Language Trainers Blog

While researching palindromes for another post, I managed to find a variant of them. This kind of word or phrase makes sense when reversed, but unlike palindromes do not read exactly the same forwards as they do backwards. The more astute among you might have noticed that semordnilap is actually the word palindromes spelled in reverse.

Take a look at some examples of semordnilaps, also known as heteropalindromes, semi- or half-palindromes, reversgrams, mynoretehs, word reversals, or anadromes:

Can you think of any more?

Aphrodisiac, atlas, biro, boycott, cardigan, panic, and sandwich all have one thing in common. They are eponyms – words derived from the names of real, fictional, mythical or spurious characters. Most eponymous words derive from a person’s surname.

Boycott, for instance, comes from the Irish Landlord Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott. After retiring from the British army, Boycott was hired to look after the Earl of Erne’s estates in County Mayo, Ireland. In 1880 the Irish Land League, wanting land reform, proposed a reduction in rents, stating that landlords who refused to accept such rents should be ostracised. Boycott refused and was promptly ostracised. His workers were forced to leave him, tradesmen refused to supply him, and his wife was threatened – indeed he was persecuted to such a degree that he and his wife were forced to flee to England, and in so doing they made the Land League’s boycott a success. The word quickly passed into other European languages; e.g. German: boykottieren.

Biro is a trademark name used to describe a kind of ball point pen, named after its Hungarian-born inventor László Josef Biró (1900-85). Biro patented his ballpoint pen, containing a quick-drying ink, in Hungary in 1938. The rise of Nazism meant that Biro was forced to leave Hungary, and he later settled in Argentina. Towards the end of the Second World War, Biro found an English company to back his product, but the company was soon taken over by the French firm Bic. So it is, then, that the ballpoint pen is known in France as bic and in the UK as a biro.

Other eponymous words include: bobby (English slang for policeman), Braille, Davis Cup, gringo, jacuzzi, masochism, Oscar (Academy award), Pandora’s box, sandwich, Tuesday, Yankee, and zeppelin. Do you know where they come from?

“False friends” (a word in another language that closely resembles a word in somebody’s first language, but means something different) are practical proof for the fact that seemingly different languages have at one point been strongly connected: the form remains identical, or at least recognizable, but the meaning has subtly shifted in one or both languages from its original definition.

So, with that in mind, can you translate these Spanish words into English without using a dictionary? Hover your mouse pointer over the box to the right to reveal the correct answer, and the answer a native English speaker might have been expecting.

Adepto :: follower, supporter (NOT adept)

América :: the Americas (NOT America specifically)

Embarazada :: pregnant (NOT embarrassed)

Librería :: bookstore (NOT library)

Parientes :: relatives (NOT parents)

Sensible :: sensitive (NOT sensible)

Soportar :: tolerate, deal with (NOT support)

Do you know other false friends? Many linguists have at least one amusing anecdote involving these tricky words. For example, the famous song “Sympathy for the Devil” is known in Spanish as “Simpatía por el demonio” which actually means “Affection for the Devil”. The correct translation should have been “Compasión por el demonio”.

Jorge Luis Borges in Other Inquisitions (1937-1952) refers to this ancient Chinese classification of animals:

Animals are divided into:
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) those that have been embalmed,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush,
(l) others,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase, and
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

Most of us would tend to feel, whether consciously or unconsciously, that this seemingly random system of organization conflicts with our modern sorting standards. However, the most integral system that divides the world conceptually is the system of language.

Somehow, those of us who speak English feel that it makes perfect sense having a single word describing “a room where food is kept, prepared and cooked and where the dishes are washed” (kitchen); however, it wouldn’t possibly be worth having a single lingual unit for “a cool basement room where the hottest part of the day is passed during the hottest season of the year”. Nonetheless, the Anglo-Indian word tyconna depicts exactly this concept. How can we justify this fact? Is this linguistic nonentity a casualty of the Great British weather?

Bedouins have ten different words to describe sand, according to its colour or consistency. Perhaps this can be easily explained by the fact that sand is a more important part of these peoples’ lives.

Hopping from verbal overkill to deficiency, did you know that Spanish doesn’t have a single word for the English verb to borrow? Spanish requires a phrase to broadcast that same meaning: pedir prestado. Considering our Bedouin example, can we possibly argue that Spanish people have no concept of borrowing? Very unlikely, it seems.

How about the Pascuense verb tingo, which means ‘to borrow things from a friend’s house one by one until there’s nothing left’? Is this such a common activity among people from Easter Island that it deserves its own word, let alone such a concise one?

Like anything else, this concept can be dangerous when taken to extremes. An irate Arthur Schopenhauer tries to defend the stereotyping of the German character by mentioning that their tongue has more than fifty words to describe drunkenness. It seems that words in some languages are inherently affected by the frequency and relevance of the activity to the speakers, while some have very different etymologies.

Languages divide the world, and they all do it differently. Does anybody else have any examples of words or expressions from different languages that seem to have no English equivalent?