Talk:پیچ
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@Fay Freak, Vahagn Petrosyan: I think it is from Iranian Origin. Compare NK bīžī and CK bīžû "illegitimate child, bastard" (NK pīč is a reborrowing from Turkish). For ultimate origin I think that it is cognate with Avestan vaēǰah "seed" (regular OIr. *v- , *ǰ- > Kurdish b-, ž-). So it is a semantic shift from "seed" > "bad seed/semen". Cognates include NP vīǰ "Alexandrian laurel"; and vīžaz "wheat grass, Agropyron Gaertn.", from *vīž-raz, lit. "garden-seed" (raz "garden"), Delijani vīž (vīždūna), Abuzeydabadi vēš, and Naraqi vēž "cotton-seed". See Marginal Remarks on the History of Some Persian Words (from Garnik Asatrian) for more.--Calak (talk) 17:21, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
- @Calak, I thought of Iranian origin. If the word is found isolated in Armenian and Georgian, it is usually an unidentified Iranian borrowing. Your etymology is attractive, but Middle Iranian languages from which Old Armenian and Old Georgian borrow usually have v- from Proto-Iranian *w-. Now I think the Old Armenian descendant of your root is վիժեմ (vižem), somehow connected with flowing semen. @Solarkoid, can you find the first attestation of Old Georgian ბიჭი (bič̣i, “bastard”)? Abuladze does not have that sense, only Rayfield does. Perhaps it is not Old Georgian at all (i.e. until 11th century). There is a corpus of Georgian texts at http://clarino.uib.no/gnc/page?page-id=gnc-main-page which can be filtered by period. --Vahag (talk) 07:13, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
- Yes you are right. Asatrian etymology (From OIran. *bīza- [< Proto-Indo-Iranian/bíHȷ́am]) also can't explain -ž or v- in NIr. cognates. Early MIr. *bīč or *bīǰ can explain Kurdish form (PIr. -č, -ǰ > NW. -č, -ǰ, -ž; SW. -z).--Calak (talk) 08:25, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
- @Vahagn Petrosyan: Chapter 8 in somewhere lower lines 42 or something here http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/cauc/ageo/etlta/etltat.htm 12th century writing on astrology. I think ბიჭი is used as an adjective (I'll ask my georgian teacher on it see if I got the meaning correctly) here, but anyhow normal record is in 17th century in Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani's (Middle) Georgian dictionary and still means the same thing - Bastard. I'm not gonna put my head in smart people work but is there a possibility it got reborrowed? Bastard -> Boy can be explained but idk. -Solarkoid (talk) 18:54, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
- Thank you both. The ultimate origin remains uncertain. See also this discussion on Twitter. --Vahag (talk) 08:37, 24 September 2020 (UTC)