From Sluice Gates to Exclusions (plus Hatchings)

Entering a lock on the Kennet & Avon canal

In our lessons this week we talked a lot about narrowboats, or rather I self-indulgently talked about mine, and my recent little adventure up the Kennet and Avon canal! This led naturally onto the introduction of some nice new vocabulary…

The French and Spanish words for a lock (on a canal) are écluse and esclusa respectively. The German word is Schleuse. None of these would have been guessable from “lock”, but “sluice” is obviously our cognate (link) word.

This led to the second-best* question of the week: Is there a link between “écluse / esclusa” and “to exclude”.

The short answer is yes!

It does not require too much lateral thinking to realise that both of these words have something to do with “shutting out”; that they sound so similar is therefore not a coincidence.

***

Something else that popped up in a couple of classes was the word for chickens “hatching”. Having returned from ma petite escapade sur le canal, I am currently doing a stint of house/cat-sitting, where there are also some laying hens…

The German verb for hatch is schlüpfen, which is interesting in its own right, but not relevant for this post. In French and Spanish however, the verbs might look familiar éclore and eclosionar. Do they not remind you of the above-mentioned word for “lock”? So is this one a coincidence?

Still no!

The Latin verb excludere had the sense of both “shutting something out” (ex = from / claudere = to shut), but also “emerging from” an enclosed space.

As French and Spanish evolved over the centuries, the respective words for exclude and hatch were deemed to require slightly different iterations of the original, hence the two similar, but now distinct words.

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Since you ask, the English “to hatch” is related to hacking – the action that the baby chick must do in order to emerge.

Andrew Wenger is the lead teacher of SameSky Languages.

We have places in most of our classes: French / German / Spanish; other languages, such as Japanese, Italian, Mandarin, and English as a Foreign Language are also available on request. We are set up to give 1-1 or group lessons at all levels: beginner / intermediate / advanced. Our classes are mostly in-person again these days, but still also offer the online option.

If you would like to find out more about joining a group, either now or looking ahead to our new set of courses in September, please contact me here