Nowadays, the landscape is mostly in black and white. This is the view from the kitchen:
Snow on the trees is the only difference between bleakness and winner wonnerland. It doesn’t happen often enough that I get used to it. There was a beautiful white scene early the other day caused by freezing fog. It was all gone by lunchtime.
I love the squiggles, life imitating abstract expressionism:
The lake is frozen now. It took a few weeks.
There’s a little bit of colour indoors.
A Bad Guide 
We had a wonderful hoar frost a few days ago – Christmas card-like. At this moment it’s very gloomy. A north wind is picking up which means that cold weather is on its way, I fear; as people like to say, we’ll get many inches of Global Warming. The Jerusalem artichokes are going to be frozen in all over Britain . We shall not see them dug up again in our winter . So we’ve dug some up as a precaution.
P.S. I loved the photo with the two wee dugs.
We don’t normally get any global warming before Christmas.
The dugs are always with me when I go out, so I thought I should show them. I’d forgotten it’s called a hoar frost; this one was really just a light dusting of snow that stayed on the trees.
It’s just started hailing.
How rude.
Then it sleeted and now the Global Warming is beginning to lie.
Sleet and freezing rain are the worst. English has thirty-five words for snow, who needs Eskimos?
Sapir-Whorf or whatever, AJ, yes, bizarre stuff. Anthropology is so entertaining.
I love the long trees. Freezing here, in sympathy.
I had to use the dictionary more than usual (sleeted, hailing, hoar frost).
Here is a wonderful day . Too bad I’m indoors, but it’s ok: your Pollock-branches provided me the exact amount of fresh (frozen) air I needed. The dogs are so lovely!
Pin, I don’t understand this cold and rain you’ve been having. I read that there’s better weather in the south part of Taiwan, but they say that about southern England too and it’s just not true. When I was in London there were lots of palm trees. Is it global warming, or is there a weather-resistant palm?
I bet you don’t ever have sleet or hoar frost in Buenos Aires.
Actually it’s snows once in a century (almost literally).
Last time, in 2007 I’ve missed the show… (I was at Paris).
Let’s see next time…
Quoth the Indy “Britain is gritting its teeth and its roads today in anticipation of the return of Arctic conditions, with heavy snow and ice storms likely to bring wide-scale disruption.”
The thing is, AJ, I am in the north. The south is considerably hotter, there’s a big spread in temperature for such a small island. The ideal lifestyle would be one featuring a 2 month break around this time, maybe cocktail-sipping in the Maldives.
All these phases and colours look exceedingly beautiful from here, where a persistent upper-level trough has determined that we are to receive concurrently and seemingly without cease both the abundant moisture and pollution of East Asia and the Arctic blasts of the Pole, leaving all things in one shade of sodden, occasionally violent, grey.
Thus I especially envy you your silver, and silvery blue.
The top five images, especially sublime.
The tremendous verticality of the images provides a terrific downward- scrolling vertigo… of a sort which I suppose I tend to love overmuch. (Still in bad odour here for too many long cascades in “my” Norway — “one would have done”.)
(By the by, your narrative here, as I read it — I read all your posts as wondrous little narratives, Artur, do forgive — has a refreshing angle: the POV of Topsy. But may I ask that you disclose the identity of the curious creature positioned above/behind Topsy in photo #6?)
Tom, the curious little creature is Alex, my late father-in-law’s Yorkshire terrier we adopted. He is 16-17ish, and a bloody good sport. He can outrun me — which isn’t so hard, now I come to think of it.
The narrowness of the format here encourages long, thin images. Short fat ones — also known as landscape format — don’t work so well, unless you click them large. But you’re encouraging me to try for something extreme: 8 cm wide x 150 cm high, something like that. Just as long as my machine doesn’t explode.
Can we see a photo of the machine that clears the drive, in action?
Whooosing huge plumes of snow into the air ?
For us technogeeks who don’t have enough snee to warrant having one …
Fifth image. It also reminds me of the default cover for middlebrow literary fiction in the UK market, the name “Jill Paton Walsh” repeats in my head as I gaze.
Do something about this obsession, Pin. This isn’t the first time you’ve mentioned Ms Walsh. Would her publishers pay for the image?
That’s a good idea, Canehan. Only this morning, we were laying bets on whether it’s going to start this year.
I had to read ‘A desert in Bohemia’ by JPW when I was ghost writing book reviews for The Independent. I’ll never shake the memory.
I spent the afternoon at a Taiwanese flea market, and I swear, her name never crossed my mind.
I’ve just been outside clearing our yard with handpowered equipment. It occured to me that this might make nice pictures for lo-tech geeks, but I didn’t have a cavepainter at hand.
>Trond: hahahaha!
If calligraphy is untidy is because my quill is still shaking
I hope the post find you well
Trond’s comment pushed me to ponder – ‘at hand’ and ‘to hand’ – actually, I am still pondering it, pleasant moments can be expended in this way.
Can’t read ‘quill’ without thinking of Hamlet, Julia.
“And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine. “
Don’t ponder my writing too much. I’m a non-native user of English trying to feel my way from one base of knowledge to the next. Idiomatic use of prepositions is the hardest thing.
I don’t like the sense of being issued with an injunction there, Trond. No matter! As I said, I was pondering the difference, not your writing. It’s precisely the fact that you’re a non-native user of English that makes it interesting, light being shone on the corners of the language.
“into the corners”, I was busy changing my mind.
They’re nearly the same, but not quite. An event, often the end of the world, is “at” hand, whereas tools are “to” hand. But it’s a distinction that only someone with sharp eyes — someone like most of you lot — would notice.
Actually, maybe that’s just me, as a native speaker, being accustomed to injunctions being softened with a “Please…”
Anyway.
“And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine. “
There was a recent book on Shakespeare which said (I quote from memory) “….and a country boy like Will would be well acquainted with porcupines”. It reminds you how hard it is for a furriner (the author was American) to know humdrum facts about a country in which he has spent little time.
AJ, that was the same example regarding the end of the world that I was pondering, and quite enjoying the idea of “The end of the world is to hand” – possibly uttered by a James Bond baddie, fingering his death ray.
Yes, having grown up next to Warwickshire, which bills itself as “Shakespeare’s County”, I can confirm that there continues to be a veritable dearth of porcupines.
Norwegian almost doesn’t have an exhortation “please”, only vær så snill, which is really “kindly”.
