A book I’m reading at the moment tells of some useful expressions in the language of the Faero Islands.
For example: Skeinkjari, ‘the man who goes among wedding guests, offering them drink’ Brenna krakk, ‘burning the three-legged stool after turning down a suitor’ Fjall, ‘to go into the hills to work among the sheep’ Skadahvalur, ‘whale-meat sold at auction to defray the cost of damages to boats’ Vevlingur, ‘a cord worn around the sleeve when digging for puffins’
The book is a mildly amusing one in a Bill Brysonesque way, and it is possible that the author is making us game for a laugh with this glossary, though he claims he got it from a 1948 book about the islands.
But it set me to thinking: do you good colleagues, so expert in linguistics, have favourite expressions in other languages?
For myself I seem to remember a single word in Sanskrit, running to a large number of Devanagiri characters, which means, “Freshly perfumed from the recently having been taken evening bath”, but alas I’ve mislaid the grammar, or I would verify this for you first.
Maybe this is a little offtopic - mainly since I don’t have any unusually hilarious words from foreign tongues to add - but I am friends with two Faeroese, if that’s the term for citizens of the Faeroe Islands. Samal and Snora are their names, minus the accents that I don’t have time to hunt down, and I’m sure they could verify the terms you provide.
By all accounts, the Faeroe Islands are an edenic exception to the crime, hatred, prejudice, insanity, and cynicism of the world at large. Of course, the only accounts I’ve had were provided by the two very enthusiastic Faeroese that I happen to be friends with.
Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have a verb “need” - modern Hebrew borrowed it from Aramaic and it retains some Aramaic forms. Also, Modern Hebrew has two perfectly synonomous (as far as I can tell) words for “here” - poh and kan- kan also is from Aramaic and preserves an alternative spelling (kaf aleph nun sofit) which is Talmudic rather than historical in order to differentiate it from “kein” (kaf nun sofit) “yes” or “indeed.”
My faviorite expressions in English, from the linguistic point of view, are “Big deal” and “Yeah right”. I giggle at the scholar who, when English is a long dead language, tries to figure out how those two expressions work in context.
My father says that Japanese has no word for “must” - instead they say something like “If you do not -----, it will not do.” My father has asked quite a few Japanese people about this, and they say yep, that’s how you say it.
I am trying to think of something in Dutch to add to this discussion but I can’t yet.
There are all kinds of peculiarities in English along the line of the ones GGG mentioned. Value and price have similar meanings (not the same, similar.) What about value-less and price-less?
[size=150]μὴ γενοὶτο[/size][face=Arial][/face] has to be my favorite Biblical Greek one that I use quite often…nothing like a good emphatic negative…English just doesn’t have as good of negatives as Greek
I have a German friend at work that I say das tut mir leit to often…she’s often having a bad day though!
In English…I say “it’s hotter than gehenna” quite often, which is a watered down way of saying it! “In theory” has become one of my favorite expressions. You can insert it into almost any sentence and it can become quite funny (in theory). A personal favorite is the term Jackie Onassis. It is a term that I use to describe a certain kind of person that is loud, obnoxious, and bothers me very much…like that guy is a complete and total Jackie Onassis…get the idea??
I guess mine don’t probably count, becasue they are really cursing alternates…although I still have been know to let a 4 letter one slip out on occaision (you should have heard me remodelling my house…yikes!)
By all accounts, the Faeroe Islands are an edenic exception to the crime, hatred, prejudice, insanity, and cynicism of the world at large
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I am certain you are right, Bellum Paxque, and although you didn’t explicitly say that I did so, I did not wish to poke fun at the Faroese.
My idea was a more general linguistical one: to learn of societies whose vocabulary is geared peculiarly to their way of life and their concerns; how expressions they employ illuminate their mores, their social structure and their economy.
For example, I have heard it said that the Inuit have a vast number of words for snow, whereas in English we have only a few; that the Berbers and Bedouin have a goodly number of words for sand.
I was also interested in verbal compression: how one word - or at least very few words - could express complex ideas, and take up many words in English; hence my vaguely remembered Sanskrit example.
I was scanning through an online dictionary of a pidgin of English. There were a lot of funny words but the most notable was “manigotkot” meaning “a defendant in a lawsuit”. But you were looking more for words with strange meanings than funny formations. I was watching a movie in one of my classes and an African woman had a name that she said meant “baby who is born with umbilical cord wrapped all over her body”!
This, alas, is a linguistic urban myth. Depending on the Inuktitut dialect, you get 2 or 3 words for snow, comparable other languages. There are lots of terms related to snow, but they’re all adjectives or modifications of other words (as when English-speaking skiers talk of ‘powder’).
If an adjective on its own refers to snow I would consider it a seperate word. What I mean is; Slushy snow becomes slush.
I’m not sure what sort of criteria was used to come up with 2 or 3 words in Inuktitut (Is that how it is spelled?) but I can come up with more in English. snow, slush, hard pack, powder, sleet, hoar. For the meteriological event; snow, blizzard, flurry, hail.
I am not a language expert so maybe all these words do not count.
Sure, they count. The point is that the Inuit don’t actually have some mind boggling number of words for snow, any more than English does. The language is very interesting on its own, without needing to be embroidered with pop linguistics.
Everyone who has studied linguistics is under a severe obligation to squash the “40 words for snow in Eskimo” myth wherever they encounter it.
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow - I draw your attention particularly to the paragraph at the end. All the Inuit languages utilize a hugely productive derivational affix system. Imagine having a suffix that changes the meaning to “someone with a big X”, say, niaqukkaaq “someone with a big head”; or “to freeze in one’s X”, as in qingaarsivuq “his nose is freezing.” This affix system sometimes confuses dictionary writers.
(Edit: I should say, the examples are from a West Greenlandic grammar. I just noticed a beautiful word: atisassaaliqivunga “I am lacking clothes.”)
Just before I took up Greek I spent several months in a small Yupik Eskimo village in the Alaskan bush. I intended to learn some of the language, and I even found a bilingual book of myths and folklore, but I quickly gave up. Some of the words were more than twenty characters long! (Just look at Will’s examples.) It might have helped if I had some sort of systematic grammar. And as hard as the villagers tried, they couldn’t teach me the correct pronunciations; they made noises with their throats that I just couldn’t make. They thought that the way I pronounced Kwethluk–the name of the village–was very humorous. So I just learned some simple phrases, and the local kids in the village made me a long list of dirty words and insults. I still have it somewhere; maybe I’ll dig it up and share some; it was very immature and very funny. From what I was told, the Yupik are the only Eskimos who still predominately speak their native language. But that was changing when I was there: satellite television meant that most of the children spoke wonderful English, although the adults didn’t know much at all.
