Back in the day, one of my favorite websites was Books and Writers, which had detailed and lively entries for just about any writer you might be interested in; I used to link to it often, e.g. for Walt Kelly in that stirrin’ thread The Hazy Yon (two decades ago!). I always wondered who was responsible for it; alas, the drifting dream is done: the URL vanished into the hazy yon years ago, and I’ve been substituting Internet Archive versions in old posts ever since. But I just discovered that some good people have created this archived version, with the notice:
This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available.
The list runs from Abdullah Achmed (“pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff”) to Zweig Stefan (“Austrian biographer, essayist, short story writer, and cosmopolitan”), and it is well worth your perusal. Belated thanks to Petri Liukkonen for conceiving it and putting it out there, and brand-new thanks to Green_Cardamom for creating the archive! (Oh, and kirjasto is the Finnish word for ‘library,’ “Coined by Finnish explorer, historian and author Carl Axel Gottlund in 1828.”)
Update. The site is now here; thanks, Dirk!
I’m surprised that kirjasto is such a recent coinage. Kirja means ‘book’ and the -sto suffix indicates a collection of such things or a place where they are to be found. E.g. saari, island; saaristo, archipelago.
I’m surprised that Finnish has an unborrowed, underived word for “book”. (Apparently may have originally meant “embroidery mark”?)
Kusaal uses gbauŋ “skin”, presumably having got to the “book” meaning via “parchment.”
Mooré has sébrè, plural sɛba, which I always assumed was cognate with sobe “blacken”: the Kusaal cognate sɔb of that verb is used for “write” (and Kusaal sɔbir means “specimen of writing”), but Mooré uses a different word altogether for “write”, and I just now noticed that it doesn’t even have a verb sebe.
And Dyula has sɛ́bɛ́(n) “write”, which could hardly be borrowed from Mooré, even if Mooré had such a verb.
So Mooré sébrè looks like a loan from Dyula. Makes sense, as literacy came with Islam, and the Dyula are the quintessential Muslim traders of western Burkina Faso.
That raises an interesting question about Kusaal sɔb “blacken” being used for “write”: again, I’ve always assumed that that’s to do with ink, but maybe it’s a kind of back-formation from sɔbir “product of blackening”, taken as the equivalent of Mooré sébrè; a sort of anti-calque based on a Kusaasi folk etymology of the Mooré word.
Maybe before 1828 they used a form of bibliotek? That’s about the right date for going all native.
I’m just impressed by the cleverness of sci.fi!
Yeah, that’s cute. But the Nordics have lots of punning domain names, to the extent that the Swedish national registry bought/contracted for the .nu ccTLD (in principle that of Niue, and they are suing to get back control; the history behind that is murky). (nu = ‘now’). .tv is also popular.
My own consultancy has a vanity domain under .it, which was cheap since my Danish registered company name uses a word that’s not Italian (and I had to add IT to the registered name anyway because somebody else beat me to it in the Danish company registry).
maybe it’s a kind of back-formation from sɔbir “product of blackening”, taken as the equivalent of Mooré sébrè; a sort of anti-calque based on a Kusaasi folk etymology of the Mooré word.
This is nice.
Dyula sɛ́bɛ́(n) ‘ paper; letter, book, document; talisman or amulet containing Arabic writing; to write’ is apparently ultimately from Arabic صفحة ṣafḥa ‘surface; page, leaf, sheet’. I wonder, how does the ‑(n) come about in Dyula?
Maybe before 1828 they used a form of bibliotek?
The only thing that I could find in the online Vanhan kirjasuomen sanakirja (‘Dictionary of Old Literary Finnish’) was bibliotekarius ‘librarian’ . There was also a kirjahuone (literally ‘book-room’, ‘book-hall’, ‘book-house’) for ‘library’.
Interesting. ‘Coined’ suggested someone going ‘we need a BETTER word for this’, which is what made me wonder if it was replacing a borrowing.
Thanks for looking 🙂
That raises an interesting question about Kusaal sɔb “blacken” being used for “write”
In Korandje, bibǝy “black” can also be used for “write”, but only as a deliberately cryptic argot term; the normal word is Arabic iktǝb.
Russian pis[-at’] is essentially “to paint”.
The Mooré word gʋ́lsè “write” is, boringly, transparently just a pluractional derivative of gʋ́le “scratch, decorate.”
Waama wari, imperfective waru “write”, more excitingly, also means “make facial scars”; the cognate waarifa is glossed in the SIL dictionary as “la scarification, l’écriture”, and in the “make characteristic identifying tribal facial scars” sense it goes all the way back to proto-Oti-Volta. The analogy even turns up in the Miyobe pair of verbs wɔ́lɛ̀ “make scars” and wɛ̀yì, imperfective wɔ̀lù “write.” (It’s this sort of thing which has led me to think that Miyobe is the closest relative of Oti-Volta.)
Dyula sɛ́bɛ́(n) ‘ paper; letter, book, document; talisman or amulet containing Arabic writing; to write’ is apparently ultimately from Arabic صفحة ṣafḥa
So Kusaal sɔb “write” would be a sort of Arabic step-loanword. I like that.
There’s a precedent, I think, in Kusaal ti’eb “prepare, get ready”, which is also used for “heal”: for “healer”, you can have either ti’eb or tip, which latter just has to be a loanword from its morphology. It’s perfectly pronounceable (cf dap “men”), but there is just no way to produce it from original Oti-Volta materials.
I don’t think the glottalised vowel in ti’eb has got anything to do with the pharyngealised initial consonant of طب ṭibb, though. Just coincidence.
“boringly, transparently” – conversely, I always find Latin scribo extremely funny (Russian skrebu “I scrape, scrab, scratch”).
It just occured to me that the famous passage about Slavic pre-Christian writing (“before Slavs didn’t know writings but read and divinated with strokes and cuts”) can simply mean: they did not know ink.
In Korandje, bibǝy “black” …
“The list runs from Abdullah Achmed (“pseudonym of Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff”)”
Wow. LH, about the time when you posted it – and I mean within a hour I typed a comment about Abdullah Achmed. I even can reproduce it by memory because it wholly consisted of quotations:
And then I deleted it. The reasons: (1) I was not sure if I’m supposed to write “It begins:” and then quote the first paragraph or something like “From its first paragraph:” and then quote these two lines about street vendors (2) could not find a good “guttural” thread here. (3) this use of “guttural” surpriused me at first but then I found it unremarkable.
Anyway, the powerful study can be found here.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Veiled_Woman_(Abdullah)
It is powerful indeed in its tautological vulgarity. It did not suffice to call the cries guttural, the entreaty must be servile. And the paragraph I was not sure I was going to quote is even worse.
It is powerful indeed in its tautological vulgarity.
With the advent of “generative AI”, I fear that we will be confronted with more sentences like that in the near future.
I myself prefer redundance-free vulgarity. And ingenuous oysters.
Honestly, the line under the picture is fine. “I can not help it Hassan. I do hate thee!”
