The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (12 page)

Some people really did dress in buff leather, as it’s a good strong material. For example, in the nineteenth century the uniform of the New York firefighters was made from buff and the firefighters themselves were often called
buffs
.

The firefighters of New York were heroes. Everybody loves a good conflagration, and whenever a New York building started burning the buffs would be called and crowds of New Yorkers would turn out to cheer them on. People would travel across the city just to see a good fire, and schoolboys would become aficionados of the buffs’
techniques for putting them out. These devoted New York schoolboys became known as
buffs
. Thus the
New York Sun
said, in 1903, that:

The
buffs
are men and boys whose love of fire, firefighting and firemen is a predominant characteristic.

And that’s why to this day you have film
buffs
and music
buffs
and other such expert
buff
alos.

On the far side of New York state, beside the Niagara River, is a whole city called Buffalo, which is a bit odd as there aren’t any bison there, and never have been. However, the Niagara River is very pretty, and the best guess about the origins of the city’s name is that
Buffalo
is a corruption of the French
beau fleuve
, or
beautiful river
. But imagine if there
were
bison in the city of Buffalo. Pigeons in London are called London pigeons. Girls in California are called California girls. So any bison that you found in Buffalo would have to be called Buffalo buffalos.

Buffalos are big beasts and it’s probably best not to get into an argument with one. That’s why there’s an American slang verb
to buffalo
meaning
to bully
. This means that if you bullied bison from that large city on the Niagara River, you would be
buffaloing Buffalo buffalos
.

But you can go further, and a linguist at the University of Buffalo did. He worked out that if bison from his native city, who were bullied by other bison from his native city, went and took their frustration out on still other bison from his native city, then:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Confused? The grammar is easier if you compare it to this version:

Buffalo bison [whom] Buffalo bison bully [then] bully Buffalo bison.

It’s the longest grammatically correct sentence in the English language that uses only one word. Word buffs love it.

Antanaclasis

Rhetorically, the sentence
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
is antanaclasic, which means that it keeps using the same word in different senses. People have been playing around with antanaclasis since language began. The Romans thought up the Latin sentence:

Malo malo malo malo.

Which means:

I would rather be in an apple tree than be a bad boy in trouble.

But neither the Romans nor the bison of Buffalo can come close to what you can achieve in Chinese if you really set your mind to it. Chinese is an incredibly inflected language and you can change the meaning of a word by slightly changing the way you say it. When you add that advantage onto the principle behind
Buffalo buffalos
and
malo malo
, you can create something much longer. That’s how a Chinese-American linguist came up with a poem that, in Westernised script, reads like this:

Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.

Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.

Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.

Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.

Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shī shì, shī shì shí shī shìshì.

Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.

Shíshì shī, Shì shī shì shì shíshì.

Shíshì shì, Shì shī shì shí shì shí shī.

Shí shí, shī shí shì shí shī, shí shí shí shī shī.

Shì shì shì shì.

Which means:

In a stone den was a poet named Shi, who loved to eat lions, and had decided to eat ten.

He often went to the market to hunt for lions.

At ten o’clock precisely, ten lions had just arrived at the market.

At that moment, Shi had just arrived at the market as well.

Seeing those lions, he shot them with his arrows.

He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.

The stone den was wet, so he had his servant clean it.

After the stone den was cleaned, he tried to eat those ten lions.

When he ate, he realised the corpses were really ten stone lions.

Try to explain this matter.

That’s one hell of a case of antanaclasis. However, like the buffalo sentence, it makes no sense, even to the Chinese, unless it’s explained.

China

Westerners find it terribly hard to pronounce Chinese words, and the Chinese find it hard to pronounce ours. In the nineteenth century when British merchants were over in China trying to trade opium, they found that the locals couldn’t even say the word
business
, and instead pronounced it
pidgin
, which is why strange colonial dialects are still called
pidgin
English
.

And we’re so bad at pronouncing Chinese that when we want one of their phrases we don’t adopt them as we would a French one, we just give in and translate. Do you have any idea how to pronounce
xi nao
? Luckily, you don’t need to, as we translated it to
brainwashing
(it was originally a form of Buddhist meditation). We never lost face by trying to pronounce
tiu lien
, instead we took the phrase and translated it to
lose face
. As for Mao Tse Tung’s
tsuh lao fu
, we call them
paper tigers
.

