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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.
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.
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You may find it interesting to know that the alternative world in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy uses "elektron" for amber and "ambaric" for electricity.
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In other news, Finnish makes me swoony.
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This is precisely how I feel; never read the Harry Potter books, so I guess I can't back it up with personal evidence. ;) Haven't heard of the Abhorsen thing though-- perhaps I should look into it!
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It likely though has roots in the words sähistä 'to hiss, to bustle (as in a throng of people), hurry' which is also related to the word sähähtää above, and säen 'spark (of fire)'. It has since spawned other related derived words like sähköinen 'electric (adj.)', sähköttää 'to telegraph, wire' (sähkö+causative), sähköistää 'to electrify', and sähke 'wire', among others. Also, the word for email includes it as a compound; sähköposti.
Interesting! Also kind of impressive that it didnt sneak in as a loan word from Swedish or something, but then there have been times when Finnish is rather successful like Icelandic at making words from native roots as opposed to borrowing them; tietokone 'computer' and kännykkä 'cell phone' included.
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Curious -- when was this essay you read written? Trydan seems to fit better to the language than lectric anyways ...
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
Tell me about it! Imagine how disappointed I was to find out that in Russian you had электричество , elektrichestva, in Armenian էլեկտրականություն, electrakanut'yun, and even Turkish had the ho-hum elektrik, and Hungarian even worse with elektromos...
The only "interesting" one that I could mention here is Cherokee, which uses ᎠᎾᎦᎵᏍᎩ, anagalisdi, conjugated into a gerund form from the word for lightning, ᎠᎾᎦᎵᎠ, anagalia.
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