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[personal profile] muckefuck
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?
Tags:
Date: 2006-03-28 07:25 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] niemandsrose.livejournal.com
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?
Date: 2006-03-28 07:28 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
I'd rather have a "screw" in there.
Date: 2006-03-28 09:11 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
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.
Date: 2006-03-28 09:16 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] niemandsrose.livejournal.com
So your gripe with French is that it's...not English?
Date: 2006-03-28 09:28 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
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?
Date: 2006-03-28 09:32 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] niemandsrose.livejournal.com
Likewise, you've lost me too. I've been joking with you all afternoon.
Date: 2006-03-28 09:38 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
This is not a laughing matter, this is linguistics! PIE has no reconstructed root for "to laugh".
Date: 2006-03-28 11:46 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] cpratt.livejournal.com
That's not a "corkpull" though - that's an Ah-So. I've never heard anyone say the words "corkpull," period.
Date: 2006-03-29 12:40 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] aadroma.livejournal.com
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 ::
Date: 2006-03-29 03:03 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
Vide supra. I never said I had any problem with this construction in Romance. When [livejournal.com profile] 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.")
Date: 2006-03-31 09:28 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
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.
Date: 2006-03-31 10:03 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
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.
Date: 2006-04-01 02:25 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] stoutfellow.livejournal.com
Huh. I did not know that.

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