Germanic languages

Consulates

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Yesterday we were exploring a part of the city we don’t usually go to, and I spotted a building with a sign

Obviously it’s the Consulate-General of the Czech Republic in Sydney, if the Czech and European Union flags on the roof didn’t show that already. Most countries have their embassy in Canberra, a consulate-general in Sydney and/or Melbourne and maybe a consulate or representative in Brisbane, Adelaide or Perth.

Czech, a Slavic language, has borrowed general, consulate and republic from Latin just as English has (maybe via French). Wikipedia reports that Czech vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German. Sydney is just Sydney, like Praha is Prague (the French spelling).

The other major Slavic languages are similar: 
Generálny konzulát Slovenskej republiky v Sydney
Konsulat Generalny Rzeczpospolita polska w Sydney
Генеральное консульство Российской Республики в Сиднее – general’noye konsul’stvo rossiyskoy respubliki v Sidneye

This is complicated by the official and common names of names of countries. The Czech Republic has the lesser-used alternative Czechia, the Slovak Republic is more commonly called Slovakia, Poland is officially the Republic of Poland and the Russian Republic is actually the Russian Federation (Российская Федерация – Rossijskaja Federacija) (more Latin). 

Among Germanic-speaking countries, we have the Federal Republic of Germany, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, and a sprinkling of monarchies, which are obviously going to have different styles of names.

Also Indo-European is Greek, which translates as Γενικό Προξενείο της Ελληνικής Δημοκρατίας στο Σίδνεϊ – Genikó Proxeneío tis Ellinikís Dimokratías sto Sídneï. 

Non-Indo-Europeanly, Finnish translates as Suomen tasavallan pääkonsulaatti Sydneyssä and Hungarian as a Magyar Köztársaság sydney-i főkonzulátusa, so consulate has travelled to those languages as well.

I’ll leave to you to compare and contrast all of those, which, apart from the original Czech, are as translated by Google. The actual name of the actual consulates may be less or more different, and I’m not going to get started on non-European languages. I’m also not going to link to all those countries and languages.  

ruth (lower-case)

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Some time ago I wrote about the word ruthless and the just-word ruthful. I didn’t mention the word ruth, which means pity or compassion; sorrow or grief; self-reproach, contrition or remorse (Dictionary.com). It is derived from rue (feel sorrow, repent, regret).

Recently Youtube suggested a video of Seven part-songs by Gustav Holst (as compared with Seven-part songs). 

Number 5, titled Sorrow and joy includes the line And she [sorrow, personified] with ruth will teach you truth. The video doesn’t list an author, but the internet found Robert Bridges, who I know enough about to know that he used older words at times. The final verse is:

Blush not nor blench with either wench,
Make neither brag nor pother:
God send you, son, enough of one
And not too much o’ t’other.

(Pother and t’other don’t rhyme in my pronunciation, if I ever pronounced them.)

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The Easter Seal

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Some people say “Put Christ back in Christmas”, but it is is hard for Germanic-language speakers to say “Put Christ back in Easter” when we have adopted the name of a pagan goddess for this festival. Even those Greek and Latinate-language speakers (and English speakers attending Orthodox churches) who use pascha or a derivative of it don’t specifically refer to Jesus. No language (that I have found) uses any word related to Jesus or even resurrection as its usual and natural word.

I started wondering what the most common collocations with Easter are – whether we have been overrun by Easter bunnies and eggs. Not yet, but many collocations are non-religious. Google Ngram Viewer shows that the most common are Sunday, Island, Monday, Day, holidays, week, day, recess, Term and term. 

I am convinced that the correct term is Easter Day, but I seem to be on losing side of that. Easter Sunday has basically always been more common than Easter Day. Easter Week is Easter Day and the six days after (liturgically, we celebrate octaves, being the day and seven days after), though it is possible that some people use it to refer to Holy Week, being the seven days before. Easter Saturday is strictly speaking the Saturday after Easter Day, but most people mean and understand it as the day before, which I call Easter Eve (and refer to the Saturday after Easter). (I suspect that Good Friday will eventually become Easter Friday.) Note that Easter continues for 40 days, until Ascension Day.

