A man in a tractor had just cut the hay, and these two were looking for food as we walked past.
They soon flew off. They are always so timid; I don’t know why.
Later it’s a surprise to see what was happening at the instant the shutter clicked. That may be what I like best about photographs.
A Bad Guide 
It looks pretty green for hay. Is he planning to make silage?
Anyway, those aren’t crows we see much of here. Which variety are they?
Yes, it’s for silage.
Here’s a closeup or two of our crows.
Here’s one in English. The Hooded Crow, or the ‘Scotch Crow’, though I’ve never seen them drinking around here.
The map at Wikipedia says that indeed we don’t get them here. It’s a bit odd that part of the British Isles gets them but not the rest, given the continental distribution.
Ah, apparently we used to get ’em. “In the past, … in Hertfordshire was known as the Royston Crow”. Why not now? The decline in cigarette smoking, I dare say.
We’ve done varieties of crow before, along with words for crow, and raven, and so on. But I don’t know when it was, and I don’t know how to search for it.
You just search for crow in the box above. Here.
My grandmother grew up near Royston. She never mentioned the crows.
“In the past, … in Hertfordshire was known as the Royston Crow”. Why not now? The decline in cigarette smoking, I dare say.
You may be thinking of The Croak and Gasper in Royston, I remember it well.
Later it’s a surprise to see what was happening at the instant the shutter clicked.
Yes, I love that too.
Wonderful pictures! Did the crows still around?
I wonder why there isn’t crows down here, do they only like the highs ot the NORTH?
What will the farmer do with the meadow now? Graze cattle on the aftermath, or grow another hay crop?
Aftermath
2 Farming new grass growing after mowing or harvest.
Didn’t know that. Grow another hay crop.
Wikipedia:
I didn’t know that, either. The crows are still around; there are hundreds of them. In the evenings in the autumn they roost together, like in a gothic horror or a Charles Addams cartoon, in special trees that they seem to like and then, suddenly, they all fly away, up over the lake.
That’s it, there’s not south-crows
I think there are south crows in Africa and Asia. Are there crows in Australia & NZ?
Dunno. But when we lived in Queensland our mango tree was home to a huge (it seemed to us) colony of fruit bats.
I don’t think they like to be called a colony nowadays. “A commonwealth of fruitbats”.
Or perhaps a “community”?
A batty community.
A community of batty old fruits. The Dame Edna Senior Citizens’ Memorial Home.
Hmm, that’s a bit near the knuckle, Stu.
My knuckles are fur-lined – caressmatic, you might say. I am a great fan of the Dame. What better place for a retiring monument than a memorial ?
In the evenings in the autumn they roost together
It’s a nice sound to hear, isn’t it?
We are getting more and more crows over here — of the Corvus splendes type —, almost everywhere on the island, including around our house, to the point that the authorities have decided to (try) eliminate half of them — the females. (Well, 40% of them to be more precise, which might suggest that men usually outnumber women among Crows.) They have undesirably come on board ships. I heard they came with Taiwanese fishing boats, but one bird specialist says in his book that they followed ships of the British India Company because the sailors used to feed them. They are said to be predators of chicks still in their nest. I’m no chick, but I hate to hear the noise they make and usually try to chase them away by throwing stones at them, or simply by pointing a stick in their direction, which works pretty well. (They are clever animals, with a good memory — about 4 GB I’d say.)
Your bicolor crows have a funny look with their grey back and black head. It is as if they had been eating in a huge jar of Marmite®.
As far as I remember Mr Crown had photos of two fruit bats. God knows in which cave he stored them.
– In the evenings in the autumn they roost together
– It’s a nice sound to hear, isn’t it?
Oops! there has been some confusion in the air. I suppose a crow crows, no? (Well, at least it doesn’t bark.)
I don’t know where the fruitbats are. If only I could search the photos.
My cousin in England knew a saying: “A rook on its own is a crow, a crow in a crowd is a rook“. And there is a word rookery that as well as being the name for a Dickensian slum, implies rooks are the sociable ones. But I’ve seen that crows are not solitary birds so I’m not sure the saying is worth anything.
I used to be indifferent to crows until I saw a children’s television series from Sweden about Bertil the Crow (Kråka Bertil), who lived at a zookeeper’s house – I can’t find these anywhere on the web, unfortunately – but it made me very interested in them. They are very intelligent and amusing birds; and if not exactly kind to other animals, certainly no worse than humans.
Why could it be that there’s no crows just in South-America? They doesn’t seem to be a bird that’s afraid of other birds or difficult to adjust to new environments, don’t you think?
I have to write stupid thoughts for my thesis now, but I hope I can investigate this matter (mystery) soon …
I’ve seen that crows are not solitary birds
That’s what I have seen too. Sometimes on the rooftops of Port Louis you can have relatively large flocks of them, hanging around, all waiting for something to happen or for something to eat – maybe waiting for Nando’s to open.
Its common name, it seems, is the “(Indian) House Crow”. Maybe it often lives in houses with people, feeding on house mice who knows, but I could not stand it (a cat is almost too much already). At this very moment I hear some of them in the neighbourhood and though they’re not too close, their cry is irritating enough.
Above I mentioned Corvus splende(n)s as the local species, and it has its own page on Wikipedia. There, I was quite shocked to see that this crow was supposed to be bicolor too, just like yours. In fact I can’t recall seeing them black and grey. The House Crows we have not far from our house are completely black. A subspecies maybe? But an invasive one in any case. Some of them might even have reached the British Isles, the Netherlands and Denmark, once again as stowaways on ships coming from Southern Asia.
It would be hard for me to tell what a rook is in French, apart maybe une tour for those who play chess. (Why this name? Anything to do with the famous Tower of London’s ravens maybe?)
When you type “bat” on google.fr, among the first 3 results, 2 point towards the “British American Tobacco”, the second one being nothing else than http://www.batfrance.com/. Despite this lack of valuable chiropteran outcome, it has been possible to found the fruit (or golden) bats, which can still be seen here:
https://abadguide.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/from-a-correspondent-in-the-indian-ocean/
(A dead (electrocuted) one can also be seen here, its mouth partly open, showing its teeth — indeed, what flies is not necessarily a bird.)
Artur, a comment above might have been gobbled down by Kråka Bertil, who seems to be so amused that he keeps on croaking like a centuries-old creaking dungeon door.
Funnily enough, in both English and French crows and frogs nearly share the same cry: they both croak when they speak English, and crows croassent when they speak French while French froggies coassent, without any audible -r. (Maybe they only have different French accents.)
At lunch time my wife and I have been trying to find/ remember the cry of a number of animals, in both French and English. It’s not as easy as it seems. For instance we couldn’t find what an English goats do.
Goats bleat.
Eek! A dead fruitbat. Poor old thing.
Frogs croak, but crows caw. And apparently puffins moo, according to Stu’s list. To croak is also an old time slang expression for to die. We say that our goats baa, but don’t forget I’m living with a bunch of foreigners (a nation of them, in fact) and we don’t always use correct English.
It’s most peculiar that there aren’t any crows in South America. Where do they stop: the Panama Canal? Have they really looked thoroughly, as my mother would have asked?
I just took some more pictures of a crow; I hope they came out. It was raining hard.
I’m sorry about your crow phobia, Sig. I feel the same way about flies.
Isn’t a rook un corbeau? Maybe that’s a raven. No, it’s le Corbeau freux (Corvus frugilegus), parfois simplement appelé « freux ».
An etymology of freux, according to Robert: • 1493; fros déb. XIIIe; frq. °hrôk. The “k” bit the poussière, as usual in French. We’ll have to wait for one of the phonologues to explain what the little circle is.
The little circle is for a reconstructed word, one which is thought to have existed but is not actually attested, an imaginary word so to speak. A bit like the Loch Ness monster, that mooing creature, or the dodo to some extent, even if some people did hear it squawk.
A. J. P., I don’t know if we can talk of a crow phobia (or maybe we could after all), but when they are croaking or cawing, whatever the case may be, I don’t find it particularly pleasant to hear. But I don’t like the ululations of the neighbours’ dog either, when he is locked in a kennel. Or my mother’s ranting.
“To caw” would be pronounced as “cow” in your opinion? That would be funny. It would make cocks crow, crows caw and cows moo.
According to the Collins English Dictionary crows croak, just like frogs, and so says the American Heritage Dictionary cited by thefreedictionary.com. (By the way, on this very page it is said that “to croak” is also “to grumble”, which might be of interest to some people around.)
Yes, Bougon, of course, goats do bleat, just like sheep. (After all Crown’s goats could easily be mistaken for sheep.)
An interesting list, the one you linked to. There, one could learn that bats screech, which indeed is the sound it sounds like when they bonk like crazy in the tree above the house — unless this is just fighting (or both). I would very much like to know its translation as I would probably need to shout at them to stop that, in French or in Creole so that it could work, but at screech my E/F Harrap’s mentions only the owl (“ululer”), the gull (“piailler”), the parrot (“crier”) and the monkey (“hurler”). Nothing about what a bat does in French.
Incidentally, this dictionary translates rook as freux, corbeau. But crow is also corbeau, as well as corneille — the animal, not the playwright.
Corneille: corbeau défunt qui croassait en alexandrins.
D’après certains, la chauve-souris grince, ou chicote, couine. The first link contains a quiz on les cri des animaux– A sample question: Quel est le cri du chameau: bêlement, blatèrement, brairement ?
For the Japanese, a crow has nothing better to offer than Ka-Ka-. I like their snake sound-bite better: ShuRuShuRu. So much more sociable than “hissssss…”, don’t you think ?
I have known bats to screech when perturbed by humans (me).
One of our prominent local owl species is known as the screech owl, but why? Its call, though loud, is not what I would call a screech.
I’m sorry for misleading you, Sig. I’d no idea that crows croak, I’d never heard it; but you’re right according to my computer’s dictionary too. I wonder if it’s a US thing. In any case, I’d never use it myself; for one thing, croak doesn’t sound like the noise they make whereas caw does. However, I read somewhere that they can make about 40 different calls, so maybe one of them is a croak.
