It’s time to play Biblical Crux once again! (Cf. Daughter of Greed, from 2019.) I’m reading Mikhail Shishkin’s 2010 Письмовник (‘Letter-writing manual,’ translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark) despite the concerns about Shishkin’s novels I expressed here, and so far I’m enjoying it (though already there’s a worrying amount of “Oh how I love you! I can’t live without you!” — Shishkin seems to think that’s pretty much what women’s mental life amounts to). In form the novel is epistolary, with alternating letters from a man and a woman, and at one point the woman writes: “Я была уродка из семейства плеченогих, крыложаберных и мшанок. А она — хоровод Манаимский с глазами, как озера Есевонские, что у ворот Батраббима” [I was a freak from the family of brachiopods, pterobranchs, and Bryozoa; she was the dance of Mahanaim, with eyes like the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim]. I knew about Heshbon (though it’s annoying that Bath-rabbim redirects to that page, when there’s no mention of Bath-rabbim there), but what was this dance of Mahanaim?
It turns out that at the end of Song of Songs 6 or the beginning of 7, depending on the tradition, there’s an obscure passage about “the Shulamite” which doesn’t seem to have attracted many commentators. I haven’t done a deep dive, but the only discussion I’ve found that’s neither antiquated (like Thomas Robinson’s) nor amateur/popular (like Archie W. N. Roy PhD’s) is by J. Cheryl Exum, who just died last year; in her Song of Songs: A Commentary, pp. 225ff., she writes:
[6:13 (7:1 H)] The woman is asked to “return” or come back, presumably from the nut garden, and probably not simply, as Murphy proposes, to turn around and face the speaker. Some scholars understand the verb to refer to turning or whirling in a dance, but the verb šwb does not have this meaning. J. G. Wetzstein’s observations of nineteenth-century Syrian marriage customs, which included a sword dance in which the bride was surrounded by women and men in two groups, led some earlier interpreters to conclude that the woman is here performing a sword dance, but this anachronistic thesis is nowadays rejected (and according to Wetzstein a man might also dance the sword dance; “Remarks on the Song” by Wetzstein can be found in an appendix to Delitzsch’s commentary). Pope proposes reading šĕbî or šēbî for MT šûbî, and translates rather unpoetically, “leap, leap,” in order to produce a dancing Shulammite. The assumption that 6:13–7:6 [7:1–7 H] describes a dance rests primarily on the obscure phrase k/bimḥōlat hammaḥănāyim (“like/in the dance of two camps”) at the end of v. 13, for nothing in the following description of the woman indicates that she is dancing or that a group of people is watching her dance.
We encounter here the Song’s characteristic blurring of past and present: the
story of the visit to the nut garden is recounted as a past event, whereas the
woman is called back in the present, so that the description of her begun in 6:4
can continue. […]In the reply in 6:13cd the speaker could be either the man, the woman, or the women of Jerusalem. If the women are the speakers who ask to gaze upon the woman in v. 13ab, then perhaps the man responds here in v. 13cd by asking why should they want to gaze as well. But how could they resist, since he has been tantalizing them (and the poem’s readers) by cataloguing her charms? More likely, in my opinion, v. 13ab is the man’s request to see and v. 13cd is the woman’s reply.
But what is the meaning of her reply? The reply begins with an interrogative particle, mâ, which normally means “what?” but can occasionally have the sense of English “how” (in the sense of either “in what way?” or “how much, to what extent?”/“how [much]!”) or “why?” (see DCH V, 150b). […]
One reason the reply is hard to understand is that the comparison to meḥōlat hammaḥănāyim (here translated “the dance of two camps”) is difficult to fathom. If we understood its significance, it would be easier to determine whether the speaker demurs at or approves of the request to look. Will those who look be gazing in awe, as they would at something spectacular? Or will they be looking with curiosity or disdain (so Fox, who revocalizes and sees the reference to “a common dancer who roams the camps of the soldiers”; see also Gerleman)?
Commentators are generally agreed that v. 13cd [7:1cd H] is a comparison, though some read “in the dance” instead of “like the dance,” with a number of Hebrew manuscripts (e.g., Bloch and Bloch). A few see “the Mahanaim dance” as the answer to the question, “What would you see . . . ?” (Delitzsch, Krinetzki 1980, Rudolph; so also Ginsburg and Gordis, translating “like a dance to double choirs” and “the counter-dance” respectively), but this involves positing different speakers in 13c and 13d, and nowhere else in the Song is a couplet divided between speakers. Since the phrase begins with k (“like”) or, in some mss, b (“in”), it is difficult to see how it could be the answer to the question. It is preferable to take the entire phrase as a simple comparison (Murphy 1987: 117): “How you gaze upon the Shulammite as you would gaze upon the dance . . . !”
Meḥōlâ is a dance, though it may designate a performance that includes singing and musical accompaniment as well as dancing (Ginsburg). LXX and Vg., both of which render “choruses of camps,” may have had instrumental and vocal accompaniment in mind (so Pope), for both Greek choros and Latin chorus can refer to dancers and singers.
Mahanaim is the name of a town in Gilead near the Jabbok River. David camped there when he fled Absalom’s coup (2 Sam 17:24–27; 19:32 [33 H]), but Mahanaim is perhaps most famous as the place where Jacob was met by messengers or angels of God. His exclamation, “This is the camp of gods/God!” provides an etiology for the name Mahanaim (Gen 32:2 [3 H]). Some translations read the name here in our verse (e.g., NIV, “as on the dance of Mahanaim”), but as a place name it does not appear to have any significance for the meaning of the verse. As a common noun, the word refers to an encampment, either a military camp or a company of people (see DCH V, 222a). The form in MT is a dual, “two camps” or “a double company.” Perhaps maḥănāyîm, “a double company,” indicates a performance with antiphonal music, dancing, and singing, and possibly ritual games as well (Sasson 1973: 158; see also Pope). The mention of “the dance of two camps” does not mean that the woman is dancing. She does not refer to herself as dancing but rather compares the interest of the onlookers to the interest that the dance of two camps would excite (Murphy 1987: 118). The point of the comparison appears to be that beholding the woman is as mesmerizing as watching a spectacle that arrests one’s undivided attention. The woman is elsewhere compared to grand, awe-inspiring sights, such as Jerusalem and Tirzah, the sun, moon, and dawn (6:4, 10).
Note that the KJV has “the company of two armies,” and various other versions are listed here (scroll down to the end, at “‘the dance of the two companies’ This is a very uncertain phrase! Several theories have been postulated”); the modern Russian translation (7:1) has Shishkin’s “хоровод Манаимский,” while the Church Slavonic one (also 7:1) has “лики полкѡвъ” (something like ‘chorus of armies’). I trust someone out there has thoughts about all this.
