A light moment in the preliminary stages of learning Turkish is to discover that the word in that tongue for ‘talking nonsense’ is fart. Later on one finds that the Turkish for ‘violin bow’ is arse, though these facts alone are not always enough to carry the student chortling on to complete mastery of the language. The Danish for bookshop is boghandel and the Swedish for ice-cream is glass. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo (Penguin, £10) is not entirely filled with such false friends, but he does like them.
I began to be suspicious when he claimed that slug means ‘servant’ in Gaulish. Gaulish? No one speaks Gaulish. A Celtic language, it is known from a few inscriptions, and slug is indeed the root of the word for ‘servant’. But I suppose looking too seriously into these things spoils the fun. We must suspend disbelief and accept for a laugh that bum is the Arabic for ‘owl’ and the Turkish for ‘bang’ too. (Actually, bum is the English for ‘bang’ as well, but we spell it boom.)
Unmentionables, as de Boinod is aware, are not so merely for scatological reasons. An Albanian word for ‘wolf’, he says, is a contraction of the aspiration, ‘May God close his mouth.’ Such threatening creatures can be euphemised, as the Furies were known as the Eumenides. But I do not think that the Russian medvedev for ‘bear’ is a euphemism, as A.J. de B. suggests, so much as a kenning, just as an Old English kenning for ‘bear’ was ‘bee-wolf’, or Beowulf.
I rather liked the author’s list of animal noises in a selection of languages. Sheep are divided into those which go baa and those which go meh. Like English baa-lambs, Slovene sheep go bee-bee and Vietnamese ones go be-hehehe.
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