Paul Schleifer

Word of the Day: Captious

According to Dictionary.com, definitions for captious include

1. apt to notice and make much of trivial faults or defects; faultfinding; difficult to please.
2. proceeding from a faultfinding or caviling disposition:
3. apt or designed to ensnare or perplex, especially in argument: captious questions.

According to www.etymonline.com, the word is from c. 1400, capcyus, from Latin captiosus “fallacious,” from captionem (nominative captio) “a deceiving, fallacious argument,” literally “a taking (in),” from captus, past participle of capere “to take, catch” (from PIE root *kap– “to grasp”).

Further, this PIE root *kap is in a lot of other words, according to etymonline.com: “It is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit kapati ‘two handfuls;’ Greek kaptein ‘to swallow, gulp down,’ kope ‘oar, handle;’ Latin capax ‘able to hold much, broad,’ capistrum ‘halter,’ capere ‘to grasp, lay hold; be large enough for; comprehend;’ Lettish kampiu ‘seize;’ Old Irish cacht ‘servant-girl,’ literally ‘captive;’ Welsh caeth ‘captive, slave;’ Gothic haban ‘have, hold;’ Old English hæft ‘handle,’ habban ‘to have, hold.’”

Etymonline also tells us that, in Modern English, *kap “forms all or part of: accept; anticipate; anticipation; behave; behoof; behoove; cable; cacciatore; caitiff; capable; capacious; capacity; capias; capiche; capstan; caption; captious; captivate; captive; captor; capture; case (n.2) ‘receptacle; catch; catchpoll; cater; chase (n.1) ‘a hunt;’ chase (v.) ‘to run after, hunt;’ chasse; chasseur; conceive; cop (v.) ‘to sieze, catch;’ copper (n.2) ‘policeman;’ deceive; emancipate; except; forceps; gaffe; haft; have; hawk (n.); heave; heavy; heft; incapacity; inception; incipient; intercept; intussusception; manciple; municipal; occupy; participation; perceive; precept; prince; purchase; receive; recipe; recover; recuperate; sashay; susceptible.”

For those interested, Lettish is the old name for the Latvian language, which is a Baltic language. The Baltic languages contain many archaic forms and are believed, by linguists who study such things, to be close to Indo-European. It is spoken by about 1.4 million people, most of them in Latvia, and is the official language of Latvia and one of the official languages of the European Union.

Gothic is spoken by nobody and is the official language of nowhere. It was an East Germanic language (there are also North Germanic languages, like Proto-Norse, Old Norse, and the Scandinavian languages of today, and West Germanic languages, like English, German, Dutch, and Afrikaans), a sub-family that included Burgundian and Vandalic, among others. Sadly, all of the East Germanic languages are extinct.

Gothic was spoken by the various groups of Goths, including the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, groups that participated in the demise of the Western Roman Empire, as well as the Crimean Goths, who were a relatively small and obscure people group, though they were the last to speak any form of Gothic. Gothic was last spoken in the 18th century.

The other East Germanic languages are known only through loan words and place names in other languages and related documents. But we have a relatively large corpus of Gothic, primarily due to a 4th century Visigothic Christian named Ulfilas (or Wulfila, 311-382). Ulfilas translated the Scriptures into Gothic for the sake of his converts. By the 600s, the Gothic language was already in decline because they were defeated by the Franks. But fragments of Ulfilas’s translation exist in a variety of places.

This tradition of translating the Bible into languages that do not have access to the Scriptures continues today. There are more than 10 different organizations (http://agape3bibleorganizations.blogspot.com/) that translate the Bible into other languages, languages that do not yet have a Bible. And some of these organizations employ linguists whose specialty is to learn a language from scratch, create an alphabet that adequately reflects the sounds of that language, and then use that alphabet to translate the Bible into that language. In some cases, these Bible translations are the first and only written record of the language. And given that there are many languages with under 100,000 speakers, some of these languages could disappear from the face of the earth forever without organizations like the Wycliff Bible Translators, the Lutheran Bible Translators, the Pioneer Bible Translators, and the United Bible Societies.

The image is from a German history book dated around 1900. It is a depiction of Bishop Ulfilas explaining the scriptures to the Goths.