I like (without finding it at all plausible) the suggestion (in the next page visible to me in Exum’s book) that the word “Shulammite” might be based on an epithet of Ishtar’s. That would give quite a different vibe to the Song … (As Gilgamesh rightly points out, Ishtar’s lovers have a tendency not to get happy endings. Ishtar does not take this well. But sometimes the truth hurts …)
The Kusaal version of the first part of the verse neatly illustrates that the vocative is marked by an enclitic attached to noun phrases, and not by a noun flexion: “O Shulammite” is rendered fʋn kanɛ an Sulam teŋ nida “you who are a Shulam-land person”, where nid “person” regains its (normally dropped) final vowel before the (invisible/inaudible) vocative enclitic.
The bit in question is just rendered
Bɔ ka ya bɔɔd ye ya gɔs Sulam dim pu’a la
nwɛnɛ onɛ wa’ad banɛ gɔsid la sʋʋginɛ?
“Why do you want to look at the Shulammite woman like someone dancing among those who are looking?”
which tends to make me go “Say what?”
The Mooré version goes
Yaa bõe tɩ y rat n ges Sulamit-poakã
wa sul a yiib neb sẽn tigim taab n saoodẽ?
“Why do you want to look at the Shulammite woman like people from two groups who have gathered together for dancing?”
The Vulgate has
quid videbis in Sulamite nisi choros castrorum?
“What will you see in the Shulammite but performers of the camps?”
I bet you say that to all the girls …
I personally would be tempted to render that “…but a chorus of Castros.”
These versions read to me like the girl saying she’s not just some kind of entertainment dancer/sex object, but I admit that this is likely to be an illegitimate importation of rather modern concepts into an ancient text …
Maybe Ishtar is here exploiting her sexuality to lead one of her mortal lovers to his inevitable doom … (if I recall correctly, one of them ends up as a bird with a broken wing …)
The dual is not used in Biblical Hebrew simply to express two of something, but only for natural pairs (like “hands.”) So הַֽמַּחֲנָֽיִם hammaḥănāyîm can’t just be “the two camps” (pace the translators of the Mooré version.) If it’s not a toponym, it must have some sort of technical or idiomatic sense.
I have nothing to say to clarify meḥōlat hammaḥănāyim, but just notice that Russian хоровод is not just any dance. English translation is “khorovod”, but “circle dance” is good enough assuming that we don’t know what they danced at king Solomon’s court. By the way, two-line circle dance seems to fit Song 7:1 reasonably well. Maybe ancient Hebrews were Moldovans?
Meholdovans.
> The dual is not used in Biblical Hebrew simply to express two of something, but only for natural pairs (like “hands.”)
Or Egypts.
I can heartily recommend reading all the commentary on verse 7:1a–d on pages 595–614 in Marvin H. Pope (1977) Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (= Anchor Bible vol. 7C). The discussion of 7:1d and maḥănāyim in particular begins on p. 601. The Internet Archive has borrowable copies here and here, and of course, scans are available in the digital jianghu.
It’s very hard for me not to interpret מחנים as “two groups of dancers opposite each other”, probably by its archaic-but-somewhat-known usage in Modern Hebrew, so this discussion kinda fascinates me.
By the way, you do realize that the Heshbon/Bat-rabbim quote is from the same chapter in Song of Songs, right? I haven’t seen this noted here.
The Light and the Dark
Song of Solomonm
Do not gaze upon me for I am dark
Todesfugue
Dein guldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Shulamit
Perhaps unrelated, but it struck me.
The passage may be obscure, but the Shulamite is the subject of the whole book of Song of Solomon.
Marvin H. Pope
It is indeed interesting: thanks!
(tl;dr: nobody knows.)
The Ishtar suggestion for the name “Shulammite” has apparently quite a pedigree: including suggestions, based on Akkadian parallels, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benno_Landsberger
who is worthy of remembrance, among other reasons, for interceding, after the war, on behalf of Wolfram von Soden, the great Assyriologist and active Nazi ideologue who had engineered Landsberger’s own dismissal from his chair at Leipzig.
There’s also a lot about the even more bloodthirsty Canaanite goddess Anat; much of all this it trying to tie in the beautiful Shulammite with this mysterious Double-Army Dance.
Not that my amateur opinion is of any significance, but, myself, I think the toponym explanation is the most plausible. Mahanaim was a significant place, and the article before the name in the text can be explained as implying that the dance (the preceding construct) is definite.
The only real counterargument seems to be that there is no other reference to a Mahanaim Dance, but given that so much else of the background to the Hebrew Bible is lost to us, that doesn’t strike me as a very cogent objection.
Mind you, that still doesn’t tell us whether looking on the Shulammite as a Mahanaim Dancer is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing.
I suppose that question turns on whether מַֽה־תֶּחֱזוּ֙ means “why do you look?” or “how you look!”
There’s an example of the exclamatory use of מַה in the very next verse: מַה־יָּפ֧וּ “how beautiful …”
All the examples of this usage before a verb that immediately come to mind involve verbs of quality, like this case, and e.g. Isaiah 52:7. But this must have been looked at properly.
The few examples of exclamatory use of מַה given in Waltke and O’Connor’s Biblical Hebrew Syntax are either of it preceding an adjective or what seem to me to be rhetorical questions rather than exclamations, though I suppose the boundary is fuzzy.
Kusaal lacks this main clause type completely: it has statements, questions and commands, but nothing like “How beautiful you are!” Verse 7:1 in Kusaal goes fʋ nɔba vɛnl nɛ ta’ada hali “Your feet are very beautiful in sandals.”
@Ryan
or sexes?
the even more bloodthirsty Canaanite goddess Anat
On a first read I took this as “even more bloodthirsty [than Wolfram von Soden].”
CGEL (pp918ff) points out that in English, exclamatory “how”, whether before an adjective, degree determinative, adverb or verb, is always concerned with degree:
“How tall they are!”
“How they deceived her!”
“How I hated it!”
CGEL also points out that there is no ambiguity between exclamative clauses and interrogatives in actual speech; sadly, the Masoretes, insanely clever and meticulous as they were with their prosodic marking, don’t provide any way of distinguishing the two clause types by intonation (and even if they did, their interpretation of the consonantal text would just be like, their opinion, man.)
The Hebrew exclamative construction with מַה is of course not necessarily exactly the same as the English with “how”; however, FWIW, a “degree” sense seems difficult to read into the Hebrew מַֽה־תֶּחֱזוּ֙ in that context. Reads like a question to me.
The other English exclamative construction uses “what”, as in “What a friend we have in Jesus.” I’m not sure that מַה can be used like that, but in any case such an interpretation wouldn’t fit in this verse.
If the clause is a question, it seems to me that there is then an implicature that seeing the Shulammite as being like a participant in the Double-Army Dance is a bad thing.
