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'A common misconception is the things that come from Neanderthals are generally bad,' Prüfer says, 'but that’s not entirely true.'   

New Clues How Neanderthal Genes Affect Your Health

link

Speaking of the fossil record, what about the linguistic fossil record? The word Neanderthal is a compound German word: Neander + thal. "Neander" is the name of a river in Germany and "thal" means valley. But not any more. Modern German dropped the "th" spelling (and the "th" sound) [ed.: nice alliteration].

Neandertal is the modern German word. There's even a bit of linguistic residue in English: Tal is cognate with "dale" as in hill and dale.

The Truth Is Subjunctive

Overheard at Althouse:

October 3, 2016 

If fat-shaming is wrong...... what about basement-living-shaming and barista-shaming? 

Posted by Ann Althouse at 1:39 PM 85 comments 

The first word "if" is the giveaway that what follows is hypothetical and not factual. But Althouse used the indicative mood for the verb, giving credence to the premise: "fat-shaming is wrong."

Now re-express the idea in the subjunctive mood:

If fat-shaming were wrong...

... what about basement-living-shaming and barista-shaming?

My version may sound stilted and dated -- but it should! The premise should be cast with doubt because it is a tenuous premise. 

Can you see how the Althouse/indicative mood helps you to accept the premise? 

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*Our word "shame" is cognate with the old Germanic word for "pudenda." Link

Executive Privilege

The German word Hinrichtung caught my eye the other day. Hinrichtung means "execution" and you can guess why it's in the news. Our word "execution" is Norman and bland; it actually comes from fusing the Latin ex + sequi in the sense of "follows from." In the consequent fusion, one of the sounds "x" or "s" was put to death, making exe-que.  Our related words "chief executive" and "executive branch" could be thought of as the "follow-fromers" of the law. The governmental sense of the word came first while the business sense of the word was apparently a 20th century one. This got me to thinking of who best in American politics has "executive experience."

Back to Hinrichtung. I often look to German for insight into word meanings. The Germans are sometimes brutally honest in their metaphors. In this case, Hinrichtung is best understood as the verb: hinrichten is a melding of hin + richten with hin* meaning "away from" and richten meaning "to judge" (Der Richter means the judge). So putting them together, hinrichten means "to put away by judgement."
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* Old and Middle English were full of germanic directional adverbs like hin. Think hither, thither, whither, whence, thence, and henceforth. Legalese preserves these fossils.

'Merkel Entthronen!': Druck Auf Bundeskanzlerin Wächst Weiter

I like the headline because it makes for good philology. An English speaker can almost glean the entire meaning with a few reminders of long-lost English cognate words.

Entthronen: "Ent" is a prefix corresponding to our prefix "ant-" roughly meaning "opposite." Thronen is a verb and pretty much means what you think it does -- "to throne." So entthronen means "dethrone."

Druck: The noun Druck means pressure. The word is now lost in English except for the family name Drucker (Druker) which meant printer. Print being synonymous with Press.

Auf: The word is a preposition meaning both up and upon. Believe it or not, the two words auf and up are related in the murky roots of both languages.

Bundeskanzlerin: A Bund in German is related to our word "bond" in the sense of bonded together as in a federation. Kanzlerin is a female Kanzler and means chancellor.

Wächst: The verb wächst means wax in the sense of "to grow" (cf. waxing moon). This is like old school English!

Weiter: This one is obvious and just means "wider." Taken together, wächst weiter also means "spreads further."

KLEM FM

It's my my second favorite Who song off my second favorite Who album, but who's counting? I must admit that I've always been a little bothered by Pete Townshend's misuse of to lie/lay, but hey, Bob Dylan did the same on "Tangled Up In Blue" and he was a lyrical genius, right?