Easter recess comes from the UK House of Parliament, and Easter T/term from UK law courts and public schools. So is usage different in the UK and USA? Google’s results for British English are Sunday, Island, Monday, holidays, Day, week, term, day, Term and recess (the same 10 words in a slightly different order) and those for American English are Sunday, Island, Monday, morning, Day, week, day, Seal, term and Term, which omits holidays and recess and adds morning and Seal, and has a slightly different order.

My readers in the USA may be surprised to learn that I had not encountered the Easter Seal before, and immediately imagined the pinniped version of the Easter Bunny. Ummm, no.

For my readers not in the USA Easter seals resemble postage stamps and are sold by the Easterseals charity in the USA and the Canadian Easter Seals charities for fundraising.

When I typed pascha above, Pages for Mac unhelpfully changed it to pasta. Paschal has maintained a more religious flavour (I won’t include its collocations) and Pascha is still basically Latin. Pasta is, of course, entirely culinary.

PS Tues 2nd: One of my nieces and her husband are members of an English-speaking Orthodox church. Even before my sister’s comment below, I messaged my niece to ask what they say. Her response was ‘Usually I just say Easter for both if it’s a non-church person, I think. Maybe specify “Orthodox Easter” or “I’m Orthodox and Easter for us is in 5 weeks…”. At church we usually distinguish “(western) Easter” and “Pascha”.’

Write on!

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Lurking at the back of my mind as I was drafting my previous post was the surname Shriver, which I associate more with the former tennis player Pam than the Kennedy- (and formerly Schwarzenegger-) related family. Shrivers are obviously people who shrive, but why would hearing confessions, assigning penances and announcing absolutions turn into an occupational surname? It didn’t. Shrivers are (or were) people who write (related to German Schreiber and English scrivener and scribe (less commonly used as surnames) (and scribble, not used as a surname) and Latin scrībere). I had been so focused on shrive as a word that I hadn’t checked its etymology, and sure enough, it’s related. I can’t see how hearing confessions, assigning penances and announcing absolutions would entail writing (given the confidentiality of the confessional and that most people couldn’t read anyway), but certainly the confessor (sense 2) prescribed what the confessor (sense 1) should or shouldn’t do. Certainly there was a correlation between being a priest or monk, and being able to read and write (see also clerk, clerical, cleric, clergy). (See also ascribe, circumscribe, describe, inscribe, proscribe, subscribe, superscribe, transcribe, their –script and –scription equivalents, and also conscript, manuscript, nondescript, postscript and typescript.)

Further, Latin scrībere comes from proto-Italic*skreiβō meaning carve and proto-Indo-European *(s)kreybʰ-meaning scratch, tear. The word for write in all but one Latintate, Germanic and Celtic language is derived from scrībere, the exception being English, for no reason I can find or think of. Write is from porto-Germanic *wrītaną carve and proto-Indo-European *wrey- rip, tear. Our distant linguistic ancestors obviously had a thing for tearing.

Write has cognates in many/most/all Germanic languages and some Slavic ones, with meanings clustered around rip, tear, scratch; carve, engrave, dig; sketch, draw; argue, quarrel.

So, write on!

sun/Sun/son/Son of righteousness

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My wife and I spent two nights away at a beach holiday town. This morning (Easter Day) we attended a dawn service in a park overlooking the beach. During the service, the sun rose, but the effect was diluted slightly by some small clouds on the eastern horizon. I couldn’t take any photos because I was meant to be concentrating on the service.

Probably inevitably, I got thinking about the coincidence of sun and son in English, especially in close conjunction with rising or risen. (See also sun/Sun/son/Son of righteousness.) These two words are similar in the major Germanic languages, but English seems to be the only one in which the two words are homophones: compare German Sonne and Sohn, Dutch zon and zoon, Danish sol and søn, Norwegian sol and sønn and Swedish Sol and son (Google Translate). Further, the two words have been similar for as long as written sources are available and have been reconstructed in proto-Indo-European as *séh₂wl̥ ~ *sh₂wéns and *suHnús. Are they related even further back? Intriguingly, Etymology.com relates son to a verb meaning “to give birth”, probably in a passive form of “having been given birth”. Unfortunately, it does not include an ultimate meaning for sun, but the relationship with “to give birth” is obvious. The answer may be in some specialised source of PIE etymology. I’ll have to leave it there, though.  

