Weird etymologies
Feb. 22nd, 2006 02:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat1138After encountering "fungible" in Sunday's Dilbert just before we headed out for lunch, I thoroughly annoyed the wombat-consort by making him explain the word to me, since I didn't recall having seen it before and hadn't had time to look it up. (Also, I think Scott Adams is definitely turning into an asshole, on which more later.)
As I'd thought, it's from the same Latin root as "function", though until I hit Cassell's just now, I'd forgotten it was actually a deponent verb: fungor, fungi, functus sum, not *fungo, fungere etc. So "functionally equivalent" is more or less, um, fungible with "fungible". However, the word "fungus" comes from a completely different root, having originated as a poetic cognate from the same Greek root as "sponge", the squooshiness of which IIRC also relates to the Sphinx (which Graves glossed as "strangler", modulo his usual sodium content) as well as "sphincter". (Ahem.)
(While I can kinda see Adams' argument, it's pitched on a completely different level than the way my brain cell operates. Maybe it's just me, but if I were going to buy a hybrid car, geopolitical economics would be somewhere down my list of reasons behind "I won't have to spend as much of my own personal money on gasoline." And once fuel-efficent technology improves to a certain level, that's likely to be the most popular reason for spreading to a nation/world-wide level, not counting the conspicuous-consumption Hummer hordes. Of course, then you end up with interesting supply/demand seesaws if there's a sufficient decrease in fuel demand to depress its price, thus decreasing the sense of consumer urgency for convservation, but hey.)
And then there's the Japanese slang term yanki(i), often transliterated as "Yankee" as an easy assumption at its source-- it refers to a certain type of bad-behavior kids who often sport bleached-blond hair. However, according to a conflicting etymology which feels better to me somehow, it's actually a purely Japanese formation based on Kansai-ben, in which the already-informal negative copula ja nai (from de wa nai) may get further clipped to yan, perhaps immediately followed by the sentence-final Kansai-ben particle ke whose significance I have thoroughly forgotten, though now I wonder if it's related to Inuyasha's favorite exclamation, "Keh!" So the initial form was supposedly yanke, which eventually morphed into the adjective yanki(i). Not that it really matters, but the Kansai-ben explanation just seems so much more interesting.
And finally, last fall there was an article in The Economist about Japanese age demographics whose online archive doesn't seem to have all of the charts I remember. Among other discontinuities, such as the sharp drop in the age group (especially males) born around 1920, there was a sharp single-year dip for the birth year 1966. While I'd remembered Kittredge Cherry's essay in Womansword about the dread of Fire Horse women, somehow I hadn't really believed her about just how much reluctance there was from prospective parents to give birth to such a child. It was somewhat reassuring to see that the gender ratio was normal among the relatively few Fire Horse births in Japan, though I'm not sure how much that was attributable to the unavailability of prenatal gender-checking, or whether the hinoeuma stigma applies to boys as well-- when we were at my parents' house for the holidays, I noticed a novel whose blurb's invocation of the destructive passions of Fire Horses seemed to be applying them to a male protagonist, which I found rather funny since my brother was born in 1966.
(Rurouni Kenshin's Yukishiro Tomoe would've been born in the antepenultimate batch of hinoeuma. He really should've known she'd be trouble :b )
Addendum: another Japanese slang term, otemba, also describes unruly women; despite its close similarity to the English "tomboy", it's actually from the Dutch ontembaar, which describes a wild horse which can't be broken. ("You can tame a dog with food. You can tame a man with money. But nothing can tame a horse of the Fire Year"? There's gotta be some better translation for the verb Saitou used, whose meaning seems to be somewhere between "tame/train a wild animal" and "raise a child" iirc, but maybe there isn't and I don't.)
As I'd thought, it's from the same Latin root as "function", though until I hit Cassell's just now, I'd forgotten it was actually a deponent verb: fungor, fungi, functus sum, not *fungo, fungere etc. So "functionally equivalent" is more or less, um, fungible with "fungible". However, the word "fungus" comes from a completely different root, having originated as a poetic cognate from the same Greek root as "sponge", the squooshiness of which IIRC also relates to the Sphinx (which Graves glossed as "strangler", modulo his usual sodium content) as well as "sphincter". (Ahem.)
