Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[WeepingElf]

Would be fitting if *urrows lived in burrows. Isn't arth just the Welsh word, though? On a tangent, what do folks here about the hypothesis that Arthur comes from arth-ursus? Heard it on a documentary a good time ago.

Possible. A combination of the British and Latin words for 'bear'. Why not?

[Richard W]

So this was cute: https://xkcd.com/2381/. A couple friends shared it with me and I made a joke about Munroe having deliberately munged the expected English reflex of *h₂ŕ̥tḱos in order to keep us all from being mauled. I personally would have expected an Old English *urh yielding Modern English *urrow, but I don't have any good models for a *r̥tḱ cluster so I'm basically just guessing.

Old English *or(r) yielding modern English *orr. Derivation:

1. r̥tḱós > r̥sós (Word-internal “thorn” clusters and the dative singular of the PIE 1st person pronoun)
2. r̥sós > urzaz (Verner and analoɡy on nom. s. ending)
3. urzaz > orr (rhotacism, fall of endings, and not an exception to u > o)
4. orr > or > orr (content word, so at least three letters if possible)

[Nortaneous]

So this was cute: https://xkcd.com/2381/. A couple friends shared it with me and I made a joke about Munroe having deliberately munged the expected English reflex of *h₂ŕ̥tḱos in order to keep us all from being mauled. I personally would have expected an Old English *urh yielding Modern English *urrow, but I don't have any good models for a *r̥tḱ cluster so I'm basically just guessing.

Also munged the PIE form - "thorn cluster" metathesis seems very unlikely for PIE proper, but would look more familiar due to Greek.

*r̥tḱ should just be *r̥ + *tḱ with no particular interaction.

There's no good evidence for what happens to thorn clusters in Germanic. *gēz < *dʰǵʰyési, but this says PIE thorn clusters > sibilants with some complicated argumentation about the pronouns, and Ringe argues that we should instead reconstruct *ǵʰ-dyés - and even if thorn clusters dropped the coronal element word-initially in Gmc, it's not clear that that also would've held word-medially.

This blog post disagrees, and says we'd have ModE **ourt... but is that a permissible sequence outside French loans? (court, gourd) I don't think so.

If PIE thorn clusters give sibilants:
*h2ŕ̥tḱos > *ursaz (initial stress, no Verner's) > ors > orse

If PIE thorn clusters undergo metathesis:
*h2ŕ̥tḱos > *urhtaz > ruht?? (is r-metathesis in _ht regular? seems common) > rought??

[KathTheDragon]

There was definitely no PIE-era metathesis in "thorn" clusters, nor any sibilants added. Both are incorrect analyses of how Sanskrit kṣ came about. The actual sequence of developments is *tḱ > *tś > *kś > kṣ. The most likely development for Germanic is just loss of the dental, as in word-initial position (dʰǵʰes- > *ges- in *gestra- "yesterday", *dʰǵʰm̩n- > *gumô "man"), giving *urhaz > OE orh > "orough" (or similar - there are absolutely no close-enough parallels for this sequence).

[Nortaneous]

There are alternate explanations for both "yesterday" (*ǵʰ-dy-) and "man" (generalization of the oblique stem after cluster simplification). If we have PGmc *urhaz > OE orh, either orough (~ borough < burh) or orrow (~ sorrow < sorh) are possible orthographic forms, although I think -ow would be more likely. Both of these OE words have -h ~ -g from PGmc *g, but arrow < earh < *arhwō, so I don't think that matters. (I could also imagine Webster or someone pushing for simplification of orough to or(r)o in the US - certainly we have plenty of town names in -boro.)

Isn't there evidence for *TK > *TsK in Anatolian? Not that this would have any bearing on Sanskrit.

"Thorn clusters" of course don't have anything to do with thorn other than obsolete and incorrect reconstructions, but the name is useful.

[KathTheDragon]

There are alternate explanations for both "yesterday" (*ǵʰ-dy-)

This is a very poor explanation as the zero-grade of the prefix is ad-hoc (and isn't that deictic actually *ǵe?), and moreover there's no evidence for a *y outside the Sanskrit hyas, so imo it's better treated as a Sanskrit innovation.

Isn't there evidence for *TK > *TsK in Anatolian?

No. The supposed evidence doesn't mean what it was claimed to mean.

[Ares Land]

Would you all please shut up? You're cursing us all!

/obligatory joke.
/exit, pursued by a bear.

[cedh]

If we have PGmc *urhaz > OE orh...

Maybe the -tḱ- cluster remained a stop in this position, and we might have found the true etymology for orc...

(That word is usually connected to Latin orcus "hell", but deriving it from a native word for "bear" seems equally plausible to me.)

[KathTheDragon]

If we have PGmc *urhaz > OE orh...

Maybe the -tḱ- cluster remained a stop in this position

Not terribly likely.