I want it to be a battle between the soldiers of two camps. You can’t look away. The image is no more incongruous than the tower of David and the army with banners, and opposing camps might be as natural a dual as Ryan’s example of Egypts. (I’m probably prejudiced by the use of “dance” for “duel” in Steven Brust’s pastiches of Dumas, Sabatini, and the like.)
The Egypts are Upper and Lower, and the pairing (though not the Semitic name itself) in referring to the entire kingdom is based on the actual native Egyptian usage. So it actually is an instance of a natural pairing. (I was going to include it in my original comment, along with “hands”, but decided it was a step too far into dubious relevance, even for me.)
Another weirdo apparently-dual toponym is ירושלם “Jerusalem”, which is pointed as Yerushalayim by the Masoretes, but that one seems to be due to a late mangling of unclear origin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Jerusalem
The consonantal text doesn’t (usually) write it as a dual.
Following Xerîb’s recommendation (in it’s underhanded manner) I looked up Pope’s commentary. If nothing else, it is exhaustive, even acribic, but the conclusion is still “dunno” (as DE already discovered). I liked his translation of the first quarter-line of the verse “Leap, leap, O Shulamite!”. Quite absurdly reminded me of “Hoopsa, boyaboy, hoopsa!”
Thanks, I didn’t know that Upper and Lower Egypt were treated as a pair in Egyptian. But I’m suggesting that two is the prototypical number of sides in a fight, so a dual would make sense for two opposing camps. Maybe if I knew a significant amount of Hebrew, I wouldn’t see it that way.
But it makes me wonder about the origin of the dual suffix in the place name Mahanaim. A garbling like that in Yerushalayim (which I also didn’t know about) would be boring, but…
Rudolf Meyer’s Hebräische Grammatik points out that “Altkan. [basically = Ugaritic] wendet den Dual auf jede Zweizahl an.” There are also a few traces of a less restricted use of dual in Hebrew.
The account in Genesis 32 says that Jacob called the place Mahanaim after he met angels of God there, and when he saw them, said מַחֲנֵ֥ה אֱלֹהִ֖ים זֶ֑ה “This is the camp of God.”
It isn’t altogether obvious to me why this makes it two camps; the Kusaal Bible has a helpful (if not altogether accurate) footnote to “Mahanaim” saying Li gbin anɛ, ‘Buudi Ayi’ La’asʋg Zin’ig’ “Its meaning is, Meeting place of two kinds of people”, which seems as likely an aetiogical explanation as any. Seems to be the usual modern exegesis, anyway.
“Mahanaim” is spelt as a dual (or plural) in the consonantal text, unlike “Jerusalem.”
On formally dual toponyms, it occurs to me that they may easily date from a period when (pre-)Hebrew still used the dual more freely than in Biblical Hebrew, as in Classical Arabic; that is to say, not just for “natural pairs.”
Thinking about it, I suppose that if you accept the Masoretic pointing as a dual in the verse here, that actually (weakly) supports the idea that we’re looking at a toponym here. A fossilised use of the dual.
[Ninja’d by ulr.]
A few spelling corrections:
Todesfuge
…
Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt
der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete
Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei
er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde
er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz
…
A fossilised use of the dual
Alternatively, as the consonantal text could be plural*, you might argue that the Masoretes interpreted an original “dance of the camps”, where “camps” is just plural, as “the dance of Mahanaim” and pointed accordingly.
A plural original would also match the Vulgate, and (more to the point) the LXX’s
τί ὄψεσθε ἐν τῇ Σουλαμίτιδι; ἡ ἐρχομένη ὡς χοροὶ τῶν παρεμβολῶν.
Possibly the Masoretes felt that “camp dances” were a bit off-colour?
* Apparently both מחנות and מחנים are attested as plurals of מחנה “camp.”
A manuscript note (from about 1960) by Celan regarding the name Sulamith:
Incidentally, although מחנה is used for “host”, its primary sense seems definitely to be “camp, encampment.” (And it derives from חָנָה “decline, bend down, encamp.”)
A speculative idea that occurred to me was that there was originally a single convenient natural campground which was divided by some natural barrier — either a ravine or a ridge. Thus, camps (dual).
WikiP:Mahanaim says that the place may have been destroyed by Shishak, so it’s been defunct for 3000ish years. There is a tell that has been suggested as having been the location, but who can say for sure?
WikiP has multiple pages for different usages of the term with different transliterations — This article [Mahanaim] is about the Biblical location. For the kibbutz, see Mahanayim. For the organization, see Machanaim. For the game, see Machanayim.
Is there any scholarship out there on why sky (or skies) (shamayim), water (or waters) (mayim), and teeth (shinayim) sound like they are dual despite not obviously being natural pairs?
In “water”, at any rate, the y historically belongs to the root:
https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D
It’s still a peculiar formation, but the resemblance to a dual is obviously accidental.
Wiktionary says the dual form of שן is used to refer to the full set of teeth because you have an upper and lower set:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A9%D7%9F
According to Meyer: the word for water is an old one-syllable stem *may < *maw with a reduplicated plural *maymay (the reduplicated form still exists in the Masoretic st. constr.). A new singular (dual-looking) *maym was derived from that plural. In the Amarna letters it occurs in the contracted form mema/mima (Samaritan Hebrew kept the contracted vowel, unlike Masoretic Hebrew).
In other words, just like the name Jerusalem, these are non-dual forms that simply by historical accidents came to look like a dual.
With “water” and “sky”, yes: but shinnayim seems to be an echt dual just used for a reason which is not immediately obvious until the rationale is pointed out. (The expected plural shinnîm turns up too.)
šinnayim supposedly comes from a reference to the two rows of teeth (Upper and Lower, if you will.) There’s also mēʿayim ‘intestines’, the plural of mǝʿī.
There are a number of things that can be singular or dual (or plural) depending on how you look at them (or what you’ve had for breakfast.)
“Sledge” is dual in Yup’ik IIRC.
Which gives me a pretext for appealing to the Wisdom of the Hattery:
Kusaal kurig “a pair of trousers”, plural kuris, and what is probably its immediate source, Mooré kuirga, plural kuirsi, look like back-formations from Dyula/Manding kulusi/kurusi “pair of trousers”, taken as a Western Oti-Volta plural and given a regular analogical singular.
One of the dictionaries says of kulusi “emprunt de: arabe”, but I’ve long since learnt that the dictionaries are by no means reliable in either identifying loanwords or attributing them to the right sources.
Kulusi/kurusi doesn’t seem to have any obvious etymology within Manding though; and it does have a vaguely Arabesque look about it.
Any ideas from our experts? (You know who you are …)
Pasadena!
Skies (neuter sg. caelum, but masculine-looking plural caeli!) are a natural pair in Latin – originally “sky/heaven and Earth”, an “elliptical dual” like Castores “Castor and Pollux”, Ἀίαντε “Ajax and his sidekick Teucer” and last but not least dyā́vā “sky/heaven and Earth”.
