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Etymological GAME

  Tags: Etymology | Games
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room Post Reply
18 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3  Next >>
Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 6342 days ago

2314 posts - 5695 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

 
 Message 1 of 18
11 July 2011 at 12:45pm | IP Logged 
Let's try this (well, let's see if anybody but me wants to try this)!

Another of those "write a word in a post" games, but this one is EDUCATIONAL! I write a word and then someone else writes a word. The word one writes must be derived from the previous word using one of the following rules:

1: You can write an older form of the word (such as Latin "cantare" from French "chanter").
2: You can write a newer form of the word (such as French "chanter" from Latin "cantare").
3: You can write the word as loaned into another language (such as Cantonese "呔" from English "tie").
4: You can write the original word of a loan word (such as English "tie" from Cantonese "呔").
5: You can write a different word that shares at least one morpheme of the word (such as "compression" from "impress" or "frienemy" from "friend"). In languages that allow composite words, this is allowed (such as Swedish "arbetarrörelse" from "arbete" or for that matter "arbete" from "arbetarrörelse")

Non-rulatory guidlines:
1: Try not to skip a bunch of steps. Instead of skipping directly from English "black" to French "blanche", do some research and find the shorter step and let someone else take over from there. Don't try to impress with long etymological chains.
2: Do try to impress with little-known connections and surprising twists.
3: Watch out for dead ends. It's very hard to go from Cantonese "呔" to anything but English "tie", the word it came from (the character as used in Mandarin has no etymological connection to the Cantonese word). Loan words will be particularly prone to this, unless they're loans into languages that form composite words (which will provide a method of switching root as per rule 5).
4: If you can't come up with anything and it seems nobody else will either, you can step back a step or two and take a different route. But don't step too far and don't do this because you thought of a cool thing about a word two pages ago.
5: In case of parallel posts, subsequent posters can choose the coolest one to spin off of.
6: Feel free to provide some additional information as to the history of the word or other tidbits to make it even more interesting. At the very least, inform us of the language and meaning if it's a non-English word (or even an obscure English one).
7: Do be clear of the exact word in case of homographs. Don't just write "too"; explain if it's the "too" of "too much" or the "too" of "me, too".

Unless there are any questions, I'll go ahead and start. Actually, even if there are questions I'll start anyway and we'll clear and/or change things up as we go along. Or maybe this thread will just die alone and unloved. The first word is:

(English) String

The noun, as in a length of.

Edited by Ari on 11 July 2011 at 10:18pm

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etracher
Triglot
Groupie
Italy
Joined 5094 days ago

92 posts - 180 votes 
Speaks: English*, Italian, Spanish
Studies: Modern Hebrew, Russian, Latvian

 
 Message 2 of 18
11 July 2011 at 1:07pm | IP Logged 
Ari wrote:


(English) String

The noun, as in a length of.


Latin stringere, meaning to draw tight, bind,, press together
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
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9078 posts - 16473 votes 
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Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
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 Message 3 of 18
11 July 2011 at 1:24pm | IP Logged 
Stringendo (Italian): when the musicians in an orchestra play faster and faster ... so to say squeezing the notes together
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Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 6342 days ago

2314 posts - 5695 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

 
 Message 5 of 18
11 July 2011 at 2:53pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
Stringendo (Italian): when the musicians in an orchestra play faster and faster ... so to
say squeezing the notes together


Great word!

Maybe a change from "root" in rule 5 to "morpheme" would be a good thing? That way we could go from
"stringendo" to "crescendo", for example.
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Doitsujin
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
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1256 posts - 2363 votes 
Speaks: German*, English

 
 Message 6 of 18
11 July 2011 at 4:21pm | IP Logged 
How about Stringtanga? It's a pseudo-English German word for thong.
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Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 6342 days ago

2314 posts - 5695 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

 
 Message 7 of 18
11 July 2011 at 10:23pm | IP Logged 
Doitsujin wrote:
How about Stringtanga? It's a pseudo-English German word for thong.


That'd work from "string", but from "stringendo" it's a pretty large leap.

I changed the "root" in rule 5 to "morpheme" and accordingly I continue with:

crescendo

Italian. Music term, meaning "growing" as in "becoming louder".
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Flarioca
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Brazil
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635 posts - 816 votes 
Speaks: Portuguese*, Esperanto, French, EnglishC2, Spanish, German, Italian
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 Message 8 of 18
28 September 2012 at 11:23pm | IP Logged 
Crescendo comes from the Latin word cresco related to creare which gives us the English creature.

I'm not sure if this goes against Non-rulatory guideline 1, but this thread was very silent, anyway.


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