And by the way, how I found it. I did not know what are hats from Djerba called (other than just “hats”), and was trying to find them in WP. WP suggested me this powerful study.
Nice hat!
what are hats from Djerba
In Dellys we’d call them mḍǝll, which works very nicely as a literal translation of “sombrero”.
“Nice hat” – Yes, and not even so guttural…
@Lameen, thanks!
@David L: I was surprised to learn that the word is indeed saaristo; I would have expected to see the i->e vowel change that occurs so often in Finnish morphology.
Lameen: I’m surprised that Finnish has an unborrowed, underived word for “book”. (Apparently may have originally meant “embroidery mark”?)
Drasvi: It just occured to me that the famous passage about Slavic pre-Christian writing (“before Slavs didn’t know writings but read and divinated with strokes and cuts”) can simply mean: they did not know ink.
I don’t know how old kirja is, but a presumptive development from “mark, sign” to “letter” -> “book” in Finnish ( and also the use of marks for divination by the Slavs) fit with what seems to have happened in Germanic. Depending on how old kirja is, the development may be due to Germanic influence. It would be interesting to know if kirja was also used for marks on other objects or divination lots at some point, or whether such divination is attested for Finnic peoples.
I see that Mampruli (sɔbi) and Dagbani (sabi) also use the “darken” verb for “write”, but Dagaare and Farefare don’t.
That gave me pause, because at least nowadays, the Mamprussi and Dagomba are much more influenced by Islam than the Kusaasi, and their languages show many more obviously Arabic-origin loans, which makes you wonder why they would borrow a word for “write” from pagan northerners.
I think I can rescue the hypothesis, though: the many Mampruli and Dagbani loans are nearly all obviously mediated through Hausa: for example, Mampruli has malaaka for “angel”, which would do fine as a loan from Hausa mala’ika (which is actually from the Arabic plural form), whereas Kusaal has maliak (Toende malek), which clearly can’t be from Hausa, and in the first instance must be from Mooré màlɛ́kà, itself presumably from Dyula mɛ̀lɛ́kɛ́ (or something.)
And I think the Hausa influence on the area is a good bit more recent that that of the Dyula and Songhay. In fact, as far as Kusaal goes, I think you can argue this from the form of loanwords: loans via Mooré have mostly lost their original final vowels, just like indigenous Kusaal words (as with maliak), whereas loans from Hausa mostly haven’t. On the other hand, final vowels in Hausa nouns are almost always long, so that could be phonology, rather than history.
And Mampruli has gbaŋŋu “skin” for “book”, too: it has borrowed the Hausa word as well, as litaafi, but that word is only used for the Qur’an and the Bible. So the words for literacy things seem to precede the influx of Hausa terms.
So their protobook is made of parchment? That’s interesting, I did not think of parchment in this context.
Actually, now I think of it, not necessarily. The gbauŋ “skin” word is used also in the compounds saŋgbauŋ “cloud”, plural saŋgbana “sky”, which is literally “rain-skin” and in teŋgbauŋ “land” (in the physical geographical sense), literally “ground-skin.” So the etymon seems to have already expanded to something like “surface”, “spread-out flattish thing.”
Na’am gbauŋ “chieftaincy skin” has (rightly) replaced na’am kʋk “chieftaincy chair” as the translation for “throne” in the 2016 Bible, but in that case the thing alluded to really is a literal animal skin (albeit presumably meant metaphorically here.*) They’re just being culturally appropriate.
https://www.imb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/20150511RWH5131.jpg
* Rev 4:2:
ka m nyɛ ka na’am gbauŋ dig arezana ni ka sɔ’ zin’ li zug
“And I saw that a chieftaincy skin was lying in heaven and someone was sitting on it.”
The other 24 guys were subchieftains sitting on sous-chef skins ?
So one supposes.
I was asking whether the Kusaal text goes on to mark a difference between types of chieftancy skin – if there is such a distinction in real life. The German has Thron for all of them.
This material would make for a successful bande animée. Hollywood is inappropriate here. Has there ever been a film of Revelations at all ? Nowadays it would be easy to cast the trumps of doom, there are enough of them around.
whether the Kusaal text goes on to mark a difference between types of chieftancy skin
Nah, they’re all just na’am gbana.
Northern Ghanaian culture is used to subchiefs. Southern Ghanaian likewise, I gather.
This material would make for a successful bande animée
I’ve heard this exact view vigorously expressed by an undoubtedly pious Christian. (“Och, it’d make a great cartoon.”)
In my entire life I can only recall one good sermon preached from a text in Revelation other than the Letters to the Churches. It was actually at our wedding …
[I think the book has bern skunked by lunatic Americans who aren’t au fait with the concept of apocalyptic as a distinct Biblical genre. Maybe its time will come again after the Harrowing of the Trumpodules.]
Oops, I mean bande dessinée. Got French and Japanese industries mixed up with Hollywood.
There are so many infotainment industries pecking and harassing us. Someone should do a remake of The Birds, titled The Media.
Actually, I imagine early Islamic history as an anime.
(I hope local Muslims will forgive me, I sometimes think this way of myself and my freinds as well)
Do the characters have enormous ingenuous eyes, and wear miniskirts unsuccessfully hiding white underwear ? Or is it more like Blue-Eyed Samurai ?
bande animée
well, i like the neologism!
one pitfall to be avoided at all costs is the one that makes the Left Behind series* painful to read: when the plot is entirely the playing out of a specific already-published interpretation of a canonical text, having characters who have read the source material makes it completely impossible to maintain any kind of suspense.
i think ikuhara kunihiko should have the right of first refusal, but i think he’d be unlikely to take the project. anno hideaki, however, should not be let within several nautical miles of any production facility involved.
.
* at least the first half-dozen; that’s all that was in the boxed set i found on the curb one year and for some reason decided to read.
Well, Anno has pretty much already done it. Admittedly, he took some liberties with the source material …
Stu, what I picture is not very detailed. Sure there are faces but I don’t remember what eyes normally look like (if anythign in particular). I imagined some male characters (from early Muslim history) wearing something “medieval Arabian”, but I don’t think I imagined anyone else in any dress. Of course my male Russian characters (freinds that is) are supposed to be wearing some sort of trousers or jeans but I did not think of it.
European women can wear a variety of things different from whatever they want by limitations imposed on public nunidity, niqabs, and dirty dress, so no point to even suppose anything.
So no Sailor-moon early Muslim ladies. (an the other hand… the crescent and the cat in Sailor moon are somewhat “Muslim” … the crescent would be a bit anachronistic)
Regarding the various Oti-Volta words for “book”, I just realised that there are a couple clearly connected with the Mooré sébrè word, even way over in Benin: Byali sábə̄lə̄ and Waama sabare. (All the same noun class, too.) No associated verb in Waama: don’t have enough info to say, with Byali.
I’m not sure what to make of that. Given that “money” looks like an undoubted loan from Western Oti-Volta even over there in the Atakora département, I suppose that it’s not out of the question that it’s a loan from the west. They’re a long way from the Dyula zone, and Dendi, the local outpost of Songhay, seems to have the quite different tíírà.
