I’m still loving Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes (see this post), and I ran across a word I wasn’t familiar with but like a lot. Here’s the passage; I’ve bolded the word:
Je prétextai des migraines pour justifier ma torpeur. Stanislas, qui s’y connaît (il a du sang polonais), me donna une kyrielle d’astuces pour se remettre d’une gueule de bois.
The narrator complains of a headache, and his roommate offers him “une kyrielle d’astuces” — a bunch of tricks — for curing a hangover. But kyrielle is one of those words that’s not easily explainable in another language; that Wiktionary entry does a terrible job:
1. (dated) rigmarole
2. host, stream (de (“of”))
3. (poetry) kyrielle
The poetic sense is obscure enough it’s not in any of my bilingual dictionaries (though it’s the source of the word: the form has a refrain that recurs like “Kyrie” in the text of the mass); the only sense in general use is 2, and “host, stream” doesn’t do a good job of rendering it. My Collins Robert dictionary says “[injures, réclamations] string, stream; [personnes] crowd, stream; [objets] pile,” which is more helpful, while my giant Larousse doesn’t bother trying to generalize and says:
kyrielle [kirjɛl] une ~ de bambins fam a whole bunch of kids; une ~ d’insultes a string of insults; une ~ de mensonges a pack ᴏᴜ string of lies.
Anyway, I like it. A little later on I learned another good word:
J’ai alors relu le livre jusqu’à l’épuisement. Lui me toise, inépuisable, et brille comme un crâne dans la nuit d’un cimetière.
“Me toise” means ‘looks me up and down scornfully’; it’s from toise ‘toise (former French unit of length),’ itself from Latin tēnsa (bracchia) ‘outstretched (arms).’ And soon after that comes:
Il me suffirait de rappeler Siga D. pour avoir le fin mot de l’histoire.
Fin mot is another good expression; it means “the real story, the whole story, the truth (behind something).” I continue to be ravished by the prose of this book!
Wiktionary implies that the “fin” in “fin mot” is the noun “end”, but the expression reminds me of fin’ amor, the Occitan for what we call “courtly love.” (Occitan speakers invented it, so I reckon they had the naming rights, myself.) I wonder if it’s actually the adjective “fine”?
French “une kyrielle de” = Australian “heaps of” = Irish “a clatter of”
In modern English, a “shit ton.” (Awaiting formal definition by BIPM).
DE. As you know, since the French noun “fin” is feminine, if the “fin” of “le fin mot” were that adjective, the idiom would be *”la fin mot” and, to boot, “fin mot” would not make sense. For two reasons, therefore, “fin” must be the masculine singular adjective so spelled and it must modify “mot,” a masculine singular word.
toise ‘toise (former French unit of length),’ itself from Latin tēnsa (bracchia) ‘outstretched (arms).’
Well, that etymological connection may now ensure that I remember what toise means. For a few weeks now I’ve left it selected in my Pons Fr/Gr phone app, because I keep forgetting what it is (Meßlatte). It’s not toit I’m confusing it with, but a similar word – for a kind of metal or metal sheet?
One of the things I like about the Cologne subway is the way some middle-aged women (toisent / von oben nach unten mustern) look every woman up and down who comes on. Such cold disdain ! I wish I could do that.
“Shit ton” I learned from Heartstopper, along with many another goody such as “bye, actually!” BTW, the director of the first two seasons was the Welshman Euros Lyn. I think he has worked with another Welshman, Russell Davies, who did Queer As Folk in the 90s. They seem to be everywhere, as Hungarians were formerly.
We have not yet made it to the Upper Nile, though.
Upper Nile is a small New South Wales Rural Location within the local government area of Lithgow.
Take that, Hungarians!
The Hungarian for Upper Nile is Felső-Nílus, which is a mesmerizing phrase. It seems like it should have magical powers, like Open Sesame.
I ran across a word I wasn’t familiar with but like a lot.
Kyrielle has occurred before at the Hattery – in 2010 (one instance) and 2012 (two instances).
(And this comment is “awaiting moderation”, because of its two links to languagehat.com!)
