Bizzare etymologies of common words in various languages

[Thande]

The Russian word for a railway station is Vokzal, which is a corruption of Vauxhall, a suburb of London. The story goes that a group of Russian engineers came to London in the 1840's to study the first railways and were shown around Vauxhall station, and thought "Vauxhall" was a generic name for the building, not the area it served.

(An alternative explanation is that it came from Vauxhall pleasure gardens, which were imitated in Russia with Vokzal becoming a generic term for an amusement park and the name then travelled to railway stations after the first line in Russia ran from St Petersburg to a Vokzal outside the city. Take your pick, but it's still Vauxhall)

Wow. I knew Donetsk was founded by a Welshman and the local geographic terms are calques of some anglophone names, but... wow ! Tsarist Russia seems to have had more contact with the British isles than visible at first glance...

A lot of Russian names for technology tend to be this for either British or French usages, you find some really odd ones if you look through a dictionary for a while.

 

[Thande]

A favourite one of mine (from QI, so they may not have got it quite right) is that the word "cravat" comes from the fact that Croatian mercenaries in the court of a French king were associated with wearing them, and "cravat" is a frenchified/anglicised version of "Hrvat", the Serbo-Croatian word for Croat.

Apparently in rural Transylvania, some people refer to rice as "Uncle Ben", in a slightly weird example of how a brand name can become the generic term (like "hoover" for vacuum cleaner in the UK).

 

[Martinus Paduei]

Automobiles once had what were known in English as "sealed beam" headlights. Speakers of Hebrew heard it as a plural, "silbim", and now a singular automobile headlight is termed a "silb" in Hebrew.

 

[Pichuscrat]

Iraq, the modern day country, I know is named after the super-ancient Sumerian city of Uruk. Amazing how the word carries on for over 5000 years.

And that Al-iksandariya is named, obviously, after Alexandria, which is named after Alexander the Great.

Also iirc, the word Gypsy comes from Egypt, the Greek word for... well Egypt, as Europeans believed that they came from the East somewhere, presumably Egypt. Not to sure one this one though.

There are some others I know, but none that I can remember at the moment.

 

[Stolengood]

Tory, from Middle Irish tóraidhe, strictly speaking outlaw, pursued man, commonly used to refer to Irish cattle thieves. Exactly why the Whigs decided that those who supported the right of a Catholic to rule England as king were similar to cattle thieves, I have no clue.

The Catholicism, maybe?

 

[Tripwire]

Excellent stuff. Keep it coming. It's fascinating how many absolutely common words had such a convoluted origin...

I think I have the craziest one yet:

Knickers. From, apparently, the trousers on drawings of Dutch colonists in New York on the cover of Washington Irving's extremely popular book Knickerbocker's History of New York, with Knickerbocker being the fictitious author of the book, which was taken from the surname of a Dutch-colonist-descended friend of Irving's, whose name was Dutch for "toy-marble baker."

So, British slang for trousers, from a picture on the cover of a book written by an American author pretending to be Dutch.

And to get even more convoluted, the word "Nickytam," meaning "garter worn over trousers," from the previous word combined with the Scottish dialectal word "taum" meaning "cord."

 

[fernerdave]

'Bolwerk' is a Dutch word, meaning a bastion or a fort.
Later, the French also started to use this word, but they called it a Boulevard, and they used it for a road behind the wall of a fort.
Boulevard later got its current meaning, and it was introduced with the same new meaning both in English and in Dutch!

In minneapolis a boulevard is the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street in a residential neighborhood. Who knows

 

[Flocculencio]

In Singaporean slang the word 'gostan' means to reverse either physically or conceptually. ('He saw his boss didn't like the proposal so he immediately gostaned'). This actually dates from the days where coolies unloading ships were ordered to go to the rear of the ship or to 'go astern'.

 

[pa_dutch]

Apparently in rural Transylvania, some people refer to rice as "Uncle Ben", in a slightly weird example of how a brand name can become the generic term (like "hoover" for vacuum cleaner in the UK).

...Or "coke" for all carbonated soft drinks in large parts of the Southern United States.

Let's see... The term "kinkajou" in English (and "kinkaju" in Spanish, "quincajou" in French) is odd. It describes a tropical mammal that only inhabits Central and South America, but it ultimately derives from the Algonquian language family from the far northeastern part of North America. The terms for wolverine, similar across Ojibwa, Micmac, Montagnais, and various other Algonquian languages, were adapted into Quebecois French as "carcajou". Somehow, from this same root, "quincajou" (which is closer to the Algonquian wolverine words than "carcajou") came to be applied to a completely different animal with a completely different range (wolverines being arctic and subarctic while kinkajous are strictly Latin American).

 

[mosodake]

Some interesting ones in Japanese: The word sebiro, meaning 'business suit', supposedly comes from 'Savile Row'. Tempura comes from the Latin tempora, or 'time period', via Portuguese.

 

[Admiral Matt]

Joss, the 19th century term for fate adopted from Chinese in the south of China by users of a variety of languages (and now by the sort of authors who romanticize Hong Kong) was in fact simply a poor attempt by Cantonese (粤语) speakers to pronounce/comprehend the Portuguese "deus."