(While I can kinda see Adams' argument, it's pitched on a completely different level than the way my brain cell operates. Maybe it's just me, but if I were going to buy a hybrid car, geopolitical economics would be somewhere down my list of reasons behind "I won't have to spend as much of my own personal money on gasoline." And once fuel-efficent technology improves to a certain level, that's likely to be the most popular reason for spreading to a nation/world-wide level, not counting the conspicuous-consumption Hummer hordes. Of course, then you end up with interesting supply/demand seesaws if there's a sufficient decrease in fuel demand to depress its price, thus decreasing the sense of consumer urgency for convservation, but hey.)
And then there's the Japanese slang term yanki(i), often transliterated as "Yankee" as an easy assumption at its source-- it refers to a certain type of bad-behavior kids who often sport bleached-blond hair. However, according to a conflicting etymology which feels better to me somehow, it's actually a purely Japanese formation based on Kansai-ben, in which the already-informal negative copula ja nai (from de wa nai) may get further clipped to yan, perhaps immediately followed by the sentence-final Kansai-ben particle ke whose significance I have thoroughly forgotten, though now I wonder if it's related to Inuyasha's favorite exclamation, "Keh!" So the initial form was supposedly yanke, which eventually morphed into the adjective yanki(i). Not that it really matters, but the Kansai-ben explanation just seems so much more interesting.
And finally, last fall there was an article in The Economist about Japanese age demographics whose online archive doesn't seem to have all of the charts I remember. Among other discontinuities, such as the sharp drop in the age group (especially males) born around 1920, there was a sharp single-year dip for the birth year 1966. While I'd remembered Kittredge Cherry's essay in Womansword about the dread of Fire Horse women, somehow I hadn't really believed her about just how much reluctance there was from prospective parents to give birth to such a child. It was somewhat reassuring to see that the gender ratio was normal among the relatively few Fire Horse births in Japan, though I'm not sure how much that was attributable to the unavailability of prenatal gender-checking, or whether the hinoeuma stigma applies to boys as well-- when we were at my parents' house for the holidays, I noticed a novel whose blurb's invocation of the destructive passions of Fire Horses seemed to be applying them to a male protagonist, which I found rather funny since my brother was born in 1966.
(Rurouni Kenshin's Yukishiro Tomoe would've been born in the antepenultimate batch of hinoeuma. He really should've known she'd be trouble :b )
Addendum: another Japanese slang term, otemba, also describes unruly women; despite its close similarity to the English "tomboy", it's actually from the Dutch ontembaar, which describes a wild horse which can't be broken. ("You can tame a dog with food. You can tame a man with money. But nothing can tame a horse of the Fire Year"? There's gotta be some better translation for the verb Saitou used, whose meaning seems to be somewhere between "tame/train a wild animal" and "raise a child" iirc, but maybe there isn't and I don't.)
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
wheeeeeeee!!!
on 2006-02-22 02:01 pm (UTC)it's snowing like an MF....
why do I have a 540 number for you? contact list mungification...sigh...
no subject
on 2006-02-22 04:12 pm (UTC)Your language explorations are always interesting and entertaining - but the derivations of yanki(i) both seem equally plausible and highly entertaining on different levels - making them fungible, ne? Surprising that you had not heard that word before, it's one of my favorites! I like to think of it as growing green on the wrong side of an unseen tree in the forrest....if nobody sees it, does it exist? lol.
In any case, this explanation of Inuyasha's favorite grunt phrase of dismissal and exasperation sounds great - but does it work for Japan post 1543, which is pretty much when IY takes place? Was "ja nai" in place then, ready to be morphed? Do we know? (Do we care?)
Now, as to the Fire Horse Women and Tomoe.....Yikes! Must investigate! Would Kenny have known her birth year? He didn't know much of anything else about her. Even more interesting, did Watsuki know? Sometimes I wonder if we end up knowing more about the "etymology" of his characters than he ever intended or imagined. But that's a good thing!
Carry on....
no subject
on 2006-02-22 06:35 pm (UTC)But sentence-final particles tend to work kinda like punctuation, so there wouldn't be any inherent link between "Keh!" (which feels like an annoyance-marker similar to 'tte(ba)) and any particular preceding word/phrase such as ja nai or yan-- the Wikipedia article on Kansai-ben says that ya is actually just the standard dialect equivalent for da, reinforcing my conviction that yan would gloss fairly well as "ain't". However, if you're a contrary street punk, you might end every other sentence with that combination. (Instead of know-it-alls, would these kids be "no it ain't"s?