I don’t think that “book” is likely to descend from proto-Oti-Volta …
Dendi tíírà “book” actually looks like it should have something to do with Gulmancema tílī, plural tílā “book, letter” and Moba tíl̀ plural tílâ “talisman, amulet.” “Amulet” as the prototypical written thing is natural enough in Muslim-influenced West Africa (basically the same as Dyula sɛbɛn as far as the semantics goes.) Gulmancema and Moba both have /l/ for [r] in loans, and lack a /r/ phoneme.
It really ought to be ultimately from Arabic …
As always, I can’t help thinking Gulmancema is a language variety spoken somewhere in the Italian Alps, or maybe in Turkey.
Gurmanche, on the other hand, clearly belongs on the Great Plains.
Spencer Trimingham’s Islam in West Africa has tira “writing, amulet’ listed as “Songhay,” He mentions a similar Berber form in passing, though. I imagine that could be the source of the Songhay. Lameen will know …
It looks like Moba and Gulmancema borrowed the word from Songhay, fitted it into the noun class system as a plural in -a, and reverse-engineered singulars from that (same principle as English “pea” and “cherry.”) That happens quite a lot when Oti-Volta languages borrow words ending in a.
Yes, Songhay borrowed the word from Tuareg, in which tira is the only surviving (verbal noun) reflex of the pan-Berber verb “write”, originally *a’rǝv. (This verb is also the ultimate source of Hausa rubuta.) Further north, tira simply means “writing”, as in Kabyle.
Thanks for that explanation, Lameen! I am happy to learn ultimate origin of Wolof téére!
I had gone looking in Charles de Foucauld (1918) Dictionnaire abrégé touareg, p. 379 (here):
Fuller entry here, p. 1557 (‘De la racine ⵔ r, ils n’ont conservé que le mot têreout’). I noted also tirawt, plural tira, in Tamajaq here. Is the formation seen in the Tuareg plural tira the same formation as in, e.g., Mzab–Ouargla tiyra ‘writing’?
Thanks, Lameen!
I think I can safely say that it would not have occurred to me that Gulmancema tili “book” might be of the same origin as Hausa rubuta “write.”
It even got in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tira#Kabyle
Huh. Buli sábí is phonologically just fine as the Dyula-origin “writing, amulet” word. It would corresponds precisely to Mooré sébrè if the words were genetically related: /a/ from short *e is regular except after palatal consonants, the tone correspondence is correct, and the loss of the *r in the singular class suffix is also regular.
The word is glossed in Kröger’s excellent dictionary by
Arabic صفحة ṣafḥa “surface, page, leaf, sheet” eventually turning up as “tobacco tin.” Given enough cultural background (and good enough dictionaries) you can actually follow how it all came about. I must say that if I saw an etymon glossed as “writing; tobacco tin” in one of those long-ranger ultralumper dictionaries I would be suitably disdainful …
@DE aha, I was waiting for this root)
I must say that if I saw an etymon glossed as “writing; tobacco tin” in one of those long-ranger ultralumper dictionaries I would be suitably disdainful …
Indeed, and this is why we must always maintain an appropriate humility about our judgments on these things. Reality is always more complex and unpredictable than we can imagine.
“*a’rǝv”
I assume replaced with √k-t-b in Touareg.
It would be interesting to compare patterns of lexical replacement (with borrowings) among Touaregs and in northern Berber.
Northerners are frequently bilingual (or quadrilingual when literate), but I suppose this is a recent situation.
I see that صفحة ṣafḥa itself is ascribed to the root of صَفَحَ “flatten”, implying that in Arabic the “page” sense has developed as a specialisation of “flat thing.” That reminds me of the semantics of Kusaal gbauŋ and its cognates, where the progression of meaning must have been “skin” > “flat surface” > “page” > “writing.” I wonder if the use of gbauŋ as “book” is actually a kind of calque, therefore?
This could lead me to a Grand Unified Theory of Western Oti-Volta “book/writing” words: all of them are ultimately based on either loans or calques from Arabic.
(“Read” is Kusaal karim, Mooré kàrme etc, pretty much a no-brainer as going back eventually to قرأ; -m is a common verb-deriving suffix, but I suspect it’s owed to some intermediate language in this case.)
DE, actually I was waiting for ṣ-ḥ-f rather than ṣ-f-ḥ…)))
cf.
” صفحة ṣafḥa “surface, page, leaf, sheet””
صَحِيفَة ṣaḥīfa …,leaf, sheet,…
PS very fricative.
I think someone can try to explain them as sound symbolism (though reduplication would certainly have helped)
So Kusaal sɔb “write” is not from sɔb “blacken” and the use of Kusaal gbauŋ “skin” for “book” has nothing to do with parchment (drasvi’s scepticism was well-founded.)
ṣ-ḥ-f
Borrowed from Ethiopic, if Wiktionary is to be believed. Doesn’t seem very plausible …
languagehat: Reality is always more complex and unpredictable than we can imagine.
I love that English has a word that has gone from meaning “flaming faggot” to “intangibles associated with an entity”—which sounds bugs, but all the intermediate meanings of brand are still in common use.
Oops. I forgot that Xerîb already wrote about ṣafḥa.(
Are there parallels to the sopposed derivation of “to write” from “a [material object with (and for)] text” – either similar directionality of derivation with other words in the same region, or with the same meaning cross-linguistically? Apart of Eng. “to text (someone)”:)
And is the Arabic word used for such objects (amulets etc) in regional Arabic (including literary)?
Oti-Volta languages seem to show very few examples of zero-derivation of a verb stem from a noun stem (pretty much all the examples I’ve found seem to involve body parts, interestingly: “foot” -> “tread on”, “tongue” -> “taste”, “nose” -> “blow the nose.”)
But I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on with e.g. Kusaal sɔbir “piece of writing” and sɔb “write.” Oti-Volta does have a lot of zero-derivation of noun stems from verb stems: not only is that the regular way of making gerunds, (and in Eastern Oti-Volta, agent nouns and “participles”, too) but there are many such cases where the derived noun expresses the place where an action occurs, an instrument used for the action (e.g. Kusaal dʋk “cooking pot” from dʋg “cook”) or the product of the action.
So if there had always been a verb sɔb “write”, sɔbir would be a perfectly normal formation for “specimen of writing.” What I’m suggesting is that the verb acquired a new sense via back-formation.
[There are precedents for that: for example, Kusaal has created a verb kabir “call out asking for admission” from the areal word kabire, which is what you actually say what calling out. That’s a noun, historically, with a singular suffix -re: the final vowel would have been deleted if it were an echt Kusaal word. The verb kabir can’t be the result of normal Kusaal word-formation: there’s no derivational suffix -r that could have created it.]
”What I’m suggesting is that the verb acquired a new sense via back-formation.”
Is “blacken” only attested for Mooré sobe but not for Kusaal sɔb?
