7 ms·

Ancient Echoes

92 points by pcmaffey 3y ago

frankus 3y ago
I saw a video claiming that Germanic words beginning with sn- all have to do with the nose. For example “snoop”, “snob”, “sniff”, “snarl”.
- heikkilevanto 3y ago
  Snow? Snap?
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    You went to too much effort; "snob" is unrelated to noses and so is "snoop". Snake, snare, and snack also come to mind.
    - kian 3y ago
      does a snob not turn up their nose? and a snoop is someone who sticks their nose in other people's business. a snake literally sees with its nose... a snare entraps anything that dares to stick its nose in it, and a snack is definitely something you'd smell with your nose (and flavor is mostly scent-based)
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        A snob is someone who makes shoes, otherwise known as a cobbler. You can't make the argument that words starting with sn- must have something to do with noses by reference to developments in the sense of a word that occurred many decades after the word was already current -- or by reference to developments in other parts of the language! By your standard, every word in every language "has to do with the nose".
        kian 3y ago
        I never said they must have to do with noses. My argument would be more like sn- words are more likely than a random word-start to eventually take on a connotation to do with noses. In this sense, the development of word-senses after word-origination and with respect to developments in other parts of the language would be a fine argument. I think, sometimes, people are so focused on etymology that they lose sense of why words evolve in meanings over time. Tracing, for example, the genetics of various finches in the Galapagos, one might find a tree of ancestry and say that "this finch species came from this other, which in turn are derived from this common ancestor" (etymology for birds) -- and that this is why their beak is shaped in such and such a way (because of their ancestral tree). To do so, however, would be to lose sight of the larger picture -- there are a variety of ecological niches in the galapagos suitable to different beak shapes, and these shapes (like crab body form) have evolved again and again. The local ecology and niche structure determines a possibility space of beak shapes -- the specifics of which species was capable of competing within those niches as competition waxed and waned in each determines which species were most likely to evolve in which directions (or split and radiate into multiple beak shapes). We have no problem understanding this for birds -- why is it so hard to conceive of something similar for words? I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but if etymology and ancestry are paired concepts, what is the name of the word that means "why this word took on this sense", or "why this word stayed in the lexicon and evolved while this other word died out in usage"? The corollary to "evolutionary pressures" on words (and their semantics)?
        thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > My argument would be more like sn- words are more likely than a random word-start to eventually take on a connotation to do with noses. > In this sense, the development of word-senses after word-origination and with respect to developments in other parts of the language would be a fine argument. That is true, but your arguments above don't speak to this point. Those are just random flights of fancy dedicated to defending a false idea. For example, snake is older than the phenomenon in question, always started with sn-, and hasn't changed relevantly in meaning. By contrast, snack is generally believed to be an example of the sn-/nose correspondence. It's not because the concept was ever, or is now, related to noses, smells, or flavor. Rather, the connection is supposed to be that the mouth was viewed as part of the nose. (This makes a bit more sense as applied to animals than to humans.) A basic prerequisite to arguing that snob developed the sense it did because of the supporting parallel existence of the expressions "turn up your nose" or "look down your nose" would be to show that those expressions predated the development in snob. That part of the argument works fine; "turning up your nose" is a very old concept. You'd also hope that the developments in snob didn't make sense on their own terms, because in that case there would be nothing left to explain by reference to noses, and in the case of snob that hope would be disappointed. > I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but if etymology and ancestry are paired concepts, what is the name of the word that means "why this word took on this sense", or "why this word stayed in the lexicon and evolved while this other word died out in usage"? My sense is that there is not a general word for your first question, but it is viewed as an important phenomenon and there are words for particular types of sense development, whereas there is not a general word for your second question, there is also no related specific terminology, and the usual feeling is that the answer to questions of that form is essentially always "chance", or in evolutionary terms "drift". In fact, more 'study' has gone into your question than I think would have been wise. You might have heard about the theory of the "bear taboo", how the Indo-Europeans replaced the word for bear with euphemistic references to the features of bears. You can find people arguing for this theory with a straight face today, but in my view there are two major problems: (1) The word for bear was replaced in Germanic, Slavic, and Sanskrit. It was not replaced in Latin, Greek, or Persian; speakers of Spanish, French, and Farsi today are still going around referring to bears by their ancient proto-Indo-European root. (2) In medieval France, the native word for fox was replaced by the Germanic word renard. In this case, we know there wasn't a taboo, and we know the source of the new word; we still have the body of literature - the Reynard the Fox stories - that supplied the modern French noun. Do we know why common usage shifted? No; that's just a thing that sometimes happens. In English, the native word hound was replaced by dog, and we have no idea where the new word came from. But most native words for common objects did not change. But this means that the only evidence we have for the bear taboo - the shift in usage - doesn't actually support the theory. > Tracing, for example, the genetics of various finches in the Galapagos, one might find a tree of ancestry and say that "this finch species came from this other, which in turn are derived from this common ancestor" (etymology for birds) -- and that this is why their beak is shaped in such and such a way (because of their ancestral tree). > To do so, however, would be to lose sight of the larger picture -- there are a variety of ecological niches in the galapagos suitable to different beak shapes, and these shapes (like crab body form) have evolved again and again. One of Darwin's more important but less famous results from studying in the Americas was that tropical American plants more closely resembled temperate American plants than they did tropical old-world plants. This speaks directly to your point here, and labels it minor in comparison to the effect of common descent. That is not to say that the effect isn't there (we know it is), or that the relative importance is equal between biology and language development (we don't know, but we can be pretty confident that they're not literally the same). But languages, like biology, are characterized by quite a lot of stability, and this tends to limit the potential significance of any systematic force for change.
