User:ApisAzuli/ESD

Etymology Super Diary

This is where I will leave observations that are not directly actionable. For actionable notes see the regular ED.

Inline comments are welcome! This isn't a blog in spe but meant for posts that failed to address the problem of a given topic, but are hopefully still readable, if only for the sake of figuring out my mistakes.

route

Is the different word order etymologically meaningful, as though rupta was the headword? (PS: cf. compare Late Latin ruta, rutta (“group of marauders; riot; unlawful assembly”)) rout)

As my Latin is poor I understand approximately wrecked road. Although cleared path would be meaningful, I still expect a positively connotated modifier, as for helweg. Hence I wonder if rupta followed reanalysis while it could betray relations to PGem *paþaz (“path”) that is itself from Iranian and so clearly a kind of wanderword. I see no way to explain a *ruC- Anlaut in Latin. Nor can I point out a clear pathway for borrowing--I could say the same about Iranian -> PGem "path", that I've only read in passing. That's how uncertain rhe following will be [[road] also looks like it wanted to be a doublette.

So, a better assumption might be that rupta via was inherited in univerbation. The former nasal-infix-present (rumptere) is secured by Indo-Iranian parallels indeed, but infixing is morphologically atypical on a whole--internal derivation for \*-n----the verbal root is "Perhaps an extension of *Hrew-.

Finally, if De Vaan is correct about via, it wouln't start as" road", so that's problematic as well. For a start, I compare octave and expect an affix.

Other reflexes in IIr show lambdacism, so that given "a semantic loan from Chinese 路 (lù)" (see route) I am tempted to draw a connection, but I know there isn't much done on that front. Given Hellweg (bright way, or broad way), a better comparison would be light, *lewk-, cp. "Sanskrit: लोचयति (locáyati), रोचयति (rocáyati, “to make shine, illuminate”)". Either way there is no regular l~r anywhere near Latin--and I don't know what conditioned the Indo-Iranian lambdacism to occur not. Since ἀρά (“prayer”) was recently created and the etymology questioned in comparison to ara (“altar”) (computer says no, rather cp. Hitt. aruwae, cf. Latin.SE), for which I feel reminded of Avestan Fire Altars--but still no lambda.

Following an extraordinarily detailed article at w:de:Hellweg it is not as I thought from hell (“bright”) which would at the time of the oldest evidence have pertained to aural clarity only (bright sounds PS: compare lu, hludwig, clodwig); cp. Broadway. An explanation as salt-way (cp. Halstadt etc.) is disfavoured too. Likewise doubtful is the highway to hell, viz. "Leichenweg". Albeit, the remaining hypothesis as Heldweg ("hälden, helden (= ‚geneigt machen, geneigt sein‘)") pertaining to drainage is based on Adelung and not even mentioned by the Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde.

I want to note alternatives

• Handelsweg (trade route), cp. Hehl, keinen Hehl draus machen (in which case akin to hell, if both from PIE *'kel-, but then unlikely to mean honest trade). I fail to distinguish trade, traduire, travailler and travel all the same. Clear wanderwords. Also see regional German einholen (“to accquire, buy; to shop grocceries”), from holen, but cp. überholen (“to overtake; to serve. maintanance”) which loosesly recalls movement and driving.
• More attractive should be comparison to Heil, as though a save way, or even holy, maybe indeed one that js well maintained and frequently repaired. Albeit, the etymology of *hailaz remains uncertain. This would also account for held-, cp. hold.
• Without doubt, passage required taxes under the auspice of afforded maintance. Conceivably, this could relate to Salt as the means of payment, after all. Similarly, Halde should relate to salt in the sence of heap, storage, reservoir, resource.

Idle skopulation cannot explain the original usage and meaning I'm affraid. The purpose of the above exercise was to find analogies to the supposed Latin etymon. The only parallel that comes to mind would be Rapture versus rupture, which is not even clearly related, though the similarity is difficult to ignore.

This concession should ring true all the more for the putative silk roads. Two online lectures later, concerning the silk-road, I'm rather left disillusioned, so my intended comparison to Chinese ma "hemp" etc. falls flat. (i) There's no mention of Road Networks Theory. (ii) The terminus was apparently coined only in recent centuries, allegedly by the Red Barron. Though I have no reason to believe this, I am not aware at all of any mentions in classical sources. (iii) Silk brought with it paper as a valuable trade item. Now we are talking!

is it merkʷ or mergʷ?