I was wondering if that might be it, AJ. My German girlfriend would (not) do the same thing.
“Alex, the moment you begin a sentence, I feel under pressure to comply!”
At first I was wondering how Shakespeare knew about porcupines, so I looked them up, and the Wikipedia article has a nice picture of Louis XII’s bronze porcupine from 100 years before Shakespeare. So it looks like everyone was talking about them. And “hedgehog” didn’t scan if you were a slave to the iambic pentameter.
I had a friend who explained how to cook hedgehog. I said, “Does it taste good?” He said, “By the time you’re hungry enough to have caught, killed and cooked a hedgehog, yes.”
“Might as well be hung for a sheep as a hedgehog”.
An event, often the end of the world, is “at” hand, whereas tools are “to” hand.
Crown, you do realize that this is 190-proof Heidegger ? Just a few corrections: stuff (Zeug: a tool is a Werkzeug) is not always to hand in the sense of in hand, cooperating with you. It becomes noticeable (auffällig) when useless (damaged, say), annoying (aufdringlich) when it’s not there although you need it, impertinent (aufsässig) when it resists all efforts at cooperation.
Thought you might need to know that.
No, of course I didn’t know it. I’m always getting scooped by the likes of Heidegger.
How do they know that was a porcupine that Louis XII had, and not a hedgehog?
Stu, I was thinking about Heidegger, also, but thought I’d not mention it, but his probing of this entire area is, to my mind, great stuff.
Zuhanden is “in hand” – you are one with the stuff, everything is working smoothly. When something screws up, the stuff is suddenly vorhanden, merely “at hand” or “there” – a recalcitrant object that you have to wrap your head around, if not your hand. Like the end of the world.
pinhut, let’s face it: the first sections of Sein und Zeit are fabulous stuff, especially the “Everybody” (Man) passage. But it makes easy sense only in German, because the words there are amenable to the games Heidegger plays with them.
It’s a feature of Beckett’s writings, that both the language, and the action, are being continually subjected to this process. I think this is why Beckett is continually drawn to descriptions of walking in his work.
Stu, I took it in by listening to lectures (in English) about it, but just that rigour, to try and get at this ground that we are naturally always busily concealing, was/is fascinating. I see strains of it in many of the writers that I am into (I’ve got to the point of believing that while not every philosopher is a great writer, all great writers are philosophers), even those who remorselessly ridicule Heidegger, such as Bernhard (my friend lived in Freiburg and confirmed that the site of Heidegger’s cabin, with all the little placards, “Heidegger stood here” etc, is truly ridiculous). In Beckett, in Blanchot, in Ballard (where nature emerges as your ‘recalcitrant object’).
Too many brackets, more than B & Q.
I’d never thought of it like that. Molloy, for instance, is full of walkings and fallings.
Language *as* the thing that disrupts. The walking becomes impossible because of attempting to render it in language. The complete opposite of that (still present, as a commonplace notion) idea of language as transparently portraying ‘the world’ etc.
Yes. Molloy, for me, my favoured Beckett novel.
But there is also the piece where the narrator walks as if he has crapped his trousers, and, solely due to his walking style, comes into conflict with the police.
There’s his bicycle fixation, too, beautifully parodied by Flann O’Brien.
even those who remorselessly ridicule Heidegger, such as Bernhard
? Can’t remember anything like that. I can unabashedly claim to have 95% of everything Bernhard has written, some of it repeatedly (Alte Meister, Auslöschung, Das Kalkwerk, Beton). It’s sort of a private vice – I can’t really understand why anyone would read him, and I would never recommend him to someone. Commentators on Heidegger I usually find more illuminating than the old codger himself, but I prefer my Bernhard straight.
… to have read 95% …
That’s a parody of Beckett? I thought it was just Irishmen on bikes.
Are we here talking about The Third Policeman ? It’s been a long time …
I think the Heidegger digs are in Old Masters (or possibly, Yes, though I don’t think so). How long since you read it? Maybe it has slipped from your mind…
Yes, I don’t push those novels on to anybody else, either. I reread them compulsively, and I always have a few in my suitcase. At the moment, The Lime Works keeps pulling me back. And, of course, he wrote that piece, Walking, which was great. “Czechoslovakian rejects!”
I am. It’s the only one I read. I really like the name Swim-Two-Birds, though. I’ve thought about naming my house that, except it would be so pretentious, especially since I haven’t read the book.
AJ, the chronology is right, Third Policeman was written after Molloy, which features a long incident with a bicycle.
The O’Brien sequence about the exchange of molecules between the rider and the bicycle is very funny.
At-swim-two-birds is great, AJ, you should really add it to your reading.
I love the phrase, “playing upon the threads of disputation” and the sequences where he parodies Celtic mythology are hilarious.
“Then must nine warriors fly their spears at him, one with the other and together. If he be spear-holed past his shield, he is not taken for want of shield-skill. […] Neck-high sticks he must pass by vaulting, knee-high sticks by stooping. With the eyelids to him stitched to the fringe of his eye-bags, he must be run by Finn’s people through the bogs and the marsh-swamps of Erin with two odorous prickle-backed hogs ham-tied and asleep in the seat of his hempen drawers. If he sink beneath a peat-swamp or lose a hog, he is not accepted of Finn’s people. For five days he must sit on the brow of a cold hill with twelve-pointed stag-antlers hidden in his seat, without food or music or chessmen. If he cry out or eat grass-stalks or desist from the constant recital of sweet poetry and melodious Irish, he is not taken but is wounded. When pursued by a host, he must stick a spear in the world and hide behind it and vanish in its narrow shelter or he is not taken for want of sorcery. […] One hundred head of cattle he must accomodate with wisdom about his person when walking all Erin, the half about his armpits and the half about his trews, his mouth never halting from the discoursing of sweet poetry. One thousand rams he must sequester about his trunks with no offence to the men of Erin, or he is unknown to Finn. He must swiftly milk a fat cow and carry milk-pail and cow for twenty years in the seat of his drawers. […] Unless he accomplishes these feats he is not wanted of Finn. But if he do them all and be skilful, he is of Finn’s people.”
I think the Heidegger digs are in Old Masters
I don’t remember that particularly, but it doesn’t surprise me – forest-cabin pretentiousness is not Bernhard’s thing.
By the way, do you know Meine Preise (My Prizes) ? This is a posthumous collection of pieces Bernhard wrote on the prizes he received – the Büchner etc. It is really funny and savage – and unsparing of himself. Suhrkamp published them last year, and issued a paperback this year. I grabbed it off the otherwise barren shelves at the bookstore of the Trier train station.