‘Kyrielle’ with the link to the Kyrie in the Mass, always translates itself in my head to a related word, ‘litany’ whenever I come across it, and mostly it fits.
It seems like it should have magical powers, like Open Sesame.
Perhaps it does …
Have you tried saying it seven times in front of a mirror?
(I haven’t. I’m waiting for someone else to try it first.)
@David Eddyshaw:
Wiktionary may be a tad confused, but this is the first meaning of fin in the TLFi.
Seems an odd construction for French (mind you, French is largely made up of odd constructions. It’s probably a conlang secretly created by Construction Grammar agents working to undermine the Chomskyans. One cannot expect all languages to be as logical as Kusaal.)
I’m trying to think of another French example of a bare noun used after the article as a premodifier of another noun and failing. Is it an appositional relationship? (Obviously fin can’t be the head – wrong gender, as M noted.)
C’est n’importë quoi.
Yes, the fin in fin mot is in fact the adjective: fin, fine (“fine”, etc.). This adjective is itself contruable as a derivation from the feminine noun fin, which is of course from Latin finis (f). Some confusion may arise from the existence of a similar rapprochement of mot and fin, in Petit Robert as “Le mot de la fin.” That expression turns up as the French title of the film Punchline, starring Tom Hanks et alii. Giacomo may be pleased to note the Italian title: L’ultima battuta.
(And when my earlier comment emerges from moderation, it will be revealed exactly where kyrielle occurs in two earlier Hattery threads: in 2010 and 2012. Two links appears [sic] to be too many, even if they are both to languagehat.com.)
Thanks for linking to the 2012 post; it gave me an opportunity to fix the dead links. And it’s always a good idea to let me know when you’ve had a comment vanish into moderation — the sooner I know, the sooner it will be exhumed.
@mollymooly “A rake of” is another fine Irish expression that fits the bill here.
At Winchester College the pupils study in ‘toys’, so called because they are a fathom in length. So I believe the ‘brachia tensa’ derivation.
“A rake of” is another fine Irish expression that fits the bill here.
This prompted me to try to come up with another English expression of similar grace, and my weird brain popped out la mar en coche de…. Now I can’t remember if that charming expression is Argentine or Mexican or… more likely it originated in Spain, or maybe in Chile.
https://boletinfilologia.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/download/50451/52987/175669
scroll down to the second page.
This site offers, without any sort of proof, a supposed etymology. I don’t buy it, but it’s amusing.
https://www.ambito.com/informacion-general/la-mar-coche-sabes-cual-es-el-verdadero-significado-la-frase-n5746652
La mar en coche is cromulent in Rioplatense but very dated. I think I’ve only heard it from people born before WW2
“A rake of” something
I immediately thought of “rick” as in “corn rick”, but the ‘net gives me no support for a connection.
Anyway, here are 8 further units of measurement that can only be used in Ireland.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang says rake is from Irish reic
eDIL: reic ‘reciting (of poems), narrating’; reic(c) ‘the act of selling or bartering.’
Re shit(e)load, Green’s has this as US from the early 60s (not denying this is Irish import , but…). I have never heard the version with e; the only compound that comes to mind is gobshite. Re rake, is the idea something like bucketful? This could also be an inspiration of shitload, depending on the size and contents of the bucket.
EDIT:
Not sure I buy the Irish origin for rake, but there is a sense “waste, squandering” for reic, but how do we know that this is not inspired by English rake “waster”.
From Boyo-wulf, quoted not only by Green but also here at Language Hat:
@PlasticPaddy My personal sense was that the reference was to a pile of something akin to leaves gathered together by a rake, like sandwiches or winnings in a card game, but am perfectly happy to defer to both @mollymooly and Green.
La mar en coche
Are there any other examples of la mar in the sense of ‘a lot’, and/or of en coche as an intensifier, jokey perhaps?
Another compound with “shite” is “shitepoke”, the Black-crowned Night-Heron, which does deliberately shit on you if you walk under its tree, I happen to know.
Could that be observer bias? Birds shit a lot, and a single tree can host quite a lot of BCNHs.