 

[Marc Pasquin]

Although nowaday the 2 main hypothesis about the origin of the name "eskimo" are either the montagnais "weaver of snowshoes" or "speaker of a foreign tongue", the reason why is considered deregatory today is due to the folk etymology of it being an algonquin word meaning "eater of raw flesh".

 

[Theodoric]

Isn't "bruin" or "brown one" basically the word(s) used in place of "bear"?

No, 'bear' itself is derived from 'brown', but that probably happened more than 2000 years ago. The original Indo-European word was quite different, and can still be found in Greek and Romance languages. Little bit from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

O.E. bera "bear," from P.Gmc. *beron, lit. "the brown (one)" (cf. O.N. björn, M.Du. bere, Du. beer, O.H.G. bero, Ger. Bär), from PIE *bher- (3) "bright, brown" (see brown). Greek arktos and Latin ursus retain the PIE root word for "bear" (*rtko), but it is believed to have been ritually replaced in the northern branches because of hunters' taboo on names of wild animals (cf. the Irish equivalent "the good calf," Welsh "honey-pig," Lithuanian "the licker," Rus. medved "honey-eater"). Others connect the Germanic word with Latin ferus "wild," as if it meant "the wild animal (par excellence) of the northern woods."

 

[Voyager75]

Włochy is the Polish name for Italy. It's a loanword of welsch which was originally used in Germanic languages to describe Celtic (and later Romance) people. It literally means "strange" but can also mean "hairy". Now the strange thing is that Walachia is a region in Romania which was settled by the Vlachs, the predecessors of the modern Romanian people. But where the hell is the Italian connection?

 

[Neala]

Romanian is a Romance language

 

[Voyager75]

Romanian is a Romance language

I know that. The question is: Why isn't Romania called "Wlochy" instead of Italy?

 

[January First-of-May]

Now I know why in Polish this small animal is called "królik" (król = king, "królik" literally means "little king"). It's probably calque from Czech.

The Russian name for the same small animal is "кролик" (krolik), likely taken from Polish. So here's another step in that convoluted story.

On an unrelated note: apparently the Italian greeting ciao comes from Latin sclavus "slave".

 

[Easterling]

The first meaning comes from the fact back in the days all the french people didn't speak Franch but their regional language/dialect/patois, so when they went to another region and asked bread and wine in a inn/tavern (bara gwin, so) the innkeeper could'nt understand what he was saying.
Another use of the term is when two people have a conversation in a language you don't understand.

We have a similar word in Romanian: a boscorodi (to speak gibberish), which is related to the word bozgor (an ethnic slur for Hungarian) and both are apparently derived form the name of the Bashkir people. Apparently some Bashkirs accompanied the Magyars in their migration (the original Hungarian people were a loose coallition of steppe tribes dominated by the Magyars). The Bashkirs must have been in the vanguard during the invasion of Transilvania so the romainans appleid their name to all Hungarians (just like Arabs during the crusades called all westerners "franks"). Also, since the Romanians could not understand Bashkir language, "to speak like a bashkir" came to mean "to speak gibberish"

Apparently in rural Transylvania, some people refer to rice as "Uncle Ben", in a slightly weird example of how a brand name can become the generic term (like "hoover" for vacuum cleaner in the UK).

I have relatives in rural transilvania and newer heard of this. But Romanian does have other cases of a brand becoming a generic term (like Xerox for copyer)

I know that. The question is: Why isn't Romania called "Wlochy" instead of Italy?

Probably because the Poles made contact with the Romanians first and had their own name for them, whereas for the far-away Italians they used a generic German word for latin people.

 

[TheBerlinguer]

In the Italian language, Germany was back to being called Germania using the ancient Latin word after being Lamagna (from the French Allemagne) for the late Middle Ages and early Modern Period; what never changed was the Italian word for "German", both noun and adjective: tedesco. The origin of this word, which has absolutely no roots in the Latin language, where it was simply Germanicus,-a,-um (and in modern Italian Germanico still means "ancient German barbarian"), can be traced back to the Italian intellectuals and poets of the Middle Ages, who modelled the word after the Latin vulgare, i.e. the language of the unlearned masses which was becoming the new trend for Italian poetry (trovatori, Stilnovisti, Dante, etc.). Vulgare means "(language) of the common people (vulgus)", so a German word for "common people", the ancient term theod, was chosen to be adjectivised in Theodiscus,-a,-um and then translettered in Vulgar to become tedesco/a, "he/she who speaks the language of the German common people". The German speakers were the only European people to receive this treatment, but it'd be interesting to know what the other nationalities could be called in a world where this process knew a more widespread use (Folchesi in England? Povani in Portugal? Demotici in Greece?)

 

[TheBerlinguer]

On an unrelated note: apparently the Italian greeting ciao comes from Latin sclavus "slave".

From the Venetian dialect, actually, where sclavus became s-ciao (s and c do not collaborate frequently in the northeastern speaking). It was simply the polite greeting of the urban classes: s-ciao suo/vostro meant "I'm your servant", meaning "I'm honoured to meet you and at your disposition". Servo (less strong word for schiavo) vostro is still used in formal occasions.