Ah, ok. No! I haven’t read it, and I see there is a translation. Many thanks, I will have it sent over.
I thought, on the subject of prizes, that William H. Gass’ essay was truly excellent.
William H. Gass’ essay
Who he, which essay ? I guess I’m rather Eurocentric in a Texas kind of way.
American novelist and producer of excellent essays. Is known for his particular emphasis on varying the sentence forms in his fiction.
I think the essay on literary prizes was in The World Within a Word collection.
The WiPe article says he describes his prose style as “Decayed modern”. This seems to be a guy after my own heart.
He also supposedly responded to the question, “What do you write for?” with “The ear.”
“Prizes, Surprises and Consolation Prizes”?
I don’t think it’s in The World within the Word or A Temple of Texts. Maybe it hasn’t been reprinted or that’s not the one you had in mind.
Thanks, MMcM. By golly, what a fine essay ! His prose flies with just the right amount of zip (if I be allowed a mixture of metaphors here).
Thanks, Pin. Thanks, M. A great essay on prizes. I’d no idea Nicholas Murray Butler was so despicable, and I’m glad I didn’t think to include him in our list of three-named Victorians. Unfortunately it’s too late to tell him what most people get up to in the fifteen-or-so floors of stacks of Butler Library, world’s worst-designed university library, at Columbia.
Completely off topic: Topsy has a facebook account? !! Ask her if she wants to be my “facebook-friend”, please.
Of course I understand if she doesn’t want.
Of course she does. I can’t remember how to open it! I’ll have to get Alma to do it…
MMcM – Yup, that’s the essay in quesiton. The only other Gass essay collection I had was Finding a Form. I still think it was World Within a Word (maybe a different edition, it has red Neville Brody-style cover)
Or Habitations of the Word.
As usual I’m getting my data from Bertie Wooster, but wasn’t it a porpentine in Shakespeare?
Anyway Louis XII definitely had a thing about porcupines. They seem to have been thought of as fierce warriors in those days, at least in Europe where they were only known by reputation.
I mentioned in a long ago thread here (must have been the one with all the strutting ostriches) that one of the contrade of Siena has the porcupine as symbol, too.
What about “on hand”?
Offhand, I don’t see why not.
Some examples, what do people think, fair distinctions?
————–
“On hand” – person/persons, or something that you can’t grasp, available
“X was on hand to help”
“There was water on hand…”
————–
“To hand” – a graspable thing available
“I don’t have the paperwork to hand”
———-
“At hand” – something temporal
“Help is at hand…”
About Gass you wrote above: “Is known for his particular emphasis on varying the sentence forms in his fiction”. What do you mean by that ? Like everyone with no particular literary mission – leaving aside Perec and such, that is – I vary my sentence forms without even trying. Could this mean I have been writing fiction all this time without knowing it ?
Your “[preposition] hand” distinctions seem fair enough, except for my sense that with your qualification as to “graspable” you’re sneaking up to some hidden semantic gotcha to be revealed later. Perhaps I’m being too literal-minded and excitable here, but in your example “X was on hand to help” I don’t see the point of stressing that X is not “graspable”. Since X is on hand, I could grasp him by the collar if I wanted, so he is “graspable” – but that’s not necessary, precisely because he’s already there and is with docile gaze awaiting my instructions.
Stu, it’s just that Gass himself emphasises that he is interested in ‘formal properties’ of particular sentences, etc. A read of just about any of his essays will clear things up.
The ‘graspable/not graspable’ distinction is only to be invoked if the thing is *not* a person (or animals). Basically, to account for why we say “There is water on hand” rather than “There is water to hand” – it seems to me that it does relate to whether something is graspable in the mitt or not.
Ø,
I’d forgotten you’d mentioned the porcupine before. I suppose it’s a symbol of defence for the Siena istrice, MOTTO — “Only for defense I stung”, sort of like “Don’t step on me”. Incidentally, the Wikipedia article says their symbol is the crested porcupine, and the Wikipedia article on that creature says:
That would make it less unusual as Louis XII’s symbol. Now I’m wondering if they actually have hedgehogs in Greece, of if it wasn’t in fact the crested porcupine that knew the “one big thing”.
Well, if you let me speak only about Spanish emblem books (even though it may be something similar in the rest of Europe), the porcupine appears as a symbol of stoic self-sufficiency and ataraxia, there’s one with the motto “Mea virtute me involvo” [I wrap myself up in my virtue]
But there’s other symbolic uses of this animal even in Spanish emblematics, : also
That’s interesting — also because they translate those as “hedgehog”; but I bet they’re crested porcupines too. They are lovely pictures!
They are funny mottos. “Comer y llevar” — “To eat and to take home”, hedgehog with madroños fruit on its quills. What are they talking about?
Apparently the madroños fruit comes from the Strawberry tree that is included in the coat of arms of Madrid and also grows in Ireland. Did they really have bears in Madrid?
Yes, I love this one (of course I think it’s clever than the stoic “erizo”)
Apparently people keep hedgehogs as pets.
Did they really have bears in Madrid?
Did they really have lions in Scandinavia?
There must have been bears in Spain at some time, because one of the first Gothic kings ( Favila) was eaten by a bear or so they say…
There you are, Trond. They did have bears.
We have always had lions & unicorns in England.
“Bearsden” is a town on the edge of Glasgow.
I’ve always thought someone should write a scholarly book about children’s stories called Goldilocks and her Forebears .
Also: madroños in Madrid’s coat of arms is one of those puns or folk etymologies that are important in heraldics to this day. Examples span from the bear of Berlin over the skis of my hometown Skien to recent inventions like the arrowpoint of Odda and the goblin’s hats of Nissedal.
I think this tradition developed from the opposite; chiefs used to have “totemic” bynames, and this totem was depicted on the shields and battlemarks of their men. When the founder’s totem was picked up by his sons it was established as a family name. The next step would be to use any battlemark as a family name. Here’sthe coat of arms of the Swedish Vasa dynasty (“Vase”). Some Swedish noble families have wonderful names like Svinhufvud “Swinehead”.
>Julia
A gossip about our king and a bear:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/oct/20/spain.russia
I confess to being Republican (LOL).
>A. J. P. Crown
“What are they talking about?”
