There is lots more to say about these stem extensions, and I'm nowhere near done figuring them out. There's some really odd stuff going on with the voice of these extensions for example. They seem to become pre-glottalised sometimes for no apparent reason.

As a final little side-note sthāpaya- looks suprisingly much like the Dutch verb stoppen 'to stop'. I don't buy the commonly cited Latin etymology stupere (it wouldn't explain with Dutch and Enlish both have the vowel o rather than u, or English with u and Dutch with o), it can hardly be cognate either, since the vowels would be wrong, and Dutch p points to PIE *b, which is very odd to have in the first place. So until I make any significant breakthrough on this bizarre word (which even if it is from Latin has a difficult reconstruction), I'll consider it completely unrelated.

One of the great annoyances about the Dutch language, is that the definition of the 'correct' standard languages is rather different from what we actually speak. This has to do with the standardisation of the Dutch language when the first bible translation was introduced. Dutch was morphed into some sort of mixture between Latin and Dutch, giving rise to new case forms and constructions previously unheard of in Dutch.

By now making a distinction between masculine and feminine is finally on its way out; and writing cases has been abolished for some time too. Nevertheless some things persist. Some people insist on making a difference between a dative and accusative third person pronoun hun and hen (I'm not even sure which of the two is which), which were originally just two dialectal variants of the same word. But were taken to be used as two different cases to facilitate a more accurate representation of the Greek language.

Another truly, and even, far more common 'correction' that is made to people's speech is the comparative.

In English we would write the following sentence:
He doesn't have more children than me.

'than me'; perfectly normal to use 'me' here, which is what all other germanic language do, except for 'correct' Dutch. We're supposed to say:

Hij heeft niet meer kinderen dan ik.

IK, nominative! Why? Because apparently you're supposed to fill in the rest of the sentence as follows:

Hij heeft niet meer kinderen dan ik heb.
or in English: He doesn't have more children than I have.

But English has no problem changing pronominal case here, why should we? And then when we look at actual spoken dutch we indeed find:

Hij heeft niet meer kinderen dan mij. As we would expect it. I had a previous suspicion that this must have been a early-modern dutch prescriptivist innovation, and as it turns out, I'm right. In Middle Dutch texts we find this sentence written in 1200 AD:

Hine hadde niet meer kinder dan mi
He-NEG had NEG more children than me.

So, the 'dan ik' construction is historically wrong. This never seems to convince prescriptivists though. Even if the construction wasn't historically wrong though. Why would anyone say that something that 90% of the population says is 'incorrect'. By which standard are you measuring language? Isn't language defined by the people who speak it? If it isn't, then what does tell us what language is? Because clearly language itself can't be used since it has no authority over what language is according to these prescriptivists. Do they really think grammar books come falling from the sky through some divine intervention?

There's an enormous contradiction here. I believe language should be spoken the way it is spoken, not the way some 17th century theologist would like to see us speak some pseudo-latin-dutch hybrid monster.

Not so much a very insightful post as a mere musing.

It has always puzzled me how one language can be so resilient to changing their phonologies when loaning words while others aren't.

There's languages that take on whole new phonemes purely from loaning from other languages. English Zoo has a word initial /z/ which in native words is illegal. Dutch goes even further, all instances of /s/ and /f/ are loan phonemes. It's highly dependent on the region in how much they merge with /z/ and /v/, but in my speech I have a clear distinction between fee 'fairy' and vee 'lifestock'. Other languages have taken on completely new illegal clusters in their language like āyiskrīm in Arabic with a CCC cluster. There's also some initial CR words though I can't think of them right now. Nevertheless Arabic always stayed quite resistant, often adapting loanwords to known consonant patterns.

bank 'bank' has a plural bunūk.

Other languages have gone even further completely taking over larger parts of illegal phonological traits. Swahili is probably a good example. stampu 'stamp' with a previously illegal st cluster at the beginning of a word.