artzmeister 3y ago
There is benefit to all in learning Latin. I cannot explain it, it's one of those things you just have to experience. Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all! Nice article.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  the few latin vocabular and grammar i knew tickled my brain in funny ways, it kinda make you think slightly differently
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Learning almost anything sufficiently new will do that to you. Dabble in calligraphy and letters will never quite look the same again. Get into dance or poetry and you'll appreciate entirely new nuances to music.
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      other skills don't alter the way to analyze and describe the world. it's more like going from arithmetic to calculus.. suddenly you see new insights
      - marginalia_nu 3y ago
        Literally every skill I mentioned does exactly that. It's very palpable, like the world gains additional colors.
        artzmeister 3y ago
        There is some element of truth to what they said, though. Not to take away from these other examples, but it is more than seeing new nuances, as in, it can become an entirely new paradigm of thinking. In English, things feel very limited and strict, and your expressiveness (so I find, at least) has an upper limit. With something like Latin, you can express more, with less, and in completely new ways that you would not think about at all in English. There is more to this argument, but this is a good start, I think.
andrewprock 3y ago
It saddens me to think that alphabetization is going the way of the dodo. It was a gateway drug into computer science for me.
- jaccarmac 3y ago
  Could you elaborate? Feels like a fun riff, even if it's just about string-sorting algorithms.
  - andrewprock 3y ago
    There's not much to elaborate, tons of practical use cases for search, sort and storage rely on alphabetization. If you move through an analog world of organized data, you'll find and develop many practical approaches to interacting with data based on knowing the key and the alphabetic ordering. Whether it's a phone book, a map, a dictionary, or filing systems, alphabets were always used as an indexing mechanism.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
benbreen 3y ago
Etymonline.com is one of my favorite websites. I had no idea it had a blog though - thanks for posting. I love the description of English as “Built from half-Frenchified Roman marble and local wattle-and-daub.”
- mcswell 3y ago
  James Nicoll said, "English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." For example, geyser (Icelandic), ski (Norwegian), mesa (Spanish), physics (Greek), pyjama (Persian), algebra (Arabic, along with the algorithms--and of course 'algorithm' comes from Arabic too), kayak (Greenland Inuit by way of Danish), canoe (Arawak by way of Spanish), banana (Wolof), coolie (probably from Tamil), hula (Hawai'ian), origami (Japanese), chimpanzee (probably from a Bantu language), alphabet(Canaanite by way of Greek), and...well, you get the idea. Also countless placenames, like Seattle (Salish).
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Most of those words exist also in a number of European languages. Not a good example for the mixed nature of English that makes it stand out; pointing to its combination of inherited Germanic lexicon and French loans would be better. Indeed, beware any popular treatments of the history of English, which might give you pithy quotations like the one you cite above, but have so often been sloppily written by non-experts.
irrational 3y ago
Hey honey, would you like to swive tonight?
shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
Some of these sw-words are old norse, eg sware - "to answer" modern swedish = svara "to answer" sweger - "mother in law" modern swedish = svägerska "mother in law" sweor - "father in law" modern swedish = svärfar "father in law"
- georgecmu 3y ago
  It would be more correct to say that some of these sw-words can also be found in or are related to Old Norse and modern Swedish words. They come from Indo-European roots and are older than Old Norse or Old English. Cognates are also found in Slavic and Roman languages: sware - свара - sermone sweor/sweger - свекор/свекровь - suocero/suocera
- arketyp 3y ago
  Old Norse is Germanic so I'm not sure whether you're suggesting those words entered the English vocabulary later, with the Vikings, of which I'm sure there are examples. On a side note, I liked seeing "swike", which would have been nice for Swedish speakers if it was still in use in English today.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > Old Norse is Germanic so I'm not sure whether you're suggesting those words entered the English vocabulary later, with the Vikings, of which I'm sure there are examples. There are many. Often the native word coexists with the borrowed Norse cognate, as in yard / garden or shirt / skirt. give is, I believe, subject to some debate. Without Norse influence, it would be pronounced yiv. People argue over whether it should be thought of as a borrowing from Norse or as a reversion of the pronunciation of the English word in a Norse-heavy environment. (etymonline has the second of those theories; wiktionary has the first.)
  - shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
    > Old Norse is Germanic No, Old Norse is Old Norse. "Germanic" (i guess you mean Proto-Germanic) and Old Norse are both indo-european languages.
Archelaos 3y ago
BTW: The image on the page is "Der Abend" ("The evening") from Caspar David Friedrich's "Tageszeitenzyklus" ("Time of Day Cycle") from 1821/22. The reproduction on the page seems to be somewhat overexposed. Wikipedia has it a lot darker: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Tageszeitenzyklus,_Der_Abend_(1821-22).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedri... -- I personally have not yet seen the original painting, but in view of other Caspar David Friedrichs and considering its title, the darker version seems more accurate to me.
nataliste 3y ago
I dreame of a setmoot wishtongue that riddes English of the mute endes and comes again to the grounde and wefte that Roman-speak still ownes. He writes, he is a writer. I sleepe, I be a sleeper. For truth, there is Anglish, but the end speakes akin to a Scotch pirater. My setmoot wishtongue has a lilt like Swedish chef. Read Chaucer aloude and he singes.

