Hi, in Latvian there is phrase "Elle un Indija", translated that is "Hell and India". It's not used as much any more, but sometimes you can still hear it, I think it was more used in the 20s and 30s last century. The meaning is similar to English "Bloody hell", but what could be the origin of that phrase, do you have any ideas?
I would need more information about when it started and how it was orginally used (what it means today might not ne reflective of its original usage). It might well have started off as a reference to two very far off unpleasant destinations. If it were English, it would be possible that one or both of the two words changed over time. People often use folk etymologies to explain words and adjust the pronunciation to match the solk etymology. For example, in English: (i) "hangnail" comes from "angnail" where ang meant 'painful and constricted.' It was changed over time once people stopped using 'ang,' and "hang" probably seemed plausible; (ii) "stark naked" where stark was originally 'start' (from the Old English steort meaning rump), again, when the word stopped being used in ots original sense, people started playing with the pronunciation of phrase, to something that seemed (vaguely) more related; (iii) same for "gingerbread," the word "bread" has nothing to do with the original gingerbrar, but nobody knew what "brar" was so the pronunciation changed to something that seemed sensible, brede (bread). It's an interesting phrase though, I hope you find a definitive answer.
I can see the British in the colonial era using India as a metaphor for hell. It's too hot, the food isn't bland enough, people don't stand far enough away from each other when they're talking, and there's just generally way too much excitement. I'm surprised that that Latvian sentence is so similar to German Hölle und India. I expected it to resemble Russian since they are more closely related.
No surprise there really, Germans had largely occupied the territory of Latvia since the 13th century. It changed to Swede and Russian occupation, but German nobility still had most of their land properties up until the establishment of the Republic of Latvia in 1918 and the following land reform. Latvia is culturally closer to Germany than it is to Russia.
You might want to take a look here. I can't read it but it seems to talk about the expression "Elle un Indija". http://www.pvg.edu.lv/datori/konkursi/2006_web/vsk/madara_medinja_indija/indija2.htm
Still, languages rarely adopt each other's deep everyday words like conjunctions. England was occupied by the French for several centuries, but the deepest borrowed word I've ever been able to think of is the adverb "very." I assume un is German und, since it's also un in Yiddish? I don't know anything about the other Baltic languages but I think "and" is i in all the Slavic languages.
English is filled with words that came from the French in the centuries immediately after the Norman Conquest (up to around 1300ish). We lost the word "hard" as a noun from Old English, and picked up "difficulty" from French for example. Also: judge (rather than the Old English "deman" from which we still have the related "doom") jury court justice crime felony prove sentence arson rob case cause jail prison attorney liberty marriage money poverty poor peasant country nation govern power rule authority assembly policy heraldry tournament traitor noble peer prince baron count duke parliament battle army sergeant lieutenant soldier troops alliance enemy victory defeat sauce mutton venison pork beef veal filet soup pastry uncle aunt nephew niece cousin (strange that so many familial titles came from abroad) butcher carpenter grocer tailor vintner beauty jewel color design costume pleasure and that's a very truncated list. According to a rough estimate by the people at the Oxford dictionary, apparently 28.3% of the words in English come from French (Norman French and otherwise, so some of that came later), discounting the 28.2% that come from Latin. Poor Old English and Old Norse only get 25%. http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/proportion Curious thing that Celtic made so little of an impact. Mostly just a few place names and some proper names.
The noun is "hardness" and we still have it, but not in the sense of "difficulty." The Normans took over the government so it stands to reason that all of our legal terms are theirs. It's been noted that the people who paid for the food spoke French, but the people who butchered it were English: sheep, deer, pig/hog, cow/steer, calf Amusingly, (AFAIK) uncle and aunt are actually Germanic words that the Franks retained from their native language when they took their turn under Roman occupation. In German it's Onkel and Tante. The Roman words appear in Spanish as tío, tía, and in Italian is zio, zia. He who pays for the service names it: the Norman, not the Englishman. Norse words are borrowings too. Many of our Latin words were adopted in the era of Modern English and did not come by way of French. Much of our scholarly vocabulary is Latin (or our strange hodgpodge of Latin and Greek like "television" and "neoconservative"), and they're words the Romans never had. But my thesis is that what I call the "deep" words are native. (More on that below.) If you just analyze a page of written English, or better yet five minutes of casual conversation, I think you'll find the proportion of Anglo-Saxon words to be far greater. It could be argued that you have that backwards, since the Celtic Brythonic people were only marginalized but not exterminated. It could be said that what really happened is that Anglo-Saxon had a profound impact on the native Celtic language. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! I daresay there are more Brythonic words in British English than Indian words in American English. Although I suspect the retention of native words is the greatest in Australian English. Maybe I didn't express myself well by using the Anglo-Saxon word "deep." What I meant by "deep" words is a core of native words that is rarely overlaid with foreign borrowings in any language. This seems to encompass conjunctions, prepositions and pronouns. I would add numerals (up into the thousands, the limit of Neolithic counting)... except that Japanese adopted the entire Chinese vocabulary for numbers and maintains it in parallel to the native set for specific purposes. The familiar ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, ku, jyu is Chinese yi, er, san, si, wu, lyou, chi, ba, jyou, shi. Also--Basque borrowed the Spanish word for "six." What I regard as the four "deepest" French borrowings in English (that have come to mind since I began thinking about this many years ago) are true bread-and-butter words that we all learned when we were tiny, and I'm surprised that they weren't on your lists: question, use and very, plus the French numeral we picked up (although it's ordinal rather than cardinal): second.