Compare Latin sol and filius, which is related to a verb meaning to suck, and the two words in any other language you know, in my case Korean 태양 (tae-yang) and 아들 (a-deul). 

Note also the Christian Church in England’s use of the Germanic pagan word Ēostre. (See my post from last year and the year before.)

gnädig und gerecht

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One of the choirs I sing in has just presented our first concert since coronavirus restrictions were eased. The program was very carefully chosen around the themes of remembrance and renewal. One of the two longer works on the program was Das ist mir Lieb, a setting of a German translation of Psalm 116 by Heinrich Schütz. Although English is a Germanic language, singing in German is a strange mix of the familiar and unfamiliar, even allowing for the fact that the choirs I sing in don’t sing in German much.

Two of the verses are:

Der HERR ist gnädig und gerecht, und unser Gott ist barmherzig. 
Der HERR behütet die Einfältigen; wenn ich unterliege, so hilft er mir. 

Alright then:

The Lord is something and something else, and our God is something different again.
The Lord does something to some people. When I somethinged, he helped me.

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Resurrection Day

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Last year I posted about my firm belief that yesterday and today are Easter Eve and Easter Day respectively. I drafted most of the following post, then actually re-read last year’s post and found that I said most of this in last year’s post. But I’ll post this anyway.

I have long pondered the use in English of the pagan-derived Easter instead of anything actually Christian. After researching this, I found that this is an issue in only two languages: English, which uses Easter, and German, which uses Ostern. Even the closely related Dutch and Danish use Pasen and påske respectively. These, as well as the equivalent words in most other European languages, are derived from New Testament Greek Πάσχα pascha, Aramaic, פסחא paskha and Hebrew פֶּסַח pesaḥ (most often transliterated as pesach), or passover. But using pascha, pesach or passover is going to cause more problems that it solves.

English-speaking Christians in particular can’t complain that Easter has become a secular, commercial food-and-drink-fest when we deliberately and habitually call it by the name of a pagan fertility goddess. I was flipping through a 172-page supermarket magazine and saw one full-page ad headed Celebrate Easter. It doesn’t mention Jesus’s resurrection; it was for a cheese company and featured an undoubtedly sumptuous cheese, fruit and chocolate platter. 

A few European languages unrelated words: Wikipedia lists (Indo-European Slavic) Czech Veliknoce (Great Night), Bulgarian Великден (Velikden) and Macedonian Велигден Veligden (Great Day) and (non-Indo-European Hungarian, húsvét (taking the meat, that is, the end of the Lenten fast) and Finnish language Pääsiäinen, “which implies ‘release’ or ‘liberation’”.

If I can trust Google Translate, many non-European languages use either a transliteration of Easter (Japanese  イースター Īsutā), pascha (Amharic ፋሲካ fasīka (I presume directly, given the long history of Christianity in Ethiopia) and (?) Malagasy Paka (I presume borrowed from French, given the colonial history and prevalence of Christianity there)) or their own words for resurrection  + day (Chinese  復活節 (trad) 复活节 (simp) fùhuó jié and Korean 부활절 buhwaljeol (I assume that Korean borrowed the word from Chinese in the same way that English takes most of its specialised vocabulary from Latin and Greek)). There are also a number of languages where the meaning is not immediately discernible. They are possibly related to resurrection.

I asked my wife if 부활 is used only in the religious sense and she said yes. I then said that in English resurrection is sometimes used about an actor or singer who was very popular, then not popular, then is beginning to be popular again, and she said that it’s used like that, too.

