“Proto-Indo-European ‘fox’ and the reconstruction of an athematic ḱ-stem” by Axel I. Palmér et al. (Indo-European Linguistics 2021) is an open-access paper that looks very interesting:
Abstract
This paper presents a detailed etymological analysis of words for ‘fox’ in Indo-European (IE) languages. We argue that most IE ‘fox’-words go back to two distinct PIE stems: *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’. We provide a revised analysis of the etymology and relationship among the various Indo-Iranian ‘fox’-words, and we argue that Baltic preserves remnants of the ḱ-suffix found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. Additionally, we describe how *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- was borrowed from Indo-Iranian into Uralic and we outline the relationship among the reflexes of this word in various Uralic languages. Finally, we reconstruct the paradigm of *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- as a unique type of hysterodynamic stem, which nonetheless has close parallels in PIE. We observe that a similar ḱ-suffix is found in PIE adjectives and animal names.
Introduction
The Indo-European languages attest several words for ‘fox’, e.g., Skt. lopāśá-, Gr. ἀλώπηξ, Arm. ałowēs, Lith. lãpė, Lat. volpēs, Alb. dhelpër, which are similar enough to have justified hypotheses of a common origin, despite the fact that not all of them show regular sound correspondences. Throughout the history of Indo-European etymological research, these words have either been lumped together under a single etymon (e.g., IEW: 1179) or split into several different roots (Schrijver 1998; De Vaan 2000). The aim of this article is to clarify the inner-Indo-European relationships between these stems, as well as their relationship to similar ‘fox’-words in the Uralic languages. After discussing the evidence for PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ in Section 1, in Section 2 we examine potential Uralic, North Germanic, and Iberian borrowings from an Indo-Iranian descendant of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ-. In Section 3, we reconstruct PIE *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’ based on Latin, Lithuanian, Persian, and Albanian evidence. Finally, in Section 4 we discuss the derivational history of PIE *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and attempt to explain the ablaut preserved directly or indirectly in the branches of Indo-European.
Piotr Gąsiorowski on FB called it “A wonderful piece of etymological analysis!” and that’s all the recommendation I need.
The paper splits the Uralic word into three separate borrowings from Indo-iranian: One really old (Pre-Proto-II) that made it into Finnic, one late Proto-Iranian specifically in Permic, and one Alanic or something in Hungarian. I wonder which Iranian language that would be in direct contact with Permic that late.
I don’t see it mentioned, but could a *ḱ-suffix in adjectives etc. be a fossilized demonstrative used for definites or attributives?
Six authors for such a short paper. That’s very rare in IE studies and historical linguistics in general.
I want to relate one of these forms to Akkadian šēlebu ~ šēlabu ~ šālibu ‘fox’, and other Semitic cognates, e.g. Hebrew שַׁעֲלָב ša’ălāb. That is one of many things that I want.
I’d never heard of שַׁעֲלָב — it seems to be a modern coinage, but is based on Arabic ثعلب “fox”. Is there a prefix š- in other animal names? The parallel ʕlb – *h₂lp does look tempting.
Very strange. Standard Modern Hebrew word is שׁוּעָל straight from the Bible. GT doesn’t know שׁעלב at all and thinks that it is Yiddish (with this orthography there is not much of a choice). Google at large gives some plant named Vulpia (from the name of a German botanist) as a translation, which not even a stone throw away from Vulpes. This seems to be one of those roundabout translation jokes.
Anyway, שׁעלב causes GT to produce “Insulted” (yes, with the capital I), which doesn’t make much sense until one remembers Russian shalava (sexually promiscuous woman, prostitute and various extensions). Make out of it what you will.
שַׁעֲלָב doesn’t mean “fox”, but is indeed (TIL) a creative Hebrew Academy coinage for the plant genus Vulpia. I don’t know how שׁוּעָל is related to this and the Akkadian and Arabic words — what’s up with the loss of the final consonant?
The string שׁעלב can unrelatedly be parsed as the subordinator she- plus `alav “insulted” (though this verb form is less common than he`eliv, from the same root in binyan hiph`il).
@ TR The place name שעלבים occurs in Judges 1:35 and First Kings 4:9 and the place name שעלבין, in Joshua 19:42.
On the assumption that the place names are the plural forms of שעלב* and that the latter is a cognate of Arabic ثَعْلَب ‘fox’, the place names are assumed to have been given to places where foxes abounded.
