Two rural words, one common and one not, both with interesting etymologies I hadn’t known.
1) brock ‘(male) badger’:
From Middle English brok, from Old English broc (“badger”), related to Danish brok (“badger”); both probably originally from a Celtic source akin to Irish broc, Welsh broch, Cornish brogh and thus ultimately from Proto-Celtic *brokkos.
Wiktionary says it’s a male badger, but the OED (entry from 1888) doesn’t limit it by sex; to quote its definition: “A badger: a name, in later times, associated especially with the epithet stinking.” Poor creature!
2) barn; OED (entry 1885):
Old English bęre-ern lit. ‘barley-place,’ < bęre barley + ærn, ern, place, closet, storeroom; reduced already in Old English to bęrern, bęren, bęrn, whence Middle English bern, modern barn.
Simple but surprising!
“Badger” in Welsh can also be mochyn daear “earth pig”; i.e. aardvark.
[“Aardvark” in Kusaal is teŋinbʋŋ “earth donkey”, which seems fair enough. They do look a bit more asinine than porcine, I reckon.]
I wondered about the surname (and then given-name) “Brock” and wiktionary sez “variant of Brook, or originally a nickname for someone thought to resemble a badger.” I’m not sure if they’re saying that different bearers of the name acquired it through different pathways or just that there are two different theories and they don’t know which one is historically accurate.
I know brock mainly — maybe only — from those lists of the puzzlingly small number of Celtic loans into Old English.
Why would the English throw away their inherited Germanic word and replace it with a loanword, only to replace it again with badger since the 1500s? What is it with Europeans and their obsession with changing the name of the badger? Much discussion of that here under Taboo Deformation and the Bear. There’s no agreement on what the PIE name for the badger might have been, even though, as Mallory/Adams write in frustration, it’s among the species that are “found so widely over Eurasia that they should have been familiar to the Proto-Indo-Europeans irrespective of where their homeland lay.”
“Brock” is also a surname in Germany —Bazon Brock. I remember him on TV decades ago, he was already then an unsufferable pretentious windbag.
‘Brok’ for a badger is certainly not well known in Danish, even though ordnet.dk says it exists. The usual meaning is either ‘hernia’ or ‘complaining’.
Hat,
Hopefully this won’t seem like a stalker’s comment.
After your mention of Endeavour several weeks ago, I turned it on, and at some point I think I passed you, after Cosset and before (Tommy) Brock.
Now, I’m wondering if you’ve come to “hard graft” yet. Or when you do, it may be good for another post.
Or maybe the ground is already trodden. But I found this interesting.
„Brock” in America is „Brock Landers”, the action hero memorably portrayed by Dirk Diggler in „Angels Live in My Town”
@ulr: … Bazon Brock. I remember him on TV decades ago, he was already then an unsufferable pretentious windbag.
Many years ago Sloterdijk would insert in his books little puff passages about Brock. I could never find out much about him. I concluded Brock must live in deserved obscurity, no matter how cool Slotty thinks he is.
Curious phenomenon, writers I like who claim to have been inspired by some other writer whom I then find to be mind-deadeningly unreadable. In early years Luhmann obsessed over Gotthard Günther (“multivalued Hegelian logic” ….), later over Spencer-Brown.
Inspiration is not always easy to pass on. In fact I now think Sloterdijk and Luhmann didn’t try very hard, because after all they had their own tattie scones to sell.
In Swedish, “badger” is grävling, “little digger”.
The older word was tax but today that means only “dachshund”.
Old English ærn doesn’t really mean “closet” or “storeroom”, but rather “building” (but it’s not so general as “place”). This could encompass granaries and storage sheds, but probably only as freestanding constructions. Latin words it glosses or translates include domus, tugurium, habitaculum, and casa. It shouldn’t be taken as necessarily exactly equivalent to any of those: these kinds of equivalencies can be very context-specific, and sometimes very loose, but the range is suggestive. We also have the word being used in the compound medo-ærn to refer to Heorot in Beowulf.
