Homate.

I got a very interesting e-mail from frequent commenter Jongseong, which he gave me permission to quote in full:

Recently, I chanced upon the word 벨로니테 bellonite (Belonite) in the Korean dictionary, supposedly designating a type of volcano. However, in English-language sources, I could only find reference to belonite referring to certain crystalline forms found in glassy volcanic rocks.

This puzzling discovery led me down a rabbit hole. I soon learned that the Korean dictionary includes seven terms corresponding to the basic types of volcanos as classified by Prague-born geologist Karl Schneider in the early 20th-century based on their shape—Pedionite, Aspite, Tholoide, Belonite, Konide, Homate, and Maar—in straightforward transcriptions of their German pronunciation: 페디오니테 pedionite, 아스피테 aseupite, 톨로이데 tolloide, 벨로니테 bellonite, 코니데 konide, 호마테 homate, and 마르 mareu. Translated Korean equivalents are given for all of these apart from the last, and at least a couple of the translated terms are familiar to many Koreans from their earth science lessons in school.

These names have fallen out of use in English-language scholarship however, volcanoes being usually classified nowadays based on their formation or composition rather than shape. This would explain why belonite only seemed to have the other meaning in English; also, when I search for many of the terms, many of the first results are in Korean (we seem to have clung on to the outmoded terminology in our textbooks). The exception is maar, which was not coined by Schneider but already existed as a term originally referring to craters and crater lakes in the Eifel region of western Germany (probably from Latin mare via post-classical Latin mara, per the OED).

The terms that do seem to have been introduced by Schneider mostly have transparent etymologies, with Pedionite, Aspite, Tholoide, Belonite, and Konide coming from the Ancient Greek roots πεδίον, ἀσπίς, θόλος, βελόνη, and κῶνος respectively. But the derivation of Homate is stumping me.

Homate refers to a low volcano whose crater is very wide relative to its size, Iceland’s Hverfjall being the prime example given by Schneider. It has been described in German as Wallberge or Ringwallberge because of the resemblance to circular ramparts. In Korean, Homate is translated as 구상 화산 臼狀 火山 gusang hwasan or 절구꼴 화산 jeolgukkol hwasan, meaning mortar-shaped volcano (as in mortar and pestle).

But I haven’t been able to come up with a derivation for Homate which would fit this definition. Perhaps it is derived from Ancient Greek like the others, the first part being the prefix hom(o)-, but if there is a second part that fits, it is escaping me. I have looked at Schneider’s Die vulkanischen Erscheinungen der Erde where he introduces his classification, but he does not explain the derivation of his terms.

Any idea where the term Homate could have come from? I am hoping you or the community of Hatters can help solve this mystery.

I join him in his hope.

Comments

  1. David Marjanović says

    No idea, and the terms aren’t used in German anymore either.

    The final -e is also odd; I suppose the terms must have entered Korean through an English translation of Schneider’s book, because in German that’s only the plural ending.

    It’s also interesting that the r of Maar gets transcribed; this side of Switzerland, it’s just /maː/ in the singular (but the /r/ resurfaces in the plural, Maare).

  2. David Marjanović says

    …The final -e is in fact perfectly unremarkable, because, quite contrary to my expectations, the terms are all meant to be feminine (excepting of course das Maar). Check out p. 128, which is p. 138 of the file.

  3. Rank speculation… I wonder if it is for a virtual Latin *omata “shouldered” with an extra h-, from ὦμος “shoulder”. (Homoplate used to be a common variant of omoplate “scapula, shoulderblade” in French.) Schneider’s term would then be in reference to a definite Bergschulter of this type of volcano. Compare the profile of Hverfjall on page 68 of Schneider. It could be described as “shouldered”. There was (is still?) also a crater on Hekla called Axlargígur (“Shoulder Crater”), so maybe there is a strong tradition of calling a part of a mountain a “shoulder” in Iceland, too.