According to the text, I understand it seems a fierce criticism at the priests that have too much money; they invite you and even they have to give some of food to you. They spend the ecclesiastical property in profane things.
Do you know the “madroños” make you drunk?
No, I didn’t know they make you drunk. Unfortunately they don’t grow this far north.
Are they planning on eating the erizo? That’s what I was wondering.
Jesús, you know the thing about the king and the bear has come up before. It was Studiolum who brought it up first, and posted about it himself. I think it’s great that something like this can come up more than once here within a year.
>A. J. P. Crown
I have a little tree strawberry in my balcony; it hasn’t done fruits yet.
¿“Erizos”? Not but probably “erizos de mar” (sea urchin). I like its.
And I’m sorry! I forgot theStudiolum’s post that I had read.
P.S.
In Asturias there are 3 bears: Paca, Tola and Furaco.
Yes, I like erizos de mar a lot. It’s my favourite sushi; unfortunately I can’t get it in Norway.
I’m sorry AJP, I don’t know what happened but I haven’t read all your comment before.
When I get home I’ll transcribe the complete translation of these emblems.
About the king of Spain and the bear, I have to confess I was also involved in this, so perhaps is not such a coincidence: only boring repetition. (In Studiolum’s original post I made a comment about Favila)
Julia, don’t apologise! It’s all meant to be fun.
ohhh, I’M SORRY!! ;-)
Pinhut, I forgot to follow up on this. What I meant was that my writing isn’t worth all that pondering. I don’t think a ‘please’ would be right, since it implies more of a command than I meant, even if it’s a polite one. Maybe I should have written “you shouldn’t” rather than “don’t”.
¡jajajaja!
All this politeness, we’re turning you all English. Who wants a cup of tea?
I got the impression that in the mind of Louis XII (or his grandfather) the porcupine was formidable on offense, not just defense. Something about the old erroneous view that it can throw its quills at its enemy.
Yes, so did I. I meant to say that. That must be it, the quills. I wasn’t sure how aggressive a porcupine actually could be.
I felt very clever when I came up with a view to a quill, but I decided to run it through Google, and the very first Google hit was this.
Longfellow:
Just like Shakespeare & the porcupine! Do they even have hedgehogs in the USA? All these guys cared about is scansion. They’d have been happy to use a giraffe if it scanned.
I disn’t know that distinction beteen porcupine and hedgehog. I’m pretty sure it’s a fairly recent invention taking advantage of the convenience of having two words for the same (folk-taxonomic) animal, and that the “new” use of porcupine makes for misunderstanding of earlier instances of the word. When did the specialization happen?
Oh, this is a case for the Ngram Viewer:
American English vs. British English.
Good idea, Trond, the Ngram! There was quite a bit of discussion of this higher up the thread. They are 2 entirely different animals, though. Wikipedia:
I have seen a hedgehog in Norway (dead).
Of course they are entirely different animals, but they didn’t use to be. Judging from the British 2gram, I think something happened that affected British usage in the 1840s and something new in the 1930s.
(Now I really want the option to compare developments in different corpora in the same Ngram. I’ve tried to fiddle with the searchstring in the URL, but with no luck so far.)
Might it just be the Romantics’ vision of the English countryside?
Mary Howitt had a (otherwise forgettable) poem “The Hedge-Hog” with porcupine in the first line.
“That’s interesting — also because they translate those as “hedgehog”; but I bet they’re crested porcupines too.”
In Spanish there are also two different names “erizo” (hedgehog) and “puercoespín” (porcupine). Only now I look for the differences between the two animals. And I can assure you that the ones in the Spanish emblems are hedgehogs. The devise of the French king himself was a porcupine. This animal was always been considered more aggressive than the hedgehog because of its larger size, I suppose.
Trond. It’s ok.
Never seen that Ngram viewer before, magic.
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=absinthe&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=fuck&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
Haha. That’s a good one. There’s some info here, Pin.
Artur,
“Do they even have hedgehogs in the USA? All these guys cared about is scansion.”
It is somewhat difficult to identify the class “these guys,” but whoever they are, it is to be hoped their scansion returned their care.
(Longfellow by the way was primarily a mildly obscene schoolboy joke term, back in the day. Elementary schools were of course named after him, nevertheless. And pageants devolved from his magnum opus, etc. You see there has always been enormous respect here for the national “classics”.)
And as you ask: there are no living hedgehog species native to North America, alas (much as there are, alas, no native speakers of English.)
Still one has ventured out into the world a bit, at one time. And found that there is something ineffably endearing about a European hedgehog, like this one which Philip Larkin ran over with his lawnmower in the bloody fields of Hull.
However currently all creatures here are occupied mainly in staying afloat. While you have had the snowy stuff we have had… rain. And more rain.
(Blinded by a teeming downpour while crossing a flooded parking lot, late last week, one failed to notice a semi-submerged set of those vehicle-repellent spikes, tripped… and up came the hard pavement, much too suddenly. The ominous cracking of the ancient bones spoke volumes about the relative kindness of lovely soft snow.)
Well, if, as Trond says, the two words porcupine & hedgehog were used interchangeably in the past, I’ll be less annoyed with Shakespeare & Longfellow (class of poets whose lines scan). In general, I don’t believe in showing reverence towards national classics unless they’re someone else’s* — Beethoven, for instance, but not Shakespeare — because I don’t like nationalism at all, but I do like art.
Sorry about your fall. I don’t find it any more enjoyable falling on snow, unless you’re making one of those snow angels.
*And sometimes not even then. HOWEVER, yesterday I saw the title of a book on Coleridge & Wordsworths & co., and it was called The Gang (it had a British author whose name I’ve forgotten). I found that to be an insolent title and off-key; if that was how the author felt he could have spared us a book about it.
I like hedgehogs, although they are pesky (get into your garbage). The cats (may they rest in peace) learned to ignore them; the dog barked like crazy at one this summer, but knew enough not to touch it.
Here’s an odd thing: Russians don’t make snow angels. Isn’t that strange? I keep wondering if they did before the Soviet period, but the archives are mute on this point. In any case, my snow angels are a big hit with Russian children.
PS we got your snow. Very pretty, dog ecstatic, traffic at a standstill.
Nobody has mentioned that hedgehogs are also sometimes called hedgepigs, along with, Wikipedia adds, ‘urchin’, and ‘furze-pig’ (furze=gorse)…
Now somebody has.
