[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[Johnny Billquist]

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On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
 > Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>> > Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
>> > comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
>> > Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which
>> > means they all share a common root.
> Absolutely.
>
>> > What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from
>> > English?
> Because when words change, they change according to common patterns
> specific to the language.  For example, a change between Old English (OE)
> and Modern English (ModE) is that long-a has become long-o.  Consequently,
> the descendants of OE bát, tá, ác are ModE boat, toe, oak.  In Scots,
> which is also descended from OE, this change did not operate, and long-a
> changed in the Great Vowel Shift along with long-a from other sources,
> giving the Older Scots words bait, tae, eik.  However, current Scots
> does not use bait, but rather boat, and we can see that because this
> breaks the pattern it must be a borrowing from English.

So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old English 
also borrowed the word from English?
(See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)

>> > (I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
> OE steor 'steering oar, rudder' + bord 'side of a ship'.  Parallel
> formations gave us common Scandinavian styrbord from ON stjórnborði,
> similarly Dutch stuurbord, German Steuerbord.  Larboard, the other side,
> began life as Middle English ladde 'load' + bord, because it was the side
> you loaded a ship from, and was altered under the influence of starboard.
> Because the two were easily confused, port officially replaced it in the
> 19C, though it had been used in this meaning since the 16C.

Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from 
bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No 
rudder to break... And it's from way before medieval times... But I'm 
pretty sure the term is from even before the Vikings were around.

	Johnny

[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[Steffen Nurpmeso]

Johnny Billquist <bqt at update.uu.se> wrote:
 |On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
 |> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
 |>>> Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English

Me too, unfortunately.  I never learned old Greek, on German
Gymnasiums you now have to learn Latin instead of Greek, since
maybe after the last war, world war that is.

 |Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from 
 |bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No 

For that the German word is "Backbord" -- and wether that is clean
depends: it seems to originate in "bak", related to "Backe", and
that is indeed "(ars)backe", which i won't translate unless
everybody has appropriate toilet support.

--steffen

[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[John Cowan]

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Johnny Billquist scripsit:

> So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old
> English also borrowed the word from English?

Now you're being silly.  It's obvious that "boat" is a cuckoo in the
Scots nest, and who could have laid it there but English?  Scots is shot
through with English borrowings, just as the Nordic languages are full
of Low German and English is full of Old Norse and French.

For an example of a Scots word that went the other way, consider OE
rád, which meant 'an event of riding'.  In Beowulf, the sea is called
(among other poetic things) the swanrád, the place of the swan's riding.
According to the sound-change I discussed before, this becomes ModE road,
which is now specialized to mean 'the place where people usually ride
(or used to)'.  In Scots, however, it took the meaning of a 'riding for
military purposes', and as the sound change predicts, its form is raid,
which was borrowed into English in the 19C (by Sir Walter Scott).

> (See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)

Etymonline is an excellent resource, but not entirely perfect, and it
happens to be wrong in this case about the related languages (which is
not its focus anyway).  The OED3 has the same story I gave you, with
some doubt about a few details; <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A5d>
agrees also.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and all other acyclic
graphs; you have a right to be here.  --DeXiderata by Sean McGrath

[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[John Cowan]

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Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:

>  |Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from 
>  |bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. 
> 
> For that the German word is "Backbord" -- and wether that is clean
> depends: it seems to originate in "bak", related to "Backe", 

Quite so, from Low German backbort or Dutch bakboord (seafaring terms
in Standard German mostly come from Low German).  The OE form is
bæcbord and the ON form is bakborði.  All of these words have have
everything to do with back and nothing to do with bare.  Whether they
refer to the helmsman's back or the back of the ship itself (that is,
the side away from the water when docked) is not clear.  The French word,
obviously borrowed from Norse (probably by way of Normand) is bâbord.
As I mentioned before, this was replaced by laddebord in Middle English.

By the way, I misspelled stéorbord in my previous post by leaving
off the accent.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting
on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV
cop shows.  When it's explained to them that they are in a different country,
where those rights do not exist, they become outraged.  --Neal Stephenson

[TUHS] Boats

[Johnny Billquist]

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On 2016-07-11 13:07, John Cowan wrote:
> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
>
>> So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old
>> English also borrowed the word from English?
>
> Now you're being silly.  It's obvious that "boat" is a cuckoo in the
> Scots nest, and who could have laid it there but English?  Scots is shot
> through with English borrowings, just as the Nordic languages are full
> of Low German and English is full of Old Norse and French.

Of course I was being silly. :-)
But I was having a hard time remaining serious under the circumstances.