@Y:
The metaphor mar = ‘a large quantity’ is entirely commonplace:
En coche I’ve never encountered in anything but its literal meaning, though.
The BCNH certainly seemed to be following me in the tree before it dropped its droppings. However, I see some sources says “shitepoke” is from their habit of defecating when they take off and is applied to other herons as well. A lot of birds do that to reduce weight, but it’s especially obvious in herons.
Green is indispensable, but I’m skeptical of taking him as an authority on etymologies from Irish, especially for a slang expression that is only attested recently (since 1968), long after Irish had been in decline. Green, as far as I know, doesn’t know Irish (non omnia possumus omnes), and that etymology apparently comes from a source he cites, Slanguage by Bernard Share (1997), who qualified it with “cf.” Share, in turn, got his Irish out of a dictionary and cautioned in his front matter that his etymologies may be only hypotheses “the merits of which I leave the reader to consider”. More solidly establishing the origin would require tracing the locations of earliest use, to see whether the phrase first appeared in an Irish-speaking region.
I don’t think the listicle is claiming that “shitload” is at all Irish. I think it assumes that “shite” is a particularly Irish variant of “shit”, and that any derivative of “shit” can be Hibernified analogously. Similarly, Irish people who say “hape” know it is the same word as “heap”, just as other anglophones know for “fella”/”feller” vs “fellow” .
Green’s Dictionary of Slang says rake is from Irish reic
I wonder where Green picked this idea up. T.P. Dolan (2006) A Dictionary of Hiberno-English: The Irish Use of English, p. 189, has the following:
Dolan’s dictionary can be borrowed online at archive.org. There are multiple copies of the work there.
The online EDD (should be here) is giving a message ‘Service Unavailable’ for me at the moment, so here is a link to the print edition (vol. 5, p. 10, column a, definition nº 7). For those without online OED access, the old entry for rake sb.³ (p. 123 here; influenced by raik sb., ibid., p. 111) still suffices for the outlines of the etymology, although the revised version makes the outlines of the semantic development clearer.
But I wonder whether current Irish usage is also influenced/supported by the notion of a ‘raking together’, as Paul Culloty suggests above. And also, does this rake have any currency at all in Australia or New Zealand? The OED3 has a couple of recent citations from India.
Alon, what do you make of the use of feminine mar, though?
where Green picked this idea up
Green’s 1968 citation (J. Healy Death of an Irish Town) is marked [BS], which per his abbreviations page means the citation is taken from Bernard Share’s Slanguage (it’s actually s.v. peck, not rake, in the book). As I said above, Share gives that etymology (archive.org), so I’m sure Green got it there.
The OED3 has a couple of recent citations from India
I wondered about that too. Searching for “a rake of” in GloWbE found the phrase predominantly in Ireland, and almost all in the slang sense “a lot of”; the few hits for “(a) rake of” in India refer to railroad cars, better matching another of the OED’s definitions for rake n.3, “I.6. Originally Scottish and English regional (northern). A row, a series; esp. a string of railway carriages or coal trucks”. (OED3’s citations are from the 1970s; GloWbE’s corpus is from 2012.)
In Latin, mare was neuter, and the resulting confusion never ended in Spanish. Mostly it has settled on el mar, but there’s hacerse a la mar “set sail” and numerous other fixed phrases, as far as I understand. French has la mer throughout.
I figured la mar has some pragmatic connotations, current and old, that I would want an educated native speaker to explicate.
As to en coche, it is — twirls moustache — as I suspected. From the Diccionario de frases populares en la literatura cubana (here, mixed luck with displaying the phrase at hand):
“set sail”
One of the few set phrases I remember from my schoolboy Latin was that ‘to set sail’ = ‘navem solvere’ (the grammatical point this was to illustrate hasn’t stuck). Caesar did rather a lot of it, I believe.
‘hacerse a la mar’ = ‘put to sea’, according to GT. On nautical note, putting to sea might involve only slaves rowing if the winds are not suitable. Is there something among the “numerous other fixed phrases” that would illuminate? How about in other daughter languages?
Oh, “put”…
What I was going for was the equivalent German expression in See stechen – literally “sting into sea”, weird unique metaphor, no article. No sails required.
