For monshu, bunj, and e.

Electric blue for me

Here's my etymological discovery for the day:

For years, I knew the Welsh word trydan was a neologism for "electricity" without having any clue as to how it was derived. My gut feeling was that -an was a suffix and the root was *tryd or *trwd, even though I don't know of such a morpheme.

I finally looked it up in the Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru today and discovered my misdivision: It's actually try- "per-" (an intensive prefix) attached to tân "fire". (The phonological adjustments--soft mutation after the prefix and shortening of the vowel in an atonic syllable--are regular.)

Of course, like most neologisms, it has some competition, in this case from the English borrowing lectric. In fact, the context in which I first learned of the word was in an essay discussing why trydan had failed to replace lectric when it was first introduced. It's fortunes seem to have recovered in the meantime, with trydan and its derivatives being much more common today than lectric.

So many of the languages I'm familiar with have borrowed some derivative of Greek elektron to designate electricity that it's always refreshing to find one which hasn't. Icelandic, of course, makes a fetish of relying on native elements and so it's no surprise to find them using rafmagn "amber power". Israel, like Wales, has an agency dedicated to finding native substitutes for English words; in this case, they've made the curious decision to repurpose the Biblical word ḥašmal, an obscure term which shows up only in Ezekiel in the context of the world's first recorded UFO sighting. (The traditional gloss is "amber" or "glowing metal"; Classically-informed readers will recognise that "amber" is also the etymological meaning of Greek elektron.)

I don't know the history of Finnish sähkö, but there's a suspicious resemblance to sähke "wire". Other languages (e.g. Arabic, Hungarian, Swahili) just extended the meaning of a native morpheme for "lightning". This is the original referent of Chinese 電 diàn, which then gets borrowed with the extended sense into Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

Guessing game

Some time ago, I gurgled about the foreign language children's books that had rolled in, some of which I expected to make it across my desk eventually. Well, today I got my first batch: The non-Roman scripts no one else could handle. Which turned out to Arabo-Persian, Japanese, Korean, and...well, I'll let you figure this one out yourselves. I'll give you the first line of the text and you tell me what you think it is:

Хадны суусар шөнөжин бөгтгөнөж мод зөөв.

Stumped? ( Click here for the translation )