Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 January 8

= January 8 =

Pet: a word from the Beaker people?
Is it reasonable to conjecture that the word pet might come from Middle Irish peta, making it potentially older than PIE? Card Zero (talk) 02:21, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * The origin is unknown. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 08:38, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Pre-PIE is logically a possibility (which Wictionary mentions), but as your linked articles explain, we don't know whether the Indo-European Goidelic Celtic languages in the British Isles displaced those of the Bell-Beaker culture directly, or an earlier wave of Celtic (hence also Indo-European) languages whose speakers themselves displaced (or absorbed) the Bell-Beaker folk, nor do we know whether the latter's language(s) were themselves Goidelic, a different Celtic, or a pre-Indo-European language such as Vasconic. In isolation, therefore, the conjecture has little basis, unless you want to use it for a historically speculative piece of fiction, for example.
 * For what it's worth, the OED traces the word (only) as far back as 16th-century Scots (a Germanic sister language to English), and (in my edition) suggests it was transferred to, e.g. Irish, rather than coming from Goidelic Celtic Scots Gaelic which of course originated in Ireland. However, it does not suggests the word's ultimate origin; as you may know, a connection via 'petty' with French petit has been suggested.
 * [Edited to add] Don't know whether my post has appeared before Lambiam's and DuncanHill's below despite being timed later. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.89.176 (talk) 11:22, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Potentially older? Middle Irish is a Celtic language, one of the major branches of the Indo-European family. All branches are likely to have borrowed terms from now extinct substrates; there is nothing special in this respect to Gaelic. And, of course, all PIE roots are potentially older than PIE. --Lambiam 11:17, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I should have answered the actual question as, (1) it is reasonable to conjecture that English pet came from Scottish peata, which may have borrowed it from Middle Irish, descending from Old Irish petta, of unknown origin. And (2), it is "not unreasonable" to conjecture that that origin was a non-IE substrate (which does not mean "older than PIE"), but the evidence is lacking (or purely circumstantial), no plausible cognates being known. --Lambiam 12:54, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * OED says "Origin: A borrowing from Scottish Gaelic. Etymon: Scottish Gaelic peata.
 * Etymology: < Scottish Gaelic peata tame animal, now also ‘spoilt child’ (Early Irish petta, Irish peata tame animal, occasionally referring to spoilt humans), probably ultimately < an extended form (-t- extension) of the Indo-European base of classical Latin suēscere to become used to (see mansuete adj.).
 * The Scottish Gaelic and Irish noun is also used preceding a noun in the genitive to specify the kind of pet, e.g. Early Irish petta eoin a pet bird, literally ‘a pet of a bird’. This may underlie the uses as adjective in English." (The symbol < means from). DuncanHill (talk) 11:21, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

