41 ms·

Five common English words we don't know the origins of–including 'boy' and 'dog'

57 points by bikenaga 2y ago

ars 2y ago
Recorder doesn't just confuse him, it confused me as well the first time I heard the word. I'd always called the musical instrument a flute, which was apparently wrong, although I don't know why since tons of other instruments that look just like a recorder are called flutes. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)#... has a full etymology, which contradicts the article.
- radford-neal 2y ago
  A recorder is a flute, more specifically, a fipple flute. But there are other fipple flutes, such as tin whistles. (One distinguishing feature of a recorder is the use of the thumb hole to control octaves.) So calling a recorder a "flute" isn't exactly wrong, but is under-specific. Also, nowadays transverse flutes are often called just "flutes", inviting confusion if you call a recorder a flute. The etymology you reference seems speculative, not really contradicting the article's claim that the etymology isn't clear.
- OJFord 2y ago
  What's called a flute that looks like a recorder? (Don't say 'flutes'..) I can think of oboes and clarinets, which are called that not flute. I'm no musician but to me a flute goes to the side; I assume per sibling comment that's what a 'transverse flute' is.
  - IggleSniggle 2y ago
    Flutes that have fipples, like penny whistles (or recorders), vessel flutes (some of which have fipples, like an ocarina), end-blown flutes without a fipple like the xiao (which also happens to have a side-blown varient). There are many, but the word is somewhat amorphous. Personally, I would call almost anything that uses a Helmholtz resonator instigated with the mouth as the initial oscillator a "flute," but will also take it to mean "orchestral flute" based on guessed context in conversation. The thing that makes clarinets and oboes not flutes is that they have one or more reeds rather than producing a direct Helmholtz resonator.
    - mrob 2y ago
      Although "Helmholtz resonator" is often used to describe a broader range of resonators than Helmholtz's original design, I think it's dubious to call fipple flutes "Helmholtz resonators". The fipple mechanism sets up an oscillating sheet of air going into and out of the pipe, which isn't present in traditional Helmholtz resonators. See: http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/how_the_flue_pipe_speaks.htm http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/how_the_flue_pipe_speaks.htm I think a better definition of a flute is a mouth-blown wind instrument with no vibrating parts.
      - IggleSniggle 2y ago
        Superb correction, thanks!
      - mrob 2y ago
        I just remembered there are East Asian flutes that use vibrating membranes to modify the sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizi_(instrument) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizi_(instrument) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegeum These are uncontroversially flutes, so the definition would have to be "mouth-blown wind instruments that generate a tone without using vibrating parts".
erickj 2y ago
With absolutely no certainty or linguistic rigor behind this observation... I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b" https://glosbe.com/en/gsw/boy https://glosbe.com/en/gsw/boy
- nobody9999 2y ago
  >I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b" According to Etymology Online[0]: `boy (n.) mid-13c., boie "servant, commoner, knave" (generally young and male); c. 1300, "rascal, ruffian, knave; urchin," mid-14c. as "male child before puberty" (possibly extended from the "urchin" sense). A word of unknown origin. Possibly from Old French embuie "one fettered," from Vulgar Latin imboiare, from Latin boia "leg iron, yoke, leather collar," from Greek boeiai dorai "ox hides." (Words for "boy" double as "servant, attendant" across the Indo-European map — compare Italian ragazzo, French garçon, Greek pais, Middle English knave, Old Church Slavonic otroku — and often it is difficult to say which meaning came first.) But it also appears to be identical with East Frisian boi "young gentleman," and perhaps with Dutch boef "knave," from Middle Dutch boeve, perhaps from Middle Low German buobe. This suggests a gradational relationship to babe. Another conjecture: In Old English, only the proper name Boia has been recorded. ME boi meant 'churl, servant' and (rarely) 'devil.' In texts, the meaning 'male child' does not antedate 1400. ModE boy looks like a semantic blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit ( *boi) and a baby word for 'brother' ( *bo). [Liberman] Used slightingly of young men in Middle English, also in familiar or contemptuous use of criminal toughs or men in the armed services. In some local uses "a man," without reference to age (OED lists "in Cornwall, in Ireland, in the far West of the U.S."). The meaning "male negro slave or Asian personal servant of any age" attested from c. 1600. Extended form boyo is attested from 1870. Emphatic exclamation oh, boy is attested by 1917. Boy-meets-girl "typical of a conventional romance" is from 1945; the phrase itself is from 1934 as a dramatic formula. Boy-crazy "eager to associate with males" is from 1923. A noticable number of the modern words for 'boy', 'girl', and 'child' were originally colloquial nicknames, derogatory or whimsical, in part endearing, and finally commonplace. These, as is natural, are of the most diverse, and in part obscure, origin. [Buck]" ` [0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=boy https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=boy
withinboredom 2y ago
Why does every word in English have to come from somewhere else. New words are invented all the time, duh, noob.
- soneil 2y ago
  New words are invented all the time, but girl, boy, dog you'd expect to be ancient concepts with ancient etymologies. 'noob' has an obvious etymology in new-neue-niwe. The idea that 'dog' doesn't blows my mind - especially since the guttural, monosyllabic utterances are often the oldest.
  - marton78 2y ago
    While not as recent, the Germanic "ship" / "Schiff" / etc. has no cognate in any other Indo-European language and no obvious origin in PIE, so it is conjectured it might be derived from a pre-IE indigenous European language.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- dustypotato 2y ago