The question concerns μόλυβδος (“lead, graphite”), which currently opines it be cognate with (sic! not from) Mycenaean Greek 𐀗𐀪𐀺𐀈 (mo-ri-wo-do), upon which Mahagaja notes that an l ~ r correspondence is not observed in Greek, and evidence for *mergʷ, including [[[murky]] is adduced. My aim was to weave in the wordplay on merkwürdig (“dunkel”), given mark and Mal, but I haven't met a conclusion.

As foreign speaker, I had associated murky with gloomy waters, so that it match marsh which would be ultimately from *mori-, "sea", compare w:Wine-dark sea (Homer). Said article talks about color-terms. κυανός (“cyan or sky blue”), which indicates *ḱweytós (“white””), with a by-sense of "dark blue enamel" in κῠ́ᾰνος. That's not enough to declare precedent for a sigmatic aorist *-kw ~ kʷ, but it should be reminiscent of various difficult comparisons:

(i) the dichotomy of black and bleak, Spanish blanco (“white”)

(ii) *mērijaz (“famous”) perhaps from "shiny" as is said (by whom?), though comparison to PCelt *māros rather implies ablaut after PIE *meh₁-

(iii) likewise, German Mal (“spot, mark”) ultimately from *meh₁-, though cf. melanom, {{|agr|μέλᾱς||black}}, with which it has been compared (Pokorny apud Kroonen)

(iv) conversely, see mark (“sign”), German merken (“to mark, notice”) (also see Kennung), as well as Mark (“border region”) (which Kroonen distinguished from PIE *morg- vs. *morǵ-, whereas we reconstruct indiscriminatel *marǵ- with non-IE or pre-(Proto)-Germanic *a, that is perhaps *eh2 in laryngeal theory)

(v) finally, perhaps a doublette of *malaną (“to grind”) vs. *marjaną (“to grind”)

in case meal was from *melh₂- and akin to Sanskr. mala (“dirt, filth, dust”), Latin I mill, I grind as well as Mehl, and meal (“flour”), we already have it. Alternaively meal is white, and maybe used as a measure of payment (cf. gram in a previous ES thread).

At this point i turned to Ling.SE to question the statement that "prefixes a-, ma- and tsa-" did not "exist in PIE.

Further, I engaged with the previous topic concerning route. I avoided the conclusion that rumptere were significant for Rome, since its etymology is wholly unknown and maybe sacriligeous. This would be relevant here if the -m-im in rumptere had no other explanation, which I don't know, although it hary matter for rupta.

Overall, l ~ r should be trivial whenever the /r R/ alophony is not valid.

pan "loaf o bread"

• First of all I find it difficult to accept that panis and patna are not related. I will keep in mind that food stuff can remain traditional, but this goes both ways: resistant to substitution in minority languages, but prone to loaning into majority languages, then under corruption; finally repossession of the borrow. Major vs. Minor is not always clear cut, or can change over time.
• cp. bun, bread bun et al. As ESL I find it peculiar that English has no other word to translate Brötchen, so I'm looking it up. Now I conude quickly that Old French beignet or a related word was the source of German Berliner, which is called Pfannkuchen only in Berlin. Upper German rather calls it Krapfen. This leaves Western Dialects in the vicinity of the French fry. Q.e.d. Corolary, if Pfankuchen and Berliner are identical, a common root should be sought. NB: If comparison to pancake lies near, although the transparent construction suggests it could be an independent development, any argument in favour of relation might remotely strengthen a comparison to Bulette, too (maybe a cp. boeuf? cp. hamburger, Low Saxon Bemme "Stulle").

• This is all fun and games as long as it stays in the kitchen on the back burner, but panis is not only unknown, but one might be inined to take certain prehistoric cultural horizons into consideration if they are predominently known for their backed ware, while words like beaker or Pokal, Bottich or pot, Topf or whathaveyou remain slightly obscure. (See also: casserole, *kens- "burn"; package; Batzen, Batz one of those words that I suspect of retaining a Germanic ending, -az, -anaz, etc.) .
• Overall, our entries on PGem *panna (“pan”), adducing Latin panna, patna, and patna itself deriving MediLat. panna and thence "Proto-Germanic panna are in incredible disagreement. I'm all for a pan-European wanderword pun as a form of mild ridicule: na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na Batman. My shit is Bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S. Competition is'bun.

• nonsequitur: Cp. Auflauf, loaf. I was willing to construe a difficult rebracketing with a different root to explain away the prefix, but forgot (got sidetracked with souffle). Now this, it seems too good to be true. I'm not aware of any hypothesis standing against it.
• Now I'm hungry for a Bamberger.

German Schnitt

• I am not particularly convinced by a red-link *skeyt-.