Tangential, but as an illustration of how bizarre glossing can sometimes get, I like the example of Épinal Glossary 1062 (this is a very early gloss-collection containing the oldest reasonably substantial English-language material we have: the glossary itself is copied in the eighth century, but probably incorporates gloss material from the late seventh), suehoras. We would expect this word to mean “fathers-in-law” (like German Schwäher), but the word is actually found glossing Latin uitelli. This is apparently due to the original gloss having been to some history like the Orosius, which mentioned the two brothers of the Vitellia clan who were executed by their brother-in-law Brutus. The proper clan-name was glossed with a description. Since they were actually brothers-in-law, not fathers-in-law, either the word had gained a somewhat looser sense (close male relatives by marriage?), or the glossator was a bit confused about the family dynamics.
@ng
In modern German, Schwager / -ägerin is “brother/sister in law” (DWDS has ” Ehemann eines Geschwisters oder Bruder des einen Ehepartners”), whereas the word for father/mother in law is Schwiegervater / Mutter. Are you sure the Old English primary sense was “father in law”?
Wiktionary says that Ge. Schwäher (which I don’t recall encountering before) is obsolete but covered both Schwager and Schwiegervater.
Schwager is not the same as Schwäher, though they are related words. The former would have turned out as something like *swǣgor or *swēgor in Old English, depending on the dialect, but it isn’t (as far as I know) attested. Schwiegervater is just the replacement of older Schwäher.
Old English swēor (the usual form, after the very early loss of intervocalic *h) definitely usually (I think always, though I haven’t checked carefully) means “father-in-law” in non-glossary contexts.
Does Wiktionary cite any evidence for the meaning “Schwager”? I couldn’t find any, and the Grimm-Wörterbuch explicitly says that “chwanken in der bedeutung ist bei diesem worte seltener als sonst bei verwandtschaftsnamen”.
Adelung’s dictionary (1793) calls the word “ein im Hochdeutschen veraltetes Wort”, but Goethe was still using it.
Wasn’t Sloterdijk a Rajneeshie?
@ulr:
Wiktionary cites Duden, DWDS and the Grimms, which first two simply give the same double meaning.
The Grimms do say, yes, that variation in meaning is relatively rare, but they also give variant meanings like levir (husband’s brother) and simply “male relative by marriage”.
Wasn’t Sloterdijk a Rajneeshie?
Yeah, a Poonass. Years later he would from time to time fess up (depending on the interviewer) while claiming it did him good. Whatever. I got tired of his writings. He now lives rent-free in my head as the opera-going, fur-draped and bejewelled wife of an industrial philosopher.
That’s a quote from a completely out of date dictionary of Old High German (Graff, Althochdeutscher Sprachschatz…, 1834-46). Schützeichels Althochdeutsches Wörterbuch (7th edition, 2012) has only “Schwiegervater”.
I remember Hoimar v. Ditfurth’s devastating review of his bestselling first book.
Kritik der zynischen Vernunft is (or was) great fun. Struck the right note for the 80s, I thought, which were otherwise dead from the waist down (Habermasian) and on the verge of yuppiedom.
“He received the nickname Bazon (Greek for ‘blatherer’) from his Latin teacher because of his abilities in rhetorical endurance.”
Maybe they’re politely saying “reading him taught me how not to do it”…?
Maybe they’re politely saying “reading him taught me how not to do it”…?
ha ha that would cover all the bases.
Sloterdijk is apparently a posthumanist, to link back to some other thread.
I actually expected ‘brock’ to be the common word – taking ‘common’ as ‘word you have definitely seen before’ – it’s the kind of word that probably not many people actively use, but which regularly turns up in local placenames (often, I think, in places where badgers still live).
I remember some ‘TV satirist in the 1990s speaking about “der Modephilosoph Schlotterdeich”.