[Kuchigakatai]

Arabic borrowed English "to shoot" (in the context of soccer), some time ago, as present-tense yaʃu:tˤu, past-tense ʃa:tˤa, verbal noun ʃa:tˤ, which hilariously matches both the English inflection and related noun (shoot, he shot, a shot) all while using a perfectly native inflectional pattern found in triconsonantal roots with /w/ as the second consonant (e.g. yaqu:lu 'he speaks', qa:la 'he spoke', which has the root q-w-l).

[Zju]

Arabic borrowed English "to shoot" (in the context of soccer), some time ago, as present-tense yaʃu:tˤu, past-tense ʃa:tˤa, verbal noun ʃa:tˤ, which hilariously matches both the English inflection and related noun (shoot, he shot, a shot) ....

Shot is not the first thing I thought of when I read past-tense ʃa:tˤa, verbal noun ʃa:tˤ...

[Kuchigakatai]

Shot is not the first thing I thought of when I read past-tense ʃa:tˤa, verbal noun ʃa:tˤ...

I should've mentioned those are Standard Arabic phonemes. In phonetic reality they're more like [ˈʃɒːtˠˤɒ] and [ʃɒːtˠˤ].

[Zju]

Now I'm intrigued - is /tˤ/ really [tˠˤ] as opposed to [tˠ] or [tˤ]? How common is that intralanguagewise, and does it occur in other languages?

[Kuchigakatai]

(the screenshot is from the Hans-Wehr dictionary, 3rd ed.)

I just learned that Arabic سوداء [sæwˈdæːʔ], the feminine singular form of أسود‎ [ˈʔæs.wæd] 'black' (the colour adjective) can mean 'black bile', a liquid traditionally associated with sadness, and yeah, also 'melancholy, gloom'. Does this mean that the etymology of that word Portuguese speakers are so proud of, la saudade, supposedly from Latin sōlitātem infl. by saudar < Latin salūtāre, is probably just an Arabic borrowing!? Swahili apparently borrowed it meaning 'melancholy' too! (as "soda")

I feel like I wrongly bought into some Portuguese nationalist narrative...

Now I'm intrigued - is /tˤ/ really [tˠˤ] as opposed to [tˠ] or [tˤ]? How common is that intralanguagewise, and does it occur in other languages?

Reply in this thread.

[Linguoboy]

I just learned that Arabic سوداء [sæwˈdæːʔ], the feminine singular form of أسود‎ [ˈʔæs.wæd] 'black' (the colour adjective) can mean 'black bile', a liquid traditionally associated with sadness, and yeah, also 'melancholy, gloom'.[/url].

This leads to an interesting pair of doublets in Modern Irish. Old Irish had linn, lind (gen.sg. lenna, lenda) "liquid", which covers everything from intoxicating beverages to bodily secretions such as semen and phlegm. In the contemporary standard, "ale" is now leann, a backformation from the irregular genitive, and leann dubh ("black ale") denotes stout or porter. However, the historical nominative form, lionn, persists with the meaning "bodily humour" (e.g. lionn súl "vitreous humour"). So "black bile", which has the contemporary sense of "melancholy", is translated as lionn dubh, e.g. Chuirfeadh sé lionn dubh ort "It would bum you out" [lit. "It would put melancholy on you"]. (In Cork Irish, leann never displaced lionn so lionn dubh does duty for both.)

[Kuchigakatai]

Someone pointed out to me that saudade was soydade in Old Galician-Portuguese, and even the spelling -oy- suggests a hiatus here, [so.i.da.de], so perhaps it is from sōlitātem after all, like Spanish soledad. However, the word that influenced the diphthong to become -au- may not have been saudar but the Arabic word mentioned above.

The same person informed me the Arabic word wasn't only borrowed by Swahili, but also Georgian, as სევდა sevda 'melancholy'. I've now added this amusing bit to Wiktionary... I wonder if classical Arabic love fiction being often tragic and sad had any influence in this word getting borrowed.

[Jonlang]

A good while ago now, I saw something either on this forum, or one of the many conlangy Facebook groups I follow, about the possibility that Welsh once had /s/ > /h/ as one of its initial consonant mutation, but it was 'abandoned' which led to some words becoming solidified with the initial /h/ (like 'Hafren' (the Welsh form of Sabrina and the name for the River Severn)) and some remaining with unlenited /s/ instead. Has anyone seen or heard of this anywhere?

[Linguoboy]

I don’t remember Jackson discussing this possibility at all. He treats initial *s > h as an unconditioned shift (as in Greek) with exceptions explained chiefly as later borrowings.

[Richard W]

To which we can add that it was part of chain shift st > s > h. A non-loan exception is saith '7'.

[Zju]

Why do sometimes people write [b̥ d̥ g̊] instead of just [p t k]?