I got curious about the word Negus, “Used formerly as a title for emperors of Ethiopia” (AHD) or, as the more expansive OED entry (updated September 2003) puts it, “(The title of) a king of Ethiopia or of a province or kingdom within Ethiopia; spec. (the title of) the supreme ruler of Ethiopia; the Ethiopian emperor.” The OED has:
Etymology: < Amharic nəgus king < näggäs- to become a king (as the title of the Ethiopian emperor also as nəgusä nägäst, lit. ‘king of kings’). Compare French négus (1556 in Middle French as negus; rare before 18th cent.).
Well, if the Amharic word is nəgus, how come the English pronunciation is /ˈniɡəs/? Happily, the AHD also gives /nɪˈɡuːs/ (in their own idiosyncratic rendering), which suits my sense of things much better, so I am adopting it.
But the AHD etymology says Amharic nəgus is “from Ge’ez nəguś, king, ruler, verbal adjective of nagśa, to rule, become king; see ngś in the Appendix of Semitic roots.” What did this ś represent? Wikipedia, s.v. Śawt (the name of the corresponding Ge’ez letter), says the Proto-Semitic sound was a “voiceless lateral fricative *ś [ɬ], like the Welsh pronunciation of the ll in llwyd,” and Rick Aschmann’s Reflexes of Proto-Semitic sounds in daughter languages says:
2. Proto-Semitic */ś/ was still pronounced as [ɬ] in Biblical Hebrew, but no letter was available in the Phoenician alphabet, so the letter ש did double duty, representing both [ʃ] and [ɬ]. Later on, however, [ɬ] merged with [s], but the old spelling was largely retained, and the two pronunciations of ש were distinguished graphically in Tiberian Hebrew as שׁ [ʃ] vs. שׂ [s] < [ɬ].
But how do they know? Via loan words in other languages?
Furthermore, the Śawt article says “See also Ḍäppa ṣ́ ፀ,” but that Ḍäppa link redirects to Ḍād, and a Google search on Ḍäppa essentially turns up only the Śawt article. What’s going on? Is Ḍäppa a thing? All information gratefully received.
There’s no problem with the mere fact that Hebrew originally preserved a distinct reflex of Proto-Semitic /ś/, of course, as that is clear from the history of the sibilants within Hebrew itself; I suppose it’s simply most parsimonious to suppose that the way it was distinct from /s/ and /ʃ/ was that it still preserved the Proto-Semitic sound. That, in turn, is still there in all its pristine glory in Modern South Arabian.
Lambdin’s Ethiopic grammar transliterates ፀ as ḍ, but says that ḍ was confused so early with ṣ that the change has contaminated nearly all manuscripts, to the degree where the choice of one or the other in roots is sometimes arbitrary.
Weird.
My comments are showing up in a sort of Heisenberg fashion. The sidebar lists them, and then when I click on them, they disappear as if they had never been …
Time to sacrifice a black cock to Akismet again …
You say “the” pronunciation, but your AHD link gives two different ones, as does Merriam-Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/negus It’s obviously possible that one is “authentic” in some historical sense and the other is a spelling pronunciation that became current because more people read the word than chanced to hear it uttered aloud by someone comfortable with it. There’s also the possibility of interference from the unrelated noun “negus,” meaning (per one source) “a hot drink of port and lemon juice, usually spiced and sweetened”* and named for its supposed inventor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Negus Different sources offer different theories as to the pronunciation of the beverage, and of course surnames can have looser orthographic/phonemic connections than many other sorts of word do.
*Can’t say I ever encountered this word before – it was apparently drunk by characters in novels by various prominent 19th-century writers but may not have survived into the 20th century, at least under that name.
Turns out here’s a now-retired Australian tv journalist named George Negus whose surname is apparently pronounced (in AustEng) with the FLEECE vowel. Back in 1979 he interviewed Bob Marley, who would have been familiar with the (Jamaican pronunciation of) the Ethiopian title. Negus’ Aussie pronunciation of phrases like “marijuana haze” is something to behold.
You say “the” pronunciation
I meant the OED’s.
There’s also the possibility of interference from the unrelated noun “negus,” meaning (per one source) “a hot drink of port and lemon juice, usually spiced and sweetened”
Yes, I’ve encountered it (the word, not the drink), which is another reason I want a distinctive pronunciation for the Ethiopian ruler. Distinguo!
Turns out here’s a now-retired Australian tv journalist named George Negus
Memorably lambasted here in 2006 as “one of the most vacuous TV presenters ever to clutter the (already mediocre) Australian airwaves.”
https://languagehat.com/grr/#comment-23710
Why is Akismet not taking my comments? I run this joint!
test comment
Why is Akismet not taking my comments? I run this joint!
…yeah that’s actually starting to look weird.
(Comments 4459430 and 4459432 appear to be substrings of comment 4459431, so you’d probably want to keep that one.)
One could survey reggae songs where the Ethopian-derived “negus” turns up in the lyrics to see if they all have the same pronunciation or exhibit variation. In this one (Toots & the Maytals) the word first turns up around 3 mins 11 secs in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrFbwScTxN0.
Comment test. Quadraticity drinks imagination. Akismet is a ch*rping m*stard.
Проверка связи. Русский язык самый русский язык в мире. Акисмет зелёный ягуар.
Yes, e.g. balsam < bśm. I don’t know how much that says about the timing, though. I also doubt that [ɬ] > [s] can be done in one step; I suspect [ɬ] > [ç] > [ɕ] (what ś is meant to suggest) and then > [s] in Hebrew, [ʃ] in Arabic.
i.e. [tɬʼ] with [tsʼ]
I think it’s not taking anyone’s comments in this thread.
Now it’s worse, the main page of the site shows the missing comments (in the sidebar), but the article page ignores them. A case of really bad caching, maybe, but even then it’s weird as ch*rp.
Yes, e.g. balsam < bśm.
Thanks!
i.e. [tɬʼ] with [tsʼ]
…no offence but a [tɬʼ] phone(me) feels very Klingon, or maybe Salishan.
I think it’s not taking anyone’s comments in this thread.
This is my impression, but at least I’ve gotten around the apparent caching issue by opening the website in another browser. (It’s probably about to start caching there too.)
…in retrospect it could be because the URL is languagehat.com/negus-sawt-%E1%B8%8Dappa (where the %E1%B8%8D bit represents ḍ) and it expects its normalizing function to only produce ASCII but apparently Ḍ was weird enough that it didn’t get normalized.
another test comment
It’s also scattered over the Caucasus, and at least some Modern South Arabian languages have a Tlingit-style [ɬʼ].
The Klingon [tɬ] is not ejective and not even aspirated; but Marc Okrand almost turns it into a trill.
What’s going on? Is Ḍäppa a thing?
The entry for ሠ śawt says “see also ḍäppa” because the original Ge’ez letter ፀ ḍäppa was used to represent the sound descended from PS *ṣ́ (< Arabic ḍ, Hebrew צ ṣ, in Aramaic eventually falling together with ע /ʕ/, etc.), and this is the emphatic (that is, ejective) counterpart to *ś (> Ge’ez ሠ ś, Arabic š, Hebrew שׂ ś, Aramaic /s/ written ס orשׂ, Syriac ܣ s). And Semitists often discuss the two together (as Alex Bellem, page 153f here, references numbers removed, with information relevant to the rest of the thread):
August Dillmann has explained the Ge’ez name däppa as being related to Arabic ضبّة ḍabba ‘door bolt’ (see here. The original form of the letter in the Old South Arabian script was 𐩳 (if this character doesn’t display for you, it looks rather like the Chinese character 日).