After your mention of Endeavour several weeks ago, I turned it on, and at some point I think I passed you, after Cosset and before (Tommy) Brock.
Ha! Yes, it was Tommy Brock that started me on the path to this post, but I forgot to mention it. Thanks for bringing it up. But we’ve already watched the entire series (some seasons more than once); this is a rewatch, after which we’ll do a rewatch of Morse.
Now, I’m wondering if you’ve come to “hard graft” yet. Or when you do, it may be good for another post.
I had wondered about that phrase, and the link you provide is excellent — everybody go click on it!
posthumanist
One of the buzzes some rando hotheads got into when Regeln für den Menschenpark came out. There is nothing of that in the essay, whatever it may be. I actually read it so had nothing to get upset about.
“der Modephilosoph Schlotterdeich”
He’s philosophy’s counterpart to Vivienne Westwood. He always writes high-class. The actual subject matter is only seasonally shocking.
I do not regret reading everything he wrote up until about 5 years ago. The ideas were worth it. It’s just that the whole philosophy carneval gets on my tits nowadays. Can’t blame him for that.
My pantheon of great guys has downsized – Luhmann, Marquard, Nietzsche… I expect only ulr knows about Odo Marquard. Y’all’s loss.
Speaking of such nicely rural words, I was modestly taken aback this morning to learn the (usual) etymology of “cider,” viz. “From Old French sidre, from Latin sicera, from Ancient Greek σῑ́κερᾰ (sī́keră), from Hebrew שֵׁכָר (šēḵār), from Proto-Semitic *šikar- (“alcoholic drink”).”* All good semantically, but how did you get from the “c” to the “d” between Lat. & OFr.?
*When it is prophesied in the first chapter of St. Luke that the about-to-be-conceived John the Baptist will refrain from both wine and “strong drink,” this Gk. word is what’s underneath the latter.
how did you get from the “c” to the “d” between Lat. & OFr.?
OED (1889): “It is not clear where or how the phonetic change from sicera to sidra took place; but perhaps the intermediate link was sizra /sitsra/ , /sidzra/ : compare French ladre < Lazarus.”
That “perhaps” is doing a lot of work, given that Lazarus didn’t come from an earlier “Lacarus.”
The Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française says this:
.
Their oldest French attestation is sizre (v. 1120).
And Meyer-Lübke’ Historische Grammatik der französischen Sprache has (§154)
Badgers are srsly badass in real life, not just in etymology. They’ll rip your face off sooner than wish you good morning. I’ve seen vids of African honey badgers strutting along next to hungry lions, being given a wide berth by the latter.
Badgers are cute and dangerous. I likes ’em like that.
That “perhaps” is doing a lot of work, given that Lazarus didn’t come from an earlier “Lacarus.”
You’re letting yourself be misled by spelling; sicera at that time and place represents /sitsera/ or (with intervocalic voicing) /sidzera/, and words with /k/ are irrelevant.
I must have learned Tommy Brock (as well as just brock) as a name for a badger from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Mr. Tod. I also undoubtedly picked up tod as a word for “fox” from Potter’s stories, although I am not sure to this day whether she invented the “Mr.” part, or if that was traditional too, like “Tommy.”
In English rural folklore — at least in the version I grew up with — ‘brock’ was the name frequently given to a badger, as here (I don’t know that particular book, but other examples are out there).
Still svoger/svigerinde and svigerfar/svigermor in Danish, which a veces makes me use Spanish suegro/suegra for the wrong thing… (The other is cuñado/cuñada; but blood relations [Latin co-gnatum] is exactly what your in-laws aren’t).
Badgers in general don’t have that reputation to that extent, but searching YouTube for honeybadger leads straight to the classic.
Maybe not; closer to home the bear was consistently Meister Petz* and the hare was Meister Lampe.
* Beautifully retconned by the Kasperltheater on Austrian TV, where Kasperl’s best friend was (is?) a Kasperl-sized bear named /pɛd͡sɪ/, the dialect nickname for Peter.
