THE KHVALYN SEA.

I’m now reading Mikhail Zagoskin‘s very enjoyable 1829 novel Yury Miloslavsky, an imitation of Walter Scott that was immediately and widely popular, and I’ve gotten to the point where the Cossack hero Kirsha (a diminutive of Kirill) is telling a gaping crowd of provincials about his adventures among the basurmany (Muslims). They ask him if it was far away, and he says “Далеконько… за Хвалынским морем” [Pretty far… beyond the Khvalyn Sea]. Since he goes on to clarify that it was “beyond Astrakhan,” I figured it must be the Caspian, but where was the name from? Vasmer explained: Хвалисское [Khvalisskoe] and its variants Хвалимское [Khvalimkoe], Хвалижское [Khvalizhskoe], and Хвалынское [Khvalynskoe] are from Middle Persian XvārēzmKhwarezm.’ This gave me one of those joyous bursts of etymological surprise that I can’t resist passing on.

Kirsha goes on to say that although in those far-off lands there is gold and silver aplenty, God has stinted them when it comes to winter [Зимой только бог их обидел]: it doesn’t snow, and the water doesn’t freeze. The bailiff (prikazchik) says “No winter at all! Truly a punishment from God—but they deserve it, the basurmany!” [Вовсе нет зимы! Подлинно божье наказанье! Да поделом им, басурманам!]. Russians do love their winter.

Addendum. A little farther on, Zagoskin describes the terem (women’s quarters) in the house of an unpleasant noble; one of the items he mentions is дорогие монисты из крупных бурмитских зерен ‘expensive necklaces made of large burmitskikh pearls.’ The word бурмицкий [burmitskii] wasn’t in any of my Russian-English dictionaries, but it was in Vasmer, who explains that an earlier form is гурмицкий [gurmitskii] and that it’s from the name of Hormuz—in other words, another Russian word with an unexpected Iranian-place-name etymology!

Comments

  1. This sounds like fun, Languagehat… I have this book somewhere but can’t find it! I bought it years ago after several friends recommended it.

  2. Lucy Kemnitzer says

    Those Russians apparently do love their winter . . . I’ve been watching endless playlists of the Samaran accordion duo “Bayan Mix” and several of their videos feature enthusiastic chorus girls in mini winter outfits and backdrops of shiny giant snowflakes. Maybe my favorite is the one where they are dressed in Father Christmas robes . . . or is it Grandfather Frost? I’m not sure I have it right.

  3. I am not trying to be pedantic but ‘basurmany’ came to mean any [hostile] non-Orthodox or non-Russian, not just muslim. In contemporary literature Napoleon’s French invaders were referred to as ‘basurmane’. For example, in Lermontov’s ‘Borodino.’
    I was also wondering how frequent it is for L to change to R?

  4. “I was also wondering how frequent it is for L to change to R?”
    I’ve been told that karandash (“pencil”) comes from qalam (Arabic for “pen”) + tash (Turkic for “stone”). If that’s right, then that’s another L that became an R in Russian.

  5. Nope, it’s from Turkic kara ‘black’ + taš ‘stone.’

  6. I always thought it was from the name of the Swiss pencil maker Caran d’Ache. Or is this the reverse, from Russian to French?

  7. L/R interchange is extremely common in the world’s languages, along with P/K interchange. Which is why in Finnegans Wake as well as one of my stories, Catholics become Pathoricks (with a nod to St. Patrick, who brought not only the religion to Ireland, but loanwords beginning with P). Another example is Hawai’ian aloha ‘hello, goodbye, love’ and Māori aroha ‘love, tenderness’.

  8. Homer: From the Russian word to the French cartoonist to the Swiss company.

  9. The Khvalyn Sea occurs as early as ca. 1470, in Afanasii Nikitin’s Journey Beyond Three Seas —
    (which makes more sense, since Afanasii was much closer, chronologically, to when Khwarezm flourished, than was Zagoskin).

  10. Most knowledgeable hatters, where should people unfamiliar with Russian turn to, in order to know the etymology of Russian words? I saw this word somewhere for example, построение, for which even someone as ignorant as me can deduce that it is a transparent nominalization of построить, well, строить. Fair enough. However, such an item is nowhere to be seen in Vasmer, for построение, построить or строить.
    I imagine I didn’t do the preliminary analysis enough, but it’s difficult to proceed further. Does there exist somewhere a more user-friendly, “learner’s” Russian etymological dictionary?