I know much less about the type of lingusitics usually discussed than others active here and know only a little about the modern form (Chomski's transformation of the field) but long ago noticed an example of the economic impact of words: Horse meat is not much eatten in the USA. I think the lack of an alternative name for it is a significant part of the reason why. We do not eat pig, we eat pork. We do not eat cow, we eat beef. We do not eat deer, we eat vinison, but need to borrow from the french vocabulary to eat horse. The french eat more horse than the Americans do, as I understand the facts. Why has the "horse owners / butchers alliance" not made a suitable English word to boost the value of old horses? Is the canned dog food market the answer? Why does English not have that missing word?
In Latvian there are not different names, in a market you sea labels "Pigmeat", "Blood sausage", "Horse meat sausage", etc., deer meat is called deer meat, and wild boar meat is called wild boar meat, bullmeat and cowmeat is under one name "liellopu gaļa" which directly translated means "bigbeast meat", which can be translated as beef.
Americans put horses in the same class as dogs, cats and parrots. We consider them companion animals, not just domesticated animals like sheep and chickens. The only horses that most Americans have seen close-up are those that are owned by families, used exclusively for pleasure riding, and treated like pets. I suspect that this might also be true in England and I wonder if the English have the same aversion to horsemeat (that's what it's called here) as we do. Even 100-150 years ago in the "frontier days" of the "Wild West," cowboys (so the story goes anyway) felt a special bond with their horses because their lives literally depended on them, and they would not eat the flesh of a horse that had to be euthanized due to an injury. Legend has it that during "range wars" over cattle grazing land, cowboys who were shooting at each other would exercise a modicum of care to avoid accidentally shooting their enemy's horses. This may of course not be true, but the fact that it's now part of our folklore indicates just how special horses are in American culture. When I was a boy sixty years ago, some brands of commercial dog food contained horsemeat. Thirty years later, my wife and I could buy ground horsemeat for our cats in frozen packages from one dealer in a remote corner of Los Angeles. (Our cats were the bosses of the neighorhood. All the other cats smelled their breath and said, "You must be one tough muthah! You killed a horse!") Today there is a huge lobby against permitting horses to be slaughtered for their meat, so I doubt that one can buy it unless one knows a farmer who raises it clandestinely. We're not the only people who feel this way. When I was in Bulgaria 35 years ago, the Bulgarians told me that one of the things they didn't like about the French was that they considered horsemeat food. Even though Bulgaria was not prosperous back in the days of communism (as if it's a whole lot better today), they said that they would not even consider eating the meat of a horse that had been killed in a road accident. Of course the Bulgarians spent a lot of time explaining why they were superior to their neighbors, the Romanians. The Romanians loved the French although I have no idea if they ate horsemeat. There was a time when the tissue of dead horses was used to make glue. Even thirty years ago people used to tell their horses that if they didn't stop misbehaving, they'd send them to the glue factory. There is no such alliance in America. Remember that most horses are owned by families who consider them almost as dear as their dogs. They would never sell their corpses to a butcher. Some people bury them in their own pet cemetery behind the house. I think the reason we don't have a special word for horsemeat is that we don't eat it, not the other way round. We could have easily borrowed the French word cheval along with all their other words for meat. We don't have a word for goat meat either, and in general Americans only consider goats to be dairy animals. I've eaten it and found it rather tasty. Certainly better than lamb, which I can't stand.
I work with a former employee at a horse-slaughtering operation - up until about ten years ago, north of Minneapolis. The shipped clear to France - period. They would not sell locally, for political reasons, and they did not advertise. The plant he worked at closed to make way for development, and I don't know where or if it opened. He had connections, so I have eaten horse. It's good food. I imagine with higher quality animals to begin with it would be even better. Wasted on dogs, for sure. The prohibition seems to be against working animals in general, mules and oxen, not just companion animals. It's almost as if there were a sense of injustice about eating an animal that had done one a service - so you owed it, instead of it owing you. Marvin Harris has an economic foundation of the relationship. And that points to the flip side of not eating what you care about - not caring about what you eat, or industrial consumption model food supply. If people treated pigs better, maybe they could eat horses with a clear conscience. As far as "hell and India", in my vague childhood memory the general construction was more common - people used to say "hell and {whatever}", IIRC, and they don't any more. The {whatever} part was always something disorderly and noisy and overwhelming somehow, it seems, but I can't recall any of them. Hmmmm. Seems like "hell and Chicago", "hell and the hogs out" come to mind.
From what I read in the animal-rights spam I get, virtually all of the U.S. horsemeat industry exists to serve the French. Considering that the French are currently out of favor among hoi polloi in America, no one will have second thoughts about shutting down the industry. I had some in Spain, 35 years ago. But it ended up going into the paella with the pheasants they had shot and everything else available, so I couldn't identify the taste or even the texture. But we also raise "oxen" for food and call them "steers." I guess the words help us think of them as different animals, a very thorough instance of cognitive dissonance. I think the opposite will happen. I am convinced that one of the reasons there is such strong but anonymous municipal opposition to the keeping of pet pigs is the worry that we'll stop eating pork. I once thought about getting one and my wife said, "Are you kidding? Pork is the only meat I really like. If we had a pig running around the house with the dogs and the parrots, I'd have to be a vegetarian." Or maybe just hot and uncomfortable, or far from home. Like India to the Brits. We still have the phrase, "to hell and gone." I don't know the origin. "I had to drive to hell and gone to find those fresh strawberries you just had to have for the special dessert you're making for your boss tonight."
Not around here. Here the objection is related to the one against making manure piles in the back yard for garden compost, or keeping a cow for lawn maintenance.
Pigs are omnivores like dogs. Their manure would not make the best compost, especially since people feed their pet pigs a high-protein diet. Besides, a true pot-bellied pig is no larger than a dog and doesn't produce any more manure than a dog. Llamas are becoming popular for lawn maintenance where we live. They're pretty ornery so two of them can hold off almost any predator except a mountain lion.