92 points by pcmaffey 3y ago

I saw a video claiming that Germanic words beginning with sn- all have to do with the nose. For example “snoop”, “snob”, “sniff”, “snarl”.

heikkilevanto 3y ago
Snow? Snap?
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  You went to too much effort; "snob" is unrelated to noses and so is "snoop". Snake, snare, and snack also come to mind.
  - kian 3y ago
    does a snob not turn up their nose? and a snoop is someone who sticks their nose in other people's business. a snake literally sees with its nose... a snare entraps anything that dares to stick its nose in it, and a snack is definitely something you'd smell with your nose (and flavor is mostly scent-based)
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      A snob is someone who makes shoes, otherwise known as a cobbler. You can't make the argument that words starting with sn- must have something to do with noses by reference to developments in the sense of a word that occurred many decades after the word was already current -- or by reference to developments in other parts of the language! By your standard, every word in every language "has to do with the nose".
      - kian 3y ago
        I never said they must have to do with noses. My argument would be more like sn- words are more likely than a random word-start to eventually take on a connotation to do with noses. In this sense, the development of word-senses after word-origination and with respect to developments in other parts of the language would be a fine argument. I think, sometimes, people are so focused on etymology that they lose sense of why words evolve in meanings over time. Tracing, for example, the genetics of various finches in the Galapagos, one might find a tree of ancestry and say that "this finch species came from this other, which in turn are derived from this common ancestor" (etymology for birds) -- and that this is why their beak is shaped in such and such a way (because of their ancestral tree). To do so, however, would be to lose sight of the larger picture -- there are a variety of ecological niches in the galapagos suitable to different beak shapes, and these shapes (like crab body form) have evolved again and again. The local ecology and niche structure determines a possibility space of beak shapes -- the specifics of which species was capable of competing within those niches as competition waxed and waned in each determines which species were most likely to evolve in which directions (or split and radiate into multiple beak shapes). We have no problem understanding this for birds -- why is it so hard to conceive of something similar for words? I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but if etymology and ancestry are paired concepts, what is the name of the word that means "why this word took on this sense", or "why this word stayed in the lexicon and evolved while this other word died out in usage"? The corollary to "evolutionary pressures" on words (and their semantics)?
        thaumasiotes 3y ago
        > My argument would be more like sn- words are more likely than a random word-start to eventually take on a connotation to do with noses. > In this sense, the development of word-senses after word-origination and with respect to developments in other parts of the language would be a fine argument. That is true, but your arguments above don't speak to this point. Those are just random flights of fancy dedicated to defending a false idea. For example, snake is older than the phenomenon in question, always started with sn-, and hasn't changed relevantly in meaning. By contrast, snack is generally believed to be an example of the sn-/nose correspondence. It's not because the concept was ever, or is now, related to noses, smells, or flavor. Rather, the connection is supposed to be that the mouth was viewed as part of the nose. (This makes a bit more sense as applied to animals than to humans.) A basic prerequisite to arguing that snob developed the sense it did because of the supporting parallel existence of the expressions "turn up your nose" or "look down your nose" would be to show that those expressions predated the development in snob. That part of the argument works fine; "turning up your nose" is a very old concept. You'd also hope that the developments in snob didn't make sense on their own terms, because in that case there would be nothing left to explain by reference to noses, and in the case of snob that hope would be disappointed. > I'm probably showing my ignorance here, but if etymology and ancestry are paired concepts, what is the name of the word that means "why this word took on this sense", or "why this