  11. CuConnacht says

    The Khvalyn sea is then an etymological near relation of algorithm, named for the mathematician al-Khwarizmi.

  12. In Vasmer it’s under строй, the base form (“сюда же стро́ить, стро́ю”); in general, the headword is the most basic form available. I don’t know of any “learner’s” etymological dictionary, but maybe somebody else does.

  13. Thanks Hat! And googling “site:dic.academic.ru/dic.nsf/vasmer/ строить” temporarily solves this problem at least for rarer derivatives.

  14. marie-lucie says

    Indeed, “Caran d’Ache” is a fancy, French-looking spelling of plain Russian karandash. Being familiar with the brand of pencils, with the name written on each of them, I was surprised when I learned the Russian word.
    Interchange between l and r: this is extremely common, as JC says, especially when there is one of each in a word. There are a number of instances in the development of Spanish: eg Latin parabola > Spanish palabra ‘word’; Lat miraculus > Sp milagro ‘miracle’, among others.
    This kind of change would not occur in languages or varieties where l and r have very different tongue placements, like “Parisian” French and Modern English varieties.

  15. Kara + tash :
    The argument against this would be that it fails to account for the n, whereas qalam (by assimilation with the following dental) does so quite nicely.

  16. Caran d’Ache story has an exciting sequel. In 1935 the Russian circus clown Mikhail Rumyantsev, who had mimicked Charlie Chaplin, changed his stage image and adopted the name Caran d’Ache after the French/Russian cartoonist. In Russian circuses clowns are more like stand-up comedians. Rumyantsev went on to become the most popular clown/comedian in the country. His stage name transformed over time to the original Russian Karandash. Will the circle be unbroken!
    Wiki about Karandash and a Venus in the park sketch.

  17. minus273: If by learner’s you mean simple, I’d recommend Ushakov which includes etymologies as well as definitions.

  18. marie-lucie says

    Lat miraculus > Sp milagro ‘miracle’
    Oops! the Latin word is miraculum.

  19. By interchange I meant not literal metathesis, but diachronic shift. It’s easy for /l/ to become /r/ or vice versa, or even for both changes to happen over the long haul. I’m not sure that this is just a matter of tongue position, as /k/ and /p/ have very different tongue positions: I think it’s more a matter of aural perception of similarity. Japanese and Cantonese are unrelated, but what is objectively a very similar sound (an apical postalveolar flap) is labeled /r/ in Japanese and /l/ in Cantonese, there being no Japanese /l/ or Cantonese /r/ to contrast with; the Japanese /r/ in particular may or may not be lateral. I could also speak of u/y interchange in the same sense in the Western Romance languages.

  20. David Marjanović says

    Nope, it’s from Turkic kara ‘black’ + taš ‘stone.’

    How did /t/ turn into /nd/? That strikes me as doubly unusual for Russian.
    That said, /t/ and /d/ have strange distributions between Turkic languages; I bet Turkish has /d/, not /t/, here.

    St. Patrick, who brought not only the religion to Ireland, but loanwords beginning with P

    And indeed the entire phoneme /p/, which had vanished before Proto-Celtic broke apart, leaving no documented trace except the ῾ of the Hercynian Forest.

    This kind of change would not occur in languages or varieties where l and r have very different tongue placements, like “Parisian” French and Modern English varieties.

    English does have Sally from Sarah and Hal from Harry, which took me many years to figure out. The tongue placement can be quite similar as long as the /r/ isn’t too retroflex.

    Being familiar with the brand of pencils, with the name written on each of them, I was surprised when I learned the Russian word.

    Same for me, despite much less exposure to the brand.

    the Japanese /r/ in particular may or may not be lateral.

    When it’s not, it’s a completely unspectacular one-contact trill like Spanish r.
    …Which brings us back to [l] turning into [r]: in Basque, /l/ between vowels turned into [r], and the existing /r/ got out of the way by becoming longer (in all positions), so there’s now a contrast between /r/ and /rː/; I bet that’s why Spanish has kept this same contrast while losing all of the other length contrasts that Latin had.