The DPD offers the following.
What I was going for was the equivalent German expression in See stechen – literally “sting into sea”, weird unique metaphor, no article. No sails required.
I feel that “sting” is too waspish and weird. The metaphor is a more general kind of “insert” that doesn’t hurt or damage. Since bodies of water have often been imagined as feminine entities, and sailors are men, possibly there was a ruder vibe there ..
Ein Paddel ins Wasser stechen.
The relevant DWDS section is (note that “schnelle” is parenthetic):
2 e)
<jmd. sticht (mit) etw. irgendwohin> eine (schnelle) stoßende Bewegung machen
Kollokationen:
mit Akkusativobjekt: ein Paddel (ins Wasser) stechen
Beispiele:
Offenbar stürmte gestern Nachmittag ein Mann in ein Hotel im Stadtzentrum, stach mit einem Messer wild um sich. [Bild, 27.06.2020]
Dann nimmt er ein Paddel in seine Hände und demonstriert, wie man es kräftesparend ins Wasser sticht. [Der Standard, 16.06.2015]
Er sticht ins Wasser, einmal, zweimal, dreimal, aber natürlich steckt am Ende kein Fisch am Stock. [Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.11.2017]
Eine Kollegin wird herbeigebeten, die mit einem Brieföffner in eine Los-Urne sticht und ein Kärtchen herausangelt. [Hars, Wolfgang: Nichts ist unmöglich! Lexikon der Werbesprüche. München: Piper 2001 [1999], S. 19]
Das australische Crawl ist […] [ein Schwimmstil], seine Beinbewegung erfolgt im Zweitakt. Wenn beispielsweise der rechte Arm ins Wasser sticht, schlägt der linke Fuß auf die Oberfläche, wenn dann der linke Arm Wasser faßt, macht der rechte Fuß einen Schlag. [Neues Deutschland, 07.12.1971]
This doesn’t tell me anything about etymology, but the earliest occurrences of la mar en coche I can find are from the Uruguayan press.
Google Books locates El Fogón (Montevideo, Octubre 18 de 1896) with the poem El Baile de ña Lisandra:
The Internet Archive locates El Siglo (Montevideo, 15 de mayo de 1897) with the column Arte y artistas:
This is still the only usage recorded in the DRAE.
If we can trust Otto Eicherts’s Vollständiges Wörterbuch zu den Schriftwerken des Cajus Julius Cäsar und seiner Fortsetzer (1883), the collocation naves solvere occurs exactly twice in Caesar’s surviving works: Bellum Gallicum IV, 36 and V, 8. Is twice “a lot”?
Btw, Eichert doesn’t give a translation for naves solvere, apparently he thought the meaning was obvious for any competent reader of Latin.
other examples of la mar in the sense of ‘a lot’
yiddish has “a yam fun…” [an ocean of…] as a fairly standard but not hugely common idiom.
You’re gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion…
“. . . take up arms against a sea of troubles . . . ”
Was “sea of” common idiom in Elizabethan English?
If Chau Wu over on LLog finds out, something is going to snap, I’m afraid.
(Mandarin yáng “ocean”; spelled with its homophone “sheep, goat” plus 3 sprinkles of water)
But “yam” is Hebrew.
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/3220.htm
Hm. Strongs sez: “From an unused root meaning to roar”
Klein (1987) does not offer such an etymology, but only references cognates in Aramaic, Phoenician, Ugaritic, Akkadian (iāmu)
Wikt: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%99%D7%9D
FWIW
@OM
I saw the emendation “siege of troubles”, which arguably makes more sense than sea with the following bit “and by opposing end them”, but I don’t know who proposed this and why it was not generally adopted.
Yes; I’m talking about the guy who keeps finding Old English and Latin “loans” in Taiwanese. (Not so much Mandarin admittedly.)
@PlasticPaddy: On the one hand, WikiP shows that the First Folio and the Second Quarto both use “sea of” (there’s a First Quarto with vastly different text, and no mention of “troubles”), and on the other, a concordance of the word “siege” shows multiple occurrences. So I’d guess that the reasoning is that two of the witnesses to the text use “sea”, and if he had meant “siege”, he could have, but arguably didn’t.