The demonym שעלבני (Second Samuel 23:32 and First Chronicles 11:33) ‘native and/or resident of…’ suggests a place name שעלבון*, likewise given to a place with many foxes.
All of the foregoing is in Gesenius.
TR et al.: You’re right. I mis-half-remembered a discussion in Aharoni. He argues that תַּן tan, nowadays used to mean ‘jackal’, was always only a bird (cf. our discussion of the ostrich). Then, he argues that the biblical term for the jackal is שׁוּעָל šū‘āl, nowadays used for ‘fox’; and for the fox he suggests שַׁעֲלָב, based on the Arabic and on the placename שַׁעֲלָבִים which David Gold notes (and gives a number of other placenames referring to animals). I don’t think anyone beside Aharoni picked up that word.
The Yidish for ‘fox’ is פֿוקס (fuks). There is no Yidish word שׁעלב * in any sense.
Hebrew שועל i’fox’ is iirrelevant here.
No Hebrew prefix -ש is involved here.
A few weeks ago I mentioned that Hebrew language planners like to rescue obscure Hebrew words from oblivion by putting them to new purposes in Israeli Hebrew, my example being the Israeli Hebrew for ‘garage’, מוסך (< a hapax in the Jewish Bible [Second Kings 16:18] meaning 'covered place').
Another example is the Israeli Hebrew name of the genus Vulpia: it is taken from the singular back-formed from the formally plural place name in Judges 1:35, First Kings 4:9, and Joshua 19:42 mentioned in my post above.
The Israeli Hebrew name of the genus is not based on Arabic. A higher priority of Hebrew language planners (initiated by Ben-Yehuda) is to save no longer used Hebrew words from oblivion by repurposing them for modern uses. Resorting to borrowings from other languages is a last resort.
Klein lists שׁוּעָל as related to ثَعْلَب and šēlabu (as well as Aramaic תַּעֲלָא), but doesn’t explain the loss of b.
Or maybe the -b got added on to an older root? All else being the same, I’d say a triliteral root is the default.
The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, which usually has detailed etymologies for those words it does cover, adds nothing more, but it does note (without sources) that Arabic has both ṯa‘lab and ṯu‘āl, plus šuḫal in Amorite, and “probably no connection” with Ethiopic takʷlā ‘wolf, jackal’, plus a mention of some unlikely etymologies people had come up with.
forgive the quibble, but it sure sounds from like the israeli for Vulpia is based on a not quite hapax legomena whose interpretation is based entirely on its similarity to an arabic word. personally, i’m not sure what pupose it serves to distinguish a coinage whose meaning depends on being hypothetically cognate with an arabic word from a coinage that’s directly borrowed from an arabic word – except to prop up israeli language planners’ myths about their language as “a pure descendent of biblical hebrew” (and certainly Completely Separate from arabic above all [except maybe yiddish]), through the kind of pilpul that gives pilpul a bad name. either way, the israeli word is based on arabic.
I don’t know how שׁוּעָל is related to this and the Akkadian and Arabic words — what’s up with the loss of the final consonant?
The *-b in the word for “fox” is also absent in Syriac taʿlā, Jibbali iṯʿél and some other Modern South Arabian forms, and, as mentioned above, in certain Arabic by-forms like ṯuʿal and ṯuʿāl. Something similar happens with the reflexes of the Proto-Semitic word perhaps to be reconstructed *ʿankab(īṯ) “spider”, seen in Hebrew עַכָּבִישׁ ʿakkāḇîš, Arabic singular عنكبوت ʿankābūt (with Aramaic influence?), but plural عناكب ʿanākīb. These exist beside what look like the reflexes of a Proto-Semitic *ʿa(n)k- in Tigre ʿako “spider”, Tigrinya ʿəkkʷät, ʿəkkot “a kind of very poisonous wasp”, Ge’ez ʿakot “small locust, dog fly, wasp”, Amharic anko “young locust”. A.J Militarev and L. Kogan (2005), Semitic etymological dictionary. 2: Animal names lxxxii-lxxiv) offer some more possible examples of such groups like “fox” and “spider”, but the correspondences are more nebulous and imprecise. Here are some summaries of these groups of cognates:
Also, I would note the strange Arabic عندليب ʿandalīb, nightingale, but plural عنادل ʿanādil (beside عندلة ʿandala “song of the nightingale”).