Borrowed from Ethiopic, if Wiktionary is to be believed. Doesn’t seem very plausible …
For recent discussion of this question, see pages 404–405, no. 12, in Stefan Weninger (2009) ‘Der Jemen als lexikalisches Ausstrahlungszentrum in der Antike’, in Philologisches und Historisches zwischen Anatolien und Sokotra. Analecta Semitica in memoriam Alexander Sima, ed. Werner Arnold et al. The old summary of material in Jefferey 1938, p. 192f (here) is also still useful (and accessible). In footnote 6, Jefferey says: ‘Itqan 120 makes it clear that مصحف [muṣḥaf] was recognized as Abyssinian in origin’.
The passage referred to by Jefferey, in Al-Suyuti’s Al-Itqan fi ‘Ulum al-Qur’an, is here:
Translation here (section titled: ‘Remarque 1 [le nom de al-Muṣḥaf pour le Coran]’):
Apologies for any hasty cutting and pasting and other errors. I must go to sleep now.
No, “blacken” goes all the way back to proto-Oti-Volta. To be accurate, the Kusaal verb sɔb actually means “darken”, in fact (as in night falling); “blacken” is represented by sɔbig, with a very common inchoative derivational suffix; but Mooré sobe means both (but not “write.”)
Kusaal sɔb “darken” itself is not a new creation: it’s got a perfectly good pedigree and lots of cognates. It’s just the “write” sense that’s new.
The new verb sense seems to be just Kusaal and its closest relatives like Mampruli and Dagbani, whereas nouns based on the Dyula form have spread a good bit more widely (which, when you think about it, is further evidence that the verbal sense “write” is a local development.)
The adjective “black” itself is sabil- in Kusaal: I just recently came to the conclusion that the vowel must have been secondarily unrounded in the adjective in WOV: all the other branches testify to proto-Oti-Volta *cob- for both the adjectival and the verbal forms from the root.
Thanks! But then
So Kusaal sɔb “write” is not from sɔb “blacken”
isn’t exactly true, it’s both in unknown proportion…
Well, it’s true in the same sense that Kusaal ti’eb “heal” is not from ti’eb “prepare”; in the sense “prepare”, the verb was there all along, but it acquired the “heal” meaning from the similarity of sound to Arabic طب ṭibb “medicine.” (Except with “write” there were further steps: borrowing via at least two intermediate languages, and then reanalysis of the “raw” borrowed form to make sense of it in terms of Kusaal word-formation.*)
If I’m right about gbauŋ “book”, the relationship to gbauŋ “skin” is more direct: the local word already had the “surface” sense of صفحة ṣafḥa, and it just expanded its semantic range to match the Arabic word: no influence from any chance sound resemblance in that case.
* It may be more complicated with “heal”, actually. I suspect the verb meaning “heal” is a back-formation from the agent noun ti’eb “healer”, which occurs alongside tip “healer.” The latter form would be the expected outcome of *tibb- by ordinary Kusaal morphophemics. Ti’eb obviously sounds similar to tip, but considered as an agent noun, it is actually an irregular formation: you’d have expected *ti’ebid. There are a whole lot of Kusaal verbs that so regularly drop the usual agent noun formant -d- in the singular, but they are all stems ending in -s. So there would have been a further analogical step involved in interpreting the word ti’eb as an agent noun …
So Kusaal gbauŋ “book” and sɔb “write” both owe their existence to the Arabic صفحة ṣafḥa. I hereby declare that this idea is so pretty that it must be true.
But صفحة is a page/side/face of an object. I wouldn’t be surprised if some pidgin borrowed En. page rather than sheet or leaf in the sense “a piece of paper with text”, I’d rather asume that speakers go to school and read books.
But unless someone can confirm that صفحة is how people referred to “a piece of paper with text”, I’ll be less than confident.
(Which isn’t to say one can predict all semantical developments.
Btw, did anyone actually used leaves from an actual MS/mushaf of the Quraan this way?
I vaguely remember having heard about such things (that some famous manuscript was used this way), not in Africa. If i’m not confusing anything, then I certainly was surprised to hear it.
DE, I just realised that sɛ́bɛ́(n) means Both “amulet” and “to write” in Dyula.
But then this
The new verb sense seems to be just Kusaal and its closest relatives like Mampruli and Dagbani, whereas nouns based on the Dyula form have spread a good bit more widely (which, when you think about it, is further evidence that the verbal sense “write” is a local development.)
…isn’t necessary true.
No: I was referring specifically, in that context, to the new sense attached to the verb “blacken, darken.”
Almost all Oti-Volta languages have the “blacken” etymon, but apart from Kusaal and its closest relatives, none use it for “write”; and that includes languages which have representatives of the *seb-rɪ noun, like Buli, Gulmancema, Byali and Waama.
The (piece-of-)writing/amulet conflation is found all over in West Africa. It’s a folk-Islamic thing that’s spread well beyond orthodox Muslims. That’s not what I was referring to.
DE, got it.
I was thinking this:
– you said the verb “blacken/darken” took on the meaning “write” ‘from the similarity in sound‘ to the borrowing.
– I thought that it also can be true that the borrowing acquired the meaning “write” ‘from the similarity in meaning‘ to “blacken” (because of presence of a verb with this sound and the similar meaning “blacken/darken”). ***In other words, if Kusaal did not have such a verb, perhaps it would have borrowed in the sense “write” not sɛ́bɛ́(n) (here I use it instead of صفحة) but an entirely different word.***
In that case it’s difficult to say, which of the two words (borrowed form-meaning pair sɛ́bɛ́(n) “amulet” and Kusaal f-m pair “blacken”) contributed more. Thus your So Kusaal sɔb “write” is not from sɔb “blacken” isn’t exactly true, as I said, because “it’s both in [an] unknown proportion”.
– then I realised that sɛ́bɛ́(n) already means “write” in Dyula. This destroyed my reasoning.
It would be natural to assume that Kusaal borrowed sɛ́bɛ́(n) in both meanings and only gave them the precise shape of sɔb-sɔbir because of re-interpretation. ***In other words, if Kusaal did not have such a verb, perhaps it would have borrowed sɛ́bɛ́(n) in the sense “write”, but in a different form.*** (here *** instead of bold to mark parallelism. Why
doesn’t work on LH?)– And now you say (if I understand you correctly) that OV languages willingly borrow sɛ́bɛ́(n) only in the sense “amulet” but NOT in the other sense (to write). I wonder why.
Or it is just because only Mooré is in contact with Dyula? (that is Mooré accidentally did not borrow it in the meaning “write”, while other OV languages in absense of contact with Dyula have to borrow Mooré words?)
Also what remains unexplained is M. sébrè. Or not? Is it the expected result of borrowing sɛ́bɛ́(n) (dropping -ɛ́(n), adding -rè, tones)?