  4. Promising, but would a scientist educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the 19th century be that ignorant of Greco-Latin vocabulary? (German speakers, unlike French persons, pronounce /h/, and thus would be less likely to cavalierly ignore a rough breathing.)

  5. Maybe he blended it with humerus?

  6. Benjamin McAvoy-Bickford says

    This is just a distant possibility but could it have something to do with haoma, the plant of Zoroastrian religion? It’s pounded in a mortar of some sort, I’m pretty sure. Not sure why of all things that would be what you call something shaped like a mortar. The phonology’s not an exact match- probably should be Haomate- but it’s a pretty reasonable approximation in my rough estimate. This might not be the most likely theory but it seems worth throwing out there.

  7. Maybe he blended it with humerus?

    And humerus, for umerus (cf. Vedic áṃsa-, Gothic acc. pl. amsans “shoulders”, Tocharian B āntse “shoulder”, Armenian ուս ows, “shoulder, mountain slope, hill”, etc.) is itself a long-established hypercorrect form, like humor for umor, illustrating the exact tendency that we could invoke to explain Homate for *Omate, if we wished to defend that proposal.

  8. Right, but that process is much older than Schneider. He would have known only of its products. He might not have been aware that the two words are cognate.

  9. Karl Sapper, a geologist writing in 1912, already notes that homate is problematic: Die sprachliche Bildung wird den Beifall der Philologen gewiß nicht finden!

  10. Couldn’t it be a derivation of χῶμᾰ ‘bank, mound; dike, dam; mole, pier’? It would fit well with Wallberg.

  11. David Marjanović says

    But that would invariably be rendered with Ch-, and pronounced /k/ in German.

  12. Die sprachliche Bildung wird den Beifall der Philologen gewiß nicht finden!

    Now, that’s a great quote; thanks for finding it.

  13. Homa Mountain in Kenya is a volcano and might be the exemplar for the Homate class.

    Otherwise, on the joking side, it could be an elision of the kind of volcano most often studied in secondary school science fairs, the Homemade.

  14. There’s a glitch in the OCR where “Homate” first appears (Hoiuate) on p. 61 of the book (70 of the scan), but it shows up in the index:

    Bei Koniden und Aspiten tritt der Krater im Vergleich zum Gesamtbau des Berges weit zurück. Wird dieser dagegen die Haupterscheinung, ergibt sich eine Bildung, wo gleichzeitig um ein mehr weniger großes ebenes Gelände ringsum ein im Vergleich zum Durchmesser der Ebene niedriger Wall aufgeworfen wurde, so wird aus der Konide die Homate, der Wallberg.

    I’m vaguely wondering if he had in mind something beginning with “ὄρος” (“mountain”), and got squeamish because what he got was too phonetically close to something beginning with “hure” (“whore”) or some other disreputable term, so he mangled it.

    Orochomate? (“mountain-bank”?)

    /Vague noodling

  15. Thanks for the post and all the comments! The idea that it means “shouldered” with an unetymological h seems like the best suggestion so far, although it is still puzzling why Schneider would have chosen that form.

    I did see that in his 1908 Zur Geschichte und Theorie des Vulkanismus, Schneider included a long passage in Latin as well as a sentence in Greek untranslated. That might not have been remarkable for a scientific publication from the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but it does track with him not bothering to explain to readers how his terms were derived since they were expected to be well-versed in classical languages.

    So I do find Karl Sapper’s quote quite funny. There is something appealing about the idea of Schneider rigorously coining erudite terms to the point of introducing Aspite instead of the existing term Schildvulkan, but not quite getting everything correct.

    @David Marjanović: I suppose the terms must have entered Korean through an English translation of Schneider’s book

    I’m pretty sure it must have entered Korean through Japanese, as would be expected in the early 20th century. There are cases of people writing 베로니테 beronite instead of 벨로니테 bellonite for Belonite, which makes sense if the immediate etymon is Japanese ベロニーテ beronīte.