It also amuses me that french has a word like scolaire after trying so hard to get rid of that cluster over the centuries creating école out of Latin schola.

And when you see languages this open to changes you wonder why Japanese after all this time and such an enormous influx of loanwords from english still refuses to pronounce love any different than /rabu/. Why, although often written as such, video is still pronounced /bideo/ and star trek is still /sutaatorekku/. Why is Japanese so resistant to changes in phonology and why aren't other languages?

The 'contact' or 'influence' argument gets you a long way, but doesn't fully cover the problems it brings. How can Latin be said to have such contact with French that it would influence their phonology, it's a dead language after all, that wasn't spoken widely either.

And maybe something could be said about English influence in Egyptian Arabic, but is such influence stronger than anglo-mania that currently spreads throughout Japanese? Not to mention the rather great, though not as great resilience to influence in Chinese loans as well. Sure it introduced some Cy clusters, but still Chinese loans sound, and never did, nothing like Chinese.

Maybe it has something to do with how limiting a phonology is? That would stand in the way why Swahili didn't follow Japanese's path. Maybe it is actually related to the orthography too?

Any musings are welcome.

A very persistent, and blatantly wrong popular believe seems to exist that the Japanese word Arigatou 'thank you' is actually a loan from Portuguese 'Obrigado', yes these two look similar, and sound similar, but by no means is the one derived from the other, it's pure simple coincidence.

I ran into it again when I googled 'History of the Japanese Language' where I ran into this page:
http://www.todaytranslations.com/language-history/japanese-language-history/

Since the mid 18th century the Japanese have adopted a huge amount of "gairaigo": foreign words mainly from English. These include "teburu" (table), "biru" (beer), "gurasu" (glass), "aisu" (ice), "takushi" (taxi) and "hoteru" (hotel).

There are also a few words from Portuguese, Dutch and Spanish, such as "pan" (bread) and "arigato" (thank you), from the Portuguese "pão" and "obrigado". Such words arrived in Japan mainly during the 16th and 17th centuries, when missionaries and merchants started to visit the country.

Sure teiburu is from table, aisu is from ice, takushi is from taxi and hoteru is from hotel. Assuming that biiru and gurasu are from English though, is a bit short sighted. It could have just as well been from Dutch.

Glas is the Dutch word for glass, and while these days it is pronounced [χlɑs] (at least in my dialect), when the Dutch first had contact with the Japanese it was most likely pronounced [glɑs] or [ɣlɑs]. But this one is still open for discussion, and probably actually is english (Did we have glasses in the 18th century?).

Biiru though, is unmistakably Dutch, just like kouhii 'coffee' is.

The Dutch word for biiru is bier. What makes it so convincing that it Dutch then? Because it has Chinese characters:

麦酒

麦 ' Barley'

酒 'Sake'

Back in the days of the Dutch contact with Japan, it wasn't common for the katakana to be used for loanwords, and it was common for every noun to have characters, thus they gave beer just that.

Same goes for kouhii

珈琲 Which in meaning of the chracters has nothing to do with it, but seems to vaguely try to imitate the word for coffee (koffie in Dutch) as 'kahai'  in it's reading. How it ended up with a more accurate pronunciation than its characters is a mistery to me.

kouhii das in fact reveal an interesting fact about the pronunciation of the 'h'  at the time, that it must have been the hypothesized [ɸ] and by that emulate the Dutch word quite closely.

One who wants to mention that the [h] was simply used to replace the unfamiliar [f], this could be true if the word for Holland (alternate word for the Netherlands) was horanda in Japanese. But actually it is oranda, showing that the Japanese were unfamiliar to the [h] sound at the time.

Here I have greatly diverged from the original topic, but it all made some remote sense, honest!

A good way to check whether a word is a loanword or not, is to see if it has any morphological complexity within the language. For example alcohol is just one word in English, but if we see it as Arabic we clearly see the definite article al+kohl, which should be its origin.

