11.2516, Sum: Cross-Linguistic "Spitten Image"

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LINGUIST List:  Vol-11-2516. Tue Nov 21 2000. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 11.2516, Sum: Cross-Linguistic "Spitten Image"

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1)
Date:  Sun, 19 Nov 2000 13:40:47 +0800
From:  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
Subject:  Cross-linguistic spitten image

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Sun, 19 Nov 2000 13:40:47 +0800
From:  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
Subject:  Cross-linguistic spitten image




On Friday, November 10, I posted this query on Linguist List 11.2434:

I am trying to compile an inventory of equivalents of the French
expression "C'est X tout crachE", corresponding to the English
expression variously rendered as the "spittin' image", "spitting
image", "spit and image", or "spit an' image".  (Some of you will
recall that I argued several years ago in this forum for an analysis
along the lines of "spitten image", with the dialectal past
participle functioning as pre-nominal adjective, and I'm hoping to
invoke these cross-linguistic correspondences to support this view.)
So far, I have obtained (from various sources):

(French)   C'est (le portrait de) son p`ere tout crachE.
(German) Er sieht seinem Vater aenlich wie ge[s]puckt.  [with typo corrected=
]
(Dutch)    Hij is zihn vader gespogen.
(Greek)    O Janis ine ftystos o pateras tou.

- all involving a reference to someone being literally the "spitten
image" of his father.  What I'm wondering is how many more such
counterparts there are out there, and especially whether there are
any such expressions in NON-Indo-European languages...
- ----------
Let me start by gratefully acknowledging all those who wrote in response:

Pier Marco Bertinetto
Stefano Bertolo
Brian O Curnain
Mirjana N. Dedaic
Jan Engh
Chiara Frigeni
Ralf Grosserhode
Gunnar Hrafn
Irena Kolbas
Larry [no last name given]
Arne Lindstad
Anke Luedeling
Bruno Oliveira Maroneze
Jose-Luis Mendivil
Becky Molloy
Viola Miglio
Jasna Novak
Don Reindl
Sukriye Ruhi
Ondrej Roldan
Marina Santini
Xulio Sousa
Wim Vandenbussche

To summarize the results, it appears that bodily-fluid metaphors and
similes for likeness between child and parent (often between child
and father in particular) are widely distributed in Indo-European,
but not well attested outside IE.  (A couple of IE languages,
including Spanish and Czech, appear to lack any bodily-fluid metaphor
for similarity, although the Czech version--lit., 'as if he had
fallen out of his eye'--isn't too distant.)  Some examples are given
here; to save space, I won't include here the morph-by-morph glosses
for which I am nonetheless extremely grateful.

CROATIAN
On je plunuti otac.
'He is [his] spitten father'

=46LEMISH (besides the general Dutch expression based on'gespogen' above)
Hij is zijn vader gebraakt en gespogen
'He is his father thrown up and spitten'

GALICIAN:
E' cuspido a seu pai
'He is spitten to his father'

ICELANDIC
Hann er eins og sny'ttur u't u'r nefinu a' honum foeDur.
[V' for accented vowels; OE for umlauted vowel, D for dental fricative]
'He is as if blown out of the nose of his father'

IRISH [V' used for accented long vowels in transcription]:
Ta' se' cosu'il lena athair, mar a chaithfeadh se' amach as a bhe'al e'.
'He is like his father, as he would throw (i.e. spit) him out of his mouth.'

ITALIAN
E' suo padre sputato; E sputato a suo padre.
'He is his father spit (out)' =3D he is the spittin' image of his father

NORWEGIAN
Han er som snytt ut av nesa pA far sin.  (A =3D a with circle diacritic)
'He is as if sneezed out of the nose of his father'

[BRAZILIAN] PORTUGUESE
Ele e' a cara cuspida e escarrada do pai.
'He is the face spitted and coughed up of [his] father'
(where "escarrar" can be also be glossed as 'spit', but seems to allude
specifically to mucus, sputum, or blood hacked up by a deep cough)

The usual bodily fluid appears to be spit/sputum, but in some cases
the child is depicted as mucus, snot, or vomit expelled from
(typically) the father. As noted, not much from non-IE languages:

TURKISH
HIk de-mis, burnundan dUs,-mUs,.
(post-consonantal comma for cedilla, U for umlauted u,
I for undotted, i.e. back, i)
[father] hiccoughed/blew his nose, [child] dropped from his nose
('mother' may also be understood here rather than 'father', and there's
some variation on whether the onomatopoeic "hIk" is understood to refer to
hiccupping or nose-blowing)

HEBREW
hu dome le-aba shelo, shtei tipot  mayim
'He looks like his father, two drops of water'  [fluids, but no
bodily fluids involved]

A couple of other random comments:

1)  Most German respondents are unfamiliar with the German expression
I cited above (which was taken from a 1930 article published in
American Speech), although a couple of local German speakers from the
Swabian area among our graduate students are at least passively
familiar with it, and I did find it used in one web site,
http://www.navigare.de/hofmannsthal/gespr.htm, which describes
someone looking as much like the late King of Spain as if he had been
spitten [gespuckt] from him.  The corresponding expression is more
robust in Dutch/Flemish, in a couple of different forms.

2)  The Croatian and Italian versions, both involving the adjectival
past participle of the verb for 'spit', appear to be quite robust.

3)  There's a range of variation in the degree to which speakers are
conscious of an allusion to genetic transmission and issues of
paternity, which I would argue to underlie all of these expressions
and cross-modal comparison of bodily fluids.  In this respect, the
reference in the Norwegian and Icelandic expressions to a son being
as much like his father as if he'd been sneezed out of his nose is
especially suggestive.  (Special thanks here to Jan Engh, who cites
the wonderful sentence "Han var=8Asom snytt av dirigentpinnen til sin
far hva fakter og minespill angikk", uttered by the leader of the
local students' orchestra to describe the young son of the conductor
as looking and acting as though he'd been blown out of his father's
baton.

4)  Just as many writers on the [spIt at n] image, including some of the
respondents to my query, have suggested that the real source is the
more delicate (but otherwise unattested) "spirit and image", Bruno
Oliveira Maroneze notes that Brazilians often insist that their
earthy expression,
"Ele e' a cara cuspida e escarrada do pai", is really a corruption of
the more delicate "Ele e' a cara esculpida em Carrara do pai" (...the
face scupted in Carrara...) or "Ele e' a cara esculpida e entalhada
do pai" (...sculpted and carved...), but as with the English "spirit
and image", this more delicate source appears to be a
wishfully-thought folk etymology.

Anyway, thanks to all for reinforcing my already firmly held belief
that Linguist List is a unique resource for this sort of
cross-linguistic lexicographic detective work.  Anybody attending the
LSA this January in Washington is invited to drop in at the American
Dialect Society meeting to hear me talk about the spitten image--same
hotel, see your Meeting Handbook for details of time and place.

Larry Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>

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