  Sounds plausiblel. Don't know why you're downvoted, frequently used ones are more prone to it I'd say, just because the possibility that someone thinks of or stumbles upon a new name for it is higher. Maybe Dog was the name of someones Hound and his/her family started naming so, and then a village, county , dutchy , country because it was short and convenient
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    I think they have been downvoted because they’ve suggested a solution which is, while plausible, not very interesting, and done so in a tone that could be read as somewhat aggressive. Also, which we could not hope to have evidence for (except in an absence of evidence for any other theory).
- Tagbert 2y ago
nobody9999 2y ago
Only tangentially related, but I've been auditing "The History of English Podcast"[0] and if this sort of thing interests you, you'll probably like that too. [0] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
- mjhay 2y ago
  I highly recommend that podcast as well. The average native English speaker doesn't know much about it.
- sevensor 2y ago
  Fabulous podcast. Fascinating how we can use pronunciation shifts to date the arrival of a word into English, and how some words have entered the language multiple times by different routes. Also, I learned that there really was a castle in a swamp, in Wessex, to which King Alfred retreated during a particularly heavy Viking invasion.
- empath75 2y ago
  This is going to sound like damning with faint praise, but it's not meant that way -- this is absolutely my favorite thing to listen to while trying to fall asleep. His voice is quite soothing, and it's interesting enough to constantly hold your attention, while not being _so_ interesting that it keeps you awake, and while it's loosely organized chronologically on an episode-by-episode basis, within each episode it's sort of arranged thematically, so you can dip in and out of consciousness and not be confused as to what he's talking about, and you can pick it up the next night at some random spot and not really feel like you missed much. It also has long stretches where he's just sort of listing off words and etymologies, which are the kinds of trivial facts I love, but I think my brain also takes as a signal to turn off.
  - devilbunny 2y ago
    I used to listen to the podcast when it was still young. His original goal was to do it in maybe 100 episodes or so. After he started making money from Patreon, it slowed to a crawl in terms of progressing through the history of the language. Eventually, I gave up. I’m not one of his backers, so he doesn’t owe me anything, but I would have preferred it if he did something more like Dan Carlin (there are plenty of quibbles about his historiography, but you have to admit he’s very good at storytelling), doing deep dives on various subjects instead of beating Middle and early Modern English to death. Yes, they were very important times in the language, where the mostly-comprehensible Middle English turned into the entirely-comprehensible (if you have footnotes for words whose meaning has changed and cultural references that no longer apply) early Modern English, but the language hasn’t been static since 1500.
alsetmusic 2y ago
Check out “Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme--And Other Oddities of the English Language” Great book!
- euroderf 2y ago
  Turning bugs into features...
SomeRndName11 2y ago
boy sounds somewhat like Turkic bala/bola ("a boy").
nick238 2y ago
Source is The Conversation that seems to have a strangely-open republication approach licensing stuff via Creative Commons BY-ND. https://theconversation.com/five-common-english-words-we-dont-know-the-origins-of-including-boy-and-dog-232299 https://theconversation.com/five-common-english-words-we-don... includes a button that just gives you the HTML and some tracking code/image.
amelius 2y ago
Purely linguistic question here. What is the word for having a sexual fantasy about someone? Since this must happen a lot, I'm wondering if all languages have a single (transitive?) verb for it. If not, then why not?
- nick7376182 2y ago
  Probably about a hundred different words for that in urbandictionary
- 1123581321 2y ago
  To fancy or to daydream about someone. If English has a term for intense or explicit sexual fantasies, it’s a modern or clinical word.
  - json_bourne_ 2y ago
    You said to reply to one of your threads to contact you: Check of scenestamps.com now! Added some features you might like.
    - 1123581321 2y ago
      Yes! This is getting very browsable/fun to explore. Auto-tagging/making clickable certain proper nouns like Homelander could be neat if there’s a way to detect them.
  - amelius 2y ago
    Thanks, but it doesn't come really close to the meaning I was looking for. I find it difficult to believe that we don't have a good word for what 99+% of people are doing since puberty and allows also to express the object of the fantasy using a simple subject+verb+object type of sentence.
    - nine_k 2y ago
      Since sexual themes are heavily regulated or prohibited in most cultures, such a word may fail to exist, or to survive intact through the millennia. I suppose that local metaphoric and slang words, and contextually-altered expressions (like the generic "daydream" narrowed to that sense) replace it in many / most cases. Same with words for copulation (highly restricted) and even for wooing / courting, which are also pretty universal activities since times immemorial.
riffic 2y ago
There's a conjecture about boy here: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8qdnpu/what_are_some_common_words_that_we_have_no_idea/e0k2bc8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8qdnpu/what_are_...
bloak 2y ago
Also "kill", apparently.
- jihadjihad 2y ago
  Seems true [0] -- as does dog. But the etymology of "boy" didn't come across as fully uncertain [1]. 0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boy
timonoko 2y ago
"Boy" comes from Japanese ボーイ(bōi). Or more generally from uralic languages, example Finnish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poika https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poika
- rdlw 2y ago
  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4 ボーイ: Borrowed from English boy
- timonoko 2y ago
  They seem to admit that Swedish and Norwegian Pojke comes from Finnish. So it came with Normen to Ængland. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pojke https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pojke