– I thought that it also can be true that the borrowing acquired the meaning “write” ‘from the similarity in meaning‘ to “blacken” (because of presence of a verb with this sound and the similar meaning “blacken/darken”)
That was what I thought myself originally. What got me reconsidering was noticing that Mooré actually doesn’t use “blacken” for “write”, and in fact the vowels of the “writing” noun differ from those of the “blacken” verb in Mooré. There’s also the fact that using “blacken” for “write” is actually very unusual, as Lameen implies. And then I noticed the Dyula word …
The form of Mooré sébrè is not surprising in itself. The -re is the singular class suffix corresponding to plural -a, and, as so often with Oti-Volta borrowings, its likely the borrowed form was actually fitted into the class system as a plural by analogy and then retrofitted with a singular. (The low tone on the suffix is as expected from Mooré morphophonemics: class suffixes are fundamentally high tone in WOV, but the tone dissimilates to low after a stem-final high: an instance of the celebrated Meeussen’s Rule, beloved by Bantuists.)
I mentioned Moba til “amulet” and Gulmancema tili “book” as examples of this retrofitting of singulars to plurals above. One from Kusaal is wada “law”, which comes from English “order” via Hausa oda. My chief informant had a singular wadir “law”, and the 1976 New Testament version extracted a stem form wad- for use in compounds, like wadtis “lawgiver.”
Fitting of loans into classes based on the analogy of their shape is very usual in Oti-Volta. A nice one in Kusaal is malif “gun”, plural mali, just like mɔlif “kob”, plural mɔli: it’s ultimately from the Arabic midfaʿ. And lɔr “car, lorry” usually has the plural lɔya, on the analogy of e,g, nɔɔr “mouth”, plural nɔya, but I have encountered lɔɔm “cars”, modelled on Mɔr “Muslim”, plural Mɔɔm.
“The Mooré word gʋ́lsè “write” is, boringly, transparently just a pluractional derivative of gʋ́le “scratch, decorate””
Isn’t “write a book” in English boringly, transparently, derived from “scratch a beech”?
I suppose it’s true that sɔb wouldn’t have acquired the meaning “write” if its original core meaning had been something too remote from “write”, like “forget” or “chew”, so to that extent, yes, the meaning will have played a part.
Similarly with “prepare” and “heal”: the extension to the original semantic range can’t be too drastic. Though if it were, I suppose you’d simply analyse the case as the ordinary sort of loan, sound and meaning together: and such loans do get adapted in form by analogy with similar existing words, too, so I suppose it’s a sort of continuum rather than an either/or thing. Calques at one end, completely unassimilated loanwords, even preserving foreign phonemes, at the other. And even the latter can drift in meaning from what they had in the source language. Life is complicated.
I suppose you actually need a two-dimensional plot to map it all out on properly. Sound resemblance along one axis, meaning resemblance along the other.
WOLD has this for Hausa r̃úbùutáa:
“I suppose it’s true that sɔb wouldn’t have acquired the meaning “write”” – my idea was that if in that case Kusaal would not have borrowed it in this sense at all, it would make both K sɔb and M sébrè necessary. Thus establishing hierarchy (“it is not from … , it is from … !”) becomes impossible.
There’s also the fact that using “blacken” for “write” is actually very unusual, as Lameen implies. – I’m not sure (twice). Derivations from “to paint” are VERY common.
“What got me reconsidering was noticing that Mooré actually doesn’t use “blacken” for “write”, and in fact the vowels of the “writing” noun differ from those of the “blacken” verb in Mooré.”
I don’t understand why this changes anything for relative contributions of (a) borrowing (b) “blacken”. It sounds like an argument against fully Oti-Volta etymology, but why is it an argument for priority of the borrowed word?
As for me, the situation is simply symmetrical: they borrow a concept and find a neat pair of Mooré sébrè “amulet” Kusaal sɔb “blacken” and form the new word based on both.
rubuʕ ‘to write’ Arabic
If I didn’t remember when WOLD came out, I’d assume this had been generated by ChatGPT. I remember posting a bunch of suggested fixes for some of the numerous little errors in the Kanuri and Hausa sections, which were duly ignored. Apparently, it wasn’t anything personal – their feedback form was broken and nobody had noticed.
Come to think of it, I posted a bunch of those corrections to my blog, including one about “write” in Kanuri: More on the WOLD Kanuri entry .
I look forward to seeing a Kusaal WOLD entry someday 🙂
it would make both K sɔb and M sébrè necessary. Thus establishing hierarchy (“it is not from … , it is from … !”) becomes impossible
Well, yes, if my idea is right, both Kusaal sɔb and Moorè sébrè are, indeed, both entirely necessary.
Perhaps I ought to clarify that I am not maintaining that Kusaal sɔb “write” is not, in some sense, derived from the Mooré sébrè: it really must be.*
What I’m doing is speculating about the mechanism of the borrowing. It is simply impossible that Kusaal borrowed a verb meaning “write” from Mooré: there isn’t any such Mooré verb. So Kusaal must have borrowed the noun sébrè, and adapted it into the more potentially-analysable Kusaal-friendly form sɔbir, interpreting it as a derivative of a previously nonexistent verb sɔb “write”: helped along, to be sure, by the fact that there was already an actual verb sɔb “darken” with a vaguely similar meaning.
Whether you call this a matter of Kusaal sɔb “write” being “from” Mooré sébrè or not, seems of little significance to me: it’s the way that the Kusaal is “from” the Mooré which is interesting. As I say, it is outright impossible for it to have been a case of Kusaal simply borrowing a synonymous Mooré word: there isn’t any such word to borrow.
* You could, I suppose, claim that it is pure coincidence that Kusaal has a verb sɔb “write” that just happens to resemble all these “specimen of writing/amulet” words you can find in the neighbouring Oti-Volta languages that have the noun in question, but don’t have any verb sob- or seb- meaning “write.” I mean, it’s logically possible …
I tend (as the more observant Hatters may have noticed) to have a somewhat Kusaalocentric view of Oti-Volta, but on thinking about this, it seems likely that of Kusaal, Mampruli and Dagbani, which all have this “blacken/darken” verb, it’s actually much more likely to have been created in Mampruli or Dagbani, “Imperial” languages of the Mossi-Dagomba kingdoms, than in Kusaal, the language of the independent-minded and determinedly pagan Kusaasi.
That could actually shed some light on the word in question: Mampruli and Dagbani belong to a subgroup of Western Oti-Volta in which non-final short *e has become /a/: so you have e g. Kusaal lɛb, Mooré lèbe but Mampruli labi, Dagbani labi “return.”
That means that Dagbani sabili “Muslim writing, amulet” and Mampruli sabri “talisman” both actually correspond completely regularly to Mooré sébrè.
Now, in Dagbani, “blacken” is sabgi and “write” is sabi, and in Mampruli, “blacken” is sɔbgi, while sɔbi is “darken” and “write”, just like Kusaal sɔb.
Sporadic a/ɔ alternation before labial consonants is very common in Western Oti-Volta, unlike a sporadic change of e to ɔ; in fact, “black”, the adjective, has sab- everywhere, even though the WOV “blacken” verbs and the cognates outside WOV show that the vowel was originally *o.