Same goes for arigatou, or more complete arigatou gozaimasu

有り難う御座います

The fact that it actually has characters belonging to it, with conjugated endings should already have your alarms ringing.

In the spelling at the time arigatou was actually written arigatahu, a rather archaic (but still existent) conjugation of arigatai　有り難い (arigatahi at the time), a compound adjective consisting of 有り 'having'  and　難い　' difficult'

Arigatou gozaimasu  therefore translates to 'it is difficult for me to have'. I'm guessing the implication is ' it is difficult for me to have/accept your (whatever the person is giving you)', which is an appropriately humble way of saying thank you in Japanese.

So arigatou actually makes morphological sense in Japanese, making it incredibly unlikely that it is a loaned word.

So maybe the Portuguese loaned arigatou into their languages as obrigado then? No, no such luck either. obrigado is from the same source as the English word 'obliged', and with my limited knowledge of Latin I'd say the Latin for is obligatus. Note the incredibly typical but irregular l>r shift! Obligado thus means 'much obliged' or something along those lines (I don't actually speak Portuguese).

So now it's clear that it's just an odd twist of languages that two words turned out to be very similar.

About a week ago, I was telling my mother about that mysterious word *ulkʷos and its odd reflexes in the Indo-European languages in general, and Germanic languages especially.

She kindly pointed out to me that there aren't that many words in Dutch that end in -olf. And in fact there aren't even many word that end in -lf either. I compiled a list, which I expect to be near-complete list of non-compounds nouns that end in -lf.

I also looked for some words that would maybe display an alternation between -lf and -lk, which wasn't quite as successful. But l'll post the results and the etymologies of these words.

• kolf 'backside of a rifle'
  
• golf 'wave'
  
• kalf 'calf' ??
  
• half 'half'
  
• zalf 'salve' ?
  
• zelf 'self'
  
• elf 'eleven' (and also twaalf 'twelve')
  
• delven 'to delve'
  
• welven 'to gulf'
  

I'll discuss these words individually

kolf
I'm not sure what the etymology of this word is. These days it's the backside of a rifle the Middle Dutch meaning was 'stick, club, bat'. etymonline suggests a root *kulþ-. But I'm not sure how to get the f  out of that word, Dutch tends to change f's to ch, but doesn't get f's from þ (see luft > lucht. graft > gracht kraft > kracht).

golf
golf < French golfe < Italian golfo < late Latin colpus <Greek κολπος
So not a Germanic origin.

kalf
kalf < PGm. *kalbaz
Gothic has kalbo which is a *eh2-feminine stem of a root *kalb- it also means 'female calf'.
It is sometimes connected with PIE *gelb(h)- from a root *gel- 'to swell' , the swelling of an animal womb. I don't find this explanation particularly compelling. either way it's not important for the comparison to 'wolf'.

half
half < PGm *halbaz
It's connected with the Indo-European root *(s)kel- 'to split'. Quite convincing, Also 'scalp' is related to this word (this time with the presence of the s-mobile).

It's interesting to see scalp have a *p-suffix and half have a *b-suffix. the actually reason for this is really difficult to trace though. We'd obviously like to connect the two, but there's no real reason fur us to do so except for 'they sound alike and related words use them'.

zalf
From a Indo-European root *selp- 'butter, fat'.

zelf
From proto-Germanic selbaz 'self' from Indo-European *sel-bho- from the base *s(w)e- "separate, apart" is wat www.etymonline.com says, makes you wonder what this -l root suffix is though. Or the bho part, I myself am not sure.

elf
From Proto-Germanic *ain-lif. litterarely one-leave. The leaving part from PGm. laibijan 'to cause to remain/to leave' from PIE root *leikʷ- There we have one! A *kʷ > *p /R_. Where R = i,l (and likely then also u,r).

delven
Apparently from an Indo-European root *dhelbh- 'to dig'.

welven
From PGm. *hwelban From Indo-European *kʷelp- To wich also Gk. κολπος is directly related.