  21. David Marjanović says

    Also: I love continental climate with an actual summer and an actual winter. I’m all sad that this winter has ended a month early.

    the entire phoneme /p/, which had vanished before Proto-Celtic broke apart

    …so that, I’m told, Latin planta in the sense of “family tree” was borrowed as clann.

    Sally from Sarah

    Also Molly from Mary, unless that’s from Irish.

  22. David, where are you, that winter has ended?

  23. I bet Turkish has /d/, not /t/, here.
    Yup, Vasmer actually says the direct source is a Turkic *karadaš, but I didn’t think the details were important since the important thing was to correct the mistaken qalam idea.

  24. marie-lucie says

    Sally,Hal,Molly : these forms of Sarah, Harry, Mary are quite old and must date from the time where Standard English /r/ was an apical trill, as it was in French and still is in Scots, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Arabic etc. Also, they must have started as childhood names, imitating a child’s own pronunciation: apical [r] is usually difficult for small children to say and often gets replaced by [l]. I am not sure when Modern American English retroflexion started, but it is not terribly old.

  25. David: A one-contact trill is a tap, and taps and flaps are pretty much the same thing.

  26. — Yup, Vasmer actually says the direct source is a Turkic *karadaš, but I didn’t think the details were important since the important thing was to correct the mistaken qalam idea. —
    I did a little digging, and it seems the qalam idea goes back to an article published in a Russian festschrift in 1966. Gerard Clauson’s review of the volume says:
    — Of the [four articles on lexicography] the most ingenious is that of Professor Németh, the doyen of Hungarian Turcologists, “The origin of the Russian word karandash” (lead pencil), which he finally traces back to Osmanli *qalam-daş “pen stone.” —
    Otherwise, I can’t find anything out about it. Has Németh’s idea been disproven?

  27. Well, you can’t really disprove such ideas, but it doesn’t seem to have made much headway, and I would point out that “ingenious” does not in any way imply “convincing.” But I shouldn’t have said “mistaken” when what I meant was more like “less plausible.”

  28. “The origin of the Russian word karandash” (lead pencil), which he finally traces back to Osmanli *qalam-daş “pen stone.” —
    interesting, in my language it’s harandaa which i always thought from russian karandash, just k becomes h(kh), and sh gets omitted, due to some phonetic changes rules i guess, and i always thought that the russian karandash also comes from the company name that was making the pencils, caran d’ash, so the pencils were first made in somewhere turko speaking central asia to come to russia named like that then? cz i always thought pencil is perhaps a western invention

  29. it’s an italian invention it seems like, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pencil
    it’s great that the woman’s name is known and mentioned there as a part of the couple who made the first ever modern style pencil

  30. marie-lucie says

    JC: By interchange I meant not literal metathesis, but diachronic shift.
    While changes such as parábola > palábra are usually described as “metathesis” (exchanging places), one of several “sporadic” changes for which there is little explanation, there are some rules or at least tendencies for this “diachronic shift” or actual interchange (in your sense, and I would use the same word), which are not limited to the “one of each” situation. I researched the topic some years ago. Notice that in the above words r > l occurs before a stressed vowel, l > r after a consonant, in a cluster left by the loss of the unstressed vowel (assuming the intermediate form *palábla. Note that there many Latin words with a stem-final br cluster (like celebr [the stem of all the case forms except the nominative] or candelabrum) but not bl, instead b and l are always separated by a vowel, as terribilis. In Portuguese, there are no initial bl or pl clusters (unless in recent borrowings), instead the original l has become r, as in Sp blanco, Ptg branco ‘white’, Sp playa, Ptg praia ‘beach’.
    It’s easy for /l/ to become /r/ or vice versa, or even for both changes to happen over the long haul.
    Indeed, because as apicals or “tongue-tip consonants” they use the same tongue position if not quite the same tongue movement.
    I’m not sure that this is just a matter of tongue position
    By ‘tongue position’ I was referring to the later avatars of the original apicals, especially the movement of [r] towards retroflexion (as in North American English) or uvularization (as in modern German and French), which makes /r/ very different from /l/ and therefore unlikely to change into or from it. I don’t think that a hypothetical *paRábola would have turned into palábra.
    Japanese and Cantonese are unrelated, but what is objectively a very similar sound (an apical postalveolar flap) is labeled /r/ in Japanese and /l/ in Cantonese, there being no Japanese /l/ or Cantonese /r/ to contrast with
    Perhaps Cantonese is labeled /l/ because it corresponds to /l/ in other Chinese varieties?
    From my experience with some Japanese speakers, it seems that they identify both American English /l/ and /r/ with their /r/. I remember one student who liked American songs and was singing “Browing in the wind” (as I saw in the notebook where he had copied the words). Of course “dark l” is quite close to “retroflex r” in tongue position and auditory effect.
    I could also speak of u/y interchange in the same sense in the Western Romance languages.
    I misunderstood this sentence at first, but I realized that I too would have called the possibility of [u > y] and vice-versa “interchange”. (Here [u] = Fr ou, German u, and [y] = Fr u, German ü).