However, some Chinese words do get into the language, mostly because of the delicious food. These remain untranslated, which is generally a good thing.
Kumquats
and
dim sum
might sell more if English-speakers knew that they meant
golden orange
and
touch the heart
; however,
fish brine
would probably not sell as much as
ketchup
,
odds and ends
(basically leftovers) doesn’t sound as exotic as
chop suey
, and nobody would eat
tofu
if they knew that it meant
rotten beans
.

However, as alien as the Chinese language may sound to Western ears, there are still some points where we can see that our languages connect, not because they are related (they aren’t) but because humans form languages in the same way, for example by imitation of sound. That’s why the Chinese word for
cat
is
miau
.

And here’s a true oddity: the Chinese word for pay is
pei
.

Coincidences and Patterns

The Chinese for
pay
is
pei
, and the Farsi Iranian word for
bad
is
bad
. The Uzbek for
chop
is
chop
, and in the extinct Aboriginal language of Mbaram a
dog
was called a
dog
. The Mayan for
hole
is
hole
and the Korean for
many
is
mani
. When, in the mountains of the Hindu Kush, an Afghan wants to show you something, he will use the word
show
; and the ancient Aztecs used the Nahuatl word
huel
to mean
well
.

Any idiot can deduce from this that all the languages of the world are related. However, anyone of reasonable intelligence will realise that they are just a bunch of coincidences. There are a lot of words and a lot of languages, but there are a limited number of sounds. We’re bound to coincide sometimes.

To prove that two languages are related you need to show a
pattern
of changes. It’s not enough to say that the Latin word
collis
has a double L in it and so does
hill
. That wouldn’t convince anyone of anything. But it’s possible to show that hundreds of Latin words that begin with a hard C have German and English equivalents that begin with an H. Moreover, you discover that the rest of the consonants are pretty much unchanged. So the Latin
cornu
translates to Old German and English as
horn
. If you can show a pattern of changes, then you can be pretty damned sure that the languages are related. Let’s give it a go.

So the English
horn of hounds
would be the
cornu canum
and the
horn of a hundred hounds
would be the
cornu centum canum
and the
hundred-headed hound with horns
would be
canis centum capitum cum cornibus
. And the …

Well, you get the idea.

The C to H shift that separates Latin from German is part of a group of shifts known as Grimm’s Law, because they were set out by Jacob Grimm, who was one of the Brothers Grimm and who spent most of his time collecting fairy tales.

There are other parts to Grimm’s Law; for example, Ps in Latin turn to Fs in German (and hence in many English words), which is how
paternal pisces
became
fatherly fishes
.

It’s easy to see how this happens when you consider how it still goes on today. In the East End of London, people don’t pronounce their Hs and haven’t done for at least a hundred years. The
house of a hundred hounds in Hackney
would be pronounced the
’ouse of an ’undred ’ounds in ’Acne
. Nor do East Enders pronounce the G at the end of participles, so instead of
humming and hawing
, a Londoner would find himself
’ummin’ and ’awin’
.

The important thing is that people do this
consistently
. Nobody listens to
’ip hop
, or even
hip ’op
. You either pronounce your Hs or you don’t. Once one H has gone, they all disappear.

Of course, East London English is still English, for now. But if somebody built a big wall around the East End and didn’t let anyone in or out for a few hundred years, the captives would probably make more and more changes until their language became utterly incomprehensible to the rest of the English-speaking world.

Can that still happen?

Nobody is quite sure how transport and communication will affect the splitting of languages. On the face of it, you’d expect accents to stop developing as everybody adjusted to the tyranny of television, but that doesn’t
appear
to be the case. In the US, for example, there’s a thing called the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, whereby people in Detroit and Buffalo have started pronouncing
block
as
black
and
cot
as
cat
. That, in turn, has pushed the A sound, so that
cat
is pronounced as
cee-at
: so folks in Detroit would call the famous children’s book
The Cee-at in the Hee-at
.