Word of the While V
May. 30th, 2026 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
de_eekhoornTwo weekends ago, I went camping a hour and a half’s bus ride north of where I live, and sat in the canyon of the Hérault at a bend in the river, watching the swallows swoop and soar right before my nose.
When you trace the ordnance maps away from the population centers, the names shift to another language, Occitan instead of French: so every map can be a palimpsest.
The word of the while is garrigue.
This is the local word for the dry shrub landscape usually referred to in English as maquis. Wikipedia informs me that one proposed distinction between maquis and garrigue is between calcium-poor and calcium-rich soils, although it also says this distinction is often confused in practice.
Garrigue comes from the root car- or kar-, which predates not only the presence of the Latin languages in France, but also the Gaulish. It means stone or stony place. This root also shows up in various place names around the area, e.g. Carcassonne. My history of the French language (Mille ans de langue française, Alain Rey et al, revised edition) links it to the Basque word harri, rock, and also traces it even further afield. Based on this article, it seems that it might well be the same car- root that eventually led to the word Karst, English via German via Illyrian for a specific type of landscape created from chalkstone.
It pleases me that the way to say ‘this is a stony place’ has survived multiple complete replacements of the spoken language.
When you trace the ordnance maps away from the population centers, the names shift to another language, Occitan instead of French: so every map can be a palimpsest.
The word of the while is garrigue.
This is the local word for the dry shrub landscape usually referred to in English as maquis. Wikipedia informs me that one proposed distinction between maquis and garrigue is between calcium-poor and calcium-rich soils, although it also says this distinction is often confused in practice.
Garrigue comes from the root car- or kar-, which predates not only the presence of the Latin languages in France, but also the Gaulish. It means stone or stony place. This root also shows up in various place names around the area, e.g. Carcassonne. My history of the French language (Mille ans de langue française, Alain Rey et al, revised edition) links it to the Basque word harri, rock, and also traces it even further afield. Based on this article, it seems that it might well be the same car- root that eventually led to the word Karst, English via German via Illyrian for a specific type of landscape created from chalkstone.
It pleases me that the way to say ‘this is a stony place’ has survived multiple complete replacements of the spoken language.
