6 posts tagged “dutch”

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

Today, a bit later than planned, I will write another update. This time it won't be specifically about the translation of a certain text, but I'll show some stuff about my own language, Dutch, and some thoughts on etymology.

First of all a translation of the title:

Ook dat nog!

Which literally translates to: also that still!
Which is a rather odd construction which I can not fully explain, but the more natural translation would be `that's just great'.

It would be used in the context like this:

Imagine yourself working on a paper all night, and you suddenly find out you were supposed to also (the ook part) finish another paper. That's the moment you'd say `ook dat nog!'.

Ook is an interesting word. It would mean something as `as well, too, also'. I started wondering about it's etymology, and my first instinct said. it must be related to the Latin suffix -que, Gothic suffix -uh, which both mean `and'. -que is suffixed to the last word of an and-construction. Like: senatus populusque romanus `senate and people of Rome'.

-que goes back to PIE *kʷe. Tracing this to gothic, by applying Grimm's law you'd get **-ƕe. Supposing it's unstressed position cause it to lost the last vowel, you'd get a form like **-h (ƕ word-finally becomes h, saƕan > sah). Since -h is difficult to pronounce, especially after a consonant, you'd expect an epenthetic vowel. resulting in the attested form -uh. One can't help but think that this looks an awful lot like german `auch' (same meaning as Dutch ook).

Now there is one enormous problem in this supposed etymology. The k in ook would not be explained. If auch comes from a proto germanic -h. Then also Dutch would have a -ch. Now it just seems that the German version is from an original -k that underwent  the High German Sound shift. And there is no way that PWGm. *k comes from PIE *kʷ.

Now there's only one way out of this mess, and that's saying that the -k in Dutch might be dialectal or from Frisian. I'm not sure if it would work for Frisian, since I'm not well known with the language. But taking a look at the Woordenboek Der Nederlandse Taal (Dictionary of the Dutch language) quickly killed all my hope.

voegw. en bijw. Got. auk, ohd. ouh, auh, mhd. ouch, nhd. auch, ags. eác, eng. (verouderd) eke (zie nog andere vormen bij MURRAY 3, 66 c), on. auk, os. ôk, mnl. oec. De oorsprong van deze algemeen Germaansche partikel is niet met zekerheid te bepalen. Gewoonlijk brengt men ze in verband met den wortel auk-, vermeerderen, waarvan got.aukan, ohd. ouhhôn, ags. eácian, on. auka, os. ôkjan, mul. ooken (verg. ook nog FRANCK, Elym. Wdb.).

I don't feel much for give a word per word translation of this entry. But what anyone should note, is that Gothic actually already has a word for `ook' being `auk'. Which quickly kills of my fantasies of it being related to Gothic suffix -uh.

Another thing that is stated, that the origins of this particle are unclear, generally it is connected with the germanic root *auk-  which mean `to add'.

Now you see, how some, `blatantly clear' etymologies can actually be wrong as well. Oh well, it was a fun thought experiment.