@dm
Ah, so it is funny for a big bear to be addressed as Petsi; do you find it funny when a big man is addressed as Petsi or Hansi, especially when this is done by a small child / woman?
I used to have a teenager who worked for me who was about 6’7″ and 250 lbs. It amused the rest of the staff (of a similar age) to call him Little Ryan. I never said it, since it would have rung differently coming from the business owner.
just to keep filling in the cognates, yiddish has shver [father-in-law*], shviger [mother-in-law], shvoger [brother-in-law], shvegerin [sister-in-law], shnur [daughter-in-law], eydem [son-in-law**], and farther etymologically afield*** mekhutn/mekhuteneste/mekhutonim [co-grandfather/mother/parents].
.
* yes, there are endless jokes about vi shver er iz.
** yes, there are gan-eydem jokes.
*** from the same חתן root as khosn [bridegroom] and khasene [wedding]
No idea, and he’s not a big bear.
Oh yeah, Eidam is a thoroughly obsolete word for Schwiegersohn.
“Aardvark” in Kusaal is teŋinbʋŋ “earth donkey”
When did donkeys arrive in that part of the world? Is there an older widespread term for ‘aardvark’ around there?
Wikipedia says the donkey “derives from the African wild ass, Equus africanus, and may be classified either as a subspecies thereof, Equus africanus asinus, or as a separate species, Equus asinus.[1]: 1 It was domesticated in Africa some 5000–7000 years ago,[1]: 2 [2]: 3715 [3]”
ETA: Which is not to say it’s native to Ghana. Wikipedia says African Wild Asses “live in the deserts and other arid areas of the Horn of Africa, in Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. It formerly had a wider range north and west into Sudan, Egypt, and Libya.” So I don’t know the answer to your question.
Origins of donkey domestication discussed here a few years ago; David Eddyshaw: “The word for ‘donkey’ is reconstructable to Proto-Oti-Volta without any trouble, but that probably only goes back about 3000 years BP. It doesn’t seem reconstructable to Proto-Volta-Congo …”
How can the domestic donkey be a subspecies of Equus africanus, when the Equus asinus name is (L.)?
There is a rule that names for wild taxa automatically have precedence over those erected specifically for domesticated taxa – but I can’t find it in the Code tonight. Spent quite some time looking. The Code is not well organized.
Edit: no, it’s not a rule, it’s Opinion 2027 that conserves a particular list of names for wild taxa over those erected for their domestic forms, so if you think these are the same taxon, you have to use the name that was erected for the wild form.
Is there an older widespread term for ‘aardvark’ around there?
No. Most Western Oti-Volta languages have “earth-donkey” formations like Kusaal, but even Mooré deviates, with tãnturi, which looks like an old compound “earth-digger.” There’s no reconstructable name for the critter in proto-Oti-Volta.
Buli, which, along with Konni, forms the closest other Oti-Volta branch to Western Oti-Volta, has either an independent parallel formation to the Mooré or a calque from some WOV language. Apart from that, the various Oti-Volta branches seem to have quite unrelated words from each other.
Buli tinturi apparently can also refer to a kind of tiny shrew; evidently the Bulsa have anticipated modern genetic studies here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrotherian
Dogon and Sirius B, nothing. (Sadly, tinturi does not also mean “elephant”, but one can’t have everything.)
>“Aardvark” in Kusaal is teŋinbʋŋ “earth donkey”
The mount of a West African king is known as the Royal Teŋinbʋŋ.
@dm 15.00
Thanks for the link; I should have known Pezi would be more Paddington and less Mischka, I just imagined Kasperl would be running away from, bzw. roughly treated by the bear who would break his stick or whatever.
Calling all Eddyshaws:
“When a ripe fruit sees an honest man, it drops.” [Nigerian ?]
Dunno. But there are hundreds of languages in Nigeria, and the only one I know any proverbs in is Hausa.