• Cp. *(s)neH-, cf. nähen (“to sew”), cp. Schneider (“taylor”); see Lubotsky on *(s)neH-, also Kloekhorst.

• If PIE theory weren't stuck in the second to last century, and the hypothesis--probably(?) pre-Skeat'ian (that is, principally prone to reanalysis)--wouldn't persist to insist that the fine folk from Sandwhich, England, had invented hithertoo unknown toping wrapped in bread, I might opine that sandwhich is cognate to Schnitte, and the -ch Auslaut reflected a laryngeal, requiring that the dental was excri-scent.

At this point I try reconstructing full words, but understand no morphology.

• *sem-mn-eh2, \*sm-n-eh2 (haha haha?);
• or before prothetic (retroflex) n *(s)edh-bw-He

• cp. mensa (viz. "food", also "table"), mendo, manger), *(s)(m)eH-dh-.

This is not leading anywhere and throws schneiden out with the bathwater.

• I have no opinion on the w though, other than Wecke proving it possibly archaic, but see Low Saxon Bämme (also see above topic, on buns), or Upper German Semmel.

• I'll note that beach instead of -which would make sense in the topology of Sandwhich as I imagine it. On the other hand, I don' t know an internal reconstruction for *wey'k- village to deny that it could have any relation to bread, or civitas

or colony. I have argued before that Klappstulle (piece, sandwhich), as it pertains to folding, should compare to club sandwhich, in which any other hypothesis has to be disregarded as prolific folk etymology.

• The funny part about it is that klappen is rather difficult (with unetymologic homonyms, perhaps). Given the vexilation outlined for Knoblauch and clover, suppose knap-, and *(s)k-n- (viz. *(s)keH- "cut"). Cp. snap, schnappen

--cp. knip, clip, idem, besides clap and snip vel sim.; also club versus Knüppel, cf. Knüppelteig, Klöpp; maybe cp. Schelle, Schnalle and Scharnier). There is a high chance of coincidence, if most these words (like knallen, cp. knulla) are chiefly informal, regional and possibly figurative, or actual doublettes

I guess we don't speak of reflexion if it only survived through reanalysis (cp. -chen

• Another option I grew curious about more recently would be Schmand vel sim (uncertain).
• Cp. Schnitzel. A proper Wiener Schnitzel gets the butterfly cut (in the horizontal plane, not all the way so as to leave a spine), to flip it open like a book for greater surface area.
• Now I do wonder about dental suffixes,or an aorist from a cut-word akin to tell (zahl, cf score) or deal (cut a deal).

English bid

There are wrinkles in the descendent trees. I say Bitte schön, Bitt'schö as a more verbose form of the offering exclamation Bitte which should logically belong with bieten shows it related to a form in *-j if schön ("well") is in this instance from the passive subjunctive or a different suffix (I notice looking at Mooring biidje and Limburgish beeje, bijje, which may be entirely regular, I don't know), cp. *-ōną, *-ō(ja)ną. Indeed, we list *gabiddjan "prayer" with a single Old Saxon reflex, and *gabedōn with OE ġebedian, that looks like it should belong to the former, or somewhere in between. If not, it might still be from the passive subjunctive, I reckon. I love the potential for irregular retention of endings after reanalysis in wanderwords, such as highly formulaic registers might have it. At any rate, this would imply synonyms at the PWGem stage already. Although, it had been the opinion last century that Germanic folk didn't have prayer, and that OS. bedon, was backformed from the noun beda, not the verb biddian, of which gabiddian or its pre-form would be derivative. Even the PIE root is held to mean "prayer" but the cognates agree too well, are all attested only after (eponymous?) marauders roamed the continent and spread the gospel, it requires a one-size fits all phoneme that has to my knowledge an unclear status in Germanic, and it has to compete with Botschaft "evangelion", Bote "messenger" from a different root (possibly homonym in Gebot) which as well has to compete with geben, Gabe, gift, not one with Latin cognate, but tbe latter with a homomorph, synonym isogloss in Italo-Celtic, that incidently checks out all relevant senses--except the prayer as far as I can tell, but "invoke" is close enough--as for [[[adhibeo]], prohibit, maybe antehibeo. See also: abeo, cp. bye, boo, bid farewell.

• I might be exagerating how well the semantics match, and I haven't worked out any opinion on the phonyology.
• Curveball: *bi- (be-come, be-eilen) + thank but Verner'ish; cp. bedanken, bedenken (like Bruder and Verner's Vater). This leaves the accent to be explained, and the rest of the verb stem (either related to Bekenntnis, or betekenis, or *tenk "think" was bi-morphemic and the k-aorist never made it into Beten). *ga-bi- would be an unusual mix as far as I can tell, though.