“To-whit, to-whoo” is the sound owls are supposed to make in English, according to Shakespeare, but the owls round here howl like foxes.
Have I shown you this link before?
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Street-knitter-strikes-again-06072012.htm
Le corbeau is the raven, a large black bird which can emit a wide variety of sounds, none of them very musical. They seem to be sociable birds, but do not congregate in very large groups like crows. La corneille is the much smaller crow, which has fewer cries (caw is not like cow but more like “krâ”). (I think le freux is the rook, another name for perhaps a subspecies of these birds).
The raven plays a large part in the mythology of peoples on both sides of the Bering Strait in the far North (just below the Eskimos), usually playing the role of the Trickster, a very smart mythological being, often tricking others but generally making life easier for humans (eg stealing fire or water on their behalf). Sometimes the raven is thought capable of predicting a death: I think this probably comes from its role as a scavenger, calling other ravens to come and share a prey that is about to die.
The cry of a camel: the verb is blatérer – le chameau blatère. I know the verb but not the sound, having never heard a camel.
bêlement, blatèrement, brairement
The first is the cry of sheep (not goats) , but the third looks very funny to me: braire is the verb for the cry of a donkey, but the noun above doesn’t look or sound right.
The verb used about sheep is bêler, but that for goats is mêler. Similarly for cows and bulls or oxen: the male beugle but the female meugle (she says meuh – like a long “mmö”, not moo as in English).
Now let’s see who knows what a giraffe says.
Heh! Note Eng. crow ~ croak “make the sound of a crow” versus Norwegian kråke “crow” ~ kra “the sound of a crow”.
No kidding.
You showed us the first one, and I think I speak for us all when I say I’m glad to be kept up to date. I like her sense of scale on these projects. Now I’d like her to knit a big tea-cosy enclosing, say, King’s College chapel. It would take several weeks to make. They’d remove it on special occasions, like Christmas Eve.
I would consult Babar l’Éléphant, if we had a copy.
“La souris chicote ou couine.”
Bougon, watch out: une chauve-souris (a bat) is not just une souris (a mouse) without hair on its head (chauve, i.e. bald).
I see braire is very similar to what an English donkey does, which is to bray.
Sig must know what a giraffe says, he lives practically next door to the giraffes.
“La girafe est muette” (Larousse). So a zarafa is as mute as a carp — or a fish, any fish (a siganid for instance).
I see braire is very similar to what an English donkey does, which is to bray.
And what a number of South African humans seem to do is braai.
Ah, thanks. I had a funny feeling that giraffe was a trap.
Here’s a thing about Ted Hughes’s Crow. I like the way they made the head, in the photograph, but I don’t think they’ve got it quite right. The eye and the height of the beak seem too small.
Watch this video if you’re interested in the Higgs boson. I got it from my friend Leif Lønnblad, who works at CERN and who appears in it. It was made at the physics conference currently taking place in Melbourne, by some CERN scientists. It runs for about an hour and it takes 5 mins to get going, but it will tell you so much more about the Higgs than the BBC, or the NY Times, or any other body that’s media-generated (no offense to journalists, but…)
I used to know Peter Higgs. He’s an pleasant fellow. That’s a 5 sigma result for physicists.
Unpleasent fellow or a pleasent fellow?
Translation for not English speaking, please… :-0
Completely off topic, but I remember you when I read yesterday that around 1610 in Spain, that was in a terrible economic situation, one of the many advises the king received was that they should arrange an union with Scotland…
Here’s the page from John Elliott’s article, one of the best historians dedicated to XVI-XVII Century Spain
(I can e-mail the complete pdf if anyone is interested)
https://plus.google.com/photos/110759830521994053578/albums/5731787681245879505/5762736989388464610
“Pleasant”, Julia: sorry for the typing mistake.
Pleasant fellow, and that’s a very reliable expectation (= “5 sigma = statistically 99.999% sure”) when you meet physicists. They’ve been saying that 5 sigma is the likelihood of the Higgs boson being the Higgs boson and not some other boson.
I got to know some high-energy physicists when I lived in Hamburg, from 1990 – 1993. There’s an accelerator there, called DESY. The physicists came from all over the world to work on it and formed a big part of the small international community. All the ones I met were very smart and interesting, and exceptionally amusing and nice people (nearly all men).
Anyway: we were up before 7:00 this morning (on a Sunday!), to see the Olympic Torch pass along our street. The girl carrying it wore an all-white track suit; many grinned at the implausibility of the symbolism. Before she came by we were given wee flags to wave. The flag was paper and said “Samsung”: its stick was plastic, after the style of a drinking straw. The lorries, buses and vans were emitting raucous muzak, and carried gaudily costumed people waving vigorously. There were lots of bobbies on motorbikes, with flashing blue lights bright enough to trigger episodes of light-sensitive epilepsy. (I wonder how often they do?) There were also St John’s Ambulance Brigade volunteers on bikes.
It was all rather silly, but obviously thoroughly enjoyed by the children who ran along in gleeful flocks, waving like billy-oh.
By the time we got back to the house our flag was falling apart. You have to admire the precision of the design.
But was it raining? I’m announcing today a 5 sigma likelihood of rain in London during the Olympics.
Of course. We had summer back in March; it’s rained most of the time since.
Bougon, watch out: une chauve-souris (a bat) is not just une souris (a mouse) without hair on its head (chauve, i.e. bald).
Oops. I had located many lists of animal sounds. The souris was in almost all of them, the chauve-souris almost never. Apparently I got my links crossed.
le cri de la girafe
This phrase has a lot of resonance (if I may use the term here) for me.
When we were children, my sisters and I were taken to a zoo were we saw a giraffe. Apart from the obvious height, we were impressed to discover that the giraffe’s tongue is blue. My father did a little more research and discovered that the giraffe has no cry! So le cri de la girafe became one of his favourite phrases, used on many occasions, as in: Ceux qui ne veulent pas de dessert imiteront le cri de la girafe (‘the ones who don’t want dessert will mimic the cry of the giraffe’), of course followed by loud yells from us.
le cri de la chauve-souris
I think that bat’s cries exist but are not usually perceptible by humans because they are beyond the normal range of human perception. Bats use echolocation, meaning that they guide their movements inside a cave and also outside by the echo of their cries or more precisely squeaks on the walls of the cave or any outside obstacle.
Ceux qui ne veulent pas de dessert imiteront le cri de la girafe
What a great father-type thing to say. I love it.
Genial!
I love it too!!
Here’s the torch story in the local rag. You can see the torch being carried by punt, just as it was in Ancient Greece!
http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/Home/Video-City-swells-with-pride-thanks-to-Olympic-Torch-Relay-08072012.htm
bat’s cries exist but are not usually perceptible by humans because they are beyond the normal range of human perception
Unfortunately that’s not the case for the great fruit bats. Most of the time they make a noise that may sound like the screeching of a mynah or a parrot — only louder, and often all night long! —, but they also make a sound that is more low-pitched. They can really be worse than barking dogs in preventing people from sleeping.
Insect-eating bats, which are much smaller, are not as noisy. But if they happen to be flying not far from you in that erratic pattern they use while hunting, it might be possible to hear their clicks.
Do you live in the middle of town then, Dearie? I’d thought you were in darkest Cambridgeshire.
Not exactly either. When I say “our street” you have to remember that we live on a Roman Road, which is quite long. “Street” was apparently the Anglo-Saxon word for a Roman Road. Many of them had no doubt been Iron Age roads before the Romans came and improved the engineering, and before that Bronze Age or even Neolithic. (We often find flints in our garden that seem as if someone might have worked them to give them an edge.)
P.S. For giraffe fans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_of_the_Giraffe
And of course, Language Hat’s translation of Nikolai Gumilev’s Giraffe.
AJP, have you seen the comment I posted this morning? It never appeared on this page and I am afraid it might have gone into the spam box.
I’ve rescued it. Thanks for telling me. How odd, I’ve no idea why it’s been doing that.
And it’s an interesting point too. I’d no idea they were that noisy.
I think I reposted Language’s great translation at the time.
I didn’t know there were Roman roads near Cambridge. Or maybe I did and I’ve forgotten.
English street is descended from the Old English adaptation of Latin strata (cf Italian la strada). There were a number of Roman roads in England. Since the name “Cambridge” refers to a bridge, perhaps one of the roads used this bridge (or its ancestor in the same place)?
Siganus, about bat cries, what I wrote was about the small cave bats. I had forgotten about the fruit bats. I saw those in Australia but did not have a chance to hear their cries (or perhaps I did hear them but confused them with bird cries, since there were lots of birds around too).
Insect-eating bats, which are much smaller, are not as noisy. But if they happen to be flying not far from you in that erratic pattern they use while hunting, it might be possible to hear their clicks.
And, as I have mentioned before, if you annoy them enough they may make some very unpleasant noises.
“I didn’t know there were Roman roads near Cambridge”: excitingly, ours has a Roman road repair under which archaeologists have found some Tyne coal. So it’s deduced that a cart of coal from the coast hit a pothole and shed a bit of its load. The repair crew didn’t think coal valuable enough to shovel it all up, so they swept it into the hole before putting the repair on top.
“perhaps one of the roads used this bridge”: the Roman road leads straight to the site of the medieval bridge, and past the site of the Roman fort. So there was presumably a ford or earlier bridge there in Roman times. (The site of the Norman castle is in essentially the same spot as the Roman fort.)
Since I grew up on the edge of a market town which had the site of a Norman castle and a Roman fort, this seems entirely natural. The absence of sea, running water, hills, much in the way of trees and hedges, and much in the way of farm animals, seems rather unnatural, though. Still, we have some pretty buildings to compensate. Insofar as they can.
