Mav adds: using two words - going back to the fine old Medieval days when clerks charged by the word and the length of the word
This goes back even further. In the dawning days of the English language as it met up with Latin in the days of Early West Saxon, et al., translations from Latin would require two English words to bracket the meaning of a Latin word that didn't quite match any one word in English.
mav would know: you got any ref you could pass on?
I believe mention is made of it in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Grammar and probably in another one I have lying next my bed of a more recent vintage. I'll get back... No wait a minute, maybe I can amazon it. Nope, the likely candidates are all out of print so they don't show the cover. I'll have to get back to you. Lemme call myself up and leave me a message so I don't forget. There, now I gots no excuse.
You also have the phenomenon which occurred after the Norman invasion, when a French/Latin word would be used alongside an Anglo-Saxon word. The most famous example of this is Cranmer's phrase, "We pray and beseech Thee", 'pray' being from French 'prier' (or the Norman-French equivalent) and 'beseech' from A.S. 'besecen', both meaning basically the same thing.
Then there are the pairs most famous in the culinary area, calf/veal, swine/pork, sheep/mutton, cow/beef etc.
curiously Honey-- was not supplanted by the old indo-europian word (as found in most europian languages-- a m with a vowel, and an d or t or s and an other vowel.. ie. mede (italian i think) and melitas (wrong, wrong, wrong-- but i'm in a field office with not a dictionary in sight!) but close to that for the greek--(Nicholas-- or Inselpeter or any of a long list,) --correct me, please.. and maybe a list of the words used for honey...
in english the only word that uses the same root is mead--( honeywine)- (following the same pattern as cow/beef)
Definitely PIE, Helen. In Hindi, madhu is the word for wine - also therefore meaning something very sweet (and also metaphorically - so hence, the local tavern for wine and so on). It is also therefore used as a (not too) common name for children - both male and female.
Speaking of ancient beverages, there was a news item recently about a golden drinking cup, which on testing was said to show that the owner had mixed wine and beer plus honey. I suspect that the beverages had been consumed separately, without washing the cup.
Have you read about the Greek vessel wreck they've under two miles of water in the Mediteranean? It was a large cargo ship, as evidenced by the hundreds or thousands of amphorae (?) of wine strewn in heaps in the area. "They" were using a remote-controlled robot to search for a lost submarine when the discovered it. The key importance of the discovery is that it seems to disprove the long-stanging assumption that the tales of high-seas expeditions surviving ancient Greece were untrue and that the ancient mariners never lost sight of land. The story was reported in the New York Times this week, and I'm sure it's still available on that site http://www.nytimes.com
This is Binky, wishing you a pleasant from the rings of Saturn, signing off.
You also have the phenomenon which occurred after the Norman invasion, when a French/Latin word would be used alongside an Anglo-Saxon word. The most famous example of this is Cranmer's phrase, "We pray and beseech Thee", 'pray' being from French 'prier' (or the Norman-French equivalent) and 'beseech' from A.S. 'besecen', both meaning basically the same thing."
"And, sigh, we are still trying to get rid of the consequent redundant doublets -- and even triplets! -- which pepper legal writing.
Clear and unambiguous Null, void and of no effect I give, bequeath and devise
I edit the redundancies in materials which Judges use in their opinions, and I'll be damned if they don't put them back in more often than not. What, I ask them, is the difference between clear statutory language and unambiguous statutory language? A glaze covers their eyes; they don't even realize what they are doing; they just follow a habitual linguistic rhythm.
on my way home from dropping my daughter off at school today, the radio traffic reporter advised that "there is some kind of problem on the 405 freeway, according to a vaguely nebulous CHP report". did he mean it was ever-so-slightly unclear???
which reminds me.... isn't "witty repartee" redundant?? it seems i always hear the two words juxtaposed.
Am I right in presuming that the root language for Indonesian is a kind of proto-Chinese? No matter how much the vocabulary may have been influenced by the colonists from South India during the glory days of the Vijayanagara empire - [digression] which fact (Borobudur, Angkor Wat, and other South East Asian monuments, the storylines of the shadow-puppet plays etc) gives lie to the egregious "India-nationalist" email I have twice had to receive over the past few years that claims 'India' has never in its history invaded or colonised another country...[/digression]
Indonesian is an Austronesian language. Austronesian languages are spoken from Madagascar in the West to Easter island in the East and from Taiwan in the North to New Zealand in the South (hi Max and Cap K), but not for the most part in Papua New Guinea and Australia. According to who you believe the Austronesian languages may have spread out from Taiwan (some of the native Taiwanese languages are members) or from the northern part of the Philippines. Either way Indonesian is not related to the Chinese languages any more than it's related to English.
Whether the Indian influences in Indonesia stemmed from some sort of political colonisation or from a combination of merchants indulging in a bit of cultural colonisation of the indigenous elite is again a matter of who you believe. There's not enough evidence to be sure either way.
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