For a possible explanation of the existence of cognates with and without -b, compare the following:
Militarev and Kogan present even more of these animal names in -b on pages lxxxiii and lxxxiv. In light of these facts, some scholars have considered the possibility that the -b is a Proto-Semitic vestigial suffix or frozen noun classifier attached to nouns referring to animals, usually more or less harmful wild ones (“dog” being a notable exception, although historical attitudes towards the dog have been ambivalent in the regions in question). The variation in the appearance of the element -b would reflect variation at the Proto-Semitic level, perhaps a trace of a system of noun classes in Afro-Asiatic (similar to those found in Niger-Congo languages) that was in decline or moribund at the time Proto-Semitic began to break up. Kogan, for instance, is attracted by this idea, whereas Militarev is skeptical. Other scholars are similarly divided.
It must be tempting to someone to unify *h2lop- and *ulp-.
@Xerîb: That reminds me of the PIE suffix *-bh- that is frequently used to form animal names and colour tems. Food for the nostraticists…
Arabic janjab, junjub “a kind of grasshaper” and Tigrinya gʷädäbä beside Arabic janjaʿ, junjuʿ “a kind of black grasshopper; kind of insect encountered while digging in the ground”
This one is a part of a larger cloud. Jundub usually compared to famous Gindibu. Or that judjud mentioned in the jundub link.
I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned the fox, ka₅{a}, in Sumerian before. Foxes were popular subjects for the proverbs that scribal schools used as example sentences to teach students Sumerian grammar. While our translations of these proverbs have improved markedly, no one has much of a clue about what they mean:
Also, while looking for the Sumerian proverb fox reference, I stumbled across this line from a Neo-Assyrian omen tablet:
Interesting indeed, but the Saussure effect, which ought to make *h₂lo- impossible, is dismissed very casually. While certainly a crazy rule that nobody has yet explained, it seems to be real.
Maybe we’re just looking at some morphological leveling in this word; the paper reconstructs zero-grade forms without *o that shouldn’t have any Saussure effect and should have retained the *h₂.
Sic transit gloria mundi: today you’re the king of the animals, tomorrow your underlings loot your stuff.
Looking ridiculous can be worth it?
Foxes were popular subjects for the proverbs
This article does not include two of my favorite Sumerian fox-themed proverbs, which I sadly don’t recall the exact wording for offhand and will have to quote from memory:
“The fox pissed into the sea and said: “Now the sea is my piss!””
“The fox lost his house and arrived in his friend’s house as a conqueror.”
The latter is familiar (if probably mistakenly) from Russian folk literature. Была у зайца избушка лубяная… The former is just (almost?) a self-contained joke.
There are some CCCb plant names, too, and two pop to mind: Hebrew קְטָלָב qṭālāb ‘Arbutus’ and Arabic سحلب saḥlab ‘orchid sp.’, whence the tasty drink.
(Xerîb, I am humbled by the quality and quantity of your research, and noting that I’m not trying to match it here at the moment…)
(Xerîb, I am humbled by the quality and quantity of your research, and noting that I’m not trying to match it here at the moment…)
I learn interesting and unexpected things at LH, so I try to do my part to maintain it as a beacon of attentiveness and clear thinking for the topics on which I can contribute.
Hebrew קְטָלָב qṭālāb ‘Arbutus’
This has an interesting etymology. Words for this tree only make a late appearance in the Midrash, apparently:
https://www.sefaria.org/Jastrow%2C_*%D7%9E%D6%B8%D7%90%D7%95%D6%BC%D7%96?ven=London,_Luzac,_1903&lang=bi&p2=Kohelet_Rabbah.6.1&lang2=bi
The Modern Hebrew קְטָלָב is doubtless inspired by Arabic قطلب qaṭlab, which, according to Löw, Aramæische pflanzennamen, p. 334, is itself an Arabization of Syriac ܩܛܠ ܐܒܘܗܝ qāṭel ʾabu, literally “father-killer”. Why this name? I found this explanation in E. Seidel (1915) Die Medizin im Kitâb Mafâtîh al ‘Ulûm, p. 56: “Weil die Früchte erst im folgenden Herbst reif werden und erst nach Durchbrechen des neuen Triebes aus der Erde verdorren”.
Arabic سحلب saḥlab ‘orchid sp.’