So it looks to me like the reanalysis of the “(Muslim) writing” word as a form of the “darken, blacken” verb sab-/sob- actually happened in Dagbani or Mampruli, and Kusaal borrowed it. That would make a lot more sense than the word diffusing south: as I said above, the Mamprussi and Dagomba are much more influenced by Islam than the Kusaasi, that that goes with literacy.
I see that Naden’s dictionaries of Dagbani and Mampruli actually tentatively suggest صفحة ṣafḥa as the origin of sabili and sabri, though without all this background speculation I’ve just invented about intermediate Dyula forms (I don’t think Naden is very familiar with Mooré.)
Once more, I am fascinated by all the Oti-Volta nitty-gritty!
(Oti-Volta Nitty-Gritty would make a good title for the popularizing work you turn to after the scholarly grammar. Just sayin’.)
@Xerîb:
Thanks for that comment about ṣ-ḥ-f!
My intuitions about plausibility fail yet again …
As Hat says: “Reality is always more complex and unpredictable than we can imagine.”
Oh yeah, I meant to mention that Xerîb’s comment (August 27, 2024 at 2:55 pm) was held up in moderation for far too long — apologies to all!
Speaking of صفحة “page” (the specialised meaning prominent in modern but not classical Arabic where it means just a “flat side” of something) and صحيفة (all sorts of meanings related to ‘sheet’):
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/صحفة
صَحْفَة • (ṣaḥfa) /sˤaħ.fa/ f (plural صِحَاف (ṣiḥāf)) (Classical Arabic) large bowl, plate, dish
Formally from the root ص ح ف (ṣ-ḥ-f), but related to ص ح ن (ṣ ḥ n), ص ف ح (ṣ f ḥ). Compare also Qatabanian 𐩮𐩢𐩰𐩩 (ṣḥft) and Minaean 𐩮𐩢𐩰𐩩 (ṣḥft) meaning a moat or lower part of a fortification.
Heberw has שְׁחִיף עֵץ šǝḥîp̄ ʽēṣ ‘a strip of wood’ (Ezekiel 41:16). Targum Onqelos has שַחַפתָא šaḥap̄tā ‘tuberculosis’, repurposed in Modern Hebrew as שַׁחֶפֶת šaḥefet. I am not sure if the this is a cognate, i.e. if š≠ṣ can be explained away.
Then there’s צַפַּחַת ṣapaḥat (1Sam 26:11, 1Kg 17:16), ‘a vessel for liquids’, one of these flattened bottles or flasks. Rabbinical Hebrew has צַפִּיחִית ṣapîḥît, something like a cookie or a flat cake. Modern Hebrew used the root for צִפְחָה tsifḥa ‘slate’, later ‘schist’.
Syriac has ṣpḥʾ ‘plate, dish’.
Y: Modern Hebrew used the root for צִפְחָה tsifḥa ‘slate’
Surely not coincidentally similar to German Schiefer. Does that make it a semantic extension or an eggcorn borrowing?
Surely an eggcorn borrowing, a.k.a. phonosematic matching, a.k.a. camouflaged borrowing.
Yeah… I was thinking that a true eggcorn borrowing is what we see in Kusaal: a borrowed word gets identified with a native soundalike. The Modern Hebrwe is the other way around: you derive a form from native roots and borrow a meaning from a foreign soundalike.
Not exactly. In the case of Hebrew borrowings the meaning is perfectly native. It’s just that you pick a sound and a meaning which happen to match the European sound and meaning.
One German example I saw somewhere is Seite, in the sense of ‘web site’. It might be an unremarkable generalization of the sense ‘web page’, but the impetus for picking it instead of some other metaphor is its similarity to the English.
At least that’s what I read. I don’t know if Seite is still used to mean ‘website’, as opposed to just ‘web page’.
zuckermann calls this “phono-semantic matching”, and analyzes it here in reference to ivrit, kemalist turkish (should we say “türkiyish”?), and lects that use chinese characters (mainland and taiwanese mandarin, the kanji layer of japanese).
I got the German example from this article, by Mailhammer.
Thanks to all for reminding me of the useful term “phonosemantic matching”, which for some reason I keep forgetting.
“Eggcorn borrowing” is better, though. However, it may be unsuitable for the elevated rhetorical style of my Kusaal grammar, once I’m sufficiently comvinced of my own ineluctable rightness to incorporate some of this in the chapter on loanwords.
Come to think of it, it might be an idea to say something about loanwords in Proto-Oti-Volta for the Uninterested as well. Good to actually explain why an obvious POV reconstruction like *seb-dɪ “amulet” is perhaps not really justifiable despite all the spot-on sound correspondences (I’ve seen one or two fairly obvious Hausa loanwords duly reconstructed to certain protolanguages it would be unkind to single out …)
“Is better” for Pullum’s fans.
Definitely not for me. It’s that annoying word that people use all the time on LH and I neer can remember what it means (and too lazy to read the story behind it once again).
Perhaps that’s because of my weird English (I rather associate it with “eggplant”), or because the word itself is not a borrowing but another modification of the PG word.
Or maybe native speakers too need to remember the story to understand and remember its meaning – then it is good as a jargonism/inside joke, but not good as a scientific term even in English context. (Please refer to Chomsky for “jargonisms and inside jokes used as scientific terms”. c-command is coined to replace kommand. ععععععع)
I’m all for scientific books written in informal convrsational style because it makes them easier, not more difficult to read and understand.
However, it may be unsuitable for the elevated rhetorical style of my Kusaal grammar
Also, drasvi doesn’t like it. Say no more.
DE, I did not say I don’t like it. (You did not say you like it either – you said it is “better” and that’s what I’m objecting too)
I never can remember what it means. It is quite different: not aesthetics, it just does not work for me.
Does Welsh car (car) count as phonosemantic matching? It derives from the same Celtic root as the English word does (through Latin and French), but maybe some other word would have been applied to the automobile if it hadn’t exactly matched the English.
“cranberry [compounds etc.]” is instead misleading. WP says: “…, this cran actually comes from crane (the bird), although the connection is not immediately evident”
I in turn associate it with crane and need to think for a minute to realise that the absence of -e and the diphtong are somehow wrong:))))))
🎵 Drasvi don’t like it
Mock the eggcorn, mock the eggcorn 🎵
Well, if one of you comes to Mogadishu and manages to explain to local students why this English name is better for them than “phono-semantic matching”, I’ll concede that it is usable (though likely they will say so because it is shorter and may change thier opinion after writing and defending their PhD dissertations).
@Keith Ivey:
Welsh car is still a good bit broader in its semantic range than (modern) English “car”: it encompasses horse-carriages, carts and sleds too, for example. So car modur would have been the natural thing to call a motor car even without the English expression suggesting it, I think. In fact, it’s difficult to see what else you would have called one in Welsh.
Is “emoji” an example of grammo-semantic matching?
DE, on the other hand is not clear why English speakers retained “car” instead of coining or borrowing something (like bil, or auto or machine). And as long as we don’t know this, we can’t rule out the possibility that the same factor determined the Welsh choice.
