Every now
and again it's good to spread your wine wings! Try a different varietal, an
exotic wine or maybe a food from a different culture. Let your wine glass take
you on a trip around the world. As you
know, our next tasting is going to be our Nationality Dinner, featuring food
and wine from around the world. Occasionally,
though, we overindulge, and the results can be amusing.
Hiccup is a
great specimen of onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like the noise it
represents. It sounds like the sudden breath (hick-) and spasm (-up) of the
diaphragm when, for example, we’ve downed a glass of wine too quickly.
But
English is not unique here. If we check across the globe, we’ll hear many
gasping h’s and gulping k’s, so much so that it almost seems like there’s a
universal word for hiccup. However, there are some surprising hiccups along the
way. Get that spoonful of sugar, salt, or peanut butter ready. Here are words
in other languages.
DANISH, NORWEGIAN, SWEDISH,
ICELANDIC, AND FINNISH
The English
word hiccup (later spelled hiccough) is first recorded in 1580, according to
the Oxford English Dictionary. A few decades earlier, English was using the
word hicket. Danish and Norwegian
have hikke. The Swedish hicka is essentially the same. In
Iceland, it’s hiksti. And in Finland
(close in geography, though not language) it’s hikka.
FRENCH
If the
French have had too much wine, they might hoquet.
The -et, a diminutive ending found in English words like gullet, likely
influenced the earlier English hicket.
SPANISH
In Spain,
you get a bad case of the hipos.
PORTUGUESE AND LATIN
You’d think
that Spain’s neighbor and Romance language cousin, Portugal, to have a nearly
identical way of hiccupping. Think again. In Portugal, a hiccup is called a soluço, which may sound more like a
sneeze to some ears. Soluço derives
from a Latin word for the bodily function: singultus,
whose g brings back the hiccup’s characteristic gulp.
ITALIAN AND ROMANIAN
Latin’s singultus also coughs up hiccup in
Italian, singhiozzo, proving, yet
again, that everything is more fun to say in Italian. Nearby in Romania, it’s sughit, with that final ț pronounced
like the ts in fits.
WELSH AND IRISH
The Welsh
have ig and the Irish snag, a lot like that metaphorical
hiccup in English, or a “minor difficulty or setback.”
DUTCH AND GERMAN
Dutch has
the straightforward sound of hik, but
German is different with schluckauf, literally
a “swallow up.” German also has the onomatopoeic hecker (noun) and hicksen
(verb).
RUSSIAN, UKRAINIAN, POLISH, CZECH,
AND BULGARIAN
Like the
Scandinavian languages, Slavic hiccupping sounds like hiccuping, just more Slavic. Russia gets an attack of the ikotas (икота), Ukraine the hykavkas (гикавка), Polish the czkawkas, Czech the škytavkas, and Bulgarian the khulstanes
(хълцане), as a few examples from this language family.
ALBANIAN
Hiccuping in
Albanian, which has its own branch in the Indo-European languages, is softer,
but it does still feature something of a hiccup bounce: lemzë (pronounced like lemzuh).
GREEK
The
diaphragm reflex in Greece is form of λόξιγκας, which roughly sounds like loxigkas.
ARABIC
You try to
get rid of your حازوقة (hazuqa) or فُواق (fuwaq)
in Arabic ...
TURKISH
… or hıçkırık (which sounds like hichkerek)
in Turkish ...
SWAHILI
…or kwikwi in southeastern Africa.
YORUBA
Saying you
have the hiccups in Yoruba, spoken widely in Western Africa, might actually
give you the hiccups: òsúkèsúkèsúkè.
ZULU
In South
Africa, where the Zulu language is prominent, you might call a hiccup an ingwici, with the letter c representing
a click sound.
CHINESE
The Mandarin
word for hiccup is from the back of the throat: 嗝, gé, voiced
with a rising tone. The left part of the character, which looks like a box, is 口 (kǒu),
meaning “mouth.”
JAPANESE
Like
English, the Japanese for hiccup features a hard k-sound in the middle of the
word: shakkuri (or しゃっくり in kana).
KOREAN
The Korean
for hiccup is a three parts: 딸꾹질, roughly tal-kuk-jil.
VIETNAMESE
Did you eat
your pho too fast? The basic word for hiccup in Vietnamese is nấc.
HINDI AND BENGALI
Hundreds of
millions of speakers of Hindi in India say हिचकी (hichakee,
pronounced like hitch-key). The word is similar in other closely related Indian
languages in the region, such as Bengali হিক্কা (hikka).
BAHASA INDONESIAN
Kecegukan is the word for hiccup in Bahasa
Indonesian, the Malay-based official language of Indonesia.
OLD ENGLISH
A word Old
English had for hiccup is ælfsogoða,
literally a kind of “elves’ heartburn.” Apparently, Anglo-Saxons believed
hiccups were caused by elves. It turns out that it isn’t just cures for the
hiccups that are old wives’ tales.
BONUS: KLINGON
The
fictional language of Star Trek’s Klingon is a notoriously guttural language.
Most of the words we’ve seen for hiccup across the globe indeed feature such
back-of-the-throat g’s and k’s. Yet the Klingon word for hiccup is bur.
Klingons are extraterrestrials, after all.
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