What’s going on? Is Ḍäppa a thing?
The entry for ሠ śawt says “see also ḍäppa” because the original Ge’ez letter ፀ ḍäppa was used to represent the sound descended from PS *ṣ́ (< Arabic ḍ, Hebrew צ ṣ, in Aramaic eventually falling together with ע /ʕ/, etc.), and this is the emphatic (that is, ejective) counterpart to *ś (> Ge’ez ሠ ś, Arabic š, Hebrew שׂ ś, Aramaic /s/ written ס or שׂ, Syriac ܣ s). And Semitists often discuss the two together (as Alex Bellem, page 153f here, references numbers removed):
August Dillmann has explained the Ge’ez name däppa as being related to Arabic ضبّة ḍabba ‘door bolt’ (see here. The original form of the letter in the Old South Arabian script was 𐩳 (if this character doesn’t display, it looks rather like the Chinese character 日).
balsam < bśm: the vocalism is obscure to me. In the (Tiberian) OT there’s beśem and bośem but no bāśām. The plural bǝśāmīm is much commoner but it would be the plural of any of the three forms. The Aramaic is buśam as far as I can tell.
…in retrospect it could be because the URL is languagehat.com/negus-sawt-%E1%B8%8Dappa (where the %E1%B8%8D bit represents ḍ) and it expects its normalizing function to only produce ASCII but apparently Ḍ was weird enough that it didn’t get normalized.
I have removed the last, weirdest word from the URL; let’s see if that helps.
tv journalist named George Negus
For me, the most famus Negus is Arthur, beloved of BBC TV “Going for a Song”/”Antiques Roadshow”.
The wiki says the Negus’s trace their ancestors back to 1700’s. Fortunately no diacritics. The name seems to be thoroughly Anglo.
Ah me! Yes. Arthur Negus …
“[…] there’s no […]bāśām.”
Could not the form underlying בְּשָׂמִי ‘my ….’ in Song of Songs 5:1 be *bāśām?
Could not the form underlying בְּשָׂמִי ‘my ….’ in Song of Songs 5:1 be *bāśām?
It would indeed, and good catch. But then why would the attestation of the singular in the SoS be bośem?
Also Chaldean < כַּשְׂדִּים (Kasdim in modern Hebrew).
I have always supposed that the Grand Nagus (pronounced with FACE) of the Ferengi Alliance was named Doylistically after the emperors of Ethiopia.
In Modern Hebrew, נוֹגֵשׂ ~ נֹגֵשׂ noges is the guy in cheesy cartoons of Ancient Egypt, standing on top of a huge stone on rollers and cracking a whip at the slaves pulling it.
We have a king serving in Congress. If I say that Eritrea and Ethiopia are close enough would it be very wrong or only a little wrong?
Well, Tigre and Tigrinya are actually more closely related to Geʽez than Amharic is, so close enough.
This went unremarked, but has a very simple answer: in Ethiopicist transcription, ə is /ɨ/ (and ä is /ɐ~ə/, for tripping up anyone expecting /æ/ or for that matter Tocharologists expecting /ɨ/). Also Ge’ez is BTW similar retranscription from Gəʽəz.
Last I heard, any genealogical notion of North Ethiosemitic was now considered dubious / mostly characterized by archaisms. Bulakh & Kogan 2014 even consider a few family trees like {Tigre, {Ge’ez, {Tigrinya, South ES}}}.
I just came here following a link on the “recently commented” site, and the URL I see is https://languagehat.com/negus-sawt-%e1%b8%8dappa/#comment-4459592 (except I actually see the ḍ displayed).
Here is the entry in the online SED for *ngś “to push, to press, to drive to work”. They say:
Some idle speculation with no particular conclusion… In regard to the (non)-relationship between ‘to press, oppress, drive’ and ‘churn, shake milk for butter’, however, I am reminded in some ways of the curious case of Indo-European *neih₁/₃- ‘turn (something) in a certain direction, lead’ and *neiH- ‘churn butter’. PIE *neih₁/₃- ‘to turn in a certain direction, lead’ can be seen in Indo-Iranian and Anatolian: Sanskrit náyati ‘he leads, directs, governs’, Avestan naiieiti ‘leads’; Hittite nāi ‘he turns (something/someone) in a certain direction, sends, wraps around or ties (as a cord)’, reduplicated intensive nanna/i- ‘drive (an animal, a vehicle)’; Luwian nana- ‘to lead’. (Perhaps also Old Irish nia ‘warrior’?)
Beside this, there exists another *neiH- ‘to churn butter’, with reflexes in Latvian and Indo-Iranian: Latvian sviestu nīt ‘to make butter’, paniņas ‘buttermilk’; Sanskrit nīta- ‘fresh butter’, netra- ‘cord for moving the churning stick’; Khotanese nīyaka-, Kurmanji nivîšk, Balochi nēmaġ ‘butter’; finite verbals forms in Roshani nay-/nid, Sariqoli nεy-/nůd, nïd ‘to churn’; Shugni nīm-δōrg ‘churnstaff’; Persian panīr ‘cheese (originally as made by reprocessing buttermilk for curds?)’. It has often been suspected that these two Indo-European roots are somehow one. Could the same be true in Semitic?
But if the two are ultimately one, in either Indo-European or Semitic or in both, does the semantic connection have to do with the actual motion, the turning of the churn-staff in the case of Indo-European, and the pushing of a goatskin churn in the case of Semitic? (From what I could find out about traditional Omani butter making, a suspended skin bag was shaken (illustration here from Kurdistan), agreeing with T.M. Johnstone’s definitions for the Modern South Arabian words.) Or could the development in Modern South Arabian have been from *‘demand, collect together’ (as seen in Hebrew and Arabic and Old South Arabian) further to “shake milk to collect the butter”?
Judging by my most recent attempt to view a new comment, there might be comment-related issues again.
(I guess I’ll know for sure if this doesn’t send.)
Now my comment is invisible but the one I was looking for is visible. Weird.
Here is the entry in the online SED for *ngś “to push, to press, to drive to work”.
Thanks very much for that and your informed commentary/speculation!
Thanks very much for that and your informed commentary/speculation!
Thank you for entertaining my speculations… I hope that a LH commenter can provide a piece of data from the vocabulary of milk-processing in Africa or Siberia or the Balkans that will clinch it.
Fulfulde for “butter” is n(y)ebbam …
Sadly, the bit of Africa I know about is not dairy country, apart from the cattle-nomad Fulɓe …
Actually even this Fulfulde word seems less specific than “butter”; it’s “oil, grease” as well; moreover, with a different class suffix, nyebbere means “bean.”
The pan-Oti-Volta etymon represented by Kusaal kpaam means “oil, grease, (shea) butter”, though you can use it for butter-as-in-dairy. You can specify that explicitly by making a compound: bin’iskpaam, where the first element is bin’sim “milk”, which is itself derived from bin’isir “breast, udder” (both pan-Oti-Volta, again, but primary referring to human breasts and human milk.) For “making butter” it seems you just say exactly that in Kusaal, with maal “make, create.”
None of my Oti-Volta dictionaries seems to have a word for “churn.” Most languages (even Nawdm, way over in Togo) have borrowed the word for “butter” from English.
I think caution is advised with the Mehri ‘churn’ word. That is because there is such an extensive butter vocabulary, judging from Johnstone’s vocabulary. There are the following (I’m listing the root only, plus the gloss for the first item derived from that root):
• ḥmź ‘to make butter, shake milk for butter (which takes 15-30 minutes).’
• ḳṭmm ‘unclarified, freshly made butter.’
