I’m reading Dumas’s1 The Vicomte de Bragelonne (the Three Musketeers 30 years later, with the restoration of Charles II as historical background), and I ran across this passage:
As he approached, he heard the noise of the pulleys which grated under the weight of the heavy pails; he also fancied he heard the melancholy moaning of the water which falls back again into the wells – a sad, funereal, solemn sound, which strikes the ear of the child and the poet — both dreamers – which the English call splash; Arabian poets gasgachau; and which we Frenchmen, who would be poets, can only translate by a paraphrase – the noise of water falling into water.
Huh. French has (or had, as of 1850) no word for ‘splash’.
It seems such a basic word to me, such a necessary word, that of course it strikes me as strange that the French don’t (or didn’t) have an equivalent. That’s the nature of different languages, though. The Germans may well think it odd that we have no words meaning Treppenwitz or Schadenfreude; Spanish speakers may consider us barbaric for failing to distinguish picante from caliente, or chile from pimienta.
‘Splash’ appears to have its origins in onomatopoeia, which is of course a particularly rich source of linguistic differences. (Consider animal sounds, for example: French turkeys say glouglou, and their roosters say cocorico.) In French, onomatopoeia is less ingrained in the language than it is in English–it’s used more in comics than anywhere else–although apparently the word ‘cliché has onomatopoeic origins.
As for the ostensibly Arabic ‘gasgachau’, that’s either a bad transliteration or an invention of Dumas’s: a Google search brings up only the same passage (in English and French) from Vicomte de Bragelonne.
1Yeah, it looks weird. There has already been an extremely lengthy and ultimately inconclusive discussion about this sort of thing, and trust me–you don’t want to go there.