To put aside all that politeness that bothered AJP, I come and say (rudely): “Did my comment on Spanish terms “Erizo / puercoespín” was so lame that nobody said nothing? Eh? Nothing to say?
Returning to my (so hardly feigned) polite ways, I want to tell Trond that his finding, the Ngram, is fabulous.Thank you!
Julia, I had assumed that “Erizo / puercoespín” was a reference to some kind of exotic sausage. Perhaps a Christmas treat?
WRONG!
(It is difficult not to be polite… liberating, however! ;-)
Julia, sometimes when my comments get no response I feel a bit like curling up into a prickly ball. But I did not ignore your Spanish words. I tried ngram on them. It worked better if I wrote puerco espin as two words.
I tried Trond’s theory on German Igel and Stachelschwein, too. Wiki says that “Stachelschwein” was what Schopenhauer used when writing about what is now sometimes called the Hedgehog’s Dilemma. It seems to really mean “porcupine”, but judging by ngram it seems not to have ever been a widely used word. I remembered “Igel” from the label on a Steiff stuffed toy I once saw; the word stuck in my head because it sounds like “eagle”. Germans wrote it a lot starting around 1810.
Wiki on Snow Angels sheds no light on their history or geographic distribution, but does inform us that:
“Making a snow angel to celebrate a touchdown in American football is not allowed and can be penalized as unsportsmanlike conduct.”
Ø hapless blogmaster, what do you think commenters feel at your very own site when they get no response from you ?
:-), Ø!
Of course I was joking… a bit.
But I think you mentioned here the biggest difference between the two animals in question (at least in their respective symbolic senses): the hedgehog (or “erizo”) curls up into a prickly ball, and the porcupine (or “puercoespín), doesn’t. It just inflates (?) its quills.
Puerco espín worked better with Ngram, because “puerco” is a very common word (is one of the terms in Spanish to say pig or pork)
Commentors ?
(After reading Grumbly comment) Oh, oh, I think I opened Pandora’s box…!
Who wants a cup of tea?
Ok, goodbye now, I have to work (She muttered and left silently)
One gets resigned to it (comments getting no response), but I think it’s good to object, Julia. You always answer my comments at your blog, and I really appreciate it. How do you know the Spanish ones are hedgehogs? Are you sure there are no crested porcupines in Spain, or do they just look more like hedgehogs? I think not. Is Trond’s theory true in Spanish: could you use the words erizo & puercoespín interchangeably in the past? I’m sure the French one’s a crested porcupine too; for one thing, they found the cannon in N. Africa.
But why in the world would any bellicose entity that was looking for a symbol choose a hedgehog when they could have a puercoespin? Except possibly Spiny Norman.
I didn’t know hedgehogs climbed into garbage cans. When I was young we used to put out saucers of milk for them, but apparently it’s bad for them (hedgehogs, not garbage collectors).
Sorry, Stew. I went to the post office.
Oh, you were talking to Ø. Sorry again.
Commenters requiring a quick response may be interested in our new service, An Instantly Bad Guide, coming early in 2011.
Dogs could not make snow angels even if they wanted to.
It seems that nobody has mentioned other animal, the only extant mammals covered with spines that lay eggs.
It’s not my finding at all. It’s been loudly propagated and heavily commented around the net for some days now.
A friend from my student days once noted, after making snowangels face down during a sauna session, that his angels looked female, but the girls’ angels didn’t look male.
MMM, let’s see how this new service works next year…
;-)
No, AJP, I know the ones in the Spanish emblems are hedgehogs because the text characterized them as “erizos” = hedgehogs. One of the things they say about them is that they curl up and roll.
And yes, of course, the King’s insignia is a porcupine.
I think that in Spanish the two terms get confused (I myself hadn’t knew the difference until now)
Dinsdale!
Jesus, do they have the crested porcupine Hystrix cristata in Spain?
>A. J. P. Crown
My family had a hedgehog when I was a child; probably it died because of milk but I don’t know. Also a hedgehog bore in my parents’ garden a few years ago.
In Madrid and Guadalajara, for example, there are fossil (Pleistocene) porcupines. I’ve just read there are porcupines in Italy (it isn’t related to Berlusconi’s hair transplant).
>Empty
You can write “puercoespín” or “puerco espín”.
My dear wife tells me that I must have been thinking of Chorizo. But hedgehog tastes pretty good: it’s mole that tastes ‘orrible (apparently).
It doesn’t taste like chocolate at all.
Haha, Jesús. Thanks for the porcupine information.
Can you and Julia explain this result in the ngram viewer? It is “porcupine” & “hedgehog” in Spanish (Spanish-language, I think) books between 1930 and now.
>A. J. P. Crown
I found the fossil porcupine is Hystrix sp. and I think the H. cristata is only in the zoos.
I don’t really understand how the Ngram works, because many of the text used as corpus is in other languages…
Is there real reason to think that Shakespeare didn’t know the difference? After all, a hedgehog doesn’t have quills that stand out like somebody surprised’s hair.
Grumbly, good point. Sometimes my metaphorical butt gets frozen in the metaphorical ice.
>A. J. P. Crown
I’ve known yesterday these ngram viewer (thanks, Trond). I don’t understand well but If you try writing “Neanderthal and Sapiens”, for example, in Spanish, French or British English you’ll see that the Sapiens curve grow after (+ or -) 1994 in Spanish: the my firstborn’s year of birth.
>Dearieme
“Chorizo”? The last time I ate some chorizo…let me think…Oh! Yes, last night: “chorizo” of wild boar in olive oil. Delicious!
Okay, well, if it’s not working properly, that would explain it. I don’t think the ngram viewer is very reliable yet.
Ø, if you read MMcM’s linked poem by this Victorian woman Mary Howitt, it seems the names were interchangeable; maybe they were in the late-16th Century and maybe they were in other languages too. There’s no reason to think Shakespeare would have seen a real porcupine — unless Sir Walter Raleigh kept one as a pet, or something.
My (fairly mere) guess is that all along “hedgehog” referred primarily to the native spiny insectivorous fellow, “porcupine” to the other non-native bigger quilled shuffling rodent. The English would have heard of it, just as they had heard of giraffes, elephants, leopards, camelopards, and so on. Clearly in many places and times some people have confused hedgehogs with porcupines — including Howitt, and Longfellow, and Julia. This is easy to do when one animal is native and the other is not and they are both known for roughly the same one great thing.
(comma after fellow)
Oh, and it seems that in Maine and parts of Canada sea urchins are called “whore’s eggs”.