With its vaguely uplifting moral, it sounds as if it ought to come from a Muslim or Muslim-influenced milieu (which does cover quite a lot of Nigeria.)
Kusaasi proverbs tend to be more cynical. (Win nyɛ ka sin “God sees and says nothing.”) I can imagine a more Diogenes-inclined Kusaasi proverb might go “When an unripe fruit sees an honest man, it drops.”
Moreover, although it’s easy enough to express the concept “honest” in Kusaal, there isn’t a simple adjective with quite the meaning of the English word. Burikin is often rendered “honest person”, but it’s more like Latin honestus “honourable”; it’s from the Songhay word for a member of the nobility.
Might be Akan. They go for that kind of cheery positivity thing too, I think, but I’m not well up on Akan proverbs at all.
Eidam, eydem also have an OE cognate, āðum, which (to judge by the citations in the Middle English Dictionary) seems to have died out sometime around 1300. It’s another one of these words where the generations don’t seem too important, since it seems to be securely attested in both the senses “son-in-law” and “brother-in-law”.
“‘brock’ was the name frequently given to a badger” (David L)
I wonder what’s the connection between Russian kisa “cat” (baby talk and marked adult speech) and Finnish kissa “cat”.
DE, “…sees a member of the nobility, it drops”.
But this scheme is universal. “When a tear sees [this, you, …], it drops”
@LH, that’s crazy. Spelling (K, C, CK) and -os aside, brokk in Proto-Celtic, brok~kh in modern Celtic, brok in English and borrowed into Danish as brok.
Wiktionary, citing Häkkinen, says that Fi. kissa is from Sw. kisse, kissa, which in turn is from kiss as an interjection to call a cat.
(Personally, I’d only ever use kisse and pronounce the interjection without the vowel – [ks:] – at least in part because the other alternatives are homophonous with kissa “pee (v)” and kiss “pee (n)”.)
@drasvi
By modern Celtic you mean Welsh. But the consonant is k, not kh in Irish. Welsh seems to be the innovator. So why couldn’t the borrowing be from before the innovation (or after, but through or mediated by Irish)?
The ch in Welsh broch is the regular outcome of *kk, just the same as the c in Irish.
The change has affected Latin loans too, etc sych “dry”, from siccus. But it’s pan-Brythonic, not just Welsh: cf Middle Cornish sygh.
Middle Irish has secc; if that was borrowed via Brythonic, it must have been borrowed prior to the Brythonic fricativisation of *kk *tt *pp, but some Irish loans from Brythonic do indeed seem to be very early. Conversely, I think there are some Irish loans in Welsh where Irish cc has ended up as Welsh ch too, though naturally I can’t think of any just now.
But I think the idea is indeed that the word was borrowed from Celtic into (parts of) Germanic, rather than Brythonic to English.
I’ve met a Russian who addresses her husband as кот and as [ksˤ]/[ksˤksˤ].
Contrast German, where the attempt to call a cat goes miez (2 or 3 times mostly), from which the cat is sometimes referred to as Mieze (feminine like Katze).
Kenneth Jackson dates the Brythonic fricativisation of *pp *tt *kk to mid-to-late sixth century. He reckons that there are no convincing examples of English loans (e.g. in toponyms) from Brythonic which antedate that change. [That’s late enough that early Irish loans could antedate it, though.]
If so, the English brought “brock” with them, rather than stealing it from the natives. That goes well with there being a cognate in Danish.
FWIW, Wiktionary on ModE brock and OE broc ~ brocc only mention English, Danish and Island Celtic, and the entry for OE brocc as well as the one for Danish brok outright claim the Danish form is a loan from English. (The Vikings did raid for words occasionally… but why “badger”?) There is no entry for MidE brok, even though we’re promised one, or *broc.
No sources are cited in the entries for English, but the one for Danish cites Den Danske Ordbog, which says “fra engelsk brock, oprindelig et keltisk ord”, and Ordbog over det danske Sprog, which says “fra oeng. brocc, eng. (grey) brock, opr. keltisk”.
