I was googling around for information on Latin vowel shifts (to see if the shift from adalter to adulter was unique or if the a to u shift happened with other words, too) and came across the Omniglot page on Coptic Latin. My first thought was: uh, what? (Mostly since I’ve studied both Coptic and Latin, and Coptic doesn’t have really anything to do with Latin. Greek, yes. But Latin?)
Turns out it’s a modern mashup of the Coptic script and the Latin language, invented by David Biliot to help his students start learning Catholic Latin (which I’m guessing is just another name for Church Latin or ecclesiastical Latin). Interesting idea. And, you know, there’s precedence for this sort of thing, since Coptic itself was a mashup of the Greek script (with modifications) and the Egyptian language.
Here’s the sample text from Omniglot’s page (which I’ve retyped using two different fonts, the second of which I find a bit more readable):
Transliteration: Omnes homines dignitate et jure liberi et pares nascuntur, rationis et conscientiae participes sunt, quibus inter se concordiae studio est agendum.
I’ve often wondered if the words adult and adultery are related — you know, adultery is something adults do, that sort of thing. (An uncomfortable folk etymology at best.) I did a little digging in the OED and some Latin etymological dictionaries and found that, thank heavens, the two words have nothing to do with each other.
Adultery
Adultery comes from the older French forms avouterie and adultère, respectively from the Latin words adulter (“adulterer”) and adulterium (“adultery”).
And where did adulter come from? Ad- (meaning “to”) and alter (“the other of two” — it’s the comparative form of alius, “another”). Add in a vowel shift from adalter to adulter and there you go.
So, an adulterer is someone who goes (ad usually implies movement) to “the other one,” to another — to someone who isn’t their spouse.
Adult
On the other hand, adult comes from the Latin adultus, which is the past participle of adolescere (“to grow up”). It means “grown up,” basically. Go figure.
(And adolescence is the condition of growing up, from the Latin adolescentia, which comes from the present participle, adolescentem.)
I’ve been reading The Story of French with my wife and came across a fascinating little tidbit: the English word pedigree comes from pied-de-grue, “crane’s foot”, apparently “a symbol used in genealogical trees to mark a line of succession.” Very cool and not at all what I expected. (The OED has the Anglo-Norman original as pé de grue, by the way, which is basically the same thing.)
Today’s release: Ἰλιάς, an EPUB/Kindle edition of Homer’s Iliad in ancient Greek (as part of my Originals series). The EPUB edition looks better than the Kindle edition, at least in iBooks and Digital Editions, but the Kindle edition is pretty usable as well. Enjoy.
Today’s release of Dream of the Rood (in EPUB and Kindle formats) also marks the beginning of my Old English Texts series. I’ll be releasing nice EPUB/Kindle editions of Old English texts, using the Labyrinth Library editions as a base. (They’ve been kind enough to grant me permission to do this.)
Now that the Kindle supports Cyrillic, I’ve put together a Kindle edition of the Russian Crime & Punishment, to match the EPUB I released a year ago. I’ve also made the EPUB formatting a little nicer. Enjoy.
A fun word nerd find: the French word jour, meaning “day” (as in “bonjour”), comes from the Latin word diurnus, meaning “daily.” It’s the adjectival form of dies, the Latin word for “day.” Incidentally, in spite of the similarities, our English word day is “in no way related to Latin dies,” according to the OED. (It is very much related, however, to the German tag.)
Speaking of the OED, their March 2011 update added OMG, LOL, IMHO, BFF, TMI, and others to the dictionary. That’s noteworthy in itself (and being a descriptivist, I’m glad to see them there), but this bit surprised me:
As is often the case, OED‘s research has revealed some unexpected historical perspectives: our first quotation for OMG is from a personal letter from 1917; the letters LOL had a previous life, starting in 1960, denoting an elderly woman (or ‘little old lady’; see LOL n./1); and the entry for FYI [FYI phr., adj., and n.], for example, shows it originated in the language of memoranda in 1941.
1917! I had no idea.
Other new additions: to heart (as a verb, as in “I heart etymology”) and smack talk.
For a few years now I’ve wanted to publish the first German edition of the Grimms’ fairy tales, and today that wish comes true. The Kinder- und Hausmärchen was originally published in two parts, one in 1812 and one in 1815. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published several more editions of the tales during their lifetimes, adding new stories (lots) and removing others (not quite as many).
