Re: Word connections - malaise and sit

--- Daniel44 <Daniel44@...> wrote:

>'Mal' obviously means 'bad' but what about the ending '-aise'?
>
>My guess is that it comes from the verb s'asseyer (I hope the spelling is
>ok) which means 'to sit'.
I think the "-aise" is related to English "ease" rather than "asseoir" (you're
thinking of "asseyez"). Changing the initial vowel _and_ the next consonant
(from /s/ to /z/) would be a strange thing to happen.

>
>So 'malaise' could be translated as 'bad sitting'. In English we have such
>an expression: 'this just doesn't sit well for me'.
>
That's expressing the idea of something not fitting in well with one's circumstances,
I think, not a general feeling of undefined discomfort. And more generally,
languages tend to use their words for "stand" rather than "sit" to talk about
states: in both Spanish and Irish the verbs for "being something temporarily"
(a bad description but it's something like that) developed independently from
the verb "stand": Spanish "estar", Irish "tá".



==

   Tom Pullman

"Dochuala as borb nad légha."

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