[PS A niece who is an English-speaking member of an Orthodox church and second-language speaker of Scottish Gaelic linked to a Twitter thread of speakers of various Great British languages or varieties discussing various words and phrases they use based on Pasch, Pascha or Pace, so it does happen. Wikipedia mentions the Pace egg play, and see also the Egg dance. The Pace eggs found in Sydney supermarkets are named after the (?Maltese) family-run company which produces them.]

gestrynan

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A few weeks ago I posted about the Middle/Early Modern English word beget/begat/begot/begotten, especially as used in the King James/Authorised version of the bible. A book I am reading mentioned Anglo-Saxon/Old English translations of the bible, so I searched for those. The one I found was just of the gospels (Ða Halgan Godspel) (no original date given), so Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus is on pages 1 and 2. The equivalent word is gestrydne, which is obviously not related to any word I discussed in my previous post. This website of Anglo-Saxon words defines gestrynan as get, acquire; beget. Further, Jesus wæs accened of Mary. acennan is bear, give birth to, and is also obviously not related to anything. They are also not related to words in other Germanic languages; for example German zeugte and geboren, Dutch kreeg and geboren, Norwegian fikk (got, not anything else you might think (well, I did)) and blev fød (see Bible Gateway then select the language and translation from the top right dropdown list).

The Anglo-Saxon wordlist contains words which have retained their form to modern English and have the same or a similar meaning, words which are clearly equivalent given spelling changes and words which are clearly unrelated.

In the vicinity of gestrynan (which is filed under s) are:

same form, same or similar meaning
strand – seashore, strand
stream – current, river

spelling changes
stræt – street, road
strang – strong, powerful
strengðo – strength

unrelated
stræl – arrow
stregan – scatter, strew
gestreon – property, treasure
stric – pestilence (apparently not related to strike/struck/stricken)
strudan – plunder, carry off
strudung – plundering, thievery, robbery

(Draw whatever conclusions you want about the nature of Anglo-Saxon society from that list!)

Wikipedia’s page on Old English says “Perhaps around 85% of Old English words are no longer in use, but those that survived are the basic elements of Modern English vocabulary” (citing Albert Baugh, A History of the English Language (1951)).

(Some of the words in the unrelated group may have cognates in other Germanic languages. I didn’t check them all.)

retarding

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Musicians in the English-speaking often use Italian musical terms instead of the English equivalents. Somehow they sound more musical, or maybe we think they are more musical because we usually encounter them in musical contexts. One of these is ritardando, which I’ll explain more in a moment. Some composers, most famously the Australian-American Percy Grainger, preferred or prefer English, specifically Germanic, terms. In Grainger’s case, unfortunately, this was specifically related to his ideas about racial purity.

A few days ago, one of the choirs I sing in sight-read a work by the American composer Leo Sowerby, whose name I knew but whose music I had never encountered. Scattered throughout is retarding, the direct equivalent of ritardando, but still Latinate. Grainger probably used the undoubtedly Germanic slowing. (I don’t know what Sowerby’s motivation in using the term was.)

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Whatever day

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I am convinced that today is Easter Day, but a lot of people think it’s Easter Sunday. This is partly simple familiarity: The Book of Common Prayer, An Australian Prayer Book, A Prayer Book for Australia, the Anglican Communion’s Cycle of Prayer and probably every hymn book I’ve ever used all use Easter Day. It is partly a matter of logic and redundancy. The Day of Resurrection has always been celebrated on ‘the first day of the week’/‘the Lord’s Day’, therefore ‘Sunday’ is redundant. Forty days later comes Ascension Day, not Ascension Thursday. But there’s also Ash Wednesday, Whitsunday and Trinity Sunday, so logic and redundancy only get me so far.

Alas, Google Ngrams shows that Easter Sunday is about three to four times as common as Easter Day. Does this make Easter Sunday ‘right’ and Easter Day ‘wrong’. No. I have the right to choose what I say (I can even say ‘the Day of Resurrection’ if I want to) and everyone else has the right to choose what they say (even if they’re wrong). (Though I doubt that many people ‘choose’ what to say in this case.) I cannot possibly say Easter Sunday and I am even fighting the urge to put it in scare quotes every time I write it.

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