2012-06-05

muckefuck: (Default)
2012-06-05 10:17 am

WotD: scaffolding

  1. das Gerüst
  2. de steiger
  3. el andamio
  4. la bastida
  5. l'échafaudage
  6. y sgaffaldiau
  7. an scafalra
  8. rusztowanie
  9. 비계 (飛階)
  10. 腳手架 jiǎoshǒujià
Notes: The etymology of scaffold and its relatives is quite complex, a mashup of Lombardic and Old Italian that got filtered to us through Late Latin and French. Catalfalque has the same origin and the second element in both these words is the root of balcony, which should give you some notion of the phonetic changes involved.

The Sino-Korean word is literally "flying steps". By comparison, the contemporary Chinese is the prosaic "foot-hand-framework". With typical terseness, the DRAE describes andamio as a compound of andar "walk" and -amio, and I needed to go to Corominas to determine what the source of this suffix was. (He considers it a variant of -amo, found in only one other current word: aramio "field plowed and left fallow".)