Here we come full circle back to שׁוּעָל ! This word has long puzzled me. It is often said that this is either a re-Arabization of a regional form of the Turkish word appearing as Republican Turkish sâlep (also sahlep) “salep”, itself from Arabic ثعلب ṯaʿlab “fox, or else a generalization of a local Anatolian Arabic or other dialectal form of Arabic ṯaʿlab “fox” (used to refer to the tubers) to the rest of Arabic. (Turkish and Persian pronounce Arabic ث ṯ as /s/, and /s/ is also used in some colloquial neo-Arabic varieties to adapt Classical ث ṯ in loanwords from the Classical language. And the regular outcome of original ث ṯ is /s/ in some colloquial varieties as well–for instance, some colloquial Arabic languages spoken in Turkey.) But it’s never been clear to me how the word came to be deformed as it was. See the details here:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/salep#Etymology
And the picture of Orchis mascula, one of the salep orchids, here:
https://pfaf.org/Admin/PlantImages/OrchisMascula.jpg
For ʿ ع ayin in Arabic and an h in Turkish in colloquial words, perhaps compare Arabic عناب ʿunnāb “jujubes” and Turkish hünnap, hünnep.
I’d heard that ‘father-killer’ etymology, and I don’t know if I’m sold on it. It sounds an awful lot like a folk etymology, and I’d want to see more plants with this kind of poetic appellation before I warm up to this one.
(Incidentally, there’s a Hungarian site dedicated to Löw, with scans of his works, more complete and better organized than those at GB or archive.org.)
I wonder if Finnish vilppi ‘deceit, mendacity, fraud (act of deceiving someone)’ belongs here, but can’t find an etymology.
“A wonderful piece of etymological analysis!”
I can only goggle at the breadth of research. But I’m left confused:
Was there any single (P)IE(I) ancestor language that had (antecedents of) _both_ ‘fox’ and ‘vulp-‘? Presumably with a differentiated meaning — we seem to have available fox, marten, dog-like, the one with (bushy) tail, wildcat, jackal, …
It must be tempting to someone to unify *h2lop- and *ulp-.
Indeed, they don’t seem as phonetically far apart as some of the derivations given in the paper. Especially if we take the ‘-eḱ-‘ as some sort of affix/inflection rather than part of the stem.
Why didn’t Latin adopt the Greek antecedent?/How did (antecedent of) Middle Persian ‘garbag’/cat swerve ahead to reach Rome as ‘vulp-‘?
Or perhaps neither stem was from PIE/they both arrived into IE daughter languages, borrowed at different times in different places?
@J FoM:
The first proverb actually occurs in two slightly different forms:
The ubiquity of these proverb collections as a way to teach introductory Sumerian grammar makes me suspect that the pee-pee jokes were chosen for inclusion specifically to appeal to children that the teachers struggled to keep focused on their studies.
The second proverb is more of a “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” proverb:
In this case, we know a bit more about the exact cultural significance of the fox, since a parallel proverb exists where “dishonest man” takes the place of “fox”:
An interesting paper. A few comments:
-In answer to Y’s comment above about six authors for such a short paper: I suspect one of the six authors was solely in charge of section 2.5, where any connection between the Indo-Iranian word for “fox” and similar-looking Ibero-Romance forms is (quite correctly, I think) dismissed. I found this part of the article odd: section 2.5 could be deleted from the article without any difficulty, as no reference is made elsewhere to the Ibero-Romance forms. I wonder whether some reviewer(s) brought up the relevant Ibero-Romance words when reviewing an earlier version of the paper?
-Far more interesting is the distribution within Indo-European of the *-eḱ suffix attached to *h₂lō̆p-. The Indo-European languages where this suffix is found (Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Greek, Armenian) share various innovations (the augment in Greek, Indo-Iranian and Armenian, for instance, or (excluding Greek) the RUKI rule). In this light it is telling that while a more peripheral language, such as Celtic, shares the *h₂lō̆p- root, no trace of the *-eḱ suffix is to be found in Celtic. This makes it possible that, whatever the status of the suffix in Proto-Indo-European, its being found attached to the root *h₂lō̆p-(eḱ) is a post-Proto-Indo-European innovation which began in the more central branches of Indo-European and did not reach a peripheral branch such as Celtic.
-If *ulp-i did indeed mean “wildcat” originally and if the shift to the meaning “fox” is a Latin innovation, then I wonder: could contamination from *ulp-i explain the irregular /p/ found in Latin “lupus”? And if the semantic innovation from “cat” to “fox” was found elsewhere in Western Indo-European, say, for example, in Germanic prehistorically…well, perhaps the /f/ of Germanic “wolf” could be due to the same factor?
-I accept the authors’ claim that the Albanian form is inherited and not a Latin/Romance loanword: but considering the obvious Albanian/Latin similarity in form, I think it is at least possible that the Latin-Albanian parallel in semantic development might be due to Latin/Romance influence upon Albanian.
