"Sunday" Trivia 14

Late again! Final projects have been occupying my brain. Here's some trivia for you.

(Spoiler alert.) The answer to last week's trivia question was pineapple, a fruit which is called ananas in a huge variety of languages other than English. The etymology of pineapple is interesting as well - the term originally referred to pine cones, and was used for the fruit because of their similarity in shape. Pine cone emerged as a replacement a few centuries later.

English has a lot of weird little compound nouns like this, especially as names for plants and animals. Some are very transparent, like jellyfish, groundhog, or firefly. Others used to be transparent but are a little hazy now, like kiwifruit, which was named after the flightless bird but is just known as kiwi to some cultures with less interesting wildlife. Or horseradish - in Old English, horse was often used to mean "strong" or "large." Still others seem transparent on first glance, like greyhound, which actually derives from Old English grig-, "bitch," not the color.

But some are extremely opaque. Butterfly, for example, may come from myths about witches disguised as insects who steal butter, or the color of the bug, or the color of its excrement. (Butterflies have funky names in many languages, including psyche, "soul," in Ancient Greek and mariposa, "Mary rests," in Spanish.) Or cockroach, which uses the folk etymology of cock, "rooster," and roach, a type of fish, but is actually derived from Spanish cucaracha.

Your trivia question today involves compound nouns. No hyphens or spaces are allowed for any answer. Name:

1. An animal whose name is a compound noun with a religious etymology.
2. An animal whose name is from a Dutch compound noun.
3. An animal whose name derives originally from the names of two animals in Greek, because in ancient times it was thought to be a hybrid of the two.

(Update: Turns out there are a few answers to number 2! Can you name an example from Netherlands Dutch and from Afrikaans Dutch?)

Sunday Trivia 13

Some words manage to take root as loanwords in languages across the world. Probably the most famous example is okay, which is also interesting because of its debatable etymology. The four major claims are:

1. Initialism for a deliberate misspelling of "all correct" as "oll korrect." In the mid-19th century there was a fad for using abbreviations with obvious misspellings, like OW for "oll wright."
2. Abbreviation of Old Kinderhook, a nickname for Martin van Buren after his hometown.
3. The Choctaw word okeh, meaning "it is so and not otherwise." The spelling okeh was common in English until the 1960s or so. This etymology was popularized around 1885 and carried some weight until modern etymologists offered opposing theories.
4. A word or phrase from an African language like the Wolof or Bantu waw-kay or the Mande o ke. This possibility has been largely debunked.

Whatever its true origin, okay has been adopted all over the world, in languages including Portuguese, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and German.

Your trivia question today is about a word which appears in many languages. There is a fruit which has the same name in Armenian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, and Turkish, but a very different name in English. What is it?

(Additional details: In the Roman alphabet, the name of this fruit is written identically in the languages listed. It is written identically but with diacritics or accents in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Macedonian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.)

Hybridizations

Thanks to my suitemate Justus for this bit of trivia.

Hybrid words are words that have roots in more than one language. For example, hexadecimal, from Greek (h)exi- for six and Latin decimus for tenth, might have been sexidecimal if purely Latin or hexidektal if purely Greek, but the ubiquity of decimal in English and the dominance of hexa- (consider hexagon, hexameter, Hexameron) yielded the word we know today.

Another interesting example is aquaphobia, which utilizes the Latin word for water but the Greek for fear, and is associated only with a general trepidation over water. Its Greek-only cousin, hydrophobia, normally refers to rabies.

Your challenge: Give a place name that is a hybrid with one root in a Native American language and the other in Greek.

Sunday Trivia 9

Etymologies that have multiple steps are extremely interesting and opaque. Some go through several changes in meaning along the way. Colors, for some reason, can be especially tangled.

One of my favorites is cardinal (the bird), which is named after the color, which is named after the robes worn by the clergy rank, which comes from Latin cardo, which originally just meant "door hinge." Chartreuse is named after the liqueur, which is named for the monastery where the liqueur is made, which is named for the mountain range, whose etymology I wasn't able to uncover. Scarlet derives from cloth marked with symbols; purple originally comes from the shellfish used to make dye; blue comes from an Indo-European root which led to terms in various languages for white, yellow, and gray as well as blue. Other colors are interesting because of the number of languages they came through on their way to English, like lilac, which derives from French, from Spanish, from Arabic, from Persian.

Your trivia question today is about colors, and complicated etymologies, and animals, and places. Name a color that derives from an animal that derives from a place that derives from an animal.

(Thanks to my linguistics professor Larry Horn for many of these.)

Incomprehensibilities

Sunday Trivia 7 was about nationalities, and a friend of mine mentioned that what we call going Dutch (splitting a bill evenly) is referred to as American in some languages and some parts of the world. It turns out that the full story is a little more complicated: some South American countries use pagar a la americana, "pay American style," and Thailand uses อเมริกันแชร์, "American share," but worldwide there are several nationalities associated with this practice. In Turkey, they say Alman usulü, "German style"; in Egypt, Englizy, "English style." This reminded me of a great graphic I once saw, originally from Language Log. It's a map of mutual incomprehensibility:

In this image, an arrow from one language to another signifies an expression like "It's all Greek to me," which is the arrow from English to Greek. (This is a phrase that Shakespeare coined, although the idea of Greek being hard to understand is much older.) Some great patterns emerge here, like the global inability to understand Chinese, or the more subtle geographic trends that govern certain areas, like English → Greek → Arabic → Hindi. It's nice to know that as messy and convoluted as English can be, there are other languages that the world has deemed much more inscrutable.

Of course, I also have some trivia for you guys. The answer is (sort of) a reversal "Greek to me." Name a term in English which derives from an onomatopoeic Greek word for foreigners.