Jun. 27th, 2007 02:03 pm
Twinkle, twinkle, little bug
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muckefuckDefining firsts is always more trouble than I think. I've been putting off another post on cicadas until my first sighting. Actually, I've seen a tonne of them already at the Oak Brook Polo Grounds, but I'm not counting that since it was a special expedition to the depths of the 'burbs. That is, I mentally redefined "first sighting" to mean "first sighting in the city". Yesterday morning, I saw several dead cicadas on the path outside my place of work, but I decided not to count them either since, well, they're dead.
So what "first cicada sighting" really means to me is something like "first sighting of a live cicada within the boundaries of Cook County"--unless, of course, the next experience which fulfils these conditions fails to match in some important detail the prototypical sighting experience I'm carrying around in my head. So it was some nights back when I caught a firefly at the door to my lobby, carried it to the bushes outside, and set it free. Sounds exactly like one of the items on my summer checklist--except that he wasn't blinking! A firefly that isn't blinking is just some stupid bug.
From that point of view, I didn't see my first fireflies until last night when I was walking home from dinner with Chef Jeff. I asked him, "What do you call them in Thai?" and he replied, "หิ่งห้อย" (hìnghɔ̂y). "Is that hoy like in hoy thaak?" I asked. He laughed and started to say, "You're the only falang I know who..." The upshot is, no, the hoy in หอยทาก hɔ̌ythâ:k is pronounced in a different tone. It means "shell" or "shellfish" (or, in slang, "vagina"); ห้อย hɔ̂y is a verb meaning "hang, suspend".
"So what does หิ่ง hìng mean?" He didn't know, but after some time with my reference works, I have a guess: It could be a borrowing from Chinese. The Standard Chinese word is 螢火蟲 yínghuǒchóng; the last two characters are literally "fire insect" and represent a disambiguating extension of the first character, which by itself means "firefly" in Literary Chinese. Karlgren reconstructs the Ancient Chinese pronunciation as ɣiʷeŋ in a low tone. (Equivalent to Pulleyblank ɣwèjŋ, IIRC.) My Vietnamese dictionary gives the reading huỳnh, which IMO makes hìng a plausible southern Chinese dialect pronunciation. (Most Chinese loans in Thai come through a Min dialect such as Teochew.) And this would explain why it's morphologically opaque in modern Thai.
I also got carried away and looked up several more translations. The majority are, as you expect, parallel to English: A word for "light", "fire", "glimmer", etc. modifying a word for "bug", "fly", "insect", etc. (e.g. Leuchtkäfer, vuurvliegje, mouche à feu, cuca de llum, ateşböceği, etc.) But there are some surprises.
The Koreans deserve a special booby prize for designating such a charming, aesthetically-pleasing insect with the term 개똥벌레 /kāy-ttong-pelley/ or "dog turd fly". I can't even guess what they're thinking--though perhaps such cultural touchstones as the short film Doggy Poo and the use of 개똥이 /kāyttongi/ as a term of endearment for babies indicate that this usage isn't as pejorative as it would seem to my American eyes.
All the same, I think I would prefer the archaic term 반되 pantoy, which today survives only in the compound 반딧불 /pantispul/ "firefly light". I don't know its etymology, but I suspect some connexion with 반득 /pantuk/ meaning "glimmering, flickering". There may even be a relationship between these words and Japanese ホタル hotaru "firefly", although Martin also proposes an etymology combining ho- "fire" (cf. 火影 hokage "firelight", etc.) with a root ter- or tar- meaning "shine".
If the Koreans ever want to dump their dog turd word for a new term, they could always steal one from Portuguese. According to Wikipedia, Portuguese names for "firefly" include pirilampo, vaga-lume, caga-lume, caga-fogo, cudelume, luzecu, luze-luze, lampíride, lampírio, lampiro, lumeeira, lumeeiro, mosca-de-fogo, noctiluz, pirífora, salta-martim, uauá. At least four of these incorporate the word "shit" or "arse", so they're in the same ballpark.
So what "first cicada sighting" really means to me is something like "first sighting of a live cicada within the boundaries of Cook County"--unless, of course, the next experience which fulfils these conditions fails to match in some important detail the prototypical sighting experience I'm carrying around in my head. So it was some nights back when I caught a firefly at the door to my lobby, carried it to the bushes outside, and set it free. Sounds exactly like one of the items on my summer checklist--except that he wasn't blinking! A firefly that isn't blinking is just some stupid bug.
From that point of view, I didn't see my first fireflies until last night when I was walking home from dinner with Chef Jeff. I asked him, "What do you call them in Thai?" and he replied, "หิ่งห้อย" (hìnghɔ̂y). "Is that hoy like in hoy thaak?" I asked. He laughed and started to say, "You're the only falang I know who..." The upshot is, no, the hoy in หอยทาก hɔ̌ythâ:k is pronounced in a different tone. It means "shell" or "shellfish" (or, in slang, "vagina"); ห้อย hɔ̂y is a verb meaning "hang, suspend".
"So what does หิ่ง hìng mean?" He didn't know, but after some time with my reference works, I have a guess: It could be a borrowing from Chinese. The Standard Chinese word is 螢火蟲 yínghuǒchóng; the last two characters are literally "fire insect" and represent a disambiguating extension of the first character, which by itself means "firefly" in Literary Chinese. Karlgren reconstructs the Ancient Chinese pronunciation as ɣiʷeŋ in a low tone. (Equivalent to Pulleyblank ɣwèjŋ, IIRC.) My Vietnamese dictionary gives the reading huỳnh, which IMO makes hìng a plausible southern Chinese dialect pronunciation. (Most Chinese loans in Thai come through a Min dialect such as Teochew.) And this would explain why it's morphologically opaque in modern Thai.
I also got carried away and looked up several more translations. The majority are, as you expect, parallel to English: A word for "light", "fire", "glimmer", etc. modifying a word for "bug", "fly", "insect", etc. (e.g. Leuchtkäfer, vuurvliegje, mouche à feu, cuca de llum, ateşböceği, etc.) But there are some surprises.
The Koreans deserve a special booby prize for designating such a charming, aesthetically-pleasing insect with the term 개똥벌레 /kāy-ttong-pelley/ or "dog turd fly". I can't even guess what they're thinking--though perhaps such cultural touchstones as the short film Doggy Poo and the use of 개똥이 /kāyttongi/ as a term of endearment for babies indicate that this usage isn't as pejorative as it would seem to my American eyes.
All the same, I think I would prefer the archaic term 반되 pantoy, which today survives only in the compound 반딧불 /pantispul/ "firefly light". I don't know its etymology, but I suspect some connexion with 반득 /pantuk/ meaning "glimmering, flickering". There may even be a relationship between these words and Japanese ホタル hotaru "firefly", although Martin also proposes an etymology combining ho- "fire" (cf. 火影 hokage "firelight", etc.) with a root ter- or tar- meaning "shine".
If the Koreans ever want to dump their dog turd word for a new term, they could always steal one from Portuguese. According to Wikipedia, Portuguese names for "firefly" include pirilampo, vaga-lume, caga-lume, caga-fogo, cudelume, luzecu, luze-luze, lampíride, lampírio, lampiro, lumeeira, lumeeiro, mosca-de-fogo, noctiluz, pirífora, salta-martim, uauá. At least four of these incorporate the word "shit" or "arse", so they're in the same ballpark.
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I haven't seen any since then, and still none in my backyard.
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