-A question for Hatters: has either *ulp-i or *h₂lō̆p-(eḱ) left any traces in Slavic?
Thanks, that’s a very helpful discussion!
@Etienne
I do not know if this is discussed in the paper, but the Proto-Slavic lisъ “fox” has the l and the s, but is missing the p (the s would be a regular development in Proto-Baltic from PIE ek, Hans would know if this is true for Proto-Slavic). The word for forest in P-S is lěsъ, and neither of these two words have a certain PIE etymology.
Didn’t Proto-Slavic drop syllable-final obstruents anyway? That might explain the absence of p.
On the Germanic side, a mixup of *wl̩kʷ-o-s and *wl̩p-i-s would indeed explain everything. That said, there’s evidence for a regular assimilation of labiovelars to labials in Germanic (most prominently the “five” word)… which is seemingly contradicted by none other than the she-wolf, Old Norse ylgr… but that’s not a contradiction if the timing of different sound changes (in this case this labial assimilation vs. the three different developments of *ɣʷ) was just right. That’s discussed in Ringe’s book at some length.
On the Latin side, I think the key to the mystery lies hidden somewhere in the rest of the word: why does it start with lu- and not with vol- > vul-? Shouldn’t we expect the latter from *wl̩- in any case, no matter if *wl̩p- or *wl̩kʷ-? After all, that’s what volpes > vulpes has.
Better yet: the *s is the regular development in Proto-Slavic from PIE *ḱ! (The Proto-Baltic outcome is *š, merged into *s except in Lithuanian.)
Yes, but I’m at a loss trying to explain the i.
Might Latin lupus, as a countryman’s word*, be taken from (or influenced by) Oscan, like bos?
* Just as Roman nobs never realised that there ought to be a h in (h)anser, what with never having had to refer to the bird in their hifalutin oratory.
CECILY: This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.
GWENDOLEN: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.
Tacitus famously doesn’t call a spade a spade, either because it was inconsistent with the dignity of his narrative or because the vulgar term escaped him (Annals, Book I, 65):
neque is miseriarum finis. struendum vallum, petendus agger, amissa magna ex parte per quae egeritur humus aut exciditur caespes
“Nor was this the end of the miseries. Fortifications had to put up and materials sought for for the ramparts, with the things for digging earth and cutting turf lost to a great extent.”
Didn’t Proto-Slavic drop syllable-final obstruents anyway? That might explain the absence of p.
Yes, but I’m at a loss trying to explain the i.
It would work anyway only if the Slavic suffix would have been *k’, not *ek’, giving a cluster *-pk’- > *-ps-that would have been simplified to -s-. Otherwise the -p- would have been kept.
” from PIE *ḱ” – cf. losь “elk”.
“It would work anyway only if the Slavic suffix would have been *k’, not *ek’”
Yes, but this -eḱ- itself is motivated poorly enough. And there are Latvian lарsа Lithuanian lãpė Prussian lаре. May have to do with Slavic. Must have to do with each other.
Perhaps it could have been corralled into an extended footnote, but I am glad it was not deleted. I applaud any effort to pre-emptively answer a supplementary question. Also, it is well known throughout academia that negative results are less likely to be published. Thank the authors for warning overenthusiastic readers not to go down a blind alley.
@drasvi: Yes, the Baltic forms belong together. Based on them, one would expect Slavic **lop- or **los-. I’m not convinced that Slavic lis(a) is related to the Baltic forms, not even as a tabuistic deformation.
The usual Welsh word for “fox” is not llywarn but llwynog, which looks transparently derived from llwyn “thicket” (yet another Latin loanword.) In fact, I’m not sure that a Welsh singular llywarn actually exists, though the plural llewyrn does.
The other (real) Welsh word for “fox” is cadno, which (wouldn’t you know it?) GPC ascribes to the ubiquitous root *kat- “battle, strife.” N I Marr really was missing a trick with kat; it can mean anything. All together now: sal, ber, yon, rosh, kat …
Evidently the Fox is the deity of war, protection and hats. Also of hail, why not.
That (with a generic waffling “Sabellic”) is indeed the majority & textbook explanation, but does it explain the lu-?
They did remember the story of the Capitoline geese, though.
I’m not convinced
Me neither:) Maybe we should distinguish two meanings of “not convinced”:
1. expectation of a connection
2. do we understand what is going on well enough? Is our reconstruction any reliable?