  31. /l/ is less sonorous than most varieties of /r/. That’s why you get often ldr from lr, but never rdl from rl. The more sonorous /r/ functions better at the position of what we call in Chinese linguistics “median”, the postconsonantal approximant (and often not-so-approximant).

  32. japanese, they have r like n ramen, ronin, just they prefer to pronounce it as if like ‘corrupting” their r as like l, cz that is thought to be a more elegant, pronunciation, not too stressing rrr, especially for women
    the way they pronounce their r would seem in my language as if like how kids can’t pronounce r growing up or someone with the speech defect
    so my “hypothesis” is perhaps there was someone considered “cool” and charismatic perhaps had some kind of speech defect that was thought as cool and should be copied, way back then in olden times of course, i can’t believe their tongues are shorter or don’t move like anyone else’s that they can’t pronounce r , just physically i mean

  33. Modern American English retroflexion
    Not just American English: essentially all varieties of English except Scottish English have this sound. It is not always enunciated retroflex, though: I myself have a alveolo-palatal approximant (tongue tip behind the lower teeth) unless a coronal consonant follows. These two sounds are acoustically almost indistinguishable.
    Notice that in the above words r > l occurs before a stressed vowel, l > r after a consonant
    Ho, a very neat generalization! I have never seen that pointed out before.
    By ‘tongue position’ I was referring to the later avatars of the original apicals
    Sure. But certainly /p/ and /k(w)/ have never had a similar tongue position (except in the sense that they are both non-coronal) and yet they interchanged in Italic and Celtic, as well as Tolkien’s Elvish languages, where the Common Eldarin root *kwet- gives Quenya quetta ‘word’, quenta ‘tale, history’, quete ‘said’ (aorist), but Sindarin peth, pennas ‘history’ (the -s is the reflex of an old abstract nominalizer), pêd. (We also have the word for ‘speakers, Elves’ (Q Quendi) in six more distantly related Elvish languages: kindi, cuind, hwenti, windan, kinn-lai, penni, a real feast of pseudo-Indo-European reflexes!)
    Perhaps Cantonese is labeled /l/ because it corresponds to /l/ in other Chinese varieties?
    A good point. Curiously, Cantonese is now undergoing a sound-change /n/ > /l/, causing a merger (and there is a similar merger between the /ŋ/ initial and the null initial, with null outcome).

  34. It seems to me the *qalam-daş “pen stone” etymology is the better one. If we assume the similarity with Mongolian “harandaa” is neither coincidental nor a direct borrowing from Russian (Are there other Russian loans into Mongolian where final š is deleted, where initial /k/ becomes /h/?), the two forms can be much more readily accounted for by *qalam-daş than by *karadaš. In Russian and in Mongolian the /n/ remains unaccounted for under the second etymology, and Mongolian initial /h/ is far more easily explained if we take /q/ and not /k/ as a starting point. Again, the first etymology wins.
    Finally, the proposed etymology makes sense semantically: Spanish LAPIZ “pencil” is a learned borrowing from Latin LAPIS “stone”, so *qalam-daş “pen stone” is less of a stretch than might be thought.

  35. @Etienne: I mostly agree with you. However, it’s to be noted that the “k” in kara and “q” in qalam are two notations for the same thing: in modern Turkish, both are velar (kara, kalem) with a velar /k/ contrasting with a palatal /kʲ/; in eastern Turkic languages, both are uvular /q/ contrasting with a velar /k/.

  36. A possible actual instance of metathesis is English sashay ‘walk conspicuously’, originally a technical term in country dancing < French chassé.

