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The Plough (Linguistics)
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Donmillion wrote:
My observations on "spell" were not taken from dictionaries or other works of fiction, but from direct personal experience which (I bet) you, Chad, and you, Ishmael, have not shared. Shame on you both for making me resort to authority because you preferred your own inexperience and ignorance to my experience and direct knowledge.


(I bet) I can piss further than you.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Donmillion wrote:
Shame on you both for making me resort to authority


good grief
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Donmillion wrote:
Yes I do think it's changed its meaning. If you think that "spell" means only "a period of time", then presumably you also think that "examination" only means "looking at something", and doesn't also mean "a formal test of someone's knowledge or capability". Words can have more than one meaning, and until someone comes up with a definition based on them, it's from context and usage (that "unspoken (but taken as read) portion") that we have to decide what the meaning is.


Donmillion;

You are hopeless.
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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I think I have a clear victory of experience, knowledge, and empiricism over callowness, igorance, and prejudice.

Take a spell, guys.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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You are trapped in a tiny box and think yourself a free man.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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One last comment Don:

If you really must gloat over a perceived victory, only do so when your position has remained consistent throughout... In this instance you shifted your position like a whore with hemorrhoids.

May I remind you, you wrote...

Yes I do think it's changed its meaning. If you think that "spell" means only "a period of time", then presumably...


...when just a few posts earlier you had written:

And yes, you're right--in both cases "spell" simply means " a period of time"


So it looks as though your self-trumpeted greater experience and knowledge is a somewhat inconsistent and unreliable resource.
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nemesis8


In: byrhfunt
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N8 reckons this was a Pillock, rather than a Pyrrhic victory.......
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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After that spelling-bee, what about Hatty's original problem?

"Furrow", meanwhile, "is cognate with" Latin porcus [F ~ P], "the ridge between two furrows".

This doesn't make sense at all, the ridge being distinct by definition from the furrow.

Think of it this way. A furh or porcus is what comes out of the back of a plough. And what comes out of the back of a plough? There's a trench, and alongside it there's the ridge of earth that came out of the trench. Furh and "furrow" denote the one, porcus the other. It's just a matter of emphasis.

"Hey, Dad, what do you call that?" (pointing at the ground behind the plough). "That, Son? That's a furh."

Which way will Son interpret it?

Latin porcus also means "pig" (Greek porkos). A quiz question for those interested in patterns, where AS = Latin = "English":

    furh = porcus = "furrow"
    sulh = sulcus = "sullow"
    fearh = porcus (pig) = ?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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If you guys aren't gonna cut the crap, I'm gonna hafta invoke my Droit d'Editeur over this thread and cut out the crap for you. Let's not have this forum looking like all the rest out there.

Don't even post to say you have stopped now: just let it be so.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Single f pretty regularly appears where modern English has "v", e.g., seofon = "seven". Note the lack of an arrow ...

And Welsh F is routinely "v"... and no one gives of a second thought... and for such reasons we say F = V.

With regard to the rest--I'm still not happy about connecting words initially on the basis of "similar" spellings and "similar" meanings.

But this is the start and the end of etymology, Don! Of course, there are historical constraints, but we subscribe to far fewer of those than the professionals do. They take it for granted that Romance comes from Latin, English from Anglo-Saxon and so on, remember? A few conclusions jumped to pale into insignificance compared with those blunders!

The word for "dog" in one of the Australian Aborigine language is transliterated as dog, but it's probably just coincidence; it's gudaga in related dialects.

"Dog" and "good dog"? It may be incorrect, but surely not ridiculous so suppose these are loans from English.

It's easy to be led astray by coincidences

Maybe so, but when you're prepared to challenge the most basic assumptions -- and not for whimsy's sake -- what counts as coincidence also comes into question. Dismissing coincidences relies on being very sure of your ground*.

Speculation is all very well, but needs to be checked against other information

But beware: facts are theory-laden. For instance, they like to say history is written by the victors, or so-and-so had a political agenda... always interpreting the evidence to suit. There are no raw data.

