cherry : via latin from greek : kerasium, see akkadian : karsu

tomato : via spanish from nahuatl (mexico) : tómatl  from tomana (=to swell)

How at Bakkum,at the Dutch coast, a Nahuatl-word resounded...

3  girls, about age 12, with a dip- net near a pool in the dunes, catching amphibian lifeforms.
One of them shouts at her father:
"Hey Dad! Look here a... whatyoucallitagain..  axolotl or something.!!"
She points at the baby watersalamander in the bucket.

The axolotl is a kind of salamander that lives in Mexico and the US.
Being mature, it still looks like a baby-salamander....(so it doesn't undergo the normal salamander-metamorphosis, but then again : apparently normal isn't so normal)

from:  atl (-water)   and   xolotl (-servant),  servant of the water..

MINORITY LANGUAGE IN THE NEWSPAPER : JOUAL

( "Jack Kerouac was raised speaking Joual until age 6")

Joual  is the name of a dialect (some call it 'slang',some call it 'sociolect'- alanguage spoken by a certain social class or group) of Canadian French in Quebec.

It's name is derived from how the Frech 'cheval' is pronounced. 

A nice English loanword in Joual : enfirouaper   ( = cheat, from: in fur wrap,sometimes the furtraders cheated by wrapping cardboard in their furbales)

The Endangered Languages of South America: Grassroots Language Activism ...

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Linguist K. David Harrison Launches Talking Dictionaries for Endangered ...

talking dictionaries for endangered languages:

EYEWITNESSACCOUNT of the VANISHING of a WORD

In Journey to the Morea he (Kazantzakis) tells this characteristic anecdote about a visit he once made to Sparta with the poet Sikilianos :

...A curious flower upon a fence had caught our eye; we stopped to pluck it. Children clustered around us.

"What do you call this flower?" we asked.

No one knew. Then a dark-haired little boy jumped up : "Auntie Lenio will know!" he said.

"Run and call her!"we told him.

The little boy ran off toward the town, and we waited, holding the flower. We admired it, sniffed it, but were impatient; we longed for the word. And then, in a short while, the boy returned.

"Auntie Lenio,"he said, "died the other day."

Our hearts constricted. We sensed that a word had perished; perished, and now no one could place it in a verse and render it immortal. We were terrified. Never had death seemed to us so irrevocable. And we left the flower spread out on the fence, like a corpse.

                                          ( KAZANTZAKIS and the Linguistic Revolution in Greek Literature

                                                                                                            Peter Bien, Princeton -1972)

( Tragic as the loss of a word is for civilization, i can not help wondering whether the other little flowers - besides feeling grief for the death of their companion - weren't somehow relieved : ah.....nameless again...after 10,000 years!)



MINOR LANGUAGE ON THE FRONTPAGE OF NATIONAL NEWSPAPER :  FRIES ( Frisian)


IT GIET OAN !   means : It's going to happen!   

 -In the Netherlands famous words of the Head-Icemaster of the district of Friesland who announced in january 1997 that  the ice was solid enough to allow the  traditional 200 km. ice-skating-marathon Elfstedentocht (Elevencities-tour) through Friesland to take place, for the first time in many years.




                                                                                                         (Newspaper SPITS, 01-02-2012)

       Words that Survive  -ii

 Words that Survive :