Iskemle, not Constantinople

I'll have to look again to confirm, but I believe somewhere in Lewis' The Turkish language reform : a catastrophic success (highly recommended!) he mentions something about Turkish iskemle "chair" being taken from "French". I found this curious, since I can't think of any piece of furniture with a French name remotely close to iskemle. Turning it over in my head, however, I was struck by the resemblance to German Schemel "stool"; could both stem from the same source?

In fact they do, but French was not involved. German Schemel is the outcome of a West Germanic borrowing of Latin scamellum, a diminutive of scamnum "bench". Advanced students will recognise in this the source of our own "shambles" (through a much-commented-upon semantic shift of "benches" > "tables for the display of goods, esp. meat" > "slaughtering benches" > "slaughterhouse" > "scene of ruin; mess").

But the Teutons weren't the only ones to find the lure of the word irresistible. Liddell and Scott show that the Latin scamnus was borrowed into Greek as σκάμνος, which they equate in meaning to σκίμπους "small couch; hammock". The regular neuter diminutive would be σκαμνίον, which survives into Modern Greek as σκαμνί "stool". And this--to come full circle--seems to be where the Turks loaned iskemle from. (The phonetics match up well once you allow for a shift of /a/ > /e/--either due to i-umlaut or a need to show the non-uvular quality of the /k/--and dissimilation of /n/ to /l/ after /m/ [cf. informal English "chim(b)ley" for "chimney"].)

The meaning of iskemle, incidentally, seems to be drifting a bit in Modern Turkish. The online dictionary I use defines it as "1. chair (without arms); stool. 2. small coffee table; end table." An image search still brings up mostly chairs (some with arms, the definition be damned), but a more eclectic and experimentally artsy selection than sandalye, the more common term. At least, I assume it's more common based on the fact that this is the title of the entry in the Turkish Wikipedia corresponding to "Chair", and iskemle does not redirect to it.

(And the etymology of sandalye? Wiktionary says "Arapça" [i.e. Arabic], but the only similar term in the Wehr dictionary is sandāl "anvil".)

Snow report

It's snowing again now, great fluffy flakes even bigger and prettier than the ones that fell during the Superbowl. The last for a while, if the weather report is to be believed. Our run of near-freezing temps is due to come to an end tonight as it actually gets cold for a change.

I feel bad that I never did come through on a post-snowpocalyptic account for the benefit of lil_m_moses. I really didn't see much of the chaos myself. If not for my brief trip to pick up furnace filters around noontime on Wednesday, I might have stayed shut in all day. By then, a couple of my condomates had already snowblown our walks and quite a few people had been out shoveling; the only stretch I really had to plunge my boots into was right along the edge of the park. (This was quite a change from when monshu left in the morning and his bootprints were the only ones out there.)

As I was returning home, though, I saw a couple of people get into an SUV parked opposite our computer room window and attempt to drive off, so I stopped to watch. To my surprise, they made it through the intersection before getting mired again. (At this point, a woman with a Caribbean accent who was dragging a small child on a sled through the middle of road turned to me and said, "This isn't weather to get in your car in drive!") I set the filters inside the entryway so I could reconnoiter the roadway ahead, since monshu had told me over the phone that he had to turn back when he hit the barrier of plowed snow at the crest of the slope.

(Yes, we live on one of the only streets in all of Chicago with a noticeable incline. And it was precisely this street that someone was trying to drive up in a half-metre of unplowed snow.)

To my surprise, Ashland was almost immaculate. Obviously a considerable amount of cleaning and salting had taken place since 5:30 that morning. Between there and the SUV, however, some serious drifting had taken place. Alongside the playlot, cars were buried up to the level of their windows. I clomped into the street here, clambered up a four-foot drift, and waved to the guys who were struggling to shovel out their car. They paid me no heed. I went inside for a bit and missed seeing them slam into it, but I did come back out to gloat a bit. "Did you not see me waving to you from on top that four-foot drift?" I asked one of them. "Hey, talk to him" he replied, indicating an older man. Someone asked the latter, "Where are you going to go?" "I'll park it in the [hardware store] parking lot," he said, as if he had no particular destination in mind.

monshu arrived home not too much later and I related the story, pointing out the car from the front windows. By now, there were a half dozen people aiding the effort, one of them with a snowblower. I kept checking on them regularly and eventually watch the car struggle the last twenty metres to Ashland and turn the corner--a mere two hours after they'd left a parking space just over a block away. By nightfall, a couple other cars had managed the same, and later that evening a bobcat came down the street and eliminated the challenge.

When I went into work the next day, I was impressed by the heroic job most of my neighbours had done. Even the indifferent snow-clearers had--for the most part--really stepped up their game. Three brownstones in a row on the north side of the avenue just west of Sheridan formed the chief exception. I was even more impressed by some of the snow forts I saw. One yard had been subdivided into three of them--it looked like the foundation of a neolithic settlement. Another, rounded like a huge chimney, stands at the next intersection from our place--and will for weeks, given the current conditions.