another nod

More ill than usual these days, I have spent my time today in bed reading the OED. As I have mentioned before in this blog, the treatment of Sanskrit in the etymologies of the OED is often a little careless. Today I came across the OED's etymology for kirpan, "the sword or dagger worn by Sikhs as a religious symbol."

Panjabi and Hindi kirpān, < Sanskrit kṛpaṇa, sword. 

Actually the Sanskrit word kr̥pāṇaḥ, "sword, sacrificial knife," has a long ā too. Punjabi kirpān and Hindi kr̥pān, by their form, must be learned borrowings, not the organic descendants of the Sanskrit through Middle Indic. Panini apparently derives the Sanskrit word from the root of kalpáyati, "he orders, apportions, cuts, trims," whose Indo-European antecedents are disputed. Kalpa is also one of the Finnish words for sword--perhaps one of the early Indo-Iranian loanwords in Uralic? 

Etymological voyage

http://www.rscds-canberra.org/texts/Pelorus-30-7-06.pdf

Interesting article that starts with the name of a Scottish reel and ends cavorting with nymphs in ancient Sicily, touching on all sorts of things--found while investigating the etymology of pelorus ("a compass-like sighting device, usually on a ship or aircraft, used for taking the relative bearings of a distant object, and consisting of a compass rose and one or two rotating sighting arms; perhaps from Pelorus, said to be the name of Hannibal's pilot"). I wondered which author transmits this name to us, and what the pilot's story was. The etymology goes further, of course: πέλωρος "prodigious, monstrous" is from πέλωρ, τέλωρ, "prodigy, monster", from Proto-Indo-European *kʷél-ōr dissimilated from *kʷér-ōr, a derivative of the root *kʷer- "to make". Words meaning "monster", like the word "monster" itself, have interesting etymologies. It strikes me that Arabic ʿifrīt عفريت "evil spirit of prodigious strength"--if from the Middle Persian equivalent of Persian آفريده "created (thing), creation, being"--is parallel. This is another of those cases of a word being borrowed into Arabic from Middle Persian with an inorganic ʿayin, like MP laškar as Arabic عسكرʿaskar  "army", or Syriac ܝܫܘܥ Isoʿ "Jesus" as Arabic عيسى ʿIsā.

Pomponius Mela's account of Pelorus is here. The events took apparently took place after the battle of Zama, when Hannibal was exiled to Syria. Perhaps Hannibal thought that instead of leading him to Syria, Pelorus was engineering a rendition to Rome? Was Pelorus real, originally a Greek in Hannibal's hire who was familiar with the coast, and who has come to be known in legend by a name based on that of the promontory? It seems too much that Pelōros was his real name and that the events just happened to occur at Peloria.

not clear as crystal

After pointless hours of research, I would do anything to know how Persian  ‏شيشه “glass”, from Middle Persian <sysk> “flask, bottle” (cf. Armenian շիշ "bottle”) might be related to Mishnaic Hebrew אֶשֶׁשׁ “crystal ball, light reflector” and Jewish Babylonian Aramaic  אֲשׁׅישָׁא “jug”. Someone somewhere has suggested such a relationship. Someone somewhere has also suggested a relationship of all these to Middle Egyptian šs “alabaster”.  Did the Iranian word originally designate a flask of semiprecious material for holding perfumes? Sorani has شووشه  and Kurmanci şûşe, and this vocalism is also found in Georgian შუშა šuši. (In this semantic sphere, later Assyrian has a luliu “slag of glass” and later Babylonion lulimtu “a jewel(?)”. That there are exchanges between š [sometimes reflecting Proto-Semitic lateral *tɬ] and lateral l in the languages of the region is well known.)

Pogoniption

It is incredible to me that the Oxford English Dictionary does not have the word "pogonip". Merriam-Webster say that they have a cite from 1865. I had thought that the OED had put all of their material for the letters M through R online, before the editors started jumping around more last year. Something that through the cracks in the OED's reading program for American genre fiction?

Perhaps this word got swept up into general-use dictionaries because it was used in a Louis L'Amour story "Down the Pogonip Trail". Later writers of Westerns and frontier fiction seem to have propagated the word after that. Gillian Welch uses the word in one verse of her marvellous song "Wrecking Ball" on her album "Soul Journey"):

Oh, just a little deadhead 

Who is watching, who is watching? 