    It’s also interesting that the r of Maar gets transcribed

    German final r tended to become 르 reu [ɾɯ] in the oldest borrowings, e.g. 베르테르 Bereutereu “Werther” (probably influenced by Japanese ウェルテル Weruteru). Later, final /ər/ (vocalized to [ɐ] in the Standard Northern German pronunciation) was mapped to 어 eo [ʌ], so nowadays Werther would be written 베르터 Bereuteo, as it indeed is in some newer translations of Goethe. But r after other vowels continued to be written as reu, e.g. 루르 Rureu “Ruhr”. More recently, since the late 1980s, they’ve made it a rule to write all final r as eo, so Ruhr would be 루어 Rueo if it followed the current rule (the old spelling is kept as an exception in this case, however).

    This works reasonably well for most vowels, but writing -ar as 아어 aeo [aʌ] seems silly to me so I ignore the rule and keep writing this as 아르 areu. Maar would now be written as 마어 maeo if we follow the rule, but many established spellings such as 바이마르 Baimareu (Weimar) and 자르 Jareu (Saar) still follow the traditional way. We might consider simply writing -ar as 아 a, but that would lead to monosyllabic 마 ma and 자 ja for Maar and Saar which we tend to want to avoid.

  16. David Eddyshaw says

    Unfortunately this Karl Schneider seems to have no WP page, but in searching for one I found this excellent fellow-practitioner, whose memory deserves honour:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Schneider_(activist)

    “Ich bin zwar kein Nervenarzt und kann deshalb euren Hitler nicht ‘heilen‘. Ich bin Augenarzt und steche den Star.”

  17. Unfortunately this Karl Schneider seems to have no WP page

    Yes, it’s quite hard to turn up any information about him.

  18. Luckily, I found a whole book on him online called Wie ein Wind vom Riesengebirge by Wolfgang Fink, which seems to be a collection of writings by former ethnic German residents of the Krkonoše (Riesengebirge) region of what is now northern Czechia to honour their local luminary.

    Karl Schneider was born in Prague in 1879 and headed the former Riesengebirge Museum in Hohenelbe/Vrchlabí until he was expelled after World War II like most ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, spending the rest of his days in Germany until his death in 1951 in Kiel. His study of volcanoes seems to have taken him to Iceland and Italy as well as his native Bohemia.

  19. I doubt it’s named after Mt. Homa. A homate is a cinder cone, from what I can tell. Mt. Homa is not (It’s a carbonatite volcano, a very rare, wonderful and scary creature. Imagine a volcano spewing molten calcium carbonate, as runny as water. )

  20. I think Fred is right, and Schneider probably had χῶμα in mind. If you look at pictures of Hverfjall, it can remind you of a dike or levee or dam wall.

  21. “Homate” keeps making me think of lobsters, although I suppose “lobster-shaped” should really be “homarate.”

  22. Perhaps Schneider coined other words besides this set of seven? If one of such others renders Greek χ as German h or ch it would support or undermine the χῶμα hypothesis.

  23. David Marjanović says

    Interesting all.

    Schildvulkan is still in use.

    Imagine a volcano spewing molten calcium carbonate, as runny as water.

    Oh, that’s the one! I had forgotten its name, but seen it on TV once. The molten limestone looks like water, too – it’s too cool to glow.

    Ich bin zwar kein Nervenarzt und kann deshalb euren Hitler nicht ‘heilen‘.

    “Heil Hitler!”
    “Heil du ihn!”

    final /ər/ (vocalized to [ɐ] in the Standard Northern German pronunciation)

    Everywhere outside of Switzerland and its closest surroundings, apart from the places where [ɐ] has merged into [a] (Berlin stereotypically) or even [aː].

    On the abstract side, I’m not sure if a separate /ə/ needs to be set up for any Standard accent, but the most likely candidates are northern.

  24. @Mollymooly: Perhaps Schneider coined other words besides this set of seven? If one of such others renders Greek χ as German h or ch it would support or undermine the χῶμα hypothesis.

    Actually, are there any examples of Ancient Greek χ being rendered as German h by anyone?

