Fòram na Gàidhlig

Latha nan Trifid - the great Vegetable Empire!

akerbeltz wrote:sometimes it's just more sensible to turn to a (partial) loan. Glasraichear just about works but vegan probably has to be veganach/veganaiche or if you want to fully gaelicise it béigeanach/béigeanaiche.

As a rule of thumb in terminology development, if your new (made up) term is much longer or much more complicated than the foreign term, it hasn't got a snowball's.

A bheil sinn a' bruidhinn, 'béigean'?

Can we say, 'béigean'? I understand what you say about needing to keep it simple.

Níall Beag wrote:Language is democratic, the majority defines meaning.

Language is not purely democratic - technical terms can and do retain precise and specific definitions in a technical context, even when general usage wanders. That is to say, a democracy of technicians can retain a technical definition, even as a democracy of lay persons create a second meaning. Using 'vegetarian' to describe someone who eats fish is never accurate.

akerbeltz wrote:Of course, without documentation on who formed the word and what the motivation was, we'll never know of the basis was Frenche "vegetable" or late Latin "vivifying". Given the general ignorance of etymology (comment not aimed at anybody, it's just a fact) I somehow suspect that greens were the motivation, rather than a late Latin root.

No, it is the Latin - it's documented in the archives of The Vegetarian Society.

akerbeltz wrote:The most radical aspect of vegetarianism from a human evolutionary point of view after all is not eating meat, not the philosophical nuances. This does not of course mean that vegetarianism does not have a wider philosophy but it is true of most words that they have a wider meaning beyond the narrow scope of their derivation.

It's not particularly radical - not evolutionarily nor culturally. There appear to have been prior phases in human evolutionary history when our diet was very closely akin to that of modern gorillas - plant-based, with a few small creatures such as insects ingested, possibly largely by accident.

It is also documented that the Europeans who coined the term 'vegetarian' were in part influenced by several thousands of years of meat-free Indian culture, described in Hindi as 'shakahar'. I imagine that it is quite possible that the Europeans thought 'shakahar' was too foreign sounding to be directly borrowed into English. This could have driven them as Classically educated intellectuals to draw on their (partial?) knowledge of Latin?

treaclemine wrote:

akerbeltz wrote:Of course, without documentation on who formed the word and what the motivation was, we'll never know of the basis was Frenche "vegetable" or late Latin "vivifying". Given the general ignorance of etymology (comment not aimed at anybody, it's just a fact) I somehow suspect that greens were the motivation, rather than a late Latin root.

No, it is the Latin - it's documented in the archives of The Vegetarian Society.

I don't consider The Vegeterian Society a particularly reliable source. Instead I tend to go with the Oxford English Dictionary, which which says that the word is derived from "vegetable". It also states quite categorically that the word pre-dates the society although it appears to have gained currency through the society's popularisation of the term.

OED: Vegetarian: Etymology wrote:Irreg. f. VEGET-ABLE after ns. and adjs. in -arian. Hence F. végétarien, G. vegetarianer. [/i] "

The general use of the word appears to have been largely due to the formation of the Vegetarian Society at Ramsgate in 1847."

I was aware that the word was in circulation before the formal founding of the Society.

However, the only early discussion - written a few years later but by people involved in the relevant events of the 1830s/40s - which I've seen of the etymology is documented in the Society archives, as I said. Another theoretically possible etymology is via 'vegetation', for example (which I think started to be used to mean 'plant life in general' about 100 years earlier.)

Since I don't currently have access to the OED, I would be grateful if you could post the evidence which they give for their etymology. I believe they only publish etymologies for which they have datable, reputable sources?

Fad 's an urrainn dhomh faicinn, bha do Bheurla gun mhearachd.