I's just a little deadhead 

I won a dollar on a scholarship 

Well, I got tired and let my average slip 

Then I's a farmer in the pogonip 

Where the weed that I recall 

Was like a wrecking ball

Is "pogonip" the only word in English from Shoshoni (besides Shoshoni nɨmɨ "person" in the subfamily name "Numic")? I really like having these rare words in the dictionary. Imagine the pleasure of reading a Western in which this word is dropped, wondering where it came from, and then looking it up in the dictionary to find its origin with the sinking feeling that it will not be entered. But there it is! I must see if there is a further Uto-Aztecan etymology for the word. Here and there on the web, one finds the statement that the Shoshoni etymon means "thundercloud". To be continued...

Zzzz...

This article on the relative values of Scrabble letters reminds me of the time when I worked as the etymologist for a dictionary a few years ago. I was always on the look-out for words that would be of utility to Scrabble players--short words with q and z, especially--when I was doing my own reading or listening to people talk. I was successful at getting some of these Scrabble words entered, like zaatar. I just checked and I could not find zerk ("a grease fitting", after Oscar U. Zerk †1968, Austrian-born American inventor) or qoz (a soil type, from Sudanese Arabic), two favorites that I can remember. Probably the best word of this type that I remember doing was zij, "medieval astronomical table", from my favorite realm of Persian loanwords in Arabic. The etymology I eventually wrote:

 [Arabic and Persian zīj (Persian, from Arabic), from Persian zīg, mason's rule, threads that serve as a guide in embroidering, zij, from Middle Iranian jīg, *zīg, thread, from Old Iranian *ǰyaka-, thread, diminutive of *ǰyā-, "bowstring, tendon"; akin to Avestan ǰyā-, from PIE *gʷhiH-, "bowstring, tendon".]

I couldn't find any goo evidence one way or the other for the identify of the final laryngeal in PIE *gʷhiH-. I believe last word in some dictionaries (Random House?) is zzz, "the sound made by a person sleeping." I thought that this had a certain panache as an ending for a dictionary.

The Soil types provide some of the most fun in the dictionary: chernozem, loess, podzol, rendzina, solonchak, solonetz, terra preta...

Ragamuffin

So the lifeguards at the swimming pool had a local pop music radio station playing over the loudspeakers. I heard the word "ragamuffin" amid the garble in a song. I was curious about the history of the term and about how this word (rather recherché for pop music outside of outside the dancehall-soca-reggae community) was being used in a top 40 pop song. So I googled around and found the song, No Doubt's new single "Looking Hot" and the lyrics for it. This is what I got at first off the web:

Running on empty,
but I have had plenty
You’re complimentary
but I’m just pretending
Uniform, hide behind,
This is my diversion
Go ahead and stare at my ragamuffin

"Go ahead and stare at my ragamuffin." This has got to be one of the funniest Mondegreens ever. Apparently the real lyrics are:

Running on empty,
but I have had plenty
You’re complimentary 
but I’m just pretending
Uniform, hide behind, 
This is my diversion
Go ahead and stare, I'm a ragamuffin

In the OED, we find that the first attestation of the term ragamuffin is in "Piers Plowman", as the name of a demon:

Ac rys vp ragamoffyn and reche me alle þe barresThat Belial þe beel-syre beot with þy damme.

(As far as I can gather, this is addressed to a Devil during the Harrowing of Hell:

"But rise up, Ragamuffin, and hand [bring?] me all the barsThat your progenitor Belial beat, along with your mother."

Or something like that.)
Anatoly Liberman has an extensive discussion of the etymology of "ragamuffin". 

El Uñón

Tonight, after seeing too many headlines saying Enrique Pena Nieto, which sounds very unfortunate, I was eventually led to search for minimal pairs in Spanish that illustrate the contrast of /ɲ/ and /nj/. Wikipedia provided the following: uñón /uɲon/ "large nail" (of the finger or toe) and unión /unjon/ "union". But how real a word is uñón?  Well, mis uñones and sus uñones get a paltry few hits, but there is also this:  

EL UÑON  Un ser mitico, hombre con uñas muy largas, que utiliza para atacar a las gentes como un animal salvaje.

found in Mitos y leyendas de Antioquia la Grande by Javier Ocampo López, a collection of Colombian folklore available on Google Books. To me there is no greater pleasure than reading dictionaries of mythogical beings—a taste I developed when I received a copy of an English translation of Borges' El libro de los seres imaginarios when I must have been six or seven. Of the many beings I read about in that book, I was particularly haunted by the thought of the Nasnas. Lying in bed with my head on the pillow in the dark of night, I often imagined that the sound of my heart was actually the thud of the horrible hopping of the Nasnas, slowly and clumsily making his way to my house in the night, bobbing up and down like a sinister pogo stick...