Yehte (W3)
Der sagenhafte, mysteriöse Himalaya-Bewohner "Yehte" (auch "Yehtie") heißt dt. "Felstier".(E?)(L?) http://blog.inkyfool.com/search/label/Etymology
Tuesday, 12 April 2011
Montivagant and Abominable
Montivagant means wandering over the mountains, it's therefore a terribly useful word for describing weekends in Snowdonia, the commute of a yeti, or the possible location of Osama Bin Laden.
Hmm. That, dear reader, has made me go and look up yeti to see what it actually means. Apparently, it's Tibetan "yeh-teh" ("Yehte") meaning "little manlike animal". I know that sounds like a lot to get into two syllables but it's probably something like mannikin. I don't know. I don't speak Tibetan, and the way things are going I probably never will.
What really surprised me was that they were little, but the OED insists on it and quotes Sherpa Tensing:
He describes it as half man half beast, about five feet six inches tall, covered with reddish-brown hair but with a hairless face.
Which is rather less impressive than I had imagined. I was at school with someone like that. The Tibetans also call them Meetoh Kangmi, which means Abominable Snowmen. This is a much older and much better name than the badly transliterated yeti. Abominable is such a lovely word: a bit religious and a bit old fashioned: like a communion wafer dipped in gentleman's relish.
Montivagant is obviously the cousin of noctivagant, omnivagant and extravagant, on all of which I have posted before.
The Inky Fool ascending to Humanities 2
Posted by M.H. Forsyth at 10:28 4 comments:
(E1)(L1) http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?corpus=8&content=Yehte
Abfrage im Google-Corpus mit 15Mio. eingescannter Bücher von 1500 bis heute.
Dt. "Yehte" taucht in der Literatur nicht signifikant auf.
Erstellt: 2014-08