11 Jul
2016
11 Jul
'16
3:34 p.m.
On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from
bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No
rudder to break... And it's from way before medieval times... But I'm
pretty sure the term is from even before the Vikings were around.
Johnny
Johnny Billquist scripsit:
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying that Old English
also borrowed the word from English?
(See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=boat)
> Uh. I'm no language expert, but that
seems rather stretched. English
> comes from Old English, which have a lot more in common with
> Scandinavian languages, and they are all Germanic languages. Which
> means they all share a common root.
Absolutely.
> What makes you say then that all the others
borrowed it from
> English?
Because when words change, they change according to common patterns
specific to the language. For example, a change between Old English (OE)
and Modern English (ModE) is that long-a has become long-o. Consequently,
the descendants of OE bát, tá, ác are ModE boat, toe, oak. In Scots,
which is also descended from OE, this change did not operate, and long-a
changed in the Great Vowel Shift along with long-a from other sources,
giving the Older Scots words bait, tae, eik. However, current Scots
does not use bait, but rather boat, and we can see that because this
breaks the pattern it must be a borrowing from English. > (I assume
you know why Port and Starboard are named that way...)
OE steor 'steering oar,
rudder' + bord 'side of a ship'. Parallel
formations gave us common Scandinavian styrbord from ON stjórnborði,
similarly Dutch stuurbord, German Steuerbord. Larboard, the other side,
began life as Middle English ladde 'load' + bord, because it was the side
you loaded a ship from, and was altered under the influence of starboard.
Because the two were easily confused, port officially replaced it in the
19C, though it had been used in this meaning since the 16C. 
11 Jul
11 Jul
4:38 p.m.
New subject: Boats (was: Slashes)
Johnny Billquist <bqt(a)update.uu.se> wrote:
|On 2016-07-11 04:00, John Cowan <cowan(a)mercury.ccil.org> wrote:
|> Johnny Billquist scripsit:
|>>> Uh. I'm no language expert, but that seems rather stretched. English
Me too, unfortunately. I never learned old Greek, on German
Gymnasiums you now have to learn Latin instead of Greek, since
maybe after the last war, world war that is.
|Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called "babord", which comes from
|bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on. No
For that the German word is "Backbord" -- and wether that is clean
depends: it seems to originate in "bak", related to "Backe", and
that is indeed "(ars)backe", which i won't translate unless
everybody has appropriate toilet support.
--steffen
5:07 p.m.
New subject: Boats (was: Slashes)
Johnny Billquist scripsit:
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you saying
that Old
English also borrowed the word from English?
Now you're being silly. It's obvious that "boat" is a cuckoo in the
Scots nest, and who could have laid it there but English? Scots is shot
through with English borrowings, just as the Nordic languages are full
of Low German and English is full of Old Norse and French.
For an example of a Scots word that went the other way, consider OE
rád, which meant 'an event of riding'. In Beowulf, the sea is called
(among other poetic things) the swanrád, the place of the swan's riding.
According to the sound-change I discussed before, this becomes ModE road,
which is now specialized to mean 'the place where people usually ride
(or used to)'. In Scots, however, it took the meaning of a 'riding for
military purposes', and as the sound change predicts, its form is raid,
which was borrowed into English in the 19C (by Sir Walter Scott).
Etymonline is an excellent resource, but not entirely perfect, and it
happens to be wrong in this case about the related languages (which is
not its focus anyway). The OED3 has the same story I gave you, with
some doubt about a few details; <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A5d>
agrees also.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and all other acyclic
graphs; you have a right to be here. --DeXiderata by Sean McGrath
5:21 p.m.
New subject: Boats (was: Slashes)
Steffen Nurpmeso scripsit:
|Well, in Scandinavian the port side is called
"babord", which comes from
|bare board, since that was the "clean" side, which you could dock on.
For that the German word is "Backbord" -- and wether that is clean
depends: it seems to originate in "bak", related to "Backe",
Quite so, from Low German backbort or Dutch bakboord (seafaring terms
in Standard German mostly come from Low German). The OE form is
bæcbord and the ON form is bakborði. All of these words have have
everything to do with back and nothing to do with bare. Whether they
refer to the helmsman's back or the back of the ship itself (that is,
the side away from the water when docked) is not clear. The French word,
obviously borrowed from Norse (probably by way of Normand) is bâbord.
As I mentioned before, this was replaced by laddebord in Middle English.
By the way, I misspelled stéorbord in my previous post by leaving
off the accent.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
Police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting
on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV
cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country,
where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. --Neal Stephenson
9:13 p.m.
New subject: Boats
On 2016-07-11 13:07, John Cowan wrote:
Johnny Billquist scripsit:
Of course I was being silly. :-)
But I was having a hard time remaining serious under the circumstances.
So the obvious question then becomes: Are you
saying that Old
English also borrowed the word from English?
Now you're being silly. It's obvious that "boat" is a cuckoo in the
Scots nest, and who could have laid it there but English? Scots is shot
through with English borrowings, just as the Nordic languages are full
of Low German and English is full of Old Norse and French. For an example of a Scots word that went the other
way, consider OE
rád, which meant 'an event of riding'. In Beowulf, the sea is called
(among other poetic things) the swanrád, the place of the swan's riding.
According to the sound-change I discussed before, this becomes ModE road,
which is now specialized to mean 'the place where people usually ride
(or used to)'. In Scots, however, it took the meaning of a 'riding for
military purposes', and as the sound change predicts, its form is raid,
which was borrowed into English in the 19C (by Sir Walter Scott).
Etymonline is an excellent resource, but not entirely perfect, and it
happens to be wrong in this case about the related languages (which is
not its focus anyway). The OED3 has the same story I gave you, with
some doubt about a few details; <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A5d>
agrees also.
So you're staying that the Old English "bat" according to Etymonline is
incorrect? So are you then saying that the Old English word was "boat"?
Because what you said was that "boat" was the original word, and all
other derivations are in fact borrowed from English.
The Old English word should be easy to verify...
Johnny
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4 comments
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Steffen Nurpmeso