Reconstruction talk:Proto-Uralic/muna

Verify

@Tropylium Can you verify the existence of this term in Proto-Uralic? A single descendant doesn't say much. You may also want to check this user's other recent contributions to Proto-Uralic and Proto-Finnic. —Rua (mew) 15:07, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

This checks out quite well; will add some more info. --Tropylium (talk) 19:06, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

I've looked over the rest as well. All are legit (in that they refer to reconstructions that can be actually found in general sources), but they're clearly going to need more work, several of them also adjustments per research from the last 20-30 years. --Tropylium (talk) 21:25, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

penis, testicle

@Rua, Surjection, Thadh

The two additional senses "penis" and "testicle(s)" seem widely attested in the Finnic, Mordvinic, and Ugric branches of the family, while they are absent from our Sami entries. The Mari and Samoyed languages have one entry between the two of them, мәну, a stub that makes no mention of reproductive organs.

According to a quick Google Scholar search, most authors seem to give the ovular sense alone, with the exception of Zhivlov (2016). As a curiousity, the vulgarity is also mentioned in the article "Sumerian, Proto-Uralic, Proto-Finno-Ugrian and Hungarian" by a "Prof. Dr. Alfred Tóth", but there is no amount of good will that could make this one a reputable source, only leaving us with Zhivlov.

Still, it seems rather strange that these branches would develop the same pair of euphemisms independently, and it does seem to have been noted before in published text. Maybe it would be best to give a secondary definition "? penis; testicles". brittletheories (talk) 21:09, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Well, considering for instance Russian яйцо (jajco), I would imagine the semantic shift "egg" > "testicle" is pretty common across languages. Consider also this paper discussing another 21 languages (and coincidently not including any Uralic language nor Russian) which have the same semantic shift/expansion.

Regarding languages we don't have entries for: The 1966 Russian-(Eastern) Mari dictionary by MNIIYLI (quite a mouthful) seems to hint at the sense "testicle" (giving the definition "egg, in verious senses"), but doesn't explicitly state this. Other dictionaries I have don't say anything on the subject whatsoever (probably because it's a taboo topic), although I must say, I didn't scan the Mari-Russian dictionaries for all mentions of "testicle", so it's possible Mari just doesn't have that sense.

Now, in Samoyedic, Kamassian seems to have the sense "testicle" (Klumpp 2016), and I couldn't find the appropriate descendants in Mator and Selkup. I haven't looked into Enets or Nganasan. Thadh (talk) 21:36, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

@Thadh I updated the page. Let me know what you think. brittletheories (talk) 10:00, 5 February 2022 (UTC)

Looks careful enough :) Thadh (talk) 11:10, 5 February 2022 (UTC)