"He was in handcuffs"
We all know what that means, and some would say it's ridiculous to object "No he wasn't; only his wrists were." But I can easily imagine that speakers of some other language would object to a rather literal translation into that language of "he was in handcuffs", on the grounds that most of him wasn't and thus that it was untrue (and a physical impossibility to boot). Yet English permits such an ... umm ... synecdoche? Somehow I suspect that there's a better term; anyone here know of one? -- Hoary (talk) 07:26, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Slang or abbreviated speech. --<-Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots-> 08:35, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Not "slang". That's "A type of language consisting of words and phrases that are regarded as very informal, are more common in speech than writing, and are typically restricted to a particular context or group of people".Iapetus (talk) 10:20, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Hoary -- In English, the word "in" allows many loose or metaphorical meanings ("in trouble", "in tears" etc) which need to be expressed in some way in languages. (Esperanto has an all-purpose vague preposition without concrete literal meaning, "je", but that's Esperanto.)   There's a longer word "inside" to indicate more strongly a physical location relationship (though "inside" can also be used loosely or metaphorically in some cases). AnonMoos (talk) 09:52, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * I'm surprised Americans haven't turned it into "He was inside of handcuffs." HiLo48 (talk) 10:04, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * You can be in brogues, you can be in gloves, you can even be in your birthday suit. Martinevans123 (talk) 10:21, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * You can be "on Facebook", "on Twitter", etc. That doesn't mean you're physically sitting on top of them. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:29, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * I can report that Turkish uses the locative case rather loosely also figuratively. The expression for saying someone is in trouble is başı belada, in which belada is the locative of bela, "trouble". Literally, though, the expression says: "their head is in trouble", leaving out the wrists. But instead of "in handcuffs", the Turkish idiom is kelepçeli, literally "with handcuffs". --Lambiam 10:57, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * As an aside, I think Ronnie and Reggie might have called them "bracelets"? But does anyone know the origin of the slang term "darbies"? Martinevans123 (talk) 11:08, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * OED has under Darby 1) "Darby's bands n. (also Father Darby's bands) apparently some rigid form of bond by which a debtor was bound and put within the power of a moneylender. (It has been suggested that the term was derived from the name of some noted usurer of the 16th cent.)" and 2) plural. Handcuffs: sometimes also, fetters. slang." (earliest quotation 1672) DuncanHill (talk) 11:12, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Abstract usage of prepositions (or similar grammatical markers) seem very common in languages on a general basis. They mostly come naturally for native speakers, but are an endless source of frustration for foreign learners... For instance, with the meaning of designated time, the Swedish phrase for ten-to-two is "ten in two", which is difficult to explain logically. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 15:09, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * p.s. it's the same in Welsh: "Roedd mewn gefynnau" - He was in handcuffs; "Roedd mewn siwt tri darn" - He was in a three-piece suit"; "Roedden nhw mewn dagrau" - They were in tears., etc. Martinevans123 (talk) 16:51, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * It reminds me of Hollywood red carpets, where they'll ask someone, "Who are you wearing?" and they'll say "Versace" or whatever. They're obviously not literally wearing the designer, they're wearing one of the designer's designs. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:58, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Ooh, get you. dahrling! Martinevans123 (talk) 19:06, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * That's probably what the cops in Beverly Hills use. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:11, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * You forgot the link. --184.144.97.125 (talk) 23:07, 8 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Damn. That's completely unhinged! 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:25, 8 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Perhaps the oddest construction like this is to "go in bare feet", as though you could take them off somehow. Grammarians here point out that "go barefoot" makes more sense. Alansplodge (talk) 10:05, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
 * Really?? Martinevans123 (talk) 10:17, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


 * "He left in a huff in a taxi." AndyTheGrump (talk) 10:57, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


 * "Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes. After that who cares? He's a mile away and you've got his shoes!"-- Martinevans123 (talk) 11:10, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


 * With no comma (or prosodic break), AndyTheGrump, that sounds off to me. But either "He left in a huff, in a taxi" or "He left in a taxi, in a huff" would be fine. It's "He left in a huff and a taxi" (or "He left in a taxi and a huff") that'd be syllepsis. -- Hoary (talk) 12:04, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Apparently this is a "zeugma, from the Greek, 'to yoke', a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses." We have a whole article here Martinevans123 (talk) 12:37, 9 January 2022 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the comments, all. (I've been enjoying "RL" for a day, and have just now returned to the computer.) AnonMoos's comments are particularly pertinent: if one thinks about it, even what many people might call the "literal" meaning of "in" has quite some polysemy. I think -- without actually bothering to do any research, sorry -- that if I'm wearing my pyjamas, few people would say that I'm only metaphorically in my pyjamas; yet my relationship (spatial, not volitional) to my pyjamas is quite different from that of wine to the uncorked bottle it's in . As for the notion of a person being in handcuffs, Richard A. Lanham (A Handbook of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd ed) writes that synecdoche is "Substitution of part for whole, genus for species, or vice versa: 'All hands on deck'"; and I can't find a more precise term in rhetoric. (And I don't much want one, as I'm sure that this is far less a matter of [conscious] rhetoric than one of [unconscious] lexical semantics.) -- Hoary (talk) 11:59, 9 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I think all the previous posters missed what seems to me to be the most important point: handcuffs are designed to only contain the wrists. Just as I can be "in my trousers" even though they do not cover anything above the waist or below the ankles, I can be "in handcuffs" if they are applied properly even though they only enclose a very small portion of my body. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 05:26, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
 * There comes a point when the analogy breaks down.  One can be "in curlers" which encompass only a small portion of the hair but nobody would say that someone with a ring on their finger was "in a ring". 86.139.97.12 (talk) 17:55, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
 * True, but handcuffs are even larger than curlers. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 18:51, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't count on it. Martinevans123 (talk) 19:00, 10 January 2022 (UTC)
 * You can be "in earrings", but you can't be "in an earring" even if you're only wearing one. --Amble (talk) 21:52, 10 January 2022 (UTC)