Your photos of pastures, slopes, trees and farm animals remind me quite strongly of home, Crown. Boyhood home, that is. Wrong crows, though. And we didn’t have goats.
dearie, from the newspaper article you linked: The city swelled with “pride and emotion” as the Olympic Torch was carried on a punt and along the famous Chariots of Fire route yesterday (July 8) on its way through Cambridge.
That reminds me that “proud” can have the meaning “swollen”. When the edges of a cut on the body don’t grow back together smoothly, a mound of flesh forms between them: proud flesh. I was once told that there is a genetic factor involved in this phenomenon, indeed I have it.
I was just about to mention smugly that the German stolz [proud, superb] doesn’t have this meaning, so it’s good that I thought to consult Duden aforehand. The “probable original meaning” is “stiffly erect”.
Nowadays most uses of stolz mean “proud, arrogant”. But there is one usage that has more to do with “superb, of considerable amount”, I think: ein stolzer Preis [a high price], eine stolze Summe [a considerable sum].
Of course Latin superbia means “pride, arrogance”, so maybe it all boils down to tumescence.
“Proud” is used when making things, as in “I want the head of the bolt to be proud of the surface”. Crown can probably vouch for this sort of use.
I can.
Your photos … remind me quite strongly of home, Crown. Wrong crows, though.
I can photoshop them black next time.
it all boils down to tumescence
Steamy imagery, Stu.
“Proud of the surface”: that’s cute. Never heard that, nor that “cut the verticals overlength” expression I learned recently @H@. I shouldn’t have skipped shop in high school.
While I’m learning handyman vocab, I would like to ask what the English expressions are for Überputz and Unterputz. When you are installing electric sockets or routing cable, you can mount them “over the plaster” or “under the plaster”, i.e. on the wall or in a recess cut out of it. Does English have simple, matching expressions for these like the German with “over” and “under” ?
How odd: Duden lists neither of those words, although they are standard in building construction. Maybe it’s trying to tell me they should be written as prepositional phrases: Über Putz and Unter Putz. You can do that too, but it’s not the only way, as a Google search confirms.
In my world a putz is either a penis or an idiot. Is this of Yiddish origin in both of these senses? Is Yiddish putz related to German putzen? If I remember, shmuck=penis is not related to Schmuck=ornament.
schmuck=penis is not German, I suppose it might be Yiddish. And of course it’s related to Schmuck=ornament, cf. “the family jewels”.
The member in question might be referred to ironically as a guy’s Schmuckstück, but Schmuck by itself is not a member.of any semantically steamy organization.
of course it’s related to Schmuck=ornament, cf. “the family jewels”.
Sez you!
whoops, try this
The opposite of “I want the head of the bolt to be proud of the surface” would be “I want the head of the bolt flush with the surface”. That might do for your Unterputz.
What a mess ! The testicles are “essential”, the penis not ? It’s the other way around: the penis is essential to family happiness, the testicles are of interest only to the species in terms of survival.
I myself have always understood “the family jewels” as a reference to ball and scepter, the whole regal panoply – not just the earrings.
Thanks, dearie, “flush” will do the trick. Does one talk about “flush-mounted” and “wall-mounted” armatures ?
That’s a very funny Lenny Bruce story. Schmo(e) was very common 40-something years ago, when I was at school in England, but I haven’t heard it since.
Stu, no. I can’t think of any. In the building trade I think Überputz would be “surface-mounted” or as dearie says “flush”, and Unterputz “recessed”, though obviously those phrases have nothing to do with verputzte oberflächen.
the “family” element being the essential one[s]
I think that this means that the word “family” is more essential to the wordplay than the word “jewel”, not that the testicles are more essential than the penis.
Is the S just a mistake? I found that whole paragraph terribly difficult to understand.
Does one talk about “flush-mounted” and “wall-mounted” armatures ?
Dunno. I’ve never built anything electrical more complicated than a radio. And that must have been —ohhhhh, about 50 years ago.
What is an armature in this context, anyway?
Umm, I was thinking of the German Armatur, for instance the Mischbatterie above the bathroom sink, with cold and hot water handles, and the tap out of which the water pours. Isn’t that called an armature ?
This is what armature means to me.
I’ve known this word for a long time. When I was 7, my father and I built an electric motor.
Oh, I didn’t know that. To me, an armature is a skeletal metal structure on which you stick on small bits of clay to make a sculpture for casting – haven’t we done this before or am I experiencing déjà vu?
Grumbly’s Armatur I’d call a fitting, as in ‘fixtures & fittings’ (fixtures being porcelain basins, tubs & toilets, and fittings being chrome & brass shower heads, taps, built-in soap dishes etc.).
Armature is originally a French word (perhaps from Italian, but certainly not German to begin with). As AJP says, it is “a skeletal structure”, not just for a sculpture, but for a number of things built in similar fashion by adding other elements which the armature supports. I think that the supporting parts of a roof could be called its armature. That might not be the exact technical term, but I think that it would still be understood.
The use in electricity seems to be different. I don’t understand the details but the meaning there must be derived from the “skeleton” meaning.
Armering is the Scandinavian term for reinforcement, the system of steelbars that adds strength to concrete and provide people like me with a living. I’m pretty sure it’s borrowed through German Armierung from French armature. Of course, this doesn’t prevent German from borrowing armature another time in a more original shape and a less original sense, or Scandinavian from borrowing that new form and sense as well. In plummer’s and electrician’s jargon armatur is used for small ready-made parts for the consumer’s end of a system, lysarmatur “light fitting”, benkearmarur “bench fixture? (watercrane to be installed on the kitchen worktop as opposed to on the wall)”, etc.
I don’t know what word my French colleagues use for the supporting structure of a building, but no doubt Shoemaker Spinefoot will know. Here we say bæresystem.
Oh, and I suppose the derivation from “skeletal structure” goes through “part (with a complex shape) built (from clay or other material) on a skeletal structure” to “small, complex part as readymate unit”.
Here is my guess as to why the word is used for the rotating part of an electric motor or an electric generator: You make this part by first making a very special object that is going to be able to spin in a magnetic field while maintaining contact with a circuit, and then coiling a great deal of fine wire around that thing in just the right way. Maybe that special thing that the wire got wound around was called the armature because of the way it served to hold the wire, and later the term got transferred to the whole package, wire included. Just my armateurish guess.
That looks like a reasonable guess. Is the gadget with fine wire around it, a rheostat?
No. It has to do with the relationship between magnetism and electricity. If electrical charge moves in the presence of a magnetic field, in a direction at right angles to the field, this creates a force on the charged particles, a force at right angles to both the magnetic field and the direction of motion of the charge.
In a motor there is a magnetic field, and when voltage is applied to cause a current to flow through the many parallel wires on the armature the effect is that the magnetic field exerts a force on the armature, causing it to turn. The whole thing is cleverly arranged so that as it turns the force will continue to turn it in the same direction.
In a generator the same principle is used in reverse. Again the armature with its many parallel wires is turning in a magnetic field. But this time instead of imposing a voltage and letting the resulting current cause the thing to turn, you mechanically make it turn and this results in current and voltage.
No doubt someone who knows this better than I do will correct or clarify.
I don’t know what word my French colleagues use for the supporting structure of a building, but no doubt Shoemaker Spinefoot will know. Here we say bæresystem.
Trond, a quick one before going back to more concrete matters…
I guess what you talk about here would correspond to the ossature of a building, from the word os, bone. See this book cover for instance: http://mauricianismes.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/andre_coin-ossature_des_batiments-7e_edition_couverture.jpg
Would bæresystem in Norwegian mean “bare system”? A bare bone then?
Indeed, armatures are rebars in reinforced concrete, which itself is called béton armé (literally “armed concrete”). I was quite amused the day I learned that in German concrete was called beton (a word that, ultimately, comes from Latin bitumen).
I have to get some ossature sorted out pretty quickly, but I’ll do my best to come back soon to another structural element more in line with the subject of this note: the corbel, which in French is called un corbeau (also a crow, a raven).
No. bæresystem means “carrying system”. The verb is behind Eng. barrow and, more distantly, berries. It’s also a cognate of Gk. phérein and -phoros.
Armert betong in Norwegian, so the calque is visible. I may have told this before, but when my Parisian brother-in-law came to Norway he was amused by the way we pronounce French loans like betong and fasong. Just like his cousin from Marseille!
And, silly me, the verb is still present in English: I hear unbearable pressure from the English redecoration program my wife’s watching on TV.
It’s called beton (stahlbeton) in Germany and armert betong in Norway presumably because reinforced concrete is an 18-19C. French invention. Only Britain stuck out for its own expression.
Can’t wait to hear why a corbel is called un corbeau.
Some walls are load-bearing.
Some hunters are loaded for bear.
Jernbetong is an older Norwegian term for reinforced concrete.
Corbel is obviously (but my sense of obvision has been unreliable before) an old form of ‘corbeau’, so it was presumably borrowed a long time ago.
I think Chicago’s Monadnock Building has the highest exterior load-bearing wall of any building (17 storeys). It’s 6 feet-thick towards the bottom. The building is only 17 storeys because if they’d built any more floors they would have lost too much rentable space at the bottom, due to the thickness of the lower part of the wall. So that was the limit. I suppose there was no zoning law back then to govern building heights.
What about castles: any walls to 170′?
corbel/corbeau
It is true that corbel is an old form of corbeau, but even though the TLFI places the two meanings of corbeau in a single entry, I doubt that this placement is correct. The old French form corbel still exists intact in encorbellement, more or less a collective noun for a larger curving structure, and it has a close relative in the feminine word corbeille, a type of handle-less basket, which cannot possibly be related to corbeau ‘raven’. I think that the two corbeaux ended up sounding the same by coincidence and came from different through similar-sounding Latin roots.
– The name of the bird is from Latin corvus or more precisely coruus (pronounced [korwus]), the root of which, pronounced [korw], must derive from an onomatopeia resembling the cry of the bird (similarly with crow).
– The other, technical words, corbel/corbeau/corbeille must come from the root cor also found in Latin corona ‘crown’, a root closely related to the alternate root cur-b-, both roots meaning ‘curving, arched, rounded’. Another closely related French word descended from the same root is courbe ‘curve, curving’.