In other words, there is no evidence for the existence of this root.
Neither the Oxford nor the Arden editions (Arden 2 and Arden 3) report this conjecture. They all note that the expression “a sea of troubles” was already proverbial at the time. The Arden editions note that the expression was criticised as a “mixed metaphor”; Harold Jenkins in Arden 2 defended Shakespeare against that criticism and the editors of Arden 3 repeat his arguments.
Criticising Shakespeare for using mixed metaphors is a bit like criticising him for not following the rules of French classical drama.
Ah, like “kimono” ⇉ χειμώνας (which I originally quoted for a Basque enthusiast)
Hebrew yām: it’s is an iffy thing for Wiktionary to do, casually throwing in a Somali supposed cognate, with no references.
The Eblaite supposed cognate is probably after Fronzaroli (NABU 1998 (3), 83, §89, here). The argument is elaborate, but the data here, by their nature, require a lot of interpretation. Fronzaroli is thorough but rightly cautious. I myself can’t judge the arguments, which rest to a great degree on Sumerian, Eblaite, and the mythology of the area.
(Not so much Mandarin admittedly.)
Obviously because the blown-off-course Celts/Latins only got to the Southern coasts, not the frozen North.
Also reconstructing a second *m which is only there in Syriac, rather than assuming Syriac regularized the two-consonant root to three consonants, I suppose.
Absolutely. That’s just cargo-cult etymology. Worthy of the Sino-Platonic Papers.
Also reconstructing a second *m which is only there in Syriac, rather than assuming Syriac regularized the two-consonant root to three consonants, I suppose.
I think the double m in the Syriac is just phonological, if it is like Hebrew.
Fronzaroli reconstructs Eblaite wammum, but the form given in W-Ary is wamû (=wamum), with just one m.
The Eblaite and the Somali were put in by user ZipperZackery, who seems to be an enthusiast of Afro-Asiatic, not so much of the “no original research” rule on Wikipedia and its offshoots.
Is not all one? More evidence for the affirmative:
Hungarian tenger along with Turkish deniz, Kazakh теңіз, Chuvash тинӗс
< Proto-Turkic *teŋiŕ (“sea”) [compare Proto-Turkic *teŋri (“sky”)]
< Middle Chinese 等 (təŋX, “equal”).
Latin aequor (“sea” mainly in poetic use, and especially sea in a calm and flat state)
< aequus (“equal”, “level”, “flat”, “plain”)
< ? (Lewis and Short: “aequus (aecus, Pac. 32 Rib.; Lucr. 5, 1023 Lachm. and Munro; AIQVOS, S. C. de Bacch. 1. 26), a, um, adj. formerly referred to ΕΙΚΩ, ἔοικα, but Pott connects it with Sanscr. ēka = one, as if properly, one and uniform; others consider it as akin to aemulor, q.v.)
Yes, the Syriac letters shown are yudh-mim-alaph. Only one mim. If you click on the Syriac word, it shows the Wikt entry for the word, with the transliteration yāmā, and etymology with Aramaic יַמָּא (yammāʾ). Only one mem there, too, but as the Hebraists already know, the dot in the letter mem is a dagesh indicating gemination.
Syriac has an actual doubled mim for the plural.
I know less about gemination than almost everyone else here, and I am often confused on the topic, so someone else can comment learnedly if they wish to.
I think the double m in the Syriac is just phonological, if it is like Hebrew
This might be the case historically (though I doubt it in view of the Aramaic cognate) but in Tiberian Hebrew the double /m/ belongs to the actual stem. Morphology, not phonology. It’s a double-ayin root.
The Hebrew word has -mm- everywhere except when the cluster is simplified because it’s word-final, as is regular in Hebrew: the geminate is there in the plural, and when He locale is attached. So the stem really is yamm-.
There’s no rule in TH geminating underlying single consonants in such cases after a-vowels or i-vowels (there is such a rule after u-vowels: long-by-position holem in the syllable before the stress doesn’t happen: the following consonant is geminated instead.)