Nachlass

I am generally interested in heritage, eh, since this is historical linguistics. So I started until it grew too long for the ES to ramble on about. It goes a little supm like this, huh:

I have not finished the text, and must have posted the introduction by accident. This is borderline shizophrenic, whoopsy. The highlight is still missing, a comparison to necklace, because the required caveat emptors and warranty waivers approach infinity in length. neck, next, nach, nakha.

*šabʿum, 7 and other numerals

I usually don't want to post generalia like in a blog, but this fits so well with Iraqi Arabic سخل‎‎ (which I will have to revise) and it was prompted by my writing about (against?) Nostratic here, so it should be fine.

• Just as I refer to سخل‎ "saχel" with general grapheme history in mind in order to excuse writing about other graphs, it occurs to me that Arabic (eastern) ٧‎ ("7") may be more than relevant, but I have something else in mind.
• I had taken to heart the long standing remark about a possible relation between the Proto-Semitic and Indo-European "7", and others like Georgian. I include adoption into my less specific definition of relation. It was sourced with Blažek 1999, if I remember correctly. Trying to defend the notion, I just wondered if it could have been loaned as a name for the numeral, so I wanted to check. Indeed, some forms of *tzayin* do look very close. Our 7 comes from Indo-Arabic numerals, and Indic scripts were probably influenced by Aramaic, Syriac (and Greek), it figures. Those numerals like Greek and some other early adopters do reportedly recieve their value from the position in the alphabet, A=1. Higher numbers tend to vary, that should be no concern here, except that our Phoenician Alphabet category has a dedicated sign for some decadence number. Okay, good, but we don't call Zeta seven or hepta and the adoption is far younger than the projected PIE number. I am not disagreeing.
• Instead, I wondered about the phonetic value. Maybe it was simply the initial letter of the original seven? I do recall Blažek, that Hebrew in particular is not in agreement with the other branches, but he was working from *sab- (as did we prior to 2019; I am not finding the deletion log, but see eg. the Arabic entry's history), whence Hebrew assibilating appears unexpected. I do not know if the new root fits any better with the evidence. At any rate, this vexilation is why I took our transliterating "(z)" to arrive at the given hypothesis although I was at first expecting a word of material significance, as would be the case for swords (Tzayin or however you write it would mean weapon, cp. sword of unknown origin, also Arab. ser). I continued hoping now all letters would show be homophone with the number's initials, because as poorly as I know Semitic languages I think 1 (ehm, maybe) matches A, though I'm sure beth does not match 2.
• Of course, if there was a strong coincidence, this would have been noted before. Albeit, our Interface is exceptionally poor with these numbers (why do שבע etc. not show a paging template like all the other languages' numbers?) so ot had to go backwards through the proto-semitic entries instead. I find that with some reservation and theory altering assumptions this works with 7, 6 (assuming š was geminated), and 5 (without much.modification), not 4, but with 3 in place of four.

• It's slightly difficult describing because I do not know how many (sound) laws I am breaking, although I am sure that comparing *ṯalāṯ- ("4") and *dalt (“door”, cf. delta) on the basis of a dental feature is heressy. So 🤘 hail Satanaya 👹
• In fact, if *ʔarbaʕ- would be a better match, I wouldn't know it. Just saying because t-glottalization is intuitive, and e.g. Amharic ሰባት (säbat) < šabʕ-, which might rather reconstruct the chiastic femininum *šabʕatum, that shows a deceptively different letter other than *ʔ, can hardly be used to make a case, but I want to believe. The fact alone should still be problematic that the reconstruction is a recent innovation with Huehnegard 2019, ie. that this has been considered problematic for a long time. If there's any jumping through hoops required to follow Huehnegard so to speak, I am simply not a circus animal. I am generally doubtful about the whole field of Proto-Semitic because it seems to be poisened by Adamic ideals, tbf, and the whole area has a cross-convergence problem (lengthy discussion of a certain Northern Levantin language being a mere dialect of Arabic comes to mind). That said, I believe in Proto-Semitic, and I would like a copy and a thorough itroduction to the formalisms, but the way believe-systems tend to be structured I can maintain so many believes at once that I won't find the time, because I prefer to take the roads less traveled, as if I were on the run.