I also looked up the badger’s name in German fables (mostly the Reynard franchise really): it’s Grimbart.
The variation in OE is interesting, because that was a phonemic contrast. (…Though I have no idea when it was actually lost; could have been long before the loss of intervocalic consonant length for all I know.)
Or… it got into the local Romance language and was picked up in the fifth or sixth century before contact with Celtic. The modern Romance “badger” words in Wikipedia are all from Germanic (…or, wait, wasn’t there something about Gaulish…), except French blaireau, Picard grizàr and Romanian viezure. Interestingly, the Frisian ones are all loans, too – West from Dutch, North from High German, Sater looks like a crossover of native and High German.
Breton broc’h as expected.
@DM: Contrast German, where the attempt to call a cat goes miez (2 or 3 times mostly), from which the cat is sometimes referred to as Mieze (feminine like Katze).
English “psps…” and “puss”?
Recently popular bumper stickers around here: “Tell your dog I said hi.” and “Tell your cat I said pspsps.”
Hausa has mussa “cat” (borrowed as amus in Kusaal, and múdĝ in Moba.)
Wiktionary: “An areal word, presumably of imitative origin. Compare Zarma múusú, Soninke muus, Tamahaq mušš.” (The regular Hausa word is kyanwa.)
They also raided for slaves — and for some silly reason (i.e. fashion) the slaves’ word for “badger” became popular.
The modern Romance “badger” words in Wikipedia are all from Germanic (…or, wait, wasn’t there something about Gaulish…), except French blaireau, Picard grizàr and Romanian viezure. Interestingly, the Frisian ones are all loans, too – West from Dutch, North from High German, Sater looks like a crossover of native and High German.
Why did all these ancient people bother to invent and steal various different names for badgers, of all animals ? Was the countryside overrun with badgers ?
It’s because it was an early internet meme:
https://weebls-stuff.com/toons/badgers/
“The variation in OE is interesting, because that was a phonemic contrast.”
Not word-finally. Or if it was, it was a contrast that is often not represented in writing: to stay with rhymes, a lock of hair is written as both locc and loc. But as soon as you add an ending, the contrast is fully represented: always plural loccas, never ˣlocas.
For badger, usually (not that the word is attested very often — unfortunately none of the saints’ lives seem to feature extensive badger-related miracles, and Beowulf is sadly lacking in badger-related references) it’s broc, but once there’s brocc, and a couple instances of brooc that are either signs of a long-vowelled variant or (much more likely) miswritten for brocc (these all occur in glossaries, which are often copied mechanically and not necessarily attentively). There are also a couple of instances of brocc in the compound brocchol (the meaning of that should be guessable). There are no inflected forms, but there is the adjective broccen “made of badger skin” (a new word for me!), also confirming the geminate.
As a curiosity, there’s one instance of a spelling broch. As much as I’d love for this to be a sign of Brythonic influence, I don’t think the h is meaningful. Plus it’s another one of these glossary forms that can’t necessarily be pressed too far.
Q: “Do you have any criticisms of the Church’s saints of the Anglo-Saxon era?”
A: “Well, for starters there’s not enough badger-related content in their vitae.”
Here’s an Orthodox vita of St. Kieran of Saighir (Ireland, 5th century), which mentions a badger although presumably a Goidelic one. https://orthochristian.com/91544.html
“But as soon as you add an ending,”
To be fully precise: a vowel-initial ending.
Another Celtic saint performing Celtic badger-related miracles can be found in the biography of the holy Mac Reithe of Kilmacrehy (from the extensive biographic section of: katolsk.no).
My translation:
Mac Reithe was called upon by Clarraige, his mother’s people, to save them from et Brioch-Seach (“badger monster”) appearing in Loch Briocsighe (“Badger Lake), which today is called Loch-no-Rátha (Lough Raha) and is situated in the parish of Rath, 3 kilometrs south of Corofin.