Tom: The ominous noise — was it literally the sound of bones cracking? breaking? I hope not.
Jajaja! I’m in a list with Longfellow (an ignorance list, may be, but it’s still a list)
Now I think I could introduce myself in some more lists… I can assure you that Cervantes, Shakespeare and Julia know nothing about Quantum Physics.
I bet Ø knows quite a bit about quantum physics, but I don’t.
You can come to our list (Mike & Bill didn’t object).
I don’t know either but I have met Ignacio Cirac.
You were better off when it was just you, Mike & Bill. I’m afraid it’s all downhill from here on.
Not at all, we’re not elitists!
The more the merrier.
I know relatively little about quantum physics, considering. Or quantum physicists, either: I had to google Cirac. I have of course heard of Dirac, and in fact I once caught a glimpse of him when he was a very old and frail man giving a public lecture. I’m quite fond of the Dirac delta function.
If Cirac is lucky, young physicists in 100 years will be confusing him with Dirac, just as we confuse hedge-pigs with porky-spinies.
I forgot to mention that, although there are no hedgehogs native to the Americas, one of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories has the first armadillos resulting from the rapid convergent evolution of a tortoise and a hedgehog on the banks of the Amazon. I love the passages where the two of them are bewildering a young Jaguar.
>Empty
It was a sort of joke. Cirac was, in a way, a colleague of me. He was a teacher in Castilla-La Mancha but he couldn’t become a professor here because of inflexibility of system. However Max-Plank-Institut gave him a place as boss. He has been nominated as a candidate of Nobel Prize.
There are many odd animals missing from the Just So Stories, ones that simply weren’t discussed in England at that time*. I’m thinking of the manatee and the capybara, though there’s room for many others too.
*Though the ngram viewer says otherwise.
“Cirac”? That’s surely a typo for “Cissac”, a rather attractive claret.
Or for “Chirac”, a rather unattractive French President.
Off topic (and not too polite) again: I just published some photos of the jacarandás trees of Buenos Aires that I mentioned before. I would like you to see them. Thanks!
Que hermosas jacarandás, Julia!
Alas, Empty, that’s literally what it was.
I am far too old to be doing such things (crashing to the pavement in a driving rain, breaking bones) without paying for it.
Currently I am paying for it.
Though last night there came the gift of an unexpected and illuminating glimpse, through a momentary break in the endless angry storm clouds, of this.
(By the by, on the odd prickly creatures theme, and speaking of old and worried, there is that old and worried question about how porcupines have sex. That it should have drifted into mind at this moment indicates… well, what? that perhaps it’s indeed true, as was once thought, that where there’s life there’s hope? At least for porcupines, at any rate.)
(And what’s perhaps even worse, it seems that among those who worry over this old and worried question, there appears to be a remarkable quantity of poor sentences.)
(Well, obviously this fellow has more wholesome thoughts in mind… not that it would take much.)
Oh, that’s a very good porcupine picture. You can see it’s completely different from a hedgehog, and quite like a capybara.
Dearie, I think Marie-Lucie has written somewhere about the -ac endings, I suppose they’re Occitan. I think she’s away. Now I’m thinking we could buy some cognac to celebrate the solstice. Chirac was a bounder, though probably not so much so as Blair.
Jesús is a republican! Don’t let anyone from the USA hear that, Jesús.
I find the ‘how’ secondary to the ‘why’. In this case I think the urge comes when having quills thrown on them by a porcupid.
It’s hard on the vets.
“Chirac was a bounder, though probably not so much so as Blair. ” Much too kind to Blair. Anyway, talking of the Labour Party, the question naturally arises – are porcupines, like hedgehogs, flea-ridden?
question about how porcupines have sex
This is at least related to (and according to one Wiki author identical with) the Hedgehog’s Dilemma.
My sister’s dog required painful and prolonged veterinary work after trying to bite a porcupine. Porcupine quills are barbed. They pull out of the animal and stay in your flesh. I don’t believe a hedgehog can achieve anything like this.
>Tom Clark
About porcupines I don’t know but about the hedgehog it had an erroneous idea that consisted in the missionary position.
>A. J. P. Crown
I’m republican, that is, anti-monarchist, although my favorite animal is the elephant (LOL).
“I find the ‘how’ secondary to the ‘why’.”
It is perhaps only “natural” for us to wonder about this.
But then, pause for a moment and enquire, might not either a hedgehog or a porcupine, viewing the human species, which certainly has its own prickly features, from a proximate distance, experience a similar puzzlement as to the ‘why’?
You’re right, Tom, I was unfair. In fact, I have a soft spot for quills. I was trying to come up with a good way to set up my porcupid line, but I got something else to do and sent what I had.
So many hedgehog remarks and yet no mention of Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld? This will must have been and were duly rectified, if I’ve got my pluperfect subjunctives right.
What is this, Des??
¡¡¡I want it NOW!!! (this exalted sentence needed exclamation marks at the beginning and at the end!)
Julia, your taste is impeccable: it is a collection of hilarious stories about pompous German academics getting themselves into absurd predicaments. If you are not particularly law-abiding, there are probably torrents of Hugh Lawrie’s narrations of them on an Internet near you. (I haven’t checked and wouldn’t necessarily condone. But I would envy you.)
¡Thank you, des!
(For the information, I’m not saying that you tempted me with a”delictive act…”)
A Christmas correlation, courtesy of Dearieshe: the later the cards arrive, the greater the proportion of them bearing a Wallace and Gromit stamp.
porcupid
Trond, that pun went right past me the first time, and the second time, too. Got it now, thanks.
(Reply with pun? Cupid, Eros, erizo, pork-cupid, pork-eros, Porquerolles, pork chorizo, sausage roll, I give up.)
Hello, I just caught up with this thread.
I have never seen a hedgehog, but while living at the Western end of Canada in an isolated area I have seen a great many porcupines, both alive and dead (run over by cars, as they are so slow). Apart from cars, their only predator is an animal called a fisher, that I have never seen. Other animals get stung by the quills. I don’t know how the quills are attached (loosely) to the body of the porcupine, but at the other end of the qill the “barb” is twisted like a tiny little spring, not a hook, so that trying to remove it just twists the quill more tightly into the flesh. Young dogs are particularly likely to try their luck with a porcupine, and you see them sometimes with several quills sticking out from their muzzle, unable toget rid of them. You have to cut off those quills close to the skin, and if unable to take the dog to the vet you just have to wait until they come off.