  37. i cant recall other similar borrowings, where k becomes kh, stol table for example can be used as ostool, but mostly of course there are our own words for everything generic shiree table for example, kalendar’ instead of becoming something like halendaa, it gets just translated into on tsagiin bichig or, from chinese i guess, huanli
    pen for example is uzeg, something i guess like a very basic original word belonging to our language, so why to borrow pencil from somewhere else, right? i wonder what is pencil in the turkic languages though, turkish pen and pencil are both kalem, google translate says
    so if only xarandaa which got those phonetic changes , so it becomes as if like questionable too, its origination from russian to our language, maybe it’s really from turkic, just what was with that caran d’ache company making pencils though

  38. chinese calendar is rili, not huanli google translate says though

  39. Pretty much every Turkic K becomes Kh in modern Khalkha Mongolian.
    Starting with word “kara” (black) itself which is “Khar” in Mongolian

  40. @read
    The traditional Chinese calendar…. is still used in the more traditional Chinese households around the world to pick ‘auspicious dates’ for important events such as weddings, funerals, and business deals. A special calendar is used for this purpose, called Huang Li (traditional Chinese: 皇曆; simplified Chinese: 皇历; pinyin: huánglì), literally “Imperial Calendar”, which contains auspicious activities, times, and directions for each day. The calendar follows the Gregorian dates but has the corresponding Chinese dates. Every date would have a comprehensive listing of astrological measurements and fortune elements.

  41. @read
    Regarding “uzeg” (pen), it seems a derivative of “uzuur” (“point”), quite understandable description for this pointy thing….

  42. Kalem in Turkic languages is an Arabic borrowing which is easily explained since the Turkic peoples are mostly Muslim.

  43. SFR! i summoned taki you, nice to know that you still read LH 🙂
    okay, huanli, i knew it’s from chinese, but tsag ulirlun bichig, on tsagiin bichig is the more used term for a calendar, though in just informal speech one would say perhaps huanli or calendar, whichever, mostly calendar

  44. so what about karandash – harandaa? is it from turkic or russian or swiss?

  45. Regarding Khvalyn sea, the old Mongolian name for the Caspian appears to have been “Kok tengis” (Blue sea). In fact, the Kalmyks still call it Кэкэ тенгис

  46. @Read
    I think it’s much older borrowing from Turkic languages (maybe even from old Uyugur). Primarily, because if it was a Russian borrowing, Mongolian would have kept the final “sh” – there are lots of borrowings from Russian with final “sh” (like “garaash”, for example)

  47. oh, yes, garage ( in russian garaj ) becomes garaash, but could it be because j is much like *harder*, or how it is called in linguistics, sound than sh, it becomes sh, when sh just gets lost?
    it sounds like foreign words gets changed a bit to fit our pronunciation, so they start sounding a bit like ‘softer’ sounding

  48. get changed
    that swiss company still like intrigues me, so should read its history maybe

  49. haha, a larchik prosto otkyvalsya gej, should have read the wiki on it before asking questions

  50. Maybe it’s because Russian language doesn’t really have any native words which end with “ash”
    http://poiskslov.com/ends-with-by-length/%D0%B0%D1%88/
    Every single word looks Turkic except patrontasche and alkash ;-)))

  51. Mongolians usually spell foreign borrowings as pronounced (unless they know the Russian or English original)
    Hence, all sorts of improbable transformations occur.
    My favorite is “pochoonk” from Russian….
    Wait, let’s maybe someone can venture a guess?

  52. there are also nash, vash, shalash in there what are native russian words imo
    seems like nobody is going to guess it, so pochoonk can be either putevka or bochonka, another corrupted pronunciation word i recall is palaaj for platie, but that’s about it, not that many russian borrowings, no?
    hey, SFR and Minus273, i have more tibetan chants now to ask about, a friend have sent me the traditional ‘malchdyn’ calendar so it has tarni on every occasion of life i guess, the one about the riches and wealth raining on one chanting the tarni i think should be particularly useful, i’ll post it in the evening if i remember

