Olympic vocabulary!

[tungemål]

Anyone else finding themselves looking up words and etymology for the olympic diciplines?
Here are some that I noticed:

- steeplechase. What the...? I look up "steeple" and find that it means a church tower and spire. It seems that originally a steeple marked the finishing point, so they'd run towards it.

- épée. It's the French word for sword. Compared to Spanish "espada" one can guess the connection.

- javelin. This one's interesting. A javelin is a spear, and the word came from French. The Latin form was gabalus, and it's a cognate with Norwegian "gaffel" and German "Gabel" (fork).

- pentathlon. This sport was part of the ancient olympic games. It combines the old greek words pente (five) and -athlon (competition).

- equestrian. Horse related sports. English tends to use fancy Latin derived words a lot, and this word came from equester ‘belonging to a horseman’ (from eques ‘horseman, knight’, from equus ‘horse’). Equus is by the way one of the oldest words in Indo-European languages, the proto word being almost the same: *h₁éḱwos.

- judo. This japanese sport is written 柔道 where the first character means "soft, gentle", and the second means "way". I already knew this, but now I had to look up:

- taekwondo. It derives from three chinese characters, meaning "kick", "fist", "way", hence "the way of kicking and punching".

Sources: lexico, wiktionary and wikipedia.

[jeffers]

I picked up one bit of French that surprised me, and will be useful again in 3 years or so.

JO pronounced "Gio", and short for Jeux olympiques. A lot of commentators on the news simply used the abbreviation without ever saying the full word.

[tungemål]

JO pronounced "Gio", and short for Jeux olympiques. A lot of commentators on the news simply used the abbreviation without ever saying the full word.

Yes, in Norwegian we'd normally say "OL" for olympiske leker. In Swedish it's "OS" for "olympiska spelen". I'd guess also other languages would use abbrevations but I don't know. It would be "OS" in German as well, but I don't know if they use that.

[IronMike]

Steeplechase is also an event in equestrian, from where I think track got it. I love watching it; it's like the NASCAR of track.

[iguanamon]

Steeplechase is also an event in equestrian, from where I think track got it. I love watching it; it's like the NASCAR of track.

And now you're going to have those outside the US looking up NASCAR!

[s_allard]

On a more general note, I have to say that watching some of the competitions with commentary in other languages and reading the press has been a crash course in specialized sports lexicon. Even in English and French I didn't know the names of at least half the disciplines and events. Much less so in my other languages.

The experience made me think of how we spontaneously pick up vocabulary as we need it. In a week I heard a bunch of new words or more accurately many words with a new meaning for me. I imagine some of these words will stick in my productive vocabulary if I use them again but most of them will fade away until I need then in four years.

[Ug_Caveman]

Question in an old Physical Education exam I once got:

"What's the name of that round thing they throw in the Olympics? Discuss."

One I do love is when my class asked why it's called "hammer throwing" and then explaining that it quite literally used to be throwing an implement that much more closely resembled what we would call a hammer today (and in the Highland games still very much is that.)

I've also noticed how much my skill at hearing/understanding fragments of the French stadium announcers has improved since I started to study languages.

I don't actively study French, but my ability to pick up on words like "vingt kilometre march(e/r?)" and "d'argent/d'or" has been quite good. (I've also been able to pick out "Nihon" fairly regularly in the Japanese announcements despite never having studied Japanese.)