• ngś ‘to mend; to shake milk for butter.’
• xzr ‘fresh (unclarified) butter.’
• xźź ‘to wade; to shake (milk for butter).’
Plus terms for the preparation of dried buttermilk, etc. To my taste, it’s better to look at the semantic map as a whole first before etymologizing the individual terms.
That said, I wonder if the first term is related to the Hebrew ḥbṣ ‘to churn’.
The SED thinks it’s rather related to Hebrew ḥmṣ “be leavened; be sour”.
I was wondering about that, then decided the semantics were too disparate. But if the phonology matches, so be it. Maybe Hebrew ḥbṣ is kin to ḥbṭ ‘beat’.
Y:
TR:
You’ve reminded me about something I remember about paneer:
I have to wonder if the Mehri made such acid-started cheese, either as an independent invention, or transmitted from somewhere else.
Akismet mislikes me…
Nah, it’s just got a thing about dappae. Or possibly neguseses. Probably sees them as rivals.
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
A bit of searching leads to some details on Arabian dairy products. It is my great pleasure to bring the word oggtt to the attention of those present here.
Oggtt is one of the best words I’ve ever seen, but is it real?
Maybe instead of cheese, I should have thought of buttermilk (sour due to lactic acid).
Indeed, أُقْطٌ (I think). Here are related forms, with an etymology. The <gg> seems to stand for q, the <tt> for ṭ.
It’s probably phonologically and grammatically naive of me to wonder if ʾaqiṭ is related to ḳṭmm above.
@Y, thank you, it is beautiful. “Studies on Oggtt” (from the bibliography to the article).
@Y, Steiner 1977 The Case for Fricative Laterals in Proto-Semitic, 123-129 (XVI. Evidence from Balsamon – Bśm for Lateral Ṥ) comments on it this way:
Presumably Encyclopedia Miqrait has more…
(i forgot the link. And a small addendum is here)
I like the first addendum: “I now prefer the term lateral fricative to fricative-lateral.”
So there are attestations of three different vocalizations, one of which (indirectly) fits the one sought here. That’s not bad. It’s curious, though, that so many forms exist. I wonder if bośem and beśem are not original, but backformed from the plural bǝśāmīm, which is attested far more than the singular.
I’m trying to read something about the history of alpha-beta-gamma (the names). So I am reading this (sci-hub).
“and even a bēt, whose pictographic character is not usually questioned, [29] looks like a ‘house’ only if we posit a surprisingly abstract drawing of a house front or a ground plan. [30]”
Well, it looks like 9 (Or more exactly) but does anyone know how children in generalized Timbuktu (that is: where roofs are not like ^) draw a house?
“…but that Ḍäppa link redirects to Ḍād,…”
Which in turn contains this line: “the corresponding letter in the South Arabian alphabet is [himjar za2.PNG, text when mouse over: ḍ] ṣ́, and in Ge’ez alphabet Ṣ́appa ፀ”
Sigh. Meanwhile the article quoted above has this note:
The wave-like shape seems to favour naḥaš ‘snake’ (Driver [n. 1], 154 and 165; cf. however Ruijgh [n. 20], 541), but this name is attested, like the other Ethiopian letter names, only in 1548 in a translation of the New Testament printed in Rome; Ullendorff (n. 31), 211–14, suspects that the entire Ethiopian name series was invented in the sixteenth century by European missionaries or scholars (cf. Sass [1991] [n. 1], 92, but differently Nöldeke [n. 20], 131–3, and Lundin [n. 29], 21). One may also ask why a name naḥaš ‘snake’, which fits the shape rather nicely, should have been replaced in the Northwest Semitic tradition by a less plausible nūn ‘fish’. On further name changes see Demsky (1997) (n. 20), 364 (hehin and pepin in Rabbinic literature); Ruijgh (n. 20), 542 (dalt renamed from dag ‘fish’; cf. Cross and Lambdin [n. 24], 25, Sass [1988] [n. 1], 113–14), and § VIII on *ṯann → šin; the excessive reliance on such changes in Lidzbarski (n. 30), 126–38, is already criticized by Gardiner (n. 1), 7–8.
I suspect that powerful linguist lobbies, wanting to ensure job opportunities for themselves, heavily influenced the decision to confuse the language of all the earth. Unfortunately, market prices collapsed about 50 years ago.
The second wave of language confusion was created by computer science lobbies, to ensure that programmers will always be in demand.
@LH, it seems this Ḍäppa-Ṣ́appa (take it as a reduplication…) comes from (archive):
T E S T A M E N T U M
ɴᴏᴠᴠᴍ ᴄᴠᴍ ᴇᴘɪꜱᴛᴏʟᴀ ᴘᴀᴠʟɪ ᴀᴅ
Hebreos tantum, cum concordantijs Euangelistarum Eu-
sebij & numeratione omnium verborum eorundem.
Miſſale cum benedictione incenſi ceræ et c. Alpha=
betum in lingua ግእዝ፡gheez, id eſt libera quia a
nulla alia originem duxit, & vulgo dicitur
Chaldea, Quæ omnia Fr̃ Petrus Ethyops
auxilio piorum ſedente Paulo.III.Pont.
Max.& Claudio illius regni Im=
peratore imprimi curauit.
ᴀɴɴᴏ ꜱᴀʟᴠᴛɪꜱ ᴍ. ᴅ. xʟɪɪɪᴠ
(I typed it as printed partly for fun, partly because ᴍ. ᴅ. xʟɪɪɪᴠ is sooooooo much better than
ᴍᴅxʟɪɪɪᴠ. And I wonder what this mutation ግእዝ / ግዕዝ (Gəʼəz / Gəʽəz) is about:-/ At least it is comforting that not only apostrophes are confused….)
It has a table (or more conveniently as jpeg), where the letter is called
ፀጳ
and values are defined as
.........ጳ pa
ፀ zɑ ........
In other words, it is what
was written about. A later Historia Æthiopica calls it Zappa – again, i don’t know what this gemination is about.
= was meant to be ⸗
PS: I understood the question “is Ḍäppa a thing?” as referring to the name Ḍäppa, not the character ፀ.
Zappa in
IOBI LVDOLFI
aliàs 𝕷𝖊𝖚𝖙⸗𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖋 dïcti
HISTORIA ÆTHIOPICA, sive brevis & ſuccincta deſcriptio REGNI HABESSINORUM,
Quod vulgò malè Pʀᴇꜱʙʏᴛᴇʀɪ Iᴏʜᴀɴɴɪꜱ vocatur.
Letter names:
Hoi Lawi Haut Mai Saut Rεεs Sat Kaf Bet Tawi Harm Nahas Alph Qaf Wawe Ain Zai Jaman Dent Geml Tait Pait Zadai Zappa Af Pſa
Another table with comparison with Samaritan letters. Without Zappa.
Alf Bet Gεml Dεnt Haut Wavv Zaj Hharm Tait Jaman Caf Lavvi Maj Nahas Saat Ain Af Tzadai Kof Rεεs Saut Tavvi
(English translation)
PS: I understood the question “is Ḍäppa a thing?” as referring to the name Ḍäppa, not the character ፀ.
Exactly right, and thanks for the information.
Well, apparently it is different people insert their transliteration of choice in _appa, where _appa follows a tradition that originated in 16th century.
But then there is another question of where Zappa comes from.
Ullendorff:
___________________________
Names of the letters of the alphabet
……………………………….
Furthermore, as we have seen above, there is no Abyssinian source, recent or ancient, which discloses any knowledge in this respect. On the contrary, there is a tradition-prevalent in all the three major modern Abyssinian languages—which can be traced back at least a hundred years (and which may, conceivably, be very old) in which an altogether different system of nomenclature is adopted.