57 points by bikenaga 2y ago

ars 2y ago

Recorder doesn't just confuse him, it confused me as well the first time I heard the word. I'd always called the musical instrument a flute, which was apparently wrong, although I don't know why since tons of other instruments that look just like a recorder are called flutes. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)#Etymology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)#... has a full etymology, which contradicts the article.

radford-neal 2y ago
A recorder is a flute, more specifically, a fipple flute. But there are other fipple flutes, such as tin whistles. (One distinguishing feature of a recorder is the use of the thumb hole to control octaves.) So calling a recorder a "flute" isn't exactly wrong, but is under-specific. Also, nowadays transverse flutes are often called just "flutes", inviting confusion if you call a recorder a flute. The etymology you reference seems speculative, not really contradicting the article's claim that the etymology isn't clear.
OJFord 2y ago
What's called a flute that looks like a recorder? (Don't say 'flutes'..) I can think of oboes and clarinets, which are called that not flute. I'm no musician but to me a flute goes to the side; I assume per sibling comment that's what a 'transverse flute' is.
- IggleSniggle 2y ago
  Flutes that have fipples, like penny whistles (or recorders), vessel flutes (some of which have fipples, like an ocarina), end-blown flutes without a fipple like the xiao (which also happens to have a side-blown varient). There are many, but the word is somewhat amorphous. Personally, I would call almost anything that uses a Helmholtz resonator instigated with the mouth as the initial oscillator a "flute," but will also take it to mean "orchestral flute" based on guessed context in conversation. The thing that makes clarinets and oboes not flutes is that they have one or more reeds rather than producing a direct Helmholtz resonator.
  - mrob 2y ago
    Although "Helmholtz resonator" is often used to describe a broader range of resonators than Helmholtz's original design, I think it's dubious to call fipple flutes "Helmholtz resonators". The fipple mechanism sets up an oscillating sheet of air going into and out of the pipe, which isn't present in traditional Helmholtz resonators. See: http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/how_the_flue_pipe_speaks.htm http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/how_the_flue_pipe_speaks.htm I think a better definition of a flute is a mouth-blown wind instrument with no vibrating parts.
    - IggleSniggle 2y ago
      Superb correction, thanks!
    - mrob 2y ago
      I just remembered there are East Asian flutes that use vibrating membranes to modify the sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizi_(instrument) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizi_(instrument) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegeum These are uncontroversially flutes, so the definition would have to be "mouth-blown wind instruments that generate a tone without using vibrating parts".

