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Why do multiple meanings of words so often map across languages
The English word 'crane' means a large bird or a giant lever-thing for moving heavy stuff. The Hungarian word 'daru' means both of the same things.
English and Hungarian are about as unrelated as languages get ... and yet, I keep bumping into parallels like that.
Thoughts, anyone?
Often this sort of occurrence is a type of calque, where the word takes on a new meaning in one language, and then that meaning carries over into other languages through a direct translation. That Wikipedia articles gives "(computer) mouse" as an example, but my favorite is the one that made me really notice the phenomenon—English's "right" vs. Spanish's "derecho" vs. Russian's "правый"/"право", meaning: correct, the opposite of left, and as in "trans rights are human rights".
In the case of English crane, the original meaning of the noun as a long-legged bird is old, originating from Prot-Indo-European (PIE) *gere-no-. The sense of the noun for the machine used for heavy lifting came about later (logically, the animals existed before the machines). Cf. etymonline.com
I can't cite any source, so don't take this as authoritative (I'm not sure if such evidence exists at all in any extant texts), but my best guess is that the physical resemblance of the form of the machine to that of the animal is the motivation for the machine-sense of the noun. (Edit: Wikipedia says this etymology is correct.) Historical semantic change of this nature is called metaphor. Semantic metaphor is a common historical change cross-linguistically, but it is not the only way that new noun-senses come about, and certainly doesn't always arise in parallel across languages.
As another example of animal → tool metaphor, look at the English noun mouse with senses for both a tool used as a pointing device for a personal computer, and the small rodent. Even if languages have a native name for the animal, the metaphor is sometimes adopted and sometimes not. Compare, e.g., Japanese マウス vs. ネズミ—the latter being the native, zoological-sense noun—with Spanish noun ratón which—like English—has both the computing and zoological senses (though some Spanish speakers' lexicons may borrow the English "mouse" directly, thus importing the metaphor regardless).
If you can share other instances of multi-sense nouns which you suspect are the product of semantic metaphor, please do share! Unfortunately, I don't think most etymological resources are catalogued/annotated such that historical semantic metaphors are easy to search for. I still highly recommend Wiktionary and Etymonline, though.
Edit: As pointed out in this comment, calques can often propagate previous semantic metaphors into other languages—I still don't know if the dual senses in Hungarian daru and English crane are the result of calqueing or independent metaphors, though.
I suspected the double-meaning for crane derived from the bird's resemblance to the machine, but I like it as an example, as I think the double meaning developed separately in each language/culture.
As with your other example, the Hungarian word for mouse, egér, shares the two English meanings as well, and I expect it is also a calque, as aleph_c described.
I know I've run across many other examples, though of course, none come to mind now. I'll try to remember to post back here, if/when they do.
It's an interesting theory (a "panmetaphor" theory, if you will, à la "panspermia"), but in etymology it's dangerous to assume anything coincidentally arose independently. I wonder if both English and Hungarian calqued this from Ancient Greek γέρᾰνος? Crane-like mechanisms seem to be even more ancient than Ancient Greek, though. Cf. Egyptian Arabic شادوف, and possibly even older Sanskrit—though I couldn't find any Sanskrit words for the machine—only the animal बकोट or बक. Hindi has separate words for the machine, क्रेन cf. Wikidata Q178692, and the bird, सारस, cf. Wikidata Q25365. Though, there is also the Wikidata alias क्रौंच for the bird which seems to translate to English heron, and seems suspiciously related. In Devanagari script, the forms are quite similar between क्रेन and क्रौंच which share a /krVn/-ish shape that is similar to other PIE descendants, including English. Since the Ancient Greeks already had developed this metaphor, I'd hazard to guess this was calqued into many other languages from Ancient Greek (and possibly calqued again from those languages into others). Without more evidence one way or another, I don't know if the Ancient Greek calque is the case for Hungarian or English (though I think it's quite likely for the latter).