  53. marie-lucie says

    I agree with Etienne about the Osmanli hypothesis, proffered by Professor Németh, the doyen of Hungarian Turcologists, “The origin of the Russian word karandash” (lead pencil), which he finally traces back to Osmanli *qalam-daş “pen stone.”
    Osmanli is “Classical Turkish”, a literary language heavily influenced by Arabic. Here is what Wiki says under “pencil” (the “leads” were actually made of lead a few centuries ago):
    The words for pencil in German (Bleistift), Irish (Peann Luaidhe), Arabic (قلم رصاص qalam raṣāṣ), and other languages literally mean lead pen. (or, in Irish and Arabic, “pen lead”, the normal word order in those languages)
    It is most likely that the Osmanli word is an adaptation from Arabic qalam raṣāṣ, with some folk etymology intervening to understand raṣāṣ as Turkish da&#351 (qalam or kalam being already known as ‘pen’ – kalem does not sound right: since Turkish usually “harmonizes” the vowels in one word, there would have been no need to change the vowels of the Arabic word). Interchange between the sounds [r] and [d] is fairly common in the history of languages, although not as frequent as between [r] and [l], so folk etymology interpreting the Arabic sequence raṣ as Turkish da&#351 is not problematic.
    Another round of folk etymology dealing with Osmanli kalamda&#351 would see in kala the Turkish kara ‘black’, and leave out the m which had no function in Turkish, thus kara da&#351, literally ‘black stone’.
    On the other hand, the Russian word supposes a Turkish form *karamda&#351 intermediate between the Osmanli and modern forms. This form would have been unanalyzable in Russian, so no folk etymology intervened, but the sequence md being phonetically unusual was changed to nd through phonetic assimilation of the nasal to the position of the following consonant (an extremely common process).
    I think that was probably the reasoning of Prof. Németh. I see that he published his article in a Russian journal. Can the commenter be more precise, either about Németh’s reasoning or about the reference?
    As for Mongolian harandaa, I am not familiar with the Mongolian language, let alone its history, but I would suggest that the middle nd does not have to have come from Russian but could also have arisen independently from md. The Osmanli word could have been borrowed into other languages in the regions located between Turkey and Mongolia. But the Russian word could also have reached Mongolia through another language. These are just hypotheses which would have to be examined by people more qualified than I am about those languages.

  54. that’s bochonok, but bochka, my mistake

  55. marie-lucie says

    JC: – essentially all varieties of English except Scottish English have this sound [retroflex r]
    Really? do English, New Zealanders, South Africans, have the same sound as Americans and Canadians? Not in my experience.
    r > l occurs before a stressed vowel, l > r after a consonant
    – Ho, a very neat generalization! I have never seen that pointed out before.
    – Neither have I! But these are just a few examples among many that I collected (that was long ago, perhaps someone else has come to the same conclusion since). These two rules are not universal: in some languages the conditioning factors could be the opposite, but they tend to be consistent within individual languages.
    /p/ and /k(w)/ have never had a similar tongue position … and yet they interchanged in Italic and Celtic
    Interchange between labials and labio-velars (and especially labio-uvulars) is not uncommon. I have found many examples in some Amerindian languages. The salient feature is “labial”, the lip position rather than the tongue position. Yes, the Elvish examples seem to cover all the Indo-European bases!

  56. read, “shalash” шалаш (a lean-to) is a Turkic borrowing too

  57. show me its etymology then i’ll believe you / a joke
    but really solomennue shalashi would seem like so naturally belonging to a russian scenery, not the steppe, no? it doesnt mean any kind of tents i thought
    the most words in the list i didnt know at all that those mean something in russian, though there are some familiar words in there of course too

  58. read, the source of “shalash” attribution is V. Radlov, a respected XIX c. turkologist. But a cursory check of Turkish dictionary doesn’t net me a close Turkish equivalent. So – should we believe this claim, or should we keep checking? I remember we discussed Russian “shatyor” and “chadra” and their relation to Turkish çadır at LH quite recently. The wise ones here may shed more light on Radlov’s claim of ‘тур. sаlаš, азерб. šаlаš “шалаш, палатка”‘

  59. good, i believe you
    so these are the tarni: i wonder what they mean
    um banza divaa savaari baari khum pad
    um badma gordo ariya zambala hridaya khum pad

  60. St. Patrick, who brought not only the religion to Ireland, but loanwords beginning with P
    The religion may have got there first: consider Cásc / Pascha.

