Etymologies

I have always been fascinated with language. I grew up in an Irish American family, so English was the sole language in our house, with the exception of a few remnants of Gaelic. I learned from my grandmother the following gems, with her sometimes incorrect pronunciation.

Caid mille failte  (Kayd milla fawlcha)
Ten Thousand Welcomes

Slainte (Sloncha)
To your health

An sagart  ('N soggert)
priest

Sassenach    (Sossenock)
Englishman

prata    (prawtee)
potato

I n-ainm an athar, agus an mhic, agus an sprid naoimh
(Inanya manaha awgus avic awgus shprig naha)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.


and the very useful

Pogue mahon (Pog mahone)

Kiss my ass.


In fourth or fifth grade, to become an altar boy, I learned the Latin responses of the Mass by rote and phonetically, the way Muslim kids learn the Koran without knowing Arabic. The Confiteor and the Suscipiat were the toughest. 

Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis 
ad laudem et gloriam nominis sui 
ad utilitatem quoque nostram 
totiusque ecclesiae suae sanctae.

My dad had been an altar boy, so he helped me with them. 


Since I grew up in New York, with so many Jews around, I assumed that some words I later found out to be Yiddish were just English. When I moved to Ohio, for instance, and discovered Oy vey that not everyone knew schlep schlemiel schlemazl schiksah meshuggah schande or shabbas.


When I was in eighth grade, I undertook to teach myself Spanish, using Margarita Madrigal's Magic Key To Spanish (illustrated by Andy Warhol in 1951!), which I took out from the library. A great way to learn Spanish. In my senior year of high school, I was taking Latin, Greek, French and Spanish. I later tackled Italian, German, Esperanto, Hebrew, Irish and Coptic. Didn't always win! Note: Hebrew is way easier than Irish. Even with the different alphabet. The Irish spelling-pronunciation dynamic is rough.

While I'm at it ("rough" reminded me), GB Shaw proposed an alternative alphabet for English, phonetic. It looked like shorthand. He pointed out the oddness of English spelling by saying that the word "ghoti" should be pronounced "fish". Gh from rough, o from women and ti from nation.

I can often recognize a language being spoken, even if I don't speak it. I can usually tell Mandarin from Cantonese Chinese, and Korean from Japanese. I recognize Arabic when I hear it. Slavic languages are harder to distinguish, though some forms of Russian can't be anything but Russian. Scandinavian tongues are hard to distinguish from each other (except Finnish). I can usually tell Dutch from German.

Part of my attraction to esoteric info is etymology. People love to point out how the history of Chinese word is visible in its ideograph. Well, same is true for languages like ours.

My discovery today --dontcha feel smarter already?--is the origin of the now universal Italian greeting, Ciao. It can be used both as a farewell and a hello. My usual Italian lingo consultant guessed, understandably, that it came from Greek. But it's from Italian itself. The very formal antique way of signing a letter in English, "your obedient servant", had its counterpart in Italian, "il tuo schiavo", your slave. And in Venice this became a verbal as well as a written form, pronounced in Venetian style where schiavo, usually skyavo, becomes shavo. Hence, ciao.

Cool, no? And pretty recherche.