I saw a particularly large and round porcupine once moving very slowly in the grass along a wilderness road. I think it must have been a pregnant female. I don’t know if porcupines can sit, but the area which would sit on the ground seems to be devoid of quills, presumably allowing for the various stages of reproduction without damage.
Marie-Lucie, I believe they can sit, as long as it is not upon another porcupine.
My greetings and best wishes for all the A Bad Guide’s bunch
¡Feliz Navidad!
¡Feliz Navidad, Julia!
¡Feliz Navidad, everyone!
Oh, heck, I haven’t thought of it in the conext of porcupines, but in Norwegian hekk “hedge” and hekk “rear end” are complete homonyms. It’s also the imperative of a verb meaning “mate” (of birds).
A pun that has to be explained twice to the master of the game isn’t much of a pun. But here’s a song I know about both christmas and hedgehogs (it’s from a (probably) 1920’s student’s variety show in Trondheim (but I’ve misplaced my songbook and can’t be bothered to Google, so it’s from memory)):
Ta dere en pinne! Og god jul!
Oh, and the melody is Incy Wincy Spider.
I’m trying to read this with the help of Google Translate. I gather that there’s a moose in the Christmas tree eating candles, and a hedgehog (or possibly porcupine) in a bathtub, and maybe it’s difficult to scrub yourself if you’re covered with prickles? And there is small change flying around the thousandsbush? Dried seat and evasion of the forehead cartilage? Or pan cartilage? And what would William do in the empty tub if there were holes? What powder? Are tulleballets really silly balls?
My sense is that Skandinavian students on festive occasions tend to get rather lit up, but what the heck are they singing about?
Illustrated.
Thank you, Trond & M.
Also, thank you, Des, for Moritz-Maria.
Thank you, Trond. My stock of useful Norwegian phraseology increases with each visit to this site.
“I haven’t thought of it in the con[t]ext of porcupines, but in Norwegian hekk ‘hedge’ and hekk ‘rear end’ are complete homonyms.”
Do I hear the sound of a charming post wearily settling down upon its metaphorical or metaphysical posterior for a well-deserved long-winter’s-night rest?
At any rate, quills do after all have multiple uses.
One of those might be to scrawl a Happy Christmas to our host, and to all my fellow Badly Guided Ones, from
the Ghosts of Christmas Past.
And now porcupines are back at Language Hat’s… What a strange déjà vu feeling!
Yes, I thought of mentioning this discussion there, but I haven’t yet.
The other thing that happened today was my cousin, who is a historian, happened to mention an essay on farting in seventeenth-century England. Unfortunately it’s part of a quite expensive book, but I may get our library to order it. It’s by Sir Keith Thomas, he’s perhaps Britain’s most notable living modern historian, and the essay is Bodily control and social unease: the fart in seventeenth-century England. The book is The extraordinary and the everyday in early modern England. Essays in celebration of the work of Bernard Capp, edited by Angela McShane and Garthine Walker (Palgrave Macmillan).
hahaha! Funny… a day with comebacks!
That article your cousin mentioned looks interesting. In Spanish literature, Quevedo was the king of scatological writing. I should look if he has something on this subject in particular, I’m sure he has.
My cousin said it carries to the ultimate Keith Thomas’s broadening of history’s scope (English history previously having only been interested in kings & queens and wars), but Spain wasn’t as puritanical as England.
but I’m sure in literature they have something similar to Quevedo.
Here is the promised ouvre from F. de Quevedo
http://www.analitica.com/bitblio/quevedo/culo.asp
It’s a pity you don’t know Spanish!
Wow. As satire, that’s shocking even today. I could hardly read it. I don’t think there’s anything comparable in English from that period, although I’m no expert. I found a translation of the first part here, but not for the farting part. However, it’s fairly understandable using google translate.
Funny to have it in a post called “Snowy Stuff”.
hahaha, yes it is funny!
And yes, Quevedo was extreme. It’s surprising that the same poet that wrote texts like this one, also wrote exquisite verses of love:
http://www.euroresidentes.com/Poemas/poesias/amor_constante_mas_alla_de_la_muerte.htm
FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO (1580-1645)
Yes, it’s shameful that I don’t speak Spanish. Here’s a translation.
trans. Eliot Weinberger
Comebacks?
Back to Beckett, then:
“And in winter, under my greatcoat, I wrapped myself in swathes of newspaper, and did not shed them until the earth awoke, for good, in April. The Times Literary Supplement was admirably adapted to this purpose, of a neverfailing toughness and impermeability. Even farts made no impression on it. I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it.”
Hahaha. Does Murdoch own the TLS, by the way?
pinhut: the TLS anecdote is from Molloy, no ? The second time I read it was in French about 2 years ago, so I’m not sure I’ve got the right feel for his English there.
Is it the TLS in the French version too?
« Et pendant l’hiver je m’enveloppais, sous mon manteau, de bandelettes de papier journal, et je ne m’en dépouillais qu’au réveil de la terre, le vrai, en avril. Le Supplément littéraire du Times était excellent à cet effet, d’une solidité et non-porosité à toute épreuve. Les pets ne le déchiraient pas. Que voulez-vous, le gaz me sort du fondement à propos de tout et de rien, je suis donc obligé d’y faire allusion de temps en temps, malgré la répugnance que cela m’inspire. Un jour je les comptai. Trois cent quinze pets en dix-neuf heures, soit une moyenne de plus de seize pets l’heure. Après tout ce n’est pas énorme. Quatre pets tous les quarts d’heure. Ce n’est rien. Pas même un pet toutes les quatre minutes. Ce n’est pas croyable. Allons, allons, je ne suis qu’un tout petit péteur, j’ai eu tort d’en parler.»
That constrast makes me even more uncertain about how sure my “feel” is for French, than I already and usually am. Those two passages seem to be written in two slightly different frames of mind. The French seems to be more sustained, more “like Beckett” than the English (except for the first two sentences), although they are surely both by him. Molloy was the first book he published in French, I think.
Maybe I should worry about such matters only in the privacy of my own home.
Thanks, M.
I suppose “pet” looks funny to the French: petshop, pet names, exotic pets, and so on — heavy petting. Sort of like Ausfart or fartsgrense in Germanic languages look to English speakers.
I wonder if the Pet Shop Boys ever did a successful gig in France. They may have been planning to do one until their fans got wind of it.