Praetorius, who in his monumental Amharische Sprache (I879) had already pointed out that the old names of the letters were nowadays completely ‘in Vergessenheit geraten ‘, drew attention to the fact (op. cit., p. 8) that all letters are called by their normal sound in the first order,¹ e.g. Iä, rä, fä, &c. The only exceptions to this rule are those letters which are no longer distinguished in pronunciation. They alone possess names known to every Abyssinian, whether Tigrinya-, Tigre- or Amharicspeaking, as follows:
(a) h- halʸeta; ḥ- ḥamär; ḫ- bəzuḫan; (b) š- nəguš; s- ʾəsat; (c) ʾ- ʾalʸef; ʿ- ʿayn; (d) sˡ- sˡälot
(also sˡəlmat and sˡədəkˡ); (e) dˡ- dˡäḥay.
ˡ
These Geʽez names are not only used when Geʽez spelling is discussed, but they are universally applied to all modern Abyssinian languages that are written in the Ethiopic alphabet, even if these languages themselves have abandoned those distinctions.
If my view that the ‘old’ letter-names in Ethiopic are of comparatively recent and non-indigenous origin is correct, then it will be readily understood that some sort of nomenclature must have been introduced at a fairly early date (certainly before the end of the first millennium A.D.), in order to distinguish such letters as had lost their characteristic pronunciation. This assumption concerning the age of the above nine names appears to find confirmation in their acceptance over the entire Abyssinian language field. Indeed, the fact that these names are common Abyssinian property might conceivably point to a period before the modern languages had succeeded Geʽez, although it has to be admitted that the universality of this nomenclature could also be explained through the traditional methods of Geʽez instruction.
The principle underlying these names is not necessarily that of acrophony, but rather the choice of a representative and frequently occurring word in which the desired sound has a prominent position: ḫ- bəzuḫan; s- ʾəsat opposite ḥ- ḥamär or dˡ- dˡäḥay.
Ḥamär is exclusively a Geʽez word; Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic use märkäb.² ʾEsat occurs in all but Tigrinya where ḥawwi is used. In Amharic bəzu the operative consonant is missing. ʾAlʸef and ʿayn are no doubt derived from the Psalter (the alphabetically ordered psalms), and sˡəlmat and sˡədəkˡ take in some schools the place of the usual sˡälot. The tradition regarding these names must thus have been old and powerful enough to counterbalance the facts that (a) most of these distinctions have become meaningless in the pronunciation of the modern languages, and (b) some of the names are not even part of the ordinary vocabulary of those languages.
Abba Yaʽqob Gebreyesus in his grammar of Geʽez (in Amharic) and his grammar of Tigrinya (written in Tigrinya) does not give names to any of the symbols of the
¹ Cf. also Mittwoch (Trad. Ausspr., p. 8): ‘Der Abessinier kennt den Begriff des Konsonanten für sich überhaupt nicht, sondern kann ihn sich immer nur in Verbindung mit einem Vokal vorstellen. Das ist auch bei sadəs der Fall, das neben der Vokallosigkeit auch den unbestimmten Vokal ə bezeichnet.’
² In other words: the names of the letters have universal currency, although the objects incidentally represented by these words (e.g.’ ship ‘,’ fire’, &c.) are, in some cases, called differently in the various languages.
____________________________
Ethiopic syllabary except to those nine sounds mentioned above: ‘There are three h sounds:
h- halʸeta; ḥ- ḥamär; ḫ- bəzuḫan are their names.’¹ or: ‘š-This s sound is called nəguš;’ ² &c., &c. but: ‘r- is the 6th letter²’ &c., &c.
The names of the Ethiopic letters thus provide one instance where indigenous tradition and external evidence allow us to arrive at the same conclusions.
Innovations in the script—as compared with Geʽez
…………………………..
¹ Mäsˡḥaf Säwasəw zägəʼ’əz (sic!), Asmara 1920 (i.e. 1927), p. 7.
² Nay təgrəňňa säwasəw, Asmara 1926 (i.e. 1933), p. 13.
__________________________________________________
And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geʽez :
… Geʽez ś ሠ Sawt (in Amharic, also called śe-nigūś, i.e. the se letter used for spelling the word nigūś “king”) is reconstructed as descended from a Proto-Semitic voiceless lateral fricative [ɬ]. Like Arabic, Geʽez merged Proto-Semitic š and s in ሰ (also called se-isat: the se letter used for spelling the word isāt “fire”).
But then there is another question of where Zappa comes from.
I know the answer to that: Baltimore.
Yes, they (17th century sources) should have retained the spelling Zɑppa (from the preface to the NT) to avoid confusion.
ḍ vs. ṣ́ : I guess
ḍ means “a Semitic correspondence to Arabic ḍad”
ṣ́ means “an emphatic counterpart to *ś in PS” (see Steiner above: intro, conclusions (p 155) and the PS word for laugh 111).
ś itself likely meant some sort of palatal fricative which is not the current (lateral..) party line. It coudl be just s² but I can see why they don’t like ṣ².
Not sure if ṣ́ is any better than ḍ. It points on the (actual) connetion with another sound in the same language. ḍ points at the (actual) connection with another sound in related language. But “this diacritic means that once upon a time we thought that a related sound is palatal (based on Arabic)” is a poor motivation to adding a diacritic… Could just write… ɬʼ
—-
….Or Cyrillic Ц with an extra dent for emphasis. …
I know the answer to that: Baltimore.
I was thinking about answering along similar lines, but then I thought, no, Languagehat is a serious blog, that kind of silliness is not appropriate 😉
Quite right, we don’t tolerate that kind of thing around here!
Well, I just calculated that if you appear naked in public, the effect will be even more striking if you behave as if you were dressed.
Also I thought “*appa-цараппа”.
zägəʼ’əz (sic!)
Oh
It was zägəʼəz (sic!)🙁
WP “Many of the letter names are cognate with those of Phoenician, and may thus be assumed for the Proto-Sinaitic script.”
Ha-ha. “Phoenician” names are attested in the form “alpha, beta, gamma….”.
Michael Jursa Die Kralle des Meeres und andere Aromata / The Claw of the Sea and other Aromatics p 156 (academia, GB):
die Kombination steht für /ś/.
Ouch. It is “die Kombination <-lt-> steht für /ś/.”. Sadly, when the comment appeared, I couldn’t edit it.
If anyone is curious about die Sklavin, Wunsch 1995 Die Frauen der Familie Egibi only has this note “Z. 7f.:Beide Zeilen sind über eine Rasur geschrieben; lies gegen Bertin ᶠBal-ta (statt DA)-am-mu; wie in 33933:4 (Nr.12)”, but she appears here, p. 30-31, ᶠbal-ṭa-am-mu, p. 33 ᶠba-al-ta-am-mu (line 4 and note 45) and especially p. 34 note 49.
Well, I just calculated that if you appear naked in public, the effect will be even more striking if you behave as if you were dressed.
Quite right. I once answered the door with no clothes on, so I just carried on normally. Fortunately, the person knew me and my oddities.
Drasvi, that article by Jursa is excellent! I was unaware of this Akkadian evidence for the interpretation of onycha (p. 154f). Thanks for calling attention to that.
Yes. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ܛܦܪܐ has “The senses “onycha” and “onyx” are semantic loans of Ancient Greek ὄνυξ (ónux).” which does not make much sense.