@drasvi: I don’t understand that point – Latin carrus never meant “automobile”, so English didn’t choose car because it sounded like a foreign word denoting “automobile”. They just selected a word denoting a conveyance for the compound motor car and then dropped the motor. The Welsh process was probably the same (DE will correct me if I’m wrong), the question is whether that just was a parallel process (Welsh chose car for the compound because it was the best available term) or because English had chosen a similar-sounding word. The latter could only be excluded if Welsh car meaning “automobile” were attested long before English car meaning the same. And I think it was both; factors enforcing each other – it was the natural word, and it sounded like the English equivalent. Reasons for social developments don’t have to be “either – or”.
@Jerry Friedman: Undoubtedly. Most smart phone chat programs convert emoticons into emoji by default now. If you’re lucky, the program lets you turn that off.
Hans, my point is that
“car (not an automobile)” > “motor car” > “car (automobile)”
is just one possible approach (comparable to French voiture / German Wagen).
Nevertheless speakers of most European languages either prefer words derived differently (e.g. auto) reserving words in the spirit of voiture/car/Wagen for special contexts, or did not follow that path at all (Russian).
Assuming there was some factor that made this option attractive for English speakers, if the same factor worked for Welsh speakers, the question whther it is borrowing or parallelism can become meaningless. So my point is the same as yours.
Speaking about Celtic words for motor cars, Wiktionary mentions Latin autoraeda (GB says “suggested by Antonio Bacci”)
It is well documented that Danish automobil > bil happened as the result of a reader’s suggestion in Politiken on March 14, 1902. It was copied into Swedish with attestations the same year, so the time was clearly ripe. But if somehow only the spoken language survived, this would probably be dismissed as a folk etymology. Or left without any explanation.
TIL that in early usage, Danes were “on” a car (på en bil). But then cars in 1902 were mostly roofless, I think. Now Danes are “in” their cars (i en bil).
Lars, also: https://fo.wiktionary.org/wiki/bilur (the list of translations below the main entry).
In en.wikntionary this list also has Elfdalian bil. Yes, unsurprisingly. You would have guessed other languages.
But note the horrifying bus and autobus from omnibus from Latin. It is Latin dative plural morpheme, it is not a vehicle!!! What next, ī for a 1 person teleportation kit? (In my head those modern omnibuses/omníbusy and autobuses/avtóbusy differ in stress from Latin ómnibus)
_____
And speaking of weird names, Egyptian Arabic: عَرَبِيَّة f (ʕarabiyya) – either I did not know or have forgotten it (the word is identical to the literary name for an Arab woman and language and Arabness in general and to the feminine “Arabic”, but comes from an oriental word for a wheeled vehicle of unclear etymology). Why -iyya? What they did not like about ʕaraba and why ʕrb is so overloaded with meanings?
@drasvi: How do you feel about “tandem” for a “bicycle built for two”?
a “bicycle built for two”
That might be a “sociable” — although I’d suspect (trying to) ride it would rapidly lead to unsociable behaviour. Then you might try a “companionable” — not strictly a bicycle because it had 4 wheels, but did feature riders side-by-side — and for which the interwebs are not delivering an illustration [**].
The C19th featured many designs for multiple-rider ‘bikes'[***]/velocipedes. A term was necessary for those with the riders ‘at length’/with one’s nose up the bum of the another rather than in a more socially equable arrangements.
[**] I see the interwebs do advertise “side-by-side tandem” bikes. tsch tsch the decline of Latin.
[***] I suppose drasvi is going to object to ‘bike’ on the grounds it’s also etymologically bogus.
to object to ‘bike’ on the grounds it’s also etymologically bogus
Indeed. Bad as “television.”
(Mind you: a barbarous name for a barbarous invention. There is a pleasing aspect to that.)
The Greeks, purists as they are, call the thing τηλεόραση.
(They have ποδήλατα instead of bicycles, too. Velocipedes …)
Kusaal lɔr, Mooré lórè, Nawdm lɔ̀ɔ́r̀, Gulmancema lòlì, Moba lúól̀, Ncam dilool “motor car” allow us securely to reconstruct proto-Oti-Volta *lô-dɪ́ “motor car.”
Waama has lost the native word (one would have expected *doore), and uses suka “horse” instead.
Kabiye lɔɔɖiyɛ “motor car” suggests that the word may go back to Central Gur, but I am not aware of any likely proto-Bantu cognates. Swahili gari cannot be connected, for example, nor Lingala (mo)tuka. Tentatively, we can conclude that the introduction of automobiles postdates the Bantu expansion.
Does not this mean that you can’t really tell a proto-OV word from an innovation?
(something easy for IE but very difficult for Semitic, where it is absence of derived words and extra meanings rather than a word’s shape that often indicates a borrowing)
I was thinking about the old-fashioned mostly (?) British use of “motor” as an alternative shortening of “motor car,” when I remembered that Charles Williams used the odd locution: “There were motors, cars, or buses…” in Descent Into Hell in 1937.
Between remembering that line and getting around to posting this comment, I also got to thinking about the Inklings. In particular, I wondered a bit how Hugo “not another fucking elf” Dyson got along with a group of fantasy authors: Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, Eddison, Owen Barfield, and Roger Lancelyn Green among them. Maybe the answer is just that while the fantasy writers are the best remembered today, they and their work were really a minority in the group.
Does not this mean that you can’t really tell a proto-OV word from an innovation?
Hardly. I’ve just written a whole lot of comments claiming that you can.
Absence of the expected language-internal derivational relationships works in Oti-Volta as well as Semitic. That’s the very thing that got me started with Mooré sébrè …
Lɔr “car”, though it makes a nice joke, even if you ignore the unlikely-for-POV meaning, doesn’t work as an inherited word really on purely formal grounds. I suppressed, for example, the inconvenient Buli logri “car.” And it actually isn’t possible to relate the Kabiye form to the others “genetically” without Ruhlen-level indifference to regular sound change.
No criterion is infallible. In fact, the one you mention doesn’t always work in Arabic: ṣ-ḥ-f has plenty of associated derived forms modo Arabico. And Mampruli-Dagbani-Kusaal have created a perfectly consistent language-internal derivation for “Muslim writing, amulet.”
Evidence for borrowing in Oti-Volta often turns on the absence of expected morphological relationships. I mentioned Kusaal malif “gun” above. There are actually a lot of obviously connected forms in Mooré and Dyula obligingly leading back to the Arabic original, but even if there weren’t, and even ignoring the unlikely-to-be-inherited meaning, there is a formal giveaway with this word within Kusaal itself. Nouns with root /a/ in that class pairing always show umlaut to /i/ in the plural in WOV: so the plural should be mili, not mali.
It’s this same umlaut phenomenon that marks the “money/cowries” word as a loan (presumably from WOV) elsewhere in Oti-Volta. This umlaut is regular in WOV and Buli/Konni, but not seen elsewhere: so e.g.
Kusaal naaf pl niigi “cow” but Nawdm naag̈b pl naagi.