I hadn’t ever considered the possibility that Latin words might have originated in onomatopoeia.
Castle walls to around 170′? In Spain, on a rocky hillside somewhere? Some of the walls at Petra must be very high, although they’re carved and they aren’t man-made all the way to the top. When you climb the steps at Tikal it seems a long way up (they’re very steep), but I don’t think it’s anything like 17 storeys. It’s funny you should ask: I was wondering why I’ve never heard the Monadnock facade described as the tallest bearing wall ever, in the history of the world. The Monodnock’s claim to structural fame is always as the tallest bearing-wall ‘skyscraper’ or ‘commercial building’ or something like that. So maybe there is a taller bearing wall somewhere.
I know nothing about structural matters, but the following occurs to me. What would be the point of calling a wall that is not part of a building a load-bearing wall ?
A wall that is not part of a building is a free-standing wall. Such a wall, like the Great Wall of China, of course has to support its own weight, otherwise it would collapse. But that is the only weight it has to bear.
So it seems to me that the very notion of a load-bearing wall necessarily involves the notion of the wall’s being part of a building that provides the extra, non-wall weight. It is then only natural to use the tallness of the building as an index to the amount of load-bearing the wall does, since it is the height of the building that provides the non-wall weight that the wall has to support in addition to itself.
The “building” I am thinking of could be partially open, say a concert stage covered by a very high concert shell resting on slender pillars at the front (towards the audience), and resting on a load-bearing wall at the back. But that would be a semi-enclosure of a space of which only a fraction – the floor where the orchestra sits – is being used and for which rent could be charged.
If you’re going for height in a building, you’re going for rentable space. So you need more floors, which add more weight that the walls have to bear (if you have load-bearing walls).
To sum up, load-bearing walls make financial sense only only when they are part of closed, tall buildings
I read the Latin name “corvus” is because this bird has a slightly curved beak.
its own weight..is the only weight it has to bear
The greatest loads, by far, on a wall or skyscraper aren’t vertical. They’re the horizontal ones, especially wind loads (pushing the wall-slash-skyscraper over on one side and sucking it from the other), and then there are the potentially huge earthquake loads that have to be prepared for in many places. A freestanding wall of 17 storeys would fall over, it would need some mass behind it to keep that from happening – that’s unless you take advantage of the sideways movement and build something flexible, something that waves like reeds blowing in the wind, but I can’t think what that might be.
OK; I thought “load” meant only weight. But when you say: “A freestanding wall of 17 storeys would fall over, it would need some mass behind it to keep that from happening”, doesn’t that explain why tall load-bearing walls are usually part of a building – the building being what is “behind the walls” ?
I was ignorantly trying to address your remark: “I was wondering why I’ve never heard the Monadnock facade described as the tallest bearing wall ever, in the history of the world. The Monodnock’s claim to structural fame is always as the tallest bearing-wall ‘skyscraper’ or ‘commercial building’ or something like that.” I took this to be wondering: “Why are tall load-bearing walls always mentioned only in connection with buildings ?”.
doesn’t that explain why tall load-bearing walls are usually part of a building ?
Yes, it does. Well, apart from the fact that there isn’t much call for 17-storey freestanding walls. Come to think of it, I wonder if that huge NASA Vehicle Assembly Building, the one they always said is the largest by volume in the history of the universe, has the tallest walls… It’s not really a bearing-wall structure, though. I see the facade is braced against a steel framework on the inside.
I was ignorantly trying to address your remark:
That’s very kind, thanks. I’m not being very articulate today. It’s usually I who am ignorantly trying to address your remarks.
I’d better stop talking about this stuff, it’ll drive away the structural engineers. They want to talk about languages and goats. They can get paid to talk about structures.
the one they always said is the largest by volume in the history of the universe
That’s an eminently stupid claim. It’s as if an Uzbeki farmer without TV and internet, who has never been outside his village, were to claim that his barn is the biggest in the world, merely on the basis of its being the biggest one in his vicinity.
Who knows anything about vehicle assemby buildings “in the universe” ? Such are the stillborn ideas of an infertile mind full of ignorance instead of imagination. Nobody can find even the black holes that are supposedly out there, nor give any account of 93% of the rest. .
I can’t remember the exact wording. They may have said it’s the biggest vehicle assembly building in the history of the space programme. Or maybe they just said it’s pretty large even for Florida. They then announced with great awe that it had its own weather, with clouds forming near the ceiling. But we have the same problem in our bathroom when someone takes a shower, and no one has ever been particularly impressed.
Sez here that there are five larger buildings on Planet Earth alone. Four of them are for constructing large spacecraft/aircraft/watercraft; the other is a Target warehouse.
It all comes down to how you define ‘a building’. I think I know one when I see it, but they’re saying
The term “building” used by this list refers to single structures that are suitable for continuous human occupancy.
Whereas the Eiffel Tower, which would fit on that list (after all, it’s got a restaurant and several viewing platforms), isn’t included on the other list, the one that makes the Shard the tallest building in Europe (even though the Eiffel tower’s taller). I hate the tallest-office-building competition, glass skyscrapers stick out of the fabric and make all cities look the same. They’ve somehow resisted the urge to build upwards in Copenhagen, I don’t know how they’ve managed it.
The Crystal Palace had its own weather, and a quite delightful design for coping with it. (According to a prog I saw on the telly in the days when decent progs somehow leaked through onto the screen.)
Jesús: I read the Latin name “corvus” is because this bird has a slightly curved beak.
I think that is what the TLFI and other sources give, but I don’t believe it, since plenty of birds have a much more strongly curved beak (such as birds of prey and a few others). But ravens and crows have a distinct, raucous cry.
In many languages, many bird names recall the cries of those birds, witness the names given by early American settlers to some birds that were unknown to them but had an easily imitated cry, eg chickadee, whippoorwill and many others.
>Marie-lucie
I don’t know either but in a book of birds I’ve found the sounds of crows are: “croc”, “croa” or “carc” and a deep “clong” , written in Spanish. Ours verbs to this song are: “crocitar” (from Latin “crocire”), and derived from it “croscitar”, “crascitar”, “croajar”. Besides “graznar” from Spanish-Latin “gracinare”, also of onomatopoeic origin.
The animal name that is onomatopoeic par excellence is cuckoo. It’s called “cuco” in Spanish and Portuguese, “coucou” in French, “cuculo” in Italian, …and “cuculus” in Latin.
Curiously I’ve heard them thousands of times but I’ve never seen one despite it’s a bird easily recognizable.
Incidentally, the Vatican found “il Corvo” some days ago although they continue looking for others.
Jesús: I’ve found the sounds of crows are: “croc”, “croa” or “carc” and a deep “clong”
The first two could be the sounds of a crow (a smallish bird) as well as a raven (a much larger bird) but the last one definitely can only be made by a raven, a low “clong” or “glop” which is very distinctive and cannot be confused with the cry of any other bird.
I don’t know what you mean about the Vatican and “Il Corvo” – is that the nickname of a criminal?
I too have heard cuckoos many times in France but never seen one. I have seen pictures of them, their colour would make them blend with forest colours.
Il Corvo. (I didn’t know about this, either.)
Crows aren’t that small, m-l. At least ours aren’t. They’re much bigger than our hens.
>Marie-lucie
Yes, I was referring to raven. I understand crow is too generic. About others, my book says:
– “corvus corone corone” (47 cm): “kree, kraa, konk”
-“corvus monedula” (33 cm): “kiak, kya or lyerr”
-“corvus frugilegus” (46 cm): “kroo, korr, kraa, gaag”.
Raven is 64 cm. Also, this bird has a guttural chatter imitating other birds’ songs.
As curiosity, here you can hear a magpie speaking (“hola”: hello) and whistling:
Il Corvo : of course I had vaguely heard of the scandal at the Vatican, but I was not familiar with the nickname.
I did not know the name of the magpie in Spanish: is urraca one of the many Basque words? You know there is a very vamous 17th century French play “Le Cid” (the hero is “El Cid Campeador”) in which there is a lady called “Dona Urraque, that must be “Urraca” (at that time they adapted all the foreign names into French, like the Spanish still do).
>Marie-lucie
By the way, I’ve just read the binomial name of common raven is “corvus corax”, being the meaning of “corax” in Ancien Greek “raven or crow”. It seems a good example of pleonasm using two languages.
As for the bird and the queen, yes, it’s Urraca in Spanish. Our dictionary says “urraca” came from “urrac”, onomatopoeia of it song. The queen was Urraca de Zamora and there were some queens here named like that.
As curiosity, in “magpie” there is “mag”, nickname of Margaret; sometimes, this bird is named here as “marica”, a kind of nickname of María.
a good example of pleonasm using two languages.
hahaha, well done.
Gracias, Jesús. In the play, “Dona Urrague” is not the queen, but perhaps a duenna for “Chimène” (Ximena), at least a girl or woman to whom Chimène tells her problems.
Corvus corax : biological terminology is often a mix, and very often pleonastic, for instance “felis catus”: ‘cat’ (lit. ‘cat cat’). (I think that “catus” is wrong, it should be cattus (see below)). Felis (hence feline) probably meant ‘wild cat’ originally.
Says Wikipedia after introducing “felis catus” (under CAT):
*** The English word cat (Old English catt) is in origin a loanword, introduced to many languages of Europe from Latin cattus and Byzantine Greek κάτια, including Portuguese and Spanish gato, French chat, German Katze, Lithuanian katė and Old Church Slavonic kotka, among others.***
Actually, I think that the word was borrowed into Latin as catta, the feminine form (see below under Egyptian), from which a masculine cattus was formed.