“There’s no problem with the mere fact that Hebrew originally preserved a distinct reflex of Proto-Semitic /ś/, of course, as that is clear from the history of the sibilants within Hebrew itself; ”
To me it is less clear. Look at English. It was spoken on Earth during much of 21st century.
There were all sort of vowel mergers, and yet they used the same literary langauge and the same writing system…
I mean, imagine:
community A has two sounds: s1-2, s3.
community B has two sounds: s1, s2-3.
They still share literary langauge (orthography, grammar, vocabulary) because of shared ancestry or convergence.
What is this if not English?
This is surely the only way to account for the fact that written shin in some (not all) lexical items later coincided in pronunciation with samech, and that those three lexical groups show distinct reflexes for the relevant consonants elsewhere in Semitic. Dialect mixture can’t explain that.
@DE, I am only beginning to expore Hebrew philology so anything I say is just my own precautions, not a learned opinion.
My motivation here as it is over and over again is that I hate the perception that diversity of ancient Mediterrinean has been surpassed by modern Dagestan (or even Brittany) by orders of magnitude. They spoke Latin, Greek (with dialects), Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic…. Somewhere to the south there were people with camels and pre-Arabic. Surely it is simpler to assume that if we know about only N lnaguages, then there were only N languages. But it is the same sort of parsimony as in “we don’t know what is there at 55° N, 38° E, so let’s believe nothing is there: no space-time, nothing”.
Now, no, it is not the only way. There could be a language or dialect whose speakers (1) used literary Hebrew and (2) have been merging these two all the way from proto–West Semitic.
I am not saying that they did not have a distinct phoneme, I am saying that could have lost it. Maybe they were not Canaanites (linguistically) at all, but the Jews who came in the land of Canaan with Abraham or Moses.
I could have taken any modern language as an example of a language where speakers systematically maintain in writing distinctions that they don’t make in pronunciation. Russian or anything. It is normal. The question is only why such community would not use a phonemic writing system.
But in this case the explanation is that there was another community for whom this writing was more phonemical. It is accepted as a fact: this system did not represent Hebrew phonemes. It merged two sounds that Masoretes distinguish. The existence of this community is also a fact.
I only propose that it also distinguished between two sounds that conincide for some other groups of speakers (the source of Masoretic spelling), and such a situation is so common that it is universal.
Now I do not mean that Hebrew “did not distinguish” between these sounds. I only don’t find the argument “but how else Masoretes could know?” strong.
There’s nothing at all controversial in the statement that the Hebrew alphabet did not represent all the consonant distinctions of actual spoken Hebrew (regardless of dialect.) Clearcut examples are cheth and ayin, each of which represented two distinct consonants; we know this for certain, because the transcriptions in Greek letters differ.
I hate the perception that diversity of ancient Mediterrinean has been surpassed by modern Dagestan (or even Brittany) by orders of magnitude
I don’t know about “orders of magnitude”, but different regions plain do differ very substantially in linguistic diversity. It’s just a fact.
Even within Oti-Volta, Mooré, Gulmancéma, Dagbani and Dagaare between them account for well over half the land area these languages are spoken in: the other twenty or so divide the rest between them. And the Atakora département of Bénin by itself is as diverse internally (just considering OV languages) as all the rest of the area, extending over Ghana, Togo, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso.
“There’s nothing at all controversial in the statement that the Hebrew alphabet did not represent”
Yes, of course. And there is also nothing controversial in the statement that the alphabet distinguished between sounds that merged in some pronunciations.
The question is when Hebrew speakers began to mix sibilants up, and the evidence of Masoretes tells me nothing about it. Either they wrote “שׂ” because it once was same as ס or they wrote שׂ because it once was a lateral. God knows.
Steiner (link) presents arguments in favour of 3-sibilant system and I don’t see how any date for שׂ – ס merger follows from his arguments.
“orders of magnitude” – Maybe one decimal order. I associate “orders” with powers of e, and even though I meant decimal orders, the association affected me. I am not saying that anyone would actually claim: “there were only ten languages in the ancient Mediterranean” or something like that.
But people often assume that what was spoken is what we know. Depending on context it can be just a few major languages – which gives us decimal orders for Dagestan (Brittany is rather an example of complicated dialectology) – or all attested languages. And all attested langauges is still not much. For super-Saharan Africa it is “Egyptian, and a couple of obscure epigraphic languages, presumably related to proro-Berber”.
People are more generous when something is attested later (or ideally is spoken today): then they are ready to extrapolate it back in time for the same place (as with Berber).
The quality of attestation: consider African Romance.
A large language with many speakers in a wast area. How well is it attested? So why things should be better for languages with comparable number of speakers in the Middle East 2000 years ago?
The question is, why was shin and not samekh chosen to double duty for ś? Was it arbitrary? Was it for some reason having to do with the logic of the script? Or maybe there was some Hebrew dialect which merged š and ś, which did not survive, and which the first users of the script were aware of?
drasvi: check out Ringe’s 2009 essay at Language Log on the linguistic diversity of the ancient Mediterranean.
Yes, I think drasvi will like that essay.
I fiund it somewhat comforting that there are people who unite shin and samech (Arabs), people who unite samech and sin (Jews) and people who unite sin and shin (the authors of the alphabet).
All combinations.
Maybe I’ll call them sinists, shinists and samechists – (i.e. sinists are people of unmerged sin, Arabs).
@Y, I’ll quote from Steiner:
In the terminology proposed above, Phoenicians, Northerners and Samaritans are samechists.
The alphabet was used by Phoenicians and other people (including people who Jews borrowed it from) but maybe those don’t count. Jews could introduce a new letter… or not (same letter for i, n, b, t, th in dotless Arabic makes one think that this was not necessary). But there could be an important samechist faction among users of written Hebrew.
As it happens, I was just rereading Johanna Nichols’ Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time (the connexion being that she gets a highly honourable mention in Ringe’s essay.)
I can never muster quite the enthusiasm for this (nevertheless very interesting) work that some others seem to, perhaps because so many of the typological features she claims to highly stable over time don’t actually seem to be so in language groups that I’m familiar with. Still, this may well be a sort of evil twin of Teeter’s Law: the better you know a language, the more you discover that it fails to conform to proposed general rules/tendencies.
She does make quite a thing of the (undoubtedly true) fact that diversity of language is extremely variable by geographic area. Spread zones and residual zones and whatever …
On drasvi’s point that dialect diversity rather than language diversity is the point in this particular Hebrew context, I’m reminded of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth
(The Hebrew text there actually says, specifically, that the Ephraimites said samech for sin, but I suppose it would have to, for the consonantal text to make sense without the Tiberian pointing.)
I had forgotten Blau’s excellent essay on ś. There’s too much there to summarize, and I’m lazy. I’ll mention only that Blau is convinced that the letter ש represents both š and ś because the sounds had merged in the language of the people who devised the script.
Also, שׂ/ס confusion occurs increasingly in Mishnaic Hebrew, but my favorite example is that from Bar Kochba’s letters, where he calls himself הנסי על ישראל ‘the headman over Israel’ or so, with the spelling נסי nasi for נָשִׂיא.
The link for Blau fell off. It’s
https://kb.osu.edu/bitstream/handle/1811/58579/HAR_v1_067.pdf
I meant to write “the Ephraimites said samech for shin” above; because of the Wrath of Akismet I’ve only now seen the mistake.
Another paper from Blau, On polyphony in Biblical Hebrew (where polyphony means a script character representing multiple sounds), starts,
I’m a little confused, because I thought he’d meant that there was a merging Hebrew dialect somewhere.