(The paper starts halfway down this page and is in Italian. There used to be an English draft available, but no longer.)
David E.: I like (without finding it at all plausible) the suggestion (in the next page visible to me in Exum’s book) that the word “Shulammite” might be based on an epithet of Ishtar’s. That would give quite a different vibe to the Song …
Isn’t Shulammite a feminine form of Salomon? Doesn’t that count for anything? If she is a member of the royal household, that might explain why gazing on her like a common dancer would be improper.
(To open a different road to confusion, Norw. hele Sulamitten (< old Bibl. transl. Sulammit) is a fixed expression meaning “the whole lot”. Ordbokene.no says it’s from old Christian traditions interpreting Sulammit as referring to the whole church/community of Christians.)
Could the archaic toponymic dual be based on “in [dual]” meaning “between” = “among, immersed in, inside”? If so, the Mahanaim dance could simply be the unsubtle performance of the prostitutes in an army entourage.
Isn’t Shulammite a feminine form of Salomon?
That’s also discussed extensively in the Pope book. He also brings in Salome (who is, sadly, unnamed in the Gospels.) She probably counts as a worthy avatar of Ishtar and/or Anat.
unsubtle performance
Between my feeling that מַֽה־תֶּחֱזוּ֙ is interrogative rather than exclamative, and the possibility that מְחֹלַ֖ת הַֽמַּחֲנָֽיִם actually does mean “dance of the camps”, consistent with the consonantal text, Vulgate and LXX, I’m inclining to think that my original naive take that the Shulammite is objecting to being taken for that kind of girl is perhaps not wrong. Despite the steamy lyrics elsewhere, she does also insist on that too.
Reminds me of my favourite among those one-line-no-setup jokes:
“Not in the fridge, Salome!”
The Light and the Dark is also the title of one of the two best novels in C P Snow’s often ho-hum Corridors of Power sequence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_and_the_Dark
The main character it’s concerned with is a Cambridge academic specialing in Manichaean texts (geddit?)
With remarkable insensitivity, Snow clearly based him on a real acquaintance, who was killed in the war, and who, unlike his fictional counterpart, was not manic-depressive and lacked several unpleasant traits that Snow foisted on the character (though he is presented positively overall.)
I liked Pope’s 19 pages on this verse. BTW, as an undergraduate, Pope accidentally signed up for a Hebrew course, then decided he might as well stay with it, and the rest was history. He was one of the great authorities on Ugaritic, and his prose here is nice too (“The interpretation of šûlammîṯ as a variant form of šûnammîṯ relates the word to the town of Shunem through its supposed variant Shulem and thus, willy-nilly, to the fervid and beautiful Abishag who ministered to King David as a human heating pad in his chilly senility and later was the prize for which the hapless Adonijah forfeited his life.”) I will nitpick him on one thing, though. On p. 601 he implies that mĕḥolôṯ is the plural of mĕḥolâ. More likely it is the plural of māḥôl, which would make the occurrence here of mĕḥolâ (in the construct case) a hapax legomenon. That said, I don’t think this changes the likelihood of any of the interpretations of the word one way or another.
(I think Pope’s similar book on Job has many misinterpretations, but then so do all the others.)
“Sledge” is dual in Yup’ik IIRC.
And plural in Russian.
“waters” being in the dual is in line with Bereshis, where the dividing of the primeval tohubohu into waters above and waters below is the key second move. that doesn’t say anything about whether the division is to justify the dual or vice versa, but it would be a little odd for the dual not to show up in the word, given the mythology.
Incidentally, I remember being told in Hebrew school that shamayim is from sham ‘there’ and mayim, so it means ‘the waters there’ in the sky, which can fall as rain (and make the sky blue?). Wiktionary just says prosaically that shamayim is “From Proto-Semitic *šamāy-.”
The waters above and the waters below show up in the story of Noah too.
> It isn’t altogether obvious to me why this makes it two camps
Wiki:
Later in the story, Jacob is moved by fear at the approach of his brother Esau (whom he has reason to fear) and as a result divided his retinue into two hosts (two companies
Although when I actually consult Genesis 32, the usage for the two parts of his retinue is plural mahanot rather than dual mahanayim. And he divides them after the supposed naming of the site.
Skies (neuter sg. caelum, but masculine-looking plural caeli!) are a natural pair in Latin
Which – surprise, surprise – looks like what a neuter dual would look like if it had survived in Latin.
Duals surviving longer in paired nouns is also a phenomenon known from Slavic. OCS still uses the dual for any two things; in later stages it gets limited to paired items. The dual forms that survive in the modern languages as irregular plurals are all of paired items (Polish examples: ręka – ręce “hands”, ucho – uszy “ears”, oko – oczy “eyes”), sometimes contrasted with regular plurals (oka “fat droplets on soup”).
About meḥōlat hammaḥănāyim/מְחֹלַ֖ת הַֽמַּחֲנָֽיִם — the term “meḥōlah” was completely obscure to me. Looking at it naively, I noted the resemblance to maḥalah; “disease; illness”. The only “dance” term that comes easily to my mind has the root rqd, and I haven’t seen most of the variety of terms used in the bible. ¹
Wiktionary reassures me that the root, ḥul, is archaic. But the definitions are interestingly more detailed: “to writhe, whirl, tremble, dance”. The entry links to Strong’s 2342, which says more fully:
Hm. Given that Song of Songs was erotica, it certainly looks like an erotic dance involving writhing and trembling and twisting (maybe what could be called “gyrating”, in modern English?) and whirling was intended — which makes me think of bellydancing. Which provokes an additional thought: could “the two camps” be a playful circumlocution for the two breasts (“divided by a ravine” — or a cleft, one might say), or to the breasts (as one camp) and the hips (as the second camp), which would presumably be writhed and trembled and gyrated?
And thus a followup thought:
Perhaps “מַֽה־תֶּחֱזוּ֙” would be better Englished as “How you ogle!” There’s your “degree” of looking/watching.
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1: I note that what King David did, for example, when he “danced before the Lord” in 2 Samuel 6, was “מְכַרְכֵּ֥ר”, mecharker and “מְפַזֵּ֤ז”, mefazzez. ²
2: Hm! Could pizzazz have come from a reader of biblical Hebrew? As Gesenius notes, “This root seems to have almost fallen into disuse amongst the Hebrews, and by many to have been forgotten, so that the writer of the Chronicles thought it necessary to interpret it in two places by other verbs which were better known.” That is, 1 Chronicles 15:29, when describing what King David did, has miraked and misachek, which are both recognizable even to me as more common Hebrew terms for “dancing” and “playing” .
3: Perhaps the root word is indeed related to the word for illness after all? I am also reminded of T Kingfisher: “I made faces like the ones on the rocks, and I twisted myself about like the twisted ones . . . ” — but I doubt that the author of Song of Songs was going for horror.