Then Wiki goes on:
*** The ultimate source of the word is Afro-Asiatic, presumably from Late Egyptian čaute, the feminine of čaus “African wildcat”.***
Afro-Asiatic includes the Semitic languages (eg Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Babylonian, etc) and others in Africa, eg Berber, Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Amharic (Ethiopian), and others. I agree that the Latin and Greek words must have been borrowed from an Afro-Asiatic language: domestic cats are not descended from European wild cats, which have never been tamed, and on the other hand the Egyptian had a Cat goddess (called Bast or Bastet) and mummified their cats. But according to everything that is known about phonetic change, a word beginning with the sound [k] cannot come from one beginning with [č] (the ch in church), it has to be the opposite (compare church and kirk, the latter more archaic as regards the consonants). So the Latin or Greek word may have been borrowed from an ancestor or a more archaic relative of “Late Egyptian” (even if the word is known, or “attested”, from writings in Late Egyptian, it does not mean that the word did not exist before that period). The fact that Late Egyptian (whatever period this term refers to) had [č] where the borrowing languages have [k] or [g] practically guarantees that older Egyptian had [k], or perhaps [q] (pronounced farther back in the mouth than [k]).
There should be a number of species with a repetitive binomial I’d say, used for the species that is (or was) seen as being the true or more characteristic member of a given genus. Sometimes it’s even “worse” when it comes to the sub-species: for instance the western lowland gorilla is known as Gorilla gorilla gorilla. Gare au gorille !
Empty, in the article you linked to it can be read that “Gabriele has been viewed as a traitor and called ‘il corvo,’ the raven, an animal known for its thieving disposition”. I only hope the German newspaper Der Spiegel knows about the implications of the expression “il corvo” in Italian. In French “un corbeau” is somebody who writes anonymous letters to other people. It is a very derogatory word, which was for instance used during the Clearstream scandal to talk of one of the EADS top guys who maliciously leaked information supposed to embarrass President Sarkozy; but it is never used for a thief. (It is the magpie which is supposed to steal.)
Corbeau used in a figurative way is generally a derogatory term: it can be someone who loves money and is quick to take advantage of the weakness of other people; it is the person who betrays his companions by writing anonymous letters or by giving anonymous phone calls; it is a pejorative word for a priest wearing a black robe; it used to be a slang word for a croquet-mort, an undertaker; in older times it was the person who carried those who died during a plague epidemic. In Mauritius there was a derogative expression — I haven’t heard it for years — used to talk of rather dark-skinned people of mixed origins: “milat korbo”, i.e. “crow/raven mulatto”.
In any case, the word corbeau is almost never associated with something positive. This is why I was quite surprised, when I read James Michener’s book “Alaska” many years ago, to see that for Athabascan people the raven was the most popular animal-totem that one could have, before the eagle or the bear for instance. Maybe the corvo/ corbeau/ raven seen as a bad omen — un oiseau de mauvais augure, a bird of ill omen — is mostly a western thing.
[Corbeau] “used to be a slang word for a croque-mort, an undertaker”: a “croque-mort”, not a “croquet-mort”. (Literally a “dead-eater”.)
Incidentally, a cormorant is a sea raven/ crow, un corbeau marin, un cor-moran. Its Latin name used to be corvus marinus. It seems to have become a bald crow as black as coal, the Phalacrocorax carbo.
In any case, the word corbeau is almost never associated with something positive.
Sig & m-l, what do you guys think about the name Le Corbusier? He invented it himself, of course. Is it close enough to le corbeau to make you think of a bird of the crow family? Non-French people think so. When I first read his name, in England, as a teenager, I thought it must be pronounced like the cognac, and I wasn’t alone; but some of us also pronounced Marcel Breuer‘s name as “brewer”, so we may have just been more interested in alcohol than in architecture.
Have any of you read The Quest For Corvo? I haven’t, though I saw a play made from Rolfe’s (Baron Corvo’s) novel Hadrian the Seventh a long time ago – apparently it was in 1968.
>Marie-lucie
I think you speak of Corneille’s play. According to Wiki, in this book Urraca was a infante, a king’s daughter but not a princess. However, she was princess in the American movie. In “El Cantar de Mio Cid” she is the princess of Zamora.
As for “corvus corax” and pleonasm, I only tried to joke. Following this attempt I’m going to write about orders. Some Latin names of orders “help” us to classify. By way of example, “proboscidea” means they have a “proboscis” (trunk), “cetacea” means big marine animal, or “chiroptera” (hand wing). However, when you read that the hare belongs to “lagomorpha” you only can say: it is obvious that the hare has hare form.
>Siganus Sutor
My mother-in-low says “corvo marino” instead “cormorán” speaking Galician.
There is also a fish, the black drum (pogonias cromis), named “corvina” in Spanish because of black color.
When Tesi and I got married we took our honeymoon in Prince Edward Island, with a side-trip to the Iles de la Madeleine. The latter is a strange little island group. Culturally odd, I mean: very small, but sharply divided into a Francophone part that is tacky-touristy and an Anglophone end that looks somewhat sad and depressed. We stuck to the Anglo end, not so much for language reasons as because we were looking for lonely beaches rather than night clubs.
One day, on a pier in the English part we saw a far-off seabird, couldn’t make out what it was, asked a local man who was standing there “what’s that bird called?” He said something like “Conrad”. Okay, maybe it was more like CAHM-rat. Okay, maybe he was saying something like CAHM-rant. Anyway, it was a cormorant, and he was calling it a cormorant, and even so we couldn’t initially put it together. When we got a better look a minute later, we said to each other “that’s just a cormorant, isn’t it?” And even so it took us another minute before we said “duh, that’s what he said, isn’t it?!”
We see cormorants all the time when we go to Westport, but I never knew where the word comes from. I’m rather fond of the words “raven” and “marine”, and now here they are together.
We also, much more rarely, see loons there, and for some reason that’s very exciting. To me they look a lot like cormorants at first glance. Tesi is better at distinguishing. Last week we came across a young loon (different coloration from the adults) while paddling around the marshes in the river.
the words “raven” and “marine”, and now here they are together.
Well, not the word “raven”. But I’m fond of the concept “raven”, too, and of the family Corvidae, and of the word-family that contains “corvus”.
> Marie-Lucie & Jesús: Urraca de Zamora is a very important character in Spanish literature. Her father Fernando I left her the city of Zamora and she defended eagerly from her brother Sancho II who wanted all the reign for himself (and apparently despised the idea of a woman ruling a city).
The ballads (“romances“) about her show Urraca as a very independent woman, And she appears in many stories about the youth of Ruy Díaz de Vivar, el Cid Campeador.
Jesús y Julia:
Yes, I meant the play by Corneille. I have not read the play since the time we studied it in school, so my memory is quite dim: perhaps “Dona Urraque” is indeed a princess or even queen who laments that she cannot hope to marry the Cid because of the difference in rank. Of course she does not say that to her friend “Chimène”, but pours out her heart to her lady-in-waiting. Something like that. Her plight was not emphasized when we studied the play, she was considered a secondary character. But she must be the one who decides the Cid’s fate and showers him with titles after his victory (I seem to remember it is a woman who does that, not the king).
Siganus, you must have studied the play too? I should really reread it.
Julia: I think you mean the kingdom here (el reino).
Julia: I think you mean the kingdom here (el reino).
Where, M-L? Do you mean at the end of my comment?
If it’s there, no, I meant Zamora, the city. The father of both Sancho, Urraca and others (like the next king Alfonso VI) divided his kingdom among his children. Well in fact I’m not sure if we can talk about a kingdom as a unified thing by that time… I think it was more like a number of cities and lands that recognized the king as its master… But I’m not an expert!
I haven’t read Corneille’s play, but in Spanish plays also of the 17th Century they equally use that kind of love tension between Urraca and El Cid.
Oh, no I see it now!
I wrote “reing” yes, I meant kingdom, sorry!!
Just to complicate the story:
Even the Cid’s daughters have different names in “El Cantar” and in the History: “Elvira y Sol” or “ Cristina y María” respectively.
Siganus, you must have studied the play too?
No, never. I never read it either. It would certainly boost my ‘Humiliation’ score.
Sig, Language’s comment about Humiliation is dated 2006. He says:
But if you look at the ‘here’, it’s from 2008. So how did he do that?
I think for a proper game of Humiliation you have to not only name books you haven’t read, but also ones you have. In other words “I haven’t read War & Peace, but I have read The Mammoth Book Of True War Stories“, something like that. Or “I haven’t read On the Road, but I have read Clarkson on Cars“.
>Siganus Sutor
Game of Humiliation?
I’m halfway through the micro-short-story called “The Dinosaur” written by Monterroso.
Next 18th I’m going to wear my new glasses so I’ll try again. On this matter, I’ll lose my “virginity”.
I have read neither On The Road nor Clarkson On Cars, but I’ve seen Clarkson in Top Gear. Perhaps “seeing” is not the right word for what you can still do when rolling in the aisles with tears in your eyes.
Siganus, I thought you might have studied “Le Cid” if the school you went to followed the French curriculum. This meant studying literary works which were much too adult for us to understand (I don’t mean “with a lot of sex”, just the social situations and psychological predicaments of the characters).
“Humiliation”: I have never heard of it, but it sounds like a silly game of “one-upmanship”, trying to put yourself on a pedestal and leave others in the dust. Nobody can have read everything! And reading is not everything either. (I have not read any of the works mentioned. I started War and Peace years ago but did not get beyond a few pages).
Julia: in Spanish plays also of the 17th Century they equally use that kind of love tension between Urraca and El Cid.
Corneille must have read some of these plays and that’s where he got the inspiration for his. Perhaps the Spanish plays emphasize the queen and the hero, while the French play emphasizes the hero who has to kill his fiancée’s father to avenge his own father! There is a famous verse soliloquy in which the hero tries to decide which side he should be on, his father or his fiancée. He chooses his father as honour and duty are more important than love. If he had not chosen so, she would have despised him and he would have lost her anyway.
Siganus: I was quite surprised, when I read James Michener’s book “Alaska” many years ago, to see that for Athabascan people the raven was the most popular animal-totem that one could have, before the eagle or the bear for instance.
