LL-L "Etymology" 2008.04.25 (01) [E]

Sat Apr 26 01:14:18 UTC 2008

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From: Gloria Cauble <glorid at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2008.04.24 (01) [E]

Hi R.H.

Just a thought.  I've a friend, last name of
Schmidtke, Germanic heritage family immigrated 2 or 3 generations ago to the
U.S. into Wisconsin, where they became dairy farmers.  His last name implies
"smith," "smitty," the like.  One day in conversation, he said "you've just
got to 'keep on pounding'" to indicate perserverence in working at something
we were talking about.  I thought that a funny expression for dairy farmers,
who (forgive me) imagine to be pulling on teats rather than pounding
anything, and thought immediately of "smith" and the concept of work from
which his last name derives.  I wondered if his words weren't a linguistic
hold-over from generations back when smithing may have been work his family
was engaged in.

The point is this.  I could imagine this word marachen to be
simply "marching."  An intransitive concept, unless one considers marching
one's reluctant self off into battle or into the tin mines a transitive way
of thinking.  It would be much like my friend using "pounding" to indicate
the same work hard idea.

All the best, G.D. Cauble

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From: Gloria Cauble <glorid at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2008.04.21 (02) [D/E]

I'd hazard a guess that, in the expression you are translating, you may try
firth/forth/fjiord as the verb: "ford," I'm thinking "ford the sink" may
work.  Though maybe not because of "sink".  Here in Florida, we have a karst
topography, with shallow bedrock and near-to-surface water table, and that
bedrock often pops a hole and the soil overlying it drops down into it like
sand through the opening in an hour-glass, so we get lots of circular sinks
which become some really nice clear water lakes.  That is particularly how
we use the word sink around here, sink hole more specifically.  On an old
Kentucky farm in my family's possession, in a landscape riddled with caves,
a dry sink is used as a garbage pit to make large things like used
appliances disappear.  One can only imagine what else may have disappeared
in places like these over the years.  Courage to the spelunker who comes
across the receptive end of one of these sinks!  Something long-ish and dry
but ovbviously a wet-season river bed we'd call a gully, I'd suppose.

I live in the general metropolitan area of the city of Jacksonville,
Florida.  Its name at the time of our civil war back in the late 1900s was
"Cowford."  Not at all elegant, but Florida has an unknown cowboy history
due (in my romantic imagination) to its early settlement by the Spanish at
St. Augustine, Florida.  Any over-land trade interaction would have been
north of St. Augustine, which is coastal, and low-landy as is much of the
Eastern seaboard of these parts.  Folks from St. Augustine and any
cattle-drivers in the area would have had to get away from the coastal
marshlands on the east, but would find themselves hemmed in by
the once-upon-a-time cypress-edged river on the west.  The site of
Jacksonville is one of the narrowest spots along the river in these parts
that I can think of.  It sounds to me like Jacksonville was once a place
were the cows forded our really magnificent dark-water meandering St. Johns
River, a river which, from the point along it from which I write, is 2 miles
wide...50 miles inland from its mouth at the ocean.  Hope this sheds some
light on the firth/forth/fjiord discussion or at least makes you more
curious.
G.D.Cauble

 From: heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk <heatherrendall at tiscali.co.uk>
 Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2008.04.19 (05) [E]
re firth/ forth/ fjiord discussion
What is the original meaning of this word, please? Could there be any
relationship between these and a word we find in our A/S charters; namely
'ferđ' in the phrase   " swa big mos setena gemaere ofer siht ferđ on thone
ealdan kyninges hagan" = and so by the boundary of Moseley over ( along?)
siht ferđ to the king's old enclosure.
'siht', I think, is now 'sike' which is used to denote any gully in a field
that cannot be ploughed ( and stays green with grass etc) and will drain
water away in heavy rain. It could have meant something like a small
intermittent stream and I have been wondering whether siht ferđ = the course
of a stream - as this would make good sense in the landscape being
described, where there is a small stream flowing west/east in exactly the
right place!
Also a brook is mentioned called 'coforđ broc' .  Any ideas on ' coforđ' ?
yours Heather
*It's related (I guess) to farana, fahren/varen (to go, modern Dutch 'to
sail', 'to go by boat'), just as (as Roland mentioned) "voorde" (place to
cross a river), which I also saw connected with Latin "portus" some time?
Diederik*