erickj 2y ago

With absolutely no certainty or linguistic rigor behind this observation... I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b" https://glosbe.com/en/gsw/boy https://glosbe.com/en/gsw/boy

nobody9999 2y ago
>I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b" According to Etymology Online[0]: `boy (n.) mid-13c., boie "servant, commoner, knave" (generally young and male); c. 1300, "rascal, ruffian, knave; urchin," mid-14c. as "male child before puberty" (possibly extended from the "urchin" sense). A word of unknown origin. Possibly from Old French embuie "one fettered," from Vulgar Latin imboiare, from Latin boia "leg iron, yoke, leather collar," from Greek boeiai dorai "ox hides." (Words for "boy" double as "servant, attendant" across the Indo-European map — compare Italian ragazzo, French garçon, Greek pais, Middle English knave, Old Church Slavonic otroku — and often it is difficult to say which meaning came first.) But it also appears to be identical with East Frisian boi "young gentleman," and perhaps with Dutch boef "knave," from Middle Dutch boeve, perhaps from Middle Low German buobe. This suggests a gradational relationship to babe. Another conjecture: In Old English, only the proper name Boia has been recorded. ME boi meant 'churl, servant' and (rarely) 'devil.' In texts, the meaning 'male child' does not antedate 1400. ModE boy looks like a semantic blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit ( *boi) and a baby word for 'brother' ( *bo). [Liberman] Used slightingly of young men in Middle English, also in familiar or contemptuous use of criminal toughs or men in the armed services. In some local uses "a man," without reference to age (OED lists "in Cornwall, in Ireland, in the far West of the U.S."). The meaning "male negro slave or Asian personal servant of any age" attested from c. 1600. Extended form boyo is attested from 1870. Emphatic exclamation oh, boy is attested by 1917. Boy-meets-girl "typical of a conventional romance" is from 1945; the phrase itself is from 1934 as a dramatic formula. Boy-crazy "eager to associate with males" is from 1923. A noticable number of the modern words for 'boy', 'girl', and 'child' were originally colloquial nicknames, derogatory or whimsical, in part endearing, and finally commonplace. These, as is natural, are of the most diverse, and in part obscure, origin. [Buck]" ` [0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=boy https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=boy

withinboredom 2y ago

Why does every word in English have to come from somewhere else. New words are invented all the time, duh, noob.

soneil 2y ago
New words are invented all the time, but girl, boy, dog you'd expect to be ancient concepts with ancient etymologies. 'noob' has an obvious etymology in new-neue-niwe. The idea that 'dog' doesn't blows my mind - especially since the guttural, monosyllabic utterances are often the oldest.
- marton78 2y ago
  While not as recent, the Germanic "ship" / "Schiff" / etc. has no cognate in any other Indo-European language and no obvious origin in PIE, so it is conjectured it might be derived from a pre-IE indigenous European language.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dustypotato 2y ago
Sounds plausiblel. Don't know why you're downvoted, frequently used ones are more prone to it I'd say, just because the possibility that someone thinks of or stumbles upon a new name for it is higher. Maybe Dog was the name of someones Hound and his/her family started naming so, and then a village, county , dutchy , country because it was short and convenient
- bee_rider 2y ago
  I think they have been downvoted because they’ve suggested a solution which is, while plausible, not very interesting, and done so in a tone that could be read as somewhat aggressive. Also, which we could not hope to have evidence for (except in an absence of evidence for any other theory).
Tagbert 2y ago

nobody9999 2y ago

Only tangentially related, but I've been auditing "The History of English Podcast"[0] and if this sort of thing interests you, you'll probably like that too. [0] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/