As I mentioned before, the raven (or rather: Raven, the mythological trickster) is the most important character in the mythology of North Pacific indigenous peoples (in both Asia and America). Not always the most admirable one though! but definitely smarter than everyone else.
I don’t know if “animal-totem” is the right word here: “totem” refers specifically to a mythical ancestor, and among the people in question Raven or other animal figures are not thought to be the ancestors of humans. But I am not very familiar with the beliefs of Athabaskans, who (coming from Siberia) have picked up a lot of customs and beliefs here and there from the various peoples who became their neighbours in the Americas.
Yes, M-L, I’m sure that’s what happened. Spanish theater and literature in general, was very influential for the rest of Europe by that time.
Here, in an 1862 edition, is a long prefatory Notice on the Spanish sources of Le Cid.
m-l: “Humiliation”: I have never heard of it, but it sounds like a silly game of “one-upmanship”, trying to put yourself on a pedestal and leave others in the dust. Nobody can have read everything!
I think you must have misunderstood the premise.
AJP, yes, you are right, I should have looked at LH’s link first. Mea culpa!
marie-lucie’s characterization of the game as “silly” is spot on, in one sense of “silly” – namely “jocular”. Even the name “Humiliation” is silly – just not in the sense of “reprehensibly childish, thoughtless and cruel”..
m-l, I’m relieved you agree. You’re so rarely wrong, so you had me worried that I’d somehow missed the point.
Thanks, AJP,. but I am more often wrong than you might think!
I have not read the play since the time we studied it in school, so my memory is quite dim
I haven’t either, but Mme Ruegg was so forceful a teacher that I remember bits of it quite well, particularly the Stances de Don Rodrigue (“Percé jusques au fond du cœur/ D’une atteinte imprévue aussi bien que mortelle…”); it hit my adolescent heart very hard and left an impression.
But if you look at the ‘here’, it’s from 2008. So how did he do that?
When I created the link, it was (obviously) not dated 2008; they must have reprinted it or something and redirected the original URL. Tricksy!
“Percé jusques au fond du cœur
D’une atteinte imprévue aussi bien que mortelle…”
…Je demeure immobile, et mon âme abattue
Cède au coup qui me tue.
(This is just the beginning of the Stances)
For a French actor, playing Le Cid is something like playing Hamlet for an English-speaking actor.
Those four lines can be read as a subjective description of the “Stockholm syndrome” shown by some kidnap victims who are said to develop a kind of sympathy for their captors. My opinion is that the “sympathy” is a proactive, self-protective measure of abasement, resembling that displayed by those wolves and dogs who submit so as not to get hurt. Le chien s’abaisse et demeure immobile, son âme se donne dejà abattue afin qu’il ne se fasse pas abattre (or words to that effect).
Sigh. I think that should be “se donne pour dejà abattue”.
To think that “El Cid” was, actually, pretty much a mercenary! When I was a child, he was a national Christian (of course) hero. My history book in my childhood had the primitive man in the first page, then the Greeks, the Romans, the Visigoths, the Moors, the Cid, the Catholic Monarchs, Columbus,…, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and finally Franco* (always one or two pages).
* By the way, today is (was, really) 18 July, the sad anniversary of coup d’état in 1936.
Grumbly, I don’t understand why you bring up the Stockholm syndrome, which is about captured people coming to like and agree with their captors, in a situation where they have no freedom of choice and resisting is futile. The situation here is quite different: the hero has to make a decision and choose between the two equally horrible courses of actiion that are open to him, and is thoroughly depressed. That’s what mon âme abattue cède … means: “I feel so low that I have no energy for anything and I am yielding” (to despair brought on by this blow). Perhaps you think that abattu means ‘killed’: it could, in a different context, but not here. The verb abattre is about the same as ‘to bring down’, which could include ‘kil’ but that is not the primary meaning. A person could be abattu because of an illness, for instance, as well as by very bad news, as in this case.
Yes, marie-lucie, I was taking the lines as they stand, without Le Cid as context. That’s why my comment starts:.”Those four lines can be read …” It is a riff on the Stockholm syndrome, not a reinterpretation of Le Cid.
The behavior in dogs and some other animals that I refer to is usually interpreted by zoologists as serving to preserve certain social structures it also helps to create. It serves to avoid and regulate conflict between individuals. I see the Stockholmer syndrome in a similar light.
“Where they have no freedom of choice and resisting is futile”, the widespread interpretation of the syndrome, is in line with one type of normative theory of human behavior, a type that focuses on rational processes – saying that humans do/should consult free choice and rationality. My interpretation focuses on other aspects of human behavior, is descriptive and not normative.
These are different interpretations of the Stockholm syndrome for different purposes, with different implications. I see no need to choose one interpretation as “the right one”. Sociologists have even put forward interpretations of why some people are convinced that there must be one “right interpretation” among several disparate ones. But those interpretations too have been countered with others.
I find it enlightening to consider the Stockholm syndrome as behavior analagous to that of submission in dogs, in that it deters conflict. I’m sorry if you feel (as you seem to do) that the comparison demeans the victims. Possibly you believe that dogs are not very smart.
Or that people should not fall into doing smart things iincompatible with the heroic goals of exercising free will and putting up a fight.
I think that the phrase “free will” covers a lot of territory. If a captive has the will to fight but no opportunity to fight, then m-l might say that he has no free will, while another person might say that he has free will but cannot exercise it.
I do not see any indication of what m-l may have felt about demeaned victims, or about heroism. It seems that she simply missed your tiny little turn signal and thought that “These four lines can be read …” meant “When reading Le Cid, these four lines of Le Cid can be read …”
By the way, wouldn’t Two Crows on a Field of Hay make a nice coat of arms? I wonder how one might express that in the language of heraldry.
Isn’t it more like Two Crows on a Field of Hay would be a heraldic image for expressing something else – virtue or strength, or something like that? I’m not feeling alert enough to decide what, exactly. It may be still available if you want to grab it for the Empty family. I’m sure Catannea could do a heraldic rendering.
It seems that she simply missed your tiny little turn signal
My comment nowhere refers to Le Cid. No turn signal was needed, since I was driving in a different direction.and nobody was following me (as so often).
By the way, nullandvoid, have you acquired a partner, or are you in the process of rebranding ? Will you be declaring things to be null and void, instead of commenting dispassionately on them ?
To me, “Two Crows in a Field of Hay” suggests forebearance and community spirit, as expressed in the German saying: Eine Krähe hackt der anderen kein Auge aus.
rebranding
No, I made what was to be a one-time change for reasons that now escape what I facetiously call my memory, and forgot to change it back.
commenting dispassionately on them
That sounds boring. Maybe I should work on showing some passion.
Isn’t it more like Two Crows on a Field of Hay would be a heraldic image for expressing something else
By the language of heraldry I meant what turns out to be called blazoning, i.e. the standard way of describing a coat of arms in words. (Think of “lion rampant” and the color words “or”, “argent”, and so on.) Crows have been done.
grab it for the Empty family
No,thanks. I’m more interested in this.
Have you read up on bat wings topology ?
You have a fantastic memory, Ø, I don’t know what you’re talking about. You remembered something recently. I’ve forgotten what it was, but I was impressed.
Those who for whatever reason regard their memory as weak, often admire people with a vast memory. Borges turned this around and on its head in the short story Funes, Who Never Forgot.
A Douglas Adams character had a memory that he himself had once compared to the Queen Alexandra Birdwing Butterfly in that it was colorful, flitted prettily hither and thither, and was now, alas, almost completely extinct.
The expression “intolerably uncountable details” pleases me for several reasons. It suggests that there may be kinds of uncountabilty that are tolerable (accessible cardinals, say) . However, it also suggests that being able to count things provides some sort of consolation. “How do I love thee ? Let me count the ways.”
My own feeling is that counting is a way to avoid physical labor and disappointment.
For what it’s worth, counting is also related to recounting. Telling your beads and telling your story. Giving an account, or comte. Zahlen and erzählen.
Montaigne claimed to have a terrible memory, and said he was therefore unfit to be a liar. But he might have been lying. He’s just the kind of well-known person to have had a good memory. I bet Shakespeare had a really good memory.
But he and Shakespeare may have written all that stuff down so that they wouldn’t forget it. World literature as “notes to self”.
That would explain what several writers have claimed: “The instant I have finished a book, I forget it and start the next one”.
Grumbly: Back to Le Cid and Stockholm (and then let’s leave the subject): I still don’t understand how those four lines would apply to a captive unless there was some deep psychological wound as well (such as falling into the hands of the captors through betrayal by a lover). And Stockholm syndrome refers to the later identification of the captive with the captors, not to the initial despair. As for dog psychology, I did not say (or even think) anything about it.
Ø : an account, “un comte”
An account is un compte (the verb is compter, from Latin computare). A tale is un conte. Un comte is a count (a noble rank equivalent to an earl, from Latin comitem , the accusative of comes). Compte, conte, comte are pronounced identically.
marie-lucie: There is no connection between El Cid and Stockholm. I was not attempting to establish one. I merely took a couple of French sentences, in particular the “Je demeure immobile, et mon âme abattue cède au coup qui me tue” one, as suggesting some thoughts about the Stockholm syndrome.
Possible empty had the Comte de comte in mind.
In England there are earls but also viscounts — i.e. vicomtes, as in Vaux-le-V.
I know very little about El Cid, except that the film (starring Charlton Heston) was filmed at the Spanish town of Peniscola.
When the film came out, in 1961, I remember that my grandmother (who didn’t speak Spanish) got cross about the pronunciation “El Sid”, which I suppose made it sound like a Carry On film featuring Sidney James. She said it should be “El Theed” (she may have heard something about it on the wireless). I was only about eight at that time, and my school friends were saying “El Sid”, so I stopped using the name.
It slightly bothers me that the wife of an earl is a countess but I suppose earless looks too peculiar, almost like a disfigurement.
If the wife of an earl is a countess, what is the wife of a count ? Does she even count ?