So now we have two words!  *leikʷ- and *ulkʷo- Which have a *kʷ > *p shift. Both in a similar environment.

We can hardly draw conclusions from this, but it was definitely worth checking out the -lf words, and seeing which words have a *kʷ > *p shift.

My next post, I'll work the other way around, and I'll look for roots that have *kʷ/*p switches.

For this special day, I have a lovely thematised blog update. In Dutch we call Christmas 'kerst' or 'kerstmis'. Which is odd, to say the least. After all Jezus' name was Jezus Christ, not Jezus Kerst/Chirst/Cherst. The second part comes from the Greek word χριστος 'anointed one'.

Dutch seems to have metathesised the vowel and the /r/. Also there has been a slight change in vowel, but this is understandable in a loaning of a foreign word.

Metathesis of /r/ is not an uncommon feature in Germanic, but it's especially productive (as far as a sporadic sound change is productive) in English.

Some examples are:
brid > bird
hros > horse (Du. ros)

I've told before about how Germanic seems to enjoy metathesising resonants all the time. I had an idea it might be some kind of cultural linguistic game, although a fun idea to sport, probably not very feasible. Nevertheless, this tendency of metathesis is a fun thing to keep in mind.

Dutch though, tends to avoid such very late resonant metathesis, and then it happened in such a (in those time anyway) essential word as Christmas.

This suddenly popped into my mind this morning after having gone to a party which lasted from 23.00 until 07.00. Comparative linguistics is a curse that will haunt you forever, even at times you'd rather be sleeping it will wake you up and tell you about such words as 'kerst'. And I'm still haunted by it because I can not explain the metathesis.

I often wonder, what do we need in spelling? Would we rather have a completely phonetic spelling, or rather a phonemic spelling?

For example Sanskrit goes incredibly far in almost being an ancient form of IPA, it has so many distinctions which are purely  based on speech, and phonetics rather than the phonemes. Now my Sanskrit isn't very good, but keeping track of all those Sandhi's seems like a real pain (I'll get back to you when I finish my class this year ;))

While Dutch goes through enormous effort in its spelling to be phonemic. As you may or may not know, Dutch has word final devoicing, so a word like Dood 'death' is actually pronounced [dot]. The reasoning why we then still used a <d> rather than a <t> is because the verb doden 'to kill' does have a phonetic [d]. This process is also done for word final /b/. But it is not done for word final /v/ and /z/. so ik geef 'I give' but: zij geven 'they give'. Why they ever chose to have this terrible spelling inconsistency is beyond me. But it does make you wonder, which one is better?

Dutch goes even further in phonemic rather than phonetic spelling. For example, the third person agreement suffix is /-t/, the reasoning is, if we're going to suffix it behind every verb with third person agreement, we're also going to suffix it to words in which you can't hear this /-t/!

So you have the notorious verb worden 'become' ['ʋɔrdən]:
Ik word  'I become' ['ɪk 'ʋɔrt]
Hij wordt 'He becomes' ['hɛɪ 'ʋɔrt]

Word final -dt?! Yes, word final -dt.

Now this seems to all make grammatically sense, but for most people it is terribly difficult to make a distinction that isn't made in speech.

There's far more of these kind of odd pairs.

words which alternate between -d- and double -dd- without a phonetic distinction for example:

De beantwoorde vraag 'The answered question'
Ik beantwoordde de vraag 'I answered the question'

Now this is all well, we're still not spelling Irish right? But it still makes you wonder, how 'necessary' is to write what is said 'underlyingly' rather than exactly what you hear. Throughout times it has become more and more normal to write phonemically rather than phonetically, but besides the orthographies becoming more elegant, the spelling also tends to become a lot more difficult.