word stayed in the lexicon and evolved while this other word died out in usage"? My sense is that there is not a general word for your first question, but it is viewed as an important phenomenon and there are words for particular types of sense development, whereas there is not a general word for your second question, there is also no related specific terminology, and the usual feeling is that the answer to questions of that form is essentially always "chance", or in evolutionary terms "drift". In fact, more 'study' has gone into your question than I think would have been wise. You might have heard about the theory of the "bear taboo", how the Indo-Europeans replaced the word for bear with euphemistic references to the features of bears. You can find people arguing for this theory with a straight face today, but in my view there are two major problems: (1) The word for bear was replaced in Germanic, Slavic, and Sanskrit. It was not replaced in Latin, Greek, or Persian; speakers of Spanish, French, and Farsi today are still going around referring to bears by their ancient proto-Indo-European root. (2) In medieval France, the native word for fox was replaced by the Germanic word renard. In this case, we know there wasn't a taboo, and we know the source of the new word; we still have the body of literature - the Reynard the Fox stories - that supplied the modern French noun. Do we know why common usage shifted? No; that's just a thing that sometimes happens. In English, the native word hound was replaced by dog, and we have no idea where the new word came from. But most native words for common objects did not change. But this means that the only evidence we have for the bear taboo - the shift in usage - doesn't actually support the theory. > Tracing, for example, the genetics of various finches in the Galapagos, one might find a tree of ancestry and say that "this finch species came from this other, which in turn are derived from this common ancestor" (etymology for birds) -- and that this is why their beak is shaped in such and such a way (because of their ancestral tree). > To do so, however, would be to lose sight of the larger picture -- there are a variety of ecological niches in the galapagos suitable to different beak shapes, and these shapes (like crab body form) have evolved again and again. One of Darwin's more important but less famous results from studying in the Americas was that tropical American plants more closely resembled temperate American plants than they did tropical old-world plants. This speaks directly to your point here, and labels it minor in comparison to the effect of common descent. That is not to say that the effect isn't there (we know it is), or that the relative importance is equal between biology and language development (we don't know, but we can be pretty confident that they're not literally the same). But languages, like biology, are characterized by quite a lot of stability, and this tends to limit the potential significance of any systematic force for change.

artzmeister 3y ago

There is benefit to all in learning Latin. I cannot explain it, it's one of those things you just have to experience. Not to mention that it will become a gateway drug... Attic Greek, Sanskrit, Syriac, Aramaic... I don't know them just yet, but Latin makes me want to learn it all! Nice article.

agumonkey 3y ago
the few latin vocabular and grammar i knew tickled my brain in funny ways, it kinda make you think slightly differently
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  Learning almost anything sufficiently new will do that to you. Dabble in calligraphy and letters will never quite look the same again. Get into dance or poetry and you'll appreciate entirely new nuances to music.
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    other skills don't alter the way to analyze and describe the world. it's more like going from arithmetic to calculus.. suddenly you see new insights
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Literally every skill I mentioned does exactly that. It's very palpable, like the world gains additional colors.
      - artzmeister 3y ago
        There is some element of truth to what they said, though. Not to take away from these other examples, but it is more than seeing new nuances, as in, it can become an entirely new paradigm of thinking. In English, things feel very limited and strict, and your expressiveness (so I find, at least) has an upper limit. With something like Latin, you can express more, with less, and in completely new ways that you would not think about at all in English. There is more to this argument, but this is a good start, I think.

