Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2012/August

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← July 2012 · August 2012 · September 2012 → · (current)

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contubernal

Can somebody please check that the etymology I gave here is correct? I suppose tuber (“hump”) means "tent" in this context, but I would like a reference to a trusted source to be sure. Thanks! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:49, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

The word was not formed in English. It was in Latin and borrowed already "pre-packaged". The tubern- is an alteration of taberna "tent". Leasnam (talk) 03:13, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I see. I'm glad I checked. Thanks!
For some reason I wasn't familiar with that word. Does that mean that taberna was once *tuberna? --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:04, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

I believe the change from a to u was probably due to lack of stress on the syllable, similar to how a in capere reduces to i in -cipere, etc. This owrd has an uncertain origin. Some tie it to tabula, others to trabs. Leasnam (talk) 14:55, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

That's very interesting. I don't believe I can think of another example of an unstressed vowel becoming a back vowel in Latin (although I could be forgetting something really obvious). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:08, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

There are lots of examples. Short unstressed vowels in word-internal open syllables regularly become u before dark [ɫ] (e.g. in + salto > insulto, ob + celo > occulo, *tetolai > tetuli, con + solo > consulo) and before [w] (which then wasn't spelled after the [u], e.g. ex + lavo > eluo), and irregularly also before labial consonants, of which con + tabernalis > contubernalis is one example (others are ob + capo > occupo and several forms that had u in older Latin and i in later Latin, such as sub + rapuit > surrupuit (> surripuit), proxumus/optumus/maxumus (> proximus/optimus/maximus), aurufex/pontufex (> aurifex/pontifex). But it stays i in probably the majority of the cases before labial consonants. Source: Sihler's New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, pp. 61–64. —Angr 19:51, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

My ignorance of phonology comes out to the light! I wasn't aware of *tetolai or some of the Old Latin forms, but I can't believe I forgot occupo. Thanks so much as always! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:04, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

inquam

I've been looking around for etymologies of this word but I don't have anything beside Google so it's not easy. The few sources I have found mention that it is from the Indo-European root *sekʷ-, and is an "aorist-present verb" (a verb that is historically aorist but present meaning). That second part is at least plausible because of the ending -am, and one characteristic of the aorist in PIE was that it was unspecific for tense, which the Latin verb also seems to be. But if that is true, it is only half the story because where did the s- go? Why not *insquam? —CodeCat 11:17, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

Refer to de Vaan. --Vahag (talk) 11:35, 2 August 2012 (UTC)

matahari

Anyone have a source for the Indonesian being derived from the Malay? --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:50, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

As far as I know, Indonesian is a dialect of Malay. —CodeCat 01:16, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

I always looked at it as three very closely related languages: Classical Malay, and its derived modern tongues Malay and Indonesian. Wiktionary evidently treats it as two languages, Malay and Indonesian. After a quick cognate check, it would appear that we ought to merge the two, presumably under the L2 header 'Malay'. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:31, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

zoysia

zoysia

Wikipedia states that the grass is named after Karl von Zois on his page: [1] and is sourced here: [2]. Wikipedia also states the IPA pronunciation of zoysia as /ˈzɔɪziə/ on its page: [3]

Should I just add this information to the definition, or is there some fact-checking procedure to follow here? How do you all manage quality control if most definitions aren't sourced?

Hopefully I've put this in the right section, It seemed to me the talk page would be unlikely to get checked in any sort of timely manner on a somewhat uncommon word.Forbes72 (talk) 00:19, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

We don't have any pre-editing procedures, you just enter the information. There are people who check edits by new accounts, so any obvious errors tend to be corrected pretty quickly, though. The zoysia page is for the English word, which is named after the genus, which was named for Karl von Zois (spelled "Carl von Zoys zu Laybach" in the original publication of the name online here). Most people would just put "From Zoysia" in the etymology section, and save the real etymology information for that page, put it wouldn't hurt to put ", named by [[w:Carl Ludwig Willdenow|Carl Ludwig Willdenow]] in honor of [[w:Karl von Zois|Karl von Zois]], in 1801" after that (or something along those lines). Creating the Zoysia entry would be a bit tricky, since we really haven't arrived at a complete consensus on how to do scientific name entries, but that's another story. As for whether this is the right place: the Information desk (WT:ID) would have been a better choice, but it's not a big deal. If you had posted this on the talk page, it would probably have been answered about as quickly (due to the checking of edits by new accounts that I mentioned above) so that would also have been a good choice Chuck Entz (talk) 05:26, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

אצטדיון

אצטדיון

Does anyone know where אצטדיון comes from and whether its similarity to stadium is a coincidence? --WikiTiki89 (talk) 20:06, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Coincidence seems very unlikely. I could speculate that this is a very old loanword from Greek, from a time when word-initial consonant clusters were prohibited in Hebrew, hence the /i/ at the beginning (just like Spanish estadio and Turkish İzmir < Smyrna. The צ could be from assimilation to the following ט at a time when it was a pharyngealized [sˁ] rather than an affricate [ts]. But all this is pure speculation on my part, not usable in the entry. —Angr 20:36, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

But then why would ט [tˁ] be used in the first place? --WikiTiki89 (talk) 13:47, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. When Hebrew words are transliterated into Greek, I think they use τ for ט and θ for ת. Maybe the reverse is true for Greek loanwords in Hebrew. Another possibility that occurred to me is that the Hebrew word may not have been borrowed directly from Greek, but from some intermediate language that borrowed the word from Greek. The obvious candidate is Arabic, but the problem is that the Arabic word for stadium uses nonemphatic [-st-] rather than emphatic/pharyngealized [-sˁtˁ-], so that doesn't help us. —Angr 21:49, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Even-Shoshan says that itstadyón specifically is a Modern form, but gives a citation of itstadín from Bava Kamma 4:4. He derives it without comment from Greek stadion. Browsing through the words that begin alef-tsadi-tet, I find that he derives itstabá, itstagnín, itst'lá, and itst'rubál (all attested from the Talmud) from Greek stibadion, steganos, stole, and strobilos, respectively, so there seems to be a small pattern. (Of course, browsing through the words that begin alef-samekh-tet, I also find some — istvanít, istasít, istratyá, from Greek stoa, stasis, stratia — plus astratilatís if we allow initial /a/, istom'khá if we allow via-Aramaic, etc.)
Unlike many loanwords from Greek, I rather doubt that itstadín can easily be identified as coming via another Semitic language, simply because I expect that Even-Shoshan would have known and mentioned if it did.
—Ruakh_TALK 23:51, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

So there's no explanation of why these words were pharyngealized? --WikiTiki89 07:30, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

No idea, sorry. —Ruakh_TALK 14:42, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

urus

The entry itself claims that it's from Ancient Greek οὔρος, but Appendix:Proto-Germanic/ūraz seems to claim otherwise. Can anyone shed light on this? --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:18, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

At Perseus, Liddell & Scott has "Lat." in the definition for οὔρος (oúros), and Lewis & Short say urus is from Celtic, though these are both old sources. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:55, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

The Online Etymology Dictionary says the Greek and Latin words are both loanwords from Germanic, and the Germanic word is of unknown origin. In fact, lots of Germanic words are of unknown origin, so that's no surprise. —Angr 23:05, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

I added an etymology at *ūraz. Leasnam (talk) 15:35, 24 August 2012 (UTC)