The WOV umlaut is often backported to the singular: Kusaal ma’an pl ma’ana “okra”, beside miif pl miini “okra seed”, where *maaf “okra seed” has been ousted by a form with the umlaut from the plural.
Then you have e.g. Mooré lágfo “cowry”, ligdi “cowries, money” but Moba líglb̂ pl líglî, Waama díkítífā pl dikitii. These vowel relationships can only be made sense of by invoking a specifically WOV sound rule which is completely absent in Moba and Waama.
Just to teach me a lesson about how difficult this question can be, I just noticed this:
Proto-Oti-Volta “six” can be pretty solidly established as *-dobɪ, vouched for by all the WOV languages, Buli/Konni, all the Gurma languages, and Mbelime.
However, although Yom/Nawdm go their own way, the Eastern Oti-Volta languages apart from Mbelime have
Byali hà̰dwàm
Ditammari kūà
Nateni kɔ̄dì
Waama kparun
and I’ve just noticed that these can all be ascribed to a POV root *kpad- by known sound developments per each language: the Byali and Waama forms also seem to share a suffix *-mʊ, and this sporadic appearance of what appear to be random noun-class suffixes on number words is a common thing in Oti-Volta (the Eastern languages have all added that same suffix to “five”, in fact: Mooré -nú versus Byali nùm.)
Moreover, these changes (like the perfectly regular Byali initial *kp -> h) are presumably fairly old.
And the neighbouring Miyobe, which is not Oti-Volta but seems to be a close relation, has kpùùlù, where the kp and l are the regular correlates of POV *kp and *d in cognates.
So is this “six” etymon a loan? If it is, it must be quite old, but then, you’d expect that, as people have been counting up to the hundreds in those parts for a long time.
There’s no obvious source for it if it is a loan: the nearby Grusi languages have lʋɖʋ (Lama) and loɖo (Kabiye); Dendi has the usual Songhay ìddú; and Baatonum has nɔbatiya, transparently “five-one.”
@rozele: … ivrit, kemalist turkish (should we say “türkiyish”?)…
If we say “Ivrit”, we should probably say “Türk dili” or “Türkiye Türkçesi”. (I got both of those from Wikipedia.). I say “Hebrew” and “Turkish”, though I’m being talked into saying “te reo Māori”.
@David Eddyshaw: So what is the origin of all those related-looking words for “car”? I thought it was going to be British “lorry”, but the inconvenient Buli word is inconvenient for that too.
No, you’re right: it’s “lorry.”
The Buli is odd, but I think I can concoct a partial explanation.
Various Oti-Volta languages have all happily taken the -ry of “lorry” as the singular noun class suffix of the commonest non-human gender/class-pairing. That was *dɪ in proto-Oti-Volta (cognate with the proto-Bantu Bleek-Meinhof sg class 5 prefix *dɪ-, hurrah!) That turns up variously as -ri/-re/-li/-le in the modern languages, as -r in Kusaal, -re in Mooré.)
In Buli, however, the suffix has become -i (via -yi) by regular historical sound changes. So you have, for example, Kusaal nɔɔr, Mooré nóorè “mouth” but Buli nóai. So the English word doesn’t fit smoothly into the class system in Buli in the way it does elsewhere. I think this accounts at least for the additional degree of mangling: the specific form perhaps owes something to Buli ligri “money.” Kröger’s dictionary gives the plural as loora and says there actually is a singular variant loori.
@JF: (with apologies to folks who’ve heard me rant on this before here)
i follow zuckermann in understanding the lect devised by the zionist movement as both linguistically distinct and historically discontinuous from the lects that have evolved continuously from biblical hebrew through the 19thC literary lects that it defined itself against and sought to supercede (and the current literary lects used outside the zionist sphere in the responsa literature and elsewhere). the counterarguments i’ve heard to his analysis basically amount to “but it has an internal ideology that says it’s the same”, which, well, abraham lincoln had a dick joke about that rhetorical move.
i think that since ivrit is a separate beast that’s been living and evolving with a speech community of its own (some of it bilingual in lects of the continuous hebrew lineage) for over a century, it’s well overdue for the respect of a name of its own. i like “ivrit” better than zuckerman’s “israeli”, because i prefer endonyms over state-oriented names (and hope that the lect will long outlive the state it was created to nation-ize).
to my eye, something quite similar applies to the lect developed after the kemalist revolution: it’s historically and linguistically distinct (though perhaps more similar to its predecessor than ivrit, since ottoman turkish was an everyday vernacular), and very much alive. i’m hesitatant about “türk dili” or “türkiye türkçesi” (and indeed about “türkiyish”) : the first seems like it could apply as appropriately to a lot of other lects; and i’m reluctant to identify the lect primarily with a state as the other two do (though like ivrit it exists because of its role as part of a state’s nation-izing project). and what i’ve heard it called in the balkans – “istanbul turkish” as opposed to “macedonian turkish” – also seems off, given what the kemalists thought/think of tsargrad. so i dunno.
Hebrew/Ivrit/Israeli has come up here a number of times, here, here, and elsewhere.
I have to say, as one who whose mother tongue is H/I, it doesn’t bother me if it is referred to as Ivrit, especially not by my colleague here. I don’t like the term “Israeli” specifically because I associate it with the Zuckermann brand.
The Zuckermann of whom y’all speak is the Ghilad edition, is that right ? Not Moshe. [Just trying to follow along at home, with only WiPe as helpmeet.]
you’re quite right, Stu!
i shoulda clarified.
How cunning you are, rozele ! If you had given the full name, I would have been none the wiser – since I knew of neither Zuckermann. Now I know of both, albeit superficially.
Enquiring minds want to know – that’s not sufficient. Those minds need to get off their butts and do something about it.
“…on purely formal grounds…”
@DE, aha, thanks!
“…doesn’t always work in Arabic…” – of course it does not. And we certainly should NOT expect every Semtic langauge to have a hundred derivarions from every (actual) PS root. Often it is going to be 0. Or 1. Or 2. With this method you can’s assign to a claim “…is a borrowing” or “…is not a borrowing” a probability ~0.001. It will be just “likely”, and this “likely” will be supported by known use of the root in the same meaning in Aramaic.
@rozele: Thanks for the explanation. I’m not qualified to discuss whether Israeli Hebrew is separate enough from older forms (including current… theological Hebrew?), but I must say I think other forms are equally entitled to be called Ivrit.
What was Lincoln’s dick joke?
In Russian:
eврей: an old Biblical borrowing, “a Hebrew man” became just the main word for “a Jew”
жид: an old borrowing, “a Jew” became “a Jew (offensive, regional)”
accordingly
еврейский came to mean “Jewish [theatre, …” and can refer to both Yiddish and Hebrew (not to speak about all other Jewish languages).
For “Hebrew” there are two competing names: древнееврейский “Old Jewish” and ivrit.
New Canaanean:)
@DE: Thanks, things are fitting together a bit.
New name/adress http://authorscalendar.info/
Thanks, I’ve added an update to the post!