Thanks, m-l. Maybe I’ll remember how to spell these words from now on.
AJP, I never knew the Count’s full name.
I am curious about this connection between computation and storytelling, reflected in the fact that there are at least two word-families that refer to both: The count/account/recount and compte/conte family, and the tell/teller/tale and zahlen/erzählen family. Maybe three: the reckon family. (Are there other such families in other languages?)
I suppose the point of contact between the two senses is that in one basic old kind of arithmetic you proceed by reciting the numbers one, two, three from memory while in one basic old kind of storytelling you recite the story word for word as you have learned it.
{ }, les bons comtes font de bons amis. (I’ll let Marie-Lucie translate this one.)
While walking towards the tomb of the universally famous comte de Malartic at lunch time today (see the Latin epitaph here with the word comes mentioned by Marie-Lucie above), it came to my mind that we could have vicious earls but no “vice/” or “visearl”. As far as I know there have been viceroys but no “viskings”.
(Er, what was this post about? Crows? Well, we shall come back to them later.)
the tell/teller/tale and zahlen/erzählen family
A small correction, possibly, depending on what you meantersay: zahlen (intr.) is “pay”, bezahlen (tr.) is pay, zählen (intr., tr.) is count.
Ich möchte zahlen [im Restaurant]
Ich bezahle alles außer den Getränken [im Restaurant]
ich zähle bis drei, dann … [“I’m going to count to three …” (you have until then to make up your mind)]
ich habe in diesem Haus drei [Strom]Zähler gezählt [“I counted three [electricity] meters in this house”]
les bons comtes font de bons amis
The corresponding German saying is a bit brusker: Beim Geld hört die Freundschaft auf.
Grumbly: (sorry, I am going beyond my resolution):
I merely took a couple of French sentences, in particular the “Je demeure immobile, et mon âme abattue cède au coup qui me tue” one, as suggesting some thoughts about the Stockholm syndrome.
These sentences certainly do not suggest such thoughts to me, even after your prompting. Perhaps this is because of your interpretation of the words “abattue”, “cède” and “coup”. I already explained “abattue”, and “cède” means ‘yields’, But the yielding here is not to an enemy who might otherwise kill you: the “coup” is a psychological blow against which the depressed and overwhelmed soul is left defenceless.
Siganus: In France this is les bons comptes font les bons amis: keeping money matters strictly fair and error-free ensures lasting friendhips.
marie-lucie: These sentences certainly do not suggest such thoughts to me, even after your prompting. Perhaps this is because of your interpretation of the words “abattue”, “cède” and “coup”.
That is not only possible, it is probable. However, unlike our learnèd Australian friend on many previous occasions at languagehat, I am not going to take it upon myself to argue with you over the interpretation of French texts !
The course of our discussion has many aspects which I find interesting. The most obvious one is that I keep recurring to what could be called detached, sociological views of things, whereas you seem to prefer sticking to matters of linguistics and text interpretation. As a result, each of us seems to be getting slightly irritated at the other – it is certainly true in my case, if I may be so bold as to mention that.
To put it metaphorically, it is as if we were sitting next to each other in a theater watching a play (of ideas). You are trying to concentrate on the plot (as summarized in the program notes) and what the actors do. I myself am following the plot and performance, but IN ADDITION I keep riffling the program notes and making comments such as: “that actor seems to be self-conscious: I think that self-consciousness in actors is …”, or “the acoustics are not as good as they could be: just consider how important acoustics are in a theater …”. Your replies to these take the form of: “that actor’s technique does not suggest self-consciousness to me”, or “I don’t see what the plot has to do with acoustics”.
To put it concretely but in abstract notation, let p be those sentences from Le Cid, and q be my description of the Stockholm syndrome as a kind of subordination behavior as you see in dogs. I initially commented: “p can be read as q”. In your formulation, I might just as well have said “p suggests q”, which is quite true. However, note that thereafter I said nothing more about p. I was attempting to change the subject, using p as a mere ruse to start talking about q.
Unfortunately, you seem to think that my brief “suggests / can be read as” remark is absolutely crucial to whether or not q can be entertained and discussed as an idea in its own right. It is as if you took my “p suggests q” not as a transition, a digression, a changing of the subject, but as a veiled claim of implication: “p -> q” in the notation of prepositional logic.
Attempting to understand why you keep coming back to “the validity of the implication from p to q”, instead of addressing q itself, I arrived at the idea that you find q offensive. I reasoned in this way:
I thought that my remarks about the Stockholm syndrome resembling certain behavior in dogs would stimulate some direct reply, but that hasn’t happened. As I see in hindsight, even in my initial comment I had a premonition that somebody might lock into the “suggests / can be read as q” part, instead of q itself. To ease the change of tracks onto the q line, I formulated the idea behind q in French, leaving Le Cid out entirely: “Le chien s’abaisse et demeure immobile, son âme se donne pour dejà abattue afin qu’il ne se fasse pas abattre (or words to that effect)”. Note the humorous subordination in “or words to that effect” – we might call it the Cologne syndrome.
Oh well. All I hope for now, marie-lucie, is that you will tell me in what respects my little French sentence is incorrect or non-idiomatic.
It’s just possible that I meant “propositional logic” above, not “prepositional logic”. The latter would be a topic in linguistics, about which I am ignorant.
let p be those sentences from Le Cid, and q be…
Oh no, not p&q! I liked the theatre acoustics analogy much, much better.
I see. You are telling me to mind my p’s & q’s.
… A P P L A U S E …
Grumbly, I like your comparison with different attitudes to watching a play, one trying to follow it and the other one making irrelevant comments. I won’t try to discuss your “exegesis” point by point.
All I hope for now, marie-lucie, is that you will tell me in what respects my little French sentence is incorrect or non-idiomatic.
It is grammatically correct, but again the main point is one of vocabulary: your misunderstanding of the difference between the word abattu as an adjective, in son âme abattue, and the verb abattre ‘to bring down (eg a tree), to “take down” or kill (an animal, an enemy)’ and metaphorically ‘to “bring low”, depress, discourage (a person)’. In your sentence about the dog, you seem to mean that the dog’s soul is presenting itself as already killed in order that he should not be killed. But son âme abattue does not mean that his soul is killed, just brought down into despair. You can be in despair at the prospect of being killed, but you cannot voluntarily give way to despair in order not to be killed. This is not the same as an instinctive reaction to “lie low” and adopt a submissive posture as a defense against a potential killer. If something very bad happens to you and you are down in the dumps (abattu), a friend could say Ne te laisse pas abattre, which would mean here ‘Don’t give up, don’t let yourself be discouraged or depressed’, not ‘Don’t let yourself be killed’. Your interpretation of the Cid’s words suggests that his soul, already killed, submits to a killer, and you apply this interpretation to the Stockholm syndrome. I repeat that this interpretation is not compativle with the language of the sentence, but based on a semantic misunderstanding.
marie-lucie: I like your comparison with different attitudes to watching a play, one trying to follow it and the other one making irrelevant comments.
There, you see ? My comments were not intended to establish relevance, but you apparently cannot accept that. You are concerned with relevance to Le Cid, and conclude that my comments are irrelevant to Le Cid. That’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion, and it is in fact true. Unfortunately it is irrelevant to what I had to say about the Stockholm syndrome.
In your sentence about the dog, you seem to mean that the dog’s soul is presenting itself as already killed in order that he should not be killed.
No, I did not mean that.
But son âme abattue does not mean that his soul is killed, just brought down into despair.
Yes, “brought down into despair” is exactly what I thought it meant, and intended it to mean. I know that abattre has several uses, and my sentence is an attempt to play on two of them: “cast down” and “kill”.
You can be in despair at the prospect of being killed, but you cannot voluntarily give way to despair in order not to be killed
I said nothing about “voluntarily”. The Stockholm syndrome is not the result of an exercise of “willpower” – on my reading anyway. A dog doesn’t “decide to submit”. It just submits, and this has the convenient (though unintended, intent being irrelevant) effect of sparing it further trouble.
The so-called “Stockhom syndrome” is not part of any standard corpus of psychic disorder, by the way. It’s more an urbane phrase, up for anyone’s grab.
Your interpretation of the Cid’s words …
I was not interpreting the Cid’s words !!
I changed the subject, thereby cutting all ribbons of relevance to the old one. The new one is not addressed by pointing out that its ribbons are in tatters.
(Not that anyone’s under an obligation to address anything.)
No, but when your mailbox fills up with unadressed letters, you begin to wonder.
Grumbly, I accept that you veered from Le Cid to Stockholm without implying that one was relevant to the other. OK. But the words, by whomever spoken, reminded you of the Stockholm syndrome, while I cannot see them as fitting that situation. The words are an immediate reaction to a deep psychological shock, yes, but there are many possible causes for such a shock and reaction, while the syndrome deals with the later consequences of a particular kind of shock in specific circumstances.
Now can we turn the page and stay friends?
Hmmm… well, OK, weil Sie es sind !
However, I wouldn’t know how to turn one of these pages. Crown, yours get very long sometimes. Do you have one of those old continuous-paper blogsites ? Even so, they would have to be replenished from time to time.
Oh dear Herr Dr Grumbelbaum, this is going to be one of those blogs where after twenty years we’ll still be calling one another ‘Sie’.
It’s not continuous paper. It’s DIN A4.
Incidentally, I don’t know what you meant by a dog doesn’t decide to submit, it just submits. Dogs certainly express free will, and don’t submit when they don’t feel like it.
Well, it was marie-lucie whom I addressed as Sie. At first I wrote weil du’s bist, because that is the standard expression. But this immediately struck me as inappropriately familiar – in the context of French possibly, in that of German. surely.
You wouldn’t understand this, of course, because you are a Revoluzzer and man of the people. All those years with the Gräfin come to naught ! Also, I am in the middle of Buddenbrooks, which elevates my sense of propriety sump’n fierce, despite my having pulled the handbrake as hard as I was able.
>A.J.P. Crown
“…we’ll still be calling one another ‘Sie’.”
