Sun, 18 Dec 2022
Important note added 20260907: I retract this article. As far as I can tell almost none of this is correct. I tried to reconstruct what I had been thinking and was not successful.
I haven't even been been able to track down where I might have seen the phrase den goede of den kwade. Google search finds only this article.
Some notes:
The orthography is archaic, as several people kindly pointed out (den has become ten) but it is not as archaic as all that. It appears that my form of the phrase, or something close to it, was common up to the end of the 19th century. I can guess that I did see it, or something like it, in an older book, but I no longer remember where.
Another possibility is that I was reading the Wiktionary entry for the Dutch word ten, which does give ten goede of ten kwade as an example, and then I misspelled ten as den. (Wiktionary says that ten is a contraction of te + den.)
I thought I might have gotten there from this discussion of an advertising sign in a 1551 Flemish painting. But no, that wasn't until three years after I wrote this, so it's a red herring.
The OED and Wiktionary both disagree with my claim that kwaad is akin to English cud and quid. Searching the OED's etytmologies for kwaad and kwade finds nothing relevant except the archaic word “quede”.
Thanks to Matthijs Blom, Hendrik Jan Veenstra, and Paul Bolle for discussing this with me and for attempting to correct my many errors.
The original article is here for historical purposes only.
Recently I encountered the Dutch phrase den goede of den kwade, which means something like "the good [things] or the bad [ones]”, something like the English phrase “for better or for worse”.
Goede is obviously akin to “good”, but what is kwade? It turns out it is the plural of kwaad, which does mean “bad”. But are there any English cognates? I couldn't think of any, which is surprising, because Dutch words usually have one. (English is closely related to Frisian, which is still spoken in the northern Netherlands.)
I rummaged the dictionary and learned that it kwaad is akin to “cud”, the yucky stuff that cows regurgitate. And “cud” is also akin to “quid”, which is a chunk of chewing tobacco that people chew on like a cow's cud. (It is not related to the other quids.)
I was not expecting any of that.
Addenda
This article, which I wrote at 3:00 in the morning, is filled with many errors, including some that I would not have made if it had been daytime. Please disbelieve what you have read, and await a correction.
20221229
Although I wrote that addendum the same day, I forgot to publish it. I am now so annoyed that I can't bring myself to write the corrections. I will do it next year. Thanks to all the very patient Dutch people who wrote to correct my many errors.
20250907
Apparently it is now next year. I have no idea what I had planned to say in the correction, but from here it looks like the best way forward is to recant the whole article, which I hereby do.
My apologies to my Gentle Readers for the errors.
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A few days ago I was thinking about Rosneft (Росне́фть), the Russian national oil company. The “Ros” is obviously short for Rossiya, the Russian word for Russia, but what is neft?
“Hmm,” I wondered. “Maybe it is akin to naphtha?”
Yes! Ultimately both words are from Persian naft, which is the Old Persian word for petroleum. Then the Greeks borrowed it as νάφθα (naphtha) and the Russians, via Turkish. Petroleum is neft in many other languages, not just the ones you would expect like Azeri, Dari, and Turkmen, but also Finnish, French, Hebrew, and Japanese.
Sometimes I guess this stuff and it's just wrong, but it's fun when I get it right. I love puzzles!
[ Addendum 20230208: Tod McQuillin informs me that the Japanese word for petroleum is not related to naphtha; he says it is 石油 /sekiyu/ (literally "rock oil") or オイル /oiru/. The word I was thinking of was ナフサ /nafusa/ which M. McQuillin says means naphtha, not petroleum. (M. McQuillin also supposed that the word is borrowed from English, which I agree seems likely.)
I think my source for the original claim was this list of translations on Wiktionary. It is labeled as a list of words meaning “naturally occurring liquid petroleum”, and includes ナフサ and also entries purporting to be Finish, French, and Hebrew. I did not verify any of the the claims in Wiktionary, which could be many varieties of incorrect. ]
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