So really, readers, I'm just curious, what do you think is necessary? A phonemic spelling? A phonetic spelling? Or a combination of letters that vaguely resemble the sounds of the word that is meant? (English :P)

This blog entry I'd like to dedicate to a rather controversial theory of mine. Namely, the cause for sporadic sound changes.

Sporadic sound changes have always been something, we historical linguists would rather ignore, because it doesn't fit in well with our theories that sound changes occur through perfectly regular set rules.

Some people are convinced that these sporadic changes aren't so much sporadic, but rather we haven't found the system behind it yet. I personally think this theory is too positive, I sincerely doubt some of your sporadic changes are actually non-sporadic.

What are sporadic changes you say? Let me give you an example.

The word for "Horse" in English and Dutch give a nice example of a sporadic change.
English has: 'Horse'
Dutch has:   'Ros'
'Ros' comes from an earlier 'hros'.
I'm not completely sure which of the two words was first, but if we can believe etymonline.com it's the 'horse' form. As you can see Dutch has then just switched around the r and the o. This does not happen in other words, and is truely a sporadic change.

A similar switch we can see in the word 'wolf' in Proto-Germanic; *wulfaz. The PIE word for this is *ulkʷos or *lukʷos.
Compare: Sanskrit vrkas, Latin Lupus, Greek λυκος.

As you can see, for some unexplained reason the root for wolf seems to alternate between 'lwof' and 'wolf' in the different Indo-European languages.

This reminded me of a rather modern form of slang from France called Verlan'.

Verlan is an inversion of the syllables in the word word 'l'envers'.

In Verlan, the point is that you change around the order of either the syllables or letters itself. Another example of verlan is the rather politically loaded 'Racaille' which president Sarkozy so 'tactfully' used to describe the people of the Parisian banlieues. The Verlan version of this word is 'Kaillera'.

Other examples are keufli for flics 'coppers' and ouam for moi 'me'. No lets hypothetically say that one of these words becomes so popular that we stop using the non-Verlan word, and if even later all accounts of Verlan were lost, you'd get the impression that without an apparent reason a word had just completely turned itself inside out.

And I think this is exactly what causes these bizarre sporadic changes, playfulness in language, like Verlan. Other people have already previously suggested such things. Like how 'wolf' can turn itself inside out, and how some languages have a -p- rather than a -kʷ-. This was apparently done because there was a taboo on the word 'wolf', maybe because the early Indo-Europeans found this creature so scary that it was considered bad luck to pronounce its name correctly.

Now we get to the more far out part of my theory, which you may readily disagree with, because I have no good way to prove it.

Me and a very good friend of mine, Leah, have in the past years created a sort of idiolect which combines Dutch and English with internet language and our own little changes. By now people have lost all track of our conversations, but we generally understand each other (onderstad00!).

Another feature of this little dialect of ours is that we randomly transpose letters. We pronounce words like 'wolf' for example as 'wlof'. Why the hell do we talk about wolves? Well it's a sort of religious object, the so called aardappelwolf or aardappelwlof, don't ask.

But all of a sudden when I started saying 'wlof' I realised that this disturbingly much like what happened to the Indo-European language. Now my theory is, that some cultures have a certain predisposition to certain sporadic changes. In Germanic languages you should never be surprised to see resonant-vowel inversions. In Romance languages you shouldn't be too surprised to see inexplicable vowel changes. So maybe, this is part of our cultural heritage, a sort of inherited language game, much like Verlan is passed on from person to person.

Who knows? It doesn't really help us predict sporadic changes, but understanding which 'sporadic change games' are more prone to happen in which language family will greatly help us with reconstruction of words that have undergone these changes.

Sorry for the late update, and sorry for the rather inaccessible update. I have a word-per-word glossed Classical Greek text from Lysias. I'm sorry to say though, that for now, it's in Dutch, since I use it as my homework in my Greek classes. But I figured it'd be better than updating nothing at all. So here it is.

Link to Lysias