muckefuck | Ex uno plures

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Ex uno plures

One of my favourite examples of both the commonalities and divergences between the modern Romance languages:

Catalan: llevataps
Spanish: sacacorchos
Portuguese: saca-rolhas
French: tire-bouchon
Italian: cavatappi

All five terms mean the same thing: corkscrew. All five are compounds formed in the same way: finite verb + noun, lit. "it removes corks/caps/plugs". But the actual words are different in each case. Spanish and Portuguese agree on the verb (sacar "take out"), but differ when it comes to the corks. Italian and Catalan agree on what to call the corks (while disagreeing on what the plurals should be), but use different words for removing them (cavare "take out" vs. llevar "lift"). And the French are never happy unless they're doing everything their own way. Not only do they use completely different words for both "take out" and "cork", but they don't put the second in the plural like everyone else. So whereas the other words are invariable, tire-bouchon has the plural tire-bouchons. Of course, since final <s> is silent in French anyway, it ends up being a distinction without a difference. (C'est tout typique, non?)

("What about Romanian?" I hear you ask. Ever the copycat, they don't have their own word. They just borrow the French, make one or two orthographic adjustments, and say tirbuşon. Slackers.)

Update #1: And my darlings, the Friulians, just don't know which way to go. Do they want to lamely copy the French, like their kin to the northeast, and use tirebusson? Or do they want their own impenetrable little compound, ğhavestropuj? (From ğhavâ, a cognate to Italian cavare even if it doesn't look it, and the plural of stropul, whose affiliations are anyone's guess.)

Update #2: And what of those precious little Rumontsches? Could they possibly have a different term for each standard dialect in their little canton?

Sursilvan: tilastappuns
Sutsilvan: tiraclacùns
Surmiran: teiracucungs
Puter: tiracucuns
Vallader: tiracucuns

Ah, so close, little dudes, but no cigar! (What is this with Vallader piggybacking on Puter all the time?) The newish unified standard, Rumantsch Grischun, figures that two out of five is as good as it gets and goes with tiracucuns.

Update #3: Occitan, forever balancing your French heart with your Catalan limbs. Tira-tap. Verb from the former, noun from the latter (but singular, as in French).

Update #4: In Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum), Belbo introduces the other principles to the Piedmontese expression "Ma gavte la nata" or "Be so kind as to remove the cork." Does this mean that the locals would call a corkscrew at gavanate?

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My impression was that final s in French still participated in liason, thus producing plural marking on the beginning of the subsequent word in some contexts. But I don't have much exposure to colloquial spoken modern French, so I could be wrong.

Depends on the following word beginning with a vowel or not, yes. I have trouble imagining a context in which the word immediately following "tire-bouchons" is not a verb (e.g. Ces tire-bouchons sont cassés"), or where the verb marking it as plural doesn't show up in the sentence somewhere (e.g. "Ils sont cassés, ces tire-bouchons").

p.s. Daniel, what's your problem with calling it a "pull-plug", hm?

I'd rather have a "screw" in there.

Seriously, my problem is that this particular form of composition violates the conventions of English compounding. Like most Germanic languages, it's strongly head-final both in noun phrases and nominal compounds. I suspect the vast majority of native speakers would expect "pull-plug" to be a kind of plug, not something which removes them. (Cf.: a drain plug plugs drains, it doesn't drain plugs.)

However, English does have a small class of noun-verb compounds (e.g. buzz-stomp/buzz-kill), so reversing the order (i.e. plug-pull) might work. In fact, we do have "corkpull" for a type of cork-removing device which doesn't involve a screw.

So your gripe with French is that it's...not English?

Now you've lost me. You asked about pull plug, not tire-bouchon. What makes you think I have any particular gripe with the latter?

Likewise, you've lost me too. I've been joking with you all afternoon.

This is not a laughing matter, this is linguistics! PIE has no reconstructed root for "to laugh".

