Talk:رمان

Etymology

I was amazed that a page with such a convoluted history didn't have any entry in its discussion page, so here I am to correct that! I removed the transliteration of egyptian jnhmn as alhammān because the coptic descendants point to final vowel short "i", and not long "a". I also removed the meaning "boobs", which doesn't sound very poetic to me, unless it is used like that in modern Arabic, in which case it should be quallified as "colloquial" or something like that. Regarding the etymology, it says "non semitic", followed by a bunch of semitic languages having the same word; that doesn't make much sense to me. One final thing is that it says that the Egyptian word was likely borrowed from Semitic, and not the other way around - but didnt the Egyptians already cultivated this plant? I really dont know, the Egyptian dictionary that i'm using doesn't indicate the period in which the words were first attested. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 20:14, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

@Sérgio R R Santos: The term was at some point borrowed into Semitic. If you start to be fluent in one Semitic language, you will realize that this form won’t be, and there also historical points about the cultivation of this plant in the language area to make. But indeed there is also statistical data on which root consonant configurations are admitted. Already Greenberg 1950 was insightful enough to make it, and Vernet i Pons 2011 looked into it expressly again. For this reason I could make obscure etymological arguments at *waral-, *kinnar, غُنْج (ḡunj), دَيُّوث (dayyūṯ), قَلَطِي (qalaṭī) etc. But I don’t know which language group coined this pomegranate word or if the origin language group is attested at all, the history is so far back that it might never be solved, but multiple difficult ancient languages are involved here we would have to check and know much about.

The Egyptian reconstruction is from Hoch 1994; maybe current knowledge or your personal one about pronunciation is better, I cannot assess this without deep-diving into Egyptology.

I have a proclivity to use multiple translations for one meaning lest we give false impressions of a gloss corresponding 100 % to one English term, and to avoid polysemy of English in many cases. Unfortunately I did not find a poetic word for breasts in English, though there be a lot of noise with nasty word. I am quite apoetical.

We are not that many on Wiktionary, so no talk page is reliably followed, only that everyone patrols his favourite languages and admins the whole project. We use the Tea Room and Etymology scriptorium you already found. For the stated reasons there is little to discuss here.

Nobody doing Hurritic here, and Akkadian only once in a while someone. These are specialized academic institutions busy enough with doing anything at all with the cuneiform tablets. Even my Arabist reading is quite unique, even more oddly since I only do it according to my fancy and in no way for bread and butter. It has not been viable for nineteen years old me to move to Berlin, London or Chicago to resolve all mysteries of historical philology. I took the comfortable way of doing the law exam in my home region, so I can be head of an immigration authority or prison where I will find enough foreign languages and social systems to handle, instead of seclusive academics, and still have made the go-to Arabic Etymological Dictionary, and am more right than the others. You see I long practised to show people how to take different perspectives with what is readily available. I don’t know, only conjecture, where you are at with your language capabilities, but being familiar with even these widespread ones and still not be a linguistics fachidiot but even a lawman as I do around 30 is steep even if you have more resourceful and less apathetic parents. Most fruits are picked at medium height. Fay Freak (talk) 21:21, 24 August 2024 (UTC)

I do not claim to be an expert, but, based only on my research as an amateur over the last few years, when I started to develop an interest in Egyptian/Coptic, I've memorized most coptic sound changes (I've written them down in a notebook, by which I mean a collection of loose papers - I wish I was more organized!) and, even though a reconstruction for the Egyptian word for pomegranate is a bit difficult, because of the variation exhibited in the Coptic dialects, they all agree in the final stressed vowel, "ⲁ"(a) in Bohairic/Sahidic, and "ⲁ (e)" in the other dialects, which points to a short /i/ in egyptian.

Regarding the word "boobs', I just think it sounds too colloquial while "breasts" sounds more neutral, if not necessarily poetic.

And this hasn't anything to do with anything, but it's just curious because in Portuguese when "breasts" are refered to with the word for a fruit (usually marmelo) it's usage is colloquial and humourous, as opposed to poetic. Sérgio R R Santos (talk) 22:11, 24 August 2024 (UTC)