Aside: someone very thoughtfully uploaded a great deal of Blau’s writing to academia.edu, under the name “Joshua Blau ז״ל”, i.e. ‘of blessed memory’. Academia.edu’s annoying dialog offers me to write a note before downloading, beginning with “Dear Joshua /blau of Blessed Memory,…”
@Y, thank you!
I was going to read Blau, but I was a bit lazy to look for titles and then for the articles, so I kept postponing it.
Here (Google Books, but it is also on numerous pirate sites) Kogan criticizes both sides – and particulrly notes some examples of a ש that does not behave itself.
Blau’s article is long enough, I am still reading. My problem, though, is that much of what I have read in Blau and all I read in Steiner and Kogan is about supposed Aramaic influence: medieval (in Steiner’s article) or (Diem) from the first millenium B.C.
My cautiousness has little to do with Aramaic.
The שׂ-ס merger among modern speakers is a fact. 3 PS sibilants is an assumption based on correspondences.
An event of merger is implied. When did it happen?
Masoretic/Tiberian spellings tell me nothing about the date. Arguments for or against Aramaic tell me nothing.
I mean, imagine:
community A has two sounds: s1-2, s3.
community B has two sounds: s1, s2-3.
this is basically the entire history of yiddish dialectology, at every historical point! dovid katz’s work on the “bney hes”/”bney khes” division in pre- or earliest yiddish and on the vocalism of yiddish words from hebrew & aramaic covers some elements of it; alexis manaster ramer and alexander beider deal with others.
one thing i get from it all is that there’s never been any kind of unitary version (or even a single high prestige version) of the relationship between hebrew as spoken and as written – which is maybe just to say the obvious: there’s no prelapsarian single True And Internally Consistent version of any language, however much nationalists would like one. it’s just one congeries of idiolects after another, all the way down! (which is, ultimately, why chomskian dogma has never made sense to me)
Starting from Steiner whose subchapter I have read:
I don’t know if “Since the Biblical text itself already shows s for etymological ś and vice versa.” is meant to show that the argument is convincing or could be convincing if.. or is not convincing.
But anyway: this and Schramms “it may be that” seems to be exactly my argument. Unfortunately, Steiner focuses on the “Masoretes reconstructed it” argument. Moreover:
But if Masoretes based it on their knowlege of Aramaic and Arabic, I am afraid, [presumably unknown to them] examples from Arabic can’t be used:-/
Correction (sorry:()
Standard German is like that, too. All its pronunciations are pretty similar to each other and have a pretty simple relationship to the spelling… but that leaves room for some strikingly different sound inventories and even sound systems that don’t have the same number of phonemes.
Even if you assume two different dialects of Hebrew, one of which merged *ś with *s and one of which merged ś with *ʃ, you still need a three-way distinction to have been preserved in Hebrew itself initially.
I take it you are therefore proposing that the Masoretes marked shin as sin in the Tanakh whenever the corresponding sound in their own L1, Aramaic, was /s/ and not /ʃ/? I think that could be made to work*: however …
The immediate problem I see with this is that Biblical Aramaic also makes this three-way distinction, marked in the same way as Biblical Hebrew in the Tiberian tradition (though with a few “errors”, suggesting the the merger was beginning.) So the Masoretes would have also to have corrected the Aramaic pronunciation to match their own, later, phonology. That seems possible: but then, how did Biblical Aramaic itself acquire this distinction? Did it also have two dialects, differing just in the same way as the Hebrew in this particular respect? How would that have come about?
I yield to none in my admiration of the Masoretes’ linguistic sophistication (seriously), but it seems unnecessarily complicated to assume that they performed all this accurate historical reconstruction when a vastly simpler explanation is available: an explanation which only has to assume that the script was inadequate to represent all consonant contrasts of either language – something which we actually already know, for certain, on other grounds.
* But then, why stop there? Why not also “restore” /t/ in the many cases where this corresponds in later Aramaic to Hebrew /ʃ/? And why would the Masoretes have supposed that their contemporary pronunciation of /s/ was more ancient or more canonical than that in the Hebrew text anyway? They were perfectly aware that Hebrew was a different language from Aramaic, and comparative linguistics hadn’t been invented yet.
The traditional explanation is that the written tradition and the oral tradition existed side by side, and the Masoretes noted in writing the two different pronunciations corresponding to the written shin. No evidence from other languages is required.
As to when the shift started occurring, misreadings of ś as s start appearing in late Biblical Hebrew, which (I think) overlaps the time when balsam would have come into Greek. So call it mid–first millenium BCE.
See also a discussion in Ben-Hayyim, A Grammar of Samaritan Hebrew, pp. 35–36.
The traditional explanation is that the written tradition and the oral tradition existed side by side, and the Masoretes noted in writing the two different pronunciations corresponding to the written shin. No evidence from other languages is required
Quite so.
It’s not remotely implausible, either, given the Masoretes’ extraordinary fidelity in transmitting the vowels of Biblical Hebrew. Admittedly, there are some errors, and the vowels appear in an Aramaicised guise (so that, for example, etymologically short vowels in open unstressed syllables are long, because in Aramaic, short vowels in this position were reduced to schwa, so they had to be long.) But in general the tradition was clearly astonishingly sound. It’s a linguistic wonder of the world.
The idea that the Masoretes (of all people!) would deliberately have substituted /s/ for /ʃ/ (both of which were phonemic in both languages, so this would be a substitution, not a confusion) in the BH text to make it match the pronunciation of cognate Aramaic words in their own speech frankly strikes me as absurd.
Talking of oral traditions, it’s rather discombobulating to realise that the Masoretes’ own oral tradition has long since been lost, and subsequent scholars have had to do their best in working out what their written tradition was meant to convey, with some help from transcriptions in Arabic and the like. Geoffrey Khan has done lots on this.
Modern Biblical Hebrew grammars rely on David Qimhi’s ingenious conflation of two different historical periods into one system.
@drasvi: English “orders of magnitude” are measured according to powers of ten—that is, as differences in the common logarithms of two quantities. If you want to indicate the equivalent differences in the natural logarithms, it’s normally “e-folds,” but you can also say, “nepers,” although that word is less known than it ought to be.
“I take it you are therefore proposing that the Masoretes marked shin as sin in the Tanakh whenever the corresponding sound in their own L1, Aramaic, was /s/ and not /ʃ/?”
No!
Aramaic influence is what they all are arguing against (and Kogan choses not to argue against). .
I just simply don’t see how any particular date for שׂ/ס merger follows from their argument.
You say there was a “three-way distinction” “in Hebrew itself initially”.
When is “initially”?
Aguments like Y’s “misreadings of ś as s start appearing in late Biblical Hebrew,” make more sense in this context. But such arguments require very detailed examination of the corpus (ś for s or s for ś in the scripture and inscriptions). I simply can’t find a work where this is done!
@Brett I don’t think that the difference between uses of “orders of magnitude” and “порядки величины” is about language but you are right: in Russian I can’t comfortably form e-folds or coin words like nepers.
I don’t know how common it is for those Russians who deal with powers of e to call it “orders”.
It is just a feature of my idiolect, when I mean decimal orders I feel obliged to add “two decimal orders”.
drasvi: I can’t find a comprehensive list of ś~s alternations in the OT, either, just mentions of examples here and there.
Another argument I saw for setting the tmie of the merger is that it would have to be after the split between the Jewish and the Samaritan reading traditions, since each merges the ś in a separate direction. That, however, has many uncertainties, including the actual time of that split.
I could swear I’ve seen a Russian term for nepers somewhere but I don’t recall exactly what it was. (It might well have been неперы; my memory suggests экспоненты but that doesn’t sound likely to be understood correctly.)