Your neutral “you” avoids that. It’s not the same in French and Spanish, as you know. Anyway, here the traffic police are the only people who say “usted” to me and always that’s not for a good news.
Jesús,
English gave up, and the Scandinavian languages have nearly given up, using two forms of “you” pronoun. The funny thing is that while the Scandinavians are giving up the formal one (De is only used in exceptionally formal circumstances), English gave up the informal (thou). Does this mean that the English preferred formality in all circumstances, but Scandinavians just want to be equals?
In England the police manage to call us “sir” & “madam” while using a tone that conveys “Watch it, or I’m going to nick you”.
Old English only used (the old form of ) thou for addressing one person. I think that the formal use of the plural came from French, which itself continued a Late Latin custom, so the use of the plural would have sounded “higher-class”. In time most people gave up thou except in formal texts (the Bible), but thou was preserved in some rural areas (eg the setting of Lady Chatterley’s Lover) as well as by the Quakers under the single form thee. Of course, once something becomes associated with a rural area, considered backward by urbanites, it does not often maintain itself, especially in a class-conscious society such as England. Perhaps Scandinavia was always less urbanized than England or Germany? if the majority of the population normally used Du to most people, it would tend to be the one pronoun retained, especially as society became more egalitarian.
I met someone from a little island off the East coast of Newfoundland, who started school in the 40’s (before Newfoundland joined Canada) and was punished for saying thee to the teacher. Newfoundland is an isolated, therefore linguistically conservative, kind of place, and this island was even more so.
The Latin/French custom of using a different, usually plural form, in formal contexts also spread to other European countries where the nobility adopted it and it later trickled down through society so as to become the default address between unrelated adults. In some countries they used a translation of French vous (2nd person plural)’, in others a 3rd person plural form (German Sie, Norwegian de, literally ‘they’). In Swedish the equivalent of vous (for singular or plural) is ni about which I know nothing else. In Italian and Spanish, things were a little different and the formal usage of a 3rd person singular arose from talking a person not by addressing them directly by name or even noble title but by referring to them obliquely with an abstract word (parallel to Your Highness or Your Honour, etc in English). So instead of saying directly “Do you want X?” a lower -ranked person would say “Does my lord want X?” or even more euphemistically “Does your honour want X?” (and similar forms). Since words for qualities (such as ‘your highness”) are feminine in the Romance languages, in Italian the formal pronoun is Lei, a form of the pronoun meaning ‘she’.
Of course, things are still much more complex in Asian countries, in which you need to know many things about a person before you can talk to them using the appropriate form for their particular rung of the social ladder (as well as their age, sex, and sometimes yet other parameters).
Crown: I remember a big discussion at languagehat two years back about these polite forms of address, in which you mocked their continued use. I stated there that I find the Sie/du distinction useful. That’s the point of view of a outsider, though.
Germans don’t think of it as “useful” – rather, it is a sociolinguistic aspect of their culture, a convention that is not experienced as “a mere convention”. Things do change, though. Many younger Germans have come to think as you do, for instance in IT projects people who have never met before – some of them anyway – insist on saying du to each other (I described that in the languagehat comment thread).
However, there is something about these forms of address in German and French (and, I suppose, the other languages too) that you may not have considered when you made your harmless joke about Sie above, just after my addressing marie-lucie with Sie. It’s not so much that I myself am “hung up” about the use of Sie. Even if I had your revolutionary convictions, I would hesitate to address marie-lucie mit du, especially after we had just been bickering – for the simple reason that I am very unsure about how she would take it.
There is a behavioral cliché about men, especially young ones – that they sometimes “need” to punch each other out before becoming the best of friends. There is some truth to that, as I have observed many times in my life. This, however, is far different from the blogger situation in which marie-lucie and I find ourselves.
For a rather dramatic analogy, consider that short story by Joyce in which (I don’t remember the exact details) an atheistic young man refuses to pretend to his dying mother that he has regained his religious beliefs, which would have allowed her to die in peace of mind. He clings to his own peace of mind – as if her dying were not the end of things after all, and “honesty” were the most important thing of all.
Even if I felt it would be only “honest” and appropriate to shift into a buddy tone with marie-lucie after our little round of mutual annoyance, I am very doubtful that she would think so. This is fundamentally a matter of considerateness rather than forms of address.
WhenIwasaboy, old boys – especially from the farms – still addressed each other as “sir”. That’s to say, two farm labourers might address each other as “sir”. “How are you, sir?” and so on. I still use it myself occasionally when I get excited or surprised. People must think that I think I’m in a restoration drama.
How do you know you’re not in a Restoration drama? Eh? Eh? Think about that, sir!
Two weeks ago, as I was waiting for someone in front of the Cologne train station, I heard a group of Americans talking nearby. One of them, a man about 40-45 years of age, was telling about having had the expression “ugly Americans” hurled at him and some other people recently in Amsterdam and Paris.
I introduced myself with a few jokes, saying that in the ’70s there was anti-American feeling here directed against American foreign policy, but also the plaid, too-short slacks that many American tourists wore at that period. Now though, I said, at my age, I think I understand what the criticism was about.
In the ensuing conversation with this reserved but pleasant man, I learned that he worked for Siemens in south Texas, on steam turbines for nuclear power plants. He was on his way to a Siemens unit in Mülheim-an-der-Ruhr to work for a few days. We chatted about nuclear power plant politics for a bit, when I noticed that he had started inserting “sir” in his sentences. Why ?, I asked myself. I wasn’t wearing a suit or tie, and I wan’t a person of authority to him.
I didn’t comment on it, but was a bit chuffed because I felt the forces of born-and-bred Texas convention grab me by throat, urging me to respond with the “sir” bit as well. I fought them down, just like I used to rebel against tie-wearing. But I felt as if I had neglected my social duties.
by the Quakers under the single form thee.
I think it must be the accusative and or dative of thou (“Nearer My God to Thee”). It hadn’t occurred to me that thou could be declined, but there’s thou, thee, thy, thine – maybe more.
In Swedish the equivalent of vous (for singular or plural) is ni about which I know nothing else.
Wow, I had no idea. How weird-sounding.
Perhaps Scandinavia was always less urbanized than England or Germany? if the majority of the population normally used Du to most people, it would tend to be the one pronoun retained, especially as society became more egalitarian.
That’s what I was wondering. Apparently the practice of addressing people you didn’t know as du didn’t catch on in Norway until after WW2. So if Germany & France were to follow the same course, it’s Sie & vous (sing.) that would disappear (though I think that ‘not within the next 100 years’ was your prediction at LH).
Grumbleguts,
Even if I had your revolutionary convictions, I would hesitate to address marie-lucie mit du, especially after we had just been bickering – for the simple reason that I am very unsure about how she would take it.
Exactly. It’s putting an unnecessary (cf. English) barrier in the way of everyday social dealings (I don’t like using the word intercourse, but that’s what I mean). It’s just one more thing to have to worry about. I don’t think it’s a good idea to pick holes in foreign languages – it’s too easy to forget that a large number of holes are ready to be picked in one’s own language, and it may just lead to thinking that one’s own language is somehow ‘better’ than the rest, as if there were some ideal worth striving for – but the Scandinavian example and the young people’s attitude to Sie that I saw when I lived in Germany make me support change here. Dunno anything about Spansk, but probably there & in Italian too.
That’s a very nice story about the Cologne station, and of course the familiarity I have with that ‘sir’ form that you & Language & dearie mention makes me feel all warm and friendly towards it. I expect that older Germans like Sie because they have a similar emotional attachment. No revolutionary rationalisations are going to make them change their minds.
dearie: I still use it myself occasionally when I get excited or surprised.
Your students must have enjoyed it.
… And now today Language mentions this very interesting post & series of comments on ‘thou’.
The other time you heard “sir”, but it was of course “Sir”, was when we addressed our teachers – except the ones we called “Miss”, obviously.
They addressed us variously, by surname, Christian name, nickname or, once, “you lucky bugger”.
You can call your dog “sir”, too.
I always address Topsy like that, “down, sir!”, without meaning to be funny but because that’s what people said to dogs when I was young, and it’s stuck. The army is the other place they use sir. There, and places like Harrods, where that’s what you’re paying for. Do barber’s shops still exist?
I am charmed. If Topsy were female, do you think you would say “down, madam!”? (In the US “down, boy” and “down, girl” are common.)
Well Topsy is a female, so no. I don’t think the ‘madam’ form exists. I don’t know why not.
Yo bitch!
Bats —
Today the BBC published a photo article about the giant Livingstone’s fruit bats living in the Comoros:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/18971346
Oh, I’ll take a look. Sig, you ought to look at Ten Years Of Language Hat I – (cont.).
Great bat pics! Maybe I’ll move to the Comoros archipelago (once I’ve found out where it is) and look after bats.
Oh, they’re half way between Madagascar & Africa…I’ll start packing. I bet they have real summers.
The Norwegian word for cormorant is skarv, a word that even means “lousy person” and “small piece of wood”. It’s probably from the same root as Eng. shark and Ger. Scharn, *skr- “excrement; something lousy”. I got the intriguing idea that as a birdname it might also arise from a misanalysis of a compound with a genitive hafs- and the regular outcome of something like *korBuZ. But that’s fantasy.
Trond: “Ger. Scharn” is rushing things a bit. There is no such current word in Duden. Grimm gives the special, historical item Scharnbulle = Mistkäfer (dung beetle), saying that this Scharn is primarily a Low German word. There is a discussion of how other, rare occurrences of Scharn meaning “bench, stand at which meat or bread is sold” may be due to a switching of “r” and “a” in Schranne. According to Duden, this is a term meaning “stand” or Markthalle, found primarily in southern Germany and Austria but somewhat old-timey (“veraltend“).
Thanks. I first used Norwegian skarn, but since that isn’t very current either I went international, misremembering Bjorvand & Lindeman’s mnt. “Middle Low German” for ty “German”. I might have been better off using Danish.