It's the lack of historical support for coincidental similarities that puts such connections out of court for "the authorities".

Indeed. But we are playing a very different game from the authorities. It is their job to erect obstacles. But 'round here, you will find us admonished to embrace new ideas first, to see where they may take us; rather than objecting or deriding. No poo-pooing. It's not quite true that we're not engaged in the Pursuit of Truth {But never treat us as an 'us'.}, but there is a strong emphasis on -- because it is a necessary step -- the Pursuit of the Interesting, Novel, Creative, Challenging, Unorthodox... We can't be expecting much new historical evidence, but a new perspective on what is already 'known' will never arise if the accepted view is the only one you're allowed.

Surely even the scholars should be able to say "well, I never noticed that!"
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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* I haven't thought of it quite this way before, but the Establishment is basically autistic.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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equating one word with another doesn't provide a definition of either of them.

Oh, no?

Are you saying that a "wake" is a type of wagon?

What, you don't speak English?

plow, plowland (a measure of land) ... from etymonline is the only "definition" I can see. Defining "plough" as "plow" doesn't help.

We both already said that. I said plough = flow.

But it's a balance of probabilities.

Not yet it's not. Probability assumes a context, a model, a ground.

Why do they all put the g there in the first place, if no-one ever pronounced it?

They did pronounce it. G = U. You were thinking of "gg" and didn't think of the other relevant options. You are afflicted by Linguistic Rectitude.

Noah Webster decided it was unnecessary when he invented "plow"

Precisely. Or rather, imprecisely. Spelling-to-pronunciation is a many-to-many relationship; the linguists carry on as though it's one-to-one: that's Linguistic Rectitude.

Why do they all except English pronounce the g?

The question is how G can serve such disparate functions. But we know different symbols can converge (hence the Z in some Scottish names that isn't a Z: arguably better represented by 3). And a system of literary education resolving on and perpetuating a single (or restricted) default value(s) is evidently under estimated, but hardly mysterious.

It seems to me more probable that English used to say it but doesn't

Maybe so. But when you spend a little time noticing how straightforwardly Chaucer, for instance, perfectly rationally represents English as we still know it, you soon see even this level of change (G lost from plough) an unnecessary and unjustified proposition.

as many modern speakers say, for example "bu'" for "but"

Assuming this to be a modern phenomenon, that dropping letters is lazy and improper, is Linguistic Rectitude.

it should be *flough, not "plough".

Eh? *flough is flow. There are cognates with P- and F- in both English and Latin (e.g. flow, plough, pluere, fluere). Overzealous attention to the specifics of the spelling is called Linguistic Rectitude.

Again, we can't tell. We can only go on the evidence we have... nobody recorded it as "the Plough" until modern English times.

So you agree we can't tell how ancient the name is. But by the same token, you can not say it isn't ancient. However, we do have it on record that there was a previously unrecorded countrymen's tradition of calling it the Plough.

"We can only commit to not knowing" is different from "we can only commit to 1593"; different rules of the game, different M.O.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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You wanted to know how the She-Bear got a long tail. It stretched. When "Jupiter" (Zeus) grabbed it and pulled her up into the sky by it.

No, I wanted to know why Ursa Major has a long tail, while bears don't. "I expect it got stretched when Jupiter picked it up" is a non-answer. It's rationalising. Zeus could have fixed it up, or picked it up differently, the other constellations aren't distorted by being placed in the sky... Just don't count a few stars and there's no problem. So what's the significance of a bear with a long tail, or of a constellation with a long tail becoming a bear?

I've looked through the "nautical" bits of Widsith, The Seafarer, Beowulf (don't throw things at me), and Genesis. and I can't see any particular need for the term to crop up--though if it did, it would quite likely be as a "kenning", a poetic metaphor like "whale-road" for "sea", which doesn't tell you what the usual word was.

Er, so the surviving early sources are not the sort of material to tell us the answer, and yet it somehow makes sense to say sailors, who have a different name for every other plank in a boat, "didn't see the need for the word"?