I agree that I can’t really form one comfortably, but then “e-folds” in English does not sound very intelligible or comfortable to me either.
In retrospect it might also have been a confusion with stellar magnitudes (звёздные величины), which go by factors of 2.512ish (the definition converts to 1 stellar magnitude = -4 dB; it’s negative because higher numbers correspond to lower brightness).
Well, in Russian a quantity is usually “larger on N orders” (just as it is “larger on two centimeters”), or less literally “N orders larger”.
“N orders of magnitide” — but in Russian “a quantity” (as opposed to ‘quantity of something’) is literally “a magnitude” — is a less common full name.
In in English I have seen both “N orders” and “N magnitudes”.
That seems possible: but then, how did Biblical Aramaic itself acquire this distinction? Did it also have two dialects, differing just in the same way as the Hebrew in this particular respect?
Just for clarity:
The Forces of Evil, (1): the three way distinction did not exist in Proto-Semitic.
The Forces of Good (Steiner, Blau and others): it did!!!
The Forces of Evil, (2): the Masoretes invented this reading based on Aramaic.
The Forces of Good: They did not!
The Forces of Evil (revised, Diem): the three-way distinction did exist in PS, but not in Hebrew (which, like other Canaanite languages, mixed up ś and š). Then the Masoretes borrowed a different reading from Aramaic.
The Forces of Good: No!
Nothing of this is my position. I do not object to proto-Semitic or Aramaic ś. I want to know how people who wrote in Hebrew pronounced “ś”, but the Forces of Good are too busy proving that the reading tradition is “genuine” and and won’t be distracted by such silly questions.
Dialects within Hebrew is what the Forces of Good propose as an explanation for the Samaritan tradition.
Cf. Kogan (neutral):
And this (by Schramm 1964): “…it may be that the manuscript tradition, where Tiberian < ś > and < š > are both represented by the same skeletal letter, was based on a dialect of Hebrew in which, as in Samaritan Hebrew, the sound values of < ś > and < š > fell together, while the oral tradition stemmed from another dialect, where the sound values of < ś > [and] < s > instead, merged.” is one option I am speaking about.
Seems probable to me. In the Samaritan abjad, the letters singat/sinkat and shan graphically correspond to samekh and shin respectively, and there are no dots: they are phonetically /s/ and /ʃ/. I have not been able to confirm that where there is a sin in the Hebrew Pentateuch, the Samaritan Pentateuch consistently has singat rather than shan, but if that’s true, it suggests that when the Aramaic square script replaced the Palaeo-Hebrew script, shin was used wherever Aramaic had it, regardless of the Hebrew pronunciation.
Add to that, if you do assemble a list of ś~s alternations in the OT, for each one you’d need to dive into arguments of the timing of the authorship and scribal transmission of each.
I did find a list, btw, of hypercorrections from s to ś, all in the book of Job. It, and the SoS (which shows some ś to s spellings) are usually assigned to the Hellenistic period.
(Comments are disappearing again; I’m leaving this just in case it miraculously stays in view, so people will know what’s happening.)
It just occured to me that we never can prove a merger.
People use the same letter in two words… and what? How do you know there is not some subtle phonetical difference? It can go beyond detectability… But how often it happens that a trained linguist is unable to detect an exotic for her feature which is massively improtant for local phonology?
But how often it happens that a trained linguist is unable to detect an exotic for her feature which is massively important for local phonology?
As reportedly happened with tones in some East Caucasian languages… for a long time nobody noticed them because nobody was looking for them in that area, and then even the people who were looking for them found them hard to detect.
Of course it’s common to be uncertain, even (especially?) in one’s own pronunciation, which sounds are pronounced differently – particularly (though not necessarily) if they’re spelled with different letters.
(Borrowed phonemes can make it even harder; I remember realizing, a few years ago, that I must have actually been pronouncing /θ/ and /t͡s/ subtly differently because my tongue was doing different things, though I couldn’t actually hear the difference myself and previously thought I was saying [t͡s] for /θ/.)
In historical contexts, of course, without recordings we might never know for sure. Did any Slavic languages ever pronounce fert and fita differently? How would we know if they did? How would we know if they didn’t? AFAIK in the original Greek they were (and still are) /f/ and /θ/ respectively but Slavic didn’t really have either at the time.
It just occured to me that we never can prove a merger.
Proof? What is this “proof” of which you speak? Are we mathematicians, or creationists?
In any case, misspellings are good evidence of at-least-near-mergers. Pardeeville, Wisconsin, is often misspelled Partyville, and John Cowan (who is a pretty good speller) often writes Herotodus instead of Herodotus, both of which tend to show the intervocalic /t~d/ merger in American English. Of course, copy editors and my knowledge of etymology (‘Hera-given’) get these forms corrected a good deal of the time. See also the Appendix Probi.
It were evolutionists who wrote the article “Proofs of Evolution” for Russian WP….
But congratulations, you are more extreme at grumbling at misuse of the word “prove” than I am.
I checked with Mark Shoulson about Samaritan, and I was wrong. He writes:
Ben-Hayyim published a phonetic transcript of excerpts from the Pentateuch, as read b y Samaritan priests. Esau’s name is transcribed as īšåb, i.e. /iːʃɑb/, with no initial ‘ayin.
So Samaritans :: Bengalis.
Or Finns. That pretty much happens whenever there is only one dorsal sibilant.
WP says:
BTW, I recommend everyone become a scholar of Biblical Hebrew. Ben-Hayyim lived to 106, Blau to 101.
In English scientific writing, proof & prove have been extremely rare for the last several decades. The word to use here would be evidence – something not many languages have a single handy word for.
@David, it is not scientific writing, it is the Russian echo of the evolutionist-creationist battle.
“Свидетельства” and “доказательства” both look weird in this context, but I suppose “evidence” looked too weak. “Доказательства” look very weird to me personally.
“That pretty much happens whenever there is only one dorsal sibilant.”
Cf. Kogan again.
But does not Samaritan have /s/?
I think a flight to the Moon proves that a flight to the Moon is possible. At least I won’t grumble if someone says so.
If a speaker is able to (tends to) recognize members of minimal pairs does this mean that those words are actually different? Maybe she’s reading your mind. Or maybe she’s just lucky (you can’t repeat the experiment infinitely many times). Or maybe something about this particular recording or the circumstances makes her prefer the correct answer. Or maybe she is not “giving the correct answer”*, maybe she is saying “yes” because she is in the mood to say this word. Maybe you are right and I need to keep in mind some of those possibilities. But when I don’t feel so, and when I think that we all agree on the rules of the game and there is no need to question those rules at the moment, I am fine with the word “proof”.
For scientific theories there is a good reason within science itself to keep questioning them and treat them as models rather than somethign that can be “proven”.
—
* you may ask, why I keep speaking about her mental state as the criterion… It is because within my model people are more real than chairs (or the equipment I am using for observing them).
I think a flight to the Moon proves that a flight to the Moon is possible.
When people complained that Le Petit Soldat was unrealistic because it showed a guy stalking another guy to kill him while carrying a gun openly in the streets of Geneva, Godard pointed out that it was clearly realistic because he had filmed the scene on location in the streets of Geneva and none of the passersby batted an eye. Pretty convincing.
Uh, how visible was the camera?
Because otherwise, openly carrying a gun while not looking like police will…
…be very much noticed by people who look at their fellow passersby. So, not that many, really. How dense was the crowd…?
In what way?
What exactly?
That’s close enough to scientific writing that people do actually avoid proof & prove there, too, though not quite as strictly as in actual scientific writing.
Uh, how visible was the camera?
