Unhelpful equivalences

[muckefuck]

I couldn't help but notice that aadroma missed another installment of Multilingual Monday. If this was for lack of fresh ideas, here's a juicy one: Ever reached for a bilingual dictionary to help you make sense of an unfamiliar foreign word only to encounter a gloss that was every bit as unfamiliar? I asked monshu if he'd ever had this experience and he complained about reading Balzac's description of 19th century carriages, which he would often describe in loving detail using technical terminology that was every bit as foreign to the GWO in English as it was in the French of any era.

This was on my mind recently because of a series of cryptic glosses in Bun-Ghaeilge. In order of appearance, they were:

banbh bonham
stuca stook
camógaíocht camogie

That last one really takes the cake, doesn't it? What all of these had in common was that (a) my Irish-English dictionary glossed them exactly the same way and (b) my American Heritage didn't contain the English "equivalents".

As it turns out, every one represents a borrowing either to English from Irish or vice-versa. Banbh "piglet" is pronounced in two syllables in most varieties of Irish and apparently the northern form is close enough to "bonham" to get folk-etymologised in this way. Stuca "shock [of wheat, etc.] went the other way, from Middle English to Irish. And then there's camogie, a neologism birthed concomitantly with the Camogie Association of Ireland in 1904. The relevant relevant Wikipedia article has a decent account of its etymology, although it elides mention of the charming coincidence that camán "hurley stick" is a masculine noun whereas camóg "camogie stick" is feminine.

An example from last year (and another language) is German Tanga, helpfully glossed by my Oxford-Duden as "tanga".