No to the second, but a similar word in Baltic that possibly shares all consonants and certainly shares the initial consonants makes some (some sort of) connection a priori likely. If Proto-Slavs have *lVsъ and Klingons land* and say “lisъ!” Proto-Slavs are more likely to borrow it:) Especially when there is already *olsь/losь “elk”.
I just mean: -i- bothers me more.
BTW, Рим – Rom(a)
—
*Or Kitsune come and say….
Very interesting paper, thanks for the heads-up.
I would have many comments on their treatment of the Uralic data… I was initially thinking of writing some of these out here, but since they’re kind of tangential to the question of the IE reconstruction, I think this will be a separate blog post of my own instead.
You might leave a link here when you’ve posted it.
J Pystynen, I’m looking forward to it. I second Hat—let us know when you’ve posted it.
Looking forward to it.
And what a fascinating story that is. First, the Romans cross the Rhine and carefully explain they’re [roːmaːniː]. The Germanic listeners have no problem borrowing the consonants and the /iː/ as such; but they don’t have an [oː], so they go for /uː/. For [aː], they might be speaking a late version of Pre-Germanic* which had an /aː/ that became the Proto-Germanic [ɔː]; or they might be speaking Proto-Germanic already, where an /aː/ existed but was rather rare, so they might have gone for /ɔː/ anyway – perhaps knowing that that was the cognate of the Celtic /aː/. (…Indeed, perhaps the name was borrowed from the Celts before the Romans actually showed up.) Reinterpret the morphology, and you get Rumoneis [ru(ː)moːniːs] in the Gothic Bible. Also, Rome itself shows up as Rumaborg in some saga or other (can’t remember if an accent is attested on the u).
Then repeat the story a few hundred years later, as some Goths or Vandals explain to their eastern neighbors that they’re leaving to go plunder [ruːmoː] and they’re not going to come back, so their neighbors can have the place. Now, when I write “[r]”, I’m not being precise. Today, the Italian and most of the Germanic /r/, where they haven’t become uvular, are apical trills, [r̺]. But the Slavic ones, like the western Romance and Alemannic ones, are laminal, [r̻]. The trick is that the speakers of Pre-Slavic in the story have already turned the cluster /rj/ into [r̻ʲ], and that sounds more similar to [r̺] than [r̻] does. So they borrow [ˈr̺uːmoː] (feminine) as [ˈr̻ʲuːmʊ] or thereabouts (looks masculine, and may become so immediately). Then their descendants turn /uː/ into [ɨː] (> ы), and /ʊ/ begins its career as a STRUT-like vowel. Eventually, /ɨː/ after palatalized consonants is turned into /iː/. Result: Римъ.
* Further evidence: Segimer, the father of Arminius, doesn’t start with a Proto-Germanic Sigi-; and the Fenni beyond the sea aren’t Proto-Germanic Finn- yet when their existence is reported to Tacitus. (But they are when Ptolemy hears of them a century later.)
Is that your theory or do you have a source for that? This reminds me of a discussion on a draft paper on academia.edu last year where different theories were considered how /i/ showed up in Slavic “Rome” and “cross” (e.g. Polish krzyż and its cognates). For the latter, both your chronology and the rooting through Germanic don’t work, so either it invalidates the theory you described or one has to assume that the /i/’s in these words are independent developments. (I don’t remember the details of that discussion, but it assumed loaning from Proto-Romance, so both “Rome” and “cross” had /o/, and loaning on the Balkans, maybe routed through Proto- or Para-Albanian.)
For the latter, both your chronology and the rooting through Germanic don’t work, so either it invalidates the theory you described or one has to assume that the /i/’s in these words are independent developments.
There might have been some conflation of the (unrelated) words for “cross” and “Christ”; Russian крест “cross” is usually said to be from the latter, I believe. Dunno about Polish.
/o/ > /u/ and /a/ > /ɨ/ are somewhat believable because the country name Romania came out as Румыния.
About half of the Slavic part is mine.
Good point.
That would work: [o] > [ø] > [e] happened in Albanian (without mergers with /ɔ/ or /ɛ/), and if this [e] was borrowed right when Slavic had turned /ei/ into [eː] but not yet into [iː], all is solved.
That has happened precisely in Romanian (â as in România is pronounced [ɯ]), but nobody is postulating that for Slavic.
There might have been some conflation of the (unrelated) words for “cross” and “Christ”; Russian крест “cross” is usually said to be from the latter, I believe. Dunno about Polish.