  61. @read
    Yes! Pochoonk is putevka (company paid vacation package in Soviet times)
    How and why putevka could turn into pochoonk is a mystery. Perhaps some linguist can explain, I certainly can’t…

  62. Btw, what do you think about this flower?

    Carissa carandas is a species of flowering shrub in the dogbane family, Apocynaceae. It produces berry-sized fruitsphoto that are commonly used as a condiment or additive to Indian pickles and spices. It is a hardy, drought-tolerant plant that thrives well in a wide range of soils. Common names include karonda (Devanagari: करोंदा), karamardaka (Sanskrit), vakkay (Telugu), kalakai (Tamil), and also less common are karau(n)da, karanda, or karamda. It is called kerenda in Malaya, karaunda in Malaya and India; Bengal currant or Christ’s thorn in South India; nam phrom, or namdaeng in Thailand; and caramba, caranda, caraunda and perunkila in the Philippines.[1] In Assam it is called Karja tenga.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_carandas

  63. @read
    The mantras aren’t really meant to be translated.
    I recognize the second one – it’s White Dzambhala mantra, here is an explanation

    The White Jambhala is said to be the manifestation of Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva (he who listens to the sounds around him and embodies compassion). He sits on a snow lion and holds a mongoose in his left hand that spits out precious gems for the poor and needy to collect. He is said to be able to stop suffering and to dispel bad Karma. Chanting his Mantra can also bring wealth, avert disaster, and give you good health.
    The White Jambhala is most effective for those with a Chinese Astrological lucky element of metal and animal sign of a monkey or chicken. It is believed pouring water on the head of his statue will allow for greater blessings. The Mantra that is chanted for this God is “Om Padma Trotha Arya Zambhala Siddhaya Hum Phat”.

    http://tantramantras.blogspot.com/2011/06/five-jambhala-wealth-gods.html

  64. who, me? i think all flowers are beautiful, this one seems like useful too, if the friut is rich in iron and vit C
    i dont think i saw it in my country, if it’s indian, no wonder
    i just wonder of course why do you know such tonkosti as pochoonk about my language and generally all the things mongolian, are you some very secretive old school cia agent back from the cold war times, no? / a joke
    too bad i am not an astrological monkey or chicken, but dog, yes the second one was about the wealth raining, though i am not that needy or think that any more money would make me any that happy, that was just a joke
    the first one they say for correcting one’s destiny if it is getting a little like crooked from its predestined right path

  65. ah you were about its name carandas

  66. minus273: That’s why you get often ldr from lr, but never rdl from rl.
    Not never. For instance, Icelandic karl, spelling revealing its original consonantism, is now [kʰard̥l] (when it’s not simplified to [kʰad̥l]).

  67. Pencil in russian is called KARANDAS.How this words hassimilarly word munshi originated ? some assign it turkish origin- karra tass(black stone)some assign it Arabic-kalam rasas,some assign it swiss origin.Bakshi and munshi are the word for a writter/a clerk in turkish language.These two words are loan words from Pali and Sanskrit. Word bakshi is is from word bhikhu,and munshi is from word muni in pali ,meaning a monk ,Buddhist monks knew the art of writting.literacy in in turkish tribes reached along with buddhism,Buddhist monks were the record keepers and teachers in turkish tribes prior to islam and these two words remained with the language even though the religion and the region changed.KARAN IS A WORD DENOTING COMMUNITY OF WRITTERS AND BUDDHIST MONKS.Karanams were the bureaucracy of the Mauryan empire. Buddhism was the religion of the elite which subequently became the reigion of the masses as well. Karnam community spread out in entire India with the spread of the Mauryan empire.This community also provided the entire monastic staff to Buddhism and sread to entire Asia as Buddhist monks This community used surname Das at the end of their officil document denoting as servant of the ralm,this susequently became their surname as well..Therefore since they wre poineers in the spread of literacy in the nomadic turkis tribes ,their instrument of writting took the their community as well as their work work name —KARANDAS

  68. David Marjanović says

    I bet Turkish has /d/, not /t/, here

    I lost that bet. Looks like the word isn’t from Turkish specifically.

    And I wonder if qara and qalam got mixed up, i.e. *qara daş (for just the graphite) was later reinterpreted as *qalam-daş (for the whole pencil) and modified accordingly.

  69. Lars Mathiesen says

    (I know Adam Fink is unlikely to read this, but) in Icelandic karl [kʰard̥l] I think that /l/ does that quite on its own and doesn’t need help from /r/ — cf Eyjafjallajökull. Well, maybe /l/ needs to be long or in a cluster.

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