That's not a "corkpull" though - that's an Ah-So. I've never heard anyone say the words "corkpull," period.

violates the conventions of English compounding

Whoa, whoa, whoa ... why would English even matter here? Unless, say, Spanish started using a bizarre import word like "scrúcorc", English doesn't matter here.

It describes exactly what it is. What does it do? Saca corchos. What about that can opener? Abra latas. And that puzzle? Rompe cabezas. Makes perfect sense to me. :: shrug ::

Vide supra. I never said I had any problem with this construction in Romance. When

niemandsrose said "pull-plug", I thought she was proposing importing it into English, where it doesn't work. If she had said "What's your problem with sacacorchos?" I would've replied, "I don't have a problem with sacacorchos."

(P.S.: I think you mean abrelatas, though I do like the concept of an abralatas. "Well, it might open them and, then again, it might not. We can't say for sure yet.")

It seems to me that English has changed, in this respect, relatively recently; consider such V+N compounds as "pinchpenny" and "pickpocket". I think this used to be a productive form, but it's been superseded by N+V+er.

Except that compounds with -er aren't that recent a development. Peacemaker, for example, first occurs only a few decades after pinchpenny and well before makepeace or pickpocket.

Simple agent nouns in -er go back to Old English and compound occupational terms (e.g. bellmaker, bookbinder, etc.) are common by 1400. Compounds without -er (e.g. wainwright, shepherd, etc.) are even older, with attestations before 1000. (These may appear to be N-V, but they're actually N-N; before the adoption of -er from Latin, the Germanic method of deriving agent nouns was to make weak nouns from verb stems.)

By contrast, I can't find an example of one of these V-N compounds from earlier than 1362 (cutpurse); I don't remember ever seeing one in Old English. It seems to have a been always a less common means of derivation that existed side-by-side with N-V-er for a while and has now almost fallen out of use.

Huh. I did not know that.

I love reading all these things about language. Sometimes it makes me wish I went into linguistics. Apropros of nothing, I have a CD of a group from Friuli who sing in Friulan. Threw me for a loop when I thought it was Italian and tried to find translations.

Isn't -stropuj the -tappi?

Not at all. If those are cognates, how do you explain the appearance of /s/ and /r/ in the Friulian form?

The Friulian cognate of Italian tappo is simply tap, but the meaning is "wedge, notch" rather than "cap".

Could've fooled me. I think I'll start calling cavatappi pasta "cava-stroppy"--

If you allow that degree of laxitude, you're going to be flooded with false hits.

Just building an idiolect, buddy.

I meant about the phonetic matches when you're trying to determine word relationships. If two consonants in common is enough, well then, that really opens the door.

When it comes to what you call your pasta in the privacy of your own home, I have no right to an opinion.

Leave those friulani alone. They were Austrian for a while, and even now some of them are Slovenian.

BTW, my favorite-named kitchen tool is a cavatutti a deep wire basket with a handle, perfect for lifting things out of liguids.

The French do not use corkscrews exclusivey. There's that silly thing with two curved/flat strips that Frenchmen insist work beautifully when you know they just want to emphasize their distinctively different nature. Tirez le bouchon, sucka!

The best parts of Italy were all Austrian for a while. (Don't let my half-Neapolitan sister-in-law know I said that.) Friuli was Venetian for even longer, which also counts for an awful lot in my book.

When I was a child, I was a cavatutti. Just ask my mother about the incident with the sandwich bags.

That silly French thing you're talking about, is it what

cpratt is calling an "Ah-So" and what the website calls a "corkpull"? I think I may have gotten one of those to work exactly once in my life.

I always have to trot out this construction in order to explain to non-Spanish speakers why chupacabras is a perfectly grammatical singular noun...

What is the plural of it then? chupancabras? :)

No, Spanish, like English, has an elabourate system of distinctive collective nouns for various beasts. To make it perfectly clear that more than one chupacabras is involved, you would speak of una cabronada de chupacabras.

i enjoyed this post very much

We aims tuh please.

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