Ancient people names in Ireland

October 30, 2012

Gearóid Mac Niocaill’s book Ireland before the Vikings (Gill and Macmillan, 1972) has an interesting passage on the names adopted on the island during the 4th, 5th and early 6th centuries. He refers to “a mosaic of peoples” who are “dimly perceptible” amid the settlements and political changes he has been discussing, and whose names appear in various forms:

ending in –raige (‘the people of’), or as Dál (‘the share of’) or Corco (perhaps ‘seed’) plus a second element, or as a collective noun ending in –ne. Some contain animal names, such as Artraige ‘bear-people’, Osraige ‘deer-people’, Grecraige ‘horse-people’, Dartraige ‘calf-people’, Sordraige ‘boar-people’; others, such as the Ciarraige, the Dubraige and Odraige, have a colour (ciar ‘black’, dub also ‘black’, odor ‘dun’) as the first element; others, such as the Cerdraige, seem to have an occupational term as the first element.

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The interstellar etymology of ‘mazel tov’

May 21, 2012

Mazal tov or mazel tov /’maz(ə)l toːv, tɒf/ is a Hebrew and Yiddish expression analogous to ‘congratulations’ or ‘good wishes’, though its literal meaning is closer to ‘good luck’.

Grammatically it functions mainly as an interjection (‘Mazel tov!’), and sometimes as a noun (‘a chorus of mazel tovs’). I see it in both forms online, and occasionally in films and books, but it’s not part of my idiolect or culture, so corrections or clarifications are welcome.

Popular on celebratory occasions such as weddings and Bat and Bar Mitzvahs, the phrase derives from modern Hebrew mazzāl ṭôb. Mazal (Hebrew) or mazel (Yiddish) refers to a star, constellation, luck or fortune; ṭôb means ‘good’, from ṭyb ‘to be(come) good’.

Mazel tov hats at a Bat Mitzvah

The American Heritage Dictionary says mazel tov comes from Mishnaic Hebrew and ultimately from Akkadian, one of the earliest written languages: manzaltu, mazzaztum meant ‘position of a star’, from izuzzu ‘to stand’. The related words Mazzaroth and mazalot have to do with astronomical constellations or the zodiac in Kabbalistic astrology.

Israeli linguist Guy Deutscher, author of Through the Language Glass, touches briefly on these connections in The Unfolding of Language, his 2005 book on how language evolves. The following passage is from its short introduction to Semitic languages and their cultural history:

Their political star may have waxed and waned, but for a good part of 2,000 years, Mesopotamian emperors, from Sargon in the third millennium BC to Sennacherib and Nebuchadnezzar in the first, would lay claim to the title ‘King of the Universe’, ruling over ‘the four corners (of the earth)’. More stable than the power of the sword, however, was the cultural hegemony of Mesopotamia over the whole region. The Akkadian language shaped the dominant canon for much of the Near East in religion, the arts, science and law, and was used as a lingua franca, the means of diplomatic correspondence. Petty governors of provincial Canaanite outposts, mighty Anatolian kinds, and even Egyptian Pharaohs wrote to one another in Akkadian. Language across the Near East also borrowed many scientific and cultural terms from Akkadian, a few of which may even be recognized by English speakers today. The Jewish expression mazel tov ‘good luck’, for example, is based on the Hebrew word mazal ‘luck’, which was borrowed from the Akkadian astrological term mazzaltu ‘position (of a star)’.

Although I have little interest in horoscopes, I like how mazel tov preserves a reminder of celestial bodies’ significance in traditional conceptions of human fate and fortune. English retains a similar link in written in the stars, thank your lucky stars, and star-crossed (‘ill-fated’).

The last of which brings us nicely to schlimazel, from Yiddish shlimazl ‘someone prone to bad luck’ – hence Schlimazeltov!, a short documentary about the concept of luck in London’s Jewish community.

Schlimazel may have somehow developed into shemozzle/schemozzle ‘muddle, melee, brawl’, but the etymology is uncertain. WordReference says shemozzle is “suggested by late Hebrew šel-lō’-mazzāl ‘of no luck’.”

[image adapted from Wikimedia Commons]