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From: Gloria Cauble <glorid at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Etymology" 2008.04.18 (07) [E]

Luc,
In Moroccan dialect, in the north, something like "cef" is used to mean
cave.  Of course this area was once Roman occupied.  In reading your male
pigeon discussion, I thought of an observation I made while there.  In
Arabic there are several "k" sounds, which I don't know how to represent
with the international phonetic symbols.  One, for which I will use "Q",
is very deeply seated in the throat and a very round, guttural sound.  This
phoneme is used in the word "Qub," which means "dome".  It is a root
concept, from which other words derive.  Many of the concepts on your list
are rounded, including an amorous male pigeon who puffs up his chest to
impress a nearby female.  My own last name is Cauble from a German
ancestor.  I asked some German women I met in Fes, Morocco, if they had ever
heard a surname or knew of a word like my surname.  They came up with an old
word from (I think) a High German dialect that meant "pregnant cow."
Hmmmm.  I read on Wikipedia that Swabian uses an "l" to make a word
diminutive, as I thought "Qabl = little dome = pregnant cow."  Aaah, to
imagine the possibilities!

Also in Arabic, the word for "heart" is "Qalb."  In Egyptian, it seems that
the "Q" is dropped, but in Morocco, it is kept.  One way of saying "my love"
in the "lover/beloved" sense is "qalbee."  The choice of "k" is
critical, for to mispronounce means you are possibly saying "kalb = dog."
Can you imagine "kalbee = no more amore." ;-)  Could it be that Arabic
traders made it up to the lowlands, and being the gallant, swashbuckling,
ear-ring wearing, woman-in-every-port types we portray them as (not without
reason) and swashbuckled some Flemish women?  That central "l" is difficult
to hear in the "Qalbee" when your heart is beating in your ears.

I know the expression "so-and-so (a person) milked me for/of everything I
had."  I sort of means gullibility on the part of the one who was milked and
implies a certain willingness on the part of the taker to take without
remorse.  As you speak of "milk" and "tap" I think also of tapping trees for
their sap, like they do up north for maple syrup or tapping into a vein of
gold.  There is a similar meaning there.

All the best to you,
G.D.Cauble

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Etymology

Well, hello, Gloria! What a treat!

Thanks to you and to Jacqueline for responding to my question about the
possible origin of the Low Saxon verb *marach-* 'to work (very) hard', 'to
slave'.

Anything with "march" won't work, because that would have a "sh" sound for
the written "ch," from French *marche*. In fact, in Low Saxon and German the
noun "march" is *Marsch*, and the verb is *marscheyr-* (*marscheer-*) in Low
Saxon and *marschier-* in German.

I've had another, this time compelling idea about the origin of *marach-*:
the Hebrew words מַעֲרָכָה *ma'ărāxā*.

Now, at first thought this doesn't seem to make much sense, because this
feminine Hebrew noun means 'order', 'battle', 'battle field' and 'act (in a
play)'. It's masculine relative מַעֲרָךְ *ma'ărāx* gives us a better idea of
the semantic depth of this group; it means 'plan', 'order', arrangement'.
The Yiddish derivation of the feminine noun is מערכה *marokhe *and means
'fate', 'destiny' (thus "preordained or prearranged life"). So, if it came
from this source, the Low Saxon verb *marachen* may have come from something
like "to live out one's fate as a slave'.

In the meantime I have also learned that this verb is used in some German
dialects as well and seems to have emanated from the once influential
Meissen dialect.

The German edition of Wiktionary assumes derival of *marachen* from Yiddish
*melokhn*. I consider this wrong and have added a remark to this effect to
the relevant entry: http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/marachen

What do our Leybl and our other *yidishe keplekh* think about this?

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
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