Now that I’ve read it, I see shamayim is actually in the paper – and compared to the Egyptian dual pty “heavens”, written with a double ideogram. Latin freni and rastri are also in there, all on the same page (664).
While I first read it in T. Kingfisher, she was of course quoting from Arthur Machen. Credit where due.
Arthur Machen was very good at it. He seems to be rather out of fashion nowadays, and he deserves to be read more.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/389
SPOILER(ish)
Near the end of The Great God Pan is a bit which perfectly captures his combination of pretend scholarship and slow-burn horror, though the horror comes almost entirely from its connection with what precedes:
Machen; maḥănāyim. Coincidence? I think not …
WP on The Great God Pan: “Machen’s story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and consequently sold well, going into a second edition.”
Personally, I think people liked it because of the Latin. You can never have too much proper Latin in genre fiction.
M. R. James?
Let’s not forget “Quis est iste qui venit” and furbis, flabis, flebis.
Yes indeed. There is definite similarity in other respects, too.
But Machen is much more unsettling. One of the eponymous Three Imposters is introduced like this:
What she (never named) is implied to get up to in the course of the novel … well, her Homeric epithet about her “piquant” expression becomes more and more disturbing …
There’s an interview with Machen on YT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxJ_CCWUXMo
“I remember G.K. Chesterton once remarking on the difference between Dickens and Thackeray…”
Machen denounces the Picture Theory of Meaning …
(Well, kinda.)
The truest poetry is the most feigning.
[Though one can only agree with Machen regarding a Dickens vs Thackeray Celebrity Novelist Deathmatch, I must say that nobody ever met a Becky Sharp, either. Vive l’Empereur!]
The close look at the details distracts from a broader point: who is speaking in this verse? The book mostly consists of monologues, addressed by the woman to the man, the man to the woman, and the woman to the Jerusalemites — her girlfriends, I’d call them — plus the woman to the city guards in 3:3. This verse is the only exception. Are those the Jerusalemite women talking to her? Someone else? And who is the one talking back to them? The man? Someone else?
Neither Exum nor Pope are of help.
BTW the Jerusalemite women are addressed in 3:5 with the masculine אֶתְכֶם ʼetḵem, not the expected feminine אֶתְכֶן ʼetḵen. Weird. Maybe it’s a sign of later language? Mishnaic Hebrew was getting sloppy about gender in the plural. Someone has probably looked at it.
Exum goes into that at length, but I didn’t quote it.
I had a look, but missed it somehow.
So is ציפורניים ‘fingernails’ due to the two sets of… hands?
IDK… the dual “teeth” idea comes from Dhorme, L’emploi métaphorique des noms de parties du corps en hébreu et en akkadien (p. 87), and he just puts it out there. Maybe both the teeth and the nails are duals by analogy? But then, why are some body parts not expressed as duals, including eyebrows, eyelashes, lungs, and kidneys?
I vaguely recall a paper linking the fact that paired body parts in Semitic languages are usually feminine (even if not marked as such morphologically) with the dual, but I’ve forgotten the details. (And also forgotten the author; John Huehnergard?)
A recent treatment of this topic is Na‘ama Pat-El (2025) ‘The Gender of Paired Body Parts in Semitic’, pp. 631–660 in Interconnected Traditions: Semitic Languages, Literatures, Cultures—A Festschrift for Geoffrey Khan: Volume 1: Hebrew and the Wider Semitic World, available here.
Looks interesting. Thanks.
I see that the suggestion about feminine gender being associated with dual marking is a venerable one (Bauer, 1914!) I must see if I can trace the paper I was thinking about.
No quarrel with Pat-El’s Semitic facts (and she knows vastly more about it than me), but I think her presentation of the cross-linguistic typology of gender and classifier systems is very questionable.
(My emphasis.) It’s one thing to say that gender/class assignment is not totally predictable on semantic grounds, and quite another to claim that it’s random.
It is not remotely true that systems with extensive agreement lack semantic content cross-linguistically.
To take a family that does “gender” better than practically any other:
In the sense used by Bantuists, a “gender” is a pairing of morphologically-marked singular and plural noun classes (or a single class with non-count semantics) which induce agreement in dependents, anaphoric pronouns, and verbs. This is really exactly the same kind of feature as Semitic (or Indo-European) gender: just with more genders.
(Volta-Congo gender markers may have developed from classifiers in the distant pre-proto-Volta-Congo past, but certainly do not constitute a “classifier” system synchronically.)
In both Bantu and Oti-Volta there are definite associations between meaning and gender* (there’s quite a literature on this in Bantu.)
No Oti-Volta language lacks recognisable correlations between gender and meaning, and in no Oti-Volta language is gender completely predictable from meaning. The fact that Oti-Volta languages have at least five genders, and sometimes a dozen or more, doesn’t mean that the system works in a totally different way from Hausa or Semitic, with a mere two genders.
And just because Semitic has only two genders, it by no means follows that semantics is solely relevant to gender assignment in the case of the sex of people and higher animals. In fact, this is not the case even in Semitic, and the idea that Semitic would be a “unicorn” among languages with gender if other semantic features than sex affected gender assignment is nonsense.
Pat-El concedes that “foot”, “hand”, “eye” and “ear” are, in fact, feminine across Semitic despite being morphologically unmarked, but simply declares that this not only needs no explanation, but cannot have an exclamation – because it’s “random.”
* In most of Western Oti-Volta, and in a few Bantu languages, agreement has been lost, and the old genders are consequently now purely morphological noun classes – “declensions”, effectively. But that doesn’t affect my point.
Women, fire and dangerous things …
I have some dim memory that Uralic languages do odd things with some paired body parts, so that “one-eyed”, for example, comes out as literally “half-eyed.”
We have at least one Uralic expert amongst us …
Is this sort of thing in Uralic seen only with a few prototypically paired body parts (such as “eye”, “ear”, “hand”), or all paired body parts?
(What I’m wondering is whether an association between dual and feminine in Semitic might be similarly limited.)
… cross-linguistic typology of gender
Huh? the system that organises nouns into inflectional classes is called, um, noun classes. There’s a separate system that regulates agreement with other parts of speech. Sometimes (in some languages, at some points in their history) the two systems line up, other times not. Sometimes nouns denoting biological sex line up with the regulates-agreement system, in which case it’s reasonable to call that ‘Gender’.
We shouldn’t expect a priori that a language has a Gender system, or noun classes, or that biological sex has much to do with either.
Describing something as “assigned … randomly” suggests Pat-El has approached some language with pre-determined categories, found that doesn’t fit, then ‘blamed’ the language.
No, there are two different issues involved.
What she’s saying is that for it to be a “gender” system in the technical linguistic sense, there has to be grammatical agreement. That is quite correct: that’s how the term is used. That’s not what I’m disagreeing with her about.