Not visible at all; Godard and his cinematographer had worked out a system where the camera and cameraman were hidden on a cart being pushed along the street.
How dense was the crowd…?
It was a normal street crowd. You can see for yourself if you watch the movie (I can’t find a clip with that scene). Trust me, nobody thought a movie was being filmed (Geneva in 1960 was not New York in the 21st century).
That’s interesting, then, and most likely speaks to how much urban people ignore each other.
“A normal street crowd” means quite different things in different places, though. In Paris it probably means twice the density as in Berlin or Vienna.
No, the word “proofs” is used here to make the Light of scientific Truth shine ever brighter as the darkenss is encroaching….
cf
Ричард Докинз ·: Самое грандиозное шоу на Земле: доказательства эволюции (en: Evidence)
Койн Д. : Эволюция. Неопровержимые доказательства (“Irrefutable Proofs”, en: Why Evolution is True?)
and so on.
In what way?
Sorry, forgot to answer this: Bengali has only shibilants (so the name Sen, as in Amartya Sen, is pronounced Shen).
No, it’s no the question “why is evolution true?”, it’s the statement “[here’s] why evolution is true”.
We discussed sibilants in languages that only have one dorsal sibilant not long ago (as time is measured in the Hattery):
https://languagehat.com/a-greek-papyrus-in-armenian-script/#comment-4374050
BTW, I recommend everyone become a scholar of Biblical Hebrew. Ben-Hayyim lived to 106, Blau to 101
Academic anatomists seem to have this particular blessing also.
Now, if you were a scholar of Biblical Hebrew Anatomy …
@hat
The actor who played Bruno Forestier has a different memory from the master…
Source: Antoine de Baeque, “Godard”, Grasset:2010 (sorry, no page ref from Google Books…), the source is given there as a TV programme Cinépanorama, 19 January, 1963.
Thanks, I’ll have to look into that. I can certainly believe Godard was (at a minimum) exaggerating…
DM, sorry, yes:) I don’t know how this question mark got in there:(
Having this said: I think books summarizing reasons to accept a theory are perfectly fine (and a specialist can benefit from such a book if it is good enough).
It is just that in Russia I hear this language from evolutionists, not creationists.
As for creationists, I need to see their publications in Russian first. I have spotted two right now (“Что ответеить дарвинисту?” and “Эволюция – ложь”) as I was googling for доказательства эволюции. But these are about the first creationist books in Russian I ever seen.
Also “creationism” (as opposed to religion) is itself a recent import (as opposed to the school subject “Basics of the Orthodox Culture” — eventually, alonside with Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish, “religious” cultures and “secular ethics” a part of “basics of religious cultures and secular ethics”).
When the echo of creatinionist-evolutionist quarrel reached Russia it took the form of (1) a school girl (based partly in St. Petersburg and partly in Dominican Republic) who sued a biology textbook (2) Russian scientific community criticizing this 1 school girl — with a motto попы совсем оборзели! inherited from the previous argument.
(By creationism which is “recent import” I don’t mean any view that implies creation. Rather the idea that a collective of people should preach creation as such, or teach it as such or devolop creationist science)
But does not Samaritan have /s/?
It does, and consistently writes it with the samekh-analogue letter known as singat (or sinkat). See above.
The word to use here would be evidence – something not many languages have a single handy word for.
Their legal dialects certainly do: Beweismittel, Indiz < indicium, preuve, fianaise < evidentia, todisteet, ראיות, گواه, απόδειξη, 證據 (zhèngjù).
@hat
The quote I meant to put in the comment was:
“Tout le monde a cru a un véritable attentat et trois types m’ont couru après, j’ai dû les tenir en respect avec mon revolver tandis que je m’échappais”
Yes, but these are countable singulars and limited to legal matters. It would be odd to talk about Indizien when talking about science; the audience would keep expecting a murder…
…and Beweis is “proof”, so Beweismittel is simply “means for [legal] proof”.
The quote I meant to put in the comment
Thanks, I’ve added it in there.
I thought “a single word that matches English ‘evidence’ in all contexts”.
Usually there is no problem with translating it to Russian, but some styles associated with it are indeed characteristically English.
“The Most Compelling Evidence Of- Extraterrestrial and Alien Abductions, Ever Documented” etc. English.
Compare:
Evidence from the Arab Grammarians for Lateral ض in Aiabic.
Evidence from Loanwords for Lateral ض in Arabic
Evidence from Ruldayu….
Sounds extremely unidiomatic if you translate “evidence” with свидетельства and “from” as от.
Свидетельства грамматиков (OF-Arab grammarians) is understood in a different sense of свидетельства: “accounts of Arab grammarians who witnessed it”
Cвидетельства бокового ض (OF-lateral ض) would use the genitive valency for something else.
Here what I called “styles” helps the English author: the reader recognizes this use of “evidence” as “something that we need” rather than “presented by”.
Compare:
?indications from Arab grammarians and loandwords for lateral ض in Arabic
The solution is [data in support / свидетельства / признаки] [of-lateral articulation/of-existence of lateral] of Arabic ض in texts of Arab grammarians.
Also “из арабских грамматиков” is possible, but won’t work with loanwords.
But it is combinability with “from” (or “for”) whcih is a problem here – and the use in titles. In the text
“The next contribution to the lateral theory was an article by N.V. Yushmanov (1926) which reviewed the evidence for lateral ḍ in Arabic and MSA and added a few new details (e.g. the rendering of ḍ with l in Arabic loanwords in Hausa).”
It is easier.
“Borger adduced this equation as evidence for a lateral realization of Arabic d already…”
“…indirectly, provided new evidence…”
It is the same as “the most compelling X”. Here in translations it is usually just свидетельства unless the English author has used “comes from”. Often a better choice is “argument”, “data in support” or признаки. Sometimes “proofs” but it is a ligher style (we all studied in school and a “proof” is Euclidean geometry).
“his response was to compensate for the lack of hard evidence with a typological argument”
Надежных данных/свидетельств
“in print, with evidence drawn from Akkadian” – here “examples” or “на аккадском метериале”.
Признак
“the primary sexual признаки” are the penis, vagina, etc.
“the secondary sexyal признаки” are the beard and breasts.
“the tertiary sexual признак” is a kilt (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Половые_признаки#Третичные_половые_признаки)
You know one’s sex by those. Smell of perfume is a признак of presence of someone if you haven’t seen her yet.
Often the translation of признак is “sign”.
I would say, there is not much difference in discourse, but English has packed in “evidence” some connotations that allow you use the word on its own (or use it with “from”) and which pop up in the reader’s mind when needed. Abusive use of the word also results from those rich connotations.
dravsi: It took me a while to figure out that by “orders of magnitude” most English speakers mean on a logarithmic scale with 10 as a base, rather than e, which I assumed. And, as you, that’s just my idiolect.
I was explicitly taught an order of magnitude (Größenordnung) is everything within a factor of 10 long before logarithms came up.
порядок величины и малость хаосу.
I don’t recall if I was explicitly taught it, but my impression was that порядок величины was one per decimal digit. It might have been associated with scientific notation (of the “5*10^6” variety, give or take some formatting details). I don’t think straight-up logarithms were ever involved.
AFAIK Russian schools teach scientific notation (in physics) long before they bother with any logarithms (mostly in math), though IIRC there’s a much earlier [than the logarithms] “powers arithmetic” stage in the math classes (where you learn stuff like a^b/a^c=a^(b-c), then have to do more complicated problems involving it) that doesn’t mention logarithms by name.
@John Cowan
But 證據 (zhèngjù) is often used for “proof,” too, in many contexts.
That’s beautiful.