Interesting Etymologies

[vijayjohn]

พิซซ่า, a Thai adaptation of the word "pizza", is slang for the crime of lèse majesté in Thailand. Section 112 is the part of the penal code which covers this crime and 1112 is the telephone number for a restaurant called The Pizza Company. (The Thai government has been known to apply this statute very draconianly so it doesn't surprise me that people would need a coded euphemism in order to avoid falling afoul of it.)

It took me a minute to figure out how this word said /ts/ in the middle and not /ss/ until I remembered that written /s/ is /t/ at the end of a syllable in Thai. I wonder if it's spelled with the same letter twice to mimic the <zz> in the middle. If so that's a neat trick.

Oh, wow, I didn't even think of that!

Another word this reminded me of is how the Thai name for English is อังกฤษ, which is /ʔaŋ˧.krit̚˨˩/ but written with the last letter being meant for historical /ɕ/. This sound doesn't exist in Thai anymore (or maybe it never did) and this letter is normally read /s/. This letter also doesn't normally come at the end of a syllable and as far as I know this word has never been pronounced with /ɕ/, but it's spelled as if it did because of the English pronunciation. Thai does this with other modern borrowings, I think. Kind of neat IMO. It's like how English and other languages have <ph>, <ch> and <rh> etc. in words from Greek for no reason other than etymology.

(I tried to learn Thai script last summer. I wouldn't say I was successful, but it sure was interesting.)

I thought ษ was historical /ʂ/ given ภาษา.

[mōdgethanc]

I thought ษ was historical /ʂ/ given ภาษา.

Oh, I think you're right. Thai has so many letters that are homophones that it's easy to get them mixed up. I mean, they have six ways to write /tʰ/ alone. Also I would bet the letters for retroflex sounds were never different phonemes from the alveolars anyway.

As I said:

I tried to learn Thai script last summer. I wouldn't say I was successful, but it sure was interesting.)

I got as far as going over the consonants a few times and began to learn the vowels, then saw how complex the rules for finding the tones are, and noped out right there. But if you're into etymological spelling, Thai is quite a rabbithole.

[mōdgethanc]

I always thought the word "anthem" came right from Greek. It turns out it did, but through this route: Greek ἀντίφωνα antíphōna > Latin antiphōna > Old English antefn > Middle English anteme. At some point the /nt/ became /nθ/, which isn't a regular sound change in the history of English but also not that odd I guess. Word-internal <f> (which is [v] here in Old English) sometimes drops out in Middle English words, like in "lord" (OE hlāford /ˈhlɑːford/ [ˈl̥ɑːvord] > ME /ˈlɔːvərd/ > /ˈlɔːwərd/ > /ˈlɔːrd/). I can see how /vn/ > /wn/ > /m/ could happen.

The kicker is that the word was then loaned from English back into Greek as ανθέμιο anthémio with the modern meaning of "anthem". (That's more like what I thought the original word would look like.) Its original meaning was a kind of hymn that is sung by a choir after a verse is read, a lot like what Catholics call a "responsorial psalm". This makes sense when you think how its Greek roots are English "anti-" and "-phone" meaning "against" and "sound".

This makes it one of the very few words from Middle English that found its way into Greek. Interestingly there was already an unrelated word ανθέμιο in Greek, meaning a kind of flowery pattern used in art and architecture. ἄνθος ánthos is Greek for "flower", which also shows up in English chrysanthemum ("golden flower", χρυσός chrysós "gold") and "anther" (the pollen-bearing stamen of a flower).

Another neat tidbit is that "hymn" (Greek ὕμνος hymnos) has been loaned into a bunch of European languages with the meaning of "(national) anthem" like French hymne (nationale), German Nationalhymne, Italian inno nazionale, Russian гимн gimn, Polish hymn, and many more. I guess there's a semantic link between "hymn" (song that is sung in praise of a deity) and "anthem" (song that is sung in praise of a country).

One of the few European languages that does have a word with native roots for "anthem" is Dutch volkslied. In German Volkslied is a word as well but it means "folk song". Icelandic also has þjóðsöngur. In English we could calque this as "thede-song" since "folk song" is already taken.

[sa wulfs]

My guess would be that antefn was reanalyzed as a variant of the unetymological form antemn under the influence of stemn~stefn, "voice; stem, tree stalk", where the variation predated the Old English period. The Old English translation of Bede's "Ecclesiastical History" has ontemn, with a>o before a nasal which usually indicates that it's not a very late text. It would seem that the words for "voice" and for "stem" had partially merged, so both stefn (*stebnō) and stemn (*stamniz) occur with both meanings (they had different grammatical genders though), which might have reinforced the reanalysis of antefn.

[mōdgethanc]

[vijayjohn]

In Indonesian, the word estafet /ɛs.ta.fɛt/ can mean either a relay race or, colloquially (according to Wiktionary), "traveling in relays, such that one can take over from another." Indonesian borrowed this from Dutch estafette /ˌɛs.taːˈfɛ.tə/ 'relay race', which borrowed it from French estafette (pronounced the same way as the Indonesian word) 'courier, (military) dispatch rider', which borrowed it from Italian staffetta 'courier, runner, relay race, relay team'. Staffetta is formed from staffa 'stirrup', which is borrowed from the Lombardic word stapho 'stirrup', which comes from Proto-Germanic *stapiz 'step', which is also where the English word step comes from.

That's a lot of borrowings (even though of course there are much more extreme cases) for a word that seems very context-specific, and I kind of like how one step turned into an entire relay race.

[Linguaphile]

How the Estonian word for "trash, rubbish" is related to the English word for "bridge":

The Low German word
brugge bridge

related to the English word
bridge

and the related Low German verb
bruggen to pave with stones or cover with wooden planks,

in Estonian became the word
prügitama to pave with stones, sand, wood, or debris

from which came the word
prügi garbage, rubbish,

originally referring to the small pieces that were used for paving roads, but now simply referring to trash.

[Linguaphile]

These two synonyms in Spanish:

audacia audacity, boldness
osadía audacity, boldness

The first is from Latin audācia and the second is derived from the related word audēre, more specifically from its frequentative ausāre.
The result is two synonyms which appear to have metathesis (reversal of /d/ and /s/) since aside from the positions of the consonants they otherwise have quite similar pronunciations in Latin American Spanish: [au̯ˈð̞asja] and [osaˈð̞ia], and a common etymology. (The the idea here being that, although the vowels and stress patterns are a bit different, it can be over-simplified for the purpose of showing the similarities: /audasia/ and /ausadia/ .)
But the /d/ changed to /s/ for the frequentative in Latin where there was no metathesis involved, and the /s/ in "audacia" is part of the root while the /d/ of "osadía" is part of a suffix, so while the similarities between the two words are a reflection of their common etymology, the metathesis itself is coincidental.