You can have a class system which doesn’t command agreement. That’s happened in e.g. Kusaal and Lingala, both of which have kept their inherited gender morphology, but abandoned agreement. In cases like that, the label “gender” is often kept, in honour of the historical origin of the system, but that is sloppy usage and is Bad. (In my Kusaal grammar, I call the ex-genders “noun-class sets”: you still need some term other than just “noun class” because of the way the classes form singular/plural pairs.)
But all of this is orthogonal to the question of the semantic associations of such grammatical genders.
As rozele has often pointed out, the technical grammatical usage of the word “gender” is unfortunate, because it is more or less bound to confuse the formal grammatical sense with biological sex; this confusion is all the worse, because biological sex of the referent really is very commonly the single most reliable semantic predictor of grammatical gender, especially in languages with only two genders.
However, contrary to what Pat-El’s paper implies, biological sex is never the sole semantic factor involved in grammatical gender assignment, even in languages with only two genders.
Moreover, there are grammatical gender systems (entirely correctly so called, in the technical linguistic sense) in which biological sex is totally irrelevant, as is the case throughout Volta-Congo. And it’s irrelevant in the Algonquian languages too, even though they only have two genders.
In fact, Pat-El seems to have fallen prey to the very confusion that rozele warns about …
The supposed opposite of something like a grammatical gender system (leaving aside purely morphological things, like declensions) is a classifier system, as in Chinese.
But in fact, it’s a mug’s game trying to draw clear dividing lines. The correct classifiers can’t always be predicted by pure semantics, even if semantics tends to be more helpful than in SAE grammatical gender systems. It’s a question of degree, not either/or.
And classifiers can be used in something which looks pretty much like agreement. The Amazonian language Bora has literally hundreds of classifiers; they can be compounded with roots to form derived nouns, and are used extensively in reference tracking, just like third person pronouns. You could, I suppose, say that the language has hundreds of genders, but that way, madness lies …
Further outright mistakes regarding gender in the Pat-El paper:
Many African languages can manipulate grammatical gender for affective purposes (“dear little X” etc.)
Everything after “namely” is straightforwardly (and embarrassingly) wrong, and based on supposing that all gender systems are like SAE. They aren’t.
(Hebrew omitted in the following.)
Paired body parts in the dual: horns, eyes, pupils (later interpreted as eyelids), ears, nostrils, lips, cheeks, shoulders, wings, breasts, loins, hands, buttocks, thighs, knees, calves, ankles, legs/feet.
Paired body parts in the plural: eyebrows, eyelashes, temples, ribs, nipples, lungs, kidneys, ovaries, testicles, arms, elbows.
Multiple body parts in the dual: teeth, intestines, nails/claws.
Multiple body parts in the plural: hairs, fingers, toes.
(Probably missed a few.)
Oh, and gums are dual too, like teeth, supporting the idea of “two rows”.
Why aren’t ribs and eyelashes in the “multiple body part” category?
@hans
Maybe eyelashes are thought of as two distinct physically connected blocks, one for each eye (like teeth) For ribs, did this ever mean something more than just the entire set of ventral rib bones, i.e., “bones and flesh assembly” (or the vertebrae could have been a dorsal “rib”)?
That was just my arbitrary decision.
Well, synchronically it’s random. In deep prehistory it may have had straightforward explanations from semantics, morphology or phonology.
I’ve read a paper or two on German gender assignment. They acted as if there was no prehistory and all gender assignment was happening right now. Blatant failures of peer review.
Gender is unique as a feature: unlike number, each noun normally has only one value and it has no access to other values; in other words, it is invariant
Since the collapse of the inherited grammatical gender system, Kusaal has a “natural” gender system, contrasting animate with inanimate. Nɔbir “foot” is, unsurprisingly, inanimate. However,
the Kusaal version of 1 Corinthians 12:15 goes
Nɔbir ya’a yɛlin ye, “Man ka’ nu’ug la zug, m ka’ niŋgbiŋ la nii,” lin kʋ nyaŋi kɛ ka o ka’ niŋgbiŋ la nii.
“If a foot were to say, ‘Because I’m not a hand, I’m not in the body’, that could not cause it not to be in the body.”
“It” is rendered by the animate pronoun o, because the foot has just been represented as speaking.
Similarly, in Algonquian languages, grammatically inanimate nouns (which are morphologically marked as inanimate) can take animate agreement if presented as initiating actions.
In Kusaal, whether you refer to a tree with animate or inanimate pronouns depends on how much of a traditionalist you are …
It is, of course, also untrue that all nouns can appear in more than one number, as a moment’s reflection should reveal. And in Volta-Congo languages, number and gender marking are both expressed by the very same system. And in the Cushitic relatives of the very Semitic languages themselves, number and gender are intimately connected.
Well, synchronically it’s random.
Sure: but that’s not what Pat-El is talking about. She’s denying a particular historical explanation of how the current gender assignment came about.
(She is also tending to confuse synchronic and diachronic points, now you bring that up.)
I don’t think enumerating a lot of Semitic words for paired body parts which are not consistently feminine across the family disproves the idea that the words for the highly visible paired-par-excellence body parts “eye” etc may owe their consistently feminine gender across Semitic to duality.
She did say “each noun normally has only one value”. (Italics added.)
Of course, in English, machines and such can be “it” or “she”, animals can be “it” or “he” or “she”, and I’m sure there are other examples.
Edit: On birding field trips, I sometimes refer to a bird we’re watching as “he”, and I hear people doing the same… occasionally, at least for less experienced birders, even when they’ve been told the bird is female.
Somebody has probably studied which animals can get animate pronouns in English. Do they have to have a head with eyes?
I should probably add, about the people who call female birds “he”, that I don’t know how much attention they were paying when someone said the bird was female.
She did say “each noun normally has only one value”
True. But I think “normally” is doing a lot of work there. In effect, it means “except when it doesn’t.” Fair enough; but she then goes on to use this as if it were in fact a universal rule.
Volta-Congo languages regularly (not exceptionally) tweak the grammatical gender (properly so called) of stems, sometimes in ways which it’s reasonable to call “derivational” (for example, turning verb stems into nouns); however, calling it derivational in all cases seems to me to be imposing an analysis modelled on SAE. For example
Swahili: mtoto “child”, kitoto “little child”;
Mbelime: sēēdè “house”, sēēkɛ̀ “hovel”; tīèbù “tree”, tīèkɛ̀ “bush.”
You could declare that these are all simply different words, but the Swahili prefixes and Mbelime suffixes here are compulsory gender markers, found in all nouns whether “derived” or not, so this is simply dodging the question. Gender alteration alone is involved in these pairs, and the affixes just reflect the gender.
To undermine my own point a bit in the comment I made previously, I think you can make the case that the “natural” gender system in current Kusaal is not really a gender system at all. Only pronouns make the animate/inanimate distinction, and my example from Corinthians could be taken as showing that the choice is completely determined by the pronoun context, and nothing actually to do with anaphora: nouns have no intrinsic gender of any kind.
By analogy: Turkish, an entirely gender-free language, nevertheless distinguishes the interrogative kim “who?” from ne “what?” But it would be absurd to try to use this distinction to classify Turkish nouns into animate and inanimate genders. Kusaal makes this distinction not only in interrogative pronouns, but also in personal, demonstrative and indefinite pronouns; but surely the same argument can apply?
I think this works for Kusaal; not sure if similar arguments could be made for other languages with “natural gender”, like English. “Natural” gender may be a more inalienable property of particular lexemes in some languages. (Perhaps one could cheat and declare that such a system was, by that very token, actually one of “grammatical” gender after all.)
But my Algonquian example still stands: the system in Algonquian languages is certainly grammatical, not natural gender (despite having very strong semantic correlations.) And even in such cases, agreement can be ad sensum at times, rather than in accord with the formal system.
Well, my own gut feeling, which I will just put out there, is that teeth being bilaterally symmetrical across the midline is more salient than their being in upper and lower sets. Prove me wrong, Dhorme!
One gut or two?
the dual “teeth” idea comes from Dhorme, L’emploi métaphorique des noms de parties du corps en hébreu et en akkadien
Dhorme’s work appeared in 1923, but this idea is already in Brockelmann (1908) Grundriss vol. I, p. 422 here, §227.B.b, in the middle of paragraph b. And Brockelmann is doubtless relaying the idea from somewhere else. His reference to Schöpf. there is to Enūma Eliš :
Describing Marduk preparing to attack Tiamat. Akkadian šinnā-, presuffixal form of nominative dual šinnān.
Among the listed Hebrew duals, the usage for intestines is curious to me. Has that section of the gut always been conceived as being divided into two parts — small and large? Illustrations online that seem intended to be true-to-life do make clear the contrast in shade, shape and size. And they show relative consistency through the parts of the small intestine, so the small/large distinction does seem like the primary natural distinction, while the other named parts, duodenum, etc., seem like lesser distinctions, at least visually.
But almost all the other dualities are similar in shape and size, symmetrical and opposed. The relationship between small and large intestine seems so different. The large to me looks like the hair and beard to the small intestine’s face.
How do others interpret the duality there?
Would Hebrew refer to the fingernails on one hand using the dual? I’m assuming that the dual implies all 10 fingernails. Does one still use a plural to refer to smaller numbers of fingernails? What if you were referring to a smaller but still parallel and symmetrical set, like “my thumbnails”? (Not sure I’ve ever referred to my thumbnails as a pair distinct from the others, but it must happen sometimes?)
If your kid lost three teeth, would you use the dual with the numeral? Google translate suggests you would. That seems quite odd to me. “A pair of three teeth.” It has me wondering to what degree speakers recognize this as a dual, or just re-analize it as a type of plural. (Which might be appealing given the formal similarity to the masculine plural?)
In Biblical Hebrew, at any rate, morphological duals of normally-paired things can have plural reference: cf Isaiah 6:2 שֵׁ֧שׁ כְּנָפַ֛יִם “six wings.” (Note that, despite having no feminine ending, כָּנָף “wing” is usually feminine, as here. Just sayin …)
I want that to mean 12 wings. 🙂
Ryan: The dual is used for any number of fingernails or toenails or claws from two up. The plural form is never used (in Modern Hebrew tsipóren is ‘nail’ but also its homophone ‘carnation’, and only for the latter you might use the plural.) Likewise with teeth. To me they just sound like plurals, though their form is dual. The dual is unproductive in the modern language, except in literary jokey contexts, and was mostly unproductive even in Biblical Hebrew.
Thanks, Y. I was thinking of asking the same question—”a plate of chicken wings” and such.
Oh, and: in the modern language shoes, socks, boots, galoshes, and pants are dual, but sleeves and gloves are plural. This may reflect dual knees and calves vs. plural elbows and arms.
An illustration of how semantics and grammatical gender interact in Volta-Congo (I’ve used Kusaal as my example language even though the noun-class sets no longer actually function as agreement genders, because the noun morphology is still just the same, and thus the semantic associations are still visible):
The great majority of Kusaal body-part nouns (of people or animals) belong to the singular -r(ɛ) plural -a(a) noun-class set (formerly, “gender.”) This is a bit of a default (ex-)gender for inanimate-reference nouns, but even so, the pattern is strong enought to be significant, and is clearly not accidental or “random.” Moreover, nearly all tree-fruits belong to the same gender, so there’s a clear “parts of living things” pattern going on.
There are only a few exceptions, but two of them evidently also go with the semantic-allocation principle: it’s just that they’ve been seduced by a different semantic lure. They’re nif “eye” and sunf “heart”, which belong to the singular -f(ɔ), plural -i(i) (ex-)gender. This has two clearly evident semantic cores: animals, and “small round things” (including all seeds.) [This odd conflation has come about because of a partly phonologically-driven fusion between what were originally two separate genders: they remain separate in most of Gurma.]
“Heart” has not been completely seduced: some speakers say suunr, and all speakers use sunya for “hearts.”
Sianif “kidney” also belongs here, because it’s been folk-etymologised as “waist-eye.”
One of what I originally took to be the two other exceptions is zug “head.” I just realised that I was wrong about the other: the word for “belly” is in fact pʋʋr, plural pʋya, which conforms to the general rule. What I had been confused by was the existence of the much commoner pʋʋg “belly”: but I’ve belatedly realised that in virtually all instances of this it is either used as a postposition “inside”, or is used metaphorically for “pregnancy.”
And that in turn sheds light on zug “head.” The cognates of this word in Gurma and Eastern Oti-Volta all belong to the “regular” body-part gender. But what’s distinctive about zug is that by far its most frequent use is as a postposition “on, onto, because of.”
The singular suffix in zug is -g(ɔ): one of the semantic fields associated with this suffix is “places”, e.g. Kʋsaas(ɛ) “Kusaasi”, Kʋsaʋg(ɔ) “Kusaasiland.” So its appearance in a noun used as a locative postposition is quite natural. (Incidentally, Swahili, like most Bantu languages, has several locative genders.)
[The constant use as a postposition may also account for the short vowel of zug, which is unexpected. The Mooré cognate of pʋʋg also has an unexpected short vowel.]
Kusaal kurig “a pair of trousers”, plural kuris, and what is probably its immediate source, Mooré kuirga, plural kuirsi, look like back-formations from Dyula/Manding kulusi/kurusi “pair of trousers”, taken as a Western Oti-Volta plural and given a regular analogical singular … One of the [Dyula] dictionaries says of kulusi “emprunt de: arabe”
I thought of consulting Naden’s Dagbani dictionary, which is never shy of suggesting Arabic origins for words, and found under kuriga, plural kurisi “trousers”:
(Dunno who SB is.)
While it would please me greatly to discover that the Kusaal word for “trousers” was a Romance loanword mediated via Arabic, sadly, I don’t buy either of these (though the sg being backformed from the pl is plausible.)
“Sock” strikes me as a semantic step too far from “trousers”; the vowels are Very Wrong, and neither word forms a handy broken plural beginning ku-; all the Western Oti-Volta forms speak for medial r, not l; and if Wiktionary is to be believed, كلسة is “North Levantine”, which is a long way from the action where WOV is concerned:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%83%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%A9
Moreover, the Manding word seems to be specifically Dyula, and not e.g. Bambara, so it may well be borrowed from Mooré, rather than vice versa.
Admittedly, كلسون has the right meaning, more or less, but there is still the problem with the vowels (and the dropped -u:n, and the WOV -r-) and the question of how the word would have got to West Africa if it’s really just Levantine Arabic.
(And how it would have got to Western Oti-Volta, specifically, if the Dyula kulusi is actually borrowed from Mooré. As far as I can tell, it’s not in Hausa or Songhay.)
(Dunno who SB is.)
This must be Sergio Baldi (2008) Dictionnaire des emprunts arabes dans les langues de l’Afrique de l’Ouest et en Swahili, who based himself on André Prost (1983) Inventaire des mots d’origine arabe passés dans diverses langues de l’Afrique de l’Ouest in his treatment of this particular group of words, I believe. And Prost probably based himself on Delafosse (1929) La langue mandingue et ses dialectes : Malinké, Bambara, Dioula, p. 93, §98 (here), who offers an Arabic etymon kulūs, which I have not been able to trace elsewhere in a brief search.
In his revised English-language version of this work, Dictionary of Arabic Loanwords in the Languages of Central and East Africa (2020), Baldi omits this West African group of words for ‘culotte, pantalon, saroual’.
an Arabic etymon kulūs, which I have not been able to trace elsewhere in a brief search.
Thanks, Xerîb. That’s very helpful.
I think there is some reason to take the Western Oti-Volta words as home-grown. I’m currently working on the origin of WOV stem-internal *r, which is actually only preserved as a distinct phoneme from /d/ in Mooré, Talni and Agolle Kusaal, but was certainly there in proto-WOV. Some instances are clearly old loanwords (like the burkina etymon, from Songhay), but others probably arose from *Ci̯ historically. The Mooré kuirga could go with that: there are other cases where a *i̯ seems to have undergone metathesis with a preceding consonant, like Mooré tòɛɛngá “beard”, plural toeemse, where the cognates are pretty much unanimous in showing that the original root must have been just *tom or *tem. (When cognates are available for comparison, Mooré Vi̯ diphthongs nearly always turn out to have arisen from proto-Oti-Volta *Vd, but there is no trace of a POV *d in any of the cognates of tòɛɛngá.)
How far West does Baldi’s coverage extend in his English-language version? Does he leave out even Hausa and Kanuri?
Sounds like the French 2008 book might be worth my while.
Isn’t that Greek (κάλτσα)? Or, wait, maybe the Greek is a borrowing.
From Italian calza (“sock, stocking”).
There’s a related term καλσόν — ah, but that’s from French caleçon also. Hm. it says “boxer shorts, boxer briefs” rather than “(men’s) drawers”. And “Borrowed from Italian calzone“, itself meaning “(usually in the plural) trousers, pants” from “From calza (“stocking, sock”) + -one (augmentative suffix).”
Well, if the Italians can do it . . .
I think the Greek meaning (tights/pantryhose) gives a hint as to how it happened — in modern times “socks” and “trousers” are two distinct items, but there was presumably a pullover garment that covered the feet, legs, and waist that was considered an overgrown pair of socks while physically resembling trousers.
(I knew that “calzone” meant something pants-related, but for some reason I thought it was “diaper”. Gotta remember that — you get trousers, not diapers, from the pizza store.)
Akismet is displeased by calzones.
I have wrested the calzones from Akismet’s greedy grasp.
Yeah, I’m prepared to concede the point on the socks/trousers thing.
My main problem is the unconvincing sound correspondences and the lack of any confirmed representatives of the calzone in languages that might realistically have transmitted the word to Western Oti-Volta.
Irrelevant, except that it involves the same etymon and irritates me perhaps rather more than is altogether rational:
Naden’s dictionary perpetuates the error that the Kusaasi personal name Akudug “Akudugu” is based on this kurig “pair of trousers” word.
While a Kusaasi personal name could in principle be based on almost any noun:
(a) the name in Agolle Kusaal certainly has -d- not -r- (they fall together in Toende Kusaal)
(b) the form of the name before a negative enclitic is Akudugɔ, whereas in that same context “pair of trousers” is kudiga
(c) the tones are wrong for the name to be based on kudig.
(d) I went to the trouble of actually asking a bearer of the name what it meant
In fact, the kudug element the name is based on means “piece of iron, nail.” As a common noun, the word has been ousted by what is historically its plural form kut, mysteriously misspelt kʋnt (i.e. /kʊ̃t/) in the Bible translation. Maybe that’s how the Young People of Today say it …
The reason someone is called “Iron/Nail” is that they have the win “spiritual individuality” of a tree as their sigir “spiritual guardian.” The “nail” is question is one that is actually driven into the tree in question to mark this connection.
“Mr Trousers”, forsooth …
I must concede that even though “Trousers” is not an actual Kusaasi personal name, “Shirt” is …
Afuug “Afugu”, where fuug is commonly used for “shirt”, but also has the broader sense “clothing.” It’s a birth-circumstance name, given to a child born with a caul.
It just dawned on me that all the relatively newfangled* singulars that German has been replacing pair-plurals with are feminine: Hose “pair of trousers”, Brille “pair of glasses”, Schere “pair of scissors”… But backforming -e f. from -en pl. is straightforward enough that it doesn’t need a semantic explanation.
* All native to me.
But the plural of Hose is still Paar Hosen (and the same applies for Jeans). Brille and Schere have Paar-less plurals
Thoroughly obsolete where I’m from.
Even eine Jean is cromulent.
there was presumably a pullover garment that covered the feet, legs, and waist that was considered an overgrown pair of socks while physically resembling trousers.
Still exists, although nowadays it’s usually worn at home or as an undergarment and coded as women’s clothes.
Very similar to what these Greeks are wearing, although in some cases it doesn’t seem to cover the feet.
@ulr, DM: I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at X Paar Hosen, but I use the Paar-less plural myself.
Even eine Jean is cromulent.
That, on the other hand, is barbaric; go stand in the naughty corner, Austrians!