The German word is “Ausfahrt”. Is there a word “ausfart” in another Germanic language?
Utfart. You see it a lot in Sweden, it means the same thing. The one that really gets me is fartsdemper, or speedbumps. They’re designed to make you fart.
Yes, Molloy.
I’d never seen the French before, philistine that I am.
(You can take the boy out of a Midlands hell-hole…)
Fartsdemper are Bodenschwellen [thresholds on the ground] in German. Türschwelle is the threshold of a door. Schwelle by itself derives from a word meaning supporting beam, or something made of boards. I’d always thought that it was obscurely related to schwellen [swell], but Duden admits to ignorance as to the origin of schwellen. Just as well, I guess, since the English “groundswell” is Dünung in German. Düne however means “sand dune”. Hmmm…
Bodenschwelle is officialese, though. In the Rheinland only overtly superior people use that word. Everyday folks just say something like Hubbel (or Hubbeln) [bumps].
The expression I know for “Bodenschwelle” is “schlafender Polizist”. See also here: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verkehrsberuhigung
Huh. Those are not the Bodenschwellen I had in mind. These are not constructed any more in Cologne (nor nationally either), since they damaged car chassis and led to damage suits against the municipality. They were raised sections just over a meter wide (“drive-across width”) that ran from one side of the street to the other. There is a Cologne street (Der Neußer Wall) right where I used to live 2 years ago, that still has these things and is notorious for that among taxi drivers.
The article shows what it calls Bremsschwellen [braking thresholds], but I have learned from riding in Cologne taxis in general that in fact there is no need to brake much for these things. You just drive the tires on one side of the car in the band of level road between the swelling and the curb (see WiPe picture), and drive the other side of the car across the swelling at a fair clip.
Is Wall still a word in German? I remember Neuer Wall, an old street in Hamburg. Mauer in Norwegian means ant (actually it’s maur, but it’s pretty close).
Wall, except in the names of streets and perhaps historical fortifications in cities, is not a word in everyday use. Perhaps I could compare it in that respect to the English “rampart” – you use it in particular contexts only.
True, there are fewer clients wanting ramparts these days.
Maybe the ram parts would sell better if you applied some goat polish.
Is German Welle (wave) related to English swell (wave)?
The OEtymD mentions a German dialect word trischaufel for threshold, implying that it’s related to threshold. Funny: I would also have believed them if they had said it was related to Türschwelle.
Or a fresh goat of paint.
Is German Welle (wave) related to English swell (wave)?
No, but German schwellen is related to English swell. I don’t know whether both derive from something else, or one of them derives from the other.
At any rate, Duden says it doesn’t know what the antecedents of schwellen are. So I assume that the antecedents of “swell” are also unknown. Unfortunately I don’t yet have my new OED 4.0 installed on my new laptop, and don’t have access to my OED 3.0 installation disks.
“trynewoed”/”trynewoed.“
After logging in, I can’t find any ways to look up a word. The sites is very unintuitively organized – except possibly for people who like oohing and aahing at shop window displays.
Please don’t bother to explain that site to me. I’ll use my offline OED 4.0 once I’ve installed it.
It’s a tempting idea that
No. svill = Eng. sill = Ger. Schwelle
are releated to
No. svelle = Eng. swell = Ger. Schwellen
It might have been a piece of wood meant t0 be soaked with water, e.g. to close a gap. But how do we match morphology with meaning?
Duden may avoid explaining it, but Bjorvand and Lindeman make a decent attempt:
The verb is originally strong, swell – swall – swollen etc. (4th declension, if I should happen to have my numbers right). There’s also a derived causative, swell – swelled – swelled etc. (As usual these verbs are mixed up in English and Scandinavian.) The strong verb can be reconstructed as Gmc. *swellan- : *swall- : *swull-, probably with -ll- from -ln- like full, since there are derived words with single l (OE swyle/swile “tumor, swelling” and Ger. Schwulst “tumor”. The weak verb *swallijan- is attested in Gothic by the derivation ufswalleins “inflatedness”.
More speculatively they suggest a connection to the originally strong verb No. velle “stream, run (of water)” and the weak verb No. velle “parboil”, Ger Wallen “boil fast”. There’s a tenuous connection to an IE word for “wave” and an uncertain, but exact, hit in Hitt. walula- “bladder (bellow, balloon)”.
They don’t touch the sill word, so I’ll pretend to be able to do that myself. First, there are forms both with and without -w-. Eng. sill is from OE syll(e). Other languages have sw-. The y can probably help explain the Eng. form as compound shortening or something like that, but the vowel i still looks like a problem. But maybe the original present of the verb was swil- (i.e., 3rd declension, if I should happen to have even this number right) and *swel- a shared contamination? I think a noun from the present rather than the perfect stem might suggest a meaning “in the process of being soaked” rather than “soaked”. This solution would seem to break the suggested connection to wel-, though.
Well done Trond!
I didn’t know the verb å velle. It must be related to welle and “well” in English, or I’m a Dutchman. They all have something to do with water and they sound the same; that’s enough for me. My reputation doesn’t rest on these judgments, so it’s a lot easier to decide.
“in the process of being soaked”
There’s a prior activity known as “getting soaked”, which involves swilling alcohol. What do Bjorvand and Lindeman say about that connection ?
English well being not only the noun but the verb, as in “well up”.
OnlEtymDict connects swill with swallow, but not with swell.
I wondered about the swallow word, but B & L says that it’s derived from a noun *swalgi- “gorge, whirl” without known etymology. To me it looks like it might be related by a simple suffix to the *(s)wVl- root, be it with a meaning “well up” or “soak”.
You wouldn’t mind adding a slash behind “*(s)wVl-“, would you? You might even consider ending the italics after the first”*velle” in my previous comment.
(I didn’t know the weak verb either, by the way, but I knew the prefigated form forvelle with the same meaning.)
You wouldn’t mind adding a slash behind
Not sure what you mean by “behind”. In fact if I look at the html there are so many dots and symbols in this comment that I’m unsure about messing with it! I think your best bet might be to resend it.
I wondered about the swallow word, but B & L says that it’s derived from a noun *swalgi- “gorge, whirl” without known etymology. To me it looks like it might be related by a simple suffix to the *(s)wVl- root, be it with a meaning “well up” or “soak”.
[And that long quotation is completely irrelevant to my argument. Confusing and irrelevant to everything now that the introduction was (rightly) deleted.]