andrewprock 3y ago

It saddens me to think that alphabetization is going the way of the dodo. It was a gateway drug into computer science for me.

jaccarmac 3y ago
Could you elaborate? Feels like a fun riff, even if it's just about string-sorting algorithms.
- andrewprock 3y ago
  There's not much to elaborate, tons of practical use cases for search, sort and storage rely on alphabetization. If you move through an analog world of organized data, you'll find and develop many practical approaches to interacting with data based on knowing the key and the alphabetic ordering. Whether it's a phone book, a map, a dictionary, or filing systems, alphabets were always used as an indexing mechanism.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

benbreen 3y ago

Etymonline.com is one of my favorite websites. I had no idea it had a blog though - thanks for posting. I love the description of English as “Built from half-Frenchified Roman marble and local wattle-and-daub.”

mcswell 3y ago
James Nicoll said, "English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." For example, geyser (Icelandic), ski (Norwegian), mesa (Spanish), physics (Greek), pyjama (Persian), algebra (Arabic, along with the algorithms--and of course 'algorithm' comes from Arabic too), kayak (Greenland Inuit by way of Danish), canoe (Arawak by way of Spanish), banana (Wolof), coolie (probably from Tamil), hula (Hawai'ian), origami (Japanese), chimpanzee (probably from a Bantu language), alphabet(Canaanite by way of Greek), and...well, you get the idea. Also countless placenames, like Seattle (Salish).
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  Most of those words exist also in a number of European languages. Not a good example for the mixed nature of English that makes it stand out; pointing to its combination of inherited Germanic lexicon and French loans would be better. Indeed, beware any popular treatments of the history of English, which might give you pithy quotations like the one you cite above, but have so often been sloppily written by non-experts.

irrational 3y ago

Hey honey, would you like to swive tonight?

shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago

Some of these sw-words are old norse, eg sware - "to answer" modern swedish = svara "to answer" sweger - "mother in law" modern swedish = svägerska "mother in law" sweor - "father in law" modern swedish = svärfar "father in law"

georgecmu 3y ago
It would be more correct to say that some of these sw-words can also be found in or are related to Old Norse and modern Swedish words. They come from Indo-European roots and are older than Old Norse or Old English. Cognates are also found in Slavic and Roman languages: sware - свара - sermone sweor/sweger - свекор/свекровь - suocero/suocera
arketyp 3y ago
Old Norse is Germanic so I'm not sure whether you're suggesting those words entered the English vocabulary later, with the Vikings, of which I'm sure there are examples. On a side note, I liked seeing "swike", which would have been nice for Swedish speakers if it was still in use in English today.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Old Norse is Germanic so I'm not sure whether you're suggesting those words entered the English vocabulary later, with the Vikings, of which I'm sure there are examples. There are many. Often the native word coexists with the borrowed Norse cognate, as in yard / garden or shirt / skirt. give is, I believe, subject to some debate. Without Norse influence, it would be pronounced yiv. People argue over whether it should be thought of as a borrowing from Norse or as a reversion of the pronunciation of the English word in a Norse-heavy environment. (etymonline has the second of those theories; wiktionary has the first.)
- shzhdbi09gv8ioi 3y ago
  > Old Norse is Germanic No, Old Norse is Old Norse. "Germanic" (i guess you mean Proto-Germanic) and Old Norse are both indo-european languages.

Archelaos 3y ago

BTW: The image on the page is "Der Abend" ("The evening") from Caspar David Friedrich's "Tageszeitenzyklus" ("Time of Day Cycle") from 1821/22. The reproduction on the page seems to be somewhat overexposed. Wikipedia has it a lot darker: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Tageszeitenzyklus,_Der_Abend_(1821-22).jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caspar_David_Friedri... -- I personally have not yet seen the original painting, but in view of other Caspar David Friedrichs and considering its title, the darker version seems more accurate to me.

nataliste 3y ago

I dreame of a setmoot wishtongue that riddes English of the mute endes and comes again to the grounde and wefte that Roman-speak still ownes. He writes, he is a writer. I sleepe, I be a sleeper. For truth, there is Anglish, but the end speakes akin to a Scotch pirater. My setmoot wishtongue has a lilt like Swedish chef. Read Chaucer aloude and he singes.