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The Plough (Linguistics)
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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[P ~ F] (my recently-invented convention for "P might be substituted with F in some contexts").

Sorry, we've already been there.

until someone comes up with a definition based on [the words], it's from context and usage that we have to decide what the meaning is.

You think a definition supersedes context and usage? Rectitude! A definition is part of the context and usage. (And another definition is another part.)
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Chad (Statler or Waldorf?) wrote:

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"


The difference was this

    When I wrote the earlier statement, I was trying to play the game your way, avoiding the use of a dictionary. Thus, I was blinkered by my own ignorance.

    When I wrote the later statement, I'd looked the word up and found that I had been wrong: in terms of the historical record (which is all we have to go on), "spell" didn't mean "simply a period of time;" this meaning developed later. It was careless of me to allow this detail to go by implication, rather than by direct statement.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Donmillion wrote:

The difference was this


Yeah Don... whatever...
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DPCrisp


In: Bedfordshire
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Enough.
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Dan, you've paid me the compliment of very full replies. As a result, though, I hardly know where to begin! (I also dabble in conspiracy theories. Secret email: "Dan, you can tie this Kiwi joker up in knots, can't you?" Sometimes it's a shame smilies are discouraged.)

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

You attribute concepts I never expressed or contemplated. "Lazy and improper speech" is an idea I threw out forty years ago, when I started reading in languages. I already knew about historical dropping of "letters" by then (e.g., Shakespeare), but BTW, if I were Statler, or possibly Waldorf, I'd have pointed out that it's not letters that are dropped, but sounds. (I hope you can overlook that non-pointing-out.)

I don't find it strange

Reversal of the meaning of words, or very strong semantic shifts, isn't at all strange, it's very common and usually easily explained. The results, however, can be strange, if it's only the results you know about, and not how it came about. Hence Hatty's puzzlement over furh = porcus where one means "down" and the other means "up". And I also "don't agree it's especially a function of history (passage of time)."

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.

Clearly, you haven't served in the Royal Navy, Merchant Navy, or Air Force, where "to take a spell on watch" or "to spell a mate while he takes a break" are very much current usage. (No, I haven't either. I found an interesting dialogue on the subject at Wordreference.com. including postings from servicemen and servicemen's wives, and quotes from modern English literature, including Patrick O'Bryan.) But I used to go rowing with an English friend, who would say, "I'll take a spell at rowing, if you like," until he learnt better. (He was a computer programmer from Tavistock, not a sailor or airman.)

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.

"Doorway" : "door" :: "gateway" is to "gate". You can go through a doorway, but try going through a door! And you can't go through a gate, in its usual modern meaning. (Street names or fortification names, in any part of the country, are fossil phenomena.) However, you can go through a gate, when it still has its earlier meaning--which, by the way, seems to be the only meaning for the equivalent word in other languages, such as German and Dutch gat, "gap, hole, breach". The later English meaning (a barrier, not an access) may have led to the invention of the word "gateway", first recorded 1707.

However, you wrote, "No, it still means both." Which was exactly the implication of my writing of its common modern usage. But I acknowledge that we can argue that it's always had both meanings in English, despite the historical record, and that when other "Germanic" languages took it up from English (including Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Norse, and Icelandic), they all agreed to lose exactly that meaning which only appears later in English. Or we could suppose that the meaning which appears later in English, and which is absent from all those other languages, was a development (a change or extension of meaning) in English. Your choice.

There are cognates with P- and F- in both English and Latin (e.g. flow, plough, pluere, fluere).

But you haven't established that "plough" and "flow" are cognates, except in the very general sense of "they are similar in sound". I (think I) understand why you also see a connection in meaning, but frankly, we can then throw in words like "flaw" (different vowel, but /plau/ and /flo/ also have different vowels) and "flew" and then "fly" (with "full" not far behind, and so "fulcrum"), not to mention "plug and play," which would bring us to the "plec-" part of "plectrum". I would have no difficulty in suggesting semantic connections between them all. Before long, all words would wind up connected by sound and sense. "No word is an island, entire of itself," but they are not all One Word.

I'll forego a detailed examination of fluere, but would point out that, from where I sit, it belongs in that constellation (asterim?) of words that have Latin "f-" = English "b-" = Greek "ph-" (frater = "brother" = phrater). So: fluere = Old Latin flugere ("flow violently") = English "boil" = Greek phluzo ("boil"). We're told that "boil" is a French word transferred into English, but of course ...

Time for bed.
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Chad


In: Ramsbottom
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Don wrote:
BTW, if I were [Chad], I'd have pointed out that it's not letters that are dropped, but sounds. (I hope you can overlook that non-pointing-out.)


Don, you misread me entirely.

As a social mammal I find it very difficult to pass up the opportunity for a bit of mutual grooming... so when I see another member of the species engaged in frenzied nit-picking it stimulates my innate desire to reciprocate.

But I am far too shy to initiate such interaction.
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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'Sgood to be able to read you aright, then, Chad.

But remember: "The Devil hides in the nits".
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Donmillion


In: Acton, Middlesex
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Way back when, Dan wrote:

how long was it called 'of countrymen the plough,' before that was recorded in 1593?

--and I was unable to answer.

But I was left (still) wondering if other cultures besides the (British) English and Old Commonwealth called the asterim "the Plough".

From Ian Ridpath's Star Tales ( http://www.ianridpath.com/startales/ursamajor.htm ):

    "Germanicus Caesar [C1 BC] said that the bears were also called ploughs because, as he wrote, ‘the shape of a plough is the closest to the real shape formed by their stars’"

But this appears to have been an isolated observation; I haven't found any other descriptions of the asterism as a plough.

