Day 10/30: The international butterfly

When I first realized that many Indo-European languages had completely different words for butterfly, I thought it was really cute. Of course, it’s not surprising at all, since that’s what different languages are all about, having different words for different things – but on the other hand, when closely related languages, like the Germanic and Romance ones, have words that differ from each other to such a great extent, it’s intriguing to say the least. It seems that those words have evolved separately, instead of having developed from a common source, like many other words within closely related branches.

 

A quick Google search confirmed that I wasn’t the first one to get intrigued by that. For example, this message on the Linguist List suggests an interesting approach:

The word for butterfly is a transfer of a gestural mimicking. The different words in the various languages are the result of a motor transfer from the gestural motor program to a structurally corresponding articulatory motor program, a manifestation of what neurologists have termed ‘motor equivalence’. The words all derive from visual perception of the characteristic pattern of flight of the butterfly; the words are not arbitrary but reflect the structure of what is seen. […] In the case of words listed for ‘butterfly’, the associated bodily gesture generated by the sound-structure of each word is a flapping movement of the arms and hands which represents the flight of the butterfly.

So, what that message says is that what’s behind many of the butterfly words is motor equivalence; the words were actually shaped so that their sound mimicks the flapping movement associated with the butterfly. Indeed, some of the words do show such kind of sound pattern, such as the Italian farfalla and the Portuguese borboleta. I have compiled a small list of words for butterfly in Indo-European languages, and a more comprehensive one can be found here.

Afrikaans: skoenlapper

Czech: motýl

Danish: sommerfugl

Dutch: vlinder

English: butterfly

Faroese: firvaldur

French: papillon

German: Schmetterling

Icelandic: fiðrildi

Italian: farfalla

Latvian: tauriņš

Lithuanian: drugys

Luxembourgish: Päiperlék

Modern Greek: πεταλούδα

Norwegian: sommerfugl

Portuguese: borboleta

Russian: бабочка

Spanish: mariposa

Swedish: fjäril

Day 8/30: On nuts and etymologies

I baked peanut butter cookies today. They are totally awesome. I also started to think about the etymology of the word peanut, which I decided must be completely obvious, since peanuts do resemble peas, sitting snuggly in their cozy, tiny pods. But what about other nuts? Walnuts, for example? There’s nothing special about a walnut that makes it similar to a… what? In Swedish, the word for walnut is valnöt, which might make one think it’s somehow related to val, meaning whale (as well as choice and election, but these are way less spectacular). Of course, I fully realized that such a coincidence is purely coincidental, and that walnuts have nothing to do with whales… But if they do have anything to do with ANYTHING in the first place, what’s that?

So, I took the cookies out of the oven and logged in to the good old Oxford English Dictionary, ready to research the origins of some interesting nut-words. I started, obviously, with nut, just to make sure where it comes from:

• Nut is an old Anglo-Saxon word. There’s no information on HOW old it is exactly, but it was known as hnutu in Old English. It most probably comes from the Proto-Germanic *khnut and the Proto-Indo-European *knu (the asterisk denotes a word that has been reconstructed on the basis of our knowledge of language development, but that has no actual evidence behind its existence).
• Walnut is, essentially, foreign nut. The wal- part comes from the Old English wealh, meaning foreign, which is also related to today’s Welsh. Just as the Welsh were foreigners to 11th-century Englishmen (the first recording of walnut comes from ca. 1050), the walnut, originating from Italy, had to be differentiated from the good old hazelnut. The OED makes an interesting remark on the origin of walnut:

The solitary OE. example (in a glossary c1050) is the earliest known appearance of the word in any language. The word must, however, have come to England from the Continent, but there is no evidence to show whether it belonged to the primitive OE. vocabulary, or was introduced at a relatively late date.

• Hazelnut seems to be a much older word; the first known recording is dated 725. Hazel was hæsel in Old English and comes most probably from the Proto-Germanic *khasalaz.
  On a side note, the first to use hazel in the meaning "the color of hazelnuts, pertaining to eyes" was William Shakespeare:

Thou wilt quarrell with a man for cracking Nuts, hauing no other reason, but because thou hast hasell eyes.
Romeo & Juliet III. i. 22

• Peanut, finally, has exactly the etymology you’d expect it to – it’s a nut that resembles a pea. There’s something interesting about its usage, though. The first recorded instance of peanut, from 1794, refers not to what we today know as the peanut, (Arachis hypogaea) but to the nut of a completely different plant (Castanea pumila). This meaning is, of course, not used today anymore. The first to use the word in today’s meaning was Washington Irving, who in 1802 wrote:

I amused myself with eating pea-nuts.

• Good for him :)

Day 5/30: What does word order reveal about our minds?

What kind of word order do most languages use?

I’ve been reading up on how different language structure their sentences recently, and noticed a couple interesting things concerning word order. To describe a language’s unmarked (most commonly used in declarative sentences) word order, you have to look at the three most important elements of a sentence: the Subject, the Verb and the Object. The basic word order in English is exactly that:

The cat	ate	the fish.
Subject	Verb	Object

 

Languages like French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, etc. are very similar to English in this respect: actually, most – if not all – Indo-European languages seem to share this pattern. Of course, some languages, such as the Slavic ones, allow the constituents to be moved around rather freely, but the basic word order is still SVO. The same for German, which has a SOV word order in some types of sentences.

There’s also a number of languages belonging to other families that use the SVO word order, such as Finnish, Khmer and Swahili. Thus, it’s easy to assume – particularly if you’re only familiar with Indo-European languages – that this is a feature that most languages in the world share.

This is, however, not true. If we take the number of languages as a criterium (as opposed to, for example, the number of speakers), the most common word order is Subject Object Verb. In this group we can find Korean, Japanese, Persian, Arabic, Hindi, Turkish, Basque… That’s quite a lot of languages from different families.

Now, what about the remaining four possibilities: VSO, VOS, OSV and OVS? This is when things start to get tricky. There’s only a handful languages (that’s been researched and analyzed!) that belong to those groups. As for VSO, there’s for example Classical Arabic, ancient Egyptian and Celtic languages. VOS languages include Fijian and Malgasy, belonging to the Austronesian family.

And as for Object-first languages (OSV and OVS), it seems only a few single cases have been found, such as Hixkaryana, Xavante and Apurinã, all spoken by indigenous tribes in South America.

Summary

The majority of the world’s languages is Subject-initial, using either the SOV or SVO word order. Verb-initial languages are much less common, but not unheard of. Object-initial languages are extremely uncommon.

What’s the meaning behind that?

There must be some. After all, if word order was assigned completely arbitrary, all the six patterns would be distributed evenly across languages. But they are not. For some reason, putting the subject first seems to be the most intuitive way to arrange information. So, does it reflect the way the human brain stores and processes information? Does it mean that for our minds, the doer is more important than the action? (Assuming that the constituent that comes first is indeed more important). Perhaps it just lies in the human nature that we want to know who performed an action first, and what they did later.

This is definitely a fascinating issue, but also rather confusing…