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".

Comments

[porysski.livejournal.com]

Well, St Louis has a camógaíocht league, so I didn't have to guess on that one. Otherwise, I'd have had no idea.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Wow! Last I lived there, the most obscure organised sport was still cricket! (Despite the long history of Gaels in St. Louis, the current GAA is apparently barely 6 years old. I guess the Turnervereine didn't make any impression on my Irish ancestors.)

[porysski.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if the camógaíocht league ever really got off the ground, since the hurley league is co-ed anyway. I think that there is still a separate league, but I don't know anyone playing in it (As opposed to hurlers, of which there are 3 in my 4-apartment building)

[cpratt.livejournal.com]

Tanga? Huh. Gloss rhymes with "butt floss," so I guess it's appropriate...

[aadroma.livejournal.com]

Hehehe, no, it's not for lack of ideas -- I'd been taking notes for quite a nice write-up on other unique verb forms (yay Hungarian textbook!) and even jotted down even more fun I've recently had with Chinese-based writing systems and direction (just when you thought that was all tapped out) -- but I had decided to not take any attention away from my current baby, the Kuma Karuta project, thus this will be posted next week in its appropriate schedule.

Obviously the whole "don't distract from the project" idea, however, has so far been a dismal failure as a whopping two people have shown interest in it, damn it all. :: laugh ::

Though now that you mention this, I must make mention of all of the times that I've had something similar to what you've described happen to me!

Isn't Tanga the first half of that movie from the 80's? You know, Tanga and Cash?

[stoutfellow.livejournal.com]

Well, at least I knew what a stook was.

Heinlein's use of the word "stilyagi" in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress puzzled me for a long time. I finally found a Russian-English dictionary that listed "stilyag", but it defined it as "teddyboy", which was not very enlightening. (I eventually tracked the latter word down.)

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Tanga as in skimpy swimsuits?

[pne.livejournal.com]

Probably as in skimpy briefs for a woman.

What do you call them? Strings? Thongs?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I distinctly remember reading that Japanese katsuo was translated as "bonito".

Though that's listed in monolingual English dictionaries, at least; it merely wasn't in my (active or passive) vocabulary at the time. (And, I would claim, it still isn't, beyond being "some kind of fish".)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

that's my ref too, from Portuguese. I had no idea the Germans were in on this. I wonder which came first.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The Angolans. It's a borrowing of Kimbundo ntanga "loincloth".

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

fantastic - and there's bundo(a) right there.

My adventures in dictionary land are all nautical right now, and there's some obscure etymology right there. I keep thinking I've found Dutch or Spanish roots for words used in English and then I discover that the equivalent terms in Dutch or Spanish are completely different, or that the word in question is originally Arabic, Persian, Malay, Berber or Malagasi. On op of that, even when I have the English word and a detailed definition, half the time I'm none the wiser.