  25. David Marjanović says

    Not that I know of. And not of Modern Greek χ either.

  26. Somewhat late to the fray, but I too find χῶμα convincing. Even in the unlikely event we did find a representation of ‘ch’ as ‘h’ in German, it wouldn’t explain why Schneider would choose such an obviously atypical spelling. I see that the word is represented normally when used in Latin, too, viz. choma. If he didn’t simply make a mistake, provoking Sapper’s wonderful observation, then perhaps he either didn’t like the intial homophony with ‘Koma’ or, in order to make these terms as distinct and memorable as possible for the learner, he decided to drop the ‘c’ so that there wouldn’t be two terms starting with [ko].
    I briefly perused a paper of his in which he defended his system of nomenclature (perhaps having been irritated by Sapper’s criticism, which he references) (no etymological explanation of ‘homate’ is given) in which he clearly thinks that philological elegance is a lesser consideration than practical, useful terminology, so perhaps the second suggestion might have something to it.
    https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/Centralblatt-Mineral-Geol-Palaeont_1913_0102-0109.pdf

    Otherwise, I did notice that one Czech term for ‘cinder-cone’ in common use is ‘sypaný kužel’, which references the earth piling up, as in χῶμα (cf. násep ’embankment’).

  27. Not that I know of. And not of Modern Greek χ either.

    Well, there is the curious case of footballer José Holebas, who was born to a Greek father and an American-German (or Uruguayan according to others) mother in Germany and played for the Greek national team.

    He is usually known in Greek as Χοσέ Χολέμπας following his German (and Spanish) name, but his original Greek name is supposedly Ιωσήφ Χολέβας. If this is true, and his Greek father’s surname really was Χολέβας, then its transcription as Holebas is highly unusual on two counts—the h for χ and the b for β.

  28. John Cowan says

    Well, if “Uruguayan” is correct, then intervocalic “b” would indeed be [v]. Such variation seems to be common in Greek: the folk hero of Greek independence is Λόρδος Βύρωνας /vironas/.

  29. Some sources say that his mother is of Uruguayan descent. The various descriptions would all be explained if she was American-German of Uruguayan descent.

    I did wonder if Holebas was a Spanish-influenced spelling, given the neutralization of b and v in that language. But I initially dismissed it as it wasn’t clear why his father, who was born and raised in Greece before coming to Germany, would spell his name in the Spanish style. Indeed, I’ve seen the father’s name given as Achilles Cholevas, which could very well be the romanization he himself uses (though it could be simply be others romanizing his original Greek name).

    But Achilles left the family not long after José was born. So maybe his name was registered by the mother instead, who used her preferred spelling. Or perhaps the name he uses personally and professionally is different from what appears in official documents.

    Was Βύρωνας the Greek spelling that Byron himself chose? It doesn’t seem inconsistent with what a classically educated Englishman would come up with. Nowadays of course the name would have been rendered phonetically as Μπάιρον.

  30. Well, if “Uruguayan” is correct, then intervocalic “b” would indeed be [v].

    [β̞], surely. [v] is restricted to the Rivera dialect, along the Brazilian border, and in any case it would not appear in the pronunciation of Holebas [(x)oˈle.β̞ah].

  31. Was Βύρωνας the Greek spelling that Byron himself chose? It doesn’t seem inconsistent with what a classically educated Englishman would come up with.

    Βύρων I think. Probably what he called himself in Greek class at school. Cf. Mύρων. There are still Greeks named Viron.

  32. David Marjanović says

    perhaps he either didn’t like the intial homophony with ‘Koma’ or, in order to make these terms as distinct and memorable as possible for the learner, he decided to drop the ‘c’ so that there wouldn’t be two terms starting with [ko].

    Oh, that makes sense.

    Βύρων I think.

    Yes. -as is Lithuanian.

    Holebas

    Maybe that’s a self-chosen transcription by someone who didn’t realize it would be considered misleading in German.