> For an example of a Scots word that went the other way, consider OE
> rád, which meant 'an event of riding'.  In Beowulf, the sea is called
> (among other poetic things) the swanrád, the place of the swan's riding.
> According to the sound-change I discussed before, this becomes ModE road,
> which is now specialized to mean 'the place where people usually ride
> (or used to)'.  In Scots, however, it took the meaning of a 'riding for
> military purposes', and as the sound change predicts, its form is raid,
> which was borrowed into English in the 19C (by Sir Walter Scott).
>
>> (See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)
>
> Etymonline is an excellent resource, but not entirely perfect, and it
> happens to be wrong in this case about the related languages (which is
> not its focus anyway).  The OED3 has the same story I gave you, with
> some doubt about a few details; <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A5d>
> agrees also.

So you're staying that the Old English "bat" according to Etymonline is 
incorrect? So are you then saying that the Old English word was "boat"?
Because what you said was that "boat" was the original word, and all 
other derivations are in fact borrowed from English.

The Old English word should be easy to verify...

	Johnny

[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[John Cowan]

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Johnny Billquist scripsit:

> Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
> comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
> Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which
> means they all share a common root.

Absolutely.

> What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from
> English? 

Because when words change, they change according to common patterns
specific to the language.  For example, a change between Old English (OE)
and Modern English (ModE) is that long-a has become long-o.  Consequently,
the descendants of OE bát, tá, ác are ModE boat, toe, oak.  In Scots,
which is also descended from OE, this change did not operate, and long-a
changed in the Great Vowel Shift along with long-a from other sources,
giving the Older Scots words bait, tae, eik.  However, current Scots
does not use bait, but rather boat, and we can see that because this
breaks the pattern it must be a borrowing from English.

Similarly, there are two Old Norse (ON) words for boat, bát(r) and beit.
The first is the ordinary word, the second is confined to skaldic poetry.
In the modern languages, we have båt (bátur in Icelandic and Faroese),
which is regularly descended from the first word.  But which ON word
is original?  The evidence is clear: beit is native, because words
with á in OE regularly correspond to ei in ON.  For example, OE gát
(ModE goat) corresponds to geit in ON (variously geit, ged, get in the
modern languages), and there are many other words following this pattern.
So native beit was displaced (except in poetry) by the OE word bát,
with the ON -r ending.

Because English is such a prolific borrower, such false relatives
appear within English itself as well.  Nothing looks more obvious than
a connection between the verb choose, which is as native as can be
(cf. archaic German kiesen, Danish kyse, Norwegian kjose), and the
noun choice.  But the "oi" in choice is a dead giveaway: no native word
contains it, and in fact choice is borrowed from French choix, from
the French verb choisir, which is itself borrowed from some Germanic
language, probably Frankish.  Similarly, the d in murderer tells us
that it is borrowed from late Latin or French, which borrowed it from a
Continental Germanic language: the native word, still used by Shakespeare,
was murtherer.

> (I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)

OE steor 'steering oar, rudder' + bord 'side of a ship'.  Parallel
formations gave us common Scandinavian styrbord from ON stjórnborði,
similarly Dutch stuurbord, German Steuerbord.  Larboard, the other side,
began life as Middle English ladde 'load' + bord, because it was the side
you loaded a ship from, and was altered under the influence of starboard.
Because the two were easily confused, port officially replaced it in the
19C, though it had been used in this meaning since the 16C.

-- 
John Cowan          http://www.ccil.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
You annoy me, Rattray!  You disgust me! You irritate me unspeakably!
Thank Heaven, I am a man of equable temper, or I should scarcely be able
to contain myself before your mocking visage.  --Stalky imitating Macrea

[TUHS] Boats (was: Slashes)

[Johnny Billquist]

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On 2016-07-10 02:52, John Cowan <cowan at mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
>  Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:
>> > "Die Segel streichen" (Taking in the sails),
> "Striking the sails" in technical English.  All the nations around the
> North and Baltic Seas exchanged their vocabularies like diseases, and if
> we didn't have records of their earlier histories, we would know they
> were related but we'd never figure out exactly how.  For example, it
> can be shown that French bateau, German Boot, common Scandinavian båt,
> Irish bád, Scottish Gaelic bàta, Scots boat, and the equivalents in
> the various Frisian languages are none of them original native words:
> they all were borrowed from English boat.

Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English 
comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with 
Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which means 
they all share a common root.

What makes you say then that all the others borrowed it from English? I 
would guess/suspect that the term is older than English itself, and the 
similarity of the word in the different languages comes from the fact 
that it's old enough to have been around when all these languages were 
closer to the roots and each other. Boats have been around for much 
longer than the English language so I would suspect some term for them 
have been around for a long time too...

If you ask me, you all got most terms from the Vikings anyway, who were 
the first good seafarers... :-)
(I assume you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol