Wiktionary:Etymology scriptorium/2018/October

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Hebrew abstract suffix -ות: doublet of the plural suffix? (Evidence in Phoenician & possible fossilized remnants in Hebrew)

See Krahmalkov's Phoenician-Punic Grammar (pp. 136-137), beginning at "4. Abstract Noun Expressed by the Plural Noun": https://books.google.com/books?id=DbC9CwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA136&ots=a6iqxBV3wH&pg=PA136#v=onepage Krahmalkov says that in Phoenician the plural was commonly used with an abstract meaning, whether it was the plural in -ūt or -īm, and this seems very well-attested.

Krahmalkov goes on to give Hebrew examples, such as Jeremiah 3:19: אֲשִׁיתֵ֣ךְ בַּבָּנִ֔ים. Chabad translates this as "place you among the sons," but Krahmalkov is arguing that it means "place you in sonship" -> "adopt you as my son." These are compared to examples Krahmalkov gives in Phoenician: "W’P B’BT P`LN KL MLK", "And every king adopted me as his father"; "B`LYTN QMD’ ’Š `L’ BBNM ’T M`QR BN G`Y", "Balitho Commodus, who was adopted in sonship alongside Macer son of Gaius")...

He also points to ימים meaning "time" as another fossilized remnant in Hebrew.

All of which brings me to the question, is the Hebrew abstract suffix -ות simply a generalization of a more archaic form of the plural in -ot? פֿינצטערניש (talk) 12:28, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

Rudolf Meyer writes in his Hebräische Grammatik § 56, 2a): “Das alte Abstraktafformativ -ūṯ, das sekundär im Hebr. mit einer F.-Bildung der Stämme III ו auf -t zusammengefallen ist (§ 41, 5b), hat erst unter aram. Einfluß zunehmend an Bedeutung gewonnen.” And § 41, 5b he writes that the abstraction suffix -ūṯ exists in Akkadian and presumably Ugaritic (not seen well in the writing). And in § 41, 5c he mentions an Abstraktafformativ -ōṯ that is “sehr selten und fraglich”. And in the few forms where it is found like חָכְמוֹת (ḥāḵmōṯ, “wisdom”) Prov. 1,20 according to him there could be Phoenician influence. Also he mentions an abstraction suffix -iṯ.

Anyway which “archaic form of the plural in -ot?”? The feminine plural suffix in Semitic is -āt from which by the Canaanite vowel shift Hebrew has -ōt. Fay Freak (talk) 13:32, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the information/clarification. I am not a Semiticist or a linguist, just a casual fanatic. I didn't see any etymology given for the abstract suffix, so wanted to ask the question. פֿינצטערניש (talk) 13:53, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

phylogenetics

RFV of the etymology. Isn't it from phylogenetic, phylogenesis or phylogeny? — justin(r)leung _{{ (t...) | c=› }} 08:35, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I’m fairly convinced the word phylogenetics was formed to have a noun for a branch of study involving phylogenetic relationships. The existence at the time of the older term genetics will have helped to make the new coinage respectable. The word occurs in an 1899 article by William Morton Wheeler in The American Naturalist on the life and writings of the German-American zoologist George Baur (“Thereupon he went to Leipzig, and during the winter of 1880–81 and the following summer semester studied comparative anatomy with Leuckart, geology with Credner, and phylogenetics with Carus.”).  --Lambiam 18:56, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I have been bold and brave, and changed the etymology to state that it is a back-formation from phylogenetic.  --Lambiam 20:35, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

Washington

RFV of the etymology.

Are either Hwæssingatūn or Hwæssa actually attested? Or is this a reconstruction? --Lvovmauro (talk) 11:26, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

It appears to me that this etymology was copied from the Wikipedia article Washington Old Hall or from any of several websites copying this from Wikipedia and is lacking a usable source. On Wikipedia this started with the claim that “the estate is of Saxon origin, being "Hwaessa", "Ing" and "Tun", Hwassa's family lands.” This was gradually embellished to the forms in which it was copied, also stepwise, to Wiktionary. Most of the time the claim on Wikipedia went uncited, except for some time when it was circularly cited.  --Lambiam 04:54, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

PIE #h₃- > PAnat. *dʒ- > Hit. š-

I paper was just published on the development of PIE #h₃- to Proto-Anatolian *dʒ- in the vicinity of a labiovelar, http://journals.ed.ac.uk/pihph/article/view/2827. Anyone have any thoughts to the veracity of this claim? @Tom 144, JohnC5, Mahagaja? --Victar (talk) 00:17, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Phonetically, I hate it. Do we have any other cases of the correspondece represented by *dʒ, perhaps in substrate words?

To veer off established PIE reconstruction, what if labiality of seemingly caused by the *h₃ is instead somehow correlated with the following labiovelars and the initial is a disappearing segment unrelated to *h₃.

To add another example to strange sound changes-at-a-distance corpus, there's Manchu *t>s before č/j. Crom daba (talk) 14:24, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

I found it a bit insouciant of the author to wholly discredit the possibility of an s-mobile, a long supported theory, just because it isn't found in other languages. It could also simply be that #sh₃{R,V}- has a different development in Anatolian than other languages. --Victar (talk) 15:48, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, that is a weak spot, but why don't we have any examples of this in combination in words that don't have labiovelars in them? Crom daba (talk) 17:31, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

True, but you could argue that not all those words require labiovelars, i.e **h₃óngʷn̥ (“fat, butter, oil, salve”), when it could be *sh₃ónǵ⁽ʰ⁾n̥ (cf. Kloekhorst *sónǵ⁽ʰ⁾-n) > Hit. šāgan, Luv. tāῑn.

Side note: The more I read his paper, the more I'm put off by his mocking attitude towards previous works -- really unprofessional. --Victar (talk) 20:01, 5 October 2018 (UTC)

stubborn

How obstinate are swine ? are they characteristically known to be so ?

Because I have thought long and hard over the years about the etymology of stubborn, where it always seemed blatantly obvious to me that the second element (if it's actually a compound word) is borne or born.

I used to think that it might be equivalent to stow +‎ borne, as in "place-borne, carrying a place" => "not movable" => "stubborn"; but "place-borne/place-carried" doesn't really make much sense...

However, the earliest attestations of this word are as stibourne, styborne, stiborn, where it seems apparent that the initial vowel was originally long i (written variably as y) and that it gradually became short, since the word originally possessed three syllables, with stress on the initial syllable. So an Old English reconstruction might be *stīborene, or *stīboren, which on the surface looks exactly like sty-born (“born in a (pig-)sty”), and would naturally have been a derogatory adjective (compare English pig-headed (“obstinate, stubborn”).

So back to my original question, to those who may have grown up on farms and been acquainted with the ways of pigs: are pigs characteristically stubborn ? Leasnam (talk) 23:16, 6 October 2018 (UTC)

I did not grow up on a farm, but I watched a documentary about a pig named Babe, and that pig was indeed stubborn in a determined way, but at the same time inordinately polite.  --Lambiam 20:55, 7 October 2018 (UTC)