I'm not really sure where Tomoe's birthdate comes from-- it's repeated all over the web, so it must be from one of the later RK fan/artbooks. Whether that makes it canon is probably debatable, considering some of the (other) speculation the authors indulged in, and Oro-chan didn't even seem to know his own birth year unless he really couldn't count that high without resorting to finger/toe/whatever-tallying when Kaoru asked him his age.
(One suspects that Hiko may not have been all that interested in teaching him math. Or perhaps one simply hopes. Hiko Seijuurou, sadistic algebra teacher extraordinaire!!!!)
no subject
on 2006-02-22 11:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-03-01 05:59 pm (UTC)I've muttered for a long time that while I can see how personalities might be partially shaped by the general time of year one was born in (and thus one's prenatal conditions and formative encounters with the world; vindication by this study (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11408788&dopt=Abstract), as it turns out), the Western zodiac would end up getting completely flipped in that regard for the Southern Hemisphere, negating any pretense to usefulness in that regard. I keep looking up and promptly forgetting what sort of natural basis there might be for the Eastern Zodiac, whose critters don't map to constellations-- the (apparent) orbit of Jupiter? what about the sixty-year macrocycle when the elements are factored in? The only other use of the critterset that I know of is a timetelling cycle of twelve ((sometimes very) approximately) two-hour units throughout the day; there's a really excellent description here (http://www.sengokudaimyo.com/miscellany/miscellany.html), which I've probably linked before :b Other pertinent factoids/keywords which I half-remember are that Chinese astronomy was oriented[*] toward the south instead of the east, as well as something to do with the horizon that's different from the following asterisquerie.
*: Aside from the obvious (but irrelevant) intercultural chaff flung up by the term "oriented" in this context, it's still a culturally loaded word for completely different reasons; Western cosmology pointed east, toward sunrise (oriens, "rising"), for a very long time. East was "up" on European maps throughout the Middle Ages, which this page (http://academic.emporia.edu/aberjame/map/h_map/h_map.htm) ascribes to the religious influence of the Crusades although that doesn't explain why the Western zodiac was originally based on heliacal astronomy, the observation of what constellation the sun was rising "into" at the horizon. However, it's definitely interesting that medieval Arabic maps are south-oriented again, which may have something to do with a global split between temperate/tropical astronomy-- once you drop to a certain range around the equator, you lose interest in the circumpolar region because you just can't see it very well anymore, though then I'm not quite sure how you keep track of where south is....
no subject
on 2006-03-01 06:43 pm (UTC)While I've never seen the mechanism by which the time of year of birth would have measurable, repeatable effects on personality (tides? eh.), I suppose if one accepts that there are such effects, different ways of mapping them might turn out to be equally accurate--just, presumably, noting different things, because catching different patterns. I guess.
But I dunno. Within a year, you've gone through every part of the year. So why would the formative experiences be substantially different?
no subject
on 2006-03-01 07:09 pm (UTC)'Zacly. What the heck is the natural twelve-year cycle (or for the finer-grained version, sixty-year cycle) that would have enough physical effect (at least in China) to be *noticed*, much less shape people's personalities? Sunspots? Sandstorms? Precessional wobble? El Niño monsoons?
(I've got a book somewhere about Chinese geomancy, published before the recent feng shui craze, which describes actual wayback reasons for some of the precepts after all-- facing the house away from the dusty winds sweeping in from the Mongol steppe; arranging the solar exposure to shelter the house from summer heat but maximize passive heating in winter, and so on.)
no subject
on 2006-03-01 08:04 pm (UTC)Now that makes more sense. But then, culturally speaking, in the long run the reasonable explanations for how a custom gets started probably don't matter. In at least some ways, kosher food preparation makes logical sense, at least what with the cleanliness, but I doubt that's generally seen as the point of it. (It's not as though it help avoid cholesterol, after all.)
no subject
on 2006-03-02 12:48 am (UTC)Speaking of which, at some point I was cooking down some chicken scraps and thought, "There's got to be a word for the stuff that's left over from making schmaltz," and almost immediately followed it up with the word(?) "gribnitz". However, gribnitz doesn't "seem to exist in that spelling in any of my books, though after a while I turned up the form gribenes. How the hell did the spelling "gribnitz" get lodged in my brain cell in the first place?
Dammit. Now I'm hungry.
no subject
on 2006-03-02 03:23 am (UTC)Tomorrow I get to get yelled at by my doctor for getting too much General Tso's Chicken in my blood cholesterol, meanwhile.