A conflation in the anlaut can’t be excluded, but that again would separate the developments in “cross” and “Rome”.
That would work
Yes, the Albanian development /o/ > /e/ would give the right input that could lead to Slavic /i/. The fly in the ointment is that Albanian has kryq for “cross”, which needs Latin /kruk-/ as a pre-form (i.e. with the classical vowel and the final consonant still a stop), while the input form for Slavic must have had an input form with /k/ becoming the affricate /tS/ due to palatalisation and then /dZ/ due to intervocalic voicing, a development attested in Northern Italy. So we’d need a variety of Albanian further North that loaned the (North Italian) variant, underwent /o/ > /e/ at the right time, and loaned it on to the Slavs when they entered the Balkans (or shortly before). It’s not impossible – it may be the (language closely related to /variety of) Albanian that is the source for those substrate words in Romanian – but it’s all hypothetical.
J Pystynen, I’m looking forward to it.
I am, too. Please include келазь as well.
Digital etymological dictionary of the oldest vocabulary of Finnish
Historically, borrowing via Germanic is very likely. Rome was loud. A second borrowing closer to Adriatic is possible.
explain to their eastern neighbors that they’re leaving to go plunder [ruːmoː] and they’re not going to come back, so their neighbors can have the place.
This is the traditional account of what happened. I do not like it:)
I do not like even “eastern”, because no one knows where Slavic was spoken before 6th century (we recently discussed movements of Basque/Aquitanian in Roman lands, so a limitation “outside of the area adjacent to the empire or known to geographers” is not necessary.).
And I think the idea of lands that become depopulated because everyone went elsewhere (kindly leaving their demonyms to newcomers) needs further elaboration.
@drasvi
Late Rome had security and taxation issues. People “went elsewhere” because they could not save enough to live through the winter (either bandits or taxmen or a combination took it all) or because they had sold themselves to a villa in return for protection and the villa closed down and reopened somewhere else.
That makes me imagine a Wandering Souls written by a Late Roman predecessor of Gogol.
“villa closed and reopened” sounds funny if you picture a building doing this.
PlasticPaddy, I rather mean East Germany, Poland etc.
There was that great debate between Slavic (Polish especially) and Germanic scholars about who conquered these lands first. And it could not bother anyone less, what people and langauges were there before. Pre-history begins with well-formed Germanic and Slavic “peoples”. The debate stopped with WWII.
“The word, which may be mechanically reconstructed as Proto-Germanic *rebaz (or *refaz), has previously been derived from an alleged PIE root *ē̆reb(h)– ‘dark, brown’ (cf. IEW: 334). However, the reconstruction of this root is fraught with formal and semantic problems. ”
(from the paper)
The recently discussed cran morpheme in Rebhuhn.
sal, ber, yon, rosh, kat …
…šlak, tsuk, …
a “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach” proverb
This is unfair to teachers, in particular the hispanophone divulgadores of science that I have been listening to for years on the radio. Most of them have doctorates in physics, biology etc. At any rate, on the radio you can’t “do” anything except talk. Talking heads are particularly prone to overpraise pragmatics – when they’re not speculating to beat the band. I suspect that these are one and the same thing in them.
I propose a different saying:
# Those who can, do. Those who can’t, cant. #
I have often noticed that I thought I knew something, before I was called upon to teach it, whereupon I realised that I didn’t know it nearly as well as I thought.
Accordingly, those who have never taught may be experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Very true. I actively seek opportunities to explain something, in order to discover whether I understand it well enough to do so. It’s easier on the nerves when I can write it down and revise, revise, revise.
In extemporaneous explanation viva voce, I must summon all my powers of free-association and be ready to back down at a moment’s notice. People get confused when a hot-shot stops in the middle of firing – it’s so unexpected, you see, in that it carries all the signs of modesty. How can it be that a hot-shot suddenly admits that he obviously doesn’t understand what he attempted to explain ? While they’re being confused, I make my escape.
Essentially, we’re talking allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden here.
@stu
Maybe we are talking also about the intuitive versus the analytical mind. The intuitive teacher can only hope students have the same intuition when placed in the appropriate environment and presented with appropriate stimuli. The analytical teacher can only present an overarching system with a finite but endless regression of nested bullet points. Both approaches provide ample scope for students to become lost or fustrated and experience feelings of Weltschmerz, Aussichtslosigkeit and Verzweiflung, which are essential to the education process and build character.
@DE, there is an opposite effect.