• There's a parallel in that Proto-Anatolian *méyu- "four" (Blažek, cp. eg. Hitt. acc. mi-i-ú-wa "span of four", see also Kloekhorst: ...) has unexpectedly no IE parallel. Their "one" also differs, but has parallels (akin to some; see also so many, cp. any, Ger. so manche, and for analogy Ger. einige, so einiges "some, any", ein- "one"; NB: sp. mucho is reportedly not cognate]]). Some cognates of four have been speculated, some meaning "number", some meaning "judge" (cf. Blažek). I'm affraid the actual word is not known, because they have spelled it simply 𒐼, iiii (or AAAA, whatever the phonetic values of a single stroke are).

• I compare may, noting that sept., oct., nov. dez. imply that, if may possibly meant four, the older calendars before dedication to Julius and Augustus leave room for only two counts between may and september, which would be in line with the fact that the time of January and February was priorily deemed one month. Although may, April and some more are reasonably attributed to Etruscan gods, the notion that Etruscans came from Anatolia (cf. Beekes, Thyrsenoii) leaves a gap that is wide enough to ship armies unnoticed.

• I had one more about may, but I cannot remember at the moment. It look better to say that I keep it secret, which is effectively true. I am not super convinced that whatever it was would be a proper cognate.
• It is hardly incriminating that Egyptian like older cuniform had used unicial counting in their number system.
• There is a generally very simple reason why numbers would shift place. It is called off-by-one error. Caedinals start with 0, sometimes, Ordinals start with one, definitely, unless counting down (eg. last). Different counting systems also.need to be considered

• The Egyotian parallels are notable as well as the other most archaic scripts, but not today.

• Frank Kammerzell suggested that the order of the Alphabet began to emerge with rows of Egyptian unicials. Various hieroglyphs other than usually given in Phoenician introductions have been suggested.

I have now wasted way too much space for a notion that is equivalent to a comparison of H and 8. The only conclusion, which is non-linguistic at that, should be that perhaps the order of the alphabet was established because of signs' meaning! While lower numbers have not been considered here, who might have represented various concepts, I suppose that the sound values as numbers was a significant factor, and not vice-versa as would be usually implied, that the graphs were chosen as representation because of their placement. The implications for the linguistics would be heavy--such type of thought is always why amateurs get hyper exited, the pet-theory doesn't match the formal expectations, so the formal.theory must be wrong, which is a real possibility in sight of the generally asterisked uncertainty, which is however more so uncertain the less one understands the theory, so that every pet theory sounds immediately like a potentially ground breaking through. This sound of breakage is not from the speed barrier, it is from the thin ice I am moving on. That is saying nothing about IE.

Descendants of Sanskrit शून्य

Let the cave-root be derived and suppose that Sanskrit preserved an archaism.

I want शून्य (sunya, “nothing”) to be from four different roots, all of them, in no particular order: (i) Anatolian and Tocharian "one" from *sem, *si or so [cf. Kloekhorst et al. 2019], also so far unexplained Greek syn-, sym-; (ii) *kwis-kwis "anything [cf. Tocharian pronouns in utexas' PIE project] related *kwo- (best matching the pressumable *kwey- ~ *kwoy) and similar words for "nowhere", "nobody", etc. p. p.; (iii) Tocharian "sun", since sunya "deserted" vel sim. might imply the desert, wasteland, death valley, convex shapes like basins or hollows at any rate (iiii) The Arab source of 'zero and cypher - sifr - and perhaps saffron despite the notion of false cognates.

Since I have for the tenthousandths time lost a lengthy draft because of aggressive cache optimizations in eep mode I don't feel like repeating all the necessary qualifications in detail. The repeated comparison of *k' and *s initial roots with further consideration of s-mobile, laryngeals, Sieb's law, and some fleeting speculation can wait.

I have been considering null since the day before this was posted to the ES. Thus I do have to note that *n- + *oynolos would be remotely comparable with ni- and -ya, if both *oy- and *-yós > -ya reflect *ey, but I am not sure about the -n- in any case. Given eleven "one left", which I regard as folk etymology notwithstanding twelve, I thought nulla could be explained as one less, less than one, like the ground level is below-first floor, cp. *ni- "down", whatever. I don't see what motivates *-lós. Ad-Hoc: Twelve-th looks possibly like the outcome of Nasal Spirant Law or some other assimilatory process.

I cannot say much about the scribal traditions related to 0, except that I suspect 'ayn ("eye, well") be related however distantly, see also biʾr "source, well, spring", literally a hole, potentially a barren one, further *Hekwo- "aqua", and aka (“well”) ("... from *h₃okʷ-, *h₃ekʷ- “eye”, whence also Latvian acs “eye”, (q.v.); ...", wat?). Burn!!! ApisAzuli (talk) 13:02, 24 September 2021 (UTC)