Latin similarly lacked a word specifically meaning "wake"... the Latin word used for "wake" is sulcus, "furrow"

That's the Latin word then. I can't understand the mental process that doesn't make the equation. What else were you looking for?
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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This doesn't make sense at all, the ridge being distinct by definition from the furrow.

Sure it does. Let's not get hung up on definitions as though they're metaphysical. In cutting a furrow you through up a ridge. If you say "there's a furrow", which bit are you looking at? Giving a name means drawing a distinction, which alludes to (at least) 2 things at once. Antagonyms, where 'the same word' also means its own opposite, are not so uncommon: fast, cleave, down... Changes in nuance, extending the concept to other areas, forgetting an old meaning... it's all part of the rough-n-tumble.

Sulh sounds like "soil" if you ignore that inconvenient -h at the end.

"Inconvenient"? Linguistic Rectitude! It sounds like soil anyway.

In the case of Anglo-Saxon furh, the equivalent English word is "furrow", so we should look for an English word like "sullow" (where "-ow" is obviously the equivalent of AS -h).

This smacks of metaphysics, too, but then I suppose you do believe in Laws of Language Change.

In burgh, brough, broch, borough, bury, burrow, borrow we have several conventions surviving. What's so special and specific about the -H = -OW equation? And if the trailing -H is a vowel sound, why not ignore it?* Even if it's written -OW, how do you know how distinctly, forcefully it should be pronounced? In RP it's quite distinct, but you can't enforce RP rules in... well... anything but RP.

* Imagine enunciating "a" carefully in order to spell it for the first time. You might write e-i-a. Some people still add vowels the rest of us done. Look at (listen to) them Evangelists.

"Soil" is also believed to be a loan-word... "a piece of land".

Er, I don't think we did agree plough is probably a loan-word into AS and English, but accepting that it suddenly appeared written in AS shortly after the Norman Conquest meaning a certain measure of land surely lends weight to Hatty's observation that sulh ~ soil, a certain measure of land. You could challenge it on the basis of linguistics/orthography; or you could establish a linguistic/orthographic point on the basis that sulh = soil.

Not until 150 years later do we find writers using it in the modern sense.

Well, that doesn't seem very significant if, as you pointed out, material with nautical content doesn't mention something so basic as a wake. Just not the right kind of material.

The normal derivation connects it to Latin solium, a "seat", used in the sense of "country seat", and with Latin solum, "ground".

How about solo/solus as in a unit of measure?

(Of course, it's possible to reverse the normal meaning of argumentum ex silentio, and argue that "plough" and "soil" were in English all along, and only emerged as English became a written language.)

The question is whether this is parenthetical in your mind; or if you're actually committed to the indeterminacy it creates.
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Language histories are full of such strange reversals of meaning.

I agree there are many. I don't agree it's especially a function of history (passage of time). And I don't find it strange.

Here's one from New Zealad: in England "to take a spell" at an activity is to undertake the activity for a period, so someone else can rest a while; in NZ, it means to rest a while, while someone else does the activity.

I don't think this is a great example since a spell in English is used various ways, but "to take a spell" at an activity isn't an Englishism I'm familiar with. But I don't agree with reactionary nit-picking over it, neither.

Answer: Oldest recorded meaning of "gate" is an opening or "gap" (may be a related word) that provides access. It's only later that the word came to mean a barrier that prevents access.

It's just a way through {G = U}. What is the point of a doorway? Both that it lets you through and that it doesn't.

(FYI, gate for road is more of a [East] Midlands/northern thing. And "any road" for "anyway" is a northernism.)

So there's an example of reversal of meaning in English: "gate" used to mean "open accessway", but now most commonly means "barrier preventing open access."

No, it still means both. Thinking it can only mean one thing and therefore must have changed is like Linguistic Rectitude: taking one reading of a letter/word as the one, the right one, and forgetting the rest of the many-to-many.
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