When I was invited to assist in teaching math in 15, I discovered that as a teacher I immediately see solutions of problems that I used to solve within minutes otherwise. It was just magic: I take a problem set, look at it, and aha: here you do this, and this one is that, hurrah I have read the whole set and ready to work.
Your effect is the same, actually. Until you teach it, you think that you understand it.
P.S. one more reason to employ students as assistants, by the way.
PlasticPaddy: because they had sold themselves to a villa in return for protection and the villa closed down and reopened somewhere else.
I knew about the concept but that’s an eye-opener of a line.
@drasvi:
True; in my own experience, I think this has often been a function of knowing that I was the person who was supposed to know about things, which can have an encouraging effect. When I taught anatomy to undergraduates, I discovered to my horror that the job also entailed teaching histology, at which I had always been fairly lamentable when a student myself, but it was remarkable what I found I was able to do when actually put on the spot.
Teaching also has the positive effect of reminding yourself that, yes, you have actually learnt quite a lot since your were a trainee yourself. (Those of us who possess self-awareness occasionally have doubts on such points.)
(Those of us who possess self-awareness occasionally have doubts on such points.)
This so-called “self-awareness” business is, in my experience, essentially nothing more than an ability and willingness to entertain doubts about one’s certainties – occasionally. By entertain I do not mean partying 24/7. That would turn you into a whiny sadsack.
Doubts are a means of being economical with one’s truths. The guy who buried his talent got a lot of undeserved stick.
How can it be that a hot-shot suddenly admits that he obviously doesn’t understand what he attempted to explain ?
“My students are so stupid! I explained them once, I explained them twice, then the third time. I have already understood it myself, but they still don’t get it”
Reminds me of one of those free-floating anecdotes which gets attached to various people:
https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/7247/in-a-popular-anecdote-who-took-20-minutes-to-decide-that-a-thing-was-obvious
I heard it myself attributed to G H Hardy, whom it would certainly fit …
Interesting answers in that thread.
Uralic vulpine minutiae now released. (Sorry Juha, I have for now not delved into other words for ‘fox’ in Uralic though.)
@Trond: we don’t have any records of the exact variety, but newish Iranian loans from the Sarmatian / Alanic / pre-Ossetic branch are well-known from Permic. One or two have been even claimed to be loans from Permic into Alanic > Ossetic. (Off the top of my head, one is ævzist ‘silver’ ~ Proto-Permic *äzveś ‘id.’, where *-veś seems to be a reflex of the pan-Uralic Wanderwort #wäśkä ‘copper/iron’. Borrowed also into Hungarian as ezüst though and this seems to share also the *t suffix with Ossetic, so possibly it’s rather Permic → (pre-)Hungarian → (pre-)Ossetic.)
Thanks. I gather that Permic had a wider (or more southern) distribution before the Turkic peoples arrived on the Volga, so word exchange with Alanic is reasonable. It’s the “late Proto-Iranian” part that’s leaving me confused about chronology.
Oh, and interesting about the lynx.
Going further back in time still, it’s not like we have reason to think of anything having come between Uralic and (Indo-)Iranian before Turkic. How much of this should be accounted for by a more northern distribution of the latter and how much by a more southern distribution of the former seems more like a question of taste than any real problem for contacts.
though I wouldn’t rule out the Russian theory that there was earlier also a “fourth” dialect of Proto-Indo-Iranian that hung out somewhere in contact with Uralic in the north, after Proto-Iranian / Proto-Indic / pre-Nuristani had split off towards the southwest and southeast, even if this might not have been necessarily spoken by the Andronovo culture specifically. Dialectologically it seems obvious that Scythic/Sarmatian/Alanic cannot be a retention over all of its known range and that it must have expanded back westwards along the steppe.
There are parallel texts in some Finno-Ugric languages at the end of Volume 1 about a fox, its cubs, and other animals:
http://languagehat.com/saras-family/#comment-3780868
BTW, is there an etymology for kihu ‘skua, jaeger’?
but it was remarkable what I found I was able to do when actually put on the spot.
Here in Leftpondia (and possibly elsewhere), you butchers have a saying “See one, do one, teach one.”
On teaching: In his Discourse on Method, Descartes notes that he might think that he understood his own original ideas, but when he tried to communicate them to someone else he would find that he really didn’t. This was why he started publishing instead of remaining a kind of hermit.
My HS hired new college graduates to teach because they were inexpensive, and often enough the teacher was reading just a chapter ahead of the class.
OTOH, one could build a reputation as a child prodigy on reading a chapter ahead of the teacher,