Contrast דָם “blood”, where the /m/ is just underlyingly single, and it’s a biliteral root.
Owlmirror: in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, double consonants with no intervening vowel are written single: this is purely orthographic convention, and says nothing about the pronunciation. Later Hebrew lost the actual doubling, which confuses the issue.
(Classical Ethiopic too: the occurrence of double consonants has to be determined from the traditional oral reading – it’s not marked in the orthography.)
My comment about “cargo cult etymology” was aimed at the Somali supposed cognate. The evidence for geminate /m/ in the stem of Hebrew יָם is perfectly solid.
Similarly, as Owlmirror pointed out, the plural of the Syriac word unequivocally shows that the stem is *ymm.
Sorry, that the root is *ymm. Double-ayin, not biliteral: again, this is morphology, not phonology.
Historically many Semitic double-ayin roots pretty certainly were expanded from biliterals, but that’s a whole other issue, and you’re also talking about a much greater time depth. Part of the Semitic drive to make everything possible into a triliteral root, creating the Semitic system we all know and love today. The process also applied more thoroughly to verb roots: there are quite a few noun roots that resisted this standardisation drive.
As the saying goes: the best way to get a right answer on the internet…
“a sea of troubles” […] “mixed metaphor”
i wonder whether there’s an intended (or likely grasped at the time) nod to canute in there.
@DE: I differ. To begin with, I see no reason to impose a triconsonantal root on either yām ‘sea’ or dām ‘blood’, or for that matter sam ‘incense’ (-ish; later also ‘drug, poison’, < Aramaic), although traditional grammars interpret all three as driving from C-m-m roots, presumably for the sake of regularity. There is no synchronic evidence for a third consonant.
(The deverbal noun in piʿēl deriving from such biconsonantal nouns duplicates the last consonant. Thus in Modern Hebrew the verbs dmm ‘to bleed (intr.)’ and smm ‘to drug’ follow exactly the same paradigm, except of course for the initial dagesh in the דּ. That is how a normal piʿēl form would look, with C₂=C₃, but the noun itself, again, is biconsonantal.
The noun dāg ‘fish’ is inflected identically to dām, but traditionally is assigned the root d-w-g. I presume that is because that is the attested root of the verb ‘to fish’, in qal.)
Now, yām, except for the singular absolute (the quotation form) inflects like sam, with a short vowel, not like dām. From what I read, that is taken to infer that it was originally yam, and that the absolute sg. is irregular. Let’s assume that (and let someone else explain the irregularity).
Back to the original point, is the Aramaic geminate evidence for a proto-(Semitic?) geminate.
So, I say, ancient gemination is lost; later, the short vowel leads to regular (compensatory) gemination of the following m, which is interpreted by later grammarians, for the sake of neatness and symmetry, as two (identical) root consonants. Does that short vowel imply an older geminated m? I am not convinced that it does (in Hebrew anyway), and even if it did, there would be no direct line between the later m-dagesh and that ancient geminate.
Clearly dām and yām/sam are different, and have different (pre-Hebrew) histories. I don’t mind the idea that proto-yām had a geminate m, but if so, the geminate in Hebrew or in Aramaic is not its direct descendent.
By the way, David, you are a lot better read on Hebrew historical phonology than I am, and I am learning a lot through these discussions. I have tended to rely on having a very good informal, usage-borne understanding of Hebrew grammar, to the neglect of actually studying it.
I actually wrote above that yām ‘sea’ and dām ‘blood’ differed, and if traditional grammars say dām is double-ayin, they’re just wrong. (Brown-Driver-Briggs actually lists yām under *ymm and dām under *dm, so that work at least does not make this error.) The /m/ in dām. is never geminated, unlike the case with yām, which has a geminate whenever BH phonotactics actually permit, viz whenever it is not word-final.
“There is no synchronic evidence for a third consonant”: apart from the gemination whenever the stem is followed by a vowel, and which is absent in dām. How is that not synchronic? You seem to be saying that BH Hebrew gemination is not real consonant doubling. Transcriptions and morphophonemics show that it certainly was.
