Two new foreign words: Turkish kahvalti and French pavé

I probably learn at least one or two new foreign words per day, and they always delight me no end.

The first new foreign word I learned today is Turkish kahvalti (lit., "before coffee) which means "breakfast".    

Inherited from Ottoman Turkish قهوه آلتی (ḳahve altı, “food taken before coffee; especially breakfast or lunch”), from قهوه (ḳahve) and آلت (alt), equivalent to kahve (“coffee”) +‎ alt (“under, lower, below”) +‎ -ı (possessive suffix), literally “under coffee”. (Wiktionary)

This tells us how important coffee is in Turkish life.

The second new foreign word I learned today is French pavé, lit., "paving block; cobblestone".  Here's how it came to my attention.

For the last year and a half, I have been carrying around — including to Korea, London, Belfast, across the United States, down the Mississippi — a very heavy book that I was commissioned to review for the French Sinological journal, T'oung Pao.  I thought that surely, in the midst of all that travelling, I'd be able to knock of the review of Étienne de la Vaissière's 648 pp. Asie centrale 300-850. Des routes et des royaumes.  Although I had written about one third of the review within the first two weeks after I received the big book from the T'oung Pao editorial office, i just couldn't finish it off for the next year.  Finally, when the new academic year began at Penn, I said to myself, "This is just too humiliating.  If I don't finish off the review within one week, it'll drag on for another year."  So I sat down and cranked out the review, and am very relived to have done so.  

When I sent in the review, the book review editor, Isabelle Ang, exclaimed, "It is a 'pavé', so it’s totally understandable that you needed a lot of time to write it!"  

I knew immediately and instinctively what she meant by that, since I myself had grown accustomed to saying to others who would ask about that big book, "It's a brick".  

Every time I learn a new word, especially a foreign word, I feel smarter.

 

Selected readings

• "Massive borrowing" (2/18/19)
• "Borrowability" (1/10/09)