However, the same source clarifies that the explanation of the bears' long tails that I cited earlier is modern (late C16). It might be implicit in one of the several versions of the Greek story summarised by Ridpath; but actually, I have a different hypothesis. The long tail appears in early modern pictorial star charts. I'm open to correction by those who know better, or who have better luck or patience with Google, but it might not date from any earlier. Take a look some time at a picture of a bear standing on all fours, side-ways on to the camera or artist, and note just how long that neck is. In the star-map pictures, the four-star "rectangle" is the bear's hind-quarters; but what if they actually make up its fore-quarters?
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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There's an interesting reappraisal of classical mythology to the effect that the whole system, or at least large chunks of it, was a mnemonic to do with the stars and planets. For example the three furies sharing an eye is supposed to be linked to three stars which are periodic, but I'm unsure if it's been systematically worked out. (Another related thing maybe is a different interpretation of 'constellation' to mean a string of stars which rise at a more or less fixed interval - in sunnier climes than here. The Egyptians are supposed to have had one such elongated constellation).

Memory still functions when other senses are disabled, like during asleep or in the dark. Some migrating birds as well as fish such as sharks don't shut down completely when they sleep but seem to navigate with half a brain as it were. Probably the left side.
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Edwin



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Whoever said or implied that context is all was right. Spell can mean different things according to how it is used in English in England.

To the sweaty sheep-shearer "I'll take a spell now" means I will take over for a while but in the same breath you can quite intelligibly say " you take a spell now" meaning you rest for a while. No difficulty whatsoever.

English being so good a communication tool you could say " I'll do the thingy while you whatever" and your sweaty friend would hand over the shears.

One could almost believe that there was a meta-English in which all words were flexible while the meanings were clear. Perhaps its those memes again.
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Edwin



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If the meaning of spell is singular it could mean that New Zealand has lost something from its English, perhaps a normal result of distancing from the source.
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Ishmael


In: Toronto
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Hatty wrote:
Another related thing maybe is a different interpretation of 'constellation' to mean a string of stars which rise at a more or less fixed interval...


Tell me more! This is precisely what my theory predicts! That the "Saints" are associated with star sequences that rise over the horizon throughout the night! But I'd never heard of such a thing.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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DPCrisp wrote:
Re: The Plough
pluvial: of or pertaining to rain, from Fr. pluvial, from L. pluvialis "pertaining to rain," from (aqua) pluvia "rain (water)," from fem. of pluvius "rainy," from plovere "to rain," from PIE base *pleu- "to flow, to swim" (cf. Skt. plavate "navigates, swims;" Gk. plynein "to wash," plein "to navigate;" O.E. flowan "to flow").

flow: O.E. flowan (past tense fleow, pp. flowen), from P.Gmc. *flo- (cf. Du. vloeien "to flow," O.N. floa "to deluge," O.H.G. flouwen "to rinse, wash"), probably from PIE *pleu- "flow, float" (cf. Skt. plavate "navigates, swims," plavayati "overflows;" Armenian helum"I pour;" Gk. plyno "I wash," pleo "swim, go by sea;" L. pluere "to rain;" O.C.S. plovo "to flow, navigate;" Lith. pilu "to pour out," plauti "rinse").


Ploughs and flowing water... I wonder whether the plough was first used for irrigation.


So.... Plowed land>>Flowed land>>Fallowed land
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Hatty wrote:
Whether as a cart or a plough, the Wain has to do travel

Transport, literally cart before horse perhaps. Might ploughs have developed from sleds? Wiki says "the plough was traditionally known by other names, e.g. Old English sulh, Old High German medela or huohili, and Old Norse arðr.

The current word plough also comes from Germanic, but it appears relatively late (it is absent from Gothic), and is thought to be a loanword from one of the north Italic languages
". The origins of the word seem rather mystifying.

As Dan has pointed out, the wheel isn't especially useful and certainly not in snowy or icy conditions, unlike runners.


Has the plough developed from the sledge, lets take a small diversion, from Jorn's "The development of the Viking Ship"


Jorn wrote:
Wile E. Coyote wrote:
I am struggling to keep up.

From what I can see the Viking Ship evolved from a sledge.


Never thought about that, but it is very likely, as transport over frozen lakes and landscapes were the preferred method to move heavy objects until the truck arrived. The coast never freezes though, because of the gulf stream, so they need ships.
The word Sledge (slede) is related to the verb slepe, that means to drag something after.


So the first transport was the sledge. You can see them in rock paintings.

If I am right, boat technology developed from sledge technology.

But then we all knew this deep down, I am stating the obvious.

Let us state something else that is obvious. ALL transport of people and “weights” of course develops from the sledge.

Let us suppose you want to move something heavy, you first try to “Carry” it, then you push and pull, then you admit defeat, you reluctantly call your mates in, (hey who wants to admit they can't move something heavy) finally you work it out together, you must "SLIDE" it. Or SLEDGE it.

Yes you have invented the SLEDGE.

One problem though, in this case your SLEDGE doesn't work.

Damn.

The ground is not slippy enough. You are defeated by "Weight" and Friction. Still there is a solution, you all already know the answer.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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DPCrisp wrote:

b) a wagon or cart


If you are a lover of experimental archaeology, you have already mentally imagined something like a heavy object, a lever, an "A" frame, with some "Runners"...... and some enthusiastic muscle.

But wait a minute....why dont you stick some logs underneath to roll the damn thing on?

Brilliant you have invented that most important invention of all, (err before the WWW) the "wheel"....

Your invention now looks something like a Sledge/Slide with wheels.

So far its been easy.

But you now hit a linguistic problem, what on earth have you invented?

Is it a "wagon" or is it a "cart"............?
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