There is no rule which geminated /m/ after a short /a/: if there had been, it would have applied to dām too. [There actually is a rule geminating a consonant after an original short o/u left in an open syllable before the word stress: unlike /a:/ and /e:/, BH /o:/ is never “long by position” here. But that’s another story.]
Proto-Semitic gemination is not lost in BH. It’s alive and well. Examples abound. It’s lost word-finally, that’s all. That is a recent rule in BH (in fact, it may even postdate BH proper, which seems to have been pretty cool with word-final consonant clusters, judging by the LXX transcriptions and Origen), and forms of the same stem which are not word-final show that BH preserved Proto-Semitic gemination just fine elsewhere. The geminate in yammīm is a survival, not a new analogical creation. Dāmīm has no gemination, because the stem-final /m/ is single: cf Arabic damun.
Derived verbs from biliteral nouns certainly can be double-ayin and fall together with derived forms from double-ayin nouns. But that doesn’t show that there are no genuine double-ayin basic nouns.
יָם is just like עַם “people” in the way it behaves in flexion. Surely you agree that that has a stem with double /m/?
I feel like germination is not quite the right term here.
עַם ʿam, irregularly, has rare examples with two mems, like עֲמָמִים ʿămāmîm (Neh. 9:22) and a few others, alongside the common regular עַמִּים ʿammîm (or I should say ʿamːîm or something.) Otherwise, I see no reason to consider Tiberian (don’t know about Biblical) Hebrew geminates to be consonant sequences rather than long consonants, synchronically anyway.
@Brett:
(Nor “gemination”, for that matter.)
Yes: it really describes how BH is written, with a single consonant symbol used for a cluster of identical consonants, however that came about. So dagesh is described as a marker of “gemination” in TH.
But the term “gemination” does indeed make it sound as if this can only happen as a result of some process of consonant doubling (as in the pi’el, or sometimes as a result of a phonological rule), rather than two identical consonants happening to come together without any intervening vowel.
When I say “geminate consonant” in this context, I just mean a cluster of two identical consonants, however that came about.
Long consonants don’t need to behave like clusters. OHG was fine with word-final clusters, but had a total ban on word-final long consonants.
In case this was just autocorrupt, I still agree: “gemination” is a misleading term to begin with, because there isn’t anything “twinned” about long consonants except in writing with Greek and (usually) Latin letters. Like long vowels, they’re just held longer.
@Y:
The Tiberian system throughout treats “geminate” consonants just like CC clusters: so, for example, in the quality of the preceding vowel, whether stressed or unstressed.
This also applies to the stress sandhi rules: for example, CVCCVC forms cannot throw back the stress to the first syllable when the next word has initial stress, unlike CVCVC forms (instead, the word loses stress altogether and is joined to the next word by maqqeph.) This is true whether or not the medial CC is two different consonants or a geminate (have a look at the text and see!)
So it is superfluous to requirements to set up a separate category of “long consonants” from CC clusters in TH. I think the urge to do so arises from (a) the pan-Semitic orthographic convention of writing CC clusters of identical consonants as single and (b) the fact that in later Hebrew, such clusters actually were simplified throughout.* But this has no bearing on the reconstruction of BH or Original Tiberian Hebrew phonology, which should be analysed on their own terms.
* In TH as its pronunciation is reconstructed by Khan, this simplification has already happened, as part of the changes that made stop fricativisation contrastive, the other being the loss of “vocalic” schwa; but Khan’s system cannot account for the details of the Masoretic pointing adequately, as I have been saying. The devisers of the pointing cannot have actually pronounced their Hebrew like that; they must have made distinctions which were later lost by the time of the Arabic transcriptions that Khan principally relies on.
Long consonants don’t need to behave like clusters
True dat. Kusaal word-internal CC clusters/whatever are limited to
(a) homorganic nasal at the end of a prefix before a root-initial consonant.
(b) /kk tt pp ŋŋ nn mm ll/ and, just to be awkward, /mn/. And single /k t p/ cannot appear in any context where the “geminates” are possible (so /kk tt pp/ are actually written single.)
But in BH and Original TH, “long consonants” did behave like clusters, and there is no actual percentage in not regarding them as clusters.