mjhay 2y ago
I highly recommend that podcast as well. The average native English speaker doesn't know much about it.
sevensor 2y ago
Fabulous podcast. Fascinating how we can use pronunciation shifts to date the arrival of a word into English, and how some words have entered the language multiple times by different routes. Also, I learned that there really was a castle in a swamp, in Wessex, to which King Alfred retreated during a particularly heavy Viking invasion.
empath75 2y ago
This is going to sound like damning with faint praise, but it's not meant that way -- this is absolutely my favorite thing to listen to while trying to fall asleep. His voice is quite soothing, and it's interesting enough to constantly hold your attention, while not being _so_ interesting that it keeps you awake, and while it's loosely organized chronologically on an episode-by-episode basis, within each episode it's sort of arranged thematically, so you can dip in and out of consciousness and not be confused as to what he's talking about, and you can pick it up the next night at some random spot and not really feel like you missed much. It also has long stretches where he's just sort of listing off words and etymologies, which are the kinds of trivial facts I love, but I think my brain also takes as a signal to turn off.
- devilbunny 2y ago
  I used to listen to the podcast when it was still young. His original goal was to do it in maybe 100 episodes or so. After he started making money from Patreon, it slowed to a crawl in terms of progressing through the history of the language. Eventually, I gave up. I’m not one of his backers, so he doesn’t owe me anything, but I would have preferred it if he did something more like Dan Carlin (there are plenty of quibbles about his historiography, but you have to admit he’s very good at storytelling), doing deep dives on various subjects instead of beating Middle and early Modern English to death. Yes, they were very important times in the language, where the mostly-comprehensible Middle English turned into the entirely-comprehensible (if you have footnotes for words whose meaning has changed and cultural references that no longer apply) early Modern English, but the language hasn’t been static since 1500.

alsetmusic 2y ago

Check out “Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme--And Other Oddities of the English Language” Great book!

euroderf 2y ago
Turning bugs into features...

SomeRndName11 2y ago

boy sounds somewhat like Turkic bala/bola ("a boy").

nick238 2y ago

Source is The Conversation that seems to have a strangely-open republication approach licensing stuff via Creative Commons BY-ND. https://theconversation.com/five-common-english-words-we-dont-know-the-origins-of-including-boy-and-dog-232299 https://theconversation.com/five-common-english-words-we-don... includes a button that just gives you the HTML and some tracking code/image.

amelius 2y ago

Purely linguistic question here. What is the word for having a sexual fantasy about someone? Since this must happen a lot, I'm wondering if all languages have a single (transitive?) verb for it. If not, then why not?

nick7376182 2y ago
Probably about a hundred different words for that in urbandictionary
1123581321 2y ago
To fancy or to daydream about someone. If English has a term for intense or explicit sexual fantasies, it’s a modern or clinical word.
- json_bourne_ 2y ago
  You said to reply to one of your threads to contact you: Check of scenestamps.com now! Added some features you might like.
  - 1123581321 2y ago
    Yes! This is getting very browsable/fun to explore. Auto-tagging/making clickable certain proper nouns like Homelander could be neat if there’s a way to detect them.
- amelius 2y ago
  Thanks, but it doesn't come really close to the meaning I was looking for. I find it difficult to believe that we don't have a good word for what 99+% of people are doing since puberty and allows also to express the object of the fantasy using a simple subject+verb+object type of sentence.
  - nine_k 2y ago
    Since sexual themes are heavily regulated or prohibited in most cultures, such a word may fail to exist, or to survive intact through the millennia. I suppose that local metaphoric and slang words, and contextually-altered expressions (like the generic "daydream" narrowed to that sense) replace it in many / most cases. Same with words for copulation (highly restricted) and even for wooing / courting, which are also pretty universal activities since times immemorial.

riffic 2y ago

There's a conjecture about boy here: https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8qdnpu/what_are_some_common_words_that_we_have_no_idea/e0k2bc8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8qdnpu/what_are_...

bloak 2y ago

Also "kill", apparently.

jihadjihad 2y ago
Seems true [0] -- as does dog. But the etymology of "boy" didn't come across as fully uncertain [1]. 0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill 1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boy

timonoko 2y ago

"Boy" comes from Japanese ボーイ(bōi). Or more generally from uralic languages, example Finnish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poika https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poika

rdlw 2y ago
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%83%9C%E3%83%BC%E3%82%A4 ボーイ: Borrowed from English boy
timonoko 2y ago
They seem to admit that Swedish and Norwegian Pojke comes from Finnish. So it came with Normen to Ængland. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pojke https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pojke