Reconstruction talk:Proto-Brythonic/gwɨrð

• Old Irish (h)úrda is an interesting word. It occurs in Old Irish in the St. Gall glosses as húrda (.i. viridis) and the Milan glosses as húrdai (gl. viridia); the latter form, which is the one being cited by Falileyev, clearly should be taken as the plural. However, it is very challenging to interpret this as a borrowing from viridis. As is well known original /*w-/ becomes Old Irish f- in almost all contexts, and on the model of Latin virtus > Old Irish fiurt we would expect a borrowing from vir(i)dis to end up as beginning with *fiur- (maybe *fiurd). Additionally, (h)úrda is an io/iā stem, which does not match the inflection of viridis. DIL instead has (h)úrda as a derivative of úr (“fresh, new”). To this we can add -da, and we have a perfectly logical in-language etymology for this word; the meaning would be approximately "fresh-like", which is an excellent match for viridis. Acknowledging as well that no other source has (h)úrda as a borrowing from Latin, it appears certain that Falileyev erred in listing it as such. I would speculate that this might have happened as a result of querying the DIL for viridis, since in the quote of the St. Gall glosses cited there húrda and viridis appear directly next to each other, which makes it easy to mistake this as the DIL saying that the Latin word is the source of the Irish one.

  @ShellfaceTheStrange: Thanks for the explanation. I'm content in it living here for future reference. --Gowanw (talk) 21:30, 28 December 2021 (UTC)

• As is well known, Welsh glas once had a much broader semantic range than it generally does now (for a brief introduction, see w:Blue-green distinction in language#Celtic). In Middle Welsh it is used to describe things which we might call blue (e.g. the sky, the sea), green (e.g. grass), and grey (e.g. metal; also compare Welsh gleisiad (“young salmon”)). Gwyrdd, by contrast, has long been used for things within the semantic range of English green, although in Y Gododdin it is used to describe the colour of dawn (= yellow or blue?). Suffice it to say that if one were to intone to the native speakers that I have spoken with that gwyrdd and glas are synonymous, an admonition would certainly be received. I bring all this up because, in comparison with the remarkably similar semantic range of Old Irish glas (“green, blue, grey”), the difference in semantics between gwrydd and glas must stretch back into prehistory. That is, *glas did not match any one colour term used in (modern) English but instead referred to a range of approximately blue + green + grey, and regardless of the exact meaning *gwɨrð possessed at that time it must have had a range narrower than that of *glas, in a way perhaps comparable to the semantics of azure compared to blue. To that end, referring to these words as synonyms is unwarranted.

ShellfaceTheStrange (talk) 17:58, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

@ShellfaceTheStrange: Synonyms are rarely absolute duplicates but instead only overlap in meaning, and *gwɨrð and *glas do indeed overlap. I really don't see the issue here. --Gowanw (talk) 21:30, 28 December 2021 (UTC)