  33. When I saw “χῶμα”, I was immediately reminded of the Hebrew word “חוֹמָה”, “wall”, of at least biblical provenance (Strong’s 2346, chomah).

    I lucked into finding a Hebrew etymological dictionary on archive.org (Klein 1987, pg 210), which says:

    חוֹמָה f.n. wall (around a city). [ From ‫חמה‬ (= to see. to protect), whence also Ugar. ḥmt, TA ḫumitu (= wall).

    (TA = Tel el-Amarna letters)

    But if there is an actual connection to the Greek word, I cannot find it. I haven’t found a similar Greek etymological dictionary with “χῶμα”.

    Am I seeing a coincidental similarity, or could there be some actual connection?

    I wonder if perhaps Schneider could have thought there was a connection. Might he have then transliterated “ח” as “h”?

  34. I haven’t found a similar Greek etymological dictionary with “χῶμα”.

    Greek χῶμα is under χώννυμι in the etymological dictionaries of Chantraine and Frisk. There is more on the Indo-European root in Pokorny.

    For more on the Semitic words, there is Leonid Kogan (2014) Genealogical Classification of Semitic: The Lexical Isoglosses, p. 294, on Ugaritic ḥmt and Proto-Canaanite *ḥāmiy-(a)t-:

    35. ḥmt, pl. ḥmyt ‘wall’…
    ● Well attested, paralleled by mgdl ‘tower’ in 1.14 ii 21‒22 (ˁl l ṯṛ mgdl rkb ṯkmm ḥmt ‘Climb on the top of the tower, mount the shoulders of the wall’) and ṯγr ‘gate’ in 1.119:26‒27 (k gr ˁz ṯγrkm ḳrd ḥmytkm ‘When a powerful one attacks your gate, a mighty one your walls …’).
    Amarna Canaanite ḫu!-mi-tu (EA 141:44, a gloss to Akk. dūru), Pho. ḥmyt (pl.), Moab. ḥmt ‘wall, fortress’ (DNWSI 381), Hbr. ḥōmā ‘(city) wall’ (HALOT 298).
    ▼ PC *ḥāmiy-(a)t- ‘wall’ is probably derived from PS *ḥmy ‘to watch, to protect’ (Blau 1957:98, Marrassini 1971:54‒56, Ginsberg 1973:134), otherwise represented by JPA ḥmy ‘to see’ (DJPA 205), Arb. ḥmy ‘to protect, defend’ (Lane 651), Sab. ḥmy ‘to protect’ (SD 69), Qat. ḥmy ‘to protect, defend’ (LIQ 63), Mhr. ḥōmi ‘to defend’ (ML 182), Jib. aḥmí id. (JL 112). The PC term is to be reconstructed as an active participle *ḥāmiy-(a)t- on the joint evidence of Hbr. ḥōmā, EA ḫu!-mi-tu and the syllabic rendering of the Ugaritic lexeme, reliably attested as ḫa-mi-ti (Huehnergard 1987a:125). In view of this remarkable formal peculiarity, Qat. tḥmy (LIQ 63‒64) – even if it really designates a concrete object (“wall”) and not a more abstract concept (“defensive works”) – is no obstacle for regarding *ḥāmiy-(a)t- as an exclusive PC isogloss…
    One is tempted to connect PC *ḥāmiy-(a)t- with Arb. ḥāmiyat- ‘mass of stones with which a well is cased; all the stones of the casing of a well, matching one another’ (Lane 652). If accepted, this comparison – morphologically attractive and implying a kind of semantic degradation of an original meaning “wall” in Arabic – would push *ḥāmiy-(a)t- ‘wall’ back to PCS. Cf. also Yemenite Arabic ḥāmiyeh ‘Hofraum’ (Behnstedt 288).

  35. David Marjanović says

    I wonder if perhaps Schneider could have thought there was a connection. Might he have then transliterated “ח